Mortal Danger

death, and they found only death inside.
    “I can remember that scene,” Fred Douglas said, “and I probably will for the rest of my life. It was shocking.”
    There were two people in the house, but they were both dead—the woman shot in the neck and head, and the man in the head. It looked like a murder-suicide.
    The blond woman had to be Turi Bentley-Williams. Was the dead man Randall Nozawa or John Williams?
    The mystery had just begun to uncoil.
    Neighbors had seen enough of the couple who’d lived there to estimate they were both in their sixties, and police were quite sure that the deceased were in that age group. They had to be Turi Bentley and John Williams. The man in surgery had dark hair and looked to be about fifty. That would be Randall Nozawa. Becky Minton, a friend from the Gateway Fitness Center, who had waited outside during the long standoff, agreed tearfully. She told police that Turi and John were married, and were quite a bit older than Randall.
    None of their names would be officially released to the media until families could be notified.
    Becky Minton said Randall had spoken with one of the fitness club members just the night before, and he had told her that John Williams had seemed “disturbed” or “upset” about something, and that he thought he could help.
    Becky couldn’t believe that Turi and John were dead. “They were just back from a trip to California—on the coast—and having a great time. And [they] always had a smile in their voices whenever you talk[ed] with them. I just can’t imagine…”
     
    As the crime scene investigation began, Detective Todd Karr of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office’s Major Crimes Unit joined the other law officers. They spread out over the property and house, looking for something—anything—that might help them get official identification of the shooter and the victims. As far as the motive for the triple shootings, they would probably have to wait until Randall Nozawa came out of surgery—if he ever did.
    Fred Douglas found a bullet hole in the master bedroom. Ballistics would show that it didn’t match the slugs and casings from the gun used to shoot Randall, Turi, and John, but it did match another of John Williams’s guns found in the house. It must have been fired sometime earlier than the night before.
    Douglas also found damage to the bedroom wall, where it looked as if a knee or an elbow had crashed almost through the drywall. A check of records showed no police calls to the house on Lost Beach Road, so if there had been domestic violence going on there, it had been kept private.
    The wallet closest to the dead man’s body had ID for John Williams, and the investigators believed that they knew who they were dealing with. At least they knew his name.
    Or one of his names.
    When they searched the attic in the house, they found a battered backpack hidden there. It contained many IDs—under several different names and birth dates. They were from Oregon, Florida, California, Washington, and other states. Several were from the British Virgin Islands. They might all have been fake, or there could have been one that was real: John W. Williams, John W. Hennings, John W. Jewell, John W. Branden, John W. Bentley, and John W. Howell. The Social Security cards in the backpack had two different series of numbers on them; two numbers had been transposed in about half of them.
    Who was he. Really? The detectives from Pierce County sent Internet messages to law enforcement departments whose jurisdiction matched the addresses on the IDs. Whenthey heard back from Detective Dave Gardiner in Curry County, Oregon, they knew that the most likely shooter wasn’t John Williams at all; he was almost certainly the man listed on an Oregon driver’s license in the backpack—John William Branden, DOB February 24, 1945, who had been a fugitive from Curry County since 1999. He had felony warrants out on him dating back to mid-1999, first locally and regionally, and eventually a federal warrant. They were all still in force.
    His crimes in Gold Beach, Oregon, had been inflicted on a woman—his common-law wife, apparently.
    And they had been crimes of violence: rape in the first degree, kidnapping in the first degree, attempted murder, attempted sodomy, menacing, and harrassment. His bail had been set at one million dollars.
    He had been a fugitive ever since.
     
    Ed Troyer, the sheriff’s spokesman for Pierce County, kept a closemouthed stance