The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “Get another?”

  “Yeah, it was her mall photo ID. No biggie. Just kind of wanted to keep it. You don’t think that’s weird, do you?”

  Grace did, but she shook her head no.

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  After a few more moments watching Oliver Angstrom play the world’s worst video game, she thanked him for his time.

  “We’ll be in touch,” she said.

  “Do you want me to burn a disk of my game for your nephew?”

  “That would be great, but no thanks. He’s too young for your game. Looks kind of adult for his age.”

  Oliver nodded and went back to the screen.

  The detectives waited until they got back into the car before saying anything. It had been one of those kinds of interviews.

  “What did you find out downstairs in the creepy kid’s crash pad?”

  “He had a picture of Emma. Said he found it. Seems like he might be a stalker or something. Maybe obsessed with her. Wouldn’t let me go in one of the rooms. He said his mom had a doll collection that was off limits. You? Anything with the parents?”

  “Mr. Angstrom said about two words, maybe three. Mrs. Angstrom went on and on about what a disappointment her boy was and how she wants to kick him out. She actually said she wished he was a suspect in Emma’s disappearance because that would mean he’d made a move on a girl. Think about it. Domineering mother, creepy basement, if there was a dead dog and wet bed we’d have the address of a serial killer.”

  Grace smiled, but it was a grim smile. “Oliver’s no serial killer. He’s a dope. I’m kind of with his mother,” she said. “Even with all that, I’m kind of curious about what’s behind that basement door. Doll collection? That really would be the topper.”

  “Agreed,” Paul said as he turned the ignition.

  “You mind dropping me off at my mom’s?” Grace said.

  “Wednesday night, is it?”

  “Yeah. Love my mom, you know I do. But since Dad died I made a promise. Every Wednesday is our night.”

  “At least you’ll have lots to talk about,” he said.

  She nodded. “That we will.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Sissy O’Hare was an exceedingly attractive woman, the kind who didn’t think old age was an excuse to fall apart and give in to the inevitable ravages of time. She didn’t chase after youth with facelifts, exotic oils, or clothing that wasn’t appropriate for her age. Sissy changed her hairstyle with the times—refusing to be one of those women who looked like a sorry depiction of their high school yearbook photo. She ate right and exercised. In a nod to her favorite fashion icon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sissy O’Hare wore a strand of favorite pearls when she was gardening.

  She let friends call her Sissy O.

  Grace adored her mother, even when she resented the circumstances of her birth. There had certainly been hard times between them, bouts where they hadn’t spoken for days on end. Most of that dissipated when Grace left home for college. It was around that time that she’d really gotten to know her mother and what made her do all that she did. Grace didn’t have children of her own, but through Sissy, she imagined she understood just how powerful the love for a child really could be.

  Since her father’s death, Grace and her mother talked almost daily. At least once a week she and Shane would have her over to dinner or take her out. Wednesdays were a mother/daughter day, a date carved in stone. The conversations were no longer about when Grace and Shane were going to have a baby, though that sometimes slipped through in veiled ways.

  “I saw the cutest baby clothes yesterday at Nordstrom,” Sissy said one time, knowing full well what she was doing.

  “I’m sure you did, Mom,” Grace said, refusing to take the bait.

  “Can you believe that Octomom woman? All those children! Wouldn’t you be happy with just one?”

  “Yes, Mom. One day, one would be nice.”

  “I didn’t mean now,” she said, not too gracefully, trying to step back a little.

  “I know.”

  That all was then. Water under the bridge. Done and gone. Their relationship was on solid ground, and though neither woman said so out loud, both were grateful for that.

  Sissy liked to eat at 6:30 on the dot, a holdover from her days when Conner would come home dog tired, belt down a Manhattan, and slide himself into a chair at the dinner table. The table. As Grace picked at her mother’s eggplant parmesan casserole—a specialty that had always been her “company’s coming” dish when she was a girl—Grace couldn’t help but be transported back to that time and place. Her mother in the kitchen, wearing a strand of pearls, stirring the marinara as it simmered over the blue flame of the stove and soaking the eggplant in a light, acidulated brine. On the refrigerator was the usual cavalcade of children’s artwork—a tracing of a hand made to look like a turkey, a self-portrait of a little girl with pigtails, a cat lumbering along the top of a fence.

