Day One by Bill Cameron Read Free Book Online

looked up into Masliah’s eyes, then down at his badge. “Aww, fuck.” He didn’t speak again for the duration of his time in custody.
    Susan and I took the call-out, our second in two days. The first involved a Franklin High basketball player who had been showingoff for his teammates by shooting an arrow straight up into the air with a hunting bow and then trying to catch it on the way down again. After a series of failed attempts he finally succeeded—with his forehead. Dead on the thirty-five-yard line of the Franklin football field. The high school and attached park is near my place, and I sometimes walk down there on summer evenings to watch recreational leaguesoftball or soccer. If I’d been down there that day I might have saved his life, something his friends seemed to have only a passing concern with. “I told him he was an idiot, but he did it anyway.” A typical response. No doubt the fence around the football field would get covered in ephemeral memorial objects over the coming days, photos and handmade, WE MISS YOU signs. “I told him he was an idiot,” would be the real epitaph. Death-bymisadventure ruled an understaffed DA’s office with no interest in filing charges. So we ended up back at the top of the call-out list just in time to catch this kid and a homicide cop’s nemesis, Jane Doe.
    The crime scene was a disaster. Pouring rain had obliterated most of the physical evidence. Susan and I left it to the crime scene team, but we didn’t expect much. We counted ourselves lucky they found the .357 round in the mud downslope from where the girl lay. Otherwise, the kid was all we had. After the EMTs checked him out and declared him bruised but otherwise unhurt, we took him to the Justice Center. I set him up at Susan’s desk with a mug of Swiss Miss and a towel, figuring an interview room would be too much for him. He stared at me, ignoring his cocoa, and I guessed I was too much for him too. I was born with a red patch of skin on my neck the shape and color of a mound of ground meat, and my face is none too pretty either. I left it to Susan to do the talking.
    He wouldn’t provide his name or the name of someone to call—mom, dad, anybody. Too young for a driver’s license, but he’d written E. GILLESPIE in black permanent marker on the white rubber toes of his Chucky Ts. Armed with that it didn’t take us toolong to learn he was registered at Mount Tabor Middle School, an incoming eighth grader. E for Edgar. He had a juvie record, nothing serious. Shoplifting, some panhandling scams, chronic truancy. He lived with his mother and two sisters in a duplex on Southeast 53rd—not too far from my own place. We left him in the care of a case worker from Child Protective Services and went by the house.
    No one was home, but we found a neighbor who told us the mother, Charm Gillespie, worked as a marketing associate for a commercial real estate firm in the Wells-Fargo building downtown. According to the neighbor, Mom called the kid Little Eddie, but everyone else called him Eager. His sisters—Gem and Jewel—were nowhere to be found. Word from the neighbor was the three kids ran wild all day while their mother worked; the girls could be anywhere. No other known family in the area. School records didn’t mention the father.
    Back at the Justice Center, we tried talking to the kid again.
    “Eager? Is that your name?”
    No response.
    “Was someone there with you and the girl?”
    Nothing.
    “Did you see the gun? Do you know what happened to it?”
    Silence.
    “What’s her name, Eager? Do you at least know her name?”
    I’d interrogated career bangers who couldn’t shut up. Not Eager Gillespie. The kid was a rock. When the CASA advocate arrived, called by the case worker, she shut down our feckless attempts to mine him, at least until we could find Eager’s mother and get consent for further questioning. Turned out she was in Eugene for the day with her broker and wouldn’t return to