Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “I probably smell like manure,” he said, though he hadn’t touched the stuff all day. It was that other smell and though he doubted that it clung to him, he felt he needed to lie. Make an excuse. It felt funny that he didn’t want to be close to his wife. Tavio didn’t like holding back, but he knew that Mimi would tell him to go to the police. He knew she’d be right, too. He didn’t want to tell the police because they’d question him, but something more was weighing on him, heavier than an anvil laid across his throat.

  It was Michael, his brother.

  “Michael home?” Tavio asked as they walked up the narrow concrete pathway to the front door.

  “Nah. He’s out again. Seems like he’s always out now.”

  “I thought he was sick.”

  “Must be better now. He left just before you got here.”

  “I haven’t talked to him for three days.”

  They went inside; the wonderful smells of his wife’s cooking—a roast chicken and vegetables—would have brought a river of salivation from his mouth down his throat on any other day. Tavio had no appetite. None at all.

  “I’m going to shower before we eat,” he said. “Need to get the stink off me.”

  Mimi patted her abdomen.

  “Baby kicking today?” he asked.

  She smiled and nodded. “Your son is a future soccer player.”

  “Baseball,” Tavio said.

  He turned and went toward the bathroom, his heart pounding and the look on his face far from the joy of the moment. He pulled the cigarette package from his jeans pocket and proceeded to tear it up into little pieces. He lifted the lid to the toilet and the confetti of paper and cellophane fluttered into the bowl.

  He flushed and the bits of paper swirled downward. Tavio was shaking then, hoping and praying that what he was thinking would not be true.

  Could Michael have done this?

  That night Tavio Navarro couldn’t sleep. With Mimi curled up next to him, he tried to stay still and not wake her. She was a light sleeper and needed her rest. Every day she woke up at 4:30 to make her husband’s lunch before she left for the school cafeteria where she worked preparing breakfast and lunch, then off to classes at Tacoma Community College. Mimi Navarro worked hard. They all did. As Tavio stared at the ceiling, he reminded himself that there was nothing but worry to be gained by making assumptions about someone. Although he’d never had the kind of brush with the law that his brother Michael had experienced, he’d been looked at with suspicious eyes in the past. He figured it was always the other guy’s problem, not his. If they wanted to think poorly of him because of his light brown skin, black hair, the accent in his speech, so be it. He could not stop them. He couldn’t explain what they could never understand: He was just like them.

  And yet he was thinking the worst of his brother. He was thinking, just maybe, he had had made a terrible mistake, a mistake like he’d made once before . . . times one million. A mistake that would send them out of the country

  That summer there had been several high-profile cases in nearby Seattle in which illegals had committed some crime only for the authorities to discover that they’d already been deported once. One man ran over a girl pushing a grocery cart across a busy roadway. Another man had raped a woman. Both cases had drawn considerable fire and ire from anti-immigration proponents because the offenders had used the legal system for nothing short of a ride back to their homeland after committing a serious crime. They barely even waited for the dust to settle before they’d returned to the U.S.

  Tavio wanted only to raise his family in a place of opportunity. He followed all the laws, he paid his taxes, and he even employed other workers. He was living the American dream.

  Michael, he feared, was another matter. Michael was six years younger, had a slighter build, and was different from his brother in every other way. Tavio thought hard work was the answer to every problem. Michael wanted to party and live a life of no responsibility. He liked hip-hop, not mariachi. He liked tequila, not beer. He liked girls who were younger than him—girls who were lithe and pretty.

  Like the one Tavio had seen on TV.

  “I’d like to get me some of that, bro,” he said when they were watching a news report about a missing Tacoma girl.

  “She’s too young,” Tavio said.

  “Young feels good to me, Tav.”

  “You said you were going to date someone your own age.”

  “Those girls are all used up.”

  Mimi came in the room just then.

  “You are a pig,” she said, giving her brother-in-law a cold look. She put down the laundry basket and started folding hand towels. “Pig,” she repeated.

