Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

303.
    None of the tact-squad members had heard any sounds from the room, and they entered with some trepidation. They saw two silent figures bound fast to the beds and were vastly relieved when they moved.
    The officers quickly released them from their bondage. Doug Parry was in good shape, but Martha Carelli was checked by waiting paramedics and then rushed to the Harborview Medical Center for treatment of her injuries. As serious as her condition was, she wasn’t concerned about herself—she wanted to know if her family was okay.
    She was assured that her family was safe. There had never been a second gunman in her home; it had all been a hoax, perpetrated by Mike Anderson.
    Her family was just as worried about her fate, knowing that she was the hostage of a jail escapee with a record of violent crimes.
    Calls were made immediately to the Tri-Cities area, letting their families know that both Doug Parry and Martha Carelli were safe. John Carelli and his grown daughter set out by private plane at once to be by Martha’s side as she was given medical treatment. Her two grown sons headed for Seattle by car.
     
    As the ERT members surrounded Anderson in the hallway of the Sherwood Inn, he’d dropped the brown paper bag he was carrying. It was stuffed to overflowing with currency—$5,862.50 worth of bills. He hadn’t had a chance to spend even a single dollar of it. He’d netted himself nothing but big trouble when he escaped from the Franklin County Jail. Anderson was transported to the King County Jail.
    Seattle Homicide detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg were called at home in the predawn hours and asked to respond to the Sherwood Inn to gather evidence in the room where Doug Parry and Martha Carelli had been held hostage.
    The double room in the luxury motel was littered with the torn sheet strips that had been used to bind the captives. The bathroom produced bloodstained tissues and towels, which Martha Carelli had used to try to clean the blood from her numerous head wounds. Money wrappers from the stolen currency covered the floor. Baughman and Marberg also found a matchbook with a Tri-Cities phone number written on the back and some mentholated cigarettes left behind by the kidnapper.
    Checking at the desk, the two Homicide detectives learned that four calls had been made from room 303, all of them local Seattle numbers: they were all to the automated information numbers provided by airlines on flight schedules.
    They determined that Mike Anderson had booked reservations on a United flight to Los Angeles that was due to leave at 7:45 A.M. And they realized that if Doug Parry hadn’t alerted the desk clerk, there was every possibility that Anderson would have killed his hostages so that they could not identify him. He would have been long gone to California before their bodies were even discovered.
    But now he was going to go back to eastern Washington.
    “We want him,” investigators from the Pasco Police Department, the Kennewick Police Department, and both Benton and Franklin County Sheriff’s Offices said when Marberg and Baughman contacted them.
    Joyce Johnson, of the Seattle Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Police Department, went to the Harborview Medical Center to take a statement from Martha Carelli. Despite the numerous high-profile cases Johnson had worked, she was shocked when she saw the terribly injured woman. She wondered how Martha Carelli had survived the ordeal.
    ER physicians said that Martha had lacerations and contusions of the scalp and face, a severe concussion, and a broken nose. Her features were so swollen that she was unrecognizable. Even so, the courageous woman insisted on giving a statement.
    Painfully, Martha related the events of her capture to Joyce Johnson. Her only concern was that her family was safe, that she had done nothing to endanger them. It was clear she still wouldn’t believe they had all survived until she saw them for herself.
    Physicians in the ER said that she would require hospitalization and further tests to determine the extent of her injuries.
    Bill Baughman and Homicide detective Al Gerdes ran the .38 Colt taken from Anderson through the National Crime Information Center computers in Quantico, Virginia, and got a hit on it. The Richland, Washington, Police Department had entered it in the NCIC computers six weeks earlier. The .38 had been stolen in the burglary of a sporting goods store in