Last Dance, Last Chance

that Tina and Gael had died there in the driftwood shed. The storm had passed, and the sun shone.
    The victims’ bodies were awaiting autopsy; their sleeping bags and backpacks were drying out back at sheriff’s headquarters in Montesano. Hopefully, the postmortem exams would add information that would help find their killer.
    Lieutenant Larry Clevenger, one of Sumpter’s sharpest investigators, was at the scene now. Ironically, on one of his rare days off, Clevenger had been fishing in the ocean the day before, not far off the very beach he now surveyed.
    The detectives were looking for some specific items as well as other evidence that might have been left behind by a killer. Gael’s glasses were missing; relatives said she was very nearsighted and would never have gone on a trip of several days without them. When Tina was found, she wore only one earring, long before it was fashionable to wear a single earring. And the murder knife might be buried somewhere in the sand.
    The searchers found neither the glasses nor the earring, but they did find a ball of twine, which appeared to be the same as the bloodstained bonds on the victims’ wrists. And they found something considerably more damaging to a suspect: buried about four inches beneath the sand at the corner of the shelter was a bill from the public utilities department.
    It was addressed to William Batten. There was also an envelope from a place called Futures Clear, addressed to his wife. The address listed was in Moclips, and it was that of an apartment that faced the ocean only a few blocks south of the driftwood shelter. The possibility that the items could have blown onto the beach and been buried there from the dump farther inland was most unlikely; the prevailing wind blew off the ocean, not toward it.
    While Harold Sumpter traced William Batten’s movements and any recent police contacts or arrests, his men, aided by every officer available from the Hoquiam Police Department, fanned out in a door-to-door inquiry in Moclips and along the route the dead girls had probably taken to reach the lonely beach where they had met their killer.
    Disappointingly, although the teenagers would have had to walk right through Moclips to reach their camp, no one in town recalled seeing them. They hadn’t shopped at the one local grocery store, or gone to the Tradewinds Lodge for coffee or a meal. This only seemed to further indicate that they had been killed shortly after coming to town. That probably would have been Monday in the hours after dark. Monday was the day they had left home for their trip. No one expected them back for a few days, so no alarm would have been raised.
    The autopsy reports from Dr. Arthur Campbell indicated that the victims had succumbed to multiple knife wounds. The most immediately fatal were two deep penetrating wounds on each body to the right carotid artery in the neck. Hemorrhaging would have been profound. Gael had superficial wounds on the neck and chest. Tina had a stab wound to her right flank and a deep wound in her back, a wound that had penetrated a piece of plastic found on top her body.
    Surprisingly, neither of the victims had been raped or sodomized. No semen was present, nor any evidence of trauma to the victims’ vaginas or rectums. However, this did not eliminate a sexual motivation in the double murders, as suggested by the seminude condition of the girls’ bodies when they were found. The killer might have panicked as he prepared to rape the helpless girls, or he might have been a sadist whose gratification came through his victims’ terror rather than through an overt sex act.
    He might even have had a premature sexual climax in the excitement of stripping his victims naked, and then been unable to achieve another erection. Then, too, he could have been impotent—a man who raped symbolically, with a knife.
    Dr. Campbell estimated that the missing death weapon was a long knife, sharpened on one side only, with a blade two and a half to three inches in width: a butcher knife.
    The time of the victims’ death was much harder to determine. When the girls were found, rigor was present only in their upper arms and jaws. This area is the first to stiffen after death, and it is also the last to be affected as rigor mortis leaves. The bodies had been preserved almost perfectly by the refrigerated air of the chilled beach. Campbell’s final assessment was only that they had been dead more than 48 hours.
    Sumpter and