The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  Sissy had to know what happened to Tricia. Wondering and waiting would never suffice.

  They parked in the lot, their car facing the blue waters of the lake that had been the site of Ted’s most notorious and brazen kills. He’d abducted two young women, one after another, from the park in the middle of a hot July day in 1974.

  Sissy led her daughter to a picnic table near the restrooms. A couple of kids played horseshoes a few yards away. A teenage boy yelled at his mother for telling him what to do. A radio played an old Beatles song. The weather wasn’t particularly great that day, but it didn’t matter to Sissy. She hadn’t brought Grace there for that kind of an outing.

  “I came here with your father after we heard the news about Ted being arrested. I didn’t know where your sister was,” she said, looking up at the Cascade foothills behind them, “but I felt like we should honor the girls who came from here.”

  Grace didn’t say anything. Her mother didn’t need her to respond. It was more about Sissy getting out the words and just letting them kick around in the wind until she was finished. It wasn’t that she didn’t value Grace’s input; it was that the endless loop of her obsession had no place for another person. There was no pause. Just a stream.

  “He told the girls that he needed help. And they helped him. They had been raised by loving and kind parents. It was their kindness that attracted him to them. I know that. I know that as much as I’ve ever known anything. Kindness can be a weakness, Grace. Please listen to me. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want you to be harsh, uncaring. Not at all. I don’t want you to be indifferent to the needs of others. I just don’t want you to put anyone else above yourself.”

  Grace nodded.

  “Okay, I guess I understand,” she said.

  When the words slipped from her lips they felt hollow. Deep down she knew that her mom did want her to put someone else above herself. Tricia. Her whole life was about her sister.

  Sissy had brought a bag of stale bread and they walked to the shore where a small flock of mallards and one big white duck congregated. Sissy handed Grace a piece of bread.

  “Break off small bits. You don’t want to choke them.” She stopped a moment and looked out at a water-skier zipping by a couple hundred yards away.

  Grace met her mother’s gaze and she did what she’d been doing too much of lately—she read into it what her mom might really be thinking.

  Did Ted choke Tricia?

  Were the girls who disappeared from the park in 1974 aware of their fate or were they knocked unconscious?

  Did they enjoy the summer sun on their faces like the water-skier that day?

  Did they know their families had never, would never, forget them?

  When Grace O’Hare was fourteen, her parents took her on a car trip to Utah. Coming from Washington State, where the landscape was dipped in green and splattered in blue, Utah’s vast vistas of orange, red, and salmon seemed completely otherworldly. The landscape itself suggested Mars. They’d played road games along the way—all but Slug Bug, because of the VW’s connection to Bundy. The stayed in motels with swimming pools, and one in Sandy that had a Jacuzzi—Grace’s first time in a tub of hot oscillating water.

  “We need to get one of these,” she told her mother.

  “If we don’t get to Granger tomorrow, we’ll all be in hot water,” her father said, with a laugh at his own pun.

  Grace climbed out of the water and took one, then two of the thin white towels supplied by the Best Western. “What’s in Granger?”

  “Meeting an old friend,” Sissy said.

  “What old friend? Someone I know, too?”

  Grace’s dad got up and went toward the gate around the pool and Jacuzzi.

  “Someone who feels as we do about Ted, honey,” Sissy said.

  Grace didn’t ask anything more. In fact, she felt deflated. The tone in her mother’s voice was familiar. It was if her vocal cords tightened and airflow was restricted. She spoke through lips held tautly over her teeth. Grace knew then that there would be no time in their lives in which her parents’ obsession would take a backseat to anything else. They were in a pinball game and every bumper they touched was the serial killer from Tacoma.

  There was no getting away from Ted.

  In August of 1975, after he’d murdered in the Pacific Northwest and moved on to kill in Colorado and Utah, Ted was arrested for the first time. It was the first instance that anyone back home in Seattle and Tacoma knew that the handsome stranger who called himself Ted was, in fact, named Ted. He drove a VW bug, too. That also fit what witnesses had told investigators that summer day at Lake Sammamish when two had disappeared. “Ted” had had his arm in a sling and asked several young women to help him retrieve his small sailboat from his car. One girl had refused because she’d seen that there was no boat and she didn’t feel comfortable getting in his car to “drive up to his parents’ house” to retrieve it. Two girls, whose only crime was the compassion they showed a man who asked for help, had agreed.

  Their bodies were found on a mountain slope only four miles from the last place they’d been seen alive.

  The detective who caught Ted in Granger had only done so after Ted refused to stop for a traffic violation.

  Sissy started corresponding with Caswell Moriarty in 1977. She didn’t like to spend money on long-distance calls, but she never failed in having a book of stamps at the ready. She’d written to others over the years, too, but this man was a true believer in her cause. She needed that. She needed her husband and daughter to see it, too.

  “See, I’m not the only one who knows that Ted killed Tricia,” she said more than one time when she needed to rally the flagging troops.

  Caswell, or Cass, as his friends called him, was a pint-sized man with a walrus moustache and a swirl of molasses-colored hair. He’d taken medical retirement from the Utah Highway Patrol after blowing out his kneecap in pursuit of a jail escapee.

