Mortal Danger

relationship. Our relationship is now.”
    The robbery detectives didn’t have the heart to remind him that “now” might be gone forever.
    Jack pulled out a picture of Laura Baylis. It showed a pretty girl with large blue eyes, a shy smile, and masses of curly blond hair.
    The detectives had seen her before. They’d gone over the film from the security camera in the 7-Eleven with a magnifying glass. This was the same girl they had seen in those photos.
    But, in those pictures, Laura wasn’t alone. Laura, dressed in blue jeans and a navy blue shirt, was at the cash register, and she held a brown paper bag in her left hand. Her expression was deadly serious.
    There was a man in the later photos. He was a tall black male dressed in an olive green jacket, and he wore a blue billed cap and glasses. As the film frames moved forward, the man appeared from the back and from the side—as if he were glancing around to see if anyone was approaching. He had a mustache and a scraggly beard. It was impossible to tell if they were real or stuck on with spirit gum.
    If he held a weapon, it was hidden.
    “Is that Laura in the picture?” Larry Stewart asked Jack Atkins.
    “Yes. I think it’s her,” Jack said, his voice trembling. “It’s not real clear—but it has to be her.”
    The bags of sunflower seeds were on the counter in the picture, but there was also a small bottle of orange juice. The bottle had been gone when police arrived.
    The man in the picture was clearly not Bubba Baker. Hewas older and bigger. Holter and his men felt a chill as they perused those pictures. They sensed that they might be seeing Laura Baylis during the last few moments of her life. The pictures flipped rapidly as the mindless camera had clicked every few seconds, until they became almost “moving pictures.”
    The men watching experienced an eerie feeling, as if what they were seeing was happening in the present, right in front of them. They watched Laura Baylis as she obeyed the man standing behind her. She had obviously cooperated with him and given him the money in the cash register.
    But where was she now?
     
    The detectives took on the tedious task of searching through 911 calls for Sunday night. Buried in hundreds of calls, they found a brief report of trouble at the Beacon Hill 7-Eleven at 11:30 p.m. But it wasn’t Laura Baylis who had made the call; the clerk who worked the shift just before hers had called Seattle Police to report a shoplifter. The thief wasn’t a tall black male. Not at all. It was a teenage girl who’d tried to make off with a large jug of wine.
    Detectives Al “Beans” Lima and Myrle Carner interviewed the clerk in the shoplifting incident. That had been fairly routine, but she was still in shock over Julie/Laura’s disappearance and tried to remember anything that might help the detectives.
    “Julie came in for work at eleven p.m. She wore blue jeans, blue shirt, her blue ski parka. Everything was normal,” the clerk said. “She was in a good mood. She almostalways was. All I know about her was that she lived with Jack, and she traveled back and forth between England and the U.S.”
    Eventually, the Seattle detectives would talk to all of the missing woman’s coworkers. Of course, they all knew Laura Baylis as Julie Costello. They were aware that Bubba Baker had been annoying her, but they’d felt she could handle him.
    “He’s a little off upstairs,” the four-to-eleven checker said. “But he’s more inclined to shoplift and get goofy crushes on the younger girls here. I’ve never thought of him as capable of harming anyone.”
    Bob Holter’s team tried to pinpoint just when the robbery had occurred. The liquor cabinets were supposed to be locked, by Washington State law, at 2:00 a.m. They had been locked when Rita Longaard arrived. The store’s two clocks had been stopped at between 3:40 a.m. and 4:13 a.m. They were electric clocks and they had stopped because someone had tripped the sixteen-circuit breaker.
    It would appear that Laura Baylis had been taken from the 7-Eleven around 4:00 a.m. Myrle Carner and Al Lima dusted the circuit breaker box for prints, then removed the clocks to put them into evidence. Although they carefully searched the alley behind the store, they didn’t come across anything that seemed to have evidentiary value.
    Patrol officers, who continued to canvass the neighborhood, finally came up with a possible witness. A woman who lived just across the street