Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  OTHER BOOKS BY HOWARD OWEN

  Littlejohn

  Fat Lightning

  Answers to Lucky

  The Measured Man

  Harry and Ruth

  The Rail

  Turn Signal

  Rock of Ages

  The Reckoning

  HOWARD OWEN

  OREGON HILL

  Copyright © 2012 by Howard Owen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Owen, Howard –

  Oregon Hill / Howard Owen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-208-4

  eISBN 1-57962-323-9

  1. Reporters and reporting—Fiction. 2. Murder—

  Investigation—Fiction. 3. Richmond (Va.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.W552O74 2012

  813'.54—dc23 2012013633

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Karen, who makes it all possible

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Patty Parks and Paula Glenn at the Grace Arents Library and Education Center for their invaluable assistance in researching Oregon Hill. Thanks also to a host of friends at the Prestwould for all the great stories.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tuesday, October 6

  The South Anna isn’t much of a river to begin with, and it had been a dry fall.

  Her body had gotten hung up on a downed tree branch a couple of feet into the water.

  I was there about half an hour after some deputy sheriff reported it, and nobody was that much into “protecting the scene” or any such shit. Not yet.

  I actually beat the Richmond city cops there by a minute or two. The place wasn’t easy to find. A couple out canoeing, slipping away on that perfect fall afternoon, had come across it, beached the canoe next to the first cleared field they saw and got a somewhat frazzled housewife to call the sheriff.

  I heard about it as soon as I got in. I’d wasted precious hours the night before covering a drug-deal-gone-bad fatality in the East End, then posting it on our Web site. The DDGB was too late for the metro city edition, what with our earlier deadlines, but we wanted our former faithful subscribers to be able to read it for free.

  Sally Velez came up to me, walking fast, before I’d even gone for coffee.

  “I think they found her,” she said, humming slightly with the kind of energy we achieve only when really horrific events interrupt our tedium. We’re ashamed of ourselves, but, God help us, we do love it so.

  The GPS was worthless, as it often is, but by following a thin red line off a thin red line off U.S. 33 on my dog-eared state gazetteer, I finally got there about four o’clock, not dressed for a swamp but with no choice. The deputy was standing at the edge of the clearing, and another squad car was charging up, all blue lights and siren, ploughing up the farmer’s field.

  The first deputy looked a little queasy. He led the others down to the South Anna, and they didn’t object when I followed. The mud was thick and gummy, almost sucking my shoes off my feet.

  She’d gone missing four days before, and her body looked as if it had spent every bit of four days being ravaged by nature. Most of her clothes were still intact, but there was bloating, and what must have been damage by animals.

  At first, I didn’t even notice, because of the way she was. Her body was pointed down, into the water, and her shoulders were bent over the tree branch that had caught her. Nobody was supposed to touch her until the medical examiner arrived, but one of the kid deputies in the second cop car waded in, unable to restrain himself, I guess.

  Only when he moved her body a little, causing the torso to bob more upright, did I, and the kid, see it.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, then turned around and threw up, mostly not on his shoes. The first deputy was standing next to me, just looking across the river. He never said anything the whole time I was there.

  I see the dead and soon-to-be dead all the time, have witnessed often the damage that bullets do to soft tissue. This was different. This was like the two-year-old East End kid last year who was running toward her older sister inside their row house, when a bullet meant to scare some teenage drug dealer standing on the street outside tore through the flimsy walls and ruptured her heart.

  This was the slaughter of an innocent.

  “Why?” the kid deputy asked as he tried to wash vomit off his shoes. And he didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Everyone understood the question: Why would anyone abduct a young girl, kill her and pitch her body into the South Anna River, to be ravaged by the birds and rats?

  And why, in the name of Christ, would he cut her head off?

  When the Richmond city cops finally got there, I was chagrined to see in the fading light that Gillespie was one of the four who’d finally found the crime scene. He’d had it in for me since I tried to get his fat ass fired for causing a completely avoidable suicide in my presence the year before. They didn’t fire him, just suspended him—with pay, at that—for three months. And now, whenever our paths crossed, there was shit to take.

  “Black,” he said, his lip curling into a sneer. “I better not hear that you’ve been tampering with evidence. Now get the fuck out of here. This is a crime scene.”

  I congratulated him on finally finding it and asked if he had any more comments for me to pass on to our readers.

  He blanched and then said, “You wouldn’t dare.”

  One of the other cops looked familiar. When he passed in front of the squad car’s lights, I was sure. I called out.

  “David Junior.”

  David Shiflett looked at me for a couple of seconds. When he saw who it was, I had the feeling he wasn’t that pleased to see me.

  “Willie,” he said, not even trying to smile. “Willie Black. Hey, Hill reunion, huh?”

  He’d been a menacing presence as an older boy in Oregon Hill long ago, and the menace was still there, either sent out by him or imagined by me. He’s still on the Hill. I see him from a distance sometimes when I’m visiting Peggy, but I haven’t spoken to him in years.

