Free Oregon Hill by Howard Owen

babysitting the place and making sure everybody hits deadline, maybe catching up on your annual review paperwork.
    “Why?”
    “Because I think there’s a very good chance Martin Fell didn’t do it.”
    I see Sally shift gears, go through all the stages of grief for her dearly departed quiet weekend, reach “acceptance” and get her game face on. Sally’s a pro, and I think she knows I wouldn’t stir up shit just to be stirring. Hell, I wanted a quiet weekend, too.
    I tell her the story, and I can tell she’s impressed, but she’s not totally on board.
    “You know, Wheelie really wants this story to run. We’ve been promoting it like hell.”
    No kidding. The skybox on top of section A1 today is all about Isabel Ducharme and Martin Fell, with a high school yearbook photo of her on one side and another version of the perp-walk picture on the other. “How could this happen?” the big words ask, as if we’re going to tell them Sunday for a buck seventy-five. I hope Isabel’s mother has gone back home and doesn’t have to see her dead daughter’s picture used to sell newspapers.
    I tell Sally that, whatever the story is, we probably want to get it right.
    She sighs again.
    “OK, I’m calling Wheelie. Just one thing, and I hate to ask, but this isn’t some kind of Leonard Pikarski make-up call, is it?”
    Only Sally, or maybe Jackson, would have been around long enough and know me well enough to bring up Leonard Pikarski.
    It was during my first stint as night cops reporter. I had just gotten on full time at the paper after spending a couple of postgraduate years interning there for as close to nothing as the law allowed. The old night cops guy was bicycling back to work after his lunch hour one night, and somebody on Monument Avenue opened a parked car door right in front of him. He hit head-first on the paving stones, and I had a full-time job.
    I’d been on it for all of a year, showing “promise,” according to my annual review.
    That spring, two sisters were murdered in their home on the North Side. They apparently had let a man into the house after school one day. When their mother got home, she found the fourteen-year-old tied to a chair with her throat slit. The other one, the twelve-year-old, had been strangled in another chair, facing her. Before he’d murdered them, the killer had raped them both.
    Leonard Pikarski was the prime suspect all along. He lived two doors down, and he was a convicted sex offender who had spent two years in prison for molesting a thirteen-year-old when he was nineteen. At the time he entered my life, he was thirty-three. He was borderline retarded, and his parents had moved to Richmond from Baltimore to start over.
    Pikarski had done yard work around the neighborhood and was not as aware as some might have been of the concept of respecting others’ space. He was a friendly man, and he was prone to walk up uninvited to neighbors in their backyards or on their front porches. Some of the neighbors said he gave them the creeps, the way he’d just stare at them and overstay his welcome, which in most cases seemed to have run out the minute he got there.
    When his past was dug up, all kinds of stories emerged. Leonard was seen staring into someone’s bedroom window. A dog turned up missing shortly after Leonard was seen petting it. Leonard seemed unusually attracted to young girls, and especially the two sisters.
    The cops got him to confess. The trial was six months later and took a week. Despite no solid physical evidence, he was sentenced to death. He might have gotten life without parole, but he kept insisting, despite an earlier confession, that he was innocent. The judge noted the lack of contrition on the part of the defendant, and I was pretty sure Leonard didn’t know what contrition was. He just seemed confused.
    I covered the whole mess, including the execution a little over a year later. I’d been touched by the brutality of the whole thing, the way it