Last Dance, Last Chance

clues, but the detectives didn’t know at the outset how very little those clues would help. It might have been better that they had no expectations—because it wasn’t going to be easy.
    The detective crew at the scene was soon joined by Homicide Detective Lieutenant Pat Murphy and George Ishii, director of the Western Washington Crime Lab, with his assistant, Bob Sullivan. Ishii pointed out that the attack had begun behind the counter in the outer office. There were marks on the plywood walls where the hammer had glanced off, and a formidable amount of blood had gushed from the victim’s head wounds and stained the floor and walls there.
    The killer had then dragged the woman into the living quarters in the rear so that she could not be seen through the glass in the office door.
    Bertha Lush’s living quarters were filled with the accumulation of many years of living: papers, family portraits, letters, books, and other memorabilia, and none of them had been ransacked. Her killer, it seemed, wanted only cash. He had probably been in a hurry and had been too apprehensive to search for money Bertha might have hidden in her apartment.
    Bertha Lush had been very cautious. Every door in both the office and living quarters had three separate locks—the usual doorknob lock and two deadbolt locks. The outer door of the office could be locked by merely pulling it shut from the outside, and it looked as though that was what her killer had done as he left, probably hoping to delay discovery of her body.
    And he had left in a rush. There was a suitcase in the office, possibly left there by the killer in his flight. It contained clothing that would fit an average-size male, from five feet eight to ten inches, 150 to 160 pounds. There were also some men’s toilet items and a tooled leather belt made in New Mexico among the effects.
    But there was always the chance that the suitcase had been left there by someone else—someone who had nothing to do with the murder and might even come forward later.
    King County Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay arrived at the scene at 1:30 A.M. and made a preliminary examination of the body. He estimated that death had occurred some two to four hours earlier, although he leaned toward the earlier figure. There was no rigor mortis as yet, and the body was still warm to the touch. Lividity had begun on the front of the body, as was to be expected because the victim had lain on her stomach. The dark purple striations of livor mortis always appear in the lowermost parts of the body, as the heart no longer circulates the blood.
    Bertha Lush had suffered many, many bludgeon blows to the skull and had almost certainly sustained fatal brain injuries. There did not appear to be any evidence of sexual assault; her pantyhose were still in place, and although her clothing was in disarray, that had probably occurred while she was dragged from the office into the back room.
    The body was removed shortly after 1:30 on Sunday morning, and Detectives Cook and Cuthill secured the crime scene at 3 A.M. , leaving a patrol officer stationed outside the motel office to guard it until detectives returned to view it in daylight. Homicide detectives, accompanied by criminalist Ishii and departmental illustrator Ben Smith, were back early in the morning. The entire office and the victim’s apartment were dusted for latent prints.
    It looked as though the killer had washed up in Bertha Lush’s bathroom, and Ishii removed a water sample from the P-trap beneath; with any luck there might be enough blood suspended there to isolate its type.
    There were also red smudges on a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom. It was a long shot, but there could be a usable print that would emerge after Ninhydrin processing, a technique that can lift prints from paper decades after they are left there.
    A paper sack near the suitcase in the office seemed to be empty—and it was, except for a sales slip. The slip was from a hardware item sold at Ernst’s Hardware, a well-known Seattle chain store. The item was a ball peen hammer. The death weapon was so new that it still bore a price tag. This sales slip matched that price tag. And the sale had taken place on May 18. How cruel, cold-blooded, and premeditated a killer would have to be to deliberately purchase a hammer with which to bludgeon an old woman! Had the killer already met Bertha Lush, or was the hammer a weapon he carried in case he needed it?
    Detective Benny DePalmo,