Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “I never talked to Ted,” Shane said, his eye on the road. “So I wouldn’t know for sure.”

  “You’ve profiled him. You know.”

  “When he found out that he was a bastard—his words, not mine—I expect it was an epic betrayal. He probably knew he wasn’t one of Johnnie Bundy’s kids—he didn’t look like them. He probably entered the room more than once when things fell silent. He knew that there was a secret about him.”

  “If he hated his mother so much,” Grace said, “maybe it was her that he was killing. Maybe everyone had it all wrong. Maybe it was his way to get Louise to pay for her lies.”

  “We’ll need to stop for gas,” Shane said, flipping on the turn indicator.

  “I’d like a pop, too,” she said.

  Shane took the next exit. “Back to what you were saying, babe. I get it. I can see his rage directed toward Louise, but I think it was toward all women. All the women in his life. He was selecting a kind of everywoman, to stand in for Louise, maybe his grandmother, his girlfriends. Remember, as much as we know about him we really can’t say for sure any of it is absolute.”

  “He was all contradictions,” she said. She was thinking about how Ted had professed a deep love for his grandfather—a man who some family members were all but certain was his actual father. In some ways, that kind of misplaced devotion fit the profile. But there was more to it. If there had been a genetic component to Ted’s aberrant behavior, it came from his grandfather. Family members talked about how Sam Cowell abused his wife, children, and even family pets.

  “Brain studies indicate a fundamental difference between sociopaths and normal brains,” Shane said.

  “I’ve done the same reading,” Grace said, her tone a little defensive. She regretted it the second the words passed her lips.

  Shane didn’t take the bait.

  “Sociopaths like Ted sometimes learn the behavior from a family member,” he said.

  “Sam literally pushed one of his daughters down a flight of stairs because she dared to oversleep,” Grace said. “Another said he swung a cat by its tail like a lariat.”

  Being a young woman in Tacoma had gotten decidedly more terrifying. Lisa Lancaster had been found butchered along the river. An unknown female’s remains had been uncovered along the beach. Emma Rose was missing. Farther south of the county, Olympia teenager Kelsey Caldwell’s name had been aligned with the missing girls cases, but that was more by the press than the genuine belief of law enforcement. She wasn’t a part of the Tacoma cases.

  That all changed one morning.

  “How did we miss this?” Grace said, studying the highlighted section of the autopsy report that Paul Bateman had planted in her hand the minute she’d sat at her desk.

  “A mistake,” he said, almost more of a question than an answer.

  “That Lisa had two left hands?”

  Paul didn’t say anything more. It was all there. The medical examiner’s report noted that there had been body parts from more than one victim recovered from the dump site along the Puyallup River. An assistant taking autopsy photos had been the first to discover what should have been patently obvious—that the hands that had been severed and recovered from the site were both lefties.

  “This is a colossal screwup,” Paul said, facial muscles tightening.

  Tissue samples had been analyzed and hand number one was a match for Lisa. The other, hand number two, was not a tissue or DNA match at all.

  “The hand’s size, overall condition, and traces of pale pink nail polish, indicate a female in her teens or early twenties. . . .”

  Grace’s blood was boiling too. “We’re going back,” she said.

  Paul nodded.

  “To the river,” she said.

  A half hour later, the two parked on the same dusty shoulder alongside River Road. The crime scene tape had been removed and rainfall had washed away the evidence of hundreds of footprints of the crime scene techs, coroner’s staff, and police detectives who’d been there when Lisa’s remains had been tagged and bagged.

  Grace walked over to the river’s edge. Paul finished up a call and followed.

  The river had swollen and sloshed over the thin shelf that served as its bank. A fisherman, unaware of the fact that they were police detectives or the grisly reason that had brought them there, paused and waved from the other side.

  “Thurston County is sending a sample of Dennis Caldwell’s DNA right now,” Paul said, getting off the phone. “No one is telling him, though. The detective there, Jonathan Stevens, knows how to keep his mouth shut. We don’t want this out.”

  “If it’s a match,” she said, “it’ll get out anyway. Probably sometime today.”

  She studied the bank and looked over humps of grass and Himalayan blackberry vines that rambled around the perimeter of the river.

  “The rest of Kelsey’s got to be around here,” she said, her eyes tracing the scene, inch by inch.

  “Maybe just that one part was ditched here,” Paul offered.

  Grace didn’t think so. She shook her head and started walking. “Ridgway and Bundy both dumped bodies in clusters. They went to places they knew would be undetected, places where they could go back.”

  “And defile the bodies,” he said.

  Grace nodded. “That, too. But I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about how they liked to relive the conquests, from the hunt to the kill. At the after-party.”

  “They really got off on it,” Paul said.

  It made her sick to her stomach, thinking of Ridgway and Bundy’s victims, their final moments. How even in death they’d been made to suffer the worst indignities that anyone could imagine. In fact, no normal person could even conjure up the activities that Ted had enjoyed with the dead girls.

  “Sick pieces of crap, those two,” she finally said, stopping and bending at her knees to get a closer look at a piece of paper that had attached itself to the damp earth. It was narrow and white, probably a receipt.

