by Gregg Olsen
Palmer shed his jacket. He was hot and angry. He knew he’d already blown up, but there was always the threat of an aftershock of anger.
“You are always in trouble,” Palmer said. “You seem to make a sport of trying to find ways to piss me off and make me wish I pushed harder for an abortion when I had the chance.”
Alex had heard that particularly hurtful regret before. His father claimed that his mother tricked him into marriage by getting pregnant. His dad had never wanted him.
“The cops came today,” he said, refusing to look into his father’s eyes.
As Alex predicted, Palmer exploded again. “Jesus! What did you do? Shoplift at Frye’s again? What an idiot!”
Alex pulled back and let his eyes look into his father’s only for a half-second. “No. No. I haven’t done that in a long time.”
Doesn’t he know the difference between shoplifting and real trouble?
“Good, because the next time you do I’m not going to bail you out by paying off the manager. He’s using me like a damn ATM. So what is it now?”
“The cops came today about Emma. She’s missing.”
“Is that the chick you were doing?” Palmer asked, a smirk now spreading over his face.
Alex glared at his father. “I didn’t do her, and yes, it was the girl I really liked.”
Palmer shook his head in utter disgust. “Liked? God! You’re nineteen, grow a pair and use ’em. Use ’em a lot. Forget liking any girl. There’s time for that later.”
Alex hated his father so much just then. More than he ever did. He knew that his dad had no real attachments to anyone. Not even Calla. Certainly not to him. Alex knew that there were things about him that were genetically linked to his father—his eyes, his build. Thankfully not his height. By his sixteenth birthday, Alex had been a good five inches taller than his dad—an achievement that made Palmer Morton bitter. As Alex watched his father, he often worried that his near sociopathic personality had transferred to him. His dad was an ass. He probably had some of that in him, too. When he’d told a friend about what he thought, she’d told him that he “absolutely” wasn’t like his dad at all.
“The fact that you recognize what kind of person he is and that you don’t want to be like him is proof enough that you’re not headed down that path.”
It was Emma Rose who had said those words. And when she had, he’d fallen for her. Hard. It was as if for the first time ever he’d found someone who wanted to believe that he had some good inside him. He wasn’t just the rich kid with the blowhard dad. He wasn’t a petty thief who shoplifted iPods and other stuff he didn’t need.
Palmer pressed on with the quasi interrogation of his son. “Why did the police come to talk to you about her?”
“She’s missing. I told you that.”
“Look, I can’t remember every detail of your social life, as puny as it is. But why did they come to you about Emma?”
“You know, because we went out a few times. That’s all. They were just looking for information.”
“What’s the big deal then?” Palmer asked.
Alex searched for the right words. Some things his dad could never understand. “I don’t know.”
Palmer unbuttoned his shirt collar. His anger still percolated, but it had subsided a little. “Alex, I can’t fix this if I don’t know what kind of problem we’re facing here.”
“Dad, I’m not sure. We had a big fight. Emma actually dumped me. I said some stuff about wanting to get her back. I didn’t want her to break up with me. Now, you know, she’s gone and it looks like, well, bad. Real bad.”
Palmer sighed. “What a pussy you are. Jesus! I never thought I’d have a dickless wonder for a son. But I’ll fix it. I always do.”
CHAPTER 34
In the manner articles highlighting a mysterious crime always do, the latest GIRLS MISSING article in the News Tribune prompted a series of calls to Grace Alexander. One tip after another that, in the interest of justice, had to be followed up in some way. Most went nowhere. Most had no real connection to the case. The call from an elderly woman was one of those. She spoke with the throaty deep voice of a smoker with a slight wheeze, suggesting that her lungs were ravaged by emphysema.
“You better find who killed those three girls,” she said.
“The department is doing its best,” Grace said.
“Your best wasn’t good enough. You never caught the SOB who killed my Susie.”
