Worth More Dead

long wait, Carolyn came on the line, but she sounded odd, almost as if she “was talking in extreme slow motion.”
    “I said, ‘What’s up?’ ”
    Maybe she was only sleepy, but her words were very deliberate, and she said that Bob had just mixed her a margarita. Although Carolyn rarely drank, a margarita was her preferred cocktail. However, as far as her sister-in-law knew, Bob had never mixed a drink for Carolyn. He disapproved of her drinking any alcohol and usually forbade her to drink except to grudgingly allow her to have an occasional drink at a family gathering. He himself drank only beer and that just a few times a year. It was hard to believe that Bob had actually mixed a drink for Carolyn.
    Worried because Carolyn was speaking so slowly, her sister-in-law asked her if she was okay. “She just said again that Bob had made her a margarita. She sounded happy enough but very unlike her usual self.”
    Asked if she had told Bob about her decision to separate from him, Carolyn said that she couldn’t talk but promised to call her back the next morning.
     
    Gary and Denise Jannusch packed up their children and their possessions and left Lake Chelan early Saturday morning, even though they weren’t due back until Monday. As soon as they got to Renton, they drove to the Durall house, hoping that Carolyn would answer the door. But she didn’t. They walked around the house and peered into the garage but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Both of the family cars were gone. They learned that Bob had left to catch a ferry to his in-laws’ island home to spend the weekend with his children.
    That seemed odd: how could he leave when his wife was missing? It seemed that the people who should be the most concerned about Carolyn weren’t even looking for her. Bob certainly wasn’t, and the police had said they could do nothing until Monday. From the very beginning it was Carolyn’s coworkers and neighbors who looked for her.
    The Jannusches drove to the property Bob and Carolyn had bought off I-90, planning to eventually build a house. They walked the property, not really sure what they might find. “We didn’t really see anything,” Denise recalled, “except for a wide trail where we could see a car had gone up in it and kind of turned around. We saw a tree where bark had been torn off, and it was fresh, white underneath the bark. And we saw what looked like fresh tire tracks on the property. We tried not to disturb anything, but we took note of it.”
    As far as they recalled, the tread on Denise’s van tires were in a straight line and the tires that left marks in the mud were “windey.” But how many people really look at their own tire patterns, much less someone else’s?
    For the whole weekend, Carolyn’s friends and coworkers searched for some sign of her or her van. They found nothing.
    Spending the weekend with his in-laws, Bob Durall received a call late Sunday night from the Washington State Patrol. The King County Police had located Carolyn’s Ford van parked alongside the road between Renton and Issaquah (a small town further east, toward the mountain foothills). The van was only about two miles from the Duralls’ house. To his host’s consternation, Bob said he would wait until Monday to return to Seattle to check on it. By that time, he couldn’t find it, he told her friends, suggesting that Carolyn had driven it someplace else.
    As soon as they got word on Monday morning that her vehicle had been sighted, four of Carolyn’s coworkers went out to look for it, driving slowly along the route where Bob said it was parked. If the van was ever there, it was gone. They called the State Patrol offices, giving them a description of Carolyn’s van and the license number.
    The patrol’s radio operator confirmed that it had been seen again. “A citizen reported seeing it this morning at 4:55 AM on the freeway, headed toward Burien. The car was being driven erratically, weaving in and out of traffic lanes.”
    Burien is more than twenty miles southeast of where Carolyn’s van had been parked on Sunday night in the Licorice Fern area. Burien is close to Sea-Tac airport. Her friends were relieved at the thought that she had been seen only about five hours earlier. But that hope was dashed when the driver was described as “dark-haired, slight build.” Carolyn was a blonde. It might have been her van, but it didn’t sound as though she had been driving it early that Monday morning.
     
    It