  “Let’s collect that,” she said, pointing to it with the tip of her shoe.

  Paul shrugged a little. “Wasn’t there when we processed the scene.”

  She looked at it and gave her head a slight shake. “Exactly. Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe he’s come back.”

  “I hate that you always call the unknown subject a he.”

  Grace shot Paul an irritated look. “Jesus. You’re going PC on me now? Fact is ninety-nine percent of these twisted pukes are male, Paul. No offense meant.”

  “Just kidding you,” he said, the smile falling from his face. “Don’t you laugh anymore?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t heard anything funny for a long time.”

  With that, she walked ahead, and Paul returned to the car to get the requisite supplies for collecting the receipt or anything else they might find. With each step on the nutrient-rich river soil, Grace Alexander thought about the kind of person who would come back to relive his murders. She knew that both Bundy and Ridgway had had sex with their victims post-homicide. Yates had emphatically denied that he had, as if that was some kind of an accolade he could give himself. There were differences detected in the clusters, too. Ridgway had posed his dead women. Bundy had admitted to moving his victims’ bodies, but never in a ritualistic manner.

  Again, as if there was a distinction between being merely a serial killer and being sick enough to pose a body in a provocative and shocking way.

  Kelsey Caldwell was out there. She just had to be.

  Unsurprisingly, Lifetime was not Grace Alexander’s go-to cable channel. She was more of an Investigation Discovery viewer. Yet when scrolling through the TV channel guide while she waited for Shane to get home, she noticed the umpteenth rerun of The Deliberate Stranger, the TV miniseries about Ted Bundy. She had watched the two-part series once with her mother, who hadn’t thought the facts were at odds with the truth. Or at least some TV writer’s version of the truth. One thing that had rankled Grace however, had been Sissy’s insisten
ce that Mark Harmon was too handsome to play Tacoma’s evilest native son.

  “Bundy was not that good looking,” Sissy had said when they’d watched the marathon of serial-killer TV movies one day, the pinnacle of which had been The Deliberate Stranger. “He wasn’t some ogre, I’ll give him that. They always tried to glamorize the bastard.”

  Grace cringed whenever her mother swore. It just didn’t seem to fit her personality. Her mother was tough, but gentle. She lived her life like she was from the South or England—tea in the afternoon, sandwiches with the crusts removed, pinochle games, and ladies’ auxiliary meetings. Not women’s, but ladies’. Grace knew the source of the bitterness that came from her mouth was because of the hurt of losing Tricia.

  The one she loved more than me.

  “Just a movie, Mom,” she said.

  “More than a movie,” Sissy said, snuggling next to Grace on the sofa that commanded most of the living room in their cozy house. “It is a reminder.”

  Grace thought about it. She was just a girl then, but she knew that she probably shouldn’t push too much even when she wanted to know more.

  “A reminder of what?” she asked anyway.

  Sissy looked at her, in that unblinking way that she did when she needed to prove a point. “That sometimes the bad guy gets away.”

  “But they caught him,” Grace said.

  Sissy didn’t blink. “They didn’t catch him for all that he’s done.”

  Grace was aware that her mom was writing to Ted at that time. She knew that she was trying to get the death row inmate to confess to his crimes—all of them, including the murder of her sister. It wasn’t that Grace wasn’t interested in what her mom was doing, but she really didn’t talk to her about the letters. At the time, talking to either of her parents about anything related to Tricia just made her feel so second place.

  “Mom,” she finally said, “maybe you’ll never, ever know.”

  Sissy O’Hare glanced away from the TV and held her daughter’s gaze.

  “That’s not acceptable,” she said, her eyes dampening a little. “I will never rest until I know. I need you to understand this. I need you to stand with me on this. We can’t ever rest until Ted Bundy has admitted to everything that he did to us. To your sister. To all of the people who were so unfortunate to have met him, talked to him, got into his car.”

  Grace just sat there. Her mom was obsessed. There was no doubt about it. What could she say to calm her?

  She swallowed. “I love you, Mom.” She put her hand on her mother’s and gripped it. “Stop. You’re scaring me.”

  “I love you, baby. And you should be scared. When the monster comes into your house he doesn’t ever leave. I need you to help me. I need you to take up the cause—if anything ever happens to me. You need to find out what happened to your sister.”

  Handsome Mark Harmon grinned on the TV screen. Mother and daughter sat in silence as the actor in tennis whites charmed a young woman. The woman was a brunette, slender, and very, very pretty.

  “Don’t go with him,” Sissy said to the screen. She squeezed Grace’s hand, pulsing it a little so as not to put a full-on hand lock.

  “She can’t help it,” Grace said. “She doesn’t know what kind of person he is.”

  “That’s right,” Sissy said, now turning back to her daughter. “Remember that. Remember that no one who knew him could believe he was so heinous. He looks like he couldn’t hurt a fly, but he’s worse than a spider. Spinning, spinning, spinning.”

  Her mother’s statement was a warning, but it also carried a challenge. Was stopping Ted Bundy something that she could do? Or if not Ted, could she stop another killer?

