Mortal Danger

times. I might call back and tell you my name after I think about it.”
    And then click and the line went dead.
    Detectives talked to Williams’s neighbors, who said he came and went at all hours, and that his Doberman barked continually.
    Todd’s Shipyard’s security officers said that the shipyard kept a box of all kinds of safety glasses on hand at the yard, some of them similar to those in the photo. “Williams would have had access to those glasses.”
    Hank Gruber and Jerry Trettevik talked to the suspect’s estranged wife. She was adamant that Clarence was the man caught by the camera and that he had a hat and jacket like those in the picture.
    They already knew that. They’d recognized his clothes, too.
    “Look,” she said firmly, “he’s got so many pairs of safety glasses, and some of them are just like that guy in the 7-Eleven store wore.
    “I know my ex was in the house where they found the body.”
    “How is that?” Gruber asked.
    “I’ve gone there with him!” she said, much to their surprise. “He was thinking about buying that house and he wanted to show me. He knew his way around it, and wewent through it in the dark. I mean, like he knew every inch of it.”
    She gave Hank Gruber a key to their family car, but, after a thorough processing, he found nothing of value to the case in it.
    Williams’s wife wasn’t surprised. “He couldn’t have driven it from the middle of September to the first week of October, anyway, because it was broken down.”
    Since Laura vanished on September 24, it was understandable that Williams had probably hidden the car and told people it was in the shop. He would have had plenty of time to steam-clean everything from the upholstery to the engine. Or maybe it was in need of repair, and he’d borrowed a car.
    Despite Williams’s protestations of innocence, there were just too many coincidences. Armed with an arrest warrant, Bob Holter, Larry Stewart, Jerry Trettevik, and Jimmy Nicholson went to the Rainier bowling lanes on the evening of October 20. Clarence Williams was a top-ranked bowler, and he was competing in league play there.
    The robbery detectives sat quietly in the spectator section until Williams recognized them and walked over.
    “What’re you gonna do?” he asked.
    “Arrest you,” Holter replied succinctly.
    “I expected it. Can I finish bowling first?” was Williams’s surprising reaction.
    “Okay. Go ahead,” Holter said. “We’ll wait right here.”
    Williams bowled his remaining three games, but he was distracted and his performance dropped with each frame. When he was finished, he submitted meekly to his arrest on suspicion of murder, kidnapping, and robbery. He wasadvised of his rights and booked into jail on $100,000 bail.
    With a new search warrant, and his Doberman locked safely away, detectives and criminalists searched Clarence Williams’s home. It was just three structures away from the vacant house where Laura Baylis’s body was found, and one mile from the 7-Eleven where she had last been seen alive.
    It was within the realm of possibility that Clarence Williams had forced Laura Baylis to walk from the store into the darkness of the wee hours. Even if he didn’t have a car, she might have been so frightened by a knife against her body that she didn’t dare scream. Lights would have been out in most houses along the way to the empty shell of a house where she was found. It was chilling to picture her walking to her death, while all the time frantically thinking of some way she could escape the tall, powerful man who held her captive.
    The investigators carried out bags and boxes of possible evidence from Williams’s rented house: a dark cap with a bill, a box containing numerous knives, jeans with a belt that held a knife sheath, a box of ten pairs of safety glasses, a .38-caliber revolver, a pair of boots bearing dark red stains, and two bank bags similar to the bags used at the convenience store to carry cash to the bank for deposit.
    Williams’s locker at the shipyard yielded a khaki fatigue jacket and more safety glasses. And finally, they found a billed cap that was identical to the cap the kidnapper/killer had worn when he was caught by the security camera. It had been stashed in an empty locker six spaces away from Williams’s own.
    On the advice of his attorney, Clarence Williams changed his mind about taking a polygraph examination. He had trimmed his facial hair so that it no longer matched that