Mortal Danger (28 page)

Besides, if Laura had decided to cut and run, taking the money from the cash register, why hadn’t she taken the envelope full of large-denomination bills from the back shelf? There was a lot more in there than in the till. (Rita Longaard said that they were all trained to periodically take the “big money” out of the till and put it in a safe place.)

No, Lieutenant Bob Holter and his crew felt that something had happened to Laura. She hadn’t come back to her young lover because she
couldn’t
come back.

Neither Laura nor Jack had a record of felonies in any state; their only contact with police had been two stops for hitchhiking in states where it was forbidden.

Jack Atkins said he didn’t know anything about Laura’s reasons for leaving her home in England. “We don’t talk
about the past,” he said softly. “We are our relationship. Our relationship is now.”

The robbery detectives didn’t have the heart to remind him that “now” might be gone forever.

Jack pulled out a picture of Laura Baylis. It showed a pretty girl with large blue eyes, a shy smile, and masses of curly blond hair.

The detectives had seen her before. They’d gone over the film from the security camera in the 7-Eleven with a magnifying glass. This was the same girl they had seen in those photos.

But, in those pictures, Laura wasn’t alone. Laura, dressed in blue jeans and a navy blue shirt, was at the cash register, and she held a brown paper bag in her left hand. Her expression was deadly serious.

There was a man in the later photos. He was a tall black male dressed in an olive green jacket, and he wore a blue billed cap and glasses. As the film frames moved forward, the man appeared from the back and from the side—as if he were glancing around to see if anyone was approaching. He had a mustache and a scraggly beard. It was impossible to tell if they were real or stuck on with spirit gum.

If he held a weapon, it was hidden.

“Is that Laura in the picture?” Larry Stewart asked Jack Atkins.

“Yes. I think it’s her,” Jack said, his voice trembling. “It’s not real clear—but it has to be her.”

The bags of sunflower seeds were on the counter in the picture, but there was also a small bottle of orange juice. The bottle had been gone when police arrived.

The man in the picture was clearly not Bubba Baker. He
was older and bigger. Holter and his men felt a chill as they perused those pictures. They sensed that they might be seeing Laura Baylis during the last few moments of her life. The pictures flipped rapidly as the mindless camera had clicked every few seconds, until they became
almost
“moving pictures.”

The men watching experienced an eerie feeling, as if what they were seeing was happening in the present, right in front of them. They watched Laura Baylis as she obeyed the man standing behind her. She had obviously cooperated with him and given him the money in the cash register.

But where was she now?

The detectives took on the tedious task of searching through 911 calls for Sunday night. Buried in hundreds of calls, they found a brief report of trouble at the Beacon Hill 7-Eleven at 11:30 p.m. But it wasn’t Laura Baylis who had made the call; the clerk who worked the shift just before hers had called Seattle Police to report a shoplifter. The thief wasn’t a tall black male. Not at all. It was a teenage girl who’d tried to make off with a large jug of wine.

Detectives Al “Beans” Lima and Myrle Carner interviewed the clerk in the shoplifting incident. That had been fairly routine, but she was still in shock over Julie/Laura’s disappearance and tried to remember anything that might help the detectives.

“Julie came in for work at eleven p.m. She wore blue jeans, blue shirt, her blue ski parka. Everything was normal,” the clerk said. “She was in a good mood. She almost
always was. All I know about her was that she lived with Jack, and she traveled back and forth between England and the U.S.”

Eventually, the Seattle detectives would talk to all of the missing woman’s coworkers. Of course, they all knew Laura Baylis as Julie Costello. They were aware that Bubba Baker had been annoying her, but they’d felt she could handle him.

“He’s a little off upstairs,” the four-to-eleven checker said. “But he’s more inclined to shoplift and get goofy crushes on the younger girls here. I’ve never thought of him as capable of harming anyone.”

Bob Holter’s team tried to pinpoint just when the robbery had occurred. The liquor cabinets were supposed to be locked, by Washington State law, at 2:00 a.m. They had been locked when Rita Longaard arrived. The store’s two clocks had been stopped at between 3:40 a.m. and 4:13 a.m. They were electric clocks and they had stopped because someone had tripped the sixteen-circuit breaker.

