Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  Grace had always been interested in crime, murder especially.

  “I think it’s in my blood,” she’d told Shane when they first met.

  “Me too, but not because of personal connection. Just a deep need to be close enough to the bad stuff to be able to stop the bad guys from doing whatever it is they’re doing again.”

  “I understand,” she’d said. “For me, for my family, murder has always been personal.”

  Some saw their strange alliance as a linkage between two individuals who were obsessed with crime. What those people missed was that they needed each other. He loved and understood her.

  She loved him with all her heart, but she also knew that he could help her.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was dusk when Lisa Lancaster looked at the newspaper vending box. The headlines of the day’s News Tribune touted a state legislator’s brilliant/bogus idea to sell the naming rights of the Narrows Bridge to ease a disastrous state budget shortfall. She wondered why Tacoma was so provincial. Why Washington was so backwards. New Yorkers would never think to sell the naming rights to the Empire State Building. No one would ever give voice to such a ridiculous scheme.

  While Lisa got most of her news from Internet sites like Gawker and TMZ, she did crouch down to read a little of a news story that caught her interest in that kind of ghoulish way that some stories do.

  HUMAN BONES FOUND: WHO IS JANE DOE AND HOW DID SHE DIE?

  The article detailed the discovery of the bones and how the Tacoma Police Department was looking into a number of missing persons cases involving young women from as far back as the 1950s.

  Lisa, a willowy brunette with shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, stopped reading because the idea of an old body grossed her out. She turned her thoughts inward as she stood outside the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do.

  With her hair.

  Her major.

  Her life.

  Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had to do with the wide breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in student loans.

  And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

  Lisa roulette dialed until someone picked up. Her best friend of the moment, Naomi, took the call and promptly used up half of her “bonus” minutes talking about her boyfriend and how selfish he was.

  “Like he acts like I’m supposed run right over to his parents’ garage whenever he’s horny,” she said. “I told him if he’s looking for a hookup then he should go on Craigslist like every other loser.”

  As she listened, Lisa watched a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.

  Lisa turned away. “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

  “That campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

  “Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

  “Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good,” she said.

  “Mine, neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents, too.”

  The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

  “God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”

  “Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

  Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.

  “Whatever,” she said, “like I wasn’t the president of that dumb club. I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm relax a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

  “You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

  “Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

  Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

  The young man fell to the pavement. One of the crutches was just out of reach.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Lisa asked.

  He looked up with an embarrassed half-smile.

  “No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”

  Lisa stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he’d thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.

  “Let me help you,” Lisa said, bending down and hooking her hands under his arms. He stood wobbly on one leg, like a flamingo at the zoo. A good wind would knock him over. Lisa handed him his other crutch and picked up the backpack.

  “You must be taking some heavy courses,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed about the unintended pun. She got a good look at his face. He actually was handsome with dark hair, large brown eyes, and stylish stubble above his upper lip and on the tip of his chin.

  A goatee in the works?

  Lisa grinned, not outwardly, but inside. The cute dork existed after all. She’ll tell Naomi the minute she helped him to his car.

  “Where are you parked?” she said.

  “Over there,” he said. “I’m Ted, by the way.”

  So sure he was about what he was about to do that he didn’t think twice about using his father’s name.

  Lisa glanced over at the burnished orange Honda Element, a boxy mini-SUV that was destined to be the VW bus of the new millennium.

  “Fun car,” she said.

  He shrugged, although with crutches under each arm, shrugging was not that easy an endeavor. “Good for outdoors stuff. If you go hiking and get mud in the car you can literally hose it out.”

  Lisa nodded. “I guess that’s good. You like to hike?”

  “I do. Sometimes I like to drive out to the middle of nowhere, pull off the road, and just find something cool to look at. A lake. A forest. Someplace where no one goes.”

  “I’m Lisa, by the way. What are you taking?” she asked, moving the heavy backpack to her other shoulder

  “Biology. Pre-med,” he said, though it was a lie. Inside his backpack were the A, B, and C volumes of old, outdated encyclopedias from his basement recreation room.

  He was looking even more handsome.

  When they arrived next to his car, he directed her to the passenger side.

  “Can you put my books there?” he asked. “Easier to get to later.”

  She nodded.

  He pushed the electronic door lock button on his key fob and Lisa popped open the door.

