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bottles of
orange juice, the type in the disposable plastic bottles that he
liked so well. He drank one of his crudely mixed screwdrivers
quickly, and the headache subsided a little. Afterward, he returned
to his shop and waited, thinking and planning the rest of the
evening. He needed something more effective than the alcohol for
his headache. The remedies were there, he knew, out in numbers on
Portland's streets, his for the asking and a $50 bill. It had all
been so easy with all of the others that there was no stopping him
now.
    At 8:30 P.M. Dayton drove home, where he had
dinner with Sherry and his son. He explained that he had to return
to the shop and work very late, perhaps into the early morning
hours, to catch up on some of the overdue work. Sherry, an
attractive curly-haired silver brunette at five feet four inches
tall, 120 pounds, and three years younger than Dayton, didn't
protest. She never did. Devoutly religious and somewhat naive, she
always trusted her husband and rarely questioned his
activities.
    Half an hour later Dayton was gone. He
stopped off at his shop, had a couple more drinks, and tinkered
with some of the easier repair projects to kill time. Shortly after
midnight he changed into his stepping-out clothes that he kept
inside his special closet, and waited inside the shop a little
longer until he was certain that Sherry had gone to bed. By 12:30
A.M. he was heading toward Portland.
    Instead of going to 82nd Avenue on the City
of Roses' southeast side, Dayton drove north on Highway 99E, which
decades earlier had been the main north-south highway between
Portland and the Willamette Valley before Interstate 5, the "super
slab," came into being. Highway 99E northbound eventually turned
into McLoughlin Boulevard near the suburb of Milwaukie, and then
changed again into Grand Avenue near the city's boundaries.
Approaching the northeast side, 99E transformed once more where
Grand Avenue merges into Union Avenue, Portland's "Prostitute Row."
In short, the old highway was a straight shot between Wood burn and
Dayton's destination in Portland and often, though not on this
particular night, offered up more female hitchhikers than the other
routes.
    A recognized ghetto replete with burned-out
buildings, boarded-up storefronts, and barred windows, Union Avenue
is not a pretty part of the City of Roses, a sprawling metropolis
with a population of nearly half a million that was once, but no
longer, touted for its livability. On any given night the avenue is
dominated by street whores, vulgarly on display for the drive-by
johns. An open-air market for sex, it is without question a
high-crime area that stretches from the city's northeast side to
its southeast. Most respectable citizens stay off the avenue at
night, and those who are forced to journey up or down it do so with
nervous unease because of the shootings, stabbings, and street
fights.
    But Dayton paid little heed to the avenue's
reputation. Having traversed it many times before, he was aware of
the risks and was not afraid. He knew how to quickly find what he
wanted and then get out of there.
    It was a sultry night, and the working girls
were out in record numbers. Dayton normally made a couple of passes
up and down Union before making his selection, sometimes driving
all the way to Northeast Lombard Street, the point where the number
of hookers standing on street corners begins to dwindle, before
turning around and heading south again. He passed up several girls
that evening along his well-thought-out route, one of his favorite
trolling areas. Some were too old, others too rough-looking. Some
he dismissed because they had made it clear to him on more than one
occasion that they wanted nothing further to do with him because of
the maltreatment he had shown them on previous dates in the Molalla
forest, and he feared that some of the girls might even report him
to the police if he attempted further contact with them. But that
evening he found what he wanted