Empty Promises

ring? Maybe.
    There would be no rush to the hospital for the baby. It was too late. The woman, who was drawing in air with great difficulty, was alive when the ambulance reached Harborview Hospital on the highest hill overlooking downtown Seattle. If anyone could save her, it would be the physicians in Harborview’s trauma center, where they were accustomed to treating terrible damage inflicted by car crashes, industrial accidents, and the extremes of human rage.
    The obvious question remained unspoken. How could anyone do this to a fragile woman? To a helpless child? What could they possibly have done to send someone into such a violent rage?
    Don Cameron called the medical examiner’s office, and when John Boatman and Mike Tando arrived, he assigned them to measure the area where the attacks had occurred and to pick up any evidence the killer might have dropped. It had to be done, of course, and he wanted to keep them away from the paramedics’ rig. “Don’t look at the baby,” he told them. They had toddlers, too; the sight of the dead child had been rough enough for Cameron, whose children were older.
    Homicide detectives do what they have to do, but all of them will admit that the murder of a child always affects them deeply. This little blond boy in his clown pajamas was one of the most shocking victims any of them had ever encountered. It didn’t matter how much tragedy they had seen or how impervious they seemed in the face of death; the murder of a child could make tough cops cry.
    Dr. John Eisele, the King County assistant medical examiner, arrived and examined the child. He gave official verification that the youngster had succumbed to severe trauma to the head within the preceding hour: “Massive head trauma with a large laceration and skull fracture at the rear of the head. It happened just a short time ago.”
    The baby’s body was moved to the medical examiner’s vehicle and transported to the morgue to await autopsy.
    Mike Tando and John Boatman walked up the bank to the spot where the attack had occurred. The uniformed officers cordoned off the entire grassy slope with yellow crime scene tape.
    In addition to the old man, another witness told them he had seen the tall, bearded suspect beating and kicking both the victims. He too said it had happened very quickly and he could only watch the huge man as he sped away in a small red car.
    “Anybody know who they are?” Tando asked the officers who had been first on the scene. “Did they live in one of the apartment houses?”
    “No,” Mochizuki said. “Nobody here knows them.”
    But the officers who had seen the woman speculated that the victims had probably been a mother and child. They both had the same blond hair. The police found no identification—the woman’s purse was gone. It was clear they had been in the car with the killer. The prime witness was certain he’d seen the woman emerge from the vehicle and run away.
    The grassy slope where the woman and baby were attacked was across the street from the homes fronting Bitter Lake. There was no moon, and the area was only dimly lit by streetlights at 3:00 A.M. But the detectives’ auxiliary lighting revealed three distinct blood splotches on the grass: the place where the woman had been found was still marked by a blood pool 13 inches by 11 inches, and the baby had lain in a puddle of blood 7 inches by 6 inches. The third pool of blood marked where the child’s head rested as responding officers tried to save him. The detectives photographed the blood and took samples for typing.
    It was ten minutes to four in the morning when the investigators cleared the scene and returned to homicide headquarters downtown. They had retrieved very little in the way of physical evidence, and there was nothing more they could do until morning light made it possible to search the scene further.
    Tando and Boatman drove up the hill to Harborview Hospital to check on the condition of the woman victim. The head resident in the ER told the two detectives that she was in “very critical” condition. She was still in surgery, where doctors were attempting to reduce the swelling in her brain, which had been so traumatized that it was now being crushed by her skull. “There’s very little chance that she will survive,” the doctor said. “But we’re trying. Do you know who she is?”
    Tando shook his head. “No idea at all.”
    The night’s work was far from over for Cameron and his crew, but