Empty Promises

explain his relationship with Kathi Jones.
    Boatman and Tando assured him they were not trying to trick him or trap him—he could stop talking at any time, and he was under no pressure to discuss anything that he didn’t wish to. “But I have to remind you,” Boatman said, “that if you make any oral statements, they can be used against you in court.”
    “Was it jealousy?” Tando ventured. “Did it all start because you were jealous—or was she jealous of you?”
    Lehn nodded his head slightly. He spoke generally of the treachery of women. As far as he was concerned, none of them could be trusted. When the detectives didn’t disagree with him, he took this to mean that they went along with his theories.
    “You were jealous of her?” Tando asked. “She betrayed you in some way?”
    If the suspect admitted to that much, at least they would have some kind of motive for what he had done. Lehn agreed that there had been jealousy in his relationship with the woman who was now fighting for her life.
    “Were you lovers?”
    Lehn said that he had been intimate with Kathi Jones in the recent past—but then he drew back into himself again. “I don’t want to discuss that anymore.”
    The detectives waited. The silence in the cramped interview room with its faded green walls grew almost louder than words.
    “Her father didn’t like me much,” Lehn finally offered.
    “Why was that?”
    Lehn made a dismissive gesture with his hand, but then he said cryptically, “You have to understand there have been things in the past that have continued to be a problem.”
    Quite sure that this was a massive understatement, the two detectives waited to see what the suspect would say next. His conversational style had fallen into a pattern of denial, followed by bursts of information.
    Lehn told them he had recently spent a night with Kathi at her condominium. He said he thought everything was going fine, but then he left for a while. When he came back, Kathi was angry with him. “Everything changed,” he said. “She discovered that somebody had vandalized her Mazda RX7. I came into the condo parking lot and she immediately accused me of doing the damage. I kept telling her that I hadn’t touched her car, that I wouldn’t have had time to do that much damage, but she didn’t believe me. She always thought that I trashed her car.” He said Kathi prized her car highly. He couldn’t come up with any reason someone else would have set out to destroy it.
    Boatman and Tando had their own ideas about who had damaged the Mazda, but talking to Pat Lehn was like trying to drive parallel to another car that kept veering off the road. He picked certain incidents out of the air, but they were remote in time and had nothing to do with the terrible attack that had happened just four or five hours before the interview. He hadn’t seen the victims the night before; he hadn’t hurt them, he insisted. He took the stance of an innocent man who was being blamed for things he didn’t do.
    Lehn was vague when Boatman and Tando asked him the hardest questions. He said he hadn’t been with Kathi in the early part of Saturday evening because she was working. “She was a hostess at L’Tastevin.”
    They knew the restaurant. It was a very popular, very upscale bistro on Lower Queen Anne Hill.
    “You didn’t go there to eat?”
    “No,” Lehn said. “I ate at El Gaucho.”
    El Gaucho was another top restaurant in Seattle, a place that had mink-lined booths, thick steaks, and the best martinis in town. Lehn had been drinking on Saturday night. He told them again about buying champagne and white wine at the 7-Eleven. He must have been saving the wine for later because he also said he went to a Chinese restaurant for a few drinks after dinner.
    “You said you talked to Kathi early last night on the phone?”
    Lehn nodded. He said he was supposed to meet Kathi after she got off work. It would have been usual for her to pick up Kris from his baby-sitter on her way home.
    “You went to her place to meet her?”
    He shook his head. No, he hadn’t met her at her condo. Rather, he said he had encountered Kathi and her little boy near her home as their cars both approached Bitter Place North, “where it happened,” Lehn said, again unconsciously referring to the attack. “I just bumped into them.” He was giving his version of their meeting, but it was so obvious that this was his agenda. “We just happened to meet there, and we