Now, there were six. This female body, who apparently was Caucasian, would only be absolutely identifiable using dental chart comparisons, although detectives suspected that she was Giselle. Jak-Bak had described a small bird tattoo on her right breast when he reported her missing, and despite postmortem changes, the bird tattoo was still visible in the same place.

The task force, accompanied by German shepherd search dogs, moved through the acres of isolated land, looking for more bodies or some physical evidence connected to the blond girl who had lain there for more than a month. They could see that this would be an opportune spot for a killer. Planes landing to the north at SeaTac were almost close enough to reach up and touch, and their engines screeched as they prepared to touch down. The screams of a hapless woman, crying out for help, would be swallowed up by airplane noise. And, certainly, nobody was going to drive by; the roads had long since been barricaded blocks away. A killer wasn’t likely to be caught unawares as he dumped a body. Dirt-bike riders would signal their approach with the buzz of their loud motors.

Dental records confirmed that the petite blond victim was, indeed, Giselle Lovvorn. Her “best friend” Jak-Bak continued to talk to the press, explaining that he had taken a lie detector test and passed. He had his own opinion of who had killed Giselle. “The word I got on the street was that it was a pimp named Peaches who put the grab on her and was trying to break her spirit and work her out of a hotel or something.”

Reporters’ interest in Jak-Bak waned as his information grew more and more grandiose. And so did the task force’s. He seemed like nothing so much as a con man coming across like a sanctimonious hero. In general, pimps lied to police, anyway.

Why? Why? Why? Whoever was killing the girls from the highway, there had to be a reason. Some motive that drove the faceless killer. Two days after Giselle’s body was discovered, Pat Ferguson, who spoke for the Green River Task Force, admitted that none of them knew why. He said the detectives had speculated on many theories. Maybe the killer was a sexual psychopath, killing for the sake of killing. Maybe he was some kind of fanatic trying to rid the highway of prostitutes. Maybe it was a pimp war with the men who lived off women protecting their territory. They were even considering that it had something to do with narcotics traffic, or that somehow the girls were murdered to cover up another kind of crime.

6

SEPTEMBER NIGHTS began to turn chilly, and Mary Bridget Meehan was still missing. Ray, the boyfriend with whom she had been staying, and her family were very worried, more so because she was heavily pregnant. It didn’t make any sense that she would suddenly decide to leave; she never had. She had spent all of her eighteen years in King County, Washington, in touch with her family even when she wasn’t living at home.

Mary Bridget was the youngest child of four, adopted, as was her brother Timothy, shortly after her birth on May 16, 1964, by an Irish Catholic couple who lived in Bellevue, Washington. Patricia and John Meehan had two birth children, but they wanted a larger family and found Mary Bridget and Tim through the Catholic Charities Organization.

That Mary Bridget should one day vanish from a seedy section of highway twenty miles from Bellevue was almost unbelievable. Bellevue wasn’t a place where terrible things happened, especially not to children of families who loved them so much.

After World War II, the building boom in Bellevue metamorphosed hundreds of acres of farmland and blueberry bogs into neighborhoods with ramblers and split-level homes. Many midwestern families were drawn to the Seattle area by the plethora of jobs available at the Boeing Airplane Company. Lake Hills was first, and then Robinswood, Robinsglen, Spiritwood, and every possible combination of rustic-sounding names for subdivisions that popped up like dandelions. The commute to Seattle seemed a long way then, but few new houses sat empty for long.

It didn’t seem to matter if they were Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic; most families had four children in the fifties and sixties. The Meehans had a girl, Maeve,* first, and then Dennis two years later. Tim and Mary Bridget fit into their family perfectly with Tim a year younger than Dennis, and Mary Bridget two years behind Tim. Her family recalled that she liked to be called Mary, while friends she met later said she hated the name and insisted upon being called Bridget.

“Mary was her street name,” Dennis said sadly. “She liked to call herself that when she was little.”

The Meehans lived in a small house near the center of old Bellevue, the little town it had been before the building boom. The couple were very strong Catholics and saw to it that each of their children was baptized and went through the First Communion rituals. All four children attended Sacred Heart School through grade school, and then began going to public school in the seventh grade. They went to Ashwood and Chinook for junior high and then Bellevue High School.

The elder Meehans were highly educated and intelligent people. Her mother was in her midforties when Mary Bridget was adopted and her father was around fifty. John Meehan was a chemist who worked in the dairy industry, but later he started his own business with a former fraternity brother. They were responsible for developing the powder used to manufacture epinephrine, a very important lifesaving drug that is routinely used to jolt a heart into sinus rhythm in extreme cardiac distress cases, the “epi” that ER doctors call for.

Meehan sold his business in 1975 and soon his financial fortune plummeted. He worked in Alaska in quality control for a year, and later drove a van for Metro, Seattle’s transit service.

Patricia Meehan was a bookkeeper before her marriage, working for the U.S. Foreign Service in Mexico and for the Great Northern Railroad. After she was married, she often did bookkeeping work on a temporary basis for doctors’ offices. They were—except for John Meehan’s remarkable achievements in chemical research—an average Bellevue family. They weren’t rich, but they had enough to raise their children and send them to private school.

Mary Bridget was a sparkling little girl with shiny dark hair. As a toddler she was “standoffish” with men, but she came to adore John Meehan. Her childhood was happy and sheltered. She loved animals but she couldn’t have any pets beyond fish because she and other family members had allergies. She railed at this.

“She would bring home stray cats all the time,” her brother Dennis remembered. “And hide them in her room. And sure enough, we’d start sneezing and coughing. We’d find them, and my mom would say, ‘You can’t keep them—see how everyone is sneezing?’ And Mary would say, ‘But I want them! I want them!’ ”

In an attempt to find a middle ground, the Meehans got Mary a parrot. “It didn’t really work,” Dennis said. “She still went out and brought more cats home.”

Mary Bridget had a great big smile and a sometimes fiendish sense of humor. She was talkative and outgoing and when she began to tease her brothers or her older sister, “She wouldn’t back off.” Her humor wasn’t mean, but she could be relentless, as many youngest children are.

Mary Bridget suffered from a hearing misperception that made some subjects in school difficult for her. When she was around ten, her grades dropped. But she was a very talented artist. More than twenty years later, her drawings still turn up unexpectedly in the Meehans’ house in Bellevue. Her “Christmas Mouse” sketch will one day soon be printed on holiday cards her siblings create and send. As different from her mother as most daughters claim to be, they were both artistic and interested in crafts, and probably would have found more in common as the years went by.