Empty Promises

have been published in the newspapers. While most good detectives will consider any avenue that might help, it is the rare seer who is able to offer precise details that will allow them to find a killer—or a body.
    King County Police Sergeant George Helland was placed in charge of the investigation. He talked to Joann’s relatives and friends, but he could find nothing at all in her life that might have marked her as a target for violence. She was only seventeen; she had no enemies; she’d been in no arguments. She was a lovely young woman, all alone in the woods. That was probably what had made her a target for someone who hid and watched her from the shadows. She had the great bad luck to have crossed a murderer’s path when he was in a killing phase of his aberration.
    Joann’s mother went through the ordeal of checking the clothes found with her daughter’s body. The clothes she had been wearing when she left for her Sunday walk were all there, but her watch was missing. It was her sixteenth birthday gift—a white metal watch, with the brand name Lucien Perreaux. Her mother was positive Joann had been wearing the watch when she left for her last walk. She never went anyplace without it.
    Helland issued a bulletin to area pawnshops in an effort to locate the missing watch. It did not turn up.
    The investigation continued—just as the Erickson investigation had never really stopped. All of the police agencies in King and neighboring counties pooled their information on the two cases but their leads ended in midair.

    Fall and winter passed and by the third week in April trilliums, forsythia, and dogwood dominated the woods and fields of western Washington. April 20 was a school holiday in Renton due to a teachers’ conference. In the southern end of town, two six-year-old boys, who were fast friends and spent most of their waking moments together, began their day. Bradley Lyons got up at eight and ate the bacon and eggs his mother prepared for him. He rode with her and his sister to the lumberyard to pick up some boards for a home project. Then he changed into black rubber boots and a quilted green jacket and headed for his friend Scott Andrews’s house.
    Scott, who had wanted only a bowl of Alphabits for breakfast, waited impatiently for his socks to come out of the dryer. Then he too donned black rubber boots and a jacket much like Bradley’s and headed out to play. He was back in at eleven to ask for cookies “for the kids,” then left again with a handful of them.
    The boys played for a while on a dirt pile near Scott’s house and then left to go to the Lyons’s backyard. It was a fascinating yard for six-year-old boys because it disappeared into a woods rife with trails, potholes, and marshy areas.
    A little before noon, Scott’s mother called Brad’s mom to ask her if she had seen the boys. Their laughter had carried on the air all morning, and their mothers had watched them from their kitchen windows, but now they were nowhere in sight. The mothers looked around the usual spots, but they were not frightened yet; they both expected Brad and Scott to come running around the corners of their houses at any moment. Theirs was a family neighborhood full of kids who ran between the streets and cul-de-sacs all the time. They were a long way from fast roads and commercial areas.
    But the boys didn’t come home for lunch. Now neighbors passed the word that they were missing, and those who were home hurried out to help look for them. Before long the police were notified and a full-scale search was organized.
    Once again, the Explorer Scouts, tracking dogs, helicopters, and police and sheriffs’ patrols gathered. They combed six square miles for the missing boys. Residents in the neighborhood were asked to check boats and trailers, car trunks, sheds, abandoned refrigerators—anyplace where the youngsters might have become trapped. Along with a growing number of civilian volunteers, forty members of the Spring Glen Fire Department joined the massive search.
    But that Tuesday night passed without a trace of Brad or Scott, and the search teams continued around the clock. Wednesday and Wednesday night went by and the first graders were still missing. There is no way to even imagine the terror in their families’ hearts. The friendly woods seemed menacing now. The spring storms had flooded swamps and potholes deep enough so that a child could drown. Even though Brad and Scott had been warned over and