Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “Drowning vic,” she said to her partner, Paul Bateman, a skyscraper of a man with pointed eyebrows that always made him look slightly perturbed, even when he wasn’t. “Samantha Maxwell, nineteen. Missing for four days.”

  Paul studied the body, face down, the dead girl’s dark hair melding with scraggly bits of seaweed. A crab crawled out from under her slackened curls. It was disgusting, but both detectives had seen far, far worse. Neither gave it a second thought.

  “How can you be positive it’s her?” Paul asked.

  “The ink,” Grace said, “here.” She pointed to the small four-leaf clover on Samantha’s right shoulder. “Don’t you ever read the paperwork? It’s in the report.”

  Paul turned up his jacket collar to ward off the breeze. “She wasn’t all that lucky,” he said.

  “Understatement of the year.”

  Grace got up and looked around, scanning the lonely section of beach. She knew that the area wasn’t a crime scene per se, only the sad site of the discovery of a dead girl.

  “Accidental drowning?” Paul asked, as the coroner’s techs made their way over the rocks and logs to collect the body. A seagull screamed overhead. A little more rain fell. The detectives took a few steps back to let the others do their work.

  “Autopsy will determine what happened,” Grace said. “Nothing to suggest anything other than an accident, at least nothing I’ve read in the missing persons report. Boyfriend said she was drinking a little and went toward the water to swim. Never saw her again.”

  “Not going to see her now,” Paul said, pulling away from the putrid odor that rose up from Samantha’s remains as the coroner’s team cocooned the body in a bright blue neoprene bag. It zipped silently with the kind of closure found on a sandwich bag.

  “Beachcomber over there found her,” Grace said, indicating the woman who was sitting on a log clutching her plastic bag of shells and glass. “Officers are getting her information.”

  Paul walked a few yards down the beach toward the base of a cliff.

  Grace called over to him. “You coming?” She repeated her question, but Detective Bateman didn’t say anything.

  She let out a sigh and followed him.

  He was on one knee, looking at something.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Paul looked up. “Not sure,” he said, his eyes staying locked on hers. “Looks like a femur.”

  She shook her head. “Driftwood,” she said. “Not a bone.”

  “Really,” he said. “I think so.”

  “Human?” she asked, now joining him on her knees to get a closer view. Neither touched the bone. If it was human, it was evidence of a possible crime. It was likely that it had been dragged there by an animal, far from where it had been hidden. That is, if it had been hidden at all.

  And if it was human.

  “Not sure,” Paul said. “But I think so. Been out here a while.”

  Grace got up and went a couple more yards west of the femur and, almost immediately, found another bone, a rib.

  “It is human, isn’t it?” she asked, feeling that mix of excitement and horror that comes every time discoveries like bones on a beach were made.

  “A woman? A child, maybe.”

  Grace stepped back and studied the outcropping above the breach. A cedar and a fir had sloughed off the top of the cliff and lodged themselves in a ledge about fifty feet above where Paul had seen the first bone. If the bones had once been concealed in a grave, it was a good bet they had literally come from above.

  Samantha Maxwell had been the victim of a tragic accident. There was no doubt about that. She was a dead girl. A teenager. A daughter. But she was something else in that moment.

  Samantha had been a messenger.

  “It was like she led us here,” Grace said.

  Paul didn’t care for that kind of woo-woo sentimentality, but he let Grace go on about her “feelings” and intuition. She’d been more right than wrong when it came to moving a possibility into something real, turning a “what-if ” into a scenario that made sense—and helped solve crimes.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “We’re going to need some techs over here,” Grace said, calling across the windy rocky beach to the investigators who’d come to collect Samantha’s remains. Samantha Maxwell wasn’t going home alone.

  She had company.

  Grace wouldn’t have told anyone—not her partner, her husband, even her mother—that it passed through her mind, as the bones were recovered amid the seaweed and silver-colored driftwood that had also cradled the remains of Samantha Maxwell. The it was like the grandfather clock in her parent’s Tacoma home, always ticking, always there. The it was like a kind of leech that had planted itself on her skin and just never let go. She drew a deep breath as she tried to put it out of her mind. While Samantha Maxwell’s case was never considered foul play, only a terrible accident, the scene had to be processed with the skill and decorum befitting the tragedy that had stolen the pretty young teenager’s life.

  The clouds had darkened and rain began to fall through a tear in the sky. The techs were dressed in dark blue rain gear as they methodically worked over an area that had been cordoned off with bright yellow tape. No telling how long the bones had been there. One young cop suggested they wait out the rain.

  “Not like this is a fresh kill and there’s any evidence to be had,” he said.

  “Are you an idiot or is your brain running low on fuel because you skipped a meal?” Grace asked. “We don’t wait for the weather when we find a body.”

  The tech turned defensive. “You don’t have to get all high and mighty with me. I’m just saying the obvious. Bones that old probably belong to an Indian or something.”

  Grace held her tongue. She could have reminded him that “Native American” was the preferred term, but there was no point in coming off as a bitch.

