Empty Promises

to the spot where she’d seen the gun flash. She found a man on the ground, his body being pelted by the rain. He was bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth. He seemed to be comatose, and she looked for something that might at least keep the rain off him. She found a broken black umbrella, and managed to prop it over his face. Then she looked up to see two young women walking nearby, and she called out to them, “Run! Call the campus police!”
    Within a few minutes, a half-dozen university police officers arrived. They were soon joined by a Medic One unit from the Seattle Fire Department. Oblivious to the fact that they were kneeling in an icy puddle, the paramedics began to work on the victim, a tall, bearded man who appeared to be in his late twenties. He had sustained gunshot wounds to his head and both arms. The medics inserted an airway to help him breathe, but his condition was very critical as he was rushed to the Harborview Hospital. Physicians there immediately monitored his vital signs. He appeared to have lost a great deal of blood and to have sustained terrible brain damage; there was only a slight chance that he would survive.
    Back at the site of the shooting, the campus police officers rigged a tarp over the ground where the victim had fallen, suspending the cover from several chairs. The broken umbrella marked the spot where the violence had erupted. Attempted murder is not a crime that college police have much experience dealing with, and they called for help from the Seattle Police Department’s homicide unit.
    Detectives George Marberg and Rick Buckland were next up to catch a night call. Before Marberg left the downtown homicide headquarters, he checked with the Harborview emergency room and learned that the John Doe victim had died. He left for the scene. Seattle Police K-9 officers and their dogs milled around, as the animals tried to pick up the scent of the killer, but they went only so far and then came back to the umbrella, frustrated; the rain had washed away all traces of the man with the gun.
    The scene of the shooting was known on campus as Hippie Hill. It was really only a grassy knoll near Parrington Hall, home to decades of classes for hopeful writers. Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas and Richard Eberhart had once taught there. Many writing students, including myself, went on to publish articles and books with skills learned in Parrington Hall.
    On this moonless and stormy night, only faint light from the streetlamps filtered through the dense greenery of trees and shrubs as the detectives began their work. The ground beneath the tarp was still stained with blood and brain tissue and littered with paraphernalia left by the paramedics. Three expended cartridge casings—probably .32 caliber—glinted in the beams of the auxiliary lights the investigators had brought in. These and the broken pieces of umbrella were all they had to go on at the start of the investigation. A man had died—suddenly, violently—in the midst of a rainstorm on a black December night. They didn’t yet know who he was or why he had died. They had one witness who’d seen a dark figure scurrying away. A quick solution didn’t look at all likely. The scene was photographed, measured, and triangulated so that it would be recorded exactly, even though the wind and rain threatened to destroy it. The shell casings were bagged and retained. Held up in the light, Marberg could see that they were Remington-Peters .32 automatic cartridges.
    The police left the bloodied knoll until it could be checked thoroughly in the daylight. University police would guard it through the night so that no one would contaminate the scene of the crime. Detectives Marberg and Buckland coordinated their investigation with Lieutenant William Dougherty and Sergeant George Vasil of the university police force. The college officers had obtained a id for the victim from his possessions: Larry Dwayne Duerksen. Duerksen’s wallet contained forty dollars when it was checked at the hospital. Dougherty and Vasil went to the apartment house listed as Duerksen’s residence. There they were met in the lobby by an apparently grief-stricken Gareth Leifbach, who said he was Larry Duerksen’s roommate.
    They could see that Leifbach had been crying. Since he was listed as Larry’s next of kin in case of an accident, Leifbach said someone at Harborview Hospital had called to tell him about Larry’s death. He requested that police come at once to