  “Did some other good Samaritan take a nap in here?” she said, a little teasingly, as she set the backpack on a seat that had been completely reclined to form a bed.

  He didn’t answer and Lisa turned to look over her shoulder.

  The young man was standing without crutches, framed by a lamp partially blocked by a dying cedar tree. Braided shadows crisscrossed his face like a spider web. He was holding one of the crutches like a Louisville Slugger.

  “What the—” L
isa started to say, but her words were cut short.

  He’d filled the aluminum tube of the crutch with his grandfather’s lead fishing weights, thinking that a little more heft would be helpful when he swung it at his victim’s head.

  Which he did.

  And it was.

  Lisa’s shoulder bag fell into the gutter and her cell phone cartwheeled on the pavement and broke into pieces. The college student offered no final scream. No real sound but the slumping of her body against the doorjamb of the Element.

  In a moment marked by a blur of swift movements and a gasp of air from the victim’s lungs, he had her inside.

  He looked at her through the passenger window, satisfied and excited. He fixed the image in his memory like a photograph that he’d retrieve later. Moments like this were to be savored and relived over and over.

  Lisa Lancaster was so beautiful. Sleeping. Like a doll with a swirl of lovely dark hair and perfect little features. He owned her right then, and a broad and unexpected smile came to his face. Not fear. Not a thumping heart sequestered behind a rib cage. None of that.

  At that moment, the young man understood something about the power of the hunt that had eluded him as he’d planned and stalked his first kill. The rush. The excitement of doing something few dared to do.

  And doing it better than the father he’d admired, though never known. He climbed behind the wheel and turned the key in the car’s ignition. He let out a little laugh at the pun that came to him just then.

  He really was in his element. In every way.

  At ten minutes before midnight, the 911 communications center received an anguished call from the mother of a missing young woman. The operator, Mary-Jo Danforth, thirty-one, took down the information provided and created a file she’d pass along to law enforcement. It was close to break time and Mary-Jo was feeling bored and restless. After she hung up the call, she swiveled her chair to talk to her friend and co-worker, Kirk Aldean.

  A video camera installed for training purposes captured their conversation.

  MARY-JO: Some mother thinks her daughter’s been abducted or something. Didn’t come home from college today.

  KIRK: Probably out whoring around.

  MARY-JO: You said it. I didn’t. I just told her that we usually don’t get involved if someone’s only been gone a few hours. I mean, Jesus, if my old man called every time I was late getting home from shopping . . .

  KIRK: Shopping? So that’s what you call whoring around?

  MARY-JO: You’re such a brat. Anyway, she was crying and saying it wasn’t like her daughter to be so, you know, irresponsible.

  KIRK: Such a ho.

  MARY-JO: You want to have coffee?

  KIRK: You hitting on me, MJ?

  MARY-JO: I guess. Let me finish the report. We can take our break out back.

  She returned to her keyboard and finished her record by typing in the name: LISA LANCASTER.

  CHAPTER 4

  One of the highlights of the lobby of the Tacoma Police Department was without question the Mug Shot Café. Forget the historic placards and the tributes to the fallen officers that filled part of a wall. The espresso shop served up decent lattes and cappuccinos to the men and women of the department that perpetually seemed understaffed—it was appreciated and needed, especially after late-night investigations that turned into early-morning case reviews. The officer who greeted visitors from behind a bulletproof glass enclosure had summoned Grace to come downstairs.

  “Your mother’s here,” he said.

  “Why does this feel like I’m in school again?” she said, trying to make light of it. Her mother had been a frequent visitor to the department. So frequent, in fact, that it had almost cost Grace the job when the department reviewed her application. Her mother wasn’t “crazy,” but she was a little on the annoying side. At least that’s what they said to each other. Inwardly, each of them felt a little different. Grace’s mother was a persistent advocate for her daughter.

  The one who had gone missing before Grace was born.

  “You said you’d call me,” said Sissy O’Hare, a woman who never waited longer than a blink to get to the heart of any matter. She was referring to the bones.

  “Mom, there wasn’t any more to say.” She looked over at a pair of black leather chairs in front of a turn-of-the-century paddy wagon that was part of the department’s mini museum of Tacoma’s law enforcement history. “Let’s sit.”

  “You didn’t tell me that the bones were a woman’s or a girl’s.”

  “I didn’t know what they were. I told you that.”

  “The news says female.”

  “They’ve made a calculated guess. We don’t know what the gender is,” Grace said.

