Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  Officer Lorenzo took a few more notes about Emma’s height and weight, and asked for a picture. Diana got up to get one off the bulletin board in the kitchen.

  “We can’t report her as missing until she’s been gone for twenty-four hours,” he said.

  Dan looked at his watch, an old Seiko that had belonged to his father. “Well, as far as we know, that’s in two hours. She closed up the Lakewood Mall Starbucks last night. She gets off between nine and ten, depending on how much cleaning is needed after a day of coffee drinkers.”

  Diana returned and handed over a five-by-seven.

  “Her senior photo,” she said.

  Officer Lorenzo looked at the photo and then looked up quickly. He didn’t want to say what he was thinking, so he said something else.

  “She looks like a very nice girl,” he said.

  “She is. Very nice,” Dan answered.

  “She’s everything to us. She would never not come home. She would never not call us. Never,” Diana said.

  The officer got up, still looking at the photo.

  He didn’t know Emma Rose, of course. But he’d seen her face before. The nineteen-year-old was a ringer for Lisa Lancaster and Kelsey Caldwell. All three wore their dark hair long, parted in the middle. Kelsey’s was slightly wavy, but her mom said she’d taken a flatiron to it over the past year to give her the long, straight look that she’d sought. It was very, very seventies, which in turn, was very, very cool.

  “I’m going to make a run over to Starbucks to see what I can find out,” he said. “It will be close to nine when I get back to the department. When I do, I’ll make the report. One of our detectives will get with you for a more detailed follow-up.”

  Diana, so wrapped up in her deepening worry, didn’t get the change in mood just then, but Dan did. There had been a seismic shift. If the officer with the kind manner had been calm and professional when he first arrived, he no longer seemed quite so composed. There was something about the photograph that seemed to change everything.

  Smaller bones likely meant—though he was inexperienced and unsure—an easier go of it in the basement when he went about the business of butchering her. Butchering her, by the way, was as far as he would ever go.

  The idea of sex with a corpse sickened him. The idea of visiting human remains in the woods of the Pacific Northwest was wholly unappealing. This wasn’t about some psycho sexual conquest, but about control and technique.

  He wanted to take what had been done before and improve it. As if he was revising code on a slow-moving, jagged-looking computer game. That was cool. It was about the cool factor and the fame that came with being the best, being better than his father, a man he had never even met, but one he’d admired and fantasized about from the time his mother told him the truth. He’d been cheated a little and he knew it. Other serial killers had unwittingly or purposefully involved their family members. When he read about Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s proclivity for bringing his little boy while hunting prostitutes along the SeaTac strip, he felt a pang of jealousy. He’d never had that time with his dad.

  That had been taken from him when he was but a child and his father was strapped into Florida’s Old Sparky. The flip was switched. Human flesh burned and his dad was electrocuted to death. That moment, as much as anything, set things in motion. Not right away, of course. He was a sleeper cell and it was that night on the Pacific Lutheran University campus, he was awakened.

  The dark-haired girl with the pretty eyes had done that. She was a shot of adrenaline. She was just like the others.

  The day after Kelsey Caldwell’s father called the Thurston County detective with the suspicion that his daughter’s case might have a connection to Lisa Lancaster’s disappearance, detectives from the Tacoma Police Department and the Pierce and Thurston County Sheriff’s Offices conferenced by phone. Grace and Paul were among those on the call, a brief one to make sure that all were aware of the purported similarities in the two cases. After a number of serial cases had gone undetected in the Northwest for a number of years, no law enforcement professionals wanted the blood of future victims on their hands. Most of the connecting of dots among the counties along Puget Sound yielded nothing more than increased awareness. The chances that a true serial was at work were slim to none.

  Serial killers, or rather the proliferation of them, was a kind of Hollywood invention. There just weren’t that many. And yet, in reality, the gloomy Pacific Northwest had had more than its share of famous cases. To many crime aficionados, the Northwest was serial-killer central. Seemingly mild-mannered Spokane resident and military man Robert Lee Yates had killed sixteen women, all prostitutes, in a two-year string that started in 1996. Gary Leon Ridgway was granddaddy of them all, at least in terms of confirmed victim count. The dull-witted truck painter, like Yates, also hunted and murdered prostitutes—a common prey among those who kill for sport. While the Seattle man was eventually convicted of killing forty-nine, he confessed to almost a hundred victims in total. There was no real diabolical brilliance displayed by Yates or Ridgway, yet they managed to elude capture for a number of years because of the victims they selected, girls and women on the fringes trying to survive by selling the only thing they felt they could offer—their bodies.

  Of course, the most infamous of all serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, and possibly in the entire world, was Tacoma’s own dark son, Theodore Robert Bundy. While most serial killers were stuck with the perpetual and requisite use of their entire formal names, Tacoma’s killer was simply known as Ted.

  Grace’s connection to Ted was deep and personal, and until her sister’s case was resolved, she knew it always would be.

