Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (17 page)

days.
 
Brad was much taller than Sara.
 
She barely came to his

shoulder.

That was one of the things she liked about him, his massive size made

her feel protected.
 
She turned toward him, looking up at his face, and

gasped suddenly.
 
Brad had a huge bruise under his left arm.
 
Her

doctor's eye noted clinically that it was dark purple, not yellow

yet.

She knew that meant it was three or four days old.

"Brad!"
 
she exclaimed.
 
"Where on earth did you get that?"

"What?

"That bruise under your arm."

"Ohþthat.
 
I was playing on the jungle gym in the park blocks with the

kids on Sunday while you were sleeping.
 
I slipped at the top, and

caught myself on one of the bars on that arm."

It was a terrible bruise.
 
And strange.
 
Sara had never before seen a

bruise on Brad.
 
Maybe it was his darkish olive complexion, one of the

few signs of his American Indian heritage, that made a bruise hard to

detect.

That same Thursday, September 25, Brad and Sara spent the night in yet

another location.
 
The children were safe with Margie, and they checked

into the Sheraton Hotel at the Portland Airport.
 
For the first time

since Cheryl's murder, they were by themselves and Sara didn't feel as

if some unknown terror was waiting just outside their door.
 
No one but

her sister knew where they were.
 
Brad told her a little more about

Sunday evening, almost as if he was trying to establish an alibi.

After he left her at the hospital, he said, he had taken the boys back

to the apartment and waited for Cheryl to pick them up.
 
She never

came.

And he had left the apartment only to do some errands around the

Madison Tower.

He had seen people and they had seen him.
 
"I saw Lily outside her

apartment on the first floor at eight," he told Sara.
 
"And I saw a

policeman talking to a couple in the garage at eight-fifteen."

"Did they see you?"
 
Sara asked.

Brad shook his head sadly.
 
He didn't think so.

Exhausted, they fell asleep to the sound of jets taking off nearby.

And it must have been well after midnight when they woke to the sound

of someone pounding on the door.
 
Sara ducked into the bathroom and

began to dress while Brad went to the door.

Jerry Finch and Jim Ayers stood there, accompanied by uniformed

officers.
 
They had been looking for Brad Cunningham for several

days.

They needed blood, hair, and fingernail scrapings from him, but he had

been anything but cooperative with the investigators working on his

estranged wife's murder case.
 
Finch and Avers had located Brad by a

fluke.
 
A Multnomah County deputy had been cruising through the parking

lots at the airport when he spotted Brad's Suburban and called in the

location to the Oregon State Police.
 
The vehicle had been on a "hot

sheet'' on the dashboards of every law enforcement agency in the

Portland area.

Clearls irritated, Brad got dressed and went with Finch and Ayers to

the Multnomah County Sheriffs substation at 92nd and Powell to give

them their damn samples.
 
For Sara it was yet another blow.
 
Obviously

the police considered Brad a suspect in Cheryl's murder.

In 1986, criminalists did not have the benefit of DNA testing.

Julia Hinkley did what forensic tests she could do, given the state of

the art.
 
The results were disappointing: Hair from driver's door

Microscopically similar in class and charaueristic to Cheryl K's.

Oral vaginal, rectal swabs Negative for semen.

Hair from victim's hand Microscopically similar in class and

characleristic to Cheryl K's.

Alcohol in victim's blood None.

Brad had told Jim Avers that he thought Cheryl had been drinking when

he last talked to her on the Sunday evening she died.
 
But the

percentage of alcohol in her blood was zero.
 
Death can sometimes raise

the alcohol reading in blood, it never diminishes it.

The investigators reached an impasse when Hinkley wasn't able to come

up with any clues that would lead to Cheryl's killer.
 
The O.S.P

criminalist had Brad's samples, but it was a hollow victory.
 
They

didn't find any matches.
 
Whatever their suspicions about Brad, they

couldn't arrest him.
 
There was absolutely no physical evidence linking

him to the crime.
 
And there were no eyewitnesses who could place him

at the scene.

He was a free man, free to go to Venezuela if he wanted toþ although if

he did go, they'd have found that interesting.

But after all the physical evidence was collected, tested, and

dismissed as borderline, one idea kept surfacing.
 
The solution to this

murder might lie not in blood tests or latent fingerprints.
 