It would appear that Laura Baylis had been taken from the 7-Eleven around 4:00 a.m. Myrle Carner and Al Lima dusted the circuit breaker box for prints, then removed the clocks to put them into evidence. Although they carefully searched the alley behind the store, they didn’t come across anything that seemed to have evidentiary value.

Patrol officers, who continued to canvass the neighborhood, finally came up with a possible witness. A woman who lived just across the street from the 7-Eleven said she had gotten up in the night to use the bathroom, and she’d seen all the store’s lights go off sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m.

She was shown the suspect from the security camera, but she didn’t recognize him as anyone she’d ever seen before. Disappointingly, none of the other neighboring residents recognized him either.

Jerry Trettevik talked to Bubba Baker’s mother, who said that her son did have a “mental problem.” Bubba himself was eager to talk to the detective. He admitted that he’d been in the store on Sunday night.

“But I left at one fifteen a.m.,” he said.

“Were you there any other time that night?”

Bubba nodded. “I was in the store around eleven thirty p.m., just when Julie came to work. I saw a big, black man there. He was very dark-skinned—not like me.”

Trettevik showed Bubba the hidden camera’s pictures, and Bubba nodded his head vigorously.

“That’s the man I seen at eleven thirty.”

“Do you know him? Ever see him before?”

“No, sir. I never seen him before.”

The canvassing and interviewing spread out, casting a wider net over the neighborhood. Myrle Carner and Al Lima talked to patrons in nearby taverns. They showed the photo of the man in the fatigue jacket and cap to customers at the Jolo Tavern. Some of the regulars said the man was “vaguely familiar,” but no one could put a name to the face.

They had better luck at the 19th Hole tavern at South Columbia and Beacon. The female bartender there remembered that a husky black male had been in on September 24 at 11:00 p.m.

“He sat at the counter and ordered wine. I’d never seen
him before. He left but he came back about forty-five minutes later and bought a bottle of beer to take with him.”

“What’d he look like? How was he dressed—beyond the jacket?” Carner asked.

“He was about five feet eleven and weighed more than two hundred pounds. I’d say he was maybe thirty-five. Had a full mustache and a goatee.”

Shown the photo, the woman nodded. “Yes. I’m positive that was the man who was here on the twenty-fourth.”

The stranger hadn’t seemed nervous or angry or in a hurry. He hadn’t been back since that Sunday at midnight.

Now more witnesses were forthcoming. Another tavern patron recalled a black man wearing a jeans jacket—but he was with another man. “I had the impression that the two men were together. The second guy wore a fatigue jacket and a blue cap with a bill. He had a goatee, mustache, glasses.”

Carner showed him the security camera photos, and he quickly identified the man shown. “He was the second man that I saw here at the 19th Hole.”

Larry Stewart and Jerry Trettevik received information from two patrol units that had worked First Watch on Sunday–Monday. They had been dispatched to the 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill at 4:00 a.m. Monday morning, shortly after they’d begun their shift.

“It was a ‘suspicious circumstances’ call,” one officer said. “A passerby phoned it in. When we got there, the store was dark, and we saw no activity in or around it. We assumed that everything was all right. We figured they’d just closed up early on Sunday night.”

Detectives located the man who’d called the police. He said he and a friend had gone to the 7-Eleven a little before 4:00 a.m. to buy cigarettes and found nobody behind the counter and the lights mostly off.

“I walked in anyway, and this black guy wearing a green fatigue jacket and a cap came out of the back room to tell me the store was closed.

“I told him all I wanted was a couple of packs of cigarettes, and he grabbed them and gave them to me. He charged me a dollar a pack. When I got home, I got to thinking about it, and it seemed really strange. I called 911 and asked for somebody to go by and check it out.”

Shown the photos, both the complainant and his friend agreed that the alleged robber was the man they had seen in the store—but they hadn’t seen Laura Baylis at all.

