Mortal Danger

wasn’t that people weren’t trying to help. Seattleites had taken Sara Beth to their hearts, even though they hadn’t known her. The slightest change in ordinary behavioralerted them. Neighbors even reported one man who’d been seen washing down his back porch and steps the morning after Sara Beth was murdered. That wasn’t really guilty behavior, but Tando talked to him anyway. “I’d washed all the windows in the back and got dirt on the porch,” he said. “So I just decided to wash it.”
    His housemates verified this. “He was home with us all of Saturday night.”
    With more leads coming in almost hourly, Mike Tando was astounded at the number of weirdos who apparently resided within the tightly populated, circumspect community of Ballard. It was as if someone had lifted the roofs off scores of houses, and the secrets once safely hidden inside were exposed for everyone to see.
    But that holds true for any area; everyone has hidden, private things—some more peculiar than others.
    The mother of a teenager in Ballard called to say that her fifteen-year-old daughter and a girlfriend had been terrified during a recent bus ride. A man in his twenties chose a seat across the aisle from them, and then he’d removed a long knife from his waistband.
    “He was enjoying how scared they were,” she said worriedly. “He kind of pantomimed how he could hide the knife in his work glove and up his sleeve.”
    “Did they know him?”
    “No. They never saw him before. Now they’re afraid to get on a bus, and I’m afraid, too.”
    She agreed to call Tando if they saw the man again, or if anyone knew who he was.
    The homicide file on Sara Beth’s case grew thicker every day. Detectives got a call from the manager of amotel on Aurora Avenue North. The area was becoming low rent, but it wasn’t yet a regular stroll for teenage prostitutes that it would become one day.
    “One of our maids started to clean a unit,” the manager said excitedly, “and she said it was ‘awash with blood.’ That’s just how she put it!”
    When investigators arrived, however, they found only isolated spots of the dried brownish-red. The manager and the maid had exaggerated. Now that he was calmer, he admitted that he’d just learned that a family had had a drunken free-for-all in the unit over the weekend.
    A special agent with the FBI, assigned to Seattle, was much more believable. He reported that he regularly commuted downtown on the same bus run in Ballard that Sara Beth and Minda had taken on Saturday, July 1. His position made him more observant than most people, and he’d become concerned.
    “On several occasions, I’ve noticed a dirty white car following close behind that bus,” he said. “I’ve tried to get a license number, but the tag’s always covered with mud. I’ll keep watching for it.”
    A thirteen-year-old junior high student found a knife in the street near 83rd and 24th NW. Unfortunately, he played with it for a day before calling the police, contaminating most of the evidence that might have been on the knife. Even so, like the other found knife, it was retained for lab tests.
    Many readers of mysteries and true crime know that an unknown killer is usually someone who moves in the same circles as the victim—a lover or spouse, a relative, friend, coworker, classmate. Good detectives do start with thoseclosest to the victim and work their way through ever-widening possibilities.
    Sara Beth had been quite close to the Aldalotti family, and was said to have gone out with both their sons. Benny, the younger brother, said he had seen Sara Beth the night before she was killed. “And I talked to her on the phone several times. We were mostly talking about how she was going to ride to our cabin on Sunday with Frankie.”
    Frankie Aldalotti, nineteen, was living in another state, but he flew home to visit his family on Saturday evening, July 1. He was the brother who had planned to pick her up the next morning for the vacation trip and who first learned that she was missing.
    Benny Aldalotti wouldn’t speculate on who might have killed Sara Beth.
    “But she seemed nervous about something when I talked to her in front of her house Friday evening,” Benny said. “She told me she really wanted to go up to our cabin for the Fourth of July weekend, but she didn’t think it would look right for us to date.
    “I asked her, ‘What are you talking about?’ ’Cause it wasn’t a date. She seemed confused