Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

little better—but she was still dizzy and nauseated. The gunman ordered both her and Parry into the bathroom so that they wouldn’t overhear him as he spoke on the phone.
    It was the first time Doug Parry and Martha Carelli had had a chance to talk. Now, she whispered to him that their captor had hidden in her home for at least twenty-four hours, and that he had kicked her into unconsciousness. She had had no choice but to leave her family tied up in their home, while the man who said his name was Mike had forced her to drive him.
    “I don’t know what’s happened to them,” she said tearfully.
    Parry comforted her as best as he could and told her he wouldn’t leave her.
    “I’ll protect you,” he promised. “Just don’t get him riled up.”
    He didn’t tell her that he had alerted the hotel clerk and that he thought the police were on the way. She was in deep shock, and he was afraid she might accidentally say something that would alert Anderson. They both had so much to lose. She had five children and a husband who needed her; Parry had a wife and four small children. And they were still at the mercy of a man with a fully loaded gun.
    Mike Anderson came to the bathroom door and ordered them out.
    “Now I’m going to tie you both up,” he said, “because I have to make some calls and I’ll be going back and forth. I want you where I can see you.”
    Anderson tore sheets from one of the beds into strips and then he hogtied and gagged Parry. That wasn’t enough to satisfy him, so he tied the store manager’s arms to the bed frame to make sure he couldn’t get free.
    Then he tied Martha Carelli’s hands and feet to the bedposts. He gagged her too, but her broken nose kept her from breathing. When he saw that she was almost suffocating, he loosened the gag a little.
    It was Anderson’s first act of anything that came close to kindness.
    So much time had passed. Doug Parry began to wonder if the clerk had understood how desperate their situation was. He’d been listening for the sound of sirens, or the engines of a number of cars turning into the motel’s parking lot. But it was quiet—too quiet.
     
    He couldn’t know that the Seattle Police Department’s Emergency Response Team was at that very moment moving stealthily outside their room. All the rooms surrounding room 303 were being quietly evacuated.
    Assistant Seattle police chief Richard Schoener and Captain “Smoky” Wesselius of the North Precinct directed ten members of the ERT, who were now deployed inside the Sherwood Inn.
    Expert marksman Ken Starkweather was stationed across the I-5 with a rifle equipped with a scope and binoculars. He had a bead on the room where Anderson was holed up with his hostages.
    Inside 303, Mike Anderson began to get antsy as he thought he heard rustling and movement in the corridor. Even though they were incapable of making much noise, he shushed his prisoners, and placed his ear against the door.
    The evacuation of guests and the infiltration of the tactical squad had been accomplished with so little noise that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Anderson was jumpy.
    It was near dawn now. Martha Carelli was able to talk a little through her loosened gag, and she assured her captor that he was hearing only the sounds of tourists leaving to get an early start on the road.
    “It’s 5 A.M. ,” she reminded him. “Remember, this is a motel, and a lot of people get up early.”
    Anderson accepted her reasoning. A short time later, he said he was hungry. He told them he was going down the hall to find a vending machine to get some candy bars and soft drinks.
    “Remember,” he warned, “if I come back and find that you’ve loosened those ties, I’ll kill you.”
    And then he stepped out into the hallway.
    He hadn’t taken a second step before ERT members J. Guich, G. Reynolds, and their team leader, Gary Veatch, stopped him. They’d been poised in an alcove there, their guns drawn.
    “Hold it! Freeze!” Guich shouted, and Anderson started to run down the hall, ducking into another alcove.
    “Throw the gun out,” the officers ordered. “You’re covered on every side.”
    For moments they were all suspended in an agonizing pause as Anderson held on to his loaded gun. And then he tossed it out onto the rug of the motel corridor. Veatch and Guich approached him and ordered him to lie prone on the floor. They cuffed his hands behind him and checked his pockets, finding the key to room