Mortal Danger

room.”
    “Traia?” they called as they walked through the silent house.
    There was no answer, only a faint echo of their own voices. They opened all the interior doors, peered into closets, and searched the yard and sheds outside, too. If Traia Carr had been taken ill, it hadn’t been in her home.
    She wasn’t anywhere on the property.
    On the other hand, there was no sign of a struggle, no blood droplets or streaks, nothing overt that shouted that there had been violence inside this quiet home.
    There was still a good possibility that Traia was safe and well but had been called away suddenly. Her car was gone, and that might be a good sign. Maybe she’d even eloped with Tom Scott, or left hurriedly to help a friend in trouble—someone her daughter didn’t know. Parents don’t tell their grown children everything.
    As Herm Mounts and the group left Traia’s home, they noticed a Snohomish County Sheriff’s patrol car parked at the house next door. Two of the county’s major crimes detectives—Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor—had been dispatched to the residence, a large two-story, older home that was currently occupied by a widow with many children. Whitman and Taylor were investigating an incident thathad taken place at a teenager’s party. One of those attending had suffered a superficial knife wound.
    Gabrielle Berrios* had been widowed fourteen months before when her husband, Luis Sr.,* died at the age of fifty. Luis Berrios Jr.* was seventeen, one of the oldest of Gabrielle’s children. Now, the two Snohormish County detectives spoke to him about what had taken place the day before. They determined that he hadn’t been involved and he said that he’d never carried a knife.
    “But there’s a kid—my mom lets him live here,” Luis said, “and he has a really big collection of knives.”
    As Whitman and Taylor left to return to their headquarters in Everett, they commented on what a coincidence it was that two local law enforcement agencies had reason to show up at the same time at houses next door to one another. Marysville was hardly a hotbed of crime, with its population of 5,000. The 1600 block of 3rd Street was a residential neighborhood where it was rare for either the Marysville police or the sheriff’s office to be summoned.
    At this point Whitman and Taylor knew nothing of Traia Carr’s disappearance—but they soon would.
    Longtime Marysville officers knew Traia’s house: They had sad memories of a violent event that had occurred there a decade earlier. In 1968, a Marysville patrolman was killed in the house when he went there to settle a family fight—one of the more dangerous calls police officers deal with. This was long before Traia moved in. Possibly she wasn’t even aware of the sudden death in what later became her home.
    As Marysville detectives conferred, they agreed that the situation in that same house didn’t sound good. A dependable woman was suddenly gone, her family was distraught because this wasn’t her pattern, and her clothing was left behind, inside out as if someone had ripped the garments from her body. From what her daughter could determine, no other clothing was missing from Traia Carr’s closet.
    It all added up to something far more menacing than a woman deciding to take a vacation on a whim. Because the Marysville Police Department had only a dozen sworn officers, who were rarely called upon to investigate circumstances as bizarre as Traia’s vanishing, they asked for assistance from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department. As it happened, Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor handled all violent crimes in the county—and they certainly knew the neighborhood where Traia lived.
    Marysville officer Jarl Gunderson was heading the probe, and he thought the two county detectives with their vast experience and training would be of great help in finding Traia.
    At 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, the trio of investigators returned to Traia Carr’s home. Nothing had changed, and there was still no word from Traia. They moved from room to room, looking at the most minute signs that something chilling had happened here.
    A glass of milk, drained of its contents, sat on the kitchen stove. The mattress was slightly off-kilter on the box springs in Traia’s bedroom, and her spread was askew. Several of her wigs were scattered on the floor.
    They picked up the phone in her bedroom and found there was no dial tone. Following the cord, they discovered that the line had