Mortal Danger

would die herself before she ever learned who had taken away her precious daughter. Her little brother, Lee, has turned forty, and Sara Beth’s friends are well into middle age now as she herself would be—had she been allowed to live.
    When the answer did come, I was astounded. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. There were remarkable similarities between Sara Beth Lundquist’s murder and another homicide that occurred that summer of 1978. Today, the truth shines through the years like a beacon, but it was obscured back then, a pale light covered by the fog of too many cases, a certain failure to communicate among and between diverse police departments, misleading autopsy results, and the state of forensic science at the time Sara Beth was killed.
    As I said earlier, it’s so much easier to view a homicidepuzzle in retrospect. Everything can fall into place perfectly when you’re looking back. When certain facts or information aren’t available, seeing clearly ahead in a baffling case with too many “witnesses” can, indeed, be like trying to negotiate a cleverly designed maze.

 
    In major cities all over America, police departments have established cold case squads, where detectives search through dusty files and blurry carbon copies written by their predecessors years before. Combining long-unsolved homicides with modern forensic science and fresh eyes, these cold case investigators have been far more successful than anyone could hope. Over the past few years, the Seattle Police Department’s cold case squads have successfully closed several cases dormant for more than three decades. Greg Mixsell, Richard Gagnon, and Mike Ciesynski have used DNA matches and other forensic science near-miracles to take another look at physical evidence carefully preserved in the huge warehouse that replaced the police department’s Property Room of the fifties and sixties.
    And that evidence has given up untold secrets.
    The evidence warehouse became necessary in 2004, having outgrown its former location in the Public Safety Building. It includes everything from specks of blood to entire walls that have been sawed out of crime scenes. A room-sized freezer preserves biological evidence: blood, bloody clothing, saliva, semen.
    Sergeant Cindy Granard, one of the custodians of this massive collection of evidence, is passionately protective of it, and for good reason. “We want to arrest the right person, or be able to exonerate someone. The public needs to know the great care we take to protect these items.”
    Unless detectives agree to have evidence that is no longer needed destroyed, everything in the warehouse must be kept sacrosanct for eighty years !
    Was it even within the realm of possibility that Sara Beth Lundquist’s killer would ever be caught? Might there be something left to examine that couldn’t be tested when she was killed because the expertise wasn’t there then?
    As Greg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon moved on, Detective Mike Ciesynski has become “Mr. Cold Case” in the Seattle department. He wasn’t that much older than Sara Beth Lundquist back in 1978 when he was growing up in Chicago. Mike always wanted to be a cop. He joined the force in Calumet City, Illinois, and then moved west to be a police officer in Casper, Wyoming. Eventually, he and his family moved even farther west. He joined the Seattle Police Department and added more years of law enforcement experience. He now has served twenty-five years as a cop and a detective.
    In 2005, Mike worked cold cases for the Seattle Police Department.
    On March 9, 2005, Ciesynski received a phone call from Lee Lundquist, Sara’s younger brother. Lee was close to forty then, not the kid brother that she had treated so kindly. Ciesynski could tell that Lee Lundquist would never rest until he found out who had killed her.
    Lee believed that Frankie Aldalotti, who was supposed to drive her to his family’s cabin on the July 4th holiday, was her killer.
    “I think there was a limo driver involved, too,” Lee said. “His nickname might be ‘Junior.’”
    Mike Ciesynski pulled Sara Beth’s case out of the archives and reviewed it. It became a priority for him. Twenty-seven years had passed since she was killed. As he pored over the files, he looked at the crime scene photos and memorized the picture of a lovely young girl who never grew older than fifteen.
    Ciesynski saw that there were many, many homicides in 1978, and most of them had been solved years