Empty Promises

in deep shock after seeing her husband killed, might have chosen to stay with the only other human being around.
    She told the investigators she had witnessed the accidental shooting. And then, she said, Brown told her that he was afraid no one would ever believe him—not with his record. He was panicking and determined to head up and over the mountain. He said he knew the woods; she didn’t. She decided, Brown said, to go with him rather than wander around in the wilderness where she probably would have died of fatigue or starvation or as prey for a bear or a cougar.
    Brown acknowledged that he had dragged the collie’s carcass off the trail and that he’d rolled Hank’s body off the bank and then covered both bodies with sword ferns to deter the ravages of animals. That stamped him as a novice in the woods, the detectives thought. A few ferns wouldn’t keep animals away, but they might hide the bodies from a human hiker.
    So Tom Brown took off into the deep woods, with Robin trailing behind. He said he spent the next three days trying to calm himself down, and he finally decided the best thing to do was to turn himself in. Robin promised him that she would stand by him, and tell the cops she was a witness to her husband’s death. “Then we headed back to Oregon City.”
    On July 29, a polygraph expert from the Oregon State Police gave Tom Brown a lie detector test. All the tracings of his body’s reactions indicated that he was telling the truth. The victim’s own wife was supporting Brown’s story, all the evidence had been turned over by Brown himself, and he passed the polygraph test. It was tragic that the young husband should have died on his first wedding anniversary, but it clearly wasn’t a homicide.
    Tom Brown vacated the motel room and disappeared. There was no reason to require him to stay around.
    The postmortem examination of Hank Marcus confirmed that he had died of a single gunshot wound to the head with the bullet entering the right cheek and traveling out the left side of his neck. The path of the bullet had been almost horizontal, indicating that he was standing next to someone of similar height when he was shot. Unfortunately, because of the extreme decomposition of the tissue, there was no way to determine if there had been any blotching or stippling of powder burns around the wound. That eliminated their chance to establish how far the shooter had been from the victim.
    However, because the Oregon State Crime Lab was doing a special study on lead traces in bullet wounds, two fragments of Hank Marcus’s tissue—each no more than an inch or so in diameter—were excised from the site of the entrance and exit wounds so they could be examined under a scanning electron microscope equipped with a laser beam.
    Because of an oversight, Rusty’s body was buried before the direction of the wound to the dog’s head could be determined. And he wasn’t buried in a single grave, but in a mass grave at the city dump with several other dogs.
    Hank Marcus was buried, too, and Robin and their families tried to pick up the loose threads of their lives.

    Everyone thought Robin was going through normal, predictable grief. In truth, Robin Marcus was suffering through her own private hell, something far beyond normal grief. There was something just below the surface of her mind that kept bubbling up, no matter how hard she tried to keep it submerged. As the days passed, it grew stronger and stronger.
    Her memory was playing games with her. It was very odd. She could remember everything about preparations for their trip, remember the day they spent before they met Tom, and even recall how she’d been afraid of him at first. But the three days after Hank and Rusty were shot were all a blur. For the life of her, she could not pull those memories into focus.
    She liked Tom. She thought she liked Tom. She could remember riding to the sheriff’s office with Mr. O’Leary, Tom’s attorney, and telling him Tom was a nice person. They asked her a lot of questions in the Clackamas County sheriff’s office about why she’d gone up into the woods with Tom. Could she have escaped from him? She said yes—yes, she could have. She could have left when they got to Mr. O’Leary’s office, but she promised Tom she would stick by him and tell them about how he’d shot Hank accidentally. The gunshot haunted her. She kept hearing the boom in her head and seeing Hank’s blood. And it frightened her. But she