The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

Her phone vibrated and she looked down.

  “Mom calling. Did I tell you she came to see me today?”

  Shane shook his head. “Take the call. She needs you.”

  Grace wanted to say something about how she needed him right then, but she didn’t. She picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Mom, just talking about you . . .”

  * * *

  After hanging up the phone, Sissy O’Hare looked out her kitchen window at the same view she’d seen in the O’Hares’ backyard since she and her husband, Conner, bought the house shortly after Tricia was born. The pregnancy had been a difficult one and doctors told her she should not have any more children. The house was for Tricia, a place to spoil an only child. A swing. A kiddie pool. A patio for riding her tricycle. Sissy held those memories and turned on the water. Steam rose and she squirted dish soap into the water. The pear tree on the far side of the yard was no longer producing decent fruit, but it was too pretty during its spring bloom to cut down. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering. Tricia had begged to be pushed skyward there, higher and higher. Grace, too. The branch where Conner had strung a swing had broken off in a storm and a massive burl had formed, a gnarled hump of healed wood. As she looked out that window, she wondered about the bones that were being pored over by the scientists in the lab in Olympia. She wondered if her little girl had been found. As the tap water filled the sink and a billowy cloud of suds heaped over the water’s surface, Sissy knew her firstborn was dead. She’d known so for decades. Yet in that moment, she half prayed that the bones were not Tricia’s. If they were, it would really be over. Final. There would be no little drop of hope that Tricia had run away and started a new life somewhere. Tears came to her eyes. She turned off the water.

  Mother and daughter had argued that last day. It was a silly argument, one that Sissy was all but certain had not been the cause of whatever it was that had happened to her. It was so silly, yet so painful; she’d never told Conner or the police about it.

  “That top, honey,” she had said, “makes you look like a streetwalker.”

  “Everyone is wearing them,” Tricia answered.

  The top in question showed a four-inch band of skin on her midriff.

  “March yourself into the bedroom and get yourself something decent. I don’t want your father to see you looking like that.”

  “I hate you, Mom. You’re always telling me what to do.”

  “I love you, Tricia, that’s why. Now, go.”

  She expected Tricia to come back into the kitchen wearing a more sensible top and give her a hug before she left. She didn’t. She slipped out the front door.

  Sissy never saw her again.

  CHAPTER 7

  For most of Grace’s life, Tricia’s room had been off-limits. She was able to go inside only when her mother and father allowed her to do so. That was once a year, when the family would gather to observe the anniversary of Tricia’s birthday. When she looked back on it later in life, she could envision that the entire bedroom was but a shadowbox of her phantom sister’s life. Her high school diploma was framed above a desk. On top of the desk were miscellaneous papers—a letter, a drawing of a cat, and other things that were so mundane that even though Grace had never known Tricia, she was sure that those things would have been thrown in the trash. They were not keepsakes at all. There were some items that truly were—her Bible, a desiccated corsage from her senior prom. The rose was no longer red, but black and brown, with petals that clung to the stem with fragility.

  Her sister’s room was the larger of the two secondary bedrooms. When she was younger, Grace had resented how even in death, Tricia would always trump her for everything—a larger bedroom, a closer relationship with her parents, even a dog. When Grace was five, the family poodle, Mirabelle, succumbed to cancer at sixteen. Mirabelle had always been known as Tricia’s dog, a trusted companion, a possible witness to whatever had happened the night of her disappearance. Grace cried a fountain after the dog died, and begged for another puppy. Her parents said no. It had been too hard to say good-bye to Mirabelle.

  Tricia’s beloved dog would be the only pet the family would have.

  A photo of Tricia taken when she was fifteen, her mouth a train track of braces, Mirabelle at her side, hung above the desk.

  Grace’s teeth were crooked, too. Yet her parents didn’t get her the benefit of orthodontics. Tricia, she had everything.

