Small Sacrifices by Ann Rule Read Free Book Online

ordered a reduction in force. They had enough pilots. "I had a wife, and a baby on the way. I looked on law enforcement as an interim career at best. I'd always been a little intimidated by cops, and I sure couldn't imagine myself actually arresting anyone."
    But Welch did make arrests and they soon became routine. The sandy-haired, freckled, would-be pilot turned out to be a sensitive, intuitive cop. After several years in patrol, Doug Welch had become a detective less than three months before Diane Downs and her children were shot.
    Welch reached the ER parking area in five minutes. He
    nodded to Rich Charboneau standing guard over a red Nissan Pulsar and walked to the trauma room. Three children lay on treatment tables, hardly what he'd expected. One child had been dead for at least an hour, her skin mottling with the purplish striations of lividity—blood reacting to gravity when the heart no longer pumps. Welch noted a gunshot wound in her left shoulder. Someone murmured that there was a similar wound in the other shoulder. He nodded; there was a roaring in his head.
    Sergeant Jon Peckels photographed the body. Welch focused on the other side of the room. Doctors were working feverishly over a second little girl; he could barely see her beyond them. i Within a minute or two, she was rushed—table and all—out of the 1
    room. He had no idea where they were taking her.
    The little boy was crying. The three detectives watched as the doctors rolled the toddler over onto his side so they could treat his back. Welch recognized the single bullet hole, located almost dead center down his spine. He saw the black sprinklingpowder and debris from the gun barrel—stippling./ «
    Contact wound. Or almost. I
    The doctors closed in again around the little boy. The ER
    crew had domain here.
    Jon Peckels was in charge of physical evidence for the county. He moved around the gurney where the dead child lay, taking more photographs. She looked so exposed that Welch had the impulse to tug the blanket over her so she wouldn't get cold. He |
    looked away. I
    Roy Pond gathered the blood-stained clothing and the purplish'
    orange towel from the baskets at the end of the gumeys and bagged them for evidence. Labels with names, dates, locations. A

SMALL SACRIFICES 33
    ->'» clue was still caught in one of the shirts. Pond slipped it into a
    // siu&
    dear envelope.
    n'ck Tracy had almost two decades on the other detectives in
    --County. "Silver Fox" attractive--white hair, ice-blue eyes-Tracv could be dapper and shrewd or play the country hick to perfection. A long time back, when he played football in Warwood,
    West Virginia, Tracy was All-City, All-State, All-Ohio-Valley. He won a scholarship to the University of Iowa, but with the Korean War he joined the Marines. Like everyone else on this case he hadn't planned on being a policeman either. He hadn't even liked cops. But here he was, with a quarter century of law enforcement behind him.
    Dick Tracy had cleared every homicide he'd ever worked;
    Welch had never worked a homicide as a detective. Off-duty, Doug Welch researched the stock market; Tracy was an avid student of metaphysics. Fellow cops tormented Welch by telling him he looked like Howdy Doody. Tracy had his name to contend with. They would be only the first of a number of "odd couple" partners in a case just beginning to unfold. Dick Tracy turned into the emergency drive-through. Louis Hince waved him down, leaned into the car window. "The family's waiting for you to pick them up at the E-Z Mart. The mother's evidently been shot too and she needs treatment. Bring them back here."
    "How about the children?" Tracy asked.
    Hince shook his head. "One little girl is gone. The others are critical."
    Tracy sighed and turned his car northeasterly. He expected ^to find an hysterical mother waiting for him in Rutherford's police cruiser. Instead, he encountered a woman still in control: "very
    "atlonal, considering what she had undergone."