Mortal Danger

that, he came to her door and asked if he could take a shower. She told him he could, but when he didn’t come back in an hour, she told Jennifer Tavares that her husband would have to come back around ten—Kristel wanted to take a shower, and it would take that long for the water to heat up again for Daniel.
    Asked if Daniel had a gun, Freitas hesitated. “Well, Jennifer had this twenty-two pistol that our mother had given her. With Daniel due to arrive this last summer, she told Jennifer she would have to get the gun out of the house before he got here because he was a convicted felon. I have no idea where that gun is now.”
    The Maucks had been shot with a .22-caliber gun.
    Saturday, November 17, was a crazy and disjointed day. On the morning of the murder, Daniel had told Kristel Freitas that he needed to go down to Brian and Beverly’s house and finish the tattoo he was doing for Brian, saying that he really needed the fifty dollars that Brian still owed him for the tattoo because he wanted to buy gas. But he didn’t accompany Jeff when he headed down the slope to see why the Maucks hadn’t responded to his knocks or his phone calls.
    And then there had been the fire. Jeff was especially worried because he’d spotted flames near the rear of Daniel and Jennifer’s fifth-wheel RV earlier Saturday morning. Daniel told him he’d been making repairs on it and a welding torch had accidentally ignited a rubber gasket.
    Jeff said he’d wondered then if Daniel was on drugs. He didn’t seem to grasp the urgency of getting the burning material out from under the fifth wheel before the whole thing went up. When Jeff ran for water, he shouted to Daniel, “Get a rake! Get a rake!”
    Daniel had just stood there at first, and then complained that he didn’t want to be “treated like a child.” But he was acting like a child, or like someone who was in a drug stupor.
    Motorists driving by had seen the smoke billowing, and they rushed up the road to Jeff’s acreage to help. They were followed by the fire department and some Pierce County deputies’ units. The fire had soon been put out completely.
    With no thanks to Daniel Tavares.
    It was then that Jeff Freitas had begun to worry in earnest about Brian and Bev. How could they have slept through all the commotion so close to their house?
    To his sorrow, he’d found out that they weren’t sleeping.
    When Jeff came back after finding that his neighbors were dead, Tavares was still standing in his living room. “I didn’t say a word to him about what I’d found, but it was like [he knew] and was expecting me to call 911. Just the expression on his face. When I told my wife what I’d just seen, Daniel acted shocked and kept saying, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over. That didn’t sound like him, and I found it odd and phony.”
    Jeff Freitas now believed that his brother-in-law had murdered Beverly and Brian, and he was afraid for himself and his whole extended family. He said he was doing all he could not to let Daniel know he suspected him. He was afraid to leave his wife and children and his parents alone.
    Deputy Ruder typed up a report of his phone conversation with Freitas and gave it to Sergeant Ben Benson.
    Benson wondered if the motive for double murder could possibly be a paltry fifty-dollar debt. Freitas was correct that Daniel Tavares seemed to have many different explanations for his injuries, tailoring them to fit whomever he was talking to. He was blabbing continually, with first slight and then outlandish adjustments to his story.
    Benson and his crew of investigators were gathering information and trying to lock in physical evidence. The fingerprint on the doorjamb in the Maucks’ house proved not to be a fingerprint at all; it was a section of a palm print, caught in fresh, wet blood, and then it had dried. There wasn’t much of the palm that had connected, and it had been natural that they thought it was a fingerprint.
    “We need to get some palm prints,” Benson told Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien. “Let’s contact Jennifer and Daniel and Jeff and his wife, and tell them we need to get clearer prints. When we get there, we’ll find a way to get their palm prints, too.”
    Neither the Freitases nor the Tavareses objected to being fingerprinted. Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien was matter-of-fact as she daubed ink from their fingertips up halfway to their elbows. The subjects didn’t question her, and she and Ben Benson kept the conversation going,