  And yet whenever she snuck into the bedroom and sat on the bed, Grace wondered how it was that for all the reasons she could conjure about why she could hate her sister, she didn’t. Instead, she felt the kind of aching loss that her parents did. Why, she asked herself over and over, did Tricia have to die? She couldn’t compete with a dead sister and she didn’t really want to. She simply wanted to know the same things that her parents agonized over.

  Who had taken her? Why hadn’t she been found? Was she still alive?

  It didn’t take a radio shrink to figure out the genesis of Grace’s interest in a career in law enforcement. She’d grown up inside a family subsisting on tragedy and anger. She’d seen her mother stuff envelopes for a crime victims’ group, her father drink until he could no longer walk. She’d heard the arguments that ran from the darkness of night to the first splinter of morning light.

  “If you’d loved her more, she wouldn’t have left us.”

  It was her mother’s voice, accusing and cuttingly cruel.

  “Sissy, you’re out of line and you know it.”

  Her dad, sober for once, had a point. Grace knew it, even as a teenager. Her sister’s disappearance was the fault of no one—other than the perpetrator—and her mother’s anger was completely unfair. Her sister’s vanishing had been random. She’d been a type of girl—pretty, slender, fine-featured, dark haired—that had been favored by a potential serial killer, one who’d never had the kind of name recognition that Tacoma’s most infamous son, Ted Bundy, enjoyed once he was finally arrested for a string of murders. Investigators had tried to link Tricia’s case and the disappearance of another Tacoma girl, Susie Sherman, to Bundy, but there was no real connection—at least none that anyone could find. After Bundy was arrested in Florida and the spotlight once more shined on potential crimes he might have committed, investigators took another run at trying to make a case that he’d been the perpetrator.

  The Tacoma News Tribune ran a story about the possibility with the headline: DID TED KILL TWO TACOMA GIRLS?

  The article indicated the similarities among Ted’s murders in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah and how the Sherman and O’Hare cases might have fit into the time line. Ted had been in the area off and on, but a gas receipt in Ellensburg on the other side of the Cascades at the time of Susie’s disappearance put her case in doubt. Ted, had, in fact, been in Tacoma visiting family when Tricia disappeared. That didn’t mean anyone had a shred of evidence, but a shred wasn’t needed when it came to what many saw as the country’s most prolific serial killer. Ted was always good for speculation. He was kind of the spaghetti serial killer—attribute a case to his name, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks.

  “Look, we’re not saying he killed every girl who ever died in the Pacific Northwest,” a Tacoma PD detective said in the news article, “but only a fool would ignore the distinct possibility that he could have been a particular killer. After all, the guy really got around.”

  The statement was made in 1974, what cops and crime writers later called the “Summer of Ted.” That was before Theodore Robert Bundy was Ted Bundy, of course. He was simply an almost mythological man with a bright white smile, a gimpy arm in a sling, and a metallic VW bug. After the hysteria swung into full gear when two young women vanished on the same day, there wasn’t a sorority girl with long, dark hair, parted in the middle who wasn’t halfway certain that she had encountered Ted somewhere during that time. And, if a girl didn’t actually have a Ted sighting of her own, there was always a friend who’d escaped being his victim.

 
Whoever Ted was. Wherever he was. He was like a handsome boogey man. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He was, many thought even at the time, a legend in the making.

  Not long after Grace met Shane they went for a long walk along Ruston Way, a stretch of restaurants and beachfront park along Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. It hadn’t really been love at first sight when they’d met at the University of Washington. He was dark, handsome, and had the kind of disarming smile that put everyone at ease. He was tall, too. In fact, more than a foot taller than she, which was a huge relief. Although she’d always planned a career in law enforcement, she still wanted a life that included heels. During that walk after dinner, Grace truly opened up the first time about her sister’s death and its impact on her life.

  “She died before you were born, but you still mourn her,” he said, as they took a place on a bench. A group of teenagers roughhoused nearby and a continual parade of couples, just like them, strolled by.