  All were drawings that had been made by Tricia, the sister she’d never known.

  Grace couldn’t remember, all those years later, if she’d ever asked her mother or father about why they insisted on keeping those relics front and center. It wasn’t that she didn’t command some display space, because she did. While Tricia’s artwork was on the front of the refrigerator door, hers was relegated to the side of the appliance.

  One time when her mother must have noticed the disappointment on Grace’s face, she’d remarked on it.

  “Honey, your drawings would only get faded. There’s less light where I put up your lovely work.”

  Grace hadn’t bought the excuse. Yet by then it had been clear that there was no competing with the memory of a dead, murdered girl. Never could be.

  Her mom served Grace a plate and watched for her approval.

  “Delicious, as always.”

  “Glad you like it, honey.”

  “Company’s coming, Mom,” she said.

  Sissy grinned, her teeth as white as they had been when she was young. Teeth, she liked to boast, that were all her own. “You remember!”

  “I remember everything, Mom,” Grace said, leaving the “everything” to mean whatever her mother wanted it to be. It didn’t have to be anything about Tricia.

  And yet that was why she was there. As the investigation of the Tacoma girls went on, the subject at hand was driven by Grace’s need to talk about the cases. Not specifics, really. And not really about the cases at all.

  “Mom, I know I’m supposed to understand what motivates these killers, but it is beyond me.”

  Sissy wiped her mouth with the corner of a chambray blue cloth napkin. “It is beyond everyone, honey.” She placed the napkin back in her lap and smoothed out the wrinkles. “It riles me that there are complete morons on TV every single day talking about the evil that men do to young, unsuspecting girls.”

  One helmet-headed blonde was particularly irksome.

  “Oh that ninny!” she went on. “She always talks with complete authority. Who but Jonathan Edwards can get into the heads of others, let alone a sociopath’s? Sure, these idiots have their degrees—” She stopped, realizing that her daughter held such a degree. “No offense,” she added quickly.

  “None taken,” Grace said. Her mother was venting and that was a good thing. Her mother had always been the kind to hold things deep inside, and then, when she could no longer do so, explode. “Who do you think knows the motivation, then?” she asked, knowing full well what her mother was going to say.

  “Only another monster knows. Only they can understand their own kind.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I’m here, Mom. There’s a monster out there and we have to stop him.”

  “Understood,” Sissy said, offering some extra cheese that she’d grated before dinner.

  Grace shook her head. “What did Ted tell you?”

  “I knew that was coming,” Sissy said, setting down her fork and searching her daughter’s eyes. “I knew you were going
to ask me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but maybe you can help. You faced him.”

  Sissy nodded. “Yes, I did. A lot of good it did, but yes, I did.”

  After dinner, Grace and her mother went downstairs to the basement where the O’Hares had kept a war room for the sole purpose of finding out who had taken Tricia. In more than three decades, it had barely changed. On one wall was a whiteboard, the kind that uses erasable markers. It had long since been wiped clean, though in the light coming in from the window wells, the faint tracings of letters emerged. Wiped off, but not removed.

  Suspects. . . . Location . . . Detective in charge . . .

  Standing there against the whiteboard and the collection of Rubbermaid tubs labeled with a Sharpie pen. Some indicated newspaper clippings, some held photos, still more had the clunky video technology that had long since disappeared—VHS tapes. As her mother moved toward a stack of the plastic boxes, Grace was clear on at least two things. There was no way she could have grown up in that house and become anything other than a police officer. Trying to catch Tricia’s killer was a family obsession. The other certainty was that her parents had never ever been able to move on from their search for justice.

  Conner O’Hare’s last words on his deathbed were incontrovertible proof of that.

