The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

“Let’s collect that,” she said, pointing to it with the tip of her shoe.

  Paul shrugged a little. “Wasn’t there when we processed the scene.”

  She looked at it and gave her head a slight shake. “Exactly. Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe he’s come back.”

  “I hate that you always call the unknown subject a he.”

  Grace shot Paul an irritated look. “Jesus. You’re going PC on me now? Fact is ninety-nine percent of these twisted pukes are male, Paul. No offense meant.”

  “Just kidding you,” he said, the smile falling from his face. “Don’t you laugh anymore?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t heard anything funny for a long time.”

  With that, she walked ahead, and Paul returned to the car to get the requisite supplies for collecting the receipt or anything else they might find. With each step on the nutrient-rich river soil, Grace Alexander thought about the kind of person who would come back to relive his murders. She knew that both Bundy and Ridgway had had sex with their victims post-homicide. Yates had emphatically denied that he had, as if that was some kind of an accolade he could give himself. There were differences detected in the clusters, too. Ridgway had posed his dead women. Bundy had admitted to moving his victims’ bodies, but never in a ritualistic manner.

  Again, as if there was a distinction between being merely a serial killer and being sick enough to pose a body in a provocative and shocking way.

  Kelsey Caldwell was out there. She just had to be.

  Unsurprisingly, Lifetime was not Grace Alexander’s go-to cable channel. She was more of an Investigation Discovery viewer. Yet when scrolling through the TV channel guide while she waited for Shane to get home, she noticed the umpteenth rerun of The Deliberate Stranger, the TV miniseries about Ted Bundy. She had watched the two-part series once with her mother, who hadn’t thought the facts were at odds with the truth. Or at least some TV writer’s version of the truth. One thing that had rankled Grace however, had been Sissy’s insistence that Mark Harmon was too handsome to play Tacoma’s evilest native son.

  “Bundy was not that good looking,” Sissy had said when they’d watched the marathon of serial-killer TV movies one day, the pinnacle of which had been The Deliberate Stranger. “He wasn’t some ogre, I’ll give him that. They always tried to glamorize the bastard.”

  Grace cringed whenever her mother swore. It just didn’t seem to fit her personality. Her mother was tough, but gentle. She lived her life like she was from the South or England—tea in the afternoon, sandwiches with the crusts removed, pinochle games, and ladies’ auxiliary meetings. Not women’s, but ladies’. Grace knew the source of the bitterness that came from her mouth was because of the hurt of losing Tricia.

  The one she loved more than me.

  “Just a movie, Mom,” she said.

  “More than a movie,” Sissy said, snuggling next to Grace on the sofa that commanded most of the living room in their cozy house. “It is a reminder.”

  Grace thought about it. She was just a girl then, but she knew that she probably shouldn’t push too much even when she wanted to know more.

  “A reminder of what?” she asked anyway.

  Sissy looked at her, in that unblinking way that she did when she needed to prove a point. “That sometimes the bad guy gets away.”

  “But they caught him,” Grace said.

  Sissy didn’t blink. “They didn’t catch him for all that he’s done.”

  Grace was aware that her mom was writing to Ted at that time. She knew that she was trying to get the death row inmate to confess to his crimes—all of them, including the murder of her sister. It wasn’t that Grace wasn’t interested in what her mom was doing, but she really didn’t talk to her about the letters. At the time, talking to either of her parents about anything related to Tricia just made her feel so second place.

  “Mom,” she finally said, “maybe you’ll never, ever know.”

  Sissy O’Hare glanced away from the TV and held her daughter’s gaze.

  “That’s not acceptable,” she said, her eyes dampening a little. “I will never rest until I know. I need you to understand this. I need you to stand with me on this. We can’t ever rest until Ted Bundy has admitted to everything that he did to us. To your sister. To all of the people who were so unfortunate to have met him, talked to him, got into his car.”

  Grace just sat there. Her mom was obsessed. There was no doubt about it. What could she say to calm her?