  “It is hard to explain, but it really isn’t mourning. Sure, sometimes I’m sad about Tricia, but most times she just casts a big shadow,” Grace said. “Remember that case where a couple had a baby because their older daughter had leukemia and there was no donor?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “They needed a match for her bone marrow and they decided to take a chance and have another child.” He put his arm around her and said, “Just in case.” It wasn’t supposed to be a sexy move, just a kind of reassuring gesture from someone who cared about her. Grace could feel it.

  “Right,” she said. “Just in case. And, you know that it worked. The little girl was a match.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Grace,” he said, after a pause.

  “I’m not saying it is exactly the same thing, but I grew up knowing that I was a kind of replacement for Tricia. Don’t get me wrong, I know my parents loved me. But they just missed her so much, loved her so much, that I was there to fill the void. You know, like a family sometimes rushes out and gets a new cat the day after their cat is run over.”

  Shane looked off at the water, thinking.

  “That’s a little severe, Grace.”

  “Maybe, but that’s how I felt. It was always Tricia this, Tricia that. Do you know that Tricia and I wore the same outfit to our first day of school? It was a pink sweater with a poodle appliqué. I thought it was cool because it matched Mirabelle. I didn’t even know it was the same sweater until years later when I was going through an album tucked away in the basement.”

  “Okay, I’ll grant you that is a little creepy,” he said.

  “That’s not all. I mean, I could tell you stories all night about what it was like being the sister of a dead girl. Even though she was gone and had been gone before I was even born, there was never a time when her name didn’t bring my dad to tears. There never was a time when I didn’t feel that they wanted her so much that if there was a knock on the door from someone with a potion or promise that could bring her back and the only caveat would be that I was to be traded for her, they would have done so without so much as a thought.”

  Grace held Shane’s gaze for a while. She could see trust, understanding in his eyes. Yet she was unsure how much she could really say. She had never been abused or anything like that; she understood that a parent’s loss was undoubtedly greater than whatever anyone could imagine unless they’d been there themselves. As she grew older she could see a haunted look in the eyes of those who had suffered great loss. When she was a small girl, her parents hosted a support group for mothers and fathers of murdered children. Her mom had her serve cookies at many of the meetings and she could feel the longing stares coming from the club members as they watched her move from the kitchen to the living room, where a semicircle of chairs had been set up.

  “How old is your little girl?”

  “Nine,” her father said.

  “My Tracy would be about her age now.”

  “My Danny would be driving a car.”

  “Paula would be married by now.”

  It was always that way. The parents talking about their loss in terms of what their children would be doing at that very moment had they survived their killers. Yet, like Tricia, the reality was that they were frozen in time. Forever stuck. Just like the pictures that hung in all the sad little bedrooms of those kids who never came home—always there, as if waiting for the inevitable and relentless tears of those who mourned them.

  CHAPTER 8

  Emma Rose set out a pair of black pants, a white cotton blouse, a SAVE THE SOUND T-shirt, a black sweater, and a pair of black heels. She was short and no matter what the occasion, heels were always in order. Even for work at the Starbucks adjacent to the Lakewood Towne Center, just outside Tacoma. Starbucks dress code was much more relaxed than her clothes indicated, but Emma was the kind of girl who liked buying her work attire at Target in batches of threes. It just made everything easier not to worry about what she was going to wear when working. There was no disputing that she was a creature of habit. Never late. Always ate at the same place—on a bench in the parking lot in front of the coffee place. Emma always wore her long, dark hair the same way too—parted in the middle and held in the back with a loose clip.

  She worked with Oliver Angstrom until just after nine.

  “Do you hate this place as much as I do?” she asked as they wiped down the counter space and loaded the dishwasher for the last cycle of the night.

  Oliver, a twenty-five-year-old in search of a publisher for a graphic novel about the end of the world, looked up. “I don’t even like coffee,” he said.

