Mortal Danger

hoping they wouldn’t notice what she was doing.
    She pressed all of their fingertips to cards and labeled them. Then she pressed several sections of their palms to cards. Her eyes met Benson’s and he nodded slightly.
    Somewhere among those cards, Benson believed they had the print they needed to compare with the one on the doorjamb in the Maucks’ house.
     
    No one in the Freitas family seemed to know exactly what Jennifer’s new husband had been in prison for, or how much time he’d served. Maybe Jennifer didn’t really know. Daniel didn’t seem eager to talk about it, but who could blame him for that? He’d come out west to a new wife and a new life, and he probably wanted to forget the past.
    Although it was the weekend and many law enforcement records departments were closed, Benson contacted the Massachusetts State Police to check on what crime had sent Daniel Tavares to prison. He received word that it had been manslaughter in 1991. There was a warrant out for him for leaving New England without informing his parole officer or getting permission to cross state lines, but Massachusetts had declined to extradite him to their jurisdiction.
    Manslaughter can mean a lot of things: He might have been responsible for a car crash that had caused a death. It might have been involuntary—an unplanned—manslaughter. For the moment, Daniel Tavares didn’t come across as a dangerous felon.
    One of the other possible suspects was the neighbor’s nephew. But efforts to locate Billy Jack were fruitless. When detectives went to the last address given for him,they found that the building had been demolished. They eventually located him, jobless and living with his mother in a small town some miles away from Graham. He had an alibi for the early morning hours of November 17.
    Ben Benson asked Jennifer and Daniel to come into the sheriff’s offices to work with a police artist and attempt to come up with likenesses of the men they’d seen in the red truck. He would send an officer to pick them up. They agreed readily, saying they would be glad to help. Deputy Nick Hausner picked them up at their trailer at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night.
    Benson didn’t believe there had been any strangers at the victim’s house the morning they died, but the police artist request gave him a reason to bring the Tavareses in.
    It was raining when Jason Tate followed Ben Benson and Daniel Tavares into the sheriff’s office for further questioning, and they had to walk through puddles. As they stepped onto a covered cement walkway, Tate happened to look down. There, just in front of him, were the wet shoe prints from Tavares’s shoes. All of the investigators who had seen the shoe prints in the victims’ blood had memorized the distinctive zigzag pattern of the killer’s shoes. Tate knew he was looking at the same pattern—not in blood, but in rainwater on a stretch of dry sidewalk.
    Ben Benson immediately contacted Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien and had her take digital photos of the prints Daniel Tavares had just made. It was essential to get clear photos before the ephemeral images dried and were lost.
    She responded at once, adding those digital images to the piles of evidence they already had. She had seen the bloody footprints at the murder scene, and these prints inrainwater looked the same to her, too. When she matched up the two images, they were as close to identical in their zigzag patterns as anything could be. She notified Ben Benson.
    Whatever Tavares had done in Massachusetts, he was looking more and more like a good suspect in Washington.
    Benson directed Daniel Tavares toward one interview room and Jennifer to another. Tavares was calm and cooperative; he actually seemed to enjoy answering Benson’s questions during the first part of their interview.
    Benson, with Detective Tom Catey looking on, began by asking Daniel Tavares when he had moved to Washington. It had been July and he’d moved from Massachusetts to meet Jennifer in person. “I met her online,” he volunteered.
    When they met in person, they had hit it off and were married on July 31. Daniel said he’d gone to work for Jeff, his new brother-in-law.
    Asked how he met Brian and Bev, he said Jeff had introduced them. “They go to Jeff’s house every Friday to play cards—so every Friday we used to get together to play cards. All of us—me, my wife, her brother, Jeff, and his wife, Kristel—and then two more friends, which is Pat and