Last Dance, Last Chance

when the police radio announced that a stolen car, a brand-new gray Lincoln sedan, had been located at 36thAvenue West and West Bertona in the Magnolia district. The officer responding to the early morning report had found that the front seat and one of the doors were stained heavily with blood.
    Seth and Sprinkle headed to Magnolia Bluff, a trip of several miles. Seattle is a city with large bodies of water on either side. The body had been found close to Lake Washington, on the east side of the city, and Magnolia Bluff was on the west side, overlooking Elliot Bay. The latter had several characteristics that were similar to the Sand Point region. The address where the car was found was only a few blocks from the Fort Lawton Army base. During World War II (and later the Korean War), thousands of troops passed through Fort Lawton headed for the Far East.
    Seth and Sprinkle would probably have to sift through thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines to find their killer. They hoped that wouldn’t happen. For now, they were very curious about the car found on Magnolia Bluff, its keys still in the ignition.
     
    “That Lincoln turned out to belong to a doctor,” Seth recalls. “He’d parked it in the Olympic Hotel garage, and when he went to get it at seven the night before, it was gone. He reported it immediately to our department.”
    Seth and Sprinkle walked around the luxury car. It didn’t have any exterior damage, and its white sidewall tires were perfectly clean. The interior was another story. The upholstery on the driver’s side of the front seat was stained with dried blood; one spot had come from pooling blood, and the other looked like transferred blood. There were also flecks of castoff blood on the dashboard. They would have come from a weapon being raised again and again. On the upswing, the velocity of the movement would have flung droplets onto the dashboard, their “tails” showing the direction of the killer’s swing.
    The clutch, brake, and accelerator pedals were covered with sandy residue, and the floorboards had a good amount of sand and tiny pebbles, similar to the dirt found at the body site.
    The physician himself, of course, became a suspect. He had reported the car stolen around 7 P.M. the night before. They didn’t know yet when the murdered woman had died, but the autopsy was about to start, and they would have a better idea soon.
    Max Allison arrived to process the car, dusting for fingerprints and taking dirt samples and tire impressions. There was enough blood to check for type—although it would be decades before DNA would assist police probes.
    *  *  *
    The postmortem was just beginning when Seth and Sprinkle arrived at the morgue. The young woman was five feet, five inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. Her red hair was luxuriant, and she had a redhead’s complexion with a profusion of freckles. It was impossible to tell whether she had been pretty, but she had a perfect figure, although it was marred now by the ugly perversion of her killer. There were more than two dozen thin cuts on her right breast, and both breasts had been laid open with deep horizontal slashes. The same weapon had been used to make a deep cut in her pubic area and then trailed up around her belly button and back down.
    “What was the weapon?” Austin Seth asked.
    “This beer bottle,” Dr. Gale Wilson said as he showed the two detectives the broken bottle that had been removed from beneath the body. The bottom had been smashed as bar-fighters do. “He held it by the neck and used the sharp edges to cut her.”
    “I think he strangled her with her own bra,” Wilson said. The bra had been cruelly jammed deeply into the victim’s throat, leaving only a thin black satin shoulder strap visible in the corner of her mouth.
    “At least this all happened after she was dead,” Wilson said. “She was strangled first, and she was raped. I can’t say if that happened before or after she died.”
    Forty years later, the semen left behind by the killer would be a vital clue. But, again, DNA testing was as unlikely in 1948 as a spaceship landing in downtown Seattle.
    “Time of death?” Don Sprinkle asked, knowing that it wouldn’t be as specific as fictional pathologists’ opinions.
    “Probably between 2 and 3 A.M. , give or take an hour either way,” Dr. Wilson said.
    That let the physician with the new Lincoln off the hook. He hadn’t