  “The double irony here,” he said when letting the O’Hares inside his tidy house on the edge of Granger, “was that scumbag’s name was Ed Dundee. Welcome to my life.”

  While her parents sat in the living room, Grace played with Cass’s dog, a small shivery creature named Taco.

  “I took the file from the office. Made you a copy,” Cass said. “Figured you’d get more use out of it now than the authorities here. Florida’s got dibs on him. The SOB couldn’t have picked a better state to kill in, if you want the ultimate justice, that is.”

  Sissy nodded, her eyes riveted to the eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph of the objects Cass had found in the car.

  “What did he say that ski mask was all about?” Sissy asked.

  Cass shrugged and rolled his eyes upward. “He was a big-time skier, that’s what. Funny thing, no skis or poles in the car.”

  They all looked down at the list, and the photograph that depicted each item in Ted’s arsenal.

  “Handcuffs? What about those?” Grace’s father asked. Conner usually let Sissy do the talking, like she was the lead investigator and he was merely there to keep the ball rolling in the event that there was a slack moment.

  “Dumpster diving. Yeah, that was his brilliant answer on that one. You know everyone talks about how smart he is, I’m not so convinced. I mean, think about it, who tosses handcuffs into the trash? Those things cost beaucoup bucks.”

  And of course the next items, those were the ones that would send anyone with a scintilla of compassion into a panic at the thought of how they’d been used—a crowbar and an icepick.

  “His depravity knew no bounds,” Sissy said. “I used to pray that he just strangled Tricia and killed her that way. I hoped that she could stare into his eyes and let him know that she was good, and he was a soulless piece of garbage. He didn’t do that, did he, Cass?”

  Cass didn’t answer right away. He was one of the world’s foremost experts on Bundy and his crimes. Others proclaimed that designation, even kind of fought for it, as if there were
some kind of honor in knowing evil better than anyone else. But he knew. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ted’s violence was never measured slowly. It was always a deluge.

  “Sissy,” he said, “you’ve always known the answer. Don’t think about that. Don’t let what he did to your little girl live on like that. She’s at peace. It doesn’t matter how she got there.”

  “It does to me,” Grace said, putting Taco down and stepping toward her mother and father. “I would like him to suffer more than my sister did. In order to do that, we have to find out what it was that he did to her.”

  Cass nodded. “I understand, Grace. I really do. But there is no way someone without a conscience can be made to suffer. You have to be among the human race to feel, and Ted Bundy was one of those aberrations that come along every hundred thousand births. Maybe a million. He looked human, I’ll give him that. I’ll give him that some of the ladies thought he was easy on the eyes. He acted like he was. But really, it was an act. He was mimicking what others do.”

  “Honey,” Sissy said, looking at her daughter, “I love you. I know that you understand.”

  Sissy squeezed Grace’s hand and looked over at her husband.

  It was a proud, proud moment.

  CHAPTER 24

  “You’ve found Emma, haven’t you? She’s dead, isn’t she? My baby’s dead!”

  Grace Alexander took a step toward the door that had swung open before she could even knock. She put her hand up and shook her head.

  “No. No, Ms. Rose, we haven’t found her.”

  “I saw the paper today,” she said, holding up a copy of the News Tribune, its headline running across the top of the page:

  SECOND GIRL FOUND BY PUYALLUP RIVER

  “It isn’t Emma,” Grace said. “I promise.”

  A look of relief came over Diana Rose. She opened the door wider, and let the detectives inside. She indicated a pair of chairs across from a black sofa draped with an orange afghan—a look that gave the North End Craftsman home a distinct Halloween vibe. On the table next to the sofa was a photograph of Emma and her sister, Tracy. The two of them posed beaming in a mountain meadow—probably Mount Rainier, Grace guessed noticing the ocean wave of purple lupine behind them. It was a cruel reminder of what had already been stolen from that particular family.

  And what might have been taken when Emma Rose vanished from the Starbucks at the Lakewood Towne Center.

  Tracy and her father had been killed in a car accident coming off the Nalley Valley viaduct four summers before.

  Grace never could rationalize why some families were a lightning rod for tragedy. It wasn’t that people were cursed with bad luck. She didn’t think that, no, not at all. And yet, there was something about the way cosmic forces conspired to pile on tragedy. It was more than someone being on the track to disaster; it was like the skids were greased and it was harder and harder to avoid calamity. It had nothing to do with socioeconomic status. The Roses were upper middle class. Arthur Rose had had a good-paying job. Tracy had been a straight-A student at Stadium High School. Father and daughter had been coming home from Spanaway. Tracy had been attending orientation at Pacific Lutheran University, where she’d intended to enroll the next fall.

  They were T-boned by a drunk driver and the downward spiral, a hurricane of bad luck and disaster, sucked the life and the joy from what had once seemed the perfect life. Perfect girls. Perfect husband. Perfect house. Everything anyone would have wanted. And now, all that was left of it was the perfect house.

