Empty Promises

rather-studious-looking member of the duo gave his name as Thomas Braun. He wore thick, dark-rimmed classes. His slight, wispy-mustached partner said he was Leonard Maine.
    The California authorities checked with the sheriff of Adams County, Washington. Surprisingly, neither suspect had a criminal record. Braun had been employed at a service station in Ritzville while Maine, married and the father of a three-month-old baby, worked in a local cement-mixing plant. The two had left Ritzville on August 17 in Braun’s recently purchased Borgward sedan. They were both eighteen years old.
    If they were guilty of killing Tim Luce and raping and shooting Susan Bartolomei, no one who knew them in Ritzville had ever had any reason to expect such violent behavior from them. They seemed to be ordinary guys living ordinary—if boring—lives in a little town that baked hot in the summer and froze in the winter. Sometimes it seemed that if Ritzville wasn’t being blasted by sandstorms, it was being pelted by blizzards.
    As the questioning continued, the local officers were joined by John B. Smoot of the California Investigation and Identification Department. Tom Braun admitted to Smoot that he had raped and shot Susan Bartolomei, killed Tim Luce, and killed a woman near Seattle and a middle-aged man in Oregon. The admitted mastermind of the killing spree calmly agreed to help detectives in those states locate the bodies of the victims.
    Leonard Maine confirmed Braun’s story. Maine, however, insisted that he had been an unwilling pawn who was terrified of Braun and that he continued on the journey only because Braun would have killed him if he didn’t. The men questioning him wondered why—if he feared for his life—Maine hadn’t crept out of the hotel in Jamestown and escaped instead of falling asleep with a fully loaded gun in his possession.
    California I.D. men compared the .22 caliber bullets taken from the bodies of Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei with the bullets in the suspects’ Ruger and Frontier Scout and in the drawers in rooms 26 and 19 of the Jamestown Hotel. They all proved to be from the same lot and the same manufacturer. More significant, the tool marks on the casings on the road where Susan was found indicated that the bullets had been fired by the Ruger and the Scout. No other guns could have made those exact markings.
    The lawmen in Tuolumne and Mendocino Counties hoped they had apprehended Maine and Braun in time to prevent other killings; they hadn’t reckoned with the possibility that their cases came at the end of a murder spree. Now the word coming back from Snohomish County, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, seemed to confirm Braun’s and Maine’s stories: their killing spree had obviously begun in the North.
    Braun and Maine had described a murder up near Cannon Beach, Oregon, that had not yet been discovered. There, they said they had encountered “an old guy” on a logging road where they had detoured to take a look at the Pacific Ocean. Oregon salesman Samuel Ledgerwood, fifty-seven, had apparently had a successful day’s fishing and was heading home when he came across the two suspects, who were changing a tire on the side of the road. He pulled over to help them. It was the last act of kindness he would ever perform.
    Within a very short time, Ledgerwood lay dead on the isolated logging road with two .22 caliber slugs in his head. Tom Braun and Leonard Maine had still been driving Deanna Buse’s car when Ledgerwood stopped to help them, but now they set it on fire—they didn’t need it anymore. They headed toward California in their latest victim’s green Buick. Perhaps it was Ledgerwood’s newer model Buick that tempted the killers and led to his death. Or perhaps murder just for the hell of it had been their goal all along when they rolled out of Ritzville. They didn’t know any of their victims and the victims themselves were different ages, different sexes. The only thing they had in common was that they were there when Braun and Maine roved along roads and freeways.
    Oregon officers had a Missing Report on Sam Ledgerwood, but they hadn’t found his body yet. Even as they headed out to the spot Leonard Maine described—a wooded area off a logging road near Cannon Beach—a report came in. A hunter had just discovered the remains of a man in that area, and there were indeed two bullet wounds in his head. It was Ledgerwood.
    Nearby, the Oregon investigators found Deanna