Worth More Dead

her by the hair and knocked her back to the seat.
    “I’ll bash your head in,” he snarled. She didn’t doubt that he would.
    Jodi managed to get just a glimpse of where they were at one point; they were east of the Timberlane area off of 199th and SE 259th. She had no way of knowing it, but they were extremely close to the area where Jackie Plante’s body was discovered. Jodi had never heard of Jackie nor of April, either.
    Convinced that this man was going to kill her as soon as the car stopped, Jodi managed to free one of her hands from its bonds. She might have a slight chance to live if she could just get out of the car. Surreptitiously, she managed to unlock the door on the passenger side. As they pulled into the rutted road to the woods, her abductor became agitated at the sight of a car parked there. His attention drifted away from Jodi for a moment as he slowed down, preparing to turn around.
    Jodi grabbed her last chance. As she pushed the door open, the rapist tried to slash her leg with his knife, but she grabbed the knife by its handle. They struggled until Jodi was able to knock the knife to the floor. She tumbled backward out of the passenger door of the slow-moving car, not knowing what she would hit or if the driver would turn and run over her. But the yellow car sped away, and she ran toward the lights of a house in the distance. There she asked the residents to call the police.
    Just as April Collins was, Jodi Lukens was an excellent witness, her ordeal having left her memory crystalline. As she lay on the front seat of what she believed was a Dodge Charger, she had observed everything within range of her hearing and vision.
    “The car was jacked up in the rear,” she told Detective Bob La Moria, mentally ticking off all the details she had memorized while she wondered if she was going to live to tell someone. “And it had a loud exhaust,” she continued. “There was a CB radio under the dashboard, bench seats, light-colored interior. Automatic transmission. The glove box opened up instead of down, and the car had a column shift lever.”
    She had remembered everything. “The man drank Budweiser beer with tomato juice while we drove around,” Jodi said, “and he smoked Marlboros. He wore brown trousers and a dark, reddish shirt.”
    One other thing that Jodi recalled was that the man who kidnapped her told her that his younger brother had recently been killed in an automobile accident.
    “He said his brother had either been drinking or doing drugs and he was in a car crash,” Jodi said. “This guy kept telling me about it.”
    There were just too many factors that linked Jackie’s murder and the two sexual assaults to be mere coincidence. Both the rape victims and the homicide victim had had their clothing sliced with a sharp knife. Although the bonds had been removed from Jackie Plante’s wrists by animals as her body decomposed during the long hot summer months, knotted bits of fabric found at the site were almost identical to those sliced from the jackets of the two rape victims.
    All of the crimes occurred in the same general area, and Jodi Lukens was driven to the site where Jackie had been left. If she hadn’t managed to escape, her corpse, too, would probably have ended up there.
    It was possible that Jackie was hitchhiking when she met her killer. More likely, her killer might have been the man she met at the kegger. He could have followed her to Buck’s house, then grabbed her as she walked away from Buck’s car when she couldn’t figure out how to work a manual transmission.
    Jodi had definitely been hitchhiking, sure that she could tell the good guys from the bad before she accepted a ride. The cars were different, but the descriptions of the rapist given by the two surviving victims matched right down the line.
    The clinching connection came when Sam Hicks and Bob La Moria checked through the dozens of envelopes of evidence picked up at the site of Jackie Plante’s body. Among those bits of cloth, those pieces of clothing sliced by the sharp knife, was one knotted strip of cloth that matched none of Jackie’s clothes. But it did match April Collins’s jacket.
    The blue-and-white strip with the zipper attached matched up perfectly with the bottom of April’s jacket. It seemed unbelievable, but April had to have been taken to the spot where Jackie’s body lay undiscovered for almost three months. Luckily, April had not seen Jackie’s remains or her attacker