  She swallowed. “I love you, Mom.” She put her hand on her mother’s and gripped it. “Stop. You’re scaring me.”

  “I love you, baby. And you should be scared. When the monster comes into your house he doesn’t ever leave. I need you to help me. I need you to take up the cause—if anything ever happens to me. You need to find out what happened to your sister.”

  Handsome Mark Harmon grinned on the TV screen. Mother and daughter sat in silence as the actor in tennis whites charmed a young woman. The woman was a brunette, slender, and very, very pretty.

  “Don’t go with him,” Sissy said to the screen. She squeezed Grace’s hand, pulsing it a little so as not to put a full-on hand lock.

  “She can’t help it,” Grace said. “She doesn’t know what kind of person he is.”

  “That’s right,” Sissy said, now turning back to her daughter. “Remember that. Remember that no one who knew him could believe he was so heinous. He looks like he couldn’t hurt a fly, but he’s worse than a spider. Spinning, spinning, spinning.”

  Her mother’s statement was a warning, but it also carried a challenge. Was stopping Ted Bundy something that she could do? Or if not Ted, could she stop another killer?

  Whenever she looked back on watching The Deliberate Stranger with her mom, Grace could see why she became a detective. It wasn’t so much for her sister, it was for her mother. It was for all the mothers out there curled up and crying at some stupid movie that reminded them of the baby someone had taken.

  In the days before Trivial Pursuit, Sissy O’Hare had created homemade flash cards to teach her daughter both the mundane and shocking facts about the man she was sure had murdered her beloved Tricia. Later, when Grace thought of it, she wondered if her mother’s obsession was almost a form of child abuse—even though her mother’s intentions had never been evil. She only wanted her daughter to understand as much as she could.

  The devil is always in the details, she could say.

  Yes, the details.

  Grace had found the index cards tucked away in a plastic sandwich container years ago when she was sorting things for the Goodwill after her father died. She was in the garage, where she had placed a piece of plywood atop two sawhorses. On one end were the boxes of clothing that were to be given away. She pondered over a few of the items as the memories associated with a particular garment came back to her. A dress she’d worn to a job interview at Nordstrom when she was in high school. She’d gotten the job, and immediately found that liked it—but not for the reasons that many her age assumed, the generous discount on new clothing. The girls she worked with were studying fashion merchandising and were giddy when the newest arrivals came in from New York. She mirrored their own enthusiasm, in the way that people do so as not to ruin a moment of joy for another. Yet their ambitions and desires seemed so inconsequential. A pair of white pants made her grimace. White pants were never a good idea.

  Never.

  Carefully, as if she didn’t want to spill its contents, Grace opened the sandwich container and took out the first three-by-five card, its edges no longer crisp, but soft and fuzzy from wear.

  She had held those cards so many times.

  Written in her mother’s handwriting:

  What is Ted Bundy’s favorite novel?

  She didn’t have to flip it over to see the answer. It was emblazoned on her brain.

  “Treasure Island,” she said softly, as though she didn’t want anyone to hear.

  She remembered how she’d despised that book, not bec
ause it was a boy’s book—the reason her friends hadn’t liked it—but because it was Ted’s book. She hated everything about him; everything that brought him joy, or sadness, brought her the opposite emotions.

  Grace set it down and looked at the next card. She recalled sitting at the big kitchen table, her mother facing her with her sweet but steely eyes, urging her to get it right.

  What was the make of Ted’s family’s car in Tacoma (the car he was embarrassed to be seen in)?

  That one was easy. Her father always pointed them out on the rare occasion when one was on the roadway, once when he’d been scavenging for parts at a junkyard and she’d accompanied him there. The answer was a Nash Rambler.

  So many of Grace’s own memories were blended with Ted’s life that sometimes it was hard to separate her own from what she’d been taught about the serial killer by her parents. She turned the cards over one by one and flipped through the answers.

