Last Dance, Last Chance

the driver’s seat. “You drive,” he ordered. “I’ll be right behind you.”
    The lights of her house faded quickly from her rearview mirror as Pat drove. Denny sat right behind her with the .303 aimed at the back of her head.
    Denny Tuohmy directed her precisely. “Turn here. Now here.” He knew where he wanted to go, but Pat didn’t know if they were headed for a deserted gravel pit where he was going to shoot her and kill her or were about to take off on a 150-mile drive to Canada. She kept hoping that her husband would come home and the kids would be safe. Somehow, she knew Roy would find her—if she could just stay alive.
     
    Cherie Mullins had heard from Denny several times on December 19 and 20. On Thursday evening, he had called her at a beauty parlor where she worked part time. It was 6:20 P.M. , and she was having her hair done. It made her nervous that he always seemed to be able to track her down. He wanted to borrow her car to drive to Tacoma.
    “I told him I was busy and I needed my car. And I couldn’t drive him down, either. I almost begged him to leave me alone.”
    He did not call again that night, but at 8:30 the next morning, Friday, December 20, just as Cherie walked into the nursing home where she worked, the phone was ringing. It was Denny again. He still wanted a ride to Tacoma. He asked her again to borrow her car or to have her drive him.
    Cherie was exasperated. “I told him I was working, and not to call me at work again or I would lose my job.”
    “Is everything all right?” Denny’s voice softened as he asked her that.
    “Yes—but I’m working, Denny,” she said in a kinder tone.
    “Do you still love me?” he asked.
    “…Yes.”
    “Will you go to Tacoma with me after work?”
    “I can’t, Denny—”
    “I’ll be there anyway,” he said. She didn’t know what he meant. Would he be in Tacoma? Or was he coming to the nursing home?
    Cherie went about her Friday morning duties at work, but she got another personal call. It was her mother’s next-door neighbor.
    The woman said that all the lights in Gladys Bodine’s house were on—even the outside Christmas lights. They’d been on all night, she thought. Gladys’s car was in the driveway, and her dog was barking in the house. But no one would answer the door.
    Cherie made arrangements to leave work immediately and drove hurriedly to her mother’s home. With the help of neighbors, she tried every door. They were all locked. A neighbor finally crawled through a side window and opened the front door for Cherie.
    She walked through the quiet rooms, filled with a dread she couldn’t really explain. She tried to tell herself that her mother could take care of herself. She was only 58, and she was almost six feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds. It wasn’t likely some burglar could hurt her mother.
    “I checked the front bedroom, but my mother wasn’t there,” Cherie said. And then she saw her mother’s bedroom slipper lying in the back hallway.
    Slowly, Cherie walked toward the rear of the house. Then she saw two feet sticking out through the back bedroom door. Her mother was lying on her back next to the bed, and two jackets had been tucked around her head.
    “I pulled the jackets away from her face, but then I saw she was dead,” Cherie Mullins recalled with a sob.
    She was too shocked to try to figure out how her mother had died, and she ran to call the police.
    Cherie was afraid she knew who had killed her mother, but it was too terrible to think about. King County sheriff’s detectives worked the crime scene in Gladys Bodine’s home on that Friday, but they made sure that the local news media wouldn’t know about the case right away. For the moment, the investigators had a few hours’ head start before a suspect might be spooked by being on the news.
     
    Cherie Mullins didn’t hear from Denny again that Friday, but she kept remembering how he had told her that she didn’t have to worry about anything any more. She would be dead and he would be dead—but he hadn’t mentioned anything about her mother. Of course, Denny resented her mother sometimes. Gladys Bodine hadn’t found him a perfect mate for her daughter, and sometimes she warned Cherie that she was getting in too deep with him, and she could do better.
    But she’d always felt so sorry for him because he hadn’t had much happiness in his life. He and his two older brothers had been deserted by their mother and had gone from