A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

outside was frozen hard, and would not have held any impressions from shoes or tire treads.
    Dr. Boccaci wasn’t sure what clothing his wife was wearing, but detectives found her kimono lying on the floor of her closet, something friends would say wasn’t at all like her. She was almost compulsively neat.
    Marcia Moore became a “missing person.” Lieutenant Darrol Bemis took over the probe personally, assisted by Detective Doris Twitchell. For detectives trained in scientific investigation, the search for Marcia Moore would be a whole new experience.
    It was not out of the scope of rational reasoning to suspect that Marcia Moore might have been kidnapped. Her family was both well-known and extremely wealthy, but no requests for ransom money came in. And kidnapping the woman without trying to collect for her safe return didn’t make sense.
    Suicide? How? And where?
    A woman whose life’s work involved writing about life and those areas beyond life would certainly have left a note. Moreover, Marcia Moore believed devoutly in reincarnation. And for believers, suicide is the worst possible death. Suicide destroys the natural karmic pattern. At best, the individual would have to come back again and start all over, making the same mistakes, suffering the same disappointments and agonies of the life they have just left. At worst, some proponents of reincarnation believe that a suicide is doomed in every life hereafter. Moore’s friends said that Marcia had espoused the latter theory. For her, suicide would be sentencing herself to endless lifetimes of misery, with no hope of spiritual growth.
    Could she have been abducted by a killer? Possibly. It was unlikely that she would have allowed a stranger into her home, but she could have gone for a walk in the cemetery and been attacked there. But, if that were the case, where was her body? Most murder victims turn up sooner or later. Most—not all. Snohomish County was full of rivers, lakes, much of it on the shores of Puget Sound. There were abandoned mine shafts, and mountain passes covered in deep snow.
    Could Marcia have decided to leave of her own accord? Neither her husband nor her brothers felt she would do that. She was happily married, involved in her work. And she was very considerate of her elderly parents. “She would communicate with us if she were able,” attorney John Moore insisted. “She wouldn’t do that to the folks.”
    Robin Moore concurred. “My sister and I were quite close. She would not have disappeared without letting me know. She was writing a book for my publishing company. If there’s one thing she had, it was a very strong sense of deadlines. She would have called.”
    Most of her friends were baffled by Marcia’s disappearance, but Elise felt an ominous cloud that had nothing to do with her skill at astrology. “I watched Marcia deteriorate very rapidly after she started experimenting with ketamine,” she said. “She had complained of pain in her hip. That was why she took walks around Floral Hills. The paths were a flat surface on which to walk. She didn’t want to talk about her hip, but she did say that someone was ‘bewitching’ her . . .”
    But Elise didn’t think Marcia would have gone walking in the cemetery at night.
    Robin Moore’s wife had spoken long-distance with Marcia on Saturday, January 13. She had found her sister-in-law very enthusiastic about her new projects, if a little repetitive and “slightly confused” about her theories.
    Robin Moore, himself familiar with police investigations and mysteries from research on his books, had two theories about his sister’s fate. “I really think it’s at least a fifty-fifty chance she was kidnapped, but not by an ordinary kidnapper. It would be a grotesque kidnapping by one of the people who knew [of] this very unorthodox spiritualism she was involved in.
    “Then maybe her husband is right. Maybe the ketamine caught up with her. Maybe something snapped and she took off walking.”
    Agonized, Dr. Boccaci said he had come to that theory as a possibility. Although he had never seen any profoundly detrimental effects from the drug, he realized that Marcia was a special case—the only human in the world known to have ingested so much for so long.
    Could she have suddenly been gripped by amnesia without his seeing its approach? The
PDR (Physicians Desk Reference)
warned that a side effect of ketamine is “confusional states” during a patient’s recovery from