No Regrets

steps. Even though it was full morning light outside, the room was shadowy and dark; as a prison for a helpless girl, it would have been just what her attacker wanted to drown out her cries. Now it looked like something out of a horror movie, with fresh blood splashed on the walls and rubble-strewn floor.
    A pair of black high-heeled sandals, a bra, and a T-shirt—all bloodied—were on the floor. Crimson-stained panties rested next to a bundle of kindling.
    The detectives knelt to look at a length of yellow rope, which had been tied into a loop.
    “She had rope burns around her neck,” Malland commented. “It looked like someone dragged her by the neck.”
    Blood and hair marked all four walls of the tiny basement prison. The victim’s attacker had literally bounced her off the walls in the savage attack. The picture in the probers’ minds wasn’t pretty: The girl had apparently been dragged from the street like an animal, with the rope around her neck, forced into this deserted room, stripped naked, and come very close to death. That she was alive atall seemed incredible, given the amount of blood that glistened on the floor and walls.
    The only thing that the sadist had left of himself was the rope—and possibly an empty pack of Salem cigarettes that might have been his on the floor. Oddly, the detectives found two one-dollar bills wedged into a pipe that ran beneath the smudged window on the south wall.
    Beryl Thompson approached the detectives with information she’d received from Officer Burke and the paramedics. “We’ve got a tentative ID on the victim and a very sketchy rundown on what happened to her. Her name is Arden Lee, and she has a home address in West Seattle. She can’t talk very well because her jaw is broken and her tongue is swollen, but Burke was able to find out that she came here with an Indian male—longish black hair, upper teeth missing—whom she knew as ‘George.’ She said that he beat and raped her.”
    There were probably five hundred Indian males in Seattle who would fit the description, but it was a start. Detective Pat Lamphere, of the Sexual Assault Unit, left the crime scene and went to Harborview to see if she could find out anything more about the suspect from the victim.
    A police radio operator reported that they had had two calls from the area during the night. Nearby residents reported hearing a woman scream. “We sent a car at about 11:45 and again at 2:20 A.M. ,” the dispatcher said. “The officers checked the whole area, but they couldn’t find anything, and there was no screaming by the time they got there.”
    Apparently, the victim had lapsed into unconsciousness in the dark corner of the basement both times the patrol officers were checking, and in the dead of night it would have been almost impossible for them to locate her.
    Pat Lamphere and a social worker from the hospital attempted to question the victim, but it was very difficult. She was almost comatose and couldn’t talk to them with much lucidity. She did, however, respond to the name “Arden,” and she nodded when they asked if that was her name.
    “Who did this to you?” Lamphere asked gently.
    “George . . . Indian... teeth ...gone...” the girl gasped.
    “Did you know him?”
    Arden Lee shook her head weakly. “Not really...met him . . . at the Korea Tavern... the bartender... introduced us.”
    The girl managed to tell them that she’d met “George” again the night before at about midnight and that he’d invited her to his house “for a drink.” She’d gone with him, thinking he was okay because a friend had introduced them.
    “Did you have a purse with you? We haven’t been able to find it.”
    “No, no purse. Just a key—a ring with a key attached.”
    “Do you know what else you left at the house... where they found you?”
    “Can’t remember—” was the soft reply, and then Arden lapsed back into a coma.
    The trauma team of physicians who had worked on Arden Lee informed Lamphere that her condition was extremely critical and the most optimistic thing they could say was that she might survive—if infection didn’t set in, or a blood clot didn’t break free and travel to her lungs. “She’s in shock; she’s been beaten as badly as anyone we’ve ever seen,” one doctor said. “The neurosurgeon’s going to check her now for brain damage.”
    And Arden Lee had been violently raped and sodomized.She had clearly been trapped by a man whose sexual