A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

stolen banana to establish commonalities between that murder and another attempted axe murder. John Nordlund worked the Wah Mee Massacre, where thirteen people were gunned down in an after-hours gambling spot in Seattle’s Chinatown. The investigators who did the crime scene quite literally waded up to their pant cuffs in the blood that flowed from the victims. Nordlund and Don Cameron found the two gunmen who had been quite willing to sacrifice more than a dozen lives in exchange for gambling money.
    Gene Ramirez remembered a 1996 case where a young man was killed under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Ramirez had a perfect case, a perfect witness—until they got into court and he learned his witness had been in jail at the time he said he’d seen a murder. Disappointed for a while, Ramirez found a better witness. His deceptively gentle questioning elicited the
real
eyewitness, a girlfriend who had seen it all.
    The trio of homicide detectives were as different in personality as it was possible to be; O’Leary was garrulous and enthusiastic, Nordlund, deadpan and cynical—at least on the surface—and Ramirez, soft-spoken and thoughtful. Each one of them was a meticulous investigator who knew people, psychology and how to work a crime scene. Together, they were a dynamite team.
    Now, they were starting at the bottom step of a case that was basically “Murder and Attempted Murder of Thirty-Four Victims.” They would try to determine if the killer was still alive. They wondered if it was possible that the shooter was one of the people who had been admitted to six different hospitals: Harborview, University of Washington Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center (First Hill), Swedish Medical Center (Ballard), Providence Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Virginia Mason Medical Center. If the killer had been so angry at someone or some
thing
that he had been willing to sacrifice a whole busload of strangers, there was no guarantee that he would stop there.
    There was a real sense of urgency about finding out the reasons behind what had just happened. Had the shooter been after Mark McLaughlin
personally,
or had he only been a target for what he represented?

    While Gene Ramirez went to the scene of the crash, John Nordlund and Steve O’Leary joined Sergeant Fred Jordan at Harborview where he was standing by the body of the victim known only as Whiskey Doe. They studied the corpse. The man looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, he was quite handsome and well-groomed and was over six feet tall. Now that the ER staff had wiped the blood away, they recognized a contact bullet wound to the right side of his head.
    Jordan showed them the bag containing Whiskey Doe’s clothes; he had worn a brown insulated vest, a long-sleeved purple shirt, blue jeans, a blue-black rubberized waist strap—the kind that people who wanted to lose weight wore—a black tank-top with a Nike logo on it, thong-style briefs with blue and black horizontal stripes, and a blue tie with circular red designs, which was attached to a red and white elastic strap with duct tape. There was an additional red and white strap. Except for the last two items, the clothing was fairly expensive and hardly unusual. The weight-loss strap was strange; the dead man was not at all overweight.
    He had had $12.75 in bills and change, a Swiss army knife, a key chain with three keys attached, and a Metro bus transfer. He had carried a gun, yes, but the derringer’s cylinder was still loaded with five bullets. He hadn’t fired it.
    Jane Jorgensen, an investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, would take custody of Whiskey Doe’s body. She would roll his fingerprints so they could be run through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) to see if there would be a match. Almost anyone in America who has applied for a job, joined the service, or been arrested has fingerprints on file somewhere.
    While the detectives were at the Medical Examiner’s office, the body of the bus driver was brought in. They learned the identity of the first victim in the puzzling shooting: Mark Francis McLaughlin, who was born on June 13, 1954. His address was listed as a single family dwelling in Lynnwood. They listened to a cursory report on his injuries: “two gunshot wounds to the right side.” It would take a complete autopsy to know the extent of the damage caused by those shots.
    O’Leary, Nordlund and Ramirez headed out to some of the other