Mortal Danger

left and what had been taken away. Tando and Cameron slipped more than three dozen bits of evidence into glassine bags and vials and marked them for lab technicians.
    The officers doing the door-to-door canvass found that a nearby tavern had been open until just after 2:00 a.m., but it was now closed. If the apartment above it was rented, nobody answered the door. A woman who lived nearby said that her dog always barked at unusual sounds. “But he didn’t bark at all last night,” she said, “and I’m the only one who lives around here—all the rest of it is shops and businesses.”
    She lived eighty yards from the gas station–tire shop. She was the only private resident around, and she admittedshe sometimes got jittery when all the businesses closed and the workers went home.
    “I would have noticed if anyone screamed in the night,” she said emphatically.
    Medical examiner Dr. John Eisele arrived and knelt beside the dead girl. He commented that rigor mortis was fully established in the body, which indicated the victim had died sometime during the night—at least twelve hours before she was found.
    “I can tell you the time of death more closely after we begin the post,” he commented. “The cause of death is apparently deep stab wounds—too many for me to count here—but that can also be more precisely defined at autopsy.”
    If rape had been the motivation for the murderous attack, it might not have been accomplished; the girl’s jeans were in place, and her shirt, though opened several buttons in the front, was still tucked into the waistband. Her shoes were gone, and the detectives found no sign of a purse or wallet near the body.
    Robbery? Hardly likely. Teenage girls don’t carry that much money, and the victim still wore relatively inexpensive jewelry. Revenge? Jealousy? Maybe. They didn’t know the victim at all at this point, or what her world had been like.
    But they would. Like all exceptional detectives, the six investigators who worked quietly throughout the rainy, gloomy Sunday would come to know Sara Beth Lundquist as well as they knew anyone in life.
    After Sara Beth’s body was removed. Marsha Jacksondusted the inside of the room for fingerprints. She succeeded in raising several more latents from the smooth wall surfaces.
    There was still doubt that the dead girl was Sara Beth Lundquist, and they needed her fingerprints, too, for comparison.
    The puzzle of Sara Beth’s missing shoes and purse was solved at 3:00 p.m. when word came that a widow living in the area of 19th NW and 83rd—very close to Sara Beth’s home—had found a pair of clog shoes and a purse. Someone had tossed them in her driveway and in the alley behind her house. The purse still held Sara Beth’s ID.
    Detective Don Strunk left at once to talk with Mrs. Lorraine Olsen.
    “Something woke me up last night,” Mrs. Olsen told him. “I don’t know what time it was, but I heard a woman’s scream. Just one. Nothing more, no car, nothing. I listened awhile and it was quiet. I wondered if I’d been dreaming, and I finally went back to sleep.
    “In the morning, I went out to move my car, and I found the shoes and purse. “I called one of the numbers inside and I got Mrs. Lundquist. Then I took the purse and shoes over to her.”
    For Sara Beth’s mother, the sight of her daughter’s shoes and purse was chilling. They had been found along the route that Sara Beth would have taken after she got off the bus. At that point, she was just a few short blocks from home.
    Strunk talked with Minda Craig. He had to tell her that her best friend was dead, murdered. Tears sprang into Minda’s eyes and ran down her face. Strunk waited while she tried to deal with the terrible news.
    “Try to remember everything you can about last night,” he asked gently. “Was there anyone you might have noticed who was watching Sara, bothering her, anything that she might have been afraid of?”
    Minda shook her head.
    “Did anyone get off the bus at the same stop she did?”
    “No, she was the only one. There was a young guy on the bus who talked to us, but he got off about two blocks later. He couldn’t have doubled back and caught up with Sara because she would have been almost home by then.”
    “Did anyone get off at your stop?”
    “I can’t remember anyone.”
    Minda said she had gone home and right to bed. She had no idea what might have happened to Sara Beth after she’d walked out of the streetlight’s glow near