Worth More Dead

process the scene.
    Shortly after eight the next day, Detective Sergeant Roy Weaver and Detectives Lockheed Reader and Frank Atchley arrived at the body site. First, they took many rolls of photographs, then they drove stakes into the ground so that they could always re-create the location of the body parts and any other pieces of physical evidence by using triangulation measurements. At a later date, this precise technique might prove to be vitally important.
    Decomposition, animals, and the elements had removed all the body’s soft tissue. The skull was still attached to several cervical (neck) and thoracic (chest) vertebrae, but the rest of the skeleton had been scattered, presumably by animals. A single tennis shoe with a sock and a desiccated leg bone still inside it was on top of two deadfall logs.
    Who was the person who had once lain here? The clothing, rotted and sun-bleached, appeared to be that of a young girl. The detectives picked up and bagged each piece: a mint green short-sleeved velour shirt with white trim and the label Cuckoo’s Nest, a hooded sweatshirt with dark blue appliquéd stripes, a pair of flared blue denim jeans, and a white bra.
    Next, Reader and Atchley sifted the dirt and leaves in the wooded glen. They turned up more bones, and more pieces of cloth, one being a blue-and-white knotted strip of cloth found close to the dirt road. Twenty-one Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts, under the direction of Lee Hahn and Officer McDowell, fanned out through the woods. They too found more bits of evidence: the other blue tennis shoe, a fingernail with silver polish, some nylon material that proved to be torn panties, a clavicle bone, a rib, and various pieces of material either cut or torn from the victim’s clothing.
    But there was nothing that would help identify the body quickly. No purse, no identification. Nor was there anything that might be deemed a weapon.
    Dr. Donald Reay, the King County Medical Examiner, arrived to remove the fragments of bone that had once been part of a living human body. The first tentative presumption of just who the victim might have been would have to come from Dr. Reay’s examination.
    Forensic pathology is a remarkable science and can give detectives a handle on a case that otherwise seems to be a loser from the start. On this one the King County detectives were at a definite disadvantage going in. They were called to the body site many months after the victim died, they didn’t know who she was or how she had died, and they had no witnesses. The trail was not only cold; it was icy.
    Dr. Reay was able to determine many things from his initial examination. A rotting brassiere, its hooks fastened in the back, still clung to the thoracic portion of the skeleton. The front midline of the bra had been cleanly sliced through by some sharp object. Reay also found a linear one-inch cut in the right cup that appeared to have been made by a knife blade or a razor. This slice in the fabric had not been roughened by the rotting material. The right sleeve of the velour shirt was gone, apparently cut off. There was a tear in the green cloth over the right breast portion, and it fit exactly over the cut in the bra beneath.
    The logical assumption was that someone had stabbed or cut the victim with considerable force and that the knife or sharp instrument had probably continued through the cloth into her flesh, maybe even into her heart or lungs. But there was no body tissue left to confirm that. Oddly, the lower part of the velour shirt had been sliced off horizontally, again by a sharp instrument.
    One leg of her blue jeans was turned inside out, and the denim material next to the zipper had been cut. It appeared that the killer had literally cut the clothing from his victim then killed the nameless girl with a stab wound to the right breast. Dr. Reay examined the skull and found no blunt-force injuries, nor did he find any marks on the bones retrieved that might be from a bullet or a knife. Granted, many bones were still missing, but, given those parts he had to work with, the medical examiner could only conclude that the woman had been stabbed to death.
    Reay could make certain judgments about the victim’s size and age by measuring the femur bone and studying the growth ends of other bones. He estimated that she had been between 14 and 20 and approximately five feet four inches tall and slender. When the medical examiner unraveled a few tangled hanks of the