  “I don’t get many complaints,” Michael said, almost at once knowing that he’d said the wrong thing.

  “What about Catalina?” Tavio asked.

  Michael jumped up from the sofa. His jawline had tightened and his eyes flashed anger.

  “Are you always going to bring that up? When am I going to be able to put that behind me?”

  It was a fair question, but Mimi didn’t bail him out by saying so. She continued to fold the laundry, barely glancing at her husband.

  “You want to talk about it, do you?” Tavio asked Michael.

  “I want you to forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. You know that. I am your brother. You are supposed to be on my side.”

  Tavio reached for the remote control and turned off the TV.

  “I will always be on your side,” he said. “Even when you are wrong. You are my blood, Michael. But that doesn’t mean I won’t worry about you and worry about the things you have done.”

  Mimi looked up. “Yes, Catalina will always be a worry.”

  Michael put his hands up in the air and stomped out of the room.

  Tavio nodded at his wife.

  “You said what needed to be,” he said, turning the TV back on. “Catalina was a good girl.”

  There were dozens of photos pasted on a board in the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case room. Grace Alexander wasn’t officially part of the cold case unit. But she found herself in that space whenever a conference was called on a major case.

  Her eyes always landed on the board, first on her sister’s high school portrait, and then up two rows to the picture of the little girl who was the first of the many unsolved cases that would forever hold the attention of the department.

  Ann Marie Burr was her name. Ann was just nine. She vanished in the night from her Tacoma home a half century ago and was never seen again. Just gone. It was as if the little girl had gone to answer the door and just followed her abductor into oblivion willingly.

  Grace didn’t want to be the sister of a Bundy Girl—the cop with something to prove. Though that’s just what she was. She never said a word and she never allowed her eyes to linger on that scoreboard of unsolved homicide. She refused to remark upon the juxtaposition of Tricia’s photo and little Ann’s.

  CHAPTER 10

  Catalina Sanchez was a lovely teenager with a cascade of black hair that she let wave down her back, never constricted by a ponytail. She was only nineteen when her body was found alongside a riverbank near Selah, an eastern Washington farming community known for apple, pear, and cherry orchards. The police did a poor job investigating the case. Not so much because she was an illegal migrant worker, but because they were so short staffed. Catalina had the misfortune to die when budgets were so tight that if cases weren’t solved within say a week, they were shuttled off to a file room and into oblivion.

  What police detectives did know was that Catalina had been raped before she was bludgeoned with a river rock and left for dead. They swabbed her vagina for semen and took scrapings of the skin caught under her red-painted fingernails. All was tagged as evidence. The detectives also noted how she had defensive wounds on her wrists from being pinned down. Her skull was fractured. Blunt-force trauma was the cause of death. Homicide was the manner of death.

  The Navarros knew Catalina. She was a g
irl from their village who had come to the United States with her family about a year after they did. She was just a kid then, of course, but even so, it was plain to see that Catalina Maria Sanchez was a true beauty in the making. Michael Navarro fixated on her. He pestered her over and over for a date, and finally, she said yes. He was giddy with excitement over the prospect of going out with her. He’d planned to take her to a nice place for dinner in Yakima and on a moonlight walk along the river. For the occasion, he bought a bottle of tequila and a brand-new shirt—pale blue fabric with mother-of-pearl buttons. It was western style, something that Michael knew Catalina had admired whenever she saw a ranch hand wearing that kind of garment.

  “Handsome cowboy,” she’d say. “Not a pretender, but a real one. That’s what I like.”

  It had rained hard the night of Catalina’s disappearance. Precipitation was scarce on the Eastern side of the Cascades in Washington state. Later, when he thought of what happened that night, Tavio Navarro would remember two things more than anything else. The sound of the rain hammering the tin roof of the migrant workers’ bunkhouse was almost like a lullaby, soothing him to sleep. It had never rained that hard in his life. So sudden. So much water. The other memory was the sound of Michael as he lay whimpering in the bed next to him.

