Empty Promises

kill to get it.”
    Tom said that he and a friend had decided at school that day that they needed some money. Brown borrowed a rifle and five bullets from a friend, picked up the sixth at home, and the teenagers headed for a gas station near a junior high but “there were too many people there for a single-shot weapon,” the cocky kid explained.
    Then they headed for Canby, Oregon. They only had a little gas, so they ran a woman motorist off the road, demanding money when they ran up to the car. The quick-thinking woman quickly locked her doors, but the two teenagers fired anyway. “The expression changed on her face,” Tom said, smiling at the memory. “We thought we’d hit her.”
    They had run into the woods, but they came back to where the woman had abandoned her car and run for help. Their plan to find someone else to shoot ended when they saw a police car approaching with the colored beacons on its light bar circling.
    “Jim hit the gas pedal,” Tom had told the deputy. “I told him to turn off at Clackamas. I knew we could make a standoff because there was only one cop. We hit a truck, slid sideways, and flipped. I was in the backseat, aiming out the back window, and let the cop have it. The next thing I knew I was out in the weeds.”
    Luckily, Tom’s shot missed the officer—but the two wild teenagers weren’t done. They were going to show the world.
    Next, Tom ran along a log boom and approached a man, demanding his car keys. The man said he didn’t have any. Then Tom had gone to a nearby house and threatened a girl there. Panicked, she ran across the street to the house where the nineteen-year-old shooting victim lived. “I ran to the girl’s house. There were windows in every room and I figured if a cop came after me, I could pick him off.”
    It was at that point that Tom Brown shot the man in the stomach, and commandeered a pickup truck to make his escape. “But there wasn’t enough room in the cab to aim my rifle—that’s when you got me,” he finished, evidently proud of his shooting spree. He believed he had shot at least two people. In truth, he had critically injured just one man, who eventually recovered.
    Tom Brown was sentenced to the MacLaren School for Boys, Oregon’s reform school. The man who liked to shoot birds and cubs and deer out of season—the “wasteful master”—had started his violent career fourteen years before he met Robin and Hank Marcus.
    Upon his release from the MacLaren School, and after an interim period of petty crimes, Tom Brown committed a crime that sounded like a rehearsal for what he’d done to the Marcuses. He had been going with a woman who had two young children, and she’d rejected him. He kidnapped her and her children at gunpoint and took them into the mountains, where he kept them overnight.
    After he released his hostages, Tom told police: “I was going to have her one way or another. I would have burned down her house, used a gun, whatever it took, so no one else would ever have her either.”
    That Milwaukee, Oregon, case never went to trial. The woman victim refused to file charges, grateful for her life and afraid of reprisal from Tom Brown.
    After that kidnapping incident, Brown had gone to Nebraska, where he worked on a farm. His boss allowed him to use a red GMC pickup truck. One day in early summer, Tom said he was going into town. He just kept on going all the way to Oregon, however, taking the truck and his employer’s rifles with him.
    Brown’s Nebraska boss was considerably disappointed in the man he’d trusted. He filed a stolen car report, and that warrant out of Nebraska was still in force. Several other friends in the Clackamas County area were also disappointed when they had cashed checks for Brown and they came back bouncing.
    This was the man Hank and Robin had met in the woods. Although he was now indicted for murder, it might be months, even years, before Tom Brown could be arrested and brought to trial. Bob Hamilton and Steve Keutzer went ahead and built the foundation of their case. They would be ready whenever Brown resurfaced.
    And then, surprisingly, Tom Brown himself strolled into the Clackamas County sheriff’s office one day. He said he’d heard there was a murder warrant out for him and he “wanted to get it all straightened out.” He didn’t seem worried or even mildly upset. He looked, indeed, for all the world like a man who had an ace up his sleeve. He was booked into jail to await