Adamson agreed to meet a Washington County, Oregon, deputy at the site of the body discoveries. “He hadn’t been out to the site, and he wasn’t sure where the location was, but he had the number of the closest telephone pole,” Adamson recalled. “But I knew. The area was new to me, but so similar to the sites in Washington. I saw the turnout spot on the road. It looked familiar. It was the Green River Killer’s favorite kind of spot. And then I saw the number on the pole. I knew this had to be where the remains had been found. I pulled over and waited for the local deputy.”

It would take a week for absolute identification to be made of the second body, which had apparently lain undiscovered for two or three years. They had found a complete skull, one rib, a part of a pelvis, an arm, a tooth, and a partial section of vertebrae. When the name was announced, it was shocking. This was Shirley Marie Sherrill, who had not disappeared from Portland at all, but from Seattle. Her killer had driven her—alive or, most probably, dead—all this way to bury her.

Even more puzzling was the discovery two days later of more remains. As the soil in the Tigard/Tualatin fields was turned over, then raked, sifted, and searched, they found two more skeletons. They had located yet another “dump site.” These last two girls could not be identified.

When night fell, a neon sign nearby blinked on and off: Jiggles. It was a club for men, a club not unlike Sugar’s in Seattle. Its significance wasn’t obvious in June of 1985.

The official toll of Green River victims was twenty-six. Eighteen of them were identified; the rest only “Bones.” On June 28, 1985, the F.B.I. officially came aboard the investigation. Victims had been taken across the state line between Washington and Oregon. No one knew if they were dead or alive when that happened.

The summer of 1985 was quiet, as if everyone in Seattle and Portland who cared about the Green River Killer’s victims—and, admittedly, some did not—was holding his or her breath, waiting.

And then something happened near Portland that made investigators wonder, even more than the Tigard/Tualatin body discoveries, if the man they tracked had moved his center of operations to Oregon. It would make sense. Things had probably gotten too hot for him in Seattle. A couple of the johns they had stopped on the Strip were repeat offenders, even though the task force hadn’t been able to gather enough evidence against them to make an arrest that would stick. Maybe he was really gone.

On September 4, 1985, two young women boarded a Greyhound bus for Portland. The two, Moira Bell* and Kitty Cain,* had met at a drug rehab program in Seattle, and when they got out, they decided to head south. They were very young, fifteen and sixteen, but far too familiar with the seamy side of life even though their pretty faces were dewy and almost childlike.

They had barely arrived in Portland before local officers picked them up and radioed in a Wants and Warrants request. Kitty Cain was kept in jail, but Moira Bell’s name brought forth no outstanding warrants and she was driven back to the bus station. She was tired and broke and she made several collect phone calls to Seattle to men she knew there. With no help forthcoming, she struck up a conversation with a man she knew only as “B.B.” They both indulged in cocaine, enough for Moira to go out on the street for three hours to make motel money. With enough to pay for a room, Moira slept all night and most of the next day.

On September 5, she was working Union Street at about ten PM with another girl she knew. It wasn’t a good night. About midnight, one john pulled a knife on her, but she managed to get away. At three in the morning, she got into an argument with B.B. She didn’t have enough for a room, so she was still out on Union an hour later.

A blue taxi, a station wagon with a company logo on the door and a light on top, pulled up to the curb near Moira, and the driver said, “Do you want a date?”

She asked what he wanted and they agreed on oral sex for $20. She studied the cab’s interior as they drove: a navy blue dash, navy vinyl bench seats with headrests, automatic transmission, an old-fashioned meter with a white flag, and a package of Benson & Hedges on the dash. She wasn’t afraid. It was just her habit to memorize her surroundings. What she was doing to survive was dumb and dangerous, but Moira herself was very smart.

The cab headed south, and then the driver parked under a bridge. He handed Moira a twenty-dollar bill and she slipped it into her right boot. She didn’t use birth control pills, but she always carried condoms with her. As she bent over to put one on her client’s erect penis, he suddenly grabbed her hair in his right hand and produced a knife with his left.

“Do as I say or I’ll kill you.” He breathed.

She took him seriously, letting him tape her wrists together behind her back with masking tape. Then he taped her arms to her body at her elbows. She was helpless. The driver forced her to the floorboard where she had to kneel. He headed toward the freeway going north, and then west.

“Excuse me,” she asked, “but what are you going to do with me?”

“Whatever I want. Do as I say and I won’t kill you.”

As they drove through the darkness just before dawn, the cabdriver alternately threatened her with the knife and checked her bonds to be sure they hadn’t loosened. Finally, she heard the sound of gravel as the station wagon pulled off the road and parked. The driver leaned over and felt in her boots—he wanted his money back.

“It’s in my right boot,” she whispered.

“Shut up! I didn’t tell you to talk.”

Next, he walked around to the passenger door and pulled her roughly out into the chilly air. He grabbed the front of her sweater dress, pulling it down to her waist. His efforts to get her dress off detached the tape where her elbows had been pinned to her body. But her wrists were still tightly bound together and she couldn’t fight him as he tore her panties, panty hose, and bra away, leaving her naked, except for the sweater dress at her waist.

And then he forced her onto the hood of his vehicle and raped her violently. As he pulled her off the hood, he punched her twice in the face, making her dizzy and she started to fall. That angered him and he socked her twice more, this time in her spine.

She was bleeding now, and the rapist was furious that he’d gotten her blood on his hand. He climbed into his cab, grabbed a rag, and wiped it off. She lay very still on the ground, hoping he would just drive away and leave her there, wherever she was. But he sat quietly in the driver’s seat for what seemed to her “a very long time.” She hoped against hope that he wouldn’t come back.

But he did. When he headed toward her, she could see that he’d changed his clothes; he now wore a blue nylon jumpsuit with an angled pocket that was zipped closed. Methodically, he tore the tape off her wrists, and finished ripping her dress off. He grunted as he used her panty hose to strangle her, but they tore in two. He reached into his back pocket for a blue bandanna. Once again, he placed a ligature around her neck and tightened it, but even though the bandanna was stronger, it broke, too.

“I pretended I was dead,” Moira later told a female F.B.I. agent. “He went back and sat in the driver’s seat again. After a while, he came back and checked my pulse and my neck. He said, ‘Sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you. You might tell.’ ”

She lay as still as death, offering no resistance at all as he grabbed her ankles and dragged her backward over rocks and sharp weeds for about seventy-five feet to the edge of a steep embankment. “It was about thirty-five feet down, but he pushed me over. I stayed limp and kept playing dead. I rolled only about halfway down because something, maybe a tree or something, caught me.”