Empty Promises

motel for the night, and he agreed to come to sheriff’s headquarters the first thing in the morning to help them find the missing rifle.
    Detective Sergeant Bill Werth and Forristall and Reeves, met with Thomas Brown early the next day. They went with him again into the Mount Hood National Forest in the Colowash River area to recover the gun.
    They took more photos of the campsite, the Marcuses’ car, and the scene where Hank had died. Then they hiked into the wilderness beyond. They crashed through underbrush for a mile to the banks of the Colowash, where they walked upstream for three miles, then crossed the river and came to a smaller stream. There Werth noted footprints that appeared to match Brown’s shoes and much smaller footprints in the soft sand. Both sets were headed in the opposite direction from where Brown was leading the investigators.
    In the heat of the day, the pace was rapid and wearying. The group walked three more miles upriver and then cut away from the riverbank again and moved into the woods in a northerly direction. They were now so deep into the forest that civilization seemed not to exist at all. Indeed, the terrain here had changed little since pioneers first came to Oregon almost 140 years before. Lost in these woods, a novice hiker might never find his way out. It was easy to understand why Tom Brown and Robin Marcus had become disoriented. But now Brown led the group, pointing out landmarks as they moved along. All of this was beginning to look familiar to him.
    He pointed to a very heavily vegetated area. “We spread our sleeping bags out here on the night of the twenty-fifth,” he said. “There it is! There’s my rifle. It’s a .22 high power with lever action. I had about eleven bullets left in a plastic bag. I tossed them out into the brush.”
    The gun was there all right, but even when they dropped to their hands and knees and searched through the undergrowth, the detectives could not find the bullets. To preserve any latent prints, they fashioned a sling in which to carry the rifle.
    Back down along the creek bed, Brown showed them where he and Robin had dumped a sleeping bag when they had finally found their way to the trail head. The sleeping bag was literally torn to pieces from being dragged through the underbrush.
    The exhausted search party got back to the campsite at 9:35 P.M. , after more than ten hours of slogging through the forest. Packing the two bodies out along the trail for postmortem examination was extremely difficult. When they returned to the sheriff’s office, the investigators secured the .22 rifle in the property room to await ballistics tests and dusting for fingerprints. They had also retrieved blood samples from the dirt near Hank’s corpse, and from Rusty’s body.
    On July 29, Tom Brown gave a more detailed statement of the accident. He explained he hadn’t known either of the Marcuses before he met them near the dam; they decided to join up for a fishing trip. The next morning he and Hank Marcus took a hike before breakfast.
    “Hank and I walked up to the clearing the morning of the twenty-fourth. He was looking through my binoculars and he spotted a deer. He handed the binoculars to me so I could see, and I handed the rifle over to him at the same time. Then, after I got a bead on the deer, I gave the glasses back to Hank and he handed the gun back. As it was being passed to me, I grabbed it by the balance with my finger on the trigger. It fired … and the bullet hit Hank in the head.”
    “And his wife saw this?”
    Brown nodded. “Like she said, she was standing a couple feet behind us. Hank fell to the ground, and I scooped up both the rifles. Robin started screaming. I ran toward the campsite.”
    Brown said that Rusty had been asleep back at the site and came running toward him, snarling as if he was about to attack. “I had to shoot him.”
    Brown said he’d been in shock. He sat around the campsite for several hours trying to decide what to do. “I finally knew I had to split—that no one would believe me. I told Robin she could do what she wanted, but that I was going to head to the mountains. She said I couldn’t leave her there, that I had to take her back to civilization, but I said, ‘No way. I’m going.’ I told her she could go with me if she wanted, but she’d better hurry and get her stuff together.”
    It was obvious that Brown lacked gallantry, but it was easy to imagine that Robin Marcus, lost in the woods,