Empty Promises

surprised to see the cracking red marks, but then he explained that he had gotten into a fight with some “middle-aged guy” outside a Chinese restaurant.
    Not surprisingly, the records department listed a number of Katherine, Kathy, and Cathy Joneses in the Seattle area. One of them was a Kathi Jones, who lived in an apartment at 322 North 134th Street—half a block from the attack site. It was also close to where they’d arrested Patrick Lehn.
    Despite what Lehn was saying, he had to have seen Kathi Jones the night before. There was little question that he was the man she had been frantic to get away from, but he stonewalled, insisting that he had only spoken to her on the phone.
    In a sense, the case seemed to be over; in another sense, the investigators knew nothing at all about the relationship and the emotions that had provoked the savage beatings on the grassy slope. What were Patrick and Kathi to each other? Was the dead child theirs? Like so many homicide investigations, this one started at the end and they would have to work backward until they discovered some sort of semirational explanation for what seemed to be complete chaos.
    Pat Lehn was taken first to the Wallingford Precinct in the north end of Seattle. At DePola’s instruction, he removed his clothing and it was bagged into evidence. His hands were swabbed with sterile water and the traces of blood obtained would be tested for type. He didn’t seem to be wounded. He was given a blanket to cover himself, videotaped to show his demeanor at the time of his arrest, and then driven to the fifth-floor offices of Homicide in the Public Safety Building for further questioning by detectives.
    It was 4:55 A.M. when Mike Tando and John Boatman introduced themselves to the hulking suspect. Tando was a wiry man with a quick grin and bushy blond curls; Boatman had a round, pleasant face and ruddy cheeks. Neither looked like a homicide detective, which proved to be an advantage in a number of cases. The man before them had massive shoulders that protruded from the blanket he clutched around him. He would have been a formidable opponent for anyone. The detectives were tremendously curious to know about what could have made him angry enough to beat a woman and a child. But of course they couldn’t let him know how anxious they were to understand his motivation. They began slowly, asking him blandly general questions about his background.
    Pat Lehn said he was currently living in Lynnwood, a small town about fifteen miles north of Seattle. Before that, he had lived in Seattle for most of his twenty-eight years. He had graduated from Shoreline High School and had attended one year of junior college. He worked as a field supervisor for a construction company building a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. That was a good job, a high-paying job that carried with it a good deal of responsibility. Lehn explained that he had no criminal record, except for a few minor charges. He read the Miranda rights form thoroughly and signed it, but he didn’t seem eager to share any details about the previous evening with them.
    “Do you want an attorney?” John Boatman asked.
    Lehn seemed to debate this in his mind. “I don’t know,” he said, slowly. “I’ve watched a lot of television and I know an attorney would be mad at me if I told you guys the whole story.”
    The detectives waited. At length, Lehn decided he didn’t want an attorney, and he did seem to be under some inner pressure. He clearly wanted to talk; he even said he wanted to discuss not only his arrest but what he knew about the victims. “But I don’t want to get into it any deeper than that,” he said.
    The two detectives agreed to take this tack. At this point, they would have been grateful for anything that might shed light on the deadly attack on Bitter Place.
    Lehn gave them Kathi’s name again, and spelled it. He spelled Kris’s name, and said he thought Kris was about three. He said that Kathi and her son lived just around the corner from where the “incident” happened.
    This spontaneous statement was interesting, since none of the police or the investigators had yet told Pat Lehn where “the incident” had happened—or even what “the incident” was. It was he who was offering the information, apparently unaware that he was implicating himself.
    And yet there was much that Lehn did not want to discuss; he claimed that it was “such a long story” and would take a long time to