  Or high and mighty, as the twerp put it.

  By the end of the day, the bones recovered—nine of them—were tagged and bundled in a plastic lidded box of the same kind many home owners use to store their Christmas decorations. The femur had been the largest bone; ribs and fragments of a pelvis were also recovered from the beach. Techs moved up to the top of the cliff, at Grace’s request.

  “No telling what happened,” she said, “but if those bones are from a homicide victim I’d say it was a good bet that the body was buried up there.”

  The cliff had sloughed off a van-sized chunk of earth.

  Paul Bateman nodded.

  “We don’t even know if the remains are human, you know. And don’t you go thinking that it’s her.”

  Grace nodded. Her partner knew her so well.

  “Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” she lied.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Salmon Beach neighborhood of Tacoma was all about the eclectic. The different drum. The doing your own thing. The charm of the neighborhood just north of Point Defiance had long been its hippie and hipness factor. Some of the houses had been brought in by barge, rejects that found new lives and the astounding view that came with being on the beach. Most, however, had been built there on stilts over the water as fishing cabins. It was a tiny village of some eighty homes with wind socks and birdfeeders, and people with strong hearts. They needed them. No cars could make their way down the sharp cliff to anyone’s front door. It was a couple hundred steps down, and more important, when there was something to carry up, a couple hundred steps to get to the top.

  Grace and Shane Alexander weren’t at all like the couples on either side of their 1940s house perched on pilings. She was a Tacoma Police detective, he an FBI agent working out of the Seattle field office. Their lives were certainly law and order, but they were very much a live-and-let-live couple. If they smelled a little pot smoke from the older couple with the tie-dyed curtains a few doors down, they never said a word about it.

  Their house, a cabin really, was only twelve hundred square feet. Cozy or cramped? That always depended on
the mood of its occupants. When they disagreed—which was more than occasionally—no house, not even Aaron Spelling’s former mansion in Hollywood, would be large enough for either to find solace in a quiet corner.

  The discovery of Samantha Maxwell’s body and the sad call she and her partner had made to the Maxwell home in nearby Spanaway had left Grace edgy. Telling a mother the worst possible news always did. And yet as bad as that was, Shane knew what was really percolating around his wife’s mind.

  “When will the lab have the results back on the bones?” he asked, finishing a beer and slipping past his wife for another in the refrigerator. He opened the freezer and retrieved a second ice-cold pilsner glass, a habit he’d had since college days at the University of Washington.

  Grace, who had been mincing some chives snipped from a deck planter for Dungeness crab cakes she was making, looked up, but only for a second.

  “A few days,” she said. “They’ll be in Olympia tomorrow.”

  The state crime lab was located in Olympia, a half hour’s drive from Tacoma.

  “Are you doing all right?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder and stopping her from her task.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Slim to none,” he said.

  Grace stopped a beat. “Excuse me?”

  He took a drink and swallowed. “Chances are the bones aren’t hers.”

  Grace scraped the chives from a wooden cutting board into the bowl of luscious pink and white crabmeat.

  “I know,” she said.

  He looked at her with those eyes, the eyes that could tap in to her soul like no others.

  “Do you really know that?” he asked, taking that first foamy sip from the second beer.

  “Yeah,” Grace said, looking up as the news came on. “Hang on.” She reached for the remote and turned up the sound on the wall-mounted TV over a living room fireplace that was as fake as a reality show. Fireplaces were not a good idea in a place as hard to get to as Salmon Beach. Several beach homes had burned to the ground over the years because the fire department couldn’t reach them in time.

  “Tonight the coroner identified the body of Samantha Maxwell, missing from Point Defiance. While there has not been an official ruling, sources tell KING-5 News that the death will likely be ruled as a swimming accident.”

  Behind the reporter was a shot of Grace and the other police at the scene.

  “Hey, you’re on TV,” Shane said.

  Grace held her hand up. “Shh! I need to hear this.”

  “While investigators were at the beach,” the reporter said in the kind of exaggerated earnestness that never seemed even remotely genuine, “they made the discovery of human remains, unrelated to drowning victim Maxwell.”

  Colette Robinson, the woman jilted by her husband for a dog sitter, appeared on the screen.

  “I saw the dead girl first,” she said, her eyes wandering from the camera lens to the interviewer. “Poor thing. I’ve seen her picture on TV. Beautiful. So, so tragic. I never saw the bones, but I watched the police detectives collect them.”

  The reporter finished the short segment by saying that “the bones are of unknown age and origin. They might not even be human.”

  Grace turned on the stove and poured some olive oil from a ceramic decanter.

  “Have you talked to your mother about it?” he asked.

  “Of course I did. She had a right to know before it came on TV, Shane.”

  Shane took another drink. “You shouldn’t get her hopes up.”

  The skillet smoked. Grace reached for it and in doing so, knocked over the oil.

  “Damn! Look what you made me do!” she said, going for the dishcloth that hung on the oven door’s handle.