  The Tacoma detective shut out the world around her and put her laser-like focus on the electronic case files of the two missing girls on her computer screen. Lisa’s had been a missing persons case, initiated by Detective Goodman. It also included updates from the interviews she and Paul conducted with her mother and best friend. Next, she turned her attention to Kelsey’s file, a more detailed accounting of the seventeen-year-old’s sudden absence from the planet. While Grace could see similarities in their physical descriptions—serial killers frequently stalk a specific type—there was something else that jumped out at her. Something she was sure was merely a coincidence.

  The circumstances of the girls’ abductions were more than familiar. They mirrored what Ted Bundy had done when he took a Washington girl and a girl from Colorado.

  Grace put it out of her mind.

  Or rather she tried to.

  Grace felt that saying much more about it would only serve to bolster her reputation for being obsessed with Ted Bundy. One time when she was in the bathroom, she’d heard a couple of other women, a records clerk and a lab assistant, talking about her.

  “I think she’s kind of weird,” the records clerk said.

  “I don’t know,” the lab assistant said. “I guess she seems nice enough.”

  “I read her file. You want to know what’s in it?”

  “You aren’t supposed to disclose that stuff.”

  “We work here. It’s all right for us to share. We’re not supposed to tell anyone outside. It’s okay to talk about stuff here because we’re all, you know, working together.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Really kind of interesting.”

  “Okay. I guess you can tell me,” the lab assistant said, lowering her voice.

  “Now you’re making me feel bad.”

  A long, seemingly, exasperated pause followed before the lab assistant gave up. “Just tell me.”

  “Fine,” said the records clerk. “Says that she had to be evaluated by the shrink twice because of her sister’s disappearance. They’ve cleared her. No reprimands. But they told her to stay out of the Ted Bundy files. I read her files. Interesting and disgusting stuff. Anyway, there is a lot of crap in there about how her mom, Sissy O’Hare, kept pestering our guys here back then. She was sure that her daught
er was a Ted victim. Never proved it. Maybe she was. Grace was digging around trying to see if they missed any clues.”

  “I guess I could understand why she’d do that. You know, why she’d want to know.”

  “Don’t you think it’s creepy?” the records clerk said.

  “Probably. But really, you shouldn’t look in her personnel files.”

  “I have clearance. I’m very responsible. I’ve never told anyone what I’ve seen. I would never, ever breach my duty to be confidential.”

  Grace waited for the women to leave. She didn’t report them. To do so, she’d felt, would only make matters worse. She believed her background was an asset, one that made her a more effective investigator and victim interviewer. She could connect with anyone who’d felt his brand of incompressible and evil influence in the trajectory of their lives.

  After reading the Lancaster and Caldwell files, she needed a moment.

  “Paul,” she said standing behind him as he finished a phone call in his cubicle adjacent to hers.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m heading out early. Hold down the fort, will you?”

  Paul nodded. He’d seen that look before.

  “Anything new on the bones?” he asked.

  Grace pulled her coat from the hook next to her chair and shook her head.

  “Not yet,” she said, heading out the door. “Might take a while. If anything, I’m patient.”

  PART TWO

  PEACE, TED

  “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”

  —TED BUNDY

  CHAPTER 14

  Grace Alexander had read every book written on Ted Bundy. In fact, true-crime author Ann Rule’s famous account of her friendship with Ted, The Stranger Beside Me, had been required reading when she was growing up in the family’s white and gray Craftsman home in North Tacoma. It sat on the shelf alongside first editions of Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The novels were genuine and undisputed classics, of course. Grace’s mother, Sissy, insisted that Rule’s book was on par with those famous tomes.

  “A story like Bundy’s deserved the ring of truth,” she’d said one night when Grace was eleven and reading the book for the first time. “Stranger is a choir bell.”

  Later, Grace wondered about a mother who would have her not only read such a book, but discuss it as if they were having a chardonnay and Brie book club meeting.

  What do you think motivated Ted to lie about things that weren’t even important?

  Do you think Ted has any feelings whatsoever?

  What kind of a mother was Louise Bundy?

  Grace had immersed herself in Ted’s life. Given the circumstances of her birth, had there ever been another path to follow? It had all been ordained by heartbroken parents, who had lost their oldest daughter, their firstborn, to a phantom.

  Grace knew how Ted had been born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, in November of 1946. His mother’s Christian name was Eleanor Louise Cowell—though later she was known only as Louise. Grace imagined what it might have been like for a young woman finding herself pregnant. Louise more than likely lied on the birth certificate that Theodore Robert was the son of an airman named Lloyd Marshall. While no one from her family ever gave voice to the rumors, some suspected that the pregnancy was darker than a mere casual relationship between a young woman and a serviceman.

  Grace’s feelings regarding Louise were like wipers, moving back and forth over an oily windshield. Louise hadn’t set out to give birth to a monster. No mother does. Sometimes Grace felt sorry for her; other times, mostly because of her mother’s stories, she hated Louise. She had a vivid recollection of the time her mother actually confronted Louise when they were out shopping. Grace was eleven at the time. Louise, dressed in a plain cotton shirtdress and shoes that were so sensible they could easily have been worn to work on a factory floor, was shopping in the linens department of the Bon Marché at the Tacoma Mall. Sissy, looking for a wedding gift and dragging Grace along, spotted Ted’s mother from a table of marked-down china.