  Sissy pressed her daughter. “Look, you’re here. You know what’s going on. The very least you could do is keep me informed.”

  Grace looked around. She didn’t like the sentence that her mother had just uttered. Her job was to solve crimes, not be a tipster whose purpose was to slake her mother’s insatiable need to know every detail of every case that could possibly help solve the mystery of what had happened to Tricia.

  “Mom, the evidence collected at the beach is in the hands of a very capable lab unit in Olympia. They will let us know what, and if possible, who, those remains belong to. Besides, getting any DNA from those bones will be difficult.”

  Sissy put her hand on her daughter’s knee. “Then you have to find the rest of her. Was—was there a skull?”

  Grace shook her head. “No. Not that we could find. We’re not sure how the bones got there, Mom. We don’t know for sure if there was a grave above, up on the cliff. We’re still looking.”

  “She had a retainer when she went missing,” Sissy said. “You remember that I told you that.”

  “I remember everything, Mom. And yes, while the retainer could be a helpful clue, the confirmation would come from teeth. The blood and tissue inside the tooth is often well-preserved.”

  The conversation was both strange and strained. The two women in front of the vintage paddy wagon were talking about a daughter Sissy hadn’t seen for decades, and the sister Grace had never known. They were detached from the idea that they needed a dead person’s teeth. It was a conversation they’d had before.

  Later, when they would separate and go about the rest of their day, they’d think about what had driven them to the point of obsession.

  Back in her end cubicle on the second floor, Grace flipped through the stack of reports that had somehow managed to appear in the twenty minutes she’d been downstairs talking to her mother.

  “You doing all right?” Paul Bateman said, setting down a morbidly stained white coffee mug—one that needed a trip home to someone’s dishwasher. Anyone’s.

  She took it anyway. She needed more caffeine. “Yeah. I don’t know what’s worse, my mother or our caseload.”

  “Speaking of caseload—we’re following up on the Lancaster case today.”

  “Of course we are,” Grace said, already scanning the report.

  When Lisa had gone missing just after Samantha Maxwell’s body was found, one of the local radio stations had tried to make something of the coincidence. The on-air hosts ignored the department’s public information officer when he reported that Samantha’s drowning was nothing but a tragic accident and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Lancaster girl.

  “Short-staffed,” Grace said, getting her coat. “Remind me to remind our wonderful sergeant that we can’t do it all. No one could.”

  Across town, a man wallowed in the same beleaguered state. So much to do. So, so little time.

  That afternoon Catherine Lancaster’s haunted brown eyes stared at the lens of a Seattle TV news camera. A pediatric nurse at Tacoma General, Catherine was a tall, lanky woman with angular features and a wide, almost slotted mouth. With dark eyes and light brown bob, she had never been a beauty queen, but those who knew Catherine would only describe her with one word: beautiful. She’d devoted her l
ife to serving others and the irony of what had happened to her wasn’t lost on anyone. Among her friends, Catherine was the first to offer help—and the last to leave when someone needed her. There was no time of day too late to call. No question that could not be asked.

  She was a woman who didn’t deserve the lens of the camera on her. Not then. Not ever.

  “Please,” she said somewhat stiffly, her voice surprisingly strong given her obviously fragile state. Her thin lips trembled as she strung together the words that no mother would ever want to utter: “Help me find my daughter.”

  Catherine was on the news that evening doing what she’d been doing from the first moment Lisa vanished from a parking lot at the Pacific Lutheran University campus. A single mother, she had only one purpose in life at that moment. She wanted to find Lisa. No one but another mother could understand the true torment that comes when a child is missing. That was not to say that fathers didn’t feel true anguish. But while in the world of political correctness no one dared to say so, it was true: It was a million times harder on a mother than a father. It just was. It just is.

  “Look,” she said, tears welling and threatening to roll down the crisp planes of her face, “I know that everyone says their kids are perfect, but Lisa was. She really, really was.”

  The reporter went on to cite Lisa’s achievements, and there were many: basketball letter as a freshman, honor roll every year through high school, leader of a group of students who sought greater understanding for those with handicaps. Lisa was a dream child.

  “She wanted to be a social worker or maybe a counselor for troubled kids. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to be because there were so many things that interested her.”

  The tears finally fell.

  The camera cut away to a wide shot of the campus parking lot, then the reporter, who stood shaking her head slightly.