Mortal Danger

other—despite the eight-year difference in their ages.
    “We teamed up on the beach in California and we began to see the country,” Jack said. “We went to Springfield, Missouri, in the beginning of September 1977, and we stayed there until New Year’s Day. She worked at a café and I worked for a wrecking company while we were in Missouri. Laura became pretty good friends with a girl named Julie Costello at the restaurant, and Julie gave Laura some of her ID papers so Laura wouldn’t have to get deported.”
    Jack said he had lied to Laura’s Missouri employers, telling them that she had run off with another man and left him. Then he had met her at a prearranged spot, and they’d left Springfield together.
    “We hitchhiked to Kansas City and stayed there until May 1978. From Kansas, we went to New England, and then Wyoming, and then we went back to California again.”
    Jack Atkins said they had enjoyed hiking in each state’s mountains, and they’d had enough money because they took odd jobs. They shared their finances and always had enough for food and a place to stay if the weather made it impossible to camp out.
    Jack said his parents knew he was with Laura. “They figured she was dependable and they knew they couldn’t stop my wanderlust. They felt like she was taking good care of me—but it was mutual. We make a good team—”
    “When did you get to Seattle?” Erickson asked.
    “August tenth, this year. We both got jobs, rented our apartment, and we opened up a joint savings account. We have about three hundred and fifty dollars saved in the bank.”
    “You two ever have arguments?” Erickson asked.
    The youth shook his head. “Not really. Oh, sometimes about money. We’ve decided to get separate checking accounts, so if either of us wants to buy something, we can use our own money. We thought that might be more fair.”
    “Do you feel”—Maury Erickson chose his words as tactfully as he could—“that maybe Laura might have just gotten tired of the situation and left?”
    “Not Laura. She’s very responsible, and she would never leave me like this. We really get along.”
     
    The detectives exchanged glances. Jack Atkins was very earnest and sure of Laura/Julie’s love for him, but they knew there was always the chance that a fifteen-year-old boy was simply naïve. Laura could have met a man her own age. They could have robbed her store and simply taken off together.
    It was obvious that Jack Atkins didn’t know that much about Laura’s background before they’d joined up to hitchhike across the country fourteen months earlier.
    He knew that Laura had relatives in England, and perhaps in Missouri, but he didn’t know any of their addresses. The peripatetic couple had lived in the moment, and he’d never asked Laura for specific names and addresses of her family.
    “What was Laura wearing when you walked her to the bus Sunday night?”
    He answered quickly. “Tight blue Bullitt jeans, a blue parka with a red lining, reddish-brown shoes—kind of like earth shoes—two thin gold necklaces. One was plain, and one had a small star, and she has pierced ears with small gold loop earrings.”
    Nothing that Jack Atkins was saying served to explain why Laura Baylis might suddenly have decided to clean out the cash register where she worked and run away. Rather, everyone they had talked to said that Laura was a very stable young woman.
    Although he was only fifteen, Jack seemed older, and he clearly loved the missing woman. And she seemed to have loved him. The detectives could not see him as a viable suspect. Nor could they picture her as a thief.
    Besides, if Laura had decided to cut and run, taking the money from the cash register, why hadn’t she taken the envelope full of large-denomination bills from the back shelf? There was a lot more in there than in the till. (Rita Longaard said that they were all trained to periodically take the “big money” out of the till and put it in a safe place.)
    No, Lieutenant Bob Holter and his crew felt that something had happened to Laura. She hadn’t come back to her young lover because she couldn’t come back.
    Neither Laura nor Jack had a record of felonies in any state; their only contact with police had been two stops for hitchhiking in states where it was forbidden.
    Jack Atkins said he didn’t know anything about Laura’s reasons for leaving her home in England. “We don’t talkabout the past,” he said softly. “We are our