Mortal Danger

were also new houses in various stages of completion, most of them unoccupied. A few houses along the road had families living in them, and there were also a number of trailers—some luxury double-wide mobile homes and some aged travel trailers, with shacklike structures built around them.
    Local ordinances had not yet laid down all kinds of restrictions about land use and building permits. Basically, it was live and let live in this friendly town where almost everyone did know everyone else. There were some local taverns and, for those who didn’t drink, grocery stores and the post office where they could catch up on the news.
    One thing was certain. No one in Graham, Washington, knew that there was a savage killer living among them.
     
    The call to 911 at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department dispatch center came in from a man named Jeff Freitas, who owned some prime acreage in Graham. He had halfway planned to take his neighbor, Brian Mauck, hunting that morning, but when he went by his house at 5:00 a.m., all the lights were out, and he figured Brian and his wife, Bev, were sleeping.
    When Freitas returned from hunting at eleven that Saturday morning, he saw that one of the front panels of his friends’ front door was knocked out. This wasn’t particularly alarming, as he knew that the newly married couple sometimes forgot their house keys and resorted to removing the door section so they could reach in and turn the locks from the inside. Most of the neighbors knew that.Brian kept intending to get extra keys and fix the door solidly, but other things got in the way.
    When Jeff Freitas got to his modern double-wide mobile home nearby, he decided to call Brian and Beverly just to be sure everything was okay. Their habits were fairly predictable, and he usually saw them around their new gray and white ranch-style home with the three-car garage by this time of the morning. And the temperature outside was cold enough that he would have thought Brian would have fixed the door panel right after they got into the house.
    There was no answer to his phone call. He tried both Brian and Bev’s cell phones, and no one answered those either.
    The Maucks’ two vehicles were parked in their driveway, and this wasn’t a neighborhood where people walked to the store. Why didn’t they answer the phone?
    Jeff Freitas told his wife and brother-in-law that he was going to walk down to the Maucks’ house to check on them. Maybe their cell phones’ batteries were dead, and the land line could have gone out, too. But the thought of the missing door panel kept bothering Freitas.
    As he came up to the front door, he could hear a television playing loudly inside. He suddenly felt a dark sense of foreboding. He forced himself to kneel down and look through the space where the door panel should have been.
    He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but it appeared that Brian—or maybe Bev—might have fallen asleep on the media room floor, and someone had covered them with a blanket or spread. He wasn’t sure why they’dfallen asleep or what had happened. Probably they’d been out the night before; they usually went out on Friday nights, and maybe they had been tired enough to drift off in front of the TV.
    Still, Freitas somehow knew the real explanation wasn’t going to be good; he just tried to delay finding out why his nerves were jangling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw what might be spilled wine or catsup—his mind darted frantically so he wouldn’t have to face the obvious source—or blood on the carpet.
    Freitas was a logger, forty-two years old, six foot one, and 240 pounds. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He backed away and called 911.
    Pierce County Deputies Kent Mundell and Laura Wilson were dispatched at about two in the afternoon and met Detectives Brian Lund and Tom Catey from the Criminal Investigation Division, who arrived soon after. They checked the outside of the house and found no signs of a break-in. Actually, the front door still had a dead bolt in place, so whoever had kicked the door panel could conceivably have done so to reach inside and lock the door, rather than unlocking it. The door section still lay just inside.
    Catey peeked through the door, just as Jeff Freitas had. He saw a blue fleece blanket and two blue and white flannel sheets spread out on the floor of the entrance hall and dining area, and he recognized that the