A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

found nothing in the building itself, and nothing in the parking lot. Several hundred yards behind the apartment property, the fir forest thickened and the shadows were deep even during the daytime. Among those trees, they found a rude dwelling—a log cabin made of saplings and interior tar paper walls. It was heated with a crude pot-bellied stove fashioned from a barrel. The floors were hard-packed dirt. It looked as if no one had lived in the shack for a long time. With the gaps in between the log walls, it would have been freezing in the wintertime.
    Paul Barclift and K. C. Jones talked to people who lived in neighboring houses and learned that teenagers had built the place one summer a few years back, planning to use it as a clubhouse.
    “Nobody lives there permanently,” a neighbor said. “Sometimes we’ll see smoke coming out of the chimney, though.”
    Walking back through the woods, the detectives saw the apartment house emerge in their line of vision. They came to a jerry-built ladder made of two-by-fours where someone had leaned it against a tree. Testing it first, Barclift climbed up into the tree. He realized that someone standing on this perch could look down into the windows of the apartment house below. He felt a chill and wondered if someone had watched Sharon Mason’s windows and seen her as she moved around her apartment. Had her killer stood here and developed a sadistic obsession for her?
    His hands sticky from the tree sap, Barclift climbed down and gestured to Jones to climb the tree. They agreed that someone had a bird’s-eye view of Sharon’s windows.
    The two detectives looked now for the teenagers who had built the log shack, or who might have used it. They finally found two boys who admitted they had been up to the cabin.
    “We met some guy up there,” one of the kids said. “He’s about twenty. He says his name is ‘Buddy.’ We gave him a lift to his friend’s house—guy named Al Wilkes*.”
    K. C. Jones knew Al Wilkes. He was on probation for burglary, but he was a small-time crook with far more nerve than brains. He had no record of violent crimes, particularly not violent sex crimes. “He lives with his father,” Jones told Barclift.
    When the two detectives went to the Wilkes home, they asked about someone named Buddy. Al Wilkes nodded and said that Buddy Longnecker sometimes bunked at their place. In fact, Buddy was there now. Buddy Longnecker was nineteen, a short, skinny kid who looked as though the next wind off nearby Black Lake would blow him away. Buddy said that he wasn’t working at the moment and lived mostly with friends. He readily admitted that he sometimes lived in the little log shack in the woods, but he shook his head when they mentioned Sharon Mason’s name.
    “Nope,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve met her.” And it wasn’t likely that he had, the investigators thought. Sharon was eighteen years older, and a world apart in social status, interests and education. Buddy and Al became simply two more names on a long list of people they had talked to. It had been three weeks, and the Thurston County detectives had checked on the whereabouts of dozens of known sex offenders in the Olympia area. They hadn’t been able to place any of them at Sharon Mason’s apartment, in the woods behind it, or around the school where she taught.
    They were holding their collective breath, but there had not been “one more” killing, and they hoped that that message on Sharon’s mirror had been an act of bravado and not a sick promise. They had been unable to find any other sexual attacks or homicides with an M.O. that was similar to the Tumwater teacher’s murder. Research told them that sexual sadists enjoyed the “staged murder scene,” and the man they sought had played out a flamboyantly cruel drama.
    They had so many feelers out, looking for a link to Sharon’s apartment that the Thurston County detectives hadn’t noticed that the report from the phone company had yet to come in. It wasn’t a top priority. They needed something definite, though. All the theories in the world were interesting, but not something they could take to Thurston County Deputy Prosecutors George Darkenwald and Hank McCleary who had been assigned to the Mason case by Prosecutor Pat Sutherland.
    And then, almost a month after they lost their daughter, Sharon Mason’s parents were sorting through mail that had been forwarded on to them in Aberdeen. They opened the