Mortal Danger

“But she didn’t want to report the gun theft because she and Brian hadn’t gotten around to registering it. Later, she found the papers ripped up in her yard.”
    Even though the man no longer lived in the neighborhood, Beverly had become afraid lately to be alone in her house, and that wasn’t like her. Her friends assumed that it was the man she believed was a burglar who still frightened her.
    A male coworker at Baydo agreed. “Seven of us went out to eat at Mazatlan in Spanaway last Friday night—November ninth,” he said, “and Bev didn’t want to go home when we left at 10:00 p.m. Brian was gone all weekend to the NASCAR races, and the nearest house with anyone living in it was three hundred feet away; she just wasn’t comfortable staying in her own house at night without him. She wanted us to drive her to her brother’s house in Lynnwood, but that was over sixty miles away, and we’d been drinking during the evening. It just wasn’t possible. We drove to her house instead, but she made us wait until a friend came to get her and take her to her house. Bev called me the next day to thank me for dinner. She said she was ‘terrified’ to be home by herself.”
    The car salesman didn’t know exactly what—or who—was scaring her, and she hadn’t said.
    Those who loved them could not believe that Beverly and Brian were gone. They had been brimming over with life on Friday night when they met Brian’s parents for dinner to celebrate his mother’s birthday.
    At a quarter to four on Saturday afternoon, after Ben Benson’s crew of forensic investigators and detectives set to work on the crime scene inside the Maucks’ home, Benson, Tom Catey, Bill Ruder, and Jason Tate talked to a few close neighbors of the two victims.
    Among the have-nots in the Maucks’ neighborhood wereJeff Freitas’s sister, Jennifer, thirty-seven, and her new husband, Daniel Tavares, forty-one. While Jeff and his wife lived in a large, modern mobile home, and Jeff and Jennifer’s parents lived in a smaller—but very nice—mobile on Jeff’s land, the Tavareses resided on Jeff’s acreage in a very small travel trailer with no bathroom, a lean-to attached to it, and a Porta Potti or, as they called it, a “honey bucket.”
    Jennifer was a pretty but very overweight woman with long blond hair who resembled the late Anna Nicole Smith. She was rumored to have met Daniel through some kind of pen-pal connection, either on the computer or through ads in a tabloid. They had moved into the tiny trailer in July, four months earlier.
    Tavares was apparently working with his brother-in-law as a logger. A powerfully built man at six feet and 225 pounds, he looked a good deal older than his age. It appeared that he and Jennifer might be the only ones who had any eyewitness observation of activity around the Maucks’ home during the early morning hours of November 17.
    Jennifer Tavares volunteered that she and Daniel knew Bev and Brian Mauck well. “They party a lot,” she said, “and they usually play cards with my brother Jeff on Friday nights.”
    Jason Tate asked Jennifer about the man in his twenties whom Beverly was rumored to be afraid of. She nodded. “That’s Billy Jack.* We’re all related to him.”
    “Has he been around lately?” Tate asked.
    “No,” she said. “Several weeks ago he stopped by Bev and Brian’s house to watch my husband give Brian a tattoo—Daniel’s very talented—but Billy Jack only stayed for one drink, and he left right after.”
    “Any problems between the Maucks and Billy Jack?”
    “Not that I know of. Someone stole Bev’s cell phone, and maybe a gun, from them when they had a party last month. There were lots of suspects, I guess, but I don’t know who. I really haven’t spent much time with Brian and Bev in the last few months.”
    “Did you hear anything early this morning?” Tate asked. “Gunshots, screaming, anything like that?”
    Jennifer told the detectives that she and Daniel were “fooling around” in bed about 7:00 a.m. and they’d heard a “pop” in the distance. They thought that it was probably a hunter, but then they had looked out the back window of their trailer and saw a “big guy with long hair.”
    Daniel had asked Jennifer who he was, but she hadn’t recognized him. Immediately after that, they heard a vehicle’s engine rev up and saw a small red truck driving northbound on 70th Avenue East. They hadn’t been able to see inside the truck,