  It was after 3 AM when Tavio went over to his younger brother to stop him from making that awful, annoying noise. When he stood next to Michael’s bed, Tavio noticed a series of muddy footprints from the door ending at the foot of the bed next to a heap of sopping clothes.

  “Shhh!” he said, tapping Michael on the shoulder.

  “Mistake,” the younger brother said, his voice falling into whimpered shards. “I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to.”

  Tavio leaned closer, as if the proximity would keep his brother from being so embarrassingly loud. “What mistake, Michael?” His eyes landed on a pair of parallel scratches across his brother’s cheek. “What happened? Did you get into an accident? You are hurt.”

  Michael, who up to that point seemed coiled into a ball, sat up. He did not want the others on the other side of the bunkhouse to hear. He motioned for Tavio to follow him to the small porch by the door.

  “Something bad happened, Tavio. It was an accident.”

  “Was it my car?” he asked referring to the old Chevy that he’d been driving for the past year.

  Michael shook his head, violently so. “No. No. Your car is fine.”

  “What then?”

  “Mi Catalina.”

  Tavio lowered his eyes and touched his mouth, signaling to his brother to be very, very quiet. “What about Catalina?” he asked in a whisper.

  “She . . .” Michael stood in the dank light of a soggy early morning and started to cry. It was not a soft cry, but a guttural sound that Tavio thought would wake up everyone in Yakima.

  “Stop!” he said, his voice growing louder than he’d wanted. “Do not cry! It cannot be so bad.”

  Michael started shaking. He no longer looked up at his brother. It seemed he didn’t want to face him at all. The words, like the rain, like muddy footprints, would never be forgotten.

  “You have to help me, Tavio. Catalina is dead. I killed her. I didn’t mean to. I am sorry. I thought she wanted me to make love to her.”

  Tavio’s eyes widened to such a degree that it seemed it was very possible that they would pop out and fall to the floor. “What are you saying, Michael?”

  “I’m saying the truth. I’m sorry. Do you want me to show you?”

  Tavio was stunned. “This has to be a mistake!”

  “No mistake. They will kill me. They will hang me. Cut off my head. Do something terrible. I did not mean to kill her. I loved her. You know that, right?”

  Tavio nodded. He would have thought so, but killing someone was too hard to forgive.

  “They will cut off my head,” Michael repeated.

  Tavio shook his head. “No. No they will not.”

  “There is no forgiveness in this country,” Michael said as he pulled on a dry pair of pants and a clean T-shirt.

  “Bring those clothes,” Tavio said, not even sure why. “Let’s go. Show me.”

  They drove mostly in silence. Tavio tried to get his brother to tell him exactly what had happened, but Michael was inconsolable by then. He managed to sputter out a few words as he directed Tavio to the turnoff by the river where he’d last seen Catalina. The ground was muddy and the sun had started to light the weeds with the morning light that would forever seem hideous instead of lovely.

  Catalina Sanchez was sprawled out next to the riverbank. Her beautiful dark hair swirled in the mud and her brown eyes gazed upward into nothingness.

  Tavio dropped to his knees and frantically began shaking her. It was a futile effort and he knew it. Her eyes confirmed what his brother had told him. She was dead.

  “Who saw you tonight?” Tavio asked.

  “Here?”

  “Anywhere. Yes, here. Yes, the restaurant.”

  Michael shook his head. “No one. We were alone.”

  “The restaurant! Who saw you there?”

  “We did not go to the restaurant. She brought tamales. She made. I think, I thought she liked me and wanted to be with me here.”

  “Tell me, are you sure no one saw you?”

  “No one. I know of no one.”

  “Good.” Tavio got up from the body and looked around. “We have to hide her.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if we should.”

  “Do you want your head cut off?”

