Mortal Danger

to Jager as they could, taking him on a well-chaperoned sightseeing trip to the mountains of Washington. Because they were kind, they hoped that Heinz would have good memories of his last visit to see his about-to-be-ex-wife and leave them alone once he was back in Switzerland.
    Heinz made no preparations to leave the United States. He seemed to have no plans beyond the day.
    After a few weeks, Heinz said he was going to California to visit a friend. He seemed calmer, and the family dared to hope that he would return to Europe and leave Amy alone. His friend in California welcomed Jager and assumed that he was accepting the fact that his marriage was over. He encouraged Heinz to make a new start.
    But Jager had plans. He returned to Seattle on June 5, a Saturday, and surprised Amy’s sister Jill at work. He said he’d just arrived by bus from California and needed a place to stay. Jill arranged for him to go to the YMCA and surreptitiously listened on a phone extension as he placed a call to Amy.
    She heard Amy explain to Heinz that she had purchased a plane ticket for him and made reservations for him to fly out of Sea-Tac Airport the next day. His destination would be his home in Switzerland.
    Jill was at a disadvantage because she could not understand the language Heinz spoke as he talked to Amy. But she could discern easily that he was angry and upset. Still, he left to stay at the Y without commenting to Jill about his phone call with Amy.
    Amy and her family spent the night with ambivalent feelings—anxiety mixed with relief that Jager’s visit wasalmost over. They agreed that Amy, Jill, and the girls’ brother, who was a golf pro at a local country club, would all go to the airport with Jager. That should prevent a terribly emotional good-bye. Even so, Amy’s brother—who had never owned a gun in his life—was worried; he arranged to borrow a small handgun, a .32 automatic, and placed it under the driver’s seat of the family’s green 1973 Fiat station wagon just in case, although he prayed he would have no reason to use it.
    Heinz’s moods were like clouds sweeping across the Alps. Amy had explained to her family that he was always like this—sunny, cloudy, stormy, calm, bleak, and back to sunny again. She herself had come to a point where she didn’t really know who he was, but the doctors in Switzerland had diagnosed him as bipolar and manic-depressive.
    Sunday morning, June 6, dawned bright and clear. By 8:30 a.m., the green Fiat, loaded down with Jager’s skis and belongings, stopped to pick up Jill for the trip to Sea-Tac Airport fifteen miles south of Seattle. Amy sat in front next to her brother, and Jill climbed in the backseat with Heinz. She could see that he was very upset and had been crying. As they backed out of the driveway, he continued to plead with Amy, saying that he could not go back without her or everything would go “kaput.”
    That word Jill understood and it frightened her.
    Heinz asked Amy to switch places with Jill and come sit in the back with him, but she refused, giving him one excuse after another. They didn’t have time to stop and change seats because they’d left a little late. As they neared the airport, Heinz became more and more agitated.
    Sea-Tac Airport is a huge complex that sprawls overhundreds and hundreds of acres in the South King County area. With its shops and restaurants, and with the thousands of travelers who pass through its gates every day, it is a small city in itself. The Port of Seattle Police Department had ninety-six officers in 1976 and was the fourth-largest municipal police department in the state of Washington. It was the law enforcement agency responsible not only for the airport but also for the shipping docks along Puget Sound and Elliott Bay. Then headed by Chief Neil Moloney, onetime assistant chief of the Seattle Police Department, the Port of Seattle Police Department was kept busy with cases much like those of any big-city police department: burglaries, forgeries, stolen cars, narcotics, sex crimes.
    Even in the midseventies, the Port of Seattle Police Department didn’t handle the minimal airport security that existed then; that was the province of private airport security firms hired by the airlines, although, in case of trouble, Port of Seattle officers assisted.
    The role of police officers at Sea-Tac had evolved from what had once been essentially “tour guides” to full-time law enforcement work. Homicide, however,