  “I used to. Now the smell of it makes me sick,” she said. “I don’t know which I hate more—the people who come in here or the coffee.”

  “Tell me about it. I think that fat guy that sat over there,” Oliver said, pointing across the room to a leather lounge chair under the plasma screen that touted the supposedly hip music that provided atmosphere all day long, “was actually watching porn with his hand in his pants.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Emma said, clearly disgusted.

  Oliver nodded. “No lie. No one complained, though. Everyone who comes in here is too self-absorbed to pay attention to what anyone else is doing.”

  “Coffee-drinking Facebookers!” Emma said, with mock outrage. “Why don’t they just go home to do their social networking?”

  Oliver nodded in agreement. Emma was right. Over the past couple of years Starbucks had changed from a place where people breezed in, got a latte, and left for work. Oliver theorized that the declining economy was an invitation for whole groups of patrons who didn’t have anywhere to go. No rush to get anywhere. Now people planted themselves at a table and Facebooked. Sometimes they didn’t even buy a drink, which totally sucked in a business plan built on making people think they could sit and visit, when really turnover was needed.

  “What did you think of the woman who bitched that her quadruple-pumped caramel macchiato didn’t have enough syrup in it?”

  “Gag me, is what I thought,” Emma said.

  Oliver laughed. “Or the dude who spilled his mocha and told us it was all our fault.”

  “Like we were going to argue with him, even though I saw the whole thing, too.” Emma stood across the counter and surveyed the scene. She liked Oliver, but she could feel what was coming next. Some girls have a kind of sixth sense about when a guy is going to hit on them. Emma did.

  “You want to hang out some time?” Oliver asked. It was a question that he’d wanted to ask for weeks, but until that moment he just hadn’t had the nerve. He’d even asked his manager what he ought to do and she’d told him to go for it. He stopped what he was doing and looked over at her.

  She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. Oliver wasn’t bad looking. He had a lean build, nice features, dark, expressive eyes magnified through horn-rimmed lenses. So the physical side wasn’t bad. Neither was his personality. One thing bugged her, however, and she couldn’t get past it. He was a video game developer and graphic n
ovel geek who lived at home with his mom and splurged once a year for a trip to Comic-Con. She lived in the real world—and she wanted to fix it. The T-shirt she wore under her work blouse said it all.

  She wasn’t really interested, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. Emma Rose simply didn’t want to live in the world of geekdom. She didn’t even want to visit it. Oliver was too, too into it. He’d once brought everyone out one at a time to look at his latest purchase in the trunk of his car.

  “What is it?” Emma had asked. “Looks like a lamp.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Oliver had looked at her like she didn’t know what day it was.

  “Er, no,” she’d said. “Not shitting you at all.”

  “This is a lamp used on the set of the Green Lantern movie.”

  “Oh,” she’d said, looking at the ordinary desk lamp with some feigned interest. “I heard that movie got terrible reviews.”

  “It wasn’t a masterpiece, but this is genuine movie history. Got it online. Paid a lot for it.”

  As she played that memory over in her head, she tried to find the right words to let him down easy. A lie seemed to be the best course of action.

  “I’m seeing someone,” she said.

  Oliver nodded, his face turning pink with embarrassment. Right then he wanted to kill the manager who had told him to go for it. Some great advice.

  “Oh,” he said, looking down. “I didn’t know.”

  Emma didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings. “It’s kind of new,” she said quickly. “He lives in Seattle. Goes to the U.”

  “Cool,” he said, lying through his teeth. He watched Emma as she went to fetch her coat.

  “Yeah, don’t know where it’s going. I mean, I know it isn’t serious, but it is kind of new and I want to focus on hanging out with him.”

  Oliver finished what he was doing and he gave the restaurant one last once-over. It was clean, ordered, and, he thought, perfectly bland. Just right for the customers who started the next day’s shift. He dimmed the lights and the pair exited. Emma went toward the bus stop and Oliver left on foot to wherever it was that he’d parked his mom’s car.