Mortal Danger

mentioned. Traia was pretty firm with him.”
    Traia Carr’s Pontiac sedan was found first. A Marysville police sergeant discovered it at 1:30 a.m. on Thursday,July 6. It was barely half a mile from her house, parked on 3rd Avenue.
    When they found her car, the investigators knew that their fears for her safety were accurate. The upholstery on the back of the driver’s seat was literally drenched in blood, which had now dried completely.
    DNA matches were unheard of at the time, but the Western Washington Crime Lab would be able to compare blood type, enzymes, and RH factors if they could find any samples or records of Traia’s blood values.
    After daylight dawned, Dick Taylor and Bruce Whitman processed the Pontiac for evidence. They found more blood in varying quantities on the hood, throughout the interior, and on the doors. There was so much blood that, if it had all come from one person, they sincerely doubted that that person could still be alive.
    Once again, they surmised that the killer—or attempted killer—probably lived close by. He could have easily dumped Traia’s car and walked to one of the many houses that spread out from both sides of 3rd Street.
    There was no purse in Traia’s car, nor her missing purple robe. The two detectives couldn’t find anything that might have belonged to the person whose gun or knife had caused all the bloodshed.
    And they still didn’t know where Traia Carr was.
    They lifted a number of latent fingerprints that might prove to be invaluable if they found a suspect whose prints could be compared to these unknown prints. In 1978, AFIS didn’t exist. The FBI didn’t keep single fingerprints three decades ago—except those that belonged to felons on the Ten Most Wanted list.
    Forensic science has advanced a great deal since the seventies, when computers weren’t yet standard household equipment. Looking back, 1978 CSI techniques seem archaic now.
    There was just one man whom Traia Carr was extremely close to, and he lived in her neighborhood. That was Tom Scott, the ex-lover who had recently come back to her. His apartment was several blocks up the street from her house.
    Jarl Gunderson, Dick Taylor, and Bruce Whitman studied Scott as they questioned him. He appeared to be very distraught and grief-stricken over Traia’s disappearance. They believed his emotions were real and not manufactured tears meant to take suspicion off of him. But they also knew that sociopaths were quite capable of feigning grief when it served their purposes.
    “I’ll do anything in my power,” Scott said, sobbing, “to find out what happened to Traia. I just keep praying she’s still alive, waiting for us to find her.”
    The three investigators didn’t believe that she was still alive, but they didn’t comment on it; Scott was upset enough as it was.
    “Try to think,” Bruce Whitman urged. “Think of anything unusual that may have happened in the past few months—anything, even if it didn’t seem important at the time, that might have caused Ms. Carr to be afraid or nervous.”
    But Tom Scott said the only thing he could think of was actually a crime where he was the victim.
    “I was over at Traia’s house for the evening, and somebody ripped off stuff from my truck—they took sometools, fishing gear, and some blank checks. I was mad. I figured it was probably somebody from the house next door. There’s a bunch of teenage kids over there, and it seemed like it was the kind of thing kids would pull. I wanted to go over there and confront them, but Traia begged me not to. She said she had a good relationship with the family, and the kids had never bothered her. She thought I might stir up trouble if I accused them. So I didn’t.”
    Gunderson nodded. “We’ve been working on that,” he said. Later, he told Whitman and Taylor that he felt Scott’s suspicions were probably true.
    “Those missing checks are popping up around town, and the makers have been traced to the Berrios house next door. Luis Jr.’s name is on some of them, but there are also some from other kids his mother lets live there.”
    The Marysville Police Department was very close, Gunderson said, to filling charges against the forgers when Traia Carr disappeared. Still, he doubted that there was a connection.
    They tended to agree. Why would anyone from the Berrios house hurt Traia? She hadn’t approached them about the theft from Tom Scott’s truck, and she’d convinced him not to accuse them,