Empty Promises

stopped our cars about three feet apart, and rolled down our windows … and then she just started to jump all over me.”
    He said Kathi brought up the trashing of her Mazda. Lehn said she had accused him once again of messing with her car. “She said somebody had taken all the lug nuts off of her front wheels. I got out of my car, and sure enough, there were lug nuts missing, one from each front wheel.”
    “You didn’t do that?”
    Lehn looked mystified. He denied being anywhere near her car on Saturday night. “She started to scream at me. She said she was going to file a police report about it and have the cops watch her condo so I couldn’t come near her anymore.”
    The big man before them insisted that he hadn’t been staking out Kathi Jones’s condo, stalking her, waiting for her to get home. He did admit that he was getting angrier and angrier as she screamed at him and accused him of following her, tampering with her car. She kept telling him to leave her alone.
    It was a tragically familiar story to the detectives—a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a suitor who wouldn’t go away. Nevertheless, Lehn maintained the stance of an innocent man, a man falsely accused.
    “I finally just gave up fighting with her at one point and tried to reach inside and kiss her on the cheek, but she was so angry at me. That’s when things started.” Lehn said he had no memory of getting into Kathi’s car. He could not remember how her clothes had come off, but he thought they might have come off inside her car. He claimed no recall of how their argument had ended.
    “Where was Kathi—and Kris—when you left?” Boatman asked.
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Do you remember if you hit Kris?”
    “I don’t—but he could have gotten in the way.”
    Lehn said he left the scene after “everything just sort of happened,” and he drove his car around the corner. Then he went back and drove Kathi’s car to a supermarket parking lot a few blocks away. He left it there and returned on foot to retrieve his own car. It was at that point that the officers had arrested him.
    Tando took Polaroid pictures of Pat Lehn, including close-up shots of his hands. They could see that his huge hands were swollen and red around the knuckles, and that he had long fresh scratches on both forearms. Lehn wore a round ring studded with small diamonds. He also told them his right foot hurt.
    “How did that happen?”
    “I might have kicked them, I guess—but I think it’s from an injury on the job.”
    The county jail was across Cherry Street from the Public Safety Building, but it was accessible through a tunnel. Tando and Boatman walked their prisoner over to the jail through the tunnel. The sun had yet to come up on that Sunday morning before Pat Lehn was booked without bail on suspicion of homicide.
    At 6:50 A.M. , Tando and Boatman returned to Harborview to collect the clothing that Kathi Jones had worn. She was still alive but in very critical condition, still in the operating room. The detectives were now into a new day, a day where sleep would be forgotten. They checked Pat Lehn’s bloodstained clothing and noted that his right shoe was dented at the toe. That spot on the shoe was covered with dried blood which had blond hairs caught in it.
    Thus far, Sergeant Don Cameron’s team had one homicide victim—the three-year-old son of Pat Lehn’s estranged lover—and they had been told that if Kathi Jones lived, it would be a miracle. They believed they had good solid physical evidence in Lehn’s clothing, not to mention the bruises and scratches on Lehn himself, and they had his vague statement about “the incident.” Now they needed to find out more about the suspect himself. He was a handsome man who had a good job, a nice apartment, and a new car. But something about his emotional affect was skewed; his responses to their questions had been strangely flat and deceptively mild, given the violent nature of the attack they were discussing.
    Homicide detectives Gary Fowler and Danny Melton took over part of the investigation at 7:30 A.M. when they reported for duty on the day shift. They located Kathi Jones’s red Mazda just where Pat Lehn said it would be—in the parking lot of a supermarket some blocks away from the scene of the beating. There were bloodstains on the right front wheel. A great deal of blood had splashed onto the hubcaps and then it had dissipated over the metal in droplets when the wheel