Day One by Bill Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

Portland until evening. She wasn’t answering her cell phone, which didn’t surprise her coworkers. Without prodding, the receptionist at the real estate firm,a catty slip of a thing with hair the color of buttermilk, volunteered that everyone knew Charm was screwing her broker. They’d probably pulled over for some afternoon delight after their sales presentation. We left messages on her voice mail and a patrol car at her house, and finally Charm Gillespie swept in like a storm front.
    “Who are you people? Why are you harassing us? When can I take my kid and get the hell out of here?” There was more along those lines. She was hard to keep up with, waving her hands as she spoke and refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Tall and thickset, not unattractive under a dense clot of metallic hair and heavy, exaggerated make-up. Agitated and uncommunicative, suggesting she had something to hide.
    Which it turned out she did. The night before she’d made a 9-11 call, someone trying to get into her house, her ex-husband. Now she didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or naturally belligerent. Maybe a little of both.
    “When was the last time you saw your husband, Mrs. Gillespie?”
    “First, he’s not my husband. I divorced that piece of shit ten years ago.”
    “Okay. So when did you last see him?”
    “Last night. But you already know that.”
    “What did he want?”
    “A blow job, more than likely. He’s lucky I wasn’t in the mood. I’d have bit his dick off.”
    “What about the kids? Did they talk to him?”
    “I wasn’t about to let him near my kids.”
    “And he didn’t tell you why he was in town?”
    “I couldn’t care less.”
    “So all he wanted was ...”
    “Jesus. How the hell do I know?” She tried to light a cigarette, but she was no Sharon Stone and Susan made her snuff it. “Listen,he just showed up pretending to be a human being. I figured he wanted to get laid and maybe a free place to sleep, though why he thought I was offering either I can’t tell you.” She blew air through her over-dyed bangs. “He also pretended he wanted to see the kids, but I wasn’t buying that bullshit. He hasn’t seen the kids or paid child support since we split.”
    “Did he mention anything about a woman, maybe someone he was traveling with? A name, anything?”
    “A woman would have to have the brains of a dog turd to take up with Big Ed Gillespie.”
    The prosecutor, a buzz cut from Astoria named Witt Deiter, urged us to keep working on Eager and Charm. Eager held his silent ground while Charm screamed lawsuit and demanded a smoke. Eventually Deiter let them go. The word to us was to keep digging. CPS would be spending some time with the Gillespie clan, so if we did turn something up, we’d know where to find him.
    Deiter was a recent transfer to Multnomah County anxious to make a name for himself. “I like the little brat for it.” He had a rep for drawing his dialog from television cop dramas—not the good ones on cable either.
    Susan pointed out the obvious. “If he shot her, where’s the gun?”
    “It’s there. Find it, or get him to talk. I don’t care which. He did it, or knows who did.”
    I was thinking about Charm. “He’s just a kid.”
    “He’s a thug in training. Make the case.”
    But there was no case to be made. The dearth of evidence left us with only the thinnest of working theories.
    Theory one: Eager shot the girl. Simple enough, for what it was worth, but we had no weapon and Eager’s lone statement suggested someone else had been at the scene. Until he started talking, we could only guess who. The paraffin test of his hands for gunshotresidue might have cleared some things up, but with the help of the CASA rep, Charm tied us up long enough to ensure the test came back inconclusive.
    Theory two: Eager came across an argument, a husband or boyfriend and the woman. This unknown subject shot the woman and fled the scene with the gun.