Three Years, Three Months Before

He Was a Cop

The responding officer reported two bodies at the scene. It was clear at a glance at least one of them was dead. A bullet had entered the young woman’s head through the nasal cavity and tore through her right frontal and parietal lobes before exiting above the occipital bone. She lay at the edge of the summit drive at the top of Mount Tabor, her feet pointing toward the Harvey Scott statue. The second body was in the road, a figure who ran headlong into the patrol car, then collapsed. When the officer, fellow named Michael Masliah, put his hand on the figure’s shoulder to check for signs of life, it unwound with a jerk and cried out, “He was a cop!” A boy, twelve or thirteen, and a mess: drenched, muddy, and slick with vomit, lower lip split and left eye socket swollen and dark. Hair buzzing atop his head like he’d stuck his tongue in a light socket. He’d been in the thick of some shit. Masliah bent down. “Damn, kid, are you all right?” The boy 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 showing off 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 too long 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 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 gunshot residue 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. Eager saw it, for some reason thought the shooter was a cop. Which, hell, maybe he was, though it wasn’t a popular notion in the Homicide pit.

Theory three? Who the fuck could guess? We took a number of runs at Eager, especially after we learned Big Ed Gillespie had been a cop himself once upon a time. A few years earlier he’d voluntarily separated from the Klamath County Sheriff’s Department rather than face an investigation into questionable activities on the job. We didn’t learn much, but the thrust was that he was linked to a protection racket in some remote corner of the county. Since he’d left of his own accord, the investigation was dropped. No doubt the department down there was glad to get clear of a problem with minimal ruckus.

But even that piece of info failed to break Charm’s resolve, or Eager’s. He’d been in enough trouble during his short life that Charm knew the system, countered us at every turn. She had a way about her, a kind of reptilian ruthlessness. She didn’t display maternal instincts so much as a dogged combativeness toward all who challenged her.

Three years later, we still don’t know who the woman is. Jane Doe. Sister of John, daughter of mystery, mother of frustration. She was buried on the county tab, what little evidence we had stored in paper bags. Susan and I kept digging, and we found a few candidates among the Missing Persons files, both local and statewide. Female, early- to-mid-twenties, dark hair, fair skin, full figure. One by one we ruled them out, either through dental records or because the missing turned up again. Her prints weren’t in the regional AFIS, her DNA profile wasn’t in CODIS. No criminal record, no government service, no first responder or job requiring a background check. The woman was vapor until someone showed up to claim her.

After three years, you gotta figure no one will.