“The guy kept his right hand in his pocket the whole time, and he was really nervous. He kept looking back at the back of the store. The big store sign was out then, but the store lights were still on.”

Citizens were trying to help. They searched their memories for anything peculiar or disturbing that might have happened on Sunday night–Monday morning. A Beacon Hill resident called Trettevik and Stewart to say that he, too, had gone into the 7-Eleven between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. “I picked up a couple of bags of sunflower seeds and put them on the counter. I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone. Then this black guy came out from the back room and said the store was closed. I saw that the till was open and empty, so I left the seeds on the counter and walked out.”

If Laura Baylis had been in the rear of the store—and
she certainly must have been—she was either too frightened to call for help, or bound and gagged—or unconscious. In the worst case scenario, she might have been dead. And yet detectives hadn’t found one drop of blood in the place, not one indication of a struggle.

The robbery detectives wondered again if there was another side to Laura’s personality. Was it possible that she’d been in cahoots with the man in the fatigue jacket?

No. They agreed that was impossible. She and Jack had been too happy, and all her acquaintances said she saw no one but him. She always went straight home from work.

Where was she?

Laura Baylis’s picture appeared in all local papers, as did the picture of the unknown man in the cap and jacket. If someone out there knew more about the baffling case, no one called the police.

Jerry Trettevik and Larry Stewart went door-to-door in the area, trying to find someone who had seen something else that night, and they came up empty-handed.

Holter and his detectives tracked down the
real
Julie Costello in Missouri. She admitted that she given Laura Baylis some ID but said she hadn’t heard from her since she’d left Kansas City.

Julie Costello said that Laura Baylis had a pattern of leaving cities precipitately—telling her friends and employers all kinds of stories about why she had to go. She had told Julie that she could never stay long enough in one spot before she worried that immigration authorities would check on her.

Julie knew very little about Laura’s background, only
that she spoke with an English accent and that she had relatives in England.

Back in Seattle, Laura remained missing. The probe into her vanishing continued. Calls poured in from people who thought they recognized the man in the pictures.

Each name mentioned was checked out and eliminated.

Jack Atkins told Larry Stewart that if Laura had any friends in America whom she might contact, it would be a young man in Minneapolis. He had been a good friend of hers. Jack gave them Ben Calkins’s* address and phone number, which he’d found in Laura’s papers. Ben was living in a fraternity house. Stewart phoned the fraternity and found that Ben was currently in England and had been for several months. Next, he called Ben’s family and spoke to his parents in Minnesota.

After Stewart explained the situation, Ben’s mother said, “Yes, we know Laura, but Ben’s lost track of her. She left some of her papers here. Would that help?”

It certainly was more than the detectives from the Robbery Unit had found so far. The woman mailed Laura’s passport (in her real name) and various other documents to Stewart.

Her birth certificate indicated that Laura Anne Baylis had been born November 30, 1955. She had emigrated from Suffolk, England, to Canada in 1976. Her Canadian passport was valid until 1982, but it didn’t allow her to cross U.S. borders or work in the United States.

Trettevik and Stewart asked an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for assistance in contacting Laura Baylis’s parents. Special Agent Anthony Provenzo contacted offices in London and asked that the parents of the missing girl call the Seattle Police Department.

A short time later, the Seattle detectives received a call from Mrs. Bessie Baylis. The distraught mother confirmed what the detectives had feared: She had no idea where her daughter was, had had no word at all from her since Laura’s last letter on September 15. At that time, her daughter had been happy and contented with her life in America.

“She didn’t mention anything about planning to leave Seattle or Jack.”

Laura Baylis’s family was extremely concerned. They promised to do whatever they could to help in the mystery that continued to grow. Mrs. Baylis said she would look for any medical or dental records that might help to identify Laura. She knew that the American detectives meant
if her body was found
, but they were as kind as they could be and didn’t spell it out. They even said that Laura might be suffering from amnesia, or that she might be headed for England.

Spokane detectives reported that they had found the body of a Jane Doe, but that victim turned out to be a sixteen-year-old local girl.