Worth More Dead

vehicle.
    Hudson and Harris contacted the Seattle Police Department’s Harbor Unit and requested divers. Cheryl had been gone for almost ninety-six hours; they were afraid that her body might be caught up under a houseboat or one of the docks.
    The divers arrived and spent hours searching beneath the surface but found no body. It was possible that someone had encountered Cheryl in Port Orchard as she left PJ’s late Saturday night and had stolen her purse and her car. Alive or dead, she herself could be anywhere between Port Orchard and Lake Union.
    A cursory look into the car revealed nothing to indicate violence. The transmission was still in drive, which suggested that whoever had left the vehicle was in a hurry. There were no car keys.
    Sergeant Joe Sanford and Detective Hank Gruber from the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit responded to the Lake Union site and agreed to have Cheryl Pitre’s car taken to the Seattle department’s property room garage. It was too dark where the car had been abandoned to search for clues and, without the keys, difficult to check the trunk without damaging the vehicle. The lighting in the property/evidence area was far superior, and they would be less likely to miss something of evidentiary value.
    It was a matter of which department had jurisdiction. There was no body. If there had been a crime, it almost certainly had occurred on the other side of Puget Sound and would be a Kitsap County case. Cheryl’s vanishing was still officially a missing persons case, Kitsap County–Number 88-14014. Sergeant Sanford assured the detectives working it that the Seattle Homicide Unit would assist them in any way they could.
    At eleven PM the truck driver who had towed in Cheryl’s car called the Seattle detectives to let them know he had just impounded another vehicle a few parking spaces away from the silver Topaz.
    “It’s an old Ford van,” the driver said to Hank Gruber. “It’s got a Kitsap County Fire Department sticker on its windshield, and I know you’ve been looking for a woman missing from over there.”
    Shortly before midnight, Sanford and Gruber went to look at the van in the tow yard. They saw that it was dirty and full of litter: beer cans and garbage. It appeared that someone had been sleeping, possibly even living, in it. Beyond the fire department sticker, there were no other signs that it had any connection to Kitsap County. They ran the license number and the VIN (vehicle identification number) through computers, but there were no hits for the battered van. It wasn’t stolen or even listed as being registered.
    The silver Topaz remained in the property room until the Kitsap County sheriff’s detectives in Port Orchard decided to have it towed aboard a ferry and returned to the area where Cheryl Pitre had vanished. Sergeant Sanford and Detective Gruber conferred with Doug Hudson and Jim Harris, and the quartet decided the car should be checked out more thoroughly before it left the Seattle Police property room.
    Gruber, Doug Wright (another Kitsap County detective), and Jim Harris walked carefully around the car. It appeared to be well cared for, and they didn’t see any dents that might indicate it had been in an accident or forced off the road. Three of the tires were in good shape, but the right front tire was nearly bald.
    The car was unlocked, and Gruber opened it carefully and examined the interior. In the bright light, he could now see what looked like blood smears, long dried. There were dark brownish-red smears in and around the ignition slot, and on the inside of the driver’s door on the armrest, the door itself, and the latch. His trained eyes saw small spots of blood on the back of the driver’s seat and on the gearshift box between the front seats and tiny globules spattered in many locations on the driver’s side. Even the passenger seat’s seat belt retractor was bloody.
    The smears on the steering wheel might still hold fingerprints—that would be the best evidence possible—but Gruber doubted that clear ridges had survived.
    Other than the blood that appeared now in the glow of bright lights, the interior looked like the vehicle of any housewife. An infant’s car seat was attached as recommended to the rear seat, and there was a jumble of papers in the car. Between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, they found a single key on an orange fob. It was marked “Do Not Duplicate.” (Doug Wright and Jim Harris later