The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule Read Free Book Online Page A

contract for Boeing. You think they give a shit about how many of us get killed?"
    "Anarchy isn't going to solve anything. You just end up scattering your forces and getting your head broken," Ted responded. They snorted in derision. He was anathema to them. The student riots, and the marches blocking the 1-5 Freeway enraged Ted. On more than one occasion, he had tried to block the demonstrations, waving a club and telling the rioters to go home. He believed there was a better way to do it, but his own anger was, strangely, as intense as those he tried to stop.
    I never saw that anger. I never saw any anger at all. I cannot remember everything that Ted and I talked about, try as I might, but I do know we never argued. Ted's treatment of me was the kind of old-world gallantry that he invariably showed toward any woman I ever saw him with, and I found it appealing. He always insisted on seeing me safely to my car when my shift at the Crisis Clinic was over in the wee hours of the morning. He stood by until I was safely inside 32

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    my car, doors locked and engine started, waving to me as I headed for home twenty miles away. He often told me, "Be careful. I don't want anything to happen to you."
    Compared to my old friends, the Seattle homicide detectives, who routinely saw me leave their offices after a night's interviewing, at midnight in downtown Seattle with a laughing, "We'll watch out the window and if anyone mugs you, we'll call 911," Ted was a like a knight in shining armorl
    I had to drop my volunteer work at the Crisis Clinic in the spring of 1972. I was writing six days a week, and, beyond that, I was getting stale--a little jaded on the phones. After a year and a half, I had heard the same problems too many times. I had problems of my own. My husband had moved out, we had filed for divorce, and I had two teenagers and two preteens at home who provided their own crises for me to cope with. Ted graduated from the University in June. We had never seen each other outside the Crisis Clinic, and now we kept in touch with infrequent phone calls. I didn't see him again until December. My divorce was final on December 14th. On December 16th all current and former clinic personnel were invited to a Christmas party at Bruce Cummins's home on Lake Washington. I had a car-but no escort-and I knew Ted didn't have a car, so I called and asked him if he would like to attend the party with me. He seemed pleased, and I picked bun up at the Rogers's rooming house on 12th N.B. Freda Rogers smiled at me and called up the stairs to Ted.
    On the long drive from the University District to the south end, we talked about what had happened in the intervening months since we'd seen each other. Ted had spent the summer working as an intern in psychiatric counseling at Harborview, the huge county hospital complex. As a policewoman in the 1950s, I had taken a number of mentally deranged subjects--220s in police lingo--to the fifth floor of Harborview and knew the facilities there well. But Ted talked little about his summer job. He was far more enthusiastic about his activities during the governer's campaign in the fall of 1972.
    He had been hired by the Committee to Re-Elect Dan Evans, Washington's Republican Governor. Former Governor Albert Rosellini had made a comeback try, and it had been Ted's assignment to travel around the state and monitor
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    Rosellini's speeches, taping them for analysis by Evans's team.
    "I just mingled with the crowds and nobody knew who I was," he explained. He'd enjoyed the masquerade, sometimes wearing a false moustache, sometimes looking like the college student he'd been only a short time before, and he'd been amused at the way Rosellini modified his speeches easily for the wheat farmers of eastern Washington and the apple growers of Wenatchee. Rosellini was a consummate politician, the opposite of the up-front, All-American Evans.
    All this was heady stuff for