The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  “What did she say?”

  “Typical teen stuff. Mad at someone, I guess, mad at that asshole Morton kid. Excuse my French. She said that she wished people were nicer.”

  “Nicer?” Grace asked, her brow slightly raised.

  Marla shrugged. “Yeah, nicer. I told her that people start out nice enough, but they shake that off soon enough.”

  Paul nodded. He, apparently, agreed.

  “We might need to take a statement later,” Grace said. “We’ll need your contact info.”

  Marla reached into her purse and pulled out a silver-plated business card case. She worked in IT at Weyerhaeuser in nearby Federal Way. Despite the economy there was still money in IT. Marla probably made more than six figures, judging by her expensive clothes, Pilates class, silver card case. Maybe even platinum. That’s how she could afford the neighborhood.

  When the Tacoma detectives got back in the car, Grace spoke first.

  “Two lies on the tally sheet for Mr. Morton.”

  Paul put the car in gear.

  “Yeah, the fact that he hadn’t seen her in a long time,” he said. “The day before yesterday doesn’t qualify as a long time in my book.”

  Grace checked her messages, her thoughts still wondering if Alex had any idea how things were shaping up against him. “Not hardly,” she said. “Plus we’ve got him dead to rights on the roses, too.”

  They drove down the hill toward the bay, the waters smooth and dark as obsidian.

  In the Morton mansion things were decidedly less tranquil. After the two detectives left, Alex Morton flopped on his bed and screamed into his pillow. Next he dialed his father’s cell phone number. No answer.

  He’s never there when I need him!

  Next, Alex dialed the office number. (“That one’s for losers,” his dad had said. “The people I want to reach me call direct.”) Calla, his father’s secretary for the past six years, answered. She was an attractive brunette with enough smarts to be an officer in the company, but for some reason, she never advanced out of the support function role she’d been hired into. A few speculated as to why, but no one dared to say anything. Her husband was Palmer Morton’s real estate business partner, Byron Jennings.

  “I need to talk to my dad,” Alex said, barely hiding his frazzled nerves.

  “Alex, he’s in a meeting,” Calla said. “Sorry. I can take a message.”

  “I don’t care,” Alex said, his voice rising in anger loud enough that Calla pulled the phone away from her ear a little. “I need to talk to him.”

  “He can’t be disturbed,” Calla said, looking through the plate-glass partition into the conference room, where Palmer Morton presided over an enormous architectural model of the mega condo and retail development The Pointe at Ruston Way, in Ruston. It was a crucial development that had the unfortunate distinction of being in the planning stages when the real estate market went kaput. New investors from Korea were in the conference room and Palmer was in the midst of his dog-and-pony show.

  “You don’t get it,” Alex said, this time with a tone that was more than a little threatening. “Do you want HR, or better yet your husband, to know that you’ve been boning my dad?”

  Calla looked around, swiveled her chair, and faced the window with the view to the choppy waters of the bay. Her back slightly hunched. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Alex, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Calla, you do,” Alex said. “Now go get him. I’m in trouble here and he needs to do some fixing. Get him now or you’ll not only be out of a job, you’ll be looking for a new man. But in your case, you better make that two.”

  The call went through to Palmer Morton’s cell phone to a number even Alex didn’t know. Phone records would later show that father and son talked for forty-five seconds before ending the call.

  * * *

  For the first time, Emma Rose noticed a small red light in the corner of the room. It was a pinprick of red, like a taillight of a little airplane far, far away. She slid her body to the edge of the mattress and got up. It was up on the ceiling over the toilet bucket.

  What was that red light? What was the creeper up to now? She wondered if maybe it was a smoke detector to keep the so-called apartment safe in the event of a fire. She remembered how those lights were tiny green ones and, to be fair, if the smoke alarm went off there was no place she could run to anyway.

  What is it?

  She stood on her tiptoes and strained to get a closer look. She tried to swipe at it with her hands, but it was just out of reach. She looked over at the bucket, still full of urine and feces. She knew that the contents of the bucket reeked. She was used to the smell, in the way she thought that a mother must get used to the stink of a baby’s vomit or diaper. Unpleasant, to be sure, but not something so terrible as to kill you.

  Not like the creeper.

  She looked over and the small red, white tip matchstick caught her eye. She went over, bending down to pick it up. She wished that it was a razor blade or something really useful. Something told her that she should hide it. She tucked the wooden match under the army blanket.

  For later.

  Next, Emma dumped the contents of the bucket onto the floor and turned it upside down. She climbed atop and strained to get at the little red light. She stood there on the bucket teetering as she finally made out four small letters on a small black box from which the light emerged.

  S-O-N-Y.

  Sony! She knew what kind of products the Japanese manufacturer of electronics made. Her mom had an old Sony Walkman that she’d finally ditched for an iPod a couple of years ago. Her uncle had a Sony video camera. Emma knew which of those items that had to be . . . a camera. The creeper had been watching her every move from the minute he held her in the prison cell he referred to as the apartment.

