Last Dance, Last Chance

them and bound them before they ever had a chance to fight back.
    It was obvious that the girls’ hands had been bound before their upper garments were pulled up; that would account for the fact that they still wore clothes. The twine knots would have made it impossible to slip their shirts off past their hands.
    Rape was the most probable motive, but it would take lab tests to determine whether the victims had actually been sexually attacked. Robbery was ruled out when Sumpter’s men found a good deal of cash in their backpacks. They also found drivers’ licenses and various kinds of identification.
    According to their identification, the victims were Tina Jacobsen and Gaelisa Burton, both 19 years old, with addresses on Vashon Island, Washington. Now, they knew who the young women were, but they had no idea who had killed them, and it would take a medical examiner to estimate the time of death.
    Harold Sumpter had a terrible feeling he had seen them before: two young women walking happily down the road a few days earlier, their orange-hued backpacks on their shoulders.
    Undersheriff Niece set about measuring and diagramming the area while the other detectives looked for evidence at the scene. It was one of the most difficult crime scenes they had ever worked. The winds keened and howled, flapping the plastic tarp they had tied atop the shelter, while the rain only increased in intensity. They didn’t even try to keep dry, but they wanted to preserve any evidence that might be there.
    Sheriff Sumpter and his men and the investigators from the Bureau of Indian Affairs were battered by the storm for four hours before the bodies were removed. They would come back to search again in the daylight; now they had to find as much as they could before the heedless wind blew precious clues away.
    It was 11 P.M. when Deputy Sepansky and Indian agent Charlie McBride were posted to secure the scene until morning. Sumpter would not be going home for three days and nights; he set up headquarters at the Tradewinds Lodge in Moclips.
    Sumpter contacted the FBI, and Special Agents Pete Shepp and Bob Wick headed toward the tiny oceanfront town of Moclips. Bureau of Indian Affairs Officer Siemers confirmed that the girls’ bodies had been found 200 feet inside the Quinault Indian Reservation, but said the case would be totally under tribal jurisdiction only if the killer or killers proved to be of Indian heritage. At this point, there was no way to determine that,
    Sumpter had a hunch. He’d felt it the first time he’d seen the twine knots that were cut carefully off the victims’ wrists. He’d mentioned it to Niece, but he knew he had to have a lot more to go on. There were advantages to being a lawman who had worked an entire county for so many years. Sumpter had a memory like a computer, and he’d worked on a troubling case in February eight years earlier, a case that came back to him now.
    Several young boys had been abducted while they were playing in a nearby town. A dark-haired man about 20 years old had threatened them with a knife to make them go with him. The frightened youngsters were then tied to trees or hung by their wrists while their tormentor threatened to emasculate them with his knife.
    Although none of them was actually cut, their terror had seemed to be enough to sexually satisfy the sadist who taunted them.
    Sumpter had been assigned to that case, and he remembered the distinctive configuration of the knots, which had been saved by one father who rescued his boy from a tree in the woods. There were five twists, looping under and over: a variation on a square knot—like something a Boy Scout might have learned.
    The knots on the dead girls looked to be identical.
    The man arrested for tormenting the schoolboys was 20-year-old William Calvin Batten, a sometime shake-mill worker. On February 10, 1967, Batten had been found guilty of indecent liberties, and he had been sent to Western Washington State Hospital’s sexual Psychopath program.
    He was released shortly thereafter.
    Sheriff Sumpter determined to find out just what William Batten had been up to in the intervening eight years. He’d heard that Batten had moved back to the west county area after living near Bremerton, Washington, for a while. Apparently he had kept out of trouble in Grays Harbor territory.
    When the full crew of county, federal, and tribal investigators assembled on the beach at dawn, only the bloodstained sand remained to show