Empty Promises

three of the witnesses were emphatic that Larry Duerksen had been living in fear, but none of them knew if Larry had known who was after him—or why.
    Asked if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, Leifbach agreed to do so without hesitation. “I’m thinking of doing my own investigation of Larry’s death,” he said. “Around the end of October, somebody tried to run over Larry in front of the Sexual Minorities Counseling Center on Capitol Hill. And then somebody left a dead pigeon in a brown paper bag outside the apartment here.”
    Gareth said he felt that the killer had been trying to get to him by hurting his roommate. “Larry was planning to make speeches on my behalf to assist in the $3.5 million lawsuit I’m bringing against the army,” he said with tears streaming down his face. “I hate guns! If it hadn’t been for that gun we had, Larry would still be alive.”
    Again, what an odd remark. He had just told them that he’d thrown the gun off a bridge hours before Larry Duerksen was shot. Leifbach signed permission for Lieutenant Dougherty and Sergeant Vasil to search the apartment. They did look around, but they found no bullets and no more wet clothing. The only thing dripping with rain was the fleece-lined jacket.
    Detective George Marberg ran Duerksen’s and Leifbach’s names through the law enforcement computer network and didn’t find any criminal record for either of them. He also checked for Duerksen’s name at the records bureau of the police department. Although Larry Duerksen had told many people that he had reported the threats against him, his name wasn’t in the police files as a complainant. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate truth from fantasy, and reality from the histrionic and attention-grabbing behavior of these two roommates—one dead and the other apparently immobilized with grief, yet not too stunned to trumpet his own fame to the detectives who questioned him.
    Gareth Leifbach had been crying when the two University of Washington police officers talked to him; they couldn’t mistake his red, swollen eyes. His ordeal wasn’t over. He had gone from that interview to identify the body of his roommate-friend-lover, and he sobbed then too. It looked as though Larry Duerksen’s complete devotion to Gareth’s fight for gay liberation in the armed services had been the death of him.
    The fatal shooting wasn’t Larry Duerksen’s first brush with death. In addition to Leifbach, both of his women friends, Tami and Ruth, verified that Larry had almost been hit by a speeding car shortly after he aligned himself with Leifbach. He had managed to leap to safety at the very last minute. It was perfectly understandable that Gareth Leifbach felt not only grief but guilt over Larry’s death.
    Early on the morning of December 15, Dr. Donald Reay, the King County medical examiner, performed the postmortem. He found that the fatal bullet had entered near the right side at the back of Larry Duerksen’s head and then traveled through the brain before exiting above his left eye. There was also a through-and-through flesh wound in his right arm, a grazing wound across his chest, and another severe wound in his upper left arm. The humerus—the large bone in the arm—had been fractured by the impact of a bullet. From the angle of fire, Dr. Reay determined that the victim had been on his feet when the arm wounds were sustained, but was lying facedown when the fatal wound to the head was administered. It was a classic execution-style killing. Larry Duerksen had been knocked to the ground by the force of the bullet that broke his arm, and then had been shot in the head as he lay with his face pressed to the sodden turf of Hippie Hill.
    When the day shift came on duty, the Duerksen murder case was assigned to Detectives Mike Tando and Duane Homan. They immediately began to receive calls from members of the victim’s family. All the detectives could tell them at this point was that Larry had been shot to death and that there were no suspects yet.
    Homan and Tando returned to the crime scene and viewed it in daylight. Although the scene had been well protected all night long, they found nothing that seemed to further the investigation. The detectives moved over the pale grass of winter with a metal detector, but there was no reaction that might suggest that a slug was lodged in the ground. They dug down six inches into the turf and still found nothing.
    Gareth