And now, in September, she had disappeared. Ray would not admit to Port of Seattle detective Jerry Alexander that Bridget was working as a prostitute, but Alexander found others who said she was. Sometimes she took her dog with her, walking along the highway near Larry’s Market, the gourmet supermarket. On the day she disappeared, Bridget had brought the dog back to the motel room she shared with Ray and left again. Ray said he had been working on the old car that belonged to Bridget, and he’d had his head in the engine compartment when she called “Good-bye” to him.

Where she had gone after she walked away from the Western Six Motel, nobody knew. When Ray reported Bridget missing, even he was confused about how pregnant she was; he thought it was either seven or eight months. The task force detectives doubted many of his answers. They learned from people who knew the couple that he often tried to persuade his friends to “get a girl to work the streets for you, too.”

“Bridget seemed too sweet and too intelligent to get talked into that,” one man told Jerry Alexander, “but I can’t say for sure.”

Her brother Dennis had difficulty believing that she would have been involved in prostitution so far into her pregnancy, but he could visualize her accepting a ride from a stranger. She liked to put on a tough veneer, but she still had her basic trust in the goodness of people.

It was herself that she didn’t really like.

Those who loved Bridget searched for her, but they didn’t find anyone who had seen her after that last day: September 15, 1982. Nor did the task force. Ray moved out of the motel, leaving Bridget’s cats behind. Animal Control picked them up. Ray threw away Bridget’s drawings and possessions, and stopped calling her parents. He found another girlfriend.

WHEN DAVE, Bridget’s long-ago soul mate, was forty, he had a dream about her, an intense dream. In the dream, he and Alison, who had been with him for years, were living in a nice little farmhouse somewhere and Bridget and a guy who seemed “okay” came to visit at the farm and they had a nine-year-old boy and a dog with them.

“We all visited and it was very pleasant, and then they had to leave. I walked them out a long drive, but something went wrong between me and her friend and we started yelling at each other. At the end of the dream, she had gotten the child out of there, and it was just me and him. I was going to go back in the house and get a gun—very strange because I’ve never owned one. I was very upset when the dream ended.”

Awake, he had the unshakable impression that the woman in the dream really was Bridget and he was being visited by the part of her that still lived. She looked as she would have looked twenty years later.

“I found myself thinking that I really needed to call her and ask how she’d been…and then I remembered.”

Dave still felt Bridget’s presence and wondered how to tap into that. He turned on his computer and typed “Bridget Meehan Green River” into the search engine.

There were, of course, several articles that popped up. He had never known exactly when Bridget vanished or when she had died—if, indeed, she had. He looked absently at the date and realized that this early morning was exactly twenty years since Bridget walked down the highway into some dark oblivion.

“I actually got scared. I knew I wanted to talk to somebody about Bridget. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

7

THE KING COUNTY public’s reaction to a yet unknown number of murdered “prostitutes” reflected views that ranged from disapproval and distaste to sympathy and sorrow. Rigidly judgmental editorials popped up in a number of small-town papers in the south end of the county. Essentially, the writers blamed the victims for being out on the street and taking such foolish chances. Beyond that, they accused lawmakers of being lax in controlling sex for sale. Interestingly, nobody blamed the johns who patronized the young women in short skirts, high heels, and, now that the weather was cooling, little rabbit-fur jackets. It seemed somehow more politically correct to condemn the dead girls themselves.

I LIVED in Des Moines, a little town where the victims were both disappearing and being found, and I passed too many young women who stood on the fog lines along the Pacific Highway. “Fog line” is a literal term; by late September in the Northwest, there is a great need for reflective strips along the side of the road because the wet black asphalt disappears into the thick mist that falls after sunset.

Sometimes over the years ahead, I would pull over and attempt to talk with the very young girls, trying to warn them of the danger all around the Strip. A couple of girls nodded and said, “We know, but we’re being careful. We use the buddy system and we take down license numbers.” Others said they didn’t care, that only dumb amateurs got caught. One or two stared at me coldly as if to say “Mind your own business.”

I had known any number of working girls in my life. I met dozens of them when I was a student intern at Hillcrest. There were absolutely beautiful girls as well as sad, homely girls there. A few years after that summer I spent “in reform school,” I ran into one of my Hillcrest girls in the bus station in Portland. She hugged me as if we were sorority sisters, and told me she had gone back to “the life.” Irene was still gorgeous and assured me she was doing well and making a lot of money. She had an older “boyfriend” who had set her up in an apartment.

Another Hillcrest alumna was a resident in the Seattle city jail while I was a policewoman, and she shouted my name as I booked in another prisoner. Janice asked me how much I was making, and I told her “Four hundred a month.” She grinned and said, “You could make more than four hundred a week if you did what I do.”

“But you’re in jail,” I said, “and I’m free.”

She shrugged and smiled wider.

It wasn’t just being free, and we both knew it. They were all living through bad times, no matter how much they protested. I think the saddest was the girl I had to arrest because a senior policewoman spotted her going into a hotel with a sailor and ordered me to follow her. I didn’t want to, because it didn’t seem fair; why should we arrest her and not him, too? The young woman limped badly and she was very pregnant. By the time we reached the room and the manager slipped his key in the lock, the sexual act, whatever it had been, was over. The “scarlet woman” was sitting in bed, eating a hamburger. She had sold herself because she was hungry. But she had broken the law, and while tears ran down her face, I took her down to be booked into jail.

I have never forgotten her.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was a woman in her late thirties who used the name “Jolly K.” Jolly K. had transcended a decade or more of prostitution to establish a nationwide support group for parents who battered their children. A striking woman with auburn hair and impeccable grooming, she had become highly respected when I interviewed her for a magazine article in the seventies.

“Weren’t you ever afraid to be alone with men that you didn’t know?” I asked her, after she explained that she usually met her johns in the cocktail lounges of hotels.

She shook her head, “No, I could tell if they were safe after talking to them for five minutes or so. I was only beaten up twice…”

Only twice.

DICK KRASKE’S detectives expanded their efforts and covered more and more ground as they followed up both tips and witnesses’ statements. Each missing girl had family, friends, and associates, and even if talking to them led nowhere, there was always the chance that it might.