Mortal Danger

threw it in the brush.”
    His tone was so matter-of-fact that the listening detectives felt a little sick.
    Luis Berrios said that he had stuffed leaves into Traia Carr’s vagina.
    “Why?” Jarl Gunderson asked him.
    “I figured that would erase any trace of rape. Kind of cover it up—”
    And then Luis had gotten into Traia’s car, sitting in her wet blood in the driver’s seat, and driven away.
    “What did you do next?” Bruce Whitman asked him.
    “I went to Smith Island and I threw her purse out. Then I drove around for a while and went back to her house. I went in and took some things I wanted.”
    The seventeen-year-old boy appeared to have no conscience at all. He betrayed no regret or guilt over what he had done to a woman who had been only kind to him. Hischoice of what to take from the dead woman’s house was strange: the radios, Traia’s jewelry, and food.
    “I took some canned goods and some fresh vegetables. I was kind of thinking of running away, and I thought the food might come in handy.
    “I put the box full of her things in the backyard on the ground, and then I took her car up about three blocks, parked it, kept the keys, and walked back home. I put the box of stuff in the washroom, and then I took the knife and put it in the flower bed. I stepped on it until it was buried.”
    But Luis was still restless. He regretted that he hadn’t taken the liquor that Traia had. “I went back to her house and took some bottles. I went to the party, drank her liquor, and got so drunk that I passed out. I woke up about four a.m. Then I came home.”
    Once Luis Berrios Jr. began to talk, his confession was a geyser of words. Maybe he did have a conscience and needed to get the ugly story out. He led the three detectives to the flower garden where he’d buried the death weapon beneath the petunias. He pointed out a few items in his family’s washhouse that the investigators had failed to find.
    Luis led them unerringly to where he’d left Traia’s body, even though it had changed somewhat because of the logging that had occurred since her murder. Then he took them to a sewer lagoon on Smith Island where the blackberry vines had grown ten feet high in the summer heat.
    “That’s where I threw her purse—and her slippers.”
     
    There was no question that Luis had killed Traia Carr. The investigators recovered physical evidence in each area he led them to. K-9 Unit’s dog Tracer wriggled through the thick and thorny Himalayan blackberry vines and emerged with her slippers and her purse.
    “I took her money, but I left her credit cards in there,” Luis said, almost as if he wanted a pat on the back for being honest.
    “Why did you kill her?” Gunderson asked him. “She didn’t fight you—you got what you wanted from her. Why didn’t you let her go home?”
    “You know I couldn’t,” Luis said. “She would have reported me to you guys for raping her. I couldn’t risk that.”
    He commented that it was kind of funny that she was really afraid he was going to kill her all during her ordeal. “But she was turning the car key at the end, and I could tell she thought she was going to live. She really thought I was going to let her go.
    “She was sure she was going to die when we left her house, but when I told her to get in the front seat and turn the key, she believed everything was going to be okay. I think she was even going to give me a ride home.”
    Luis told the detectives that he thought he’d been caught for sure when they showed up at his house the day after the Fourth of July. “I thought you guys had found her body already. I was relieved when you were only asking about the guy that got stabbed at the party. I didn’t touch him, you know, I just helped clean up his wound—it wasn’t anything much, anyway.
    “I told you about how I killed Traia. There’d be no point in my lying to you now about that thing at the party.”
    They were inclined to believe him. He’d been in a number of juvenile scrapes with local police, but nothing in Luis’s background indicated a propensity for violence. What had happened to Traia Carr seemed completely out of character for this taciturn, emotionally flat kid.
    And yet Luis had admitted to watching Traia for a long time. He had become obsessed with her. It wasn’t money he wanted; it was a chance to act out the sexual fantasies that consumed him.
    Traia had been touched that the neighbor boy would invite her to his family’s