Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

emergency call for help. Their patrol cars screeched to a stop in front of a small green-shingled house on South Myrtle Street. Within minutes, the rain-washed pavement in front of the house was alive with blue-and-white squad cars.
    Don Cameron and Officer Bill Brooks arrived on the scene. They found a critically wounded seventy-five-year-old woman who was bleeding profusely from a wound in her throat. Ignoring her own injuries, she insisted on leading them into the house. They followed her along a narrow hallway to where a very old man lay motionless on a linoleum floor, the surface beneath him so awash with blood that its pattern was obscured.
    More Homicide detectives and a Seattle Fire Department paramedic unit pulled up. The holiday for Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Detectives Dick Sanford and Dick Reed was over. They could see that any Christmas celebrating had long since ceased in the little house on South Myrtle.
    The old man was dead.
    Bill Brooks took a nearly incoherent Florence Borden to Harborview County Hospital. It was difficult to understand her, but she kept saying that someone named Terry had “hurt Papa” and herself, and she was afraid that he might have hurt her granddaughter, too.
    “Where is your granddaughter?” Brooks asked. He wondered if the child—or maybe she was a teenager—was lying injured, or even dead, back in the Bordens’ house.
    Florence Borden shook her head. “He kept knocking me down on top of Papa,” she sobbed, ”and then he grabbed Emily and made her leave with him. I’m afraid he’s going to kill her.”
    The elderly woman was treated in the ER and then admitted to the hospital in serious condition from shock and blood loss. She had a jagged knife wound in her throat. It was a wonder she’d survived; the knife had barely missed her carotid artery.
    Back at the Borden home, the Homicide investigators surveyed the carnage. The one-story, two-bedroom home must have been immaculate before everything in the kitchen and hall area became sprayed and soaked with blood.
    Dick Sanford had investigated many murders in his first year and a half as a Homicide detective, but he had never seen so much blood. He mentioned it to Dick Reed, who had more experience in the Homicide Unit than any of the eighteen detectives assigned there. Reed had seen other victims who had literally exsanguinated—bled out—but not often.
    Trying not to notice the Christmas tree in the living room and the presents around it, they began to work the crime scene. Bloody footprints made a path down the hallway to the kitchen sink, and then out to the back porch, and back to the bathroom sink. The red stuff marked everything from the floors to the ceilings, on all the walls and doorways.
    The frail old man lay on his side in the walkway just between the two bedroom doorways. He was fully clothed; his glasses were near his head. Someone had cut his throat, slicing through his jugular vein and left carotid artery. His life’s fluid had poured out unchecked. He would have been dead from such a wound in a matter of a few minutes. It was such an ugly crime, made more so by the obvious vulnerability of the victim.
    “He couldn’t have put up any kind of fight,” Dick Reed said. “His wife said he was eighty-three.”
    The Homicide crew sketched the scene, took measurements, and logged in numerous items of physical evidence they recovered, carefully sealing it and signing their initials.
    And all the while, they tried to piece together what might have happened. They noted bloody fingerprints on a beige phone near the bed in the west bedroom. In the east bedroom, they found a white nightgown, a black lace scarf, and a green pullover shirt—all of them ripped to pieces.
    The kitchen phone line was yanked from the wall.
    The Bordens’ daughter pulled up in front of the house and wandered in shock past the squad cars. She had come to see why her parents hadn’t shown up for Christmas dinner. Barely able to speak, she was finally able to tell the detectives that the old man was her father: William Robert Borden. The gravely injured woman, who was currently in surgery, was her mother, Florence.
    The shocked woman said that her niece Emily had been visiting her grandparents for the past several days. She had arrived from Texas with her common-law husband, twenty-nine-year-old Terry Ruckelhaus.
    When they asked her about Ruckelhaus and where he might have gone, the woman tried to gather her thoughts. “He said