No Regrets

wrinkled. They might be interfering in a domestic situation, a family fight, but they had seen the terror in the young woman’s eyes, and they weren’t going to leave her there.
    As they headed out of the campground, Bessey saw that the suspects’ car was right behind them. Both vehicles headed toward Highway 49, but the men in the Ford didn’t try to stop Bessey’s truck. When they reached the road, Bessey turned left toward North San Juan, and the red and white Thunderbird turned right and headed northbound on 49—toward Downieville.
    •  •  •
    It was close to one in the afternoon when Kari and her rescuers walked into the S&C Market. The same woman was behind the counter, and she pointed toward a phone on the wall when they said they had to call the sheriff. When they reached the dispatcher at the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Mike McPeters was dispatched to meet them at the North San Juan store.
    McPeters asked Kari what had happened to her, and if she was hurt. She told him she had been kidnapped and raped. And, yes, she could describe the men who abducted her and she was ready to give a statement. She didn’t quite believe that she had survived her time with two dangerous, drunk, half-delusional men. But she had. She looked at the clock behind the counter. It was 1:37 P.M . on Sunday.
    “Please let my husband and my mother know,” she said to McPeters. “And tell my friends at Sancho Panza that I’m okay. Tell them I made the 2:00 P.M. call, with some time to spare.”
    Although Kari tried to hold herself together, McPeters could see that the disheveled woman was extremely upset, and she trembled as she tried to give him a preliminary statement.
    Kari was in shock, and she had trouble remembering the order of the events that had begun the night before. Her captors had rambled here and there, retracing their travels, threatening to kill her if she didn’t get money for them. The weird visit to Mike’s mother’s house out in the countryside was her most recent memory, and she had had a sense of doom about that. Mike so clearly hated his mother that she wondered if it would have been enough for him to introduce Kari as his wife? Or would he have ended up hurting both her and his mother? She had a betterfix on John; she had even begun to predict what would set him off—but Mike had been somehow more frightening. His silence and the way he had spoken to Shelly when he was tying her up was more chilling than John’s open threats.
    “The knife might have been a Buck knife,” Kari told Deputy McPeters. “It was long when it was open—probably eight or nine inches long. He always had it in his shirt sleeve—or his jacket sleeve.”
    A mile the other side of the Indian Valley Restaurant, a woman was driving at the speed limit when a red car came up behind her so fast that she thought it was going to rear-end her car. She sped up to stay ahead of it, but the other driver just went faster. She knew the road well, and worried about the many sharp curves ahead. If they met another car, they would all be dead. She looked for a wide spot where she could get over to the shoulder and let them pass. She found one just in time as they were trying to edge her off. The two men in the car waved to her in thanks as they sped past.
    She saw someone in the car ahead throw a bag out of the window, and then the Thunderbird disappeared.
    Now she saw a CHP officer heading toward her, and a few miles up the road she saw a sheriff’s car making a U-turn, and heading in the direction of the speeding car. Several miles farther on, she saw the deputy had pulled the Thunderbird over, and that he had two men leaning over the back of it. He was attempting to hold them and radio for backup at the same time.
    “One of the men got back in the car and tried to escape,”she later told the sheriff’s detectives. “But they stopped him.”
    Nevada County Deputy Albert Johnson and Sierra County Deputy David Marshall arrested Mike Hutson, thirty-five, and John Martin, thirty-four, less than a half hour after Kari Lindholm ran to freedom.
    Their rented Thunderbird was a treasure trove of evidence. Kari Lindholm’s and Shelly Corelli’s credit and ID cards were all there, solid physical links between the kidnappers and the victims. There were fifteen empty twelve-ounce beer cans, and the remains of the “picnic"—a loaf of Rainbow wholewheat bread and a pack of lunch meat. The beer was Olympia and Miller High