  I told him not to let Gillespie eat all the doughnuts, and Gillespie threatened to have me arrested if I didn’t—“right damn now”—get behind the crime scene tape they still were putting up.

  Back at the paper, I told them that, no, I didn’t take the damn idiot camera, that our readers would have to be content with words this time.

  Jackson was not pleased, not because he cared much for photojournalism either, but because he knew the new managing editor did.

  I told Jackson what we were dealing with, but I didn’t really want to talk about what I’d seen. Somebody might try to turn it into some kind of dark humor, and I might have to hit them. I went to get some coffee, only to discover that, as was usually the case, some considerate individual had emptied the pot and hadn’t started a fresh one.

  I was waiting for the new one to brew when one of our Sarahs came in. This one actually is named Sarah. Sarah Good-night. U.Va., Class of ’08. We generally have two kinds of people in our newsroom. We have the old farts like me, mostly male, trying to hang on to our sorry-ass jobs in a dying industry in a tanking economy. And you have the Sarahs. They’re mostly women. They’re young, they’re talented, they’re motivated, and they’re very politely, very respectfully waiting for us to get the fuck out of the way so they can get our jobs, which they’ll do just as well for abo
ut half the salary. If we don’t get out of the way, they go to law school, which many of them do anyhow.

  Still, no hard feelings. Hell, I was young once. Really. Besides, one of them might be my boss some day.

  She adjusted one of her spaghetti straps and asked me about the body. I poured her a cup, then one for myself, and told her the basic, gory details.

  “Oh, my god,” she said. “Her head? He cut her head off?”

  “He. She. Somebody.”

  She’d gone to a couple of homicides with me, just for the experience, and she didn’t flinch or go all girly about seeing her first dirt nap, but I could tell this shook her a little.

  We went back into the newsroom. Sarah led the way and I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, torn between the urge to advise her to dress more professionally and the desire to hit on her. As is (I am proud to say) almost always the case, I took the safe middle ground.

  It didn’t take long for a story like that to pass through the newsroom. I tried to tell as little as possible.

  After half an hour, I had to get up and go down to the ground floor and out into the courtyard, where smoking is permitted. During the day, it’s kind of sad to be there with all the others pretending to be mavericks instead of addicts. At night, when the ad salesmen and bean counters have gone home, it’s kind of peaceful.

  I tried Andi’s cell number, but I didn’t leave a message. I’d left one the last time I called. Didn’t want to seem desperate.

  Sally Velez was waiting when I came back in. She pulled me into one of our phone-booth conference rooms, looking quite serious. Sally’s forty or forty-one, and her dark hair has streaks of gray that I admire her for not tinting. Like so many older women at the paper, she did at one time deign to spend non-work hours with me. It was between my second and third wives.

  “People will talk,” I said. She didn’t even tell me to shut the fuck up, her usual response to my lighthearted banter.

  “They found it,” she said. “Up in Massachusetts.”

  Isabel Ducharme had come to Richmond in August to start classes at Virginia Commonwealth University. It’s what they call an “urban school,” and it doesn’t get a large number of out-of-state students, but for some reason, Isabel had chosen to come here from a suburb of Boston.

  She had disappeared the Friday before, last seen leaving a bar on West Main that she’d apparently been able to penetrate with a fake ID. She was, her suitemates agreed, on the strength of some five weeks’ acquaintance, a sweet-natured, friendly girl, prone to get a little wild when she had too much to drink. She wanted to be a veterinarian, she’d told them.

  In the photos, she had dark hair, a nice natural tan and bright, expressive eyes.

  “If she had been some black girl from the projects,” Handley Pace said, “would we be burning this much newsprint?”

  No, I told him, probably not.

  “Still . . .” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Isabel Ducharme’s father had stayed behind when his wife came south on Sunday, as soon as she was notified that their daughter was missing. She explained that her husband was too upset to make the trip.

  He apparently had stayed home from work, waiting for news. UPS delivered the package about one thirty.

  It was about a foot square, and Philippe Ducharme was surprised by its weight. He was sitting at the kitchen table when he opened it, and when he saw what was inside, he merely wrapped his late daughter’s head back up and called the police. They found him outside, perched on the curb, his hand on top of the box at his side, staring into space.

  By the time the police had called his wife, she had just been notified by the Richmond cops’ grief squad that they had found the body.

  Marie Ducharme made a brief appearance on one of the local TV stations that night. She’d been on twice before, pleading with her daughter’s presumed abductors to please, please let her go. She had been somewhat charming, I thought, dressed stylishly but not too much so, talking with a hint of a French accent. She was, to be crude, a MILF. Thing is, she displayed so much class that people used to seeing drama-addicted next-of-kin go batshit in high-def suspected her of being “cold.”

  Now, she was about as cold as a blast furnace in hell.

