The Dreams of Ada Read Free

would be clean and ready for business when it opened the following morning.
    Nobody stopped him. Nobody gave a thought to fingerprints.
             
    Marie Titsworth is a small, dark, gentle Indian woman, who makes her living cleaning houses for people in Ada. Once a part of Indian Territory, the Ada area is home to a large number of Indians. The Chickasaw Nation headquarters is in town, as is the Carl Albert Indian Hospital.
    Two nights earlier, on April 26, Marie Titsworth had called the police to her home. Her son Odell had gotten drunk, was arguing with his girlfriend, and things were getting violent. She wanted both of them out of the house. Several uniformed officers responded. Odell refused to leave the house. He fought with the police when they tried to subdue him. This was not an unusual scene. Odell had four felony convictions, for burglary and assault. There was no love between Odell Titsworth and the Ada police department.
    The officers wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Odell, on the ground, was still kicking, and an officer kicked back. Titsworth’s arm was broken. Finally subdued, he was taken in a squad car to the emergency room at Valley View Hospital, where his arm was set in a cast and put in a sling. It was a spiral fracture of the upper arm, very painful. The doctor told him he might have to sleep sitting up for a while.
    Under the regulations of the Ada police department, a full written report must be filed on any incident in which someone is injured during a police action. This is to help with any charges the police might want to bring, and to defend the police against any possible lawsuits. On Friday night, Detective Mike Baskin, one of the four detectives on the thirty-three-man force, went to Valley View to interview the emergency room staffers who had treated Titsworth. But, having worked all night the night before, they were off duty; they would be back on Saturday night. So it was that Baskin, normally off on Saturdays, was working the evening of April 28. He drove to police headquarters, exchanged his own car for a squad car, and went to Valley View. When he got there, about 9 P.M ., he waited for a while. Then he was told that the staff was having a busy night, and was asked if he could come back later. He said he could. He was on his way back to headquarters when the news of the robbery at McAnally’s, and of Donna Denice Haraway’s possible abduction, crackled over the police radio. Mike Baskin drove to the scene.
    The Timmons brothers had already left when he got there. He was filled in by Gene Whelchel, Harvey Phillips, Monroe Atkeson. Baskin, too, gave no thought to fingerprints, to possible evidence. The clerk apparently had been abducted. His first priority was to find that light-colored pickup, to find the girl.
    He called the highway patrol, arranged to meet several officers at a nearby intersection. Just as the officers arrived, an orange pickup ran a stop sign. Baskin and the others went after it when the truck sped away. It wasn’t the right color, but it was fleeing.
    The truck finally stopped on a dead-end street. Baskin and the patrolmen approached, warily. Inside were two young men and a girl. They were scared. He had fled, the driver said, because he did not want to get a traffic ticket for running the stop sign. Neither the truck nor the girl matched the descriptions from McAnally’s. The officers didn’t bother to write a ticket. They had more important things to do just then.
    They divided the town into areas to search. Baskin, twenty-eight years old, round-faced, stocky, a policeman for eight years, a detective for one, drove out east along the highway for two miles beyond McAnally’s. He turned right onto a narrow blacktop that led to a development called Deer Creek Estates. Here, he knew, there were houses scattered acres apart, on rolling hills, far from the highway. If you wanted to assault someone in a quiet place, where her