No Regrets

and I had to stop screaming.”
    “What happened then?”
    “There was a little stairway with a metal railing. He made me take down his pants and do oral sex.”
    “How did you get down the path to that stairway?”
    “He dragged me by the rope around my neck.”
    Arden said that when the act of fellatio was finished, George had dragged her down into the concrete room in the basement. There, he’d made her take all her clothes off, and he asked her for money. “I gave him the two one-dollar bills I had. I always carry a bottle of Tylenol with me because I get bad toothaches. And he took that, too.”
    “Now you’re inside the room,” Nordlund said. “Does he still have the rope around your neck?”
    “Yes. He had the rope on my throat the whole time. After I got my clothes off—he ripped some of them off— he made me lie on my stomach.
    “He unzipped his pants and tried to have intercourse in my behind—but he couldn’t do it. He told me to put my hands behind my back, and he would tie me up and for me not to tell anyone what had happened. So I put my hands behind my back and he kind of sat on them, and then he pulled my head up with the rope.”
    At that point, Arden thought she had passed out—liter-ally hung by the rope. Although tests had shown she’d been raped vaginally, too, she had no memory of it, norcould she remember the terrible beating she’d endured.
    “The next thing I knew, I was awake and I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t find my clothes. I was alone in that dark room and he was gone. First, I tried screaming and screaming and then I remembered where I was and I tried to find my clothes, but every time I stood up, I’d pass out and fall down.”
    “Was the rope still around your neck?” Nordlund asked.
    “No. I kept trying to make my way to where the door was, but it was so dark and my eyes wouldn’t focus very good. I kept thinking that I’d rest awhile and my head would clear.”
    It was obvious that Arden had lapsed in and out of consciousness—perhaps for hours at a time—all night.
    “It finally got light out, but I still couldn’t see very well. I got the door open—don’t ask me how, because it was real heavy and you had to lift up on it. I called out, but no one came. I passed out two times on the path, and then I realized I had no clothes on. But I got to the apartment next door and tried to get help, but nobody answered the bell.”
    Arden described how three or four people had walked by her as she lay bleeding on the sidewalk, begging for help. She had only a vague recollection of the paramedics working over her.
    Arden still thought she’d been attacked by a Native American, but she was also sure that George had told her he worked as a bouncer at the Exotica. He’d been clean and neatly dressed. She thought he weighed about two hundred pounds.
    Pat Lamphere asked her, “Would you recognize George if you saw him again?”
    “Yes... yes, I’m sure of it.”
    The interview was concluded and Arden was prepared for surgery to set her mangled jaw.
    Pat Lamphere and John Nordlund headed back to their offices in the Public Safety Building, and they were surprised to find that Roger Pomarleau had called once again. “He said he found a photo of George Ayala,” Joyce Johnson said. “He brought it in, and he told me that Ayala had been living in some kind of ‘youth hostel’ before he moved into the Exotica. He may have meant the Green Turtle.”
    The Green Turtle was a no-frills building in downtown Seattle with clean beds and a kitchen where travelers on a budget could cook their own food. It was well-managed, and considered safe. Old buses and vans left regularly from the Green Turtle for California with a motley bunch of travelers who had signed up for a reasonably priced fare. If he’d behaved himself, no one there would have questioned Ayala. Arden Lee had described him as clean and neat.
    Roger Pomarleau had told Joyce Johnson: “Ayala’s probably a Caucasian-Spanish combination. He has such a big belly that he looks pregnant.”
    “Is he on drugs of any kind?” Johnson asked him.
    And Pomarleau had shaken his head. “As far as I know, he doesn’t use drugs or drink much,” Pomarleau recalled, “except he sniffed some kind of a liquid out of a brown bottle. I don’t know what that was all about.”
    Johnson reported that Pomarleau had found that Ayala had charged several long-distance calls at the Exotica and that he would bring