  “Ms. Rose,” Grace said, close enough to the trembling mother to touch her, but feeling reluctant to do so. “We haven’t found Emma, but we found this and we need you to identify it.”

  Grace looked over at Paul and he handed her a plastic bag. It was plain its contents were familiar to the missing girl’s mother. It was a powder-blue T-shirt with faded graphics depicting a circle of seven dolphins swirling around SAVE THE SOUND logo.

  “That’s Tracy’s,” Diana said, reaching for it, feeling the crinkling plastic as she massaged the garment through its protective covering.

  “You mean Emma’s?” Paul asked.

  Grace shot him a look, one that she hoped conveyed that he’d promised that she could run the investigation insofar as victims’ families were concerned.

  “It was Tracy’s. She bought it the year before she and my husband were killed in the accident. Emma wore it. Often. It was kind of her way of staying close to her sister,” she said, moving her gaze from the detectives to the photograph of the sisters on Mount Rainier. “They both loved the mountains and water. They were close.”

  Grace didn’t say so right then, probably because Paul was incapable of understanding just what that might feel like. She easily could.

  My sister is gone, too.

  Grace gently pulled the bagged and tagged garment from the fingers of the grieving and anxious mother. “You said she was wearing a white blouse when she went to work. Was she wearing this, too?”

  Diana snapped her attention back to the detectives, and shook her head. She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her temples.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said, her words now coated in the distinct aguish of a mother who doesn’t know where her child is. “I mean, I’m sure that the T-shirt was hers, was Tracy’s. Where did you find it?”

  Grace set the bag on her lap. “Some blues found it a quarter mile from the latte stand,” she said.

  Diana looked confused. “Blues?”

  “Sorry,” Grace said. “Patrol officers.”

  Diana didn’t ask the question that both detectives were sure she was thinking. If her daughter was wearing a blouse with the blue T-shirt as an extra layer underneath, how was it that the T-shirt was no longer on her body? Had she taken it off? Or had someone else?

  “May we see her room?”

  “You think someone took her, don’t you?”

  “We don’t know what happened, Ms. Rose,” Grace said.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  It was obvious it was hard for Ms. Rose to let that phrase pass her lips, but she managed. It was almost like she was practicing. Preparing. Not wanting it to be true, but given the way her life had been going for the past two years, it was so sadly possible.

  “Can we see her room?” Paul asked.

  Diana got up and the detectives followed.

  Emma’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It was painted a peachy pink, a color that was somewhere between a little girl’s dream hue and a more sophisticated young woman’s idea of what was pretty. The room had a large bay window that overlooked the garden with just a hint of a view of Commencement Bay. The bed was an antique, painted white iron with small shabby-chic flecks of the metal showing. On the right side of the headboard someone had tied streamers of blue and white ribbons. Grace wondered if Emma had been a bridesmaid earlier that spring.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Diana asked.

  “Whatever makes you the most comfortable,” Paul said.

  “You speak,” the mother said.

  “When she lets me,” he said, looking over at Grace, who had moved to the desk across from the bed. She was either engrossed in something or pretending not to hear. Diana left the room.

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.

  Grace turned over some cards and papers on the desk, but didn’t look up.

  “If we’re going to find her, we need to know her. And if . . .” She hesitated and looked over at her partner, making sure that the mother was gone. “. . . and if she’s the victim of an abduction of some kind we will need to know why she was picked up.”

  “If she was.”

  “Right. If.” She held out a card. On the front was a photograph of a kitten sniffing a white rose.

  “Cute,” Paul said, though he really didn’t think so.

  “Ms. Rose?” she called out. A beat later, Diana Rose stood in the doorway. Her red eyes gave her away. She’d been crying quietly in the
hallway.

  “Did you find something?”

  “Who is Alex?”

  “Her boyfriend. They only dated a few months. She broke it off with him.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I don’t know. I think she was tired of being tied down. She wanted to go out with other guys. Have fun. You know, you remember when you were a teenager, don’t you?”

  Grace nodded. “Barely. But yes, I do. Why did she keep this card if she was so over him?”

  Diana took the card and looked at it. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen this before. Where did you get it?”

  “Just here.” Grace pointed to the desk.

  “May I see it?” Diana said, not really waiting. She took the card and her eyes met the detective’s. “You don’t think he had anything to do with her disappearance, do you?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll check it out. What is Alex’s last name? And do you know where he lives?”

  “Morton. He lives a few blocks over.”

  “Palmer Morton’s son?” Paul asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “The Palmer Morton?” Grace asked, though she knew by the way the mother and her partner were acting that it had to be the very same. Everyone in Tacoma knew Palmer Morton. He owned about a third of the downtown retail core, including a steak house named Morton’s. He’d sued the famous Morton’s chain and won a provision that there would be no Morton’s steak house in Tacoma that wasn’t his. Chicago. New York. L.A. But not in Tacoma.

  Palmer Morton was that kind of a guy. Both detectives knew his son’s reputation, too. He’d been picked up for shoplifting at the Tacoma Mall, a case that had been conveniently dropped. Something about a file being lost, though no one in the department thought it was anything other than a favor called in by a fellow who knew something about favors.