  Shane took the skillet off the heat to let it cool a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he knew he really hadn’t done anything wrong. “I just want to be a help to you and your mom. I’m on your side.”

  “What side is that?” she asked, immediately wishing that her tone had been absent of any impatience or sarcasm.

  To his credit, Shane ignored it.

  “The side of truth and peace,” he said.

  As she looked across the table at Shane that night, Grace couldn’t help but remember that day she’d first laid eyes on him. It had been years ago, but not long enough to be a distant memory. Shane was on leave from the FBI at the time, promoting his book, Birth of a Serial Killer, a compendium of cases he’d worked on at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Shane wasn’t a “profiler,” at least he didn’t like to use the label. He felt that the status that came with that particular moniker was beyond the true grasp of those working in the field trying their best to catch a killer. He considered himself “more of a criminal genealogist” than a profiler.

  To understand what makes a serial killer, he’d written in the introduction to his book, law enforcement and other interested parties need to dig in to the killer’s family tree. No one becomes the ultimate evil merely because they were born bad; they become evil because it is almost a part of their DNA.

  As he talked to a sizable group in the auditorium on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University the night he met his future wife, Special Agent Alexander showed slides of the crimes that he’d worked in his relatively young and exulted career at the FBI.

  “Toni Caswell, nineteen, was the first victim of the Naperville Strangler, Ronald Chase Mitchell,” he said, his voice projecting low and deep in the darkness of the auditorium. “The nineteen-year-old college student was not the first victim to be discovered, but actually the fourth.” He paused, not for dramatic emphasis, as Grace would later learn, but because of the devastating guilt that came with his next words, an admission of sorts.

  “Had her body been found earlier,” Shane said, pausing to click to the next image, one of a young woman with a halo of blond hair and piercing green eyes, “I think that Cassandra Kincaid would likely not have been killed.”

  A hand shot up.

  It belonged to a young Tacoma Police detective named Grace O’Hare. It was the first time she’d spoken to the man who she had considered an idol, then later, her husband.

  “Yes, in the front row,” Shane said, his blue eyes squinting a little in the dark.

  Grace nodded, and a woman with a microphone came toward her.

  “Yes, Special Agent, I still don’t understand why—with all of the vast resources at the bureau—that you were unable to ascertain what became obvious years later, that Toni was Ronald Chase Mitchell’s girlfriend and that all the victims after her were dead ringers for her?”

  Shane Alexander nodded a little. He’d heard that question before.

  “Look,” he said, his tone even and not the least bit defensive, “we are really learning the truth of what’s behind the mask. What is obvious after the fact is sometimes painfully so.”

  The comment was a none-too-subtle reference to the New York Times profile that had led to his book deal.

  “I guess,” Grace said, holding on to the microphone. The young woman next to her, whose job it was to pass it to the next person, made an irritated face. “What you’re saying is that as much as we know about sociopathic personality disorder, we really don’t know enough to actually stop them from killing.”

  Shane stepped closer to get a better look at her. She wasn’t going to back down. He knew he hadn’t seen the last of her, and in that minute, that was just fine.

  “No, I guess we don’t,” he said, as politely as possible. He turned around and indicated a young man in the second row. “Question?”

  After the lights went up, Grace found her place at the end of the line for the book signing. She let several others go ahead of her, even putting up with the crime groupies and their over-the-top gushing about the agent’s work at the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

  One young woman, a reasonably attractive redhead who had a too-heavy hand with her eyeliner and slashes of blush that looked like they’d been applied with a stencil, s
erved up the line of the night.

  “That analysis would be above my pay grade,” he said.

  “I don’t know which is sexier,” she cooed, “serial killers or the hotties who catch them.”

  Grace watched the special agent deal with the crime groupie. He smiled and signed her book.

  After she departed, clutching a book that she’d likely fall asleep while reading, he looked up at Grace.

  “I don’t know what is more repulsive, serial killers or the groupies they attract,” he said.

  “Your job puts you in danger a lot. I guess that’s sexy to some,” she said.

  “We’re well trained,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean the FBI. I meant your job as an author and lecturer. That’s the scary one.”

  He laughed. “I’m Shane Alexander,” he said, stating the obvious, but doing so to break the ice and get her to say her name—without being too forward.

  Grace nodded. “I know. I read your book.”

  “And you are?”

  She looked at him with those eyes that could never tell a lie. “Grace O’Hare. My sister, Tricia, was one of Ted Bundy’s victims. At least we think so.”

  “You want to talk?”

  Grace, back in the moment, offered Shane the last crab cake. The sun was down and the water had turned from golden to black.

  “You made ’em, you have the last one,” he said, patting his slightly expanding midsection.

  “You could burn off the calories by going up to my car. I left my book up there.”

  “You need to get an e-reader, Grace. We don’t have the storage for any more books around here anyway.”

  He was right about that. The north wall of their small house was floor-to-ceiling books, most of them nonfiction crime, though there was the occasional serial-killer thriller—more for a diversion from the reality of the dark professions they’d both chosen.