Wright was allowed into the back room of the task force headquarters where the “body map” was kept, covered with a tarp so that no reporter might accidentally see it. “The map was punctured with an overwhelming number of colored pins. Each pin represented a body, and these seemingly endless colored beads took me aback. How could there be so many bodies and we normal citizens not even know this?”

Every body site had been videotaped. At first there had been sound on the tapes, but the officers who had to deal with the horrors they found often swore or used four-letter words to defuse their own feelings. Wright suggested, “We have to think there may be a jury one day who will see these tapes, and listen to your profanity, and that won’t help the prosecution.

“The sound was turned off,” he recalled.

Chuck Wright saw how difficult it was to know what was evidence and what had simply been thrown away in trash piles: women’s underwear, cigarette butts, beer cans. To be safe, they took it all.

Despite the things he had seen during his many years as a probation officer, Wright had a number of unique experiences as he worked with the task force. As a winter sun set one night, he accompanied two plainclothes investigators into woods that grew darker with every step as the trees closed behind them. There had been a report that two bodies were hidden there. “It was pitch-black,” he recalled, “and I asked, ‘Aren’t you guys scared?’ and they whispered, ‘No,’ but when I turned around with my flashlight, I saw they both had their guns drawn—just in case.”

They walked a little farther into the “black hole.” “I took one more step and felt my foot go through some soft material, and my ankle and lower leg got wet with some warm liquid,” Wright said. “My heart stopped and my mind raced. I swore, too, ‘Oh shit! I just sank my foot into a body.’ But it was only a rotten log.”

One thing that impressed Wright was how concerned the King County officers were for the women on the street. “We parked on the SeaTac Strip, and we noticed a van pulling up ahead of us. The driver motioned to a young woman, and she walked over to the driver’s window so they could talk. In no time at all, she walked around and got into the passenger side, but before she did, she looked back and smiled at us. I was surprised, but the officer I was with just smiled back at her. When the van started up, so did our undercover car. We followed the van, staying well back, and stopped when it stopped. The deputy with me explained that they tried to watch johns and their dates to be sure the women were safe.

“After they finished, we followed the van back to the highway. When the girl got out, she looked back at us and we could tell by her body language that she was okay. At least for that moment in time, that girl was safe.”

The Pro-Active Team was developing rapport with the working girls as well as protecting them, and when they needed information about one of the men who picked them up, the women gave it. While the missing girls were very young and inexperienced for the most part, some prostitutes were streetwise and had learned to deal with the kinky demands of certain customers, including bondage and discipline, “water sports,” and necrophilia.

One aspect of necrophilia astonished Chuck Wright, who thought he had covered almost every perversion in the class he taught on sexual deviancy. Since they were investigating murders, the task force detectives talked to prostitutes who were willing to fulfill the truly grotesque fantasies of men who wanted to have sex with dead women. One “specialist” said she provided a room with a coffin, flickering candles, and mournful organ music. She powdered herself until she was as pale as milk, and actually inserted ice cubes into her vagina so she would seem to be a truly cold woman, the opposite of what most men might want. She said she made $500 for such a specialized performance.

Seattle police raided an escort service and arrested two men for promoting prostitution. In the evidence seized, they found index cards with the names, addresses, business connections, and personal preferences of their clients. Although most of that information would never be released, the list was culled for clients marked “dangerous,” and those with violent preferences were turned over to the Green River Task Force.

Such johns were added to the “persons of interest” list, and a few so-called respected citizens were shocked to be contacted by the detectives about their deepest secrets. But none of them could be linked to the Green River murders.

The women who made top dollar were the exception, of course. Wright remembered interviews with some of the families of the girls who had disappeared, many of them memorable because of the complete apathy he saw. “I was with two deputies who were trying to verify if a young teenage girl was ‘just’ missing or if she really was a Green River Killer victim,” he said. “When her father answered our knock, we walked into a house that was so messy that none of us sat down. The place was littered with beer cans, and cigarette smoke filled the room to the point that my eyes started to water. When one of the deputies asked him about his missing daughter, the man was very nonchalant. He said he had no idea where she was. When the deputy noted that she had been gone for over two months according to the report, the guy said he was surprised by the news. But he didn’t really seem surprised. Apparently, he was used to her not being around; he said he usually didn’t know where she was. She had ‘run off’ so often that he had just stopped being concerned about her whereabouts or welfare.

“When we got back in the squad car, we could only shake our heads. How could any father not know or even care about his daughter? Her case just had sadness built into it. We found out later that she was working the streets somewhere in California. At least she was alive and maybe in a better place than if she’d been in her dad’s household.”

Wright got to know the members of the task force well. He could see that some were “sprinters” who wanted to catch an infamous serial killer and do it now. “Others were highly trained long-distance runners—and that’s what Adamson needed, because it was clear it would be a long haul.”

No one could have known just how long.

Probably the most distinguished adviser to come on board the task force was Pierce Brooks. He was, of course, the investigative genius in America on serial murder. Although he already had his hands full launching VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, working with the F.B.I. in Quantico, and he was officially retired from law enforcement, Brooks had yet to slow down. He was in his early sixties and his health wasn’t the best; he had undergone delicate arterial surgery, and he would have dearly loved to spend his time with his wife, Joyce, in his home on the MacKenzie River east of Eugene, Oregon. Instead, he was constantly flying between Eugene; Quantico; Huntsville, Texas; and Seattle.

Brooks and I worked together on the VICAP task force, and, along with John Walsh, we had testified on the threat of serial murder in America at a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing in early 1983. Senators Arlen Spector and Ted Kennedy were two members of the committee who seemed to agree with what we had to say.

Now Brooks came to Seattle to evaluate the ongoing Green River investigation. He spent two weeks perusing the staggering amount of information gathered thus far by the first two task forces. His recommendation was that the investigation must continue, with as large a team as possible. If catching this killer meant doubling the manpower, then it should be done. Every public record, F.I.R., tip, clue, or possible bit of information had to be gathered and fed into the computer system they had.