No Regrets

home—without the keys— Sunday night. He had discovered it was missing the next morning. He had no idea who might have taken it; hewas the only one who had the key, and no one else ever drove it.
    King County Medical Examiner Dr. John Eisele completed William Heggie’s autopsy the morning after the deadly bank robbery. Heggie had succumbed to a single gunshot wound through the sternum near the midline of the chest. Eisele could not pinpoint the distance Heggie had stood from his killer. Surgeons in ER had cut into his chest to massage his heart in a futile attempt to save him, and any gun barrel stippling or powder burn marks were destroyed in the process. But it was clear any attempts at resuscitation would have been in vain. The elderly man’s liver, right lung, and the right ventricle of his heart had been torn away by the bullet. Dr. Eisele retrieved it, and noted that it was the kind of high-impact ammunition used by Seattle police officers. It was in good condition and would be useful for ballistic comparison if detectives should ever find the shooter and his stash of bullets.
    Calls from tipsters continued to come in. A Renton, Washington, bank reported that they had taken in some bills with reddish stains. But when the bills’ serial numbers were checked, they did not match those missing in the Prudential robbery.
    And then, George Marberg and Al Gerdes received a phone call from a police dispatcher in communications center. “A man just called in on 911 and he says his son might have some valuable information about the bank suspect. I’ve got a contact number for you.”
    This was the kind of information that every detective hopes for, especially in a case like this in which they had absolutely no idea who they were looking for—not even the race, sex, or age of a suspect.
    The detective team arranged to meet the young male informant,Mark Halley,* twenty-two, in his father’s downtown office. The clean-cut witness began to tell them of his suspicions about who the Prudential robber might be. What Halley had to say was riveting.
    “I think it was a guy named Sam Jesse. I went to school with him; I’ve known him for years....We graduated from high school together five years ago, and we’ve been close friends.”
    Halley said that he and Sam Jesse both lived with their mothers in Laurelhurst, which is a venerable upper-middle-class neighborhood northeast of the University of Washington. Laurelhurst was only blocks from the Prudential Bank where William Heggie was killed. They had graduated from high school in the late seventies, and had remained close friends.
    “What makes you feel that this Sam would be involved in a bank robbery?” Marberg asked.
    “Sam’s a different kind of guy,” Halley explained. “Always has been. At first you’re gonna think that he’s putting you on because he’s always talking about stuff that doesn’t seem real. But he’s a ‘go for it’ person. He rides his motorcycle at the highest speeds, smokes a little more marijuana than anyone else, and drinks way more and gets way more blown away. It’s an all-or-nothing type deal. There was always something weird about him. That’s sort of what I thought was pretty cool about Sam. You just wouldn’t put anything past him.”
    “You wouldn’t put bank robbery and shooting someone past him?”
    Halley shook his head. “No. Sam’s always been on this bit about karma. And he’s always told me that it’s OK to kill people because he believes in ‘survival of the fittest.’”
    That still didn’t explain why Halley had connected SamJesse to the Prudential Bank. But he hastened to explain further. “We got drunk together on New Year’s Eve, and Sam was going on about how he was working eight hours a day for minimum wage. He said he had found a way around that. He was really going to go out and rob a bank. He said he was going to get enough money to live in his own apartment and buy a guitar. He wanted to start a rock band. He began to talk about things so bizarre that I found them hard to believe—even for him. But now, I’m afraid he was serious.”
    “Why? You didn’t just think he was drunk and rambling?” Gerdes asked.
    “No—because of the way he talked, and then how he acted after. Sam actually bragged to me that he’d strangled a girl once, but I didn’t believe him because he once told one of our other friends that he’d knocked an old woman down to take her purse. He likes to shock people,