Empty Promises

Better start us an aid car. Have the aid car enter off Greenwood.”
    “Received. What type of injuries?”
    “Checking right now.” The dispatcher waited until Sleeth replied, “You’d better send Medic One. I hope they make it. We’ve got a lady with a serious head injury. And we’ve got a little child here that’s also been injured.”
    With their flashlights and the paler glow of the streetlight, the uniformed officers saw that the woman lay face down in a pool of blood that was rapidly seeping into the damp grass. Her face was a horror of bruises and cruel cuts; one of her eyes had actually been kicked or beaten out of its socket.
    A little boy lay beside her. He appeared to be two or three years old. He was dressed in yellow clown pajamas and a tiny Seattle Seahawks jacket. His face, too, had been so brutally beaten that the patrol officers could hardly bear to look at him.
    As they knelt over him, they held their breath, but they could detect no sign that he was breathing. Sleeth and Mochizuki performed CPR, breathing into the toddler’s mouth, and pressing carefully on his tiny chest so they wouldn’t break a rib or do more damage. They continued to work on him, stopping to listen for some sign that he was drawing in air on his own.
    The woman moaned and tossed. She was breathing, but she was unconscious. As the Medic One rig’s siren came closer and closer, Sleeth picked up the radio mike again. “You’d better notify homicide,” he said tightly. “And get them out here right away.”
    The Seattle Fire Department paramedics looked at the little boy and shook their heads. They were too late to save him. They worked frantically over the woman, knowing that it would be a miracle if she lived.
    More officers arrived on the scene. They questioned the elderly witness who had watched the struggle from his home. He was able to give them a remarkably detailed description of the man he’d seen chasing the woman. “He wore a brown jacket, maybe leather. He was big, husky,” the man said carefully. “Not a teenager but not old either. Maybe in his twenties or early thirties. He looked like that basketball player from Portland, that Bill Walton. He had a beard like him. I could see him driving away in the red car after I came back from calling you.”
    It hadn’t been that long. Maybe ten minutes at the most. The dispatcher alerted all police units in the area to be on the lookout for the suspect in the shiny red sports car.
    The area was soon alive with police vehicles and Medic One units. What had happened had occurred with deadly speed, and neither the stunned policemen nor the paramedics could do much to help the victims, but they might have a chance to trap the attacker within the net of patrol cars that were blocking exits from the Bitter Lake neighborhood.
    It was 2:05 A.M. on March 30 when the phone rang in Homicide Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s home. Cameron’s crew was on call for the weekend. When the regular shift of detectives left the homicide offices in the Public Safety Building at 11:45 P.M. , the calls automatically went to the standby crew. “Patrol units are on the scene of a very brutal assault,” the dispatcher said tersely. “They’re requesting Homicide.”
    Cameron threw on his clothes as he talked. He called two of his detectives, Mike Tando and John Boatman, at home and asked them to swing by Homicide to pick up the cameras and investigative kits and bring them to Bitter Lake. “I’ll head there now and meet you,” he told them.
    It was 2:30 A.M. when Cameron arrived at the scene. Patrol officers told him the Seattle Fire Department rig had just left with the injured woman. “She’s not expected to live, according to the medics,” Sleeth said. “The baby’s still here. He’s over there.”
    Cameron walked to the second Medic One rig. The child lay inside. The huge detective sergeant whom everyone called Mr. Homicide took a deep breath and peered into the brightly lit ambulance. He could see that the little boy had suffered numerous blunt-impact-type injuries to his head, and Cameron forced himself into the objective mode of a detective. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to do this. He saw a strange pattern emblazoned in the middle of the toddler’s forehead; he had been hit with something that left a circular indentation with several distinct impressions in the center of the circle. Not a hammer. A hammer would have left a solid circle. What then? A