  “When I’m in heaven, I will finally be able to ask Tricia who killed her,” he’d said.

  Grace watched her mother pick up a medium-sized box and slide it on top of the pool table that Conner had covered with a sheet of wood so they could use it as a meeting table for the victims’ families meetings.

  No one played pool in the house after Tricia vanished, anyway. She and her father had loved the game. Grace had learned never to acknowledge that the table had once had a function other than being a place for the grieving and angry to meet once a week.

  On the top and sides of the plastic box, Sissy had written, in block lettering, TED.

  In the family they’d always been known as the Ted Letters. They were a collection of missives written by Ted Bundy while he was on death row in Florida. Grace had been led to believe that it was some kind of cat-and-mouse game that her mother employed to get Ted to tell her if he, in fact, had killed her daughter. There were other potential Bundy Girls and she would have liked to have closed the case on any of them. She wrote to Ted more than fifty times over a two-year period. He never failed to answer. And while she loathed Theodore Robert Bundy over any other human being in the world, she never told him so. Ted might have thought they were friends. On the morning after Ted’s execution, a prison chaplain called her with a message from Ted.

  “He wanted me to tell you thank you for the correspondence over the years. He also said that he wished he could have helped you find out who killed your daughter.”

  “He didn’t say anything about Tricia? The other girls?”

  The chaplain sucked in more air. He wasn’t being impatient, just resigned to the fact that the monster that he had tried to lead toward salvation had done nothing to ease the minds of those who needed it the most. “No. Just that he wanted to wish you well. To wish you peace.”

  “Nothing?” she asked, pressing the question to the chaplain one more time.

  “No, sorry. Ted said nothing specific.”

  “I have something specific for him. In case you pray for his soul,” she said.

  “I do and I will.”

  “Tell him I hope he rots in hell. Good-bye.”

  Sissy had hung up the phone feeling angry and numb at the same time. If Ted had the truth somewhere in his evil and diseased brain, it was possible that he was making one final attempt to show up the world that he was gentle and misunderstood. A feeble attempt, for sure. Deep down, Sissy was sure that the nation’s most notorious serial killer had been responsible for Tricia’s death.

  It wasn’t just wishful thinking, either. Her daughter fit the profile of Ted’s so-called type—not only in her physical appearance, but her personality, too. Most of the girls whom he’d killed were the kind who could be called upon to be helpful. Tricia was without question the kind of girl to give a stranger directions, help an injured student with his books, provide money for an emergency phone call.

  There was one more bit that played into the possibility that Ted had been Tricia’s captor and murderer. After Bundy was apprehended, a detailed accounting had been made of every traceable moment of his life. Every receipt with his name on it, every phone call that he’d made or answered, was logged into a master file by the King County Sheriff’s Department, which had assembled a major task force to catch the man who’d been murdering pretty young women in Washington state.

  On the day that Tricia disappeared, a credit card receipt from a gas station in Shelton was logged into evidence. Shelton was less than an hour away from the Pacific Lutheran University campus. While it didn’t carry as much weight as a charge slip from Tacoma, it was very, very close.

  A clerk who’d sold Ted seven dollars of gas and a Mars candy bar said that he hadn’t been traveling alone. It provided the third leg of the stool on which the possibility that Tricia O’Hare had been a Bundy victim rested. The transcription between King County Detective Gerry Montrose and Super Seven Gas station attendant Lee Wong was the go-to piece of evidence for Sissy and Conner O’Hare, and later, Grace. The choicest bit of the transcript appeared on the twentieth page of the twenty-page document.

  DETECTIVE MONTROSE: Did you actually talk to Mr. Bundy?

  LEE WONG: Weird that you call him mister. Guy’s a real dick. Yeah, I did talk to him. I remember how he waved me away when I approached his car. I went over to him, you know, to see if he wanted oil.

  MONTROSE: Waved you away?