  He shook his head. “No. But shouldn’t I just tell the police what happened?”

  Tavio looked down at the body. Catalina’s blouse was torn and her pretty blue and white skirt was pushed up in front. It was obvious what happened. The scratches on his brother’s face had made it so very clear. And yet, he had to ask one more time.

  “No. Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  Michael slumped on the hood of the car.

  “She let me kiss her. She did. She let me put my hand on her. She liked it. She did. She told me to keep going, to make love to her.”

  He stopped for a moment as a car, out of view, passed by on the main road.

  “What happened?”

  Michael looked away. “I don’t know. She didn’t seem to want me anymore. I told her it wasn’t good for me to get all excited and not make love to her, but she laughed at me. She said that she didn’t want me. She wanted some other guy. I tried to kiss her some more and she slapped me . . . laughing at me. I told her, ‘No, don’t laugh. I love you.’ But she kept laughing so I grabbed her and well . . .”

  “Did you rape her? Did you do that to her?” Tavio could scarcely believe that his brother could do such a thing to a woman, a girl. It was disgusting. Vile. Against everything that their parents had taught them.

  Michael locked eyes with his brother. “I didn’t rape her. I made love to her. She just got so mad at me. So embarrassed.”

  Tavio looked directly at the scratch marks on his brother’s face, but said nothing about them.

  “How did she die, Michael? What did you do to her to kill her?”

  “It was an accident. It was. I was making love to her and her head hit a rock and I didn’t know it. I thought she was just finally, you know, relaxing.”

  There was something insane about what Michael was saying, but Tavio saw no way out of it. He did not want his brother’s head cut off . . . or whatever they did in Washington.

  “Let’s hide her now.”

  Catalina weighed no more than ninety-five pounds, but her dead body felt like a ton. The Navarro brothers dragged her to the edge of the riverbank where there was a shallow pool—a place marked by candy wrappers and pop cans—where young kids liked to swim. The morning light had brightened considerably and anyone close by could easily see that they were not a couple of kids swimming, but two grown men and a dead girl. Tavio held her feet; Michael had hooked his hands under her armpits. Her head, at once
bloody and pale, hung limply from her slender neck. With each step, it swung, like a bell counting off the moment of her final good-bye.

  “I’m sorry, mi corazón,” Michael said.

  Tavio just looked at his brother with disbelieving eyes. The words meant nothing. He meant nothing just then. It was hollow. Empty. Just words to soothe his own guilty heart.

  Straddling the rocks, they waded out and gave the body a decisive shove, sending it down the lazy waters of the river to a place where someone would find it. Not soon, they hoped. But they didn’t want her to never be found. She was a girl from their village. She’d given up everything to start over in the United States.

  She’d given her life.

  Neither brother knew a thing about DNA right then. Later, they would wonder if the police who found her body would have thought to have taken a sample. If they did, would they somehow find Michael Navarro?

  And if they did find him, would they cut off his head?

  CHAPTER 11

  It was early the next afternoon, that time of day when nothing happens, the so-called dead shift. Snickers bar in hand from her trip to the employee vending machines, 911 dispatcher Luna Demetrio was barely in her chair when she picked the next call from the console that fed calls from all over Tacoma and Pierce County, one desperate caller at a time.

  LUNA: What’s your emergency?

  CALLER: I need to tell somebody something bad happened.

  LUNA: All right, sir. Can you tell me your name?

  CALLER: (muffled noise, no answer)

  LUNA: You there? I hear you breathing, are you all right?

  CALLER: I’m not going to give my name. I’m calling from a pay phone. I’m going to leave the second I’m done with you so don’t send someone.

  LUNA: I can barely hear you. Please speak louder. What’s your emergency?

  CALLER: I think, I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s a dead body by the river. I saw it.

  LUNA: What river?

  CALLER: I didn’t know we had more than one. The Puyallup. Off River Road. Over by the bridge there’s a gravel lot.