A half hour later, Richard Carbone called, or he said he was Carbone. His voice sounded remarkably like Matthias’s. Either only one of the two prisoners was making the calls, or their voices and “confessions” had been rehearsed. Carbone, however, claimed that he and Matthias had killed women in three states—Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. “We put the girls in the trunk of whatever car we’d stolen last, and then we left them.”

Like Matthias, he was worried about the trip back to Seattle if they were extradited from California, and he wanted me to assure him they would be safe. Would I come along as an extra witness? He voiced his concerns that they would be deluged by the press and “fans when we’re brought to Seattle and it hits the papers. There are a lot of sick people out there,” he pointed out piously, “who get off on associating with people like us.”

As I look at the eighteen, single-spaced, pages I typed out on Matthias’s and Carbone’s calls and then sent to Detective Bob Gebo, I realize I must have bought their stories enough to listen to them that long. But, as Matthias said, he had “a great gift of gab.”

Paul Smith, Ed Streidinger (also on loan from the Seattle homicide unit), and Randy Mullinax flew to San Francisco to question Carbone and Matthias. They questioned them separately, of course. One said he’d killed eleven, and the other thought they must have killed sixteen. They were clearly blowing smoke.

Mullinax had counseled many victims’ families and seen their grief and terror. His was a solid shoulder they could count on, and he told a lot of mothers that they could call on him whenever they needed to ask questions or just to talk. Now, he looked with loathing at the man who sat across from him because he knew he was lying; Matthias had his facts wrong. The usually taciturn detective reached across the table and grabbed the glib prisoner by the collar. “Listen, you S.O.B.,” Mullinax said. “There are families out there dying, waiting to hear about their daughters. Don’t you dare play with their hopes and emotions.”

Both men admitted that they had lied about the whole thing. They figured it would be a good way to escape, expecting that they would be extradited to Seattle, guarded by only one detective apiece. Their plan called for one of them to create a distraction while the other stole the handcuff keys.

When Randy Mullinax told Mertie Winston about it later, he laughed that the pair was so dumb, they didn’t realize they would each have had three or more guards, and they had never considered that they would have been in leg irons, too.

Mertie could tell that Mullinax would almost have welcomed the jerks making a move to escape. She bought Randy a plaque that said “Make My Day” and he quickly hung it over his desk at task force headquarters.

The investigation had been going on for a long time, and most of the families knew how hard the detectives were working, how emotionally invested they were. But there were a few parents who complained. They tended to be the ones who hadn’t really looked after their daughters in the first place.

Mertie Winston and Randy Mullinax had grown up in the same general neighborhood in the south end, although they’d never met. She knew about his family, and he always asked about her boys. She knew that he would call her if there was any news at all about Tracy. Dave Reichert, too, seemed to care a lot about the families who waited, their agony almost more than they could bear. Some of the task force investigators admitted that they had to stay detached emotionally. There was just too much cumulative pain among the families and they felt they couldn’t do their jobs if they allowed themselves to be caught in it.

“I used to take chocolate chip cookies down to the task force when they were headquartered in the old junior high school,” Mertie said. “But it was difficult for me because that was the same school Tracy had gone to when things were so different. I had to pass close to her homeroom, and I heard the same bells ringing when classes changed. I couldn’t stay very long. I wasn’t comfortable in that school. It brought back too many memories.”

Citizens and politicos grew restive with the expense of keeping a task force intact when it hadn’t yet arrested a suspect. It wasn’t turning out the way it did on television shows.

There was talk that the task force might be cut back in both personnel and funds. Thus far, the King County budget had had almost $2 million sliced out of it to fund the Green River investigation, and some felt that wasn’t politically correct, not when there hadn’t been any positive results in more than two years. Sheriff Vern Thomas explained that it was too early in the game to evaluate what the forty-person team had accomplished.

The plain fact was that there had never been a series of murders as difficult to solve as the Green River killings. The King County Sheriff’s Department wasn’t equipped to do it in the beginning, nor would any other department in the United States have been. Yes, King County had worked the Ted Bundy murders, but only three of Bundy’s victims were found within its jurisdiction, three were Seattle police cases, one was a Thurston County case, and one girl had disappeared in Corvallis, Oregon. Subsequent Bundy victims were abducted from Utah, Colorado, and Florida. In the end, Bundy was never charged in Washington State, and he was convicted, of course, in Florida and executed there.

The Green River Killer was mainly striking in Seattle and King County, and seeming to do it with impunity. Those who hunted for him knew he was no superman, but his apparently stranger-to-stranger homicides, with so many names and identities, were the hardest of all to solve.

They needed time. Time for the computer to be programmed. Time to follow up the ten thousand leads that had by now poured into the task force. In October of 1984, their $200,000 computer went on line, a tremendous help for the task force in keeping track of things, such as how many times a certain name might pop up on an F.I.R. Cross-referencing leads and even nonthreatening johns could very well pop up a name that would be vital.

A lot of things were happening through the summer and fall of 1984, and the jabs at the task force became sharper as the months passed. It was hard to take. It would always be hard to take.

Frank Adamson had good reasons for not revealing any number of facts uncovered by the task force, and he and his detectives absorbed complaints from the public that nothing was happening. They all knew that they cared about the victims and their families; taking the abuse thrown at them was just part of the job.

But something else was not happening, something hopeful. The disappearances had stopped.

33

DAVE REICHERT, the detective who had caught the first King County case, the murder of Debra Bonner, was now responsible for solving several of the more recent killings, and he chafed at the bit. He had worked day and night for years, a familiar sight in almost every photograph of body search scenes. His full head of chestnut-colored hair, shot here and there with gray strands now, fell over his eyes as he dug and sifted dirt in one wilderness or another. As they all were, he was looking for something the killer had left behind. Just one magic irrefutable connection to the wraithlike killer. And still it eluded him.

They were moving into their third year and the killing machine was still out there, even if he seemed to have slowed down. That didn’t alleviate Reichert’s feeling that there must have been something that he could have done, should have done, early in the game. More than most of the investigators, Reichert went over everything that had been done to find their quarry, looking for some link that had been overlooked. When he walked where he knew the killer had tread, he followed Pierce Brooks’s edict to put himself into the killer’s mind, to think the way he thought.