When Tracy’s lover was paroled from prison, her parents were beside themselves. “He called here once,” Mertie said, “and I let him have it, using language I never use. I told him to stay away from Tracy. He never called again, but I think Tracy was seeing him. We got no help from anyone, and we didn’t know what to do. I found out that Chuck was going out at night, looking for Tracy. He took an aluminum baseball bat with him because he had to go to really bad places. When the police said they couldn’t do anything, Chuck finally walked into the Georgetown Precinct carrying his bat. He told them he was going to use it if he had to, and they said they’d have to arrest him if he did.”

“So follow me then,” Tracy’s dad said.

Two uniformed officers did follow him as he went to a house where he thought the occupants were hiding Tracy. He banged on the door and demanded that they send Tracy out, but they said she wasn’t there. Chuck Winston and the two cops looked through the house and found that indeed Tracy wasn’t there, but she had been.

Tracy’s parents seldom knew any longer where she was staying. She still came to see them—for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She wouldn’t tell them where she was living, but she would come home for dinner.

“We always sent her away with care packages,” Mertie said. “Mostly canned food, macaroni and cheese. For a while, she lived with a gay man who was a chef, and that seemed a little safer to us. Chuck would drive her home, but when he went back to see her, he’d find out that wasn’t really where she lived.”

The last time Mertie saw Tracy was on Mother’s Day, 1983, and it was a good visit. They gave each other a big hug and Mertie said, “I love you!” and Tracy said, “I love you, too!”

Her parents had come to a place where they realized they couldn’t follow Tracy everywhere. She was almost twenty now, and they had two other children to raise in a time when the job market was iffy. Mertie was working on commissions only, and her hours weren’t predictable.

“I don’t know if she was ever prostituting,” Mertie said. “I can’t imagine that it was a regular thing for her. I know she wasn’t at all hardened. I talked to one of the jailers on that last weekend when Tracy was in there, and she told me, ‘She has no business being here; she’s like a frightened rabbit.’ ”

Tracy had been on the verge of changing her life that Sunday night when she told her dad not to come down and get her, not to see her in jail. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “you and Mom were so right. I’m going to get myself together, get my GED, go to school. I’m going to make you and Mom so proud of me.”

As September passed, and then October and November, Mertie Winston had an awful feeling. They hadn’t heard a word from Tracy after her call from jail. She had said she was making a new start and they would be proud of her. Maybe she was taking steps in that direction and wanted to surprise them with a fait accompli, or at least with proof that she was on her way. But when Tracy didn’t come home to take her brother Kevin trick or treating or to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family, Mertie knew she had to do something.

“I thought that I would call up the police and report her as a missing person, and then they could check her social security number and tell us where she was working, or where she had been recently. And they took my report. I had to tell them that I just didn’t know where she had lived last. ‘I know my daughter,’ ” Mertie told police. “ ‘She always calls home, but now she hasn’t.’ Even after Tracy was out of the house, she always called at least once a week. When three or four weeks went by and she didn’t call, I knew it was going to be bad. I wouldn’t accept it in my heart, but I knew.”

When the Winstons got a phone call from Randy Mullinax, who was very gentle as he told Chuck that he was one of the detectives working on the Green River Task Force, Mertie heard her husband say “Green River Killer?” and she felt an almost physical jolt. She knew what this call meant—that Tracy might be one of his victims, even though Mullinax assured them that there was nothing definite yet and his was just a follow-up call on the missing person’s report.

Mertie took the phone and described how tall and slender Tracy was, how deep the dimples were on both sides of her mouth when she smiled, and how pretty she was. Mullinax had seen that when he looked at Tracy’s mug shot from King County Jail. He had also seen how scared she looked, a doe caught in the headlights as the jail camera clicked away.

Now that they had to face the worst possibility of all—that the Green River Killer might have gotten hold of Tracy—the Winstons were terrified for her. When her name was added to the Green River list, Mertie was unable to escape the fear and anxiety that grew with each passing day. She could no longer rationalize and tell herself that Tracy was all right, that maybe she had gone to California as her friends tried to tell her.

“I was actually crawling on my bedroom floor, trying to get away from myself, but of course I couldn’t,” Mertie remembers some twenty years later. “I ended up crouched in a corner in a ball. My friend, who loved Tracy as much as I did, begged me to try to sleep. She coaxed me to lie down and rubbed my back, until I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

“I had a dream. I was at Evergreen High School in the gym, and there must have been a dance going on. There was a stage, and the bleachers were pulled out and there were adults sitting on the bleachers. Those round, faceted mirror balls were twirling overhead and casting their lights on the crowd.

“Tracy was there in front of me, with that wonderful smile of hers. I could hear her talking although I couldn’t see her mouth move. She kept smiling at me and I heard her say over and over, ‘I’m okay, Mom. I’m okay now. Don’t worry about me. Everything’s okay.’

“I woke up with a jolt and I didn’t know where I was. I believed—and I still do—that Tracy had been there with me in the room. It was the most peaceful I’ve felt in the last twenty-seven years.” But Mertie sensed that Tracy was never coming home again, that she would never see her again.

The months alternately dragged and flew by. “We talked to anyone and everyone who might know Tracy’s whereabouts, asking who she’d been seeing, where she might have been. Her best friends were twins and had a much wider network than we did. We got reports that she’d been seen in Vancouver, Canada, and California. We passed it all on to the Green River Task Force, no matter how insignificant it seemed to be, whether it was rumor or fact. They treated the information with priority and importance.”

Tracy must have encountered someone who pulled her from her life into oblivion on September 12.

Mertie was more disturbed than reassured when Tracy’s second cousin, Chris, who was nine months older than Tracy, told her about having met Tracy once with an older man. Chris was slim and blond and, like her cousin, a very pretty girl. She remembered the last time she’d seen Tracy and called Mertie and Chuck. It was either in the spring or fall of 1983, probably sometime in September. Chris had been waiting for a bus near the high school she’d once attended when a car drove by and somebody yelled and waved at her. She recognized Tracy, who was riding with a man Chris didn’t know. The driver pulled over and Tracy told Chris to get in and they’d give her a ride to wherever she was going.

Chris got in the backseat. Tracy introduced the man as “Gary” and said that he was a friend of hers who was helping her look for a job. Then Tracy turned to the man and kidded, “Chris and I are the bad seeds in the family.”

“Hi,” the driver said flatly. He was quite a bit older than Tracy, a rather nondescript man. All Chris really remembered about him were his eyes. “He didn’t really look at me when I got in,” she recalled, “but he kept watching me in the rearview mirror. I’ll never ever forget his eyes, and the way he kept watching me. He made me so nervous staring at me that I made up some excuse to get out of his car.”