  By age ten he was dragging girls to the woods to urinate on them.

  He was a Cub Scout.

  He stole ski equipment in high school.

  None of his teenage friends ever visited his bedroom in the basement of his childhood home.

  He hated the way Tacoma smelled.

  Grace smiled at that one. Who, but the owners of the smelter that gave Tacoma a nose-plugging reputation, didn’t hate the stink, the so-called aroma of Tacoma?

  She looked back down at the cards.

  He picked through garbage cans in search of porn.

  He was jealous of his cousins because they had a piano in their home.

  He never bonded with his stepfather—refusing to call him Dad.

  Grace knew all of those things and more. She probably knew Ted better than he knew himself. She knew every tragic, disgusting, disturbing detail of his life. She knew how he’d come into the world as an imposter, something less than a human being. She knew how cunning he could be when it came to winning over the sympathy of a pretty young girl. She knew that he understood that as a perceived weakness, like an arm in a sling, was a far better approach than the thuggish behavior of wrestling a woman down in broad daylight. Later, that lesson would be forgotten as his rage escalated into a frenzied rampage at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida.

  The next index card was about Chi Omega, the location of the second to the last gasp of Ted Bundy’s toxic life.

  Grace ran her fingertip over the image of an owl, the mascot for the sorority on the card. She’d researched the sorority at the Tacoma Public Library. She decided that if she were ever going to pledge, it would be to Chi-O. She’d drawn the owl on the card, not to cheat or remind her with an obvious clue. She was only a girl then. She drew the owl because she liked the bird. Nothing deeper. Nothing that drilled down into anything more than just that. She thought about how her mother had let her paint a big mural behind her bed, the gnarly branches of a maple tree with four owls against a daisy yellow moon. A brief smile came to her lips, but it passed the instant she flipped over the card. The answer printed, again in Sissy’s controlled penmanship:

  Fifteen minutes.

  Just fifteen minutes. Grace knew that was the length of time it had taken for Ted Bundy to slip into the sorority house in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978 and molest and rape and murder. He used a wooden club, something that he’d found en route. It wasn’t planned and it was beyond risky. Four sorority sisters had been beaten, two of them had died. Survivors said that Bundy had worn panty hose over his face to disguise his appearance.

  Only nine hundred seconds. That’s all he’d needed.

  Grace drew a short breath. It was the last card that always got to her.

  Who killed your sister?

  The answer to that one was all incumbent upon her. It always had been. It was the reason she’d been born and it was the driving force behind everything she did. It was a curse, and yet it was also empowering. She needed to succeed where others had failed. At times she felt that her parents had created her for the purpose of hunting their prey, but that didn’t always bother her. She felt sorry for people born into the world without any kind of purpose whatsoever. What was the point of being on the planet, if not to do something right and good for someone else? All other options seemed hedonistic, selfish.

  She flipped the little white card over.

  Theodore Robert Bundy.

  Grace was thirteen when it should have ended. She and her mother were watching TV nonstop, waiting for Ted to die. It was January 24, 1989. She remembered seeing on TV a man from Florida who was standing next to a hand-lettered sign that said FRY DAY IS TUESDAY and wearing a BURN, TED, BURN T-shirt, which he was selling (twenty dollars for two). He unflinchingly told a reporter that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with selling the shirts. After all, Bundy was a killer, and that certainly was far worse than making money off one.

  Sissy O’Hare didn’t agree with the man and told Grace so. She didn’t agree with all the profiteering that came with Ted. The authors who insisted their books were about “educating” rather than making money, the movie people who wanted their films to “tell the true story” and ghoulish women who followed Ted like he was some kind of Pied Piper to hell. All of them sickened her. All of them. There was something so very wrong about those people who were making their livelihoods off someone who made a sport of killing young women.

  “See that man selling T-shirts?” she asked Grace as they watched the pending execution unfold on TV.

  Grace nodded her head, her eyes glued to her mother’s.

