No Regrets

months ago—possibly longer.”
    The cause of death would be harder to determine. Much soft tissue had been lost to the elements, the burning sun of late summer and early fall, and then rain and snow in November and December. There were animals in the woods, too, mostly small. Eisele could not immediately isolate any cause of death. “I’ll be able to tell more at the postmortem,” he said.
    Roy Gleason and his fellow detectives worked through the long, chill December afternoon, first with the rays ofpale sunlight that cut through the trees, then with auxiliary lighting as the sun set. In December, that occurred well before four. They bagged and labeled the dead woman’s clothing for evidence, and did the same with soil and leaf samples.
    They took careful measurements, triangulating them with trees, and photographed the remains and the scene. At length, the fragile remains were removed for autopsy, and the Bellevue investigative crew cleared the scene.
    The woods were now as they were before.
    She had lain there for so long. There was no point in hurrying, but they were back in the woods and the adjoining neighborhood as soon as the sun rose. They canvassed the nearby homes, but their questions netted nothing helpful. Most people don’t recall noises or out-of-the-ordinary incidents that happened months ago—not unless there is something on which to peg a hidden memory. Sherwood Forest residents were accustomed to a lot of foot traffic through the woods, and the less welcome roar of motorbikes and cycles.
    “Who was she?” was the question that kept niggling at them. Would they ever be able to find that out from a few bagfuls of mouldering clothing? They had found some of her teeth, but they had fallen out and landed in the wet, yellowed peach leaves. It wasn’t as if they had an intact jaw that a forensic odontologist might use for identification. The separate teeth had probably been knocked out in a violent struggle. There might be enough of them left in the skull for a forensic dentist to make a positive comparison—if they could locate the dental records of the dead girl. It was a vicious circle. Unless they had some inkling about her name, they wouldn’t be able to locate her dental records.
    Was there someone, someplace, who missed her—who would read of the discovery in the lonely orchard woods and call in? The Bellevue detectives knew that was their best hope.
    Bellevue itself had no reports of women who had gone missing in the last six months, but the Seattle Police Department and the police of Lynnwood (a small town along I-5 north of Seattle) shared open files on a missing case, one that had baffled them since July 9.
    Stacy Sparks, eighteen, had had no reason to run away. The recent high school graduate had a new job she liked, a ticket already purchased for a dream trip to Hawaii, and a steady boyfriend. She had lived with her mother and stepfather in the Ballard section of Seattle, apparently in complete harmony. Aware of the Sparks case, the Bellevue detectives thought first of the pretty blonde who had vanished so inexplicably on that Monday night. No one believed that Stacy had left of her own accord.
    And yet, no one had seen Stacy Sparks since she left the Raintree Restaurant in Lynnwood at 9:30 P.M . on July 9. She had promised to pick up her boyfriend from his job in south Seattle, and she had been driving her prized Plymouth Arrow hatchback with the white racing stripe.
    Five months now, and they had found nothing of Stacy Sparks—not even her distinctive car. The first opinion of those most familiar with her case was that this unidentified body in Sherwood Forest would prove to be Stacy’s.
    However, there were things that didn’t fit: Stacy wore a yellow cotton shirt the night she disappeared, but hers was a T-shirt with a rose appliquéd on it—not a hooded sweatshirt. The jeans were right, but the blouse wasn’t. Ofcourse, there was always the possibility that Stacy had stopped somewhere to change her clothes before she either encountered someone dangerous or, less likely, chose to run away.
    Stacy had yellow-blonde hair and the hair near the skull in Bellevue was more a “mousy” blonde, more brown than Stacy’s appeared in the missing posters that still clung to fences and utility poles, faded and tattered now.
    The possibility that this victim might be Stacy Sparks proved unlikely after the postmortem examination. Dr. Eisele performed the autopsy on the nameless