No Regrets

another visit in 1979, joining his siblings in Oslo for the skating championships.
    “He was happy and gay,” his sister Eugenie recalled. “The last time I saw him was in Oslo and he was just like himself. We had lots of fun.”
    This was probably the twelfth trip Rolf Neslund made to see his family in Norway, and neither Eugenie nor his brother Harald found him depressed about the debacle surrounding the West Seattle Bridge collapse. He was like he had always been, except perhaps a little more content to stay at home. If he ever needed to talk about what had happened, Harald felt he would know and they would talk about it then.
    As things turned out, no one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf exactly how he did feel about the bridge.
    No one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf anything.

Four
    In the seventies, Ray Clever was a cop in Newport Beach, California, a smart young policeman who hoped one day to emulate the older, experienced detectives he watched with something like awe. “They could get suspects to tell them almost anything,” he says with a smile. “I used to sit in the interrogation rooms just to watch them work, hoping I could learn from them.”
    One of Clever’s heroes was a detective named Sam “the Shark” Amburgy, whose mastery of interrogation was phenomenal—low key and silent and deadly as his nick-name—and who always wore a fedora. A younger officer with a friendly open face, Clever carried out the usual routine duties of patrol, but his ambition was to be a criminal investigator himself one day. He remembered the way the experienced detectives questioned suspects, noting that they often let them ramble on long enough to back themselves into a corner without ever realizing it. What might seem to be only a casual conversation could be, in reality, a delicate game of cat and mouse.
    Some of the older detectives were very intense and some seemed laid-back, but Clever found them remarkable in their ability to elicit information that their subjects never expected to reveal.
    Clever rose through the ranks in the Orange County departmentand become a detective there, but his first marriage ended in what he recalls as “a bad divorce,” when he was in his midthirties. He didn’t have much to distract him from the disappointment of his failed marriage; he was back working patrol rather than investigating baffling murder cases. He wanted to change his life completely and move someplace as unlike Orange County, California, as possible. Clever’s brother, Dick, was a reporter for the
Post-Intelligencer,
the morning newspaper in Seattle, Washington, and he made Seattle sound like a good place to live. Ray moved north.
    He became a building contractor first. He was always talented in construction and tile and granite work. It wasn’t his real ambition—that was law enforcement— but Clever also enjoyed building.
    “But then there was a downturn in the economy,” he recalls, “and pretty soon I needed a job.”
    San Juan County was hiring deputies, and Ray Clever had experience. He was hired on in February 1981. He didn’t expect a lot of action on any of the four little islands that composed San Juan County. It wasn’t the ideal place to commit robberies or burglaries since the felons would have to wait for the next ferry to make their escapes. DWIs (Driving While Intoxicated) and family fights were more likely than homicides, although anywhere human beings live there are sex offenders, disputes between neighbors, and even love triangles. Still, there was little chance that all Clever’s studying and observation of master detectives in Orange County was going to pay off in San Juan County, Washington. Nevertheless, Clever liked the region and he was glad to have the job.
    He was assigned to Patrol on Lopez Island and told the name of his first partner: Senior Deputy Greg Doss. Cleverdidn’t know the geography of Lopez Island, or anything about its residents. For that matter, he had never even seen Doss before they met on Clever’s first day on the job on February 23.
    The two deputies had been asked to check on the welfare of a longtime Lopez resident named Rolf Neslund. Apparently, he hadn’t been seen in his usual haunts for some time, and members of the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had become concerned. Gunnar Olsborg, a retired pilot and a Norwegian like Rolf, who had been his friend since 1945, talked to a number of pilots who were used to seeing Rolf often. He