No Regrets

orange powder. Certainly, the suspect would also be stained with the pervasive orange powder. If they could locate him quickly, he would still have the dye stigma marking him as a killer and a thief. It was made up of compounds that would not be easy to wash off.
    They asked the radio operator to check the license number through computers and learned that the vehicle had been reported stolen over the weekend. It figured. If they had hoped to get a lead on the killer via his vehicle, they were out of luck. He’d made sure there was no connectionto him. Clearly, he had dumped the truck and left this quiet residential street in some other manner.
    Back at the bank, Al Gerdes and George Marberg were faced with the most frustrating kind of crime scene. Because the sea of blood left behind was so upsetting to bystanders, fire crews had hosed down the sidewalk where William Heggie died. Not only had they washed away the blood, but any possible clues that might have lain there also disappeared into the gutter drains. All the other debris had been picked up and put into trash cans. Gerdes and Marberg pawed through the trash, but found only paraphernalia left behind by the paramedics. Mr. Heggie’s glasses, International Kiwanis pin, and post office key had been found on the sidewalk, carried into the bank by someone, and placed on a counter. In the aftermath of such a shocking incident, bystanders often try to “tidy up,” trying to get some semblance of normalcy after disaster.
    The detectives knew only that they were looking for a tall man, a man possibly bearing orange dye stains on his clothing and his person. Jill Mobley said she had given him upward of fourteen hundred dollars in ones, fives, tens, and twenties. The twenty-dollar bills bore serial numbers prerecorded by the bank. This was standard practice in a robbery—to keep marked bills handy and slip them to the thieves.
    Hours went by, and the investigators felt the pressure of time passing; they wanted to get to the suspect before he could change clothes or get rid of the money. In the meantime the bulletin going out to Washington State law enforcement agencies specified that officers should be on the alert for individuals whose skin or garments bore bright-colored red or orange stains.
    A Washington State Patrol officer heard the alert for the“orange man” and reported that he had just stopped someone with peculiar skin color for a traffic violation on the freeway south of Seattle. “But it wasn’t a man,” he said. “It was a woman—her skin was bright orange. She looked like a tangerine!”
    “Was she really tall?” Marberg asked.
    “I can’t say that she was,” the trooper said. “But she was sitting down in the car. She could have had very long legs.”
    He passed on the address that had come back for the woman when he did a Wants-and-Warrants search on her driver’s license and registration. “She lives in Tacoma.”
    Tacoma was thirty miles south of the bank. Jill Mobley had been almost sure that the Prudential bank robber was male—but there was always the possibility that he had a woman waiting in his truck. If so, she, too, would have been enveloped in the cloud of orange dust. Tacoma detectives went to the “orange woman’s” home to question her. She wasn’t there; her roommate said she was at a doctor’s office appointment.
    “She has hepatitis,” the friend said. “That’s why her skin’s that funny color. The doctor told her that’s a symptom of liver trouble; your skin turns all orangey-yellow.”
    That eliminated the woman as a suspect; she might be a lousy driver, but she wasn’t a bank robber.
    A canvass of offices around the bank had produced no witnesses. No one but Jill Mobley had seen the pickup truck before the robbery, and only the two tellers had seen it speeding away.
    Al Lima and Jim Lundin processed the stolen pickup with ID Technician Jeanne Ward. It was extraordinarily clean: It held few traces of the killer—nothing beyond the orange dye that stained it and a pair of sunglasses with theframe now dyed orange. Both the truck’s ignition and the wires under the dashboard had been tampered with, undoubtedly when it was stolen. The ashtray was pulled out, and there was a plastic garbage bag under the dash which contained paper towels. They retained the contents of the ashtray and the garbage sack, as well as samples of the dye-stained upholstery and the driver’s seat belt.
    Although there had been