Empty Promises

they didn’t mind working through the night; a suspect in the brutal attack had surfaced. He had been caught in the police net they had dropped over the Bitter Lake neighborhood. And based on first reports, he certainly sounded like the huge bearded man their prime witness had described.
    At 1:58 A.M. on that Sunday in March, Officer Mary Brick was working third watch in Unit 3U6. She had heard Sleeth and Mochizuki calling frantically for assistance from the paramedics. Then, as she turned toward Greenwood Avenue from the I-5 freeway, she listened to the information broadcast about a possible suspect on the loose in the vicinity. She made a mental note to watch for a bearded man driving a small red car, but she hadn’t had long to look because the next call was directed to her unit: “Go to 345 North 133rd. Possible suspect vehicle located at that location. Washington license DBV-624.” Brick’s patrol unit rounded the corner near that address, and she saw fellow officers Steve Knectel and Andy DePola running toward a maroon Toyota Corolla a block ahead. A tall white male was just getting into the driver’s seat. She maneuvered her unit close to the suspect vehicle and heard Knectel and DePola shout at the man, “Get out!”
    The man didn’t move.
    “I said get out!” DePola snapped.
    The man finally emerged, unfolding himself from a car that seemed too small to hold him until he stood towering over it. Knectel handcuffed him and walked him back to Mary Brick’s vehicle. DePola followed, and the three officers and their suspect crowded into the patrol car. They then advised the suspect of his Miranda rights.
    Knectel and DePola had been on the scene as the paramedics worked over the two victims. They had followed the killer’s trail, after noting that the elderly witness mentioned “screeching tires.” The two officers walked southbound down Bitter Place and saw fresh tire marks leading away from the crime scene. The tire tracks turned onto 133rd Street.
    The burned rubber was fading, but at that hour of the morning, they found only one set of recent tire tracks on the rain-slick cement of North 133rd. Knectel and DePola moved forward on foot like Indian trail-cutters until they spotted a red foreign car parked up ahead. It was unoccupied, but when Knectel felt the hood, it was still warm. That was when he radioed for Mary Brick to “sit on” the car while he and DePola went to the nearby houses.
    A house-to-house check proved unnecessary. Even before Mary Brick pulled up, Knectel and DePola observed a large man with a fiery red beard walk toward the suspect vehicle and get in. They were beside him before he realized they were there. Glancing through the driver’s window, Knectel and DePola saw crimson stains on the large man’s hands and ordered him to get out of the car.
    Oddly, the man seemed scarcely disturbed at being arrested. He gave his name as Patrick David Lehn, and his birthdate as March 9, 1952. He was a huge man, well over 6 feet, 3 inches tall, and he looked to weigh about 230 pounds. He had a thatch of curly brown hair and a bright red beard and mustache. He did indeed resemble Portland Trailblazers star Bill Walton.
    Mary Brick studied the prisoner. He sat in a relaxed position in the backseat of her patrol car, but sweat continually beaded up on his forehead and rolled down his cheeks into his beard and mustache.
    “Do you know who those people are?” Brick asked, gesturing toward the scene of the attack, which wasn’t that far away. She didn’t say “victims” or “the woman and the boy,” but he seemed to know who she was talking about.
    Lehn replied quite calmly: “Kathi and Kris … Kathi Jones and Kris Haugen.”
    “You know them?” she persisted.
    “I dated her once,” he said. “She worked at a French restaurant in Seattle.”
    But when Brick and DePola questioned him further, Lehn was adamant that he hadn’t seen Kathi Jones the previous evening. He couldn’t have seen her, he said, because he didn’t know where she lived. “I talked with her on the phone last night, though.” Lehn said he’d gone to dinner alone at a steak house in Seattle and then had headed toward his north end home on I-5. He said he’d left the freeway at the Northgate Mall and gone to a 7-Eleven to purchase a bottle of champagne and a bottle of chablis.
    “How did you get those stains on your hands?” DePola asked. “You cut yourself?”
    Lehn stared at his hand as if he was