  WONG: Yeah. Like I said earlier, he jumped out of his car to pump his own gas even though he was at the full-serve pump. The dick said, “I’ll do it myself. No oil needed.” Then he actually pushed me back from the car like he thought I was going to fight him for the dipstick or something.

  MONTROSE: Was he aggressive with you?

  WONG: No, and it doesn’t matter if he was. I pack a thirty-eight. You practically have to, working at a gas station or mini-mart these days. Customers will kill you if they don’t like the way you screw on their gas tank lid. And yes, in case you’re going to ask it, I have a CW permit.

  MONTROSE: Good. Did you get a look inside the car?

  WONG: Not really. I mean, I sort of think he had someone sleeping in the backseat. I can’t be sure because I didn’t get a real look. You know, out of the corner of my eye when he was hassling me about the oil fill-up.

  MONTROSE: So you didn’t see anyone, really? Just more like an impression?

  WONG: Yeah, an impression. That’s a good way of looking at it. I got the impression of a girl sleeping in the back. Now . . .

  MONTROSE: Now, what?

  WONG: Now, I guess I wonder a little if it might have been a girl. Maybe a dead one. If she was dead, then I’m sorry for her family. If she was alive, well, I don’t even want to think about how bad I feel. You know, how I could have maybe done something.

  MONTROSE: You would have no way of knowing, either way. Don’t beat yourself up.

  WONG: Okay. Thanks.

  [End of transcript.]

  And then there were the letters. The Ted Letters.

  “Can I take these, Mom?”

  Sissy scrunched up her brow and thought a moment. “Oh, I don’t know. I loaned them to The National Enquirer and it took more than a year to get them back. Goodness, I was stupid. I should have photocopied them.”

  “I’m not the Enquirer. I’m your daughter. Besides, the Enquirer paid you. I seem to recall that you got ten thousand dollars for your group.”

  “I’m a tough negotiator,” Sissy said, a slight smile on her face. “Yes, you can borrow them. Not sure what you’re looking for, but yes, if you think it will help, take them.”

  Grace looked down at the letters. Her mother had tied them with a periwinkle blue ribbon, like some yo
ung girl might have done to a batch of love letters. These, however, were far from love letters. These were letters from the devil.

  “I’ll bring them back in a few days, Mom,” Grace said as they walked back up the stairs, away from the pool table that wasn’t really a pool table, from a war room that had never ceased to be the central location for a group of men and women bonded by the murders of their children.

  “Don’t forget to turn out the light,” Sissy said.

  “Lights out, Mom. Lights out.” Grace turned down the switch and the room behind them went completely black.

  CHAPTER 19

  Sissy O’Hare wore a platinum locket around her neck. A gift from Conner the year after everything happened, the locket was heart-shaped and when opened revealed a photograph of the child she would mourn forever. Grace had never known a time when her mother hadn’t worn the locket. She’d also seen her open it, look at it, and with tears streaming down her cheeks, snap it shut and close her eyes. Grace, though jealous of her murdered sister, always hoped that Sissy was remembering something beautiful about Tricia. As jealous as she could be—and as foolish as it was—she loved her mother. Some solace was needed. The locket was a symbol of loss, love, and the awareness that everything precious could be taken away by anyone, at any time. There was never any doubt that when her mother passed on, she would be buried with the locket around her neck. It was such a part of her.

  Although Sissy’s memories of her eldest daughter varied, as those of most mothers do, there were two etched in her brain so deeply that for the longest time others struggled to surface. The first was the day Tricia had gone missing.

  It was the first of October. Vine and big leaf maples had started to turn the previous week, and the snap of autumn made all Pacific Northwesterners think of New England and what truly splendid fall colors might look like if the region had more deciduous trees. Pumpkins for carving and apple cider served in big, red mugs fueled the fantasy. Conner had gone to work, and Sissy and Tricia were alone at the breakfast table. Sissy had made her daughter’s favorite—a toad-in-the-hole fried in so much butter that if the cholesterol police had been invented back then they surely would have handcuffed Sissy and taken her away to serve time for overindulging her daughter.