  They had to bleep about every third word, but the gist was that she rued the day she’d ever let her beautiful Isabel come to this godforsaken patch of perdition, which she cursed for the shithole it was and forever would be.

  Who could blame her?

  Murder isn’t exactly a blue-moon occurrence around here. Most of the time, it’s either DDGB or domestic. The former have abated somewhat since heroin replaced crack cocaine as the drug of choice, but we still lose about a hundred a year, on average, which means you have about a 1-in-2,000 chance of being a victim.

  Now and then, though, we get an “exotic,” something that breaks from the same tired script.

  Isabelle Ducharme’s death was definitely an exotic.

  By eleven o’clock, the TV stations were in high gear. They’d been spreading her story all over the screen for three days by then, and now they had something new to boost their sadass ratings. I think the TV guys are actually more honest than we are. While we pretend that we have some kind of sacred duty to truth, justice and the American way, they’re committed to ratings, period.

  Out-of-town vultures from Washington and elsewhere were pouring in. At least two crews got stuck in the Hanover County mud trying to find the scene of the crime. Others, less intrepid or more sensible, set up camp outside the hotel where Marie Ducharme was staying, and they were the ones who were able to mine a grieving mother’s insanity for a great sound bite. Other fine media outlets, from Boston and elsewhere, lay siege to the Ducharme home in Chestnut Hill.

  Our new managing editor came by and stood over me while I wrote what I knew. He’d been there five months, replacing the one before him. She’d lasted two years before being lucky enough to land a job teaching journalism.

  “This is a dead business,” she confided to me and half a dozen others at the going-away party down at Penny Lane. It struck me as funny that you’d leave a dying business to help train kids go into a dying business, but you do what you gotta do.

  Mallory (“Call me Mal”) Wheelwright was ten years younger than I was and obviously on a much faster track. He’d come to us from Providence, and his directive was to make people read our paper. He was trying, bless his heart.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat, “she was decapitated?”

  “Yeah. Last time I looked.”

  “Well,” he said, “that ought to sell some papers.”

  It doesn’t really pay to get all choked up about bad things if you’re a night cops reporter. Hell, it was the same when I covered state politics, except there you’d have to joke about some state senator getting caught with his pants down. With night cops, the humor is sometimes a little tougher to come by. “Hard-bitten” is something the younger ones aspire to, and sometimes I want to tell them: Don’t strain yourself; it isn’t all that great when you get there.

  A guy two years out of Washington & Lee remarked, mostly for the benefit of one of the unpaid, comely fall interns, that he supposed it’d be like Stonewall Jackson’s amputated arm, buried somewhere up in Orange County while the rest of him lies in Lexington.

  “Gross,” the intern said, smiling.

  I can’t help thinking about Andi. I try to call. No answer.

  The too-flinty voice advises me to leave a message. I almost hang up, but then I can’t stop myself.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I say, and cringe, because she doesn’t like me using terms of endearment. “It’s me. Dad. Call me.” I nearly say “please,” then hang up.

  The story isn’t that hard to write. It does seem to go on and on, though, with all the backstory starting Friday night. When I’m done, it’s almost thirty inches, almost a column and a half, and us trying to save newsprint.

  “Well,” Ray Long on the copydesk says
when he gets it, “I guess it’s inevitable we’ll have a bad head on this one.”

  People groan.

  I need a drink.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wednesday

  Peggy’s call cut my beauty rest short at about five hours.

  “He’s at it again,” she said, by way of greeting. “Were you asleep? What the hell are you doing asleep at nine o’clock?”

  It hardly seemed worth explaining to her that, as has been the case for a year and a half now, I cover the night cops beat, which includes the inconvenience of working evenings. Add to that the fact that we are now expected to stay around until two A.M., and pile on the fact that I can’t really sleep that well sober, and you have a very untraditional schedule. This is something that Peggy and some of my bonehead friends can’t quite seem to grasp, and I keep forgetting to unplug the phone. Abe must already be at work.

  The presses run way before two A.M. As a matter of fact, the deadlines get earlier every time this woebegone industry makes another great technological leap forward, for some damn reason. But if the occasional homicidal insomniac kills his buddy over a cigarette after the bars close, I’ll be there, Willie on the spot, to report on it, for the equally insomniac fifteen “readers” who can’t wait for sunrise to go to our Web site. You think I’m kidding about the fifteen readers? I’ve seen the numbers, pal.

  Peggy wants me to come over and get Les down again. What can I do? A boy’s best friend is his drug-addled, three times divorced, sixty-eight-year-old, bleached blonde mother. (After Kate left, Peggy said maybe three was a magic number for us. I told her I wasn’t seeing the magic.)

  Besides, it’s not that far, and I can get a coffee to go at the 821 Café on the way. Maybe I’ll be awake when I get there.

  On the paper rack outside the 821, I see the big block headline: GIRL’S BODY FOUND.

  “Third time this month,” Peggy says, both of us looking up.