Mortal Danger

Puget Sound to the west. On days when the wind is right, the brightly hued spinnaker sails of private boats dance like butterflies on the waters of Elliott Bay.
    Ballard has always been a family community, withhomey-looking bungalows, a local theater that features serials and second-run movies, parades and festivals on both American and Norse holidays—a good place to raise youngsters and a part of the city with a relatively low crime rate.
    Sara Beth Lundquist grew up there. At fifteen, she wasn’t very different from her peers. She got good grades at Ingraham High School where she was a sophomore—when she studied—but she could be distracted by so many more fun things to do. She worked part-time as an aide in a convalescent home, and her soft heart hurt to see so many elderly people whose families had left them there, alone, and never came to visit. She tried to spend extra time with them.
    Sara Beth lived with her mother, Lynne, and her sister, Melissa, in a home divided by divorce. Her ten-year-old brother, Lee, lived much of the time with their father, Robert. The children were close to one another, and Sara Beth saw her father often. She actually liked her little brother and often let him tag along when she was with her friends, even though five years was a big age gap.
    Sara Beth liked to cook, especially experimental dishes. She made her own Christmas gifts, and was sewing some pretty aprons. She loved her mother and told her so often. Sometimes, Lynne would find notes on her pillow that Sara Beth had left for her, saying, “I love you.”
    She was as natural an ice-skater as if she’d been born and raised in Sweden or Norway. She played the piano and taught Sunday school.
    And she loved to laugh and to make her family laugh. Sara Beth was at that crystalline point between being achild and a woman; she was past the early pubescent years when mothers and daughters sometimes lock horns, and she hadn’t yet reached the pseudosophistication of an older teen.
    And yet Sara Beth was different from a lot of teenagers. She was extraordinarily beautiful. She had even features, very large blue eyes fringed with incredibly thick, dark lashes, and a perfect rosebud complexion. She was slender and exquisitely proportioned.
    She seemed unaware of how pretty she was. When she wore makeup, she looked older than fifteen and could have passed for eighteen or twenty.
    Tragically, she would never grow any older than fifteen. Someone stalked Sara Beth Lundquist in the shadows of a rainy July night. Maybe he had been stalking her for a long time and waiting for his chance to take her away from where she was safe. Perhaps he’d just spotted her and become obsessed with the idea of hurting her or taking sexual advantage of her.
    Sara Beth’s best friend was Minda Craig,* also fifteen. They’d known each other since kindergarten, and they’d been best friends for a year. They had plans for Saturday night, July 1. They were going to see Damien: Omen II , about a thirteen-year-old devil child purported to be the Antichrist, and they looked forward to being a little frightened.
    Sara Beth was excited about getting out. Three weeks earlier, she’d been diagnosed with mononucleosis, a common teenage illness. At first, she felt quite sick, and later she’d been prevented from working at her job at the convalescent center where she’d been a therapy aide for ninemonths. Finally her doctor had declared her “no longer contagious.” She looked forward to returning to work. Her elderly friends there had missed her as much as she’d missed them.
    The movie was one of her first social outings for weeks.
    The two teenagers took a bus to downtown Seattle a little before nine in the evening. Minda rode down the hill from her house, and Sara Beth got on at 24th NW and North 85th Street. “I remember the driver was new,” Minda recalled, “a really nice black woman who showed us how to get to the Coliseum Theatre.”
    As she’d promised, Sara Beth called her mother right after the movie to let her know they were okay and would probably be on the midnight bus to Ballard.
    Outside the theater, some teenage boys “hassled” the girls, dancing around them, blocking their paths, and asking for their names and phone numbers. They were annoying, but they weren’t frightening, and they didn’t follow Sara Beth and Minda onto the bus. But they did make them too late, so it was a little bit after 11:30 when the girls caught the next