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to break and run.
    No one. The
    river gurgled and tumbled, heedless of the watchers on
    her banks. Rutherford felt a cop's familiar tightening of the muscles at the base of his neck. Was the gunman waiting somewhere out in the black? He cut the lights on his vehicle.
    Officers from the Springfield Police Department were already working the road and the fields with a search dog. More men were on the way from Lane County, from Springfield, and from the Oregon State Police. |
    Diane asked why there was only one tracking dog.
    "That's the only dog available now," Rutherford explained.
    "But these fields are full of horses. If there was a stranger out there in the dark, the horses would let us know." w-3 -"Oh," she said, "I didn't know that." ie I
    "They're almost as good as dogs when something alien gets into their fields." - j
    That sounded reasonable; Diane had always loved horses, j and she had great respect for their sensitivity. *
    Suddenly, she remembered something she'd forgotten in all the panic at the hospital. The yellow car. She could see it in her mind, she told Rutherford. An "icky yellow car" parked somewhere along this road. It hadn't seemed important before. They looked
    for it, but the yellow car was gone.
    As the squad car cruised slowly back toward the south end of Old Mohawk Road, they passed a huge old farmhouse. Diane sa^

SMALL SACRIFICES 31
    lieht on upstairs and nudged her father. They peered up at the doming structure. Wes saw the light; then it went out. Rutherford
    too, saw the light but doubted that anyone waited high up in the dark window of a farmhouse, taking a careful bead on them. That made little sense; why would a gunman choose to draw further attention to himself when the area was alive with cops?
    Diane's injured arm was beginning to throb, and she complained to Rutherford. She was frightened too, she said.
    The sheriffs sergeant picked up his radio mike and asked for someone to meet them and transport Diane and Wes back to the hospital. He would remain at the scene to help man the roadblocks. One of the most massive criminal investigations in the state of Oregon had begun.
    It was a quarter after eleven on that Thursday night when Lane County Detectives Dick Tracy, Doug Welch, and Roy Pond were called at home and told to report to the McKenzieWillamette Hospital. That was procedure: the cops were called first, then the DA's office if they needed a search warrant or other legal backup. Unaware, Fred Hugi slept the last good night's sleep he
    would have for a long time. As the crow flies, the site of the shooting was no more than six miles away on the other side of the forest land behind his house, much too far for him to hear the shots.
    From the brief information the sheriff s detectives got from It Louis Hince, they expected to find kids with minor injuries,
    children caught in the cross fire of a family fight escalated out of control. Photographs would be required, close-ups of the kids' |
    wounds, something to hand to the District Attorney's office. It ^as a chore Pond and Welch dreaded--directing hurt kids to sit
    frozen under bright lights at midnight so that the lurid topography 01 the damage done to them could be preserved for legal posterity.
    Welch checked on his own two sons before he left the house. He tried not to identify, but child abuse got to him. Some kids "rew the short straw in life, and it wasn't fair. Doug Welch, oldest son of a Detroit Tigers catcher-turned"^ntanaLevi-jeans salesman, sometimes wondered how he'd ended lie a cop' "^ never thought of being a cop. A ballplayer maybe,
    ki^ ^ ^ac*' ^e P^y^ P1'0 ^au' anc^tnen semi-pro when I was a th reInember going to the games. I always fell asleep before fj^.^^nth inning; even so, ball players were my heroes. Or 16lller pilots. Not cops. No way."
    32 ANN RULE
    Welch had been about to graduate from the University of
    Oregon, six months away from a second lieutenant's commission and pilots' training, when the government