Sex. Murder. Mystery(212)

“They seemed okay,” she said later. “Maybe they were wrecks, but I don't know. I know it is going to be tough.”

She and her son left Alaska feeling hopeful that things would turn out all right after all.

* * *

The Mecca Cafe was one of those authentic restaurants where meat loaf was still served, and waitresses worked there long enough to know almost every customer by name. The cafe at the base of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill was a favorite hangout for one of Mary Kay's chief groupies, and had been so for a decade and a half. The friend thought it would be a wonderful out-of-the-spotlight place for Mary's thirty-fifth birthday. She agreed. The guest list was small, a few regulars from the Mecca, Mary, the friend, and Abby Campbell. By one P.M. on January 30, 1998, everyone was there.

Mary arrived in what had become her signature outfit since her release: full-blown teenage regalia that consisted of pedal pushers and a baggy T-shirt. She was upbeat, happy. Conversation was breezy that afternoon and spirits were high. Abby Campbell pulled a batch of photos from her purse and presented them to Mary. Images of Vili and baby Audrey were fanned over the back booth's surface. Abby invited Mary to keep a sampling—but not all of them. The friend who arranged the birthday lunch thought it was peculiar. Mary didn't ask for the whole lot of them. It was as if she didn't mind being told what to take, what to do.

She's a teenager, he thought.

A little while later, after Abby left, the friend leaned over and pounced. He had one question he'd been dying to ask.

“How the hell do you stay in touch with Vili?” he asked Mary.

Mary looked over her shoulder; her eyes darted over the restaurant, up past the row of stools fronting the counter to the front door.

“Abby Campbell and Bob Huff help me,” she said.

The friend had suspected as much, but the answer ate at him. If true, not only were the pair helping Mary to violate a court order prohibiting contact between Mary and Vili, they were putting a fragile woman in a precarious situation. They were adding fuel to a bonfire. Mary Letourneau didn't see it that way. She saw their help as a way to stay close to the man/boy of her dreams.

“I had a bad feeling about it,” he said later. “And, of course, I was right.”

Later, when he confronted the others about what Mary had told him, they denied it. If Mary had been in contact with Vili, then it hadn't been through gofer Abby or lawyer Bob Huff.

“Believe what you want,” the friend said later, “I know what I heard.”

Bob Huff stood firm on the subject many months later. He did not, would not, facilitate communication between Mary Kay and Vili.

“[Neither] Mary nor Vili ever put me in that position,” he said. “They knew I wouldn't do it and they knew it would get me in hot water with the judge and the prosecution. Besides, why would I encourage the relationship between Mary and Vili? I didn't think the relationship was particularly healthy. Let's say that there wasn't equal bargaining power between Mary and Vili. I thought it would be better for him to be without her for a while, anyway. Let him be for a few years… so he can move in another direction if he wants to.”

On the other hand, Bob Huff couldn't absolve Abby Campbell of possibly keeping what she apparently considered star-crossed lovers in touch.

“Abby did a lot of stuff I wouldn't do,” the lawyer said finally.





Chapter 67

IT WAS A typical winter's night. The low temperatures were in the forties and the high the next day would only be ten degrees warmer. Dogs barked intermittently down by Lake Washington and porch lights glowed like fireflies in the 4800 block of Forty-ninth Avenue South, the Seward Park neighborhood where Beth Adair lived. One family even had Christmas lights still on, though it was February 3, 1998.

At 2:24 A.M. Seattle Police Officer Todd Harris was pulling routine neighborhood patrol when he happened across a VW Fox parked in front of the Shorewood Elementary music teacher's home. He could see a woman sitting in the driver's seat, her head turned toward the passenger side. Her blond hair was matted against the glass of the windows painted with condensation. The parking lights of the Fox were on.

The officer ran the plates and drove past the car. Of course, it wasn't against the law to sit outside and talk in a car. Running plates was just something a cop does to pass the time. It was routine. As he passed the car Officer Harris could see that the driver wasn't alone; it appeared there was a passenger with her—though the passenger's seat had been fully reclined. It looked like a young man, a teenager, was with her.

On this night the routine of running the plates brought more than he bargained for. And for the woman inside the car it brought an end to her story.