Last Dance, Last Chance

had held her head down, or perhaps she was already dead.
    They didn’t disturb the body, waiting for homicide detectives to arrive from headquarters in downtown Seattle. It wasn’t long before the weed-filled field was alive with police cars and plainclothes vehicles. Sergeant I.A. O’Mera and Lieutenants Austin Seth and his partner, Don Sprinkle, made the 10-mile trip in no time. King County Coroner John Brill came along, too. He would be the one to officially declare the victim dead, but he wouldn’t remove the body until a search for possible evidence had been finished.
    In the 1940s, detectives still wore fedoras, suits, white shirts, and ties. The group of men who gathered around the body resembled an outtake from a film noir movie.
    Sprinkle and Seth were close friends as well as partners, and Seth would never in his life have a better partner. Austin Seth was 33 years old, six feet three, with thick dark hair; Don Sprinkle was a year younger, several inches shorter than Seth, with reddish-blond hair. He was a snappy dresser; his hat was woven of straw with an extra-wide brim and a cloth band in a tropical print. Seth was far more conservative. The two homicide detectives worked together so well that often they didn’t even have to speak to know what the other was thinking.
    Now, they tossed their suit jackets in their car and rolled up their sleeves. They dug a ditch in the dirt road next to the ditch so that the water would drain from the depression where the body lay.
    They didn’t know yet how she had died, but it wasn’t likely that she had been hit by a car on the narrow dirt road—not when she now lay naked, except for the sweater with its ornate gold buttons. There were traces of blood on the sweater. Her long thick auburn hair floated in the muddy water, obscuring most of her face. But when they turned the body, already stiffening with rigor mortis, they had no doubt at all that the young woman had been murdered. More than murdered—if such a thing were possible. She had been beaten savagely. Her right eye was swollen and as purple as a ripe plum, her nose was broken, and her head and face were covered with multiple bruises and abrasions. A black strap of some kind protruded from her mouth.
    Although Brill could not tell the actual manner of death, he said it was likely that she had been manually strangled. Deep black bruising on the front of her neck made that a strong possibility.
    Worst of all, her killer had slashed at her breasts and pubic area with a razor-sharp instrument, mutilating her body in a way that suggested she had encountered an acutely disturbed sexual psychopath.
    “I think these will prove to be wounds that were administered after death,” Brill said. “But we’ll have to see what Doc Wilson says after he does the autopsy.”
    The victim’s body was removed and taken to the King County morgue, located in the basement of the County City Building. Hopefully, a postmortem examination would give the investigators an accurate picture of her time of death.
    Precious little physical evidence was found at the body site. They found one sturdy woman’s oxford shoe, the kind that nurses wear—although this one was brown—and a pair of panties. The chances were good that the actual murder had occurred someplace else and the killer had brought the body here to dispose of it.
    The soil was very sandy, and Seth noticed fresh tire tracks not far from the ditch. The imprints were sharp; clearly, no other vehicle had driven over them. Max Allison, head of the crime lab, headed out to take a plaster of paris impression, known as a moulage cast, of the tread pattern. If they found tires to compare with the pattern, they might just have a positive piece of evidence.
    The neighborhood was mostly residential, with neat little homes just across the street from the open field where the victim had been left. Their lawns sloped down to the street and were all carefully landscaped. A few blocks farther along, the houses became virtual mansions, with gated entries. Another major presence in the area was the Sand Point Naval Air Station, where hundreds of pilots and officers were assigned. The killer could have come from the naval base, from the neighborhood, or from someplace far away.
    Austin Seth and Don Sprinkle followed the coroner’s ambulance as it headed downtown; as the principal detectives assigned to this case, they would observe the autopsy. However, they had gone only a few blocks