It might

lie somewhere in Cheryl Keeton's life, or in Brad Cunningham's past.

Maybe recently.
 
Maybe far, far back in time.
 
Generations, perhaps.

In 1948, Seattle, Washington, had a downtown with lights that were

reflected in the night sky, and department stores so big that everyone

from miles around came to shop, to eat out at fancy restaurants, to see

first-run movies.
 
Always a wondrous city, surrounded by water,

shrouded in green foliage, softened by constant rain, and watched over

by a beneficent Mount Rainier, Seattle never had slums, only

neighborhoods less appealing than others.
 
And eventually, it had

suburbs that were a world, rather than miles, away.
 
By 1986, Seattle

was struggling to maintain its center.
 
After World War II, young

professionals migrated east across Lake Washington to Bellesue.

Doctors and lawyers settled on Mercer Island.
 
Probably the most

desirable spot to live was Bainbridge Island, a ferryboat ride across

Elliott Bay.

South of Seattle, the Boeing Airplane Company is on one side of the

Duwamish River, and South Park and the Cheerier Daze tavern are on the

other.
 
South Park used to be pastoral.
 
And the Duwamish was once a

clear, sweet river.
 
Now, fish caught there are suspect, eaten only by

the extremely hungry or the very reckless.
 
Some years ago, a young

woman from east of the Cascade Mountains was murdered and thrown into

the Duwamish.
 
She was buried in an unmarked grave as "Jane Doe.
 
Her

parents had reported a brown-eyed girl missing, and the corpse's eyes

had been turned blue by the chemicals in the I)uwamish.

As the Duwamish River curls south, it parallels Boeing Field, Seattle's

smaller airport, then pulls away from the hamlet of Riverton and edges

a golf course in Tukwila.
 
Once the center of fertile truck farms,

Tukwila is now the location of Southcenter, a huge shopping mall.

Midway through Tukwila, the Duwamish becomes the Green River, site of

the discovery of the first five bodies of young prostitutes in

America's worst outbreak of serial murders to date, a chain of

slaughters that would claim almost fifty similar victims between July

1982 and April 1984.
 
The Green River Killer has never been caught.

Burien, Wasllillgton, is a south-end town too, sitting five miles due

west of T ukwila by freeway.
 
If possible, Burien is even less

distinguished than Tukwila, a prosaic little town located near the

flight path into the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
 
The

south-end Park-and-Ride station is located there.
 
Old Burien is quaint

and quiet, the newer downtown has no particular charm.
 
There are a

number of small ranch-style homes with carefully groomed yards,

numerous antique and secondhand stores, an inordinate number of Asian

restaurants, and, down along the banks above Puget Sound, expensive

waterfront homes accessible only by private funiculars on steep tracks

slicing down through the maples and fir trees.

although few who met him as a grown man knew his background, Bradly

Morris Cunningham grew up in Burien along with his two sisters, his

cousins, and scores of friends.
 
His progenitors were from two proud

and completely diverse backgrounds.
 
Brad's mother, Rosemary Edwards,

was a Colville Indian, his father, Sanford Cunningham, had roots in the

British Isles.
 
Rosemary was slender and beautiful with thick dark hair

and flashing black eyes.
 
Sanford, often called Stan, was big, blond,

and florid, with a strong, almost prognathous jaw.
 
In the early years

of their marriage, they loved each other passionately, they had

wonderful plans for the future, and they wanted nothing but the best

for their children.

If every marriage started fresh with no memories and nothing from the

past, the odds for success would be far better, but each partner

inevitably brings along old scars, prejudices, and unrealistic

expectations.
 
Stan and Rosie were no different, indeed, they probably

carried more baggage than most.
 
Each generation before them had added

another stone to the load, and by the time they got together, some

patterns were so thoroughly entrenched that one could almost predict

that they would continue their destructive erosion through a family

begun with love and happy plans.

The Cunningham clan was proud, loyal, and spread out all over western

Washington, although its home base was originally on Whidbey Island.

That was where they always held their annual summer reunions with huge

barbecues and potluck picnics.
 
Sanford and his younger brother Jimmy

were born to Dr. Paul L. Cunningham and his wife Bertha* in the decade

after the First World WarþSanford Morris in 1924 and James Lincoln in