Don’t Look Behind You

bottom in about twelve feet of water some twenty-five feet from shore. He and Dollinger brought the woman’s body to shore. She was completely nude, save for the shredded remnants of a nylon stocking clinging to her right foot.
    She wore a wedding band on her left ring finger.
    The detectives who observed the petite form could only guess that she might have been attractive in life. Although the tiny woman’s figure was voluptuous and well proportioned, her face—beneath wet strands of longish blond hair—was a ruin. Her forehead was split above her right eye, and there were open wounds over and under that eye as well as on the top and sides of her nose. Ugly bruises marked each side of her chin and two rows of round bruises—as if fingers had pressed deeply into her flesh—were apparent on the underside of her left arm.
    The dead woman appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties and was probably about five feet tall. She could not weigh more than 110 or 115 pounds.
    “She hasn’t been dead long,” Nolan commented. “Her body is perfectly preserved. On a beach as popular as this one, her purse and clothes didn’t go unobserved for long.”
    “I wonder what she could have done or said to make someone this angry,” Ben Colwell muttered. “She’s been hit again and again—and hit hard. She sure wouldn’t makemuch of an opponent for anyone. She’s just a little bit of a thing.”
    As they waited for deputy medical examiners from Dr. Gale Wilson’s office, detectives carefully placed plastic bags around the victim’s hands and secured them at the wrists to preserve possible evidence under her fingernails.
    At 7:15 p.m. coroner’s deputies removed the body to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office to await a postmortem examination.
    In early July, it doesn’t get dark in the Northwest until almost ten p.m., and Sergeant Schmitz, Deputy Colwell, and detectives Nolan and McGonagle remained at the body site until it was fully dark, meticulously searching the shoreline and the shallows for every possible piece of evidence, anything that might somehow explain the incredible violence that had taken place and the motive behind it.
    The two divers moved once again into the lake. This time they retrieved a wine-red jacket that obviously matched the short shorts found earlier. The jacket had been ripped to tatters. There was also a beige blouse—styled in leotard fashion—of sheer stretch fabric with panties attached. However, the blouse had been ripped into two pieces and the panty half floated separately. The divers swam in widening circles one hundred feet from shore searching the bottom of the lake for a possible murder weapon.
    They found no weapon. Seventy-five feet from shore, Deputy Zimmerman located a woman’s white crisscross sandal in new condition. Could someone have thrown itthat far? Or had the wind stirring up the waves carried it there?
    Dan Nolan photographed the scene and all the evidence and then assisted McGonagle as they took triangulation measurements of the area and bagged the evidence in plastic containers. The triangulations would allow them to pinpoint exactly where the woman’s body and the evidence had been—if they had to return to the site or needed to re-create it.
    As they went over the scattered contents of the black purse, they consistently found one name: Mrs. Bethany Stokesberry.* Credit cards, doctor’s appointment cards, and letters alike bore that name and gave an address, some six or seven blocks south of Echo Lake.
    “I don’t think there’s much question that the dead woman is Bethany Stokesberry,” Nolan remarked. “If she has a family at this address, we can probably get positive identification tonight.”
    McGonagle nodded grimly. No amount of experience in homicide investigation can inure an officer to the dreaded task of informing a family that someone they loved is dead.
    As the investigative crew finished gathering evidence and darkness settled over the peaceful setting, it fell to Dan Nolan to contact possible family members at the residence whose address appeared in the victim’s belongings. Nolan, a veteran of the King County Police Department, is a native of Ireland, a congenial soft-spoken man whose voice still carries a trace of brogue in relaxed moments.
    Now he approached a pleasant dwelling where he was greeted by a man in his thirties who said he was Beth Stokesberry’s husband, Martin.
    The worried husband fought for