A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

that was odd; Marjorie was either barefoot or wearing thongs earlier in the evening.
    Mrs. Knope heard the back door slam, and the roar of an engine revving up nearby. These were the sounds of a summer night, except they were louder than usual. There was a crunch of gravel and the sound of the car backing up and then accelerating toward the Kent-Kangley Road. She thought little of it, and half-smiled. That “Jim” that Marjorie was hoping to hear from must have come over instead of phoning. She was glad; her daughter had grieved long enough over her fiancé.
    When Marjorie’s dad arose the next morning, he was startled to find the TV blaring and every light in the house on. More disturbing than that, the back door was ajar. But then they lived so far out in the country in such an isolated spot that they didn’t have to bother about locking doors. Mr. Knope figured that Marjorie had gone to bed and carelessly forgotten to secure the door.
    But when her father checked her bedroom, Marjorie wasn’t curled up asleep in her bed. Nor had the bed been slept in.
    Puzzled, and with the first flickers of worry intruding, he walked outside in the bright Saturday morning sunlight. Marjorie’s rubber thongs lay in the driveway beside some fresh tire tracks.
    This wasn’t like Marjorie. This wasn’t like Marjorie at all. Mr. Knope didn’t go to work after all, and when there was no sign of or word from Marjorie by 9:30, the Knopes began to call her friends. Perhaps she had decided at the last minute to spend the night with a girlfriend. She had done that once before, but when she found out how worried her parents had been, she had promised never to do it again. She was a considerate daughter who would never worry them unnecessarily.
    No one they called had seen Marjorie since late Friday afternoon. The next hour passed with terrible slowness. Marjorie had to be someplace close by, but they couldn’t find her. Filled with dread, her parents reported her missing to the Kent Police. Although she had been wearing baby-doll pajamas when they’d seen her last, a check of her closet led them to believe she was now wearing blue jeans and a “Captain America” shirt. “Some crazy thing with blue and white stripes,” her father told the radio operator, “and a big white star on the front. And she’s probably barefoot. Her shoes are in the driveway here.” He said his daughter was five feet, five inches tall, but weighed only a bit over a hundred pounds. She needed her glasses to see any distance at all.
    While the Kent police checked with the King County police about any accident and injury reports, her parents continued to search the house. Their fears increased when they found her blue jeans and the “Captain America” shirt stuffed in the back of her closet. That meant she was still in her baby-doll pajamas. They were positive that Marjorie would never have left the house wearing only her sheer, shortie pajamas—at least not by choice.
    The morning wore on with no news of Marjorie. As the noon sun shone high in the sky on her birthday, a fourteen-year-old boy was taking a short-cut across the football field of Meridian Junior High School, a school located several miles from the Knope home. He was almost across when he noticed something lying on the west side of the field, something he couldn’t identify right away but which seemed out of place. Feeling the little hairs stand up on the back of his neck, the teenager walked cautiously to within twenty feet of the object and tried to make his brain absorb what his eyes were seeing. Suddenly he realized he was looking at the nude body of a woman. She lay, crumpled in a strangely awkward position, at the far edge of the playing field.
    The boy drew no closer, but whirled and ran for home. Thinking he had to be imagining things, his mother told him somewhat impatiently to get in the car, and they drove to the junior high school. When she looked where her son was pointing, she believed him. But she was too afraid to go closer. They knocked on the door of a nearby house and the man living there agreed to accompany them to the field.
    He walked to the woman who half-lay, half-knelt there. He touched his hand to the sole of her foot, and found it cold to the touch. Next, he tried to find some faint pulse in her wrist and throat, but there was none.
    “She’s dead, I think,” he told the teenager and his mother. “We won’t touch anything—I’m going to call the