  CHAPTER 29

  Near the bottom of one of her mother’s TED boxes was a letter to her mother from a minister, a man from Pennsylvania who had taken a train and a Greyhound bus to be one of the last people to see Bundy before his execution. The letter was dated two weeks after the high-voltage stream turned the serial killer’s brain into some kind of evil casserole. Even though she’d been only a girl at the time, Grace held a vague memory of the day the letter arrived at their Tacoma home. Seeing the condition of the letter, not its contents, for the first time in so many years later only confirmed that recollection.

  The letter had been shredded to pieces, and then carefully put back together with strips of cellophane tape, yellowed with age.

  Grace had remembered how her mother had opened that particular envelope to read with the rest of the mail while she was making dinner. Pork chops, Grace recalled. Funny how she could pull that little, dumb, not-needed-to-be-remembered detail. Sitting at the kitchen table, Grace’s eyes widened as her mother transformed; her mom’s face went from interest in what she was reading to complete and utter rage.

  From calm to red as quickly as could be.

  “Liar!” Sissy O’Hare had called out as she tore up the letter. Her father, who had been in the living room, hurried toward the kitchen to see what had provoked his wife to scream.

  “Sis! You all right?” Conner called out, rounding the corner into the room.

  “I will never be all right,” Sissy said.

  In a way, in that moment, it was clear that, even with Ted Bundy dead, she was right.

  A snow of bits of paper littered the black-and-white checkerboard floor—the floor that appeared in a couple of eerie photographs later—photos in which Grace later concluded she had been purposely posed to resemble images of her dead sister. Those photos were disturbing to Grace and she was sure they were the source of a lot of her belief that she was a replacement daughter.

  While the light of her desk lamp drenched the yellowed cellophane tape Frankensteining the paper shards together, Grace read the letter.

  Dear Mrs. O’Hare,

  First of all, let me offer my condolences for the loss of your
daughter. While I have comforted many in my congregation over the years for the loss of a loved one, I have never had to share the grief of the mother or father of a murdered child. My only offer of solace to you is that I know that someday you and your precious Tricia will be united in heaven and will be together for all time, for all eternity.

  Now, the other purpose of my letter. I guess, the real reason. As you might have read in the paper or viewed on the television, a number of clergymen met with Theodore Robert Bundy just before his execution two weeks ago. I was among that collection of Godly men, which included two protestants, two Baptists (like myself) a Catholic, and even some kind of denomination that considers crystals as magnifiers of spirit power. I have not chosen take to the airwaves as some of those have, as I find this kind of tragedy personal and I find it beyond immoral to promote a connection with the notorious for the mere sake of building name recognition or expanding one’s flock. And, to be frank, I don’t think that the New Age minister really has a flock, as flocks tend to be made of people, not magical thinking.

  Grace recognized that as a none-too-subtle dig at another minister who’d interviewed Bundy and announced during a press conference that, among other things, Bundy’s murder spree had been fueled by pornography and later, by demonic possession. In a taped interview, Bundy had said: “It was like coming out of some kind of a horrible trance or dream. I can only liken it to having been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next morning wake up from it, remember what happened.”

  Through that pastor, Ted had told the world that pornography was the root of all serial homicide and that he was convinced that TV and movies shouldered the majority of the blame. Pornography was rampant, literally and figuratively shoved in a viewer’s face. Conner O’Hare considered that reasoning “utter hogwash” and decades later, Grace agreed that there was no better phrase to describe it. It was hogwash.

  She sipped her tepid coffee and read on as the minister who wrote to her mother went on and on about what he hoped to accomplish, and how everyone—even Ted—deserved forgiveness.

  Mrs. O’Hare, consider this truth: By not forgiving someone you are not right with the Lord. You are letting your hate and anger fuel all of the wrong feelings. If you could find forgiveness somewhere in your heart, I assure you that you will find peace.

  Grace flashed on how Ted had signed his letters to her mother: Peace, Ted.

  Fleetingly, because giving a Bundy apologist any semblance of genuine consideration went against everything she knew to be true, Grace wondered how it was that her mother was supposed to forgive the man that she was certain in her bones was her daughter’s killer when he wouldn’t admit to it.

  I talked to Ted about his roster of victims and while everything he said to me sickened me to my soul, I did my best to remember every single word of it. He spoke to me with tears streaming down his face. This was a man in deep pain, a man with a desire to repent for his sins. Despite his chains and shackles, he got down on his knees and we prayed together. I’m no fool, Mrs. O’Hare. I know the truth when I see it. My congregants know that about me, and if you knew me personally, you’d undoubtedly agree. He told me the names of the girls whom he’d killed, the girls he was driven by demons to kill. But one of the names not on that very sad list was your daughter’s. Ted said he did not kill Tricia. He said, “Tell Mrs. O’Hare when I’m gone that she should rejoice and revel in her freedom.” He said—and he wanted me to carry this message to you as accurately as possible—“Be as free as a dove, to be anything else is to have an albatross around your neck.”

  Grace had never seen it, but the words in the stitched-together letter sparked another memory. When Tricia went missing, she’d been wearing a simple necklace with the charm pendant of a dove.

  Free as a dove. Albatross around your neck. Peace, Ted.