Grace instantly recalled the name, and the voice. Susie Sherman’s photo was on the wall of unsolved cases, like her sister. It was Susie’s mother, Anna, on the line.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sherman,” she said.
“I’m sure you are. I’d be sorry, too.”
Anna Sherman and Grace Alexander shared a bond. There was no doubt about it. Years after Susie’s disappearance in 1972, her body had been discovered in the woods off a remote stretch of Highway 401 under the shadow of Mt. Rainier. Anna’s voice still held the unmistakable sharp pain that came with each utterance.
Like my mother.
Like my father, too.
Grace knew that tragedy either bound family members tightly together or tore them completely apart. She’d seen her own parents’ marriage disintegrate over the years. Within the heavy walls of Anna Sherman’s throaty voice Grace could still hear echoes of her own mother’s grief. It was, she knew, a grief that never went away. While it was clear that Mrs. Sherman couldn’t exactly shed any light on the cases that were consuming every moment, there was no way she would ever refuse the invitation the still-grieving offered.
“Come and see me. I think I know something about serial killers who prey on young women,” Anna said.
“Are you a psychologist?” Grace asked, wishing a second later that she hadn’t.
“I’m a mother,” she said.
Grace felt embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Of course. I didn’t mean . . .”
“That’s all right. I corresponded with Ted Bundy.”
“You did?”
In that moment, Grace wondered who hadn’t corresponded with the serial killer. Authors, her mother, and now, Anna Sherman. It seemed Ted Bundy might have been in need of a social secretary.
“Don’t be so surprised,” Anna said. “If you thought someone killed your daughter you would have done the same thing. I thought I could get him to tell me something, you know, before he fried in the electric chair.”
“Did he tell you anything about what happened to your daughter?” Grace asked.
A beat of silence.
“No. Not really, but he told me enough that made me feel that the world was a safer place for everyone when they finally put him out of his miserable existence. I don’t mind telling you I had a glass of champagne the night he cooked on the electric chair.”
“I understand,” Grace said, though she never admitted to anyone that she didn’t believe in the death penalty. Her job had been about tragedy and death and there was no need to add to it by taking another’s life.
Even Theodore Robert Bundy’s.
“Anyway,” Anna said, again with a wheeze, “I think Ted might be able to help you better understand what might have happened to the missing girls.”
The words were perplexing. Ted is dead.
“Sorry?” she asked.
“Come and read the letters. I have a stack of them. Better than some hifalutin profiler on the Today show. I know all about you. I think you’re smart. Besides, I make pretty good banana bread and I’ll have some out of the oven by the time you get here.”
Anna Sherman was in the Island Home retirement center not far from the Target off Union in Tacoma. Grace knew the location; she had visited there with her seventh-grade choir to sing Christmas carols to the elderly residents. As she went inside to find Anna, the wafting smell of old people filled her nose. It was as if the scent of the people who had been there two decades prior still lingered like summertime lavender and, she thought, a little bleach. That wasn’t the case, of cou
rse. Places like the Island Home always smelled that way. Anna lived in the assisted-living section of the community. She had been moved from the “live alone” to “needs a little more help” series of buildings cheerfully painted in red, blue, and yellow—a color combination that Anna thought must have been a painter’s mistake.
“If they were going for something patriotic, they blew it big time. I mean, really, yellow? Who pairs yellow with blue and red?” she’d asked when her daughter and son-in-law moved her there four years ago.
Grace found a place to park under a big fir tree. A yard keeper ran a leaf blower over the sidewalk and a couple of young people went toward their car, the woman crying. It was, Grace imagined, a typical morning in a place that always needed to look pretty for someone’s final days.
Anna was in Rosedale Bungalow, room fourteen. A nurse’s aide named Brigitte let Grace inside. In a wheelchair by the window, a small gray-haired woman with driftwood-gnarled hands and hunched shoulders brightened. At her side was a blue plastic file box. Anna was an impossibly tiny woman. She sat ramrod straight watching a dog chase a cat across the parking lot. It wasn’t a pretty view, but it held her interest.
