Mortal Danger

found none. The basement walls were too rough to hold fingerprints, and nothing useful for evidence turned up.
    Criminalist Battista did recover two hairs that didn’t match the blond hair of the victim. One was short, black, and curly.
    The three detectives were inclined to believe that the victim had been killed somewhere else and brought to the basement closet within a few hours of her death. Lividity is a purplish-red striation pattern formed in newly deceased bodies. When the heart stops pumping, blood no longer circulates and sinks to the lowest level of the body, where it eventually etches a series of permanent bright stripes— unless it is moved before lividity is set.
    In that case, detectives and medical examiners see two “stainings.” There will be the first lighter pink shading and then the final lividity stripes, marking a new position. That part of a body that rests on a hard surface is blanched white. Once lividity is complete, the body can be moved without any change in the pink to purplish markings.
    Due to the paucity of blood where her body had lain and the pattern of lividity on her body, the detectives agreed that the victim had been killed somewhere else. They also felt that whoever carried the body in had not gone beyond the basement area. This was probably going to be the only area in the house that would give up any physical clues.
    Back in the Homicide Unit, they placed a call to Laura Baylis’s parents in England and told them gently that the body of a young woman had been found. “We’re not positive yet,” Duane Homan said, “but we have reason to believe that we’ve found Laura.”
    Bessie Baylis said she hadn’t been able to locate any of Laura’s medical or dental records. “But I’ll keep searching,” she said, with tears in her voice.
    Robbery detectives Jerry Trettevik and Larry Stewart attended the postmortem examination of the unidentified victim. The dead girl had succumbed to nineteen stab wounds of the neck and torso. It was far too late to estimate measurements of the murder weapon or to determine if she had been sexually assaulted, although the way her clothing had been disarrayed certainly suggested rape or a rape attempt.
    Stewart and Trettevik retained the girl’s clothing for evidence. They watched as the forensic surgeon removed her fingertip skin, which slipped off as easily as gloves from her desiccated hands. There was a good chance thatcriminalists from the crime lab could rehydrate the skin, at least enough to obtain usable prints.
    The detectives were almost positive that the dead woman was Laura Baylis; everything matched, right down to the two gold necklaces her boyfriend had described. But Laura Baylis’s parents were having difficulty finding records that could validate that this was Laura. Her dentist had died and his records disposed of. They had nothing with her fingerprints on it. English law doesn’t require that babies’ footprints be taken at birth. All of the best ways of identifying a nameless body at the time were unavailable to the investigators.
    In the Western Washington Crime Lab, ID technician Marsha Jackson was finally able to obtain fingerprints from the victim by “plumping” the fingertip tissue with liquid. She then matched these prints to a single print on an identification card Laura had once obtained in Kansas City. The name on the card was Julie Costello, but the photograph it bore was of Laura Baylis. She had been an attractive young woman who might well have inspired fantasies in the mind of someone who was emotionally disturbed. In fact, she looked a lot like Genie Francis of the popular soap opera General Hospital.
    Anyone who had seen Laura would probably remember her. Customers of the all-night market did, and they wanted to help catch her killer, but no one had any more information about Sunday night, September 24.
    Now the detective team knew for sure that they had found Laura, but her killer had a three-week head start. All they had was a black, curly hair and the picture of the manin the billed cap and fatigue jacket taken by the surveillance camera.
    On October 16, they received a vital lead through an anonymous phone call. A woman, who refused to give her name, called Larry Stewart to say that she had seen the picture of the man they sought.
    “I saw it in the newspaper, and I think it’s a guy named Clarence who lives in the Sixty-one hundred block of Beacon Avenue. If it isn’t him, it’s a dead