  Grace folded the letter, the adhesive on the cellophane tape coming undone, and inserted it back into the envelope. Her coffee cup was empty and her stomach was in need of food. She touched her abdomen to stop it from growling, a noise that seemed louder than it really was. She couldn’t shake the contents of the letter.

  Had Ted challenged her mother in some strange way?

  Had he taunted her with the mention of a dove, the albatross, and her neck?

  Grace had the distinct feeling that was just what the serial killer had had in mind.

  Grace couldn’t sleep, a condition that had become entirely too common in the days since the first of the Puget Sound girls started to vanish—and when the bones were found. Part of it was her job, of course. She played the scenarios of what the girls’ last moments might have been like, if indeed all three had had last moments. Until there was a body—or body parts—found there was hope for Emma Rose, but that hope only made it harder to sleep. Something else kept her up, too. It was the face of the sister she didn’t know, the one who had been part of her life since before she was conceived. Grace crawled out from under the bedcovers, trying hard not to wake Shane. Her restlessness should not become his problem, too. She felt wired, as if she’d consumed ten cups of sugared coffee, but she hadn’t. She just couldn’t shut off her brain. No matter how much she needed rest. Peace eluded her.

  She crept down the hall to the office that would someday, she still vaguely hoped, be converted to a nursery. She’d had plans for that space since they bought the house on Salmon Beach. She painted it in her head, blue, then pink, then yellow, then back to blue. Time was running out on that. Women were having children later and later, but she didn’t want to be a mother like her own—the one other kids in the class thought was a grandma. Sissy had been over forty when she had her. Grace hoped that if she and Shane ever became parents they’d start with a boy, a boy who would be just like Shane—responsible, caring, yet with just enough of a mischievous streak to keep things interesting.

  Her nightgown provided only the thinnest layer of warmth and she nearly turned back to get her robe. But she didn’t. The pull to the scrapbook that her mother and father had created about Tricia’s disappearance and murder was impossible to avoid.

  She opened it to the first page of the white and pink book. It was a strange color scheme, she thought. She wondered if it was a baby book that had been turned completely around and converted to a death book of sorts.

  The eyes of her sister in the missing poster stared at her. The dot pattern was large, probably from the pages of the News Tribune, but it still didn’t obliterate the lovely and haunted look in Tricia’s eyes.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Grace swiveled around and looked up at Shane, standing behind her in his underwear. “No. I guess not,” she said.

  Shane stepped closer and put his hand on her shoulder, his eyes tracing the pages of the book. “I’d be an idiot to ask what’s on your mind, because I already know. Want to talk about it?”

  Grace nodded. She felt the strange flush of emotion coming to her, but she fought it. It was like the boy who’d rescued a girl from a stabbing and held it together like a champ until he spoke to his mother. Love and a safe place always invited a person to let go.

  “Ted had something to do with my sister’s death,” she said, a single tear rolling. “I think my mom’s been right all along.”

  He turned her chair to face him. “You know that’s not true, Grace. You know Bundy and his crimes are among the most investigated cases in history. More FBI, more local PDs, historians, all of them have had a crack at trying to identify all his vics.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I think I do know that,” she said. “Thanks for the support, Shane.”

  “I’m just saying what you already know.”

  She looked up at him. No more tears had fallen, nor would she allow them. She loved Shane more than anything, but he didn’t understand what her life, a life in the shadow of a dead sibling, had been like. Nor did he really understand her need to figure out once and for all what it was that drew her to law enforcement, to homicide.

  “Look,�
�� she said, her fingertip tapping the poster image in the scrapbook.

  He patted her shoulder, but not in a condescending way. “I’ve seen it,” he said, “very sad. It will always be sad to me.”

  “The necklace with the dove,” she said, her eyes now locked on the page.

  Shane didn’t quite get where Grace was going. He put his arm on her shoulder. “Right,” he said. “The necklace.”

  “Bundy had taunted my mom with a reference to that necklace.”

  “You can barely make out the dove,” he said.

  “In fact,” she said, now looking into her husband’s eyes, “you can’t.”

  Shane leaned closer and focused his sleepy eyes. “I guess you’re right. But I don’t think I’m following you.”

  “My mom was fixated on that letter from the minister. The dove letter.”

  “I know,” he said, trying to be patient at a very, very late hour.

  “My dad said that if Ted was trying to push her buttons from the grave he’d used the missing poster as a reference. You know some little detail to make her feel that he knew something. Or better yet, was holding something back.”

  “But if he didn’t get the dove reference from the poster, where did he get it? The newspaper?”

  Grace set down the ice-cream-store-colored album and led her husband back to the bedroom. “No. The newspapers never mentioned it. The necklace was something only the killer could have known. They were sure that Ted had kept it after Tricia’s murder.”

  “As a trophy.”

  She nodded.

  “But you’re saying now that he didn’t.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m just thinking out loud here. If Ted was taunting Mom and Dad with the dove comment it wasn’t coming from him seeing it on the poster—that was always what the original case detectives told them.”

  “So if not from the poster, from someone else?”

  “Maybe,” she said, taking Shane’s hand as they walked back to the bedroom.

  “A real possibility was someone in prison. Someone he met. He wasn’t in isolation until Florida, death row.”