She turned to the detective and smiled.
“You look like you did when you were a little girl, Grace. Just as pretty as a picture.”
“I thought you wouldn’t remember me,” Grace said, bending down to give the old woman a gentle, but heartfelt hug.
“I’m as old as the hills,” she said, pointing to her temple, “but I’ve still got everything right upstairs. Knock on wood.” She looked around and smiled at the obvious fact that there was no real wood in her room. “All vinyl and plastic. Ugh. I don’t know why they think everything has to be completely hose-able around here.”
Grace smiled. “You look lovely, Mrs. Sherman.”
“Anna,” said the elderly woman with glossy white hair and bright-red fingernail polish—a trademark look she’d held on to all of her adult life. “You’re not a child anymore.”
“Fine, Anna, then.” She took a seat across from Anna’s wheelchair. A nurse’s aide looked in and nodded.
“How is your mom getting along without your father?” Anna asked, inching the wheelchair a little closer.
“About the same,” Grace said. “She has her good days and bad days.”
“I was sorry to read about your father’s passing. He was a kind, decent man.”
“Thank you, Anna.”
“You’re not here about Susie, are you?”
Grace shook her head. “No.”
“The three girls I’ve been reading about.”
Grace nodded sadly. “Right,” she said, not even a little surprised that Anna Sherman read the paper. Of the members of her parents’ group, she was unquestionably the best informed. In another time and place, Anna Sherman could have been a female version of John Walsh. Whenever a new missing girl was reported, Anna already had in hand whatever public information she could glean. She had friends at the police department who routinely copied public information files for her—through whatever channels she was able to create on the sly.
“I know it sounds far-fetched, but when I read about Emma Rose—that’s her name, right?”
Grace smiled inwardly; Anna Sherman hadn’t changed one bit.
“Right,” she said. “Emma Rose.”
Anna looked away at the dog in the parking lot. She wasn’t distracted by the animal. She was thinking, pulling together the threads of what she wanted to say.
“When I read about the circumstances of her vanishing, I thought it seemed a lot like what happened to Susie. That Lancaster girl reminded me of your sister’s disappearance.”
Grace, of course, had thought the same thing. Emma and Susie had been taken after closing at their respective jobs. Emma, Starbucks. Susie, a produce stand and gift shop on the west side of Tacoma. Lisa Lancaster and Tricia O’Hare were both college students last seen in a Pacific Lutheran University parking lot. All four girls had never given the authorities any reason to suspect that they’d run off willingly. If any had a secret boyfriend or lover, it would have been news to their families. Big news.
And all four girls had one thing in common—their physical appearance. Susie, Lisa, Kelsey, Tricia . . . all were brunettes of a similar body type and build. They were lovely girls; two lost forever. One was still missing—waiting patiently for someone to find her dead or alive.
“I’m thinking that you came here for help of some kind, Grace,” the elderly woman said.
“Yes,” Grace said, hesitating a little. It was the reason she’d come. Anna Sherman could read people better than anyone. “This is hard to ask, but I’ve been thinking about Ted Bundy and . . .” Her voice trailed off and the look of recognition came to Anna’s face. Her dusty blue eyes were instantly full of emotion. Even all those years after everything happened, the name still brought back a flood of memories. None of them good.
Anna locked her eyes on Grace. She didn’t say anything. She just looked.
“I was thinking about the similarities of the cases . . . and, you know, the letters to and from Ted.”
“Tell me about the letters,” Grace said.
“You’re interested, then?”
She nodded and looked at the blue plastic box. “Yes, that’s why I’m here.”
By the looks of them, the letters had been typed on a manual typewriter. Some letters, most notably the E and R, seemed to stick and were rendered slightly above the baseline of the words in which they were used. It was double spaced and signed: peace, Ted.