  “He’s doing something evil and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know about the pain behind what Bundy did. He doesn’t understand that turning Bundy’s execution into a carnival only celebrates what he did.”

  Grace nodded.

  “There is only one type of person with any honor in this, that’s the man—or woman—who carries a badge.”

  Grace looked a little unsure.

  “Police, honey. They are the only ones I want to see happy in a mess like this one. They are the ones I want to see smile because they put the bad guy right where he belongs.”

  CHAPTER 15

  In the second-floor offices at the Tacoma Police Department, Grace Alexander and Paul Bateman looked at the photographs of the three faces who’d commanded the attention of the homicide unit for the past few weeks. The first, though this had been unknown to Tacoma police, had been Kelsey Caldwell, seventeen. The second to go missing had been twenty-four-year-old Lisa Lancaster. The newest face put up on the wall, adjacent to the pictures of every member of the police department, belonged to Emma Rose. They were in the war room, the detective’s conference room. It was the place where cases were discussed, evidence was weighed, and theories were shared. Until the possibility of a third missing girl made its way to that room, there had not been a pattern. Two does not make a pattern. Two can be a coincidence. Random. Just one bad bit of bad luck after the other.

  But three? Everyone knew that like in the old game tic-tac-toe, three in a row was significant. All three girls were similar in age, size, build. Their facial features were blandly pretty, their hair long and dark. On their own they might not have been noticed, but in a group of three everything that was common about them became remarkable.

  “They guy’s obviously hung up on a type,” Detective Bateman said. Coming from him, the comment was almost funny. After his wife ditched him, he’d hooked up with a woman who looked so much like her a few people thought they’d gotten back together.

  No one had used the “S” word yet. Calling something a serial killer case was the epitome of TV-style police chatter. But there they were. Three young women, girls really. Pretty maids all in a row.

  “The newest girl has been missing for a little more than a day. Parents called it in after they found out that she didn’t get to work,” Grace said.

  Paul nodded. “Yeah. Last seen at her job,” he said.

  “Where does she work?” she asked.
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  “Starbucks. Lakewood Town Center.”

  Grace went for her coat. “Good. I could use a cup of coffee.”

  Just before they left, Paul picked up the phone. The call was brief. He locked his eyes on Grace’s.

  “ME’s office. Tissue’s a match. It was Kelsey’s hand.”

  Grace didn’t say anything. In her bones, she’d already known that.

  Where were the rest of Kelsey’s remains? And, more important, who would have done that to her?

  The Lakewood Towne Center Starbucks was like a lot of such places—loud with people talking, blenders buzzing, and a thick layer of the aroma of coffee permeating everything and everyone. The only thing of note was that one of its workers was missing and the staff that was behind the counter was jittery when the police detectives arrived. Not jittery in the overcaffeinated way that its patrons often were, but the kind of jittery that came from deep concern.

  Emma Rose was dependable. If she wasn’t at work and she wasn’t at home, no one thought there could be a good outcome.

  “When she was fifteen minutes late, I texted her,” Sylvia Devonshire told the detectives.

  “Did she text back?” Grace said.

  Paul added three packets of Splenda to his drink and stirred. Grace looked over at him and shook her head, but said nothing.

  “Is it that unusual? I mean, fifteen minutes. That’s a tight leash you’ve got on your people.”

  Sylvia shrugged. “It is what it is. You try making twenty drinks for some schmo’s office suck-up and you need everyone you can.” She looked up and smiled at one of the schmos in line. “Just a second. Aphrodite is making your drinks now.”

  The man nodded impatiently, obviously indifferent to anyone’s needs but his own.

  “See?” she said, this time in a low voice.

  Paul stopped stirring. “Okay, so Emma is dependable and you were worried. Anything you can tell us about her last shift?”

  Sylvia pretended to be busy and looked away.

  “Sylvia, you’re thinking about something,” Grace said.

  The young woman looked up. “I don’t know,” she said.