Mortal Danger

the bus stop.
    “Did Sara have any enemies? Anyone who didn’t like her?” Minda, still in shock, shook her head. “No. Oh, no—she’s very popular at school. She was nice to everyone.”
    “Did she date?”
    “Different boys, but nothing serious. She wasn’t going steady or anything. I think lots of guys like her, though.”
    At a quarter to five, the detectives cleared the scene and returned to homicide headquarters to review what they knew of the case so far. Someone had to have grabbed Sara Beth Lundquist shortly after she got off the bus. Her shoes and purse were found in the driveway and the alley behind Lorraine Olsen’s house, and she had heard a cry for help.
    “I think that’s where he—they, maybe—abducted her,” Cameron said. “Mrs. Olsen didn’t hear a car, but he probably had one. It was three miles to where he left her in the tire shop. But I think he killed her somewhere else, possibly in a car, because there wasn’t enough blood where we found her.”
    The question was: Had someone known that Sara Beth would be on that bus, someone who waited for her until she was alone and virtually helpless? Or had a stranger seen her that evening, hopped on the bus without either Minda or Sara Beth noticing him, and exited through the back door? Minda could be confused when she said Sara Beth was the only one who got off the bus. Two teenagers busy talking about the movie they’d just seen, and talking with the young man on the bus, could have failed to be aware of someone who didn’t want to be noticed.
    And there was always the chance that she had encountered evil in the few blocks she had to walk to get home. A chance meeting with a monster? It happened, and it was the hardest kind of case to solve.
    Don Cameron sent a request to patrolmen working out of the North Station about the murder and asked them to look for vehicles that had bloodstains on the upholstery or even on the exterior, or drivers with bloodstained clothes.
    “Even if it seems far-fetched, look for any evidence or anyone who acts suspicious that might tie in with this girl’s murder,” he noted. “If the killer’s weird, he might still be wearing the same clothes. And look for any vehicle fires. They may be arson. He could have torched his car to hide any residue of this homicide.”
    He ended his memo by asking that it not be broadcastover police radio (where citizens with scanners could pick it up) but that it be relayed only at roll calls when shifts changed.
    Detectives contacted Metro Transit to ask for the name of the driver of the bus the girls had taken the night before. Homicide partners Wayne Dorman and Dick Reed talked with the bus driver.
    The man searched his memory. “There were a lot of people on the bus coming from downtown, that time on a Saturday night,” he said. “I can remember two sets of teenage girls. One set of ’em were both wearing blue. I think one girl got off at Eighty-fifth and Twenty-fourth.”
    “Anybody get off with her?”
    “Maybe. I seem to recall a good-looking young fellow—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, rides the run a lot, very friendly, six feet, slender, longish brown hair. He talked with the girls and he might have got off with the first one. I can’t be sure.
    “The other girl rode on up the hill and I think she got off the same time as a middle-aged white guy.”
    Odd. Minda Craig was positive that Sara Beth got off the bus alone. Detectives figured she would be more likely than the busy bus driver to notice a man getting off with her friend.
    Minda examined the purse recovered in Lorraine Olsen’s driveway and verified that it was Sara Beth’s. “It’s got six dollars in it, and that’s how much she had when we left the movie.”
    As far as she could tell, the contents hadn’t been disturbed since the last time she’d seen Sara Beth open the purse.
    Dick Reed and Wayne Dorman asked Minda about Sara Beth’s boyfriends. She said the victim had mostly dated a foreign student at the University of Washington, the son of a very wealthy Iranian family.
    “He told Sara Beth that they owned a lot of oil fields or something,” Minda said. “I think he was pretty rich, but he didn’t make a big deal of it.”
    “Where did she meet him?”
    “At the I. Faces Disco on Second Avenue. She really liked him, and he treated her great. But he’s gone home on vacation now. He left for Iran five days ago.”
    Detectives learned that, in the fairly recent past, Sara