Dear Mrs. Sherman:
I want to call you Anna, but I don’t know if you want me to do that. I look forward to each of your letters and though I wish I had some information to ease your mind, I know I don’t. Every time I write to you without the response that you are looking for, I think you will stop writing to me. I would hate for our friendship, however tenuous, to end because I will not make up a story about your daughter just to give you peace of mind. I guess everyone wants peace of mind. Even me.
Especially me.
So that we can continue our correspondence, I will offer you something. Not an admission of course—because that’s not the truth—but I will offer you my most sincere, my most heartfelt, most genuine condolences for your loss. Your daughter was a beautiful girl and undoubtedly loved by many. Whoever killed her is a complete monster.
But I am not that monster. I’m a guy who made some mistakes and now I am paying the price for it. I’m not saying that my mistakes weren’t big ones, but the measure of my supposed crimes is far less than those who want to kill me would have.
I am sorry about Susie. I have seen her photograph many, many times over the years. She’s always put up with the string of girls from Oregon to Washington. I admit that she looks like whatever the world seems to think I’m responsible for, but I never would have killed her.
He scratched out the last few words and wrote with pen: never would have killed anyone.
The correction was very telling. Anna knew it when she read it the first time. It was a slipup. Ted had edited himself. A sociopath of the highest order, yet devious enough to know the denial of killing a particular girl was not a strong enough protestation on its own. A normal person—one who didn’t suckle on the bloodlust of a murder spree—would dismiss the entirety of the question.
Ted was good at reading people. He was always good at second-guessing what someone would think or do. That was how he’d been able to pick the victims who would help him with his sailboat, change a tire, carry some books as if he were on his way to some political science class.
Ted Bundy, the up-and-comer. Ted, the young Republican. Ted, the manipulator. But more than anything, Ted the predator.
Grace’s eyes met Anna’s, and she went on to the next letter.
Dear Mrs. Sherman:
Tell me more about you. I want to know what kind of home Susie was raised in? Did she have a lot of friends? Was she as pretty as h
er picture? Did she seem to have a bright future? Do you think you will ever stop hurting because she is gone?
Sometimes when I was a kid I thought that the world was a big ugly place. I had no real idea how ugly it was, how petty people could be. I tried my best to fit in wherever I could. Sometimes I thought that people were just jealous of me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an egomaniac. I’m good looking. That’s one thing I got from my dad, I guess. People used to say that I looked like Johnnie Bundy. What a joke that was. He wasn’t even my dad. I was nothing like him. He was a goody-goody, all right. My mom . . . my mom. Hard to even talk about her. I know she did the best that she could for me, given the times. Yet, she was the one who spread her legs and nine months later out popped me! Sometimes I wonder if she was easy and didn’t know who my dad was or if it was just that she was naïve about sex. I don’t like slamming my mom. She stood by me through all of my troubles and that’s better than the rest of the Bundy clan.
I bet your family never stopped praying for Susie. Did you decide if you can send me her picture? I’d like to see what she looked like in a decent photograph. The ones I saw in the paper were always her high school senior photograph. Those always look cheesy. I know mine did. Mrs. Sherman, it would mean a lot to me if I could see her photo. Will you please, please send me one? You mentioned that you vacationed with Susie the summer before she died. . . . Was it on the beach on the Oregon Coast? Maybe you have a photograph from that trip you could send me? Did she wear a bikini?
Grace felt her stomach turn somersaults. It was beyond belief that Ted Bundy would seek a swimsuit photograph of a girl he’d probably killed. She could only imagine that he’d wanted to relive whatever he’d done to Susie Sherman. It was disgusting, vile, reprehensible.
“You didn’t send him a photo, did you?” she asked
Anna shook her head and motioned for Grace to pour her some water from a plastic pitcher on a tray next to her bed. It was the first time that Grace noticed the oxygen tank—at the ready, but not in use.