  Whenever she looked back on watching The Deliberate Stranger with her mom, Grace could see why she became a detective. It wasn’t so much for her sister, it was for her mother. It was for all the mothers out there curled up and crying at some stupid movie that reminded them of the baby someone had taken.

  In the days before Trivial Pursuit, Sissy O’Hare had created homemade flash cards to teach her daughter both the mundane and shocking facts about the man she was sure had murdered her beloved Tricia. Later, when Grace thought of it, she wondered if her mother’s obsession was almost a form of child abuse—even though her mother’s intentions had never been evil. She only wanted her daughter to understand as much as she could.

  The devil is always in the details, she could say.

  Yes, the details.

  Grace had found the index cards tucked away in a plastic sandwich container years ago when she was sorting things for the Goodwill after her father died. She was in the garage, where she had placed a piece of plywood atop two sawhorses. On one end were the boxes of clothing that were to be given away. She pondered over a few of the items as the memories associated with a particular garment came back to her. A dress she’d worn to a job interview at Nordstrom when she was in high school. She’d gotten the job, and immediately found that liked it—but not for the reasons that many her age assumed, the generous discount on new clothing. The girls she worked with were studying fashion merchandising and were giddy when the newest arrivals came in from New York. She mirrored their own enthusiasm, in the way that people do so as not to ruin a moment of joy for another. Yet their ambitions and desires seemed so inconsequential. A pair of white pants made her grimace. White pants were never a good idea.

  Never.

  Carefully, as if she didn’t want to spill its contents, Grace opened the sandwich container and took out the first three-by-five card, its edges no longer crisp, but soft and fuzzy from wear.

  She had held those cards so many times.

  Written in her mother’s handwriting:

  What is Ted Bundy’s favorite novel?

  She didn’t have to flip it over to see the answer. It was emblazoned on her brain.

  “Treasure Island,” she said softly, as though she didn’t want anyone to hear.

  She remembered how she’d despised that book, not because it was a boy’s book—the reason her friends hadn’t liked it—but because it was Ted’s book. She hated everything about him; everything that brought him joy, or sadness, brought her the opposite emotions.

  Grace set it down and looked at the next card. She recalled sitting at the big kitchen table, her mother facing her with her sweet but steely eyes, urging her to get it right.

  What was the make of Ted’s family’s car in Tacoma (the car he was embarrassed to be seen in)?

  That one was easy. Her father always pointed them out on the rare occasion when one was on the roadway, once when he’d been scavenging for parts at a junkyard and she’d accompanied him there. The answer was a Nash Rambler.

  So many of Grace’s own memories were blended with Ted’s life that sometimes it was hard to separate her own from what she’d been taught about the serial killer by her parents. She turned the cards over one by one and flipped through the answers.

  By age ten he was dragging girls to the woods to urinate on them.

  He was a Cub Scout.

  He stole ski equipment in high school.

  None of his teenage friends ever visited his bedroom in the basement of his childhood home.

  He hated the way Tacoma smelled.

  Grace smiled at that one. Who, but the owners of the smelter that gave Tacoma a nose-plugging reputation, didn’t hate the stink, the so-called aroma of Tacoma?

  She looked back down at the cards.

  He picked through garbage cans in search of porn.

  He was jealous of his cousins because they had a piano in their home.

  He never bonded with his stepfather—refusing to call him Dad.

  Grace knew all of those things and more. She probably knew Ted better than he knew himself. She knew every tragic, disgusting, disturbing detail of his life. She knew how he’d come into the world as an imposter, something less than a human being. She knew how cunning he could be when it came to winning over the sympathy of a pretty young girl. She knew that he
understood that as a perceived weakness, like an arm in a sling, was a far better approach than the thuggish behavior of wrestling a woman down in broad daylight. Later, that lesson would be forgotten as his rage escalated into a frenzied rampage at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida.

  The next index card was about Chi Omega, the location of the second to the last gasp of Ted Bundy’s toxic life.

  Grace ran her fingertip over the image of an owl, the mascot for the sorority on the card. She’d researched the sorority at the Tacoma Public Library. She decided that if she were ever going to pledge, it would be to Chi-O. She’d drawn the owl on the card, not to cheat or remind her with an obvious clue. She was only a girl then. She drew the owl because she liked the bird. Nothing deeper. Nothing that drilled down into anything more than just that. She thought about how her mother had let her paint a big mural behind her bed, the gnarly branches of a maple tree with four owls against a daisy yellow moon. A brief smile came to her lips, but it passed the instant she flipped over the card. The answer printed, again in Sissy’s controlled penmanship:

  Fifteen minutes.

  Just fifteen minutes. Grace knew that was the length of time it had taken for Ted Bundy to slip into the sorority house in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978 and molest and rape and murder. He used a wooden club, something that he’d found en route. It wasn’t planned and it was beyond risky. Four sorority sisters had been beaten, two of them had died. Survivors said that Bundy had worn panty hose over his face to disguise his appearance.

  Only nine hundred seconds. That’s all he’d needed.