Worth More Dead

big deal,’ ” Denise remembered. “Maybe it was a tough night, and I thought I would call back later—but I did leave a voice mail asking Carolyn to call me just as soon as she got to work.”
    Denise’s cell phone rang at nine. With a sigh of relief, she answered, but it wasn’t Carolyn; it was the office calling to ask if she had heard from Carolyn. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Carolyn was half an hour late. With anyone else, it might have been different. But not Carolyn.
    Denise asked one of the male brokers to check across the street from their office where Carolyn’s parents kept a small condo to stay in when they were in the Seattle area. “See if her van is there, would you?”
    He came back on the line. “No van.”
    Kim Arriza, who had said good-bye to Carolyn the previous afternoon, lived just up the street from the Duralls. She worked a later shift, so the increasingly worried staff at Morgan Stanley called her and asked her if she’d drive down to Hoquiam Court to see if she could spot the van.
    When Kim turned into the Duralls’ driveway, she saw that Bob’s 1997 green Nissan Pathfinder was there, backed up to the garage. There was no sign of Carolyn’s van. Bob came around the house, and Kim noted that he was sweating profusely. He seemed surprised to see her. When she asked him where Carolyn was, he answered, “She left for work.”
    But Carolyn hadn’t come to work at all that morning. Her friends and her supervisors were now worried in earnest. When they called her home, the phone rang and rang until voice mail with a standard message picked up.
    They called Carolyn’s next-door neighbor, Linda Gunderson, and asked her to check to see if Carolyn’s car was in the driveway.
    “Her car’s gone,” Linda said, “and so is Bob’s. It looks as if there’s nobody home.”
    Now Linda Gunderson felt a sense of urgency. She hadn’t seen any activity around the house next door that morning, and as far as she knew, they weren’t planning to leave a day early to go to Carolyn’s parents’ island cabin. After she knocked on the door and received no response, she glanced up at the master bedroom’s window. It was shut. She felt a pang of fear. Bob and Carolyn always left that window open, even when they were away. It kept the house from getting stuffy, and it was too high for a burglar to reach unless he scaled the roof.
    The whole house was locked up tight. It seemed to be zipped up completely and lifeless.
    Carolyn’s coworkers and Linda Gunderson gave up any pretense that everything was all right. They called the Renton Police Department and asked if a patrolman could go to Hoquiam Court and check on the Durall house.
    An officer was dispatched to the pale green house shortly after ten to do a “check on the welfare of Carolyn Durall.” No one answered his pounding on the door, either, but that didn’t seem unusual to him on a Friday in summer. He noted there were no cars in the driveway and figured that the family who lived there had probably just decided to leave early for the weekened.
    Their worries hardly eased, Carolyn’s coworkers attempted to report her as a missing person, but the Renton officer explained that such a report had to come from someone in her family. Undeterred, they then called Carolyn’s parents on the island. They hadn’t heard from Carolyn, either. The island was accessible only by ferry, and on a summer weekend, there were long lines at either end. They all hoped that Carolyn was waiting in one of those lines.
    Carolyn’s parents were very concerned, too. It wasn’t like her to be out of touch with them when her children were staying with them.
    Some people go missing for a week or so and nobody thinks much about it. But Carolyn’s friends at Morgan Stanley knew what her plans for the night before had been and that she had fully intended to be at work this morning. As Friday crawled by, they grew increasingly worried.
     
    Bob Durall didn’t go to work at the Seattle Housing Authority on Friday morning, but he wasn’t expected; he was scheduled to attend a class in Fife, a small town near Tacoma. His coworkers, alerted by Carolyn’s office, tried to call him there. They learned that he had called in to say he would be an hour late.
    Denise Jannusch, still at Lake Chelan, learned that as she called everyone she could think of. Bob wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at his office or the computer class. He finally answered the phone at