  “Stay close,” she said. She set down the oh-so-slightly chipped platter, and walked over.

  Louise’s eyes fluttered a little, but she offered no indication that she knew Sissy.

  “I know who you are,” Sissy said.

  “Excuse me?” Louise answered without really even looking up. Ted’s mother ran her fingertips over a piece of the fabric exposed through a small slit in its plastic wrapping.

  Grace’s mother reached over and touched Louise’s hand.

  She was trembling a little.

  When their eyes finally met, Sissy saw something that she hadn’t expected to see.

  Fear and recognition.

  “I know who you are, too,” Louise said, finally and softly. “I know what you believe and I know in my heart that nothing I can say would make a bit of difference to you.”

  Sissy O’Hare’s heart rate had accelerated by then. She had seen the picture of Louise on the night of Ted’s execution, the phone pressed to her ear, around her the simple furnishings of a hardworking couple’s life.

  “Do you know anything about my daughter?” she said.

  Louise tightened her grip on her purse and stepped back a little. She kept her eyes fastened on Sissy.

  “I know what it’s like to lose a child,” Louise said, her voice a slight croak. “If I could ease any mother’s pain, I would.”

  Sissy, who had imagined all sorts of scenarios had she ever had a moment alone with Ted’s mother, hadn’t expected that she would feel pity. She told Grace that’s just what happened. While it spun through her mind to shoot back a cold remark about how Louise couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have her child missing or murdered by a monster, Louise had experienced a profound loss, too.

  “I imagine that you and your family have suffered a great deal, too,” Sissy said, finally, and not without compassion in her heart.

  A salesclerk interrupted the conversation.

  “Can I help you two find anything?” she asked.

  Both women shook their heads. Louise loosened her grip on the sheet set and put it back on the shelf. There was an irony to the younger woman’s question, of course. Both women had needed help in finding answers—Sissy, for the identity of the killer; Louise, for the reason her beautiful boy had turned into the worst kind of evil.

  And yet, as her mother replayed that encounter with Grace when she was a little older, it was clear that she didn’t hold Louise responsible. Grace was in the middle of a social studies course at school that introduced the nature versus nurture debate.

  “We don’t know everything about what makes a person evil,” Sissy said.

  “That’s only partially true, Mom,” she said.

  “If you’re thinking that Ted’s mother is a factor in what he ended up doing later in life, I think you’re overstating things.”

  “She abandoned him when he was a baby, Mom.”

  Sissy nodded. “Yes, but she went back for him. She didn’t leave him at the home. She loved him enough to bring him home.”

  Grace pressed her mother. “She led him to believe that he was her brother.”

  “Those were the times, Grace.”

  “He never knew who his father was. His family had wrapped up his entire young life in lie after lie.”

  Sissy knew where her daughter was going, and she knew that she was probably right. And yet, she debated her right then. Grace was smart, tenacious, and well equipped to do what Sissy wanted her to do above everything else. She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t. She didn’t want Grace to think that her own environment, her own upbringing in the shadow of Tricia’s murder, was artificial. The love between them was genuine.

  Louise Bundy may have given birth to a monster, and she’d certainly played a role in the miserable trajectory of his life, b
ut not all of it was her doing. Grace and her mother parted company on that. Sissy felt that there was such a thing as “a bad seed” and that Ted had been evil from the outset.

  One time when Grace was a teen, a story about a young woman who grew into adulthood not knowing that her grandfather was in fact her father appeared on a TV talk show. The young woman had lived a life of crime, unable to resolve just why it was that everything she touched turned ugly.

  “She was born evil,” Sissy said as mother and daughter pulled weeds from a garden bed under a beloved pear tree.

  “Maybe she was bad because her mother hated her?”

  Sissy stopped what she was doing.

  “You mean, her mother’s hidden feelings were not so hidden? Is that what you are saying?”

  Grace dropped a dandelion into an old galvanized bucket. “Think about it, Mom. If she was treated like she was garbage, like she was vile, maybe she would grow up to be that way.”

  “A self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe?”

  “I guess it might be. Maybe we can never understand what makes people do the ugly things they do. We try, though. Don’t we?”

  It wasn’t the greatest mystery in the annals of crime, but it was one that Grace pondered over and over as she tried to understand the man who would have such an influence on her life. Ted was an obsession, one that had been passed on through her own personal history and the desires of her own mother. They kept coming back to this: Who was Theodore Robert Cowell, Ted Bundy? Really? Was he the son of an Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall? A sailor named Jack Worthington? Both were names that Ted’s mother had ascribed to the man who’d made her pregnant. Over the years, the Cowells suggested that Ted was the result of incest between Louise and her father, Sam.

  “He hated his mother for doing that to him,” Grace had said once, revisiting a familiar conversation with Shane when they took a drive to the peninsula to visit friends. It was summer, hot, dry. It was the kind of day that would bring out young women in bathing suits and predators on the hunt for them. Somewhere. Anywhere. There was always someone on the hunt. Those days often evoked Ted.