The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  Grace slipped under the covers and kissed Shane.

  “Maybe it was just a coincidence,” she said letting her eyes close. “Maybe my mom and dad were wrong all these years.”

  Shane lay still, listening. He could feel her body going limp as she fell into much-needed slumber.

  CHAPTER 30

  Tavio Navarro started a new job—a complete yard remodel with a stone pool, a fountain, and a pergola that would frame the garden view of a large home in North Tacoma. He wasn’t responsible for the pergola. Another contractor had been hired for that. In another time or place, Tavio would have been overjoyed with the prospect of such a prestigious job. He wasn’t just a yard boy anymore. He, with his company, Green Ways, was seen as one of the better landscapers in the area, an up-and-comer who not only designed yards of distinction, but did so with a mind for easy maintenance. That was key. Less watering. Less pruning. More time for the home owners to enjoy the benefits of their gardens. A few of his workers chided him for designing them out of regular weed and water service, but he laughed it off.

  That day, however, he wasn’t laughing at all. Tavio had been a wreck ever since he found the dead, dismembered girl along the Puyallup River. He’d questioned Michael, but he seemed evasive and angry at the mention of anything related to what he said was the worst mistake of his life.

  The girl on the news looked like Catalina and her eyes haunted Tavio. So had her mother’s pleas for help on TV. He wondered if Catalina’s mother had begged the same way when she heard her daughter was missing. He wondered how hard she’d cried when her body was found three days later.

  Three days after he and his brother moved from Yakima.

  Those had been the darkest of times. They had no money. No food. And they had the specter of the law chasing after them. When they picked cherries in Wenatchee or apples in Cashmere, they never did so without repeated glances over their shoulders.

  But no one came calling. No one went looking for them. They just disappeared. They were given a chance to start over and make a new life—a new life with the ghost of Catalina always hovering near, whispering that she did not love Michael; whispering that one day he would face her and he would pay for what he’d done.

  Tavio told his trio of workers to get busy.

  “This section,” he said, pointing to a weedy patch of lawn near the new water feature, “needs to be done today. Vámonos!”

  The workers—two young men straight from Guatemala, and Michael—nodded and did as they were told.

  Tavio watched his brother as he instructed the boys. His heart was heavy and he felt sick to his stomach.

  “Going to the store,” he said. “Be back in un momento.”

  There were few pay phones in the area, but he knew of the one in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. He parked his truck and went to the phone, depositing the coins that had warmed deep inside his pocket. He dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that it was not an emergency.

  Though deep down, he felt that it was just that.

  “Detective, uh,” he said, “Alexander. The lady police officer on TV.”

  Grace Alexander was at her desk, a small cubicle that was more office worker than TV cop. She knew the irony of the world’s view of police work. Everyone assumed that detectives drove nice cars, wore expensive clothes, and worked in an environment befitting stars. The truth was that while the Tacoma Police Department boasted a state-of-the-art facility—interview rooms with two-way mirrors, a forensic lab that rivaled what the state crime lab had—it was decidedly mundane. She had a collection of Mariner bobbleheads on one side of her cubicle desk and a picture of her and Shane when they’d summited Mt. Rainier that summer. It hadn’t been that difficult of a trek, but it still came with some bragging rights.

  “Next year, Everest,” Shane had teased as the guide snapped the photograph.

  “Next year, Hawaii,” Grace had shot back.

  She smiled at the memory as she picked up the phone.

  “Alexander,” she said.

  “I want to know something,” said a man with a Latino accent.

  “How can I help you? Who is calling?”

  “I don’t want to say my name. But can I still ask a question?”

  “This isn’t the help desk at the library, sir.”

  There was a short pause. “Yes, I know. I want to know something about the girl I saw on TV. The girls you were talking about.”

  “Kelsey Caldwell? Lisa Lancaster?”

  Another short pause, followed by, “I need to talk here. Go away.”

  “I’m not going away,” she said.

  “No. Not you. I want to know if she has DNA on her.”

  “Sir, we don’t disclose that kind of information. Who are you and why are you asking?” The caller ID on her phone indicated a pay phone. Damn!

  “Please look into a case in Yakima. Her name was Catalina Sanchez. Please check on her. Do the DNA. Please.”

  “Catalina Sanchez?” Grace repeated as the phone line went dead.

  Paul Bateman, in the next cubicle, had heard part of the conversation and had quickly planted himself in front of Grace.

  “That sounded like a crazy or a good tip.”

  “You don’t get many like that. The guy basically told me to try for a DNA match on another case in Yakima.”

  “Yakima? Pretty far from here.”

  “Far, yes. But let’s turn a few stones.”

  Grace typed C-A-T-A-L-I-N-A + S-A-N-C-H-E-Z into the database and pressed the SEARCH key.

  Her eyes met Paul’s as the screen flashed with a hit.

  “Three years ago. Nineteen-year-old girl. Migrant worker. Unsolved.”

  “Suspects?” he asked.

  “None.”

  “Interesting, but what’s her connection to Tacoma’s vics?”

  Grace clicked through the report and a photo of Catalina Sanchez filled her screen.

  “Jesus,” Paul said, refraining from using the Spanish pronunciation, something that undoubtedly took a lot of willpower. Dead girls were nothing to make light of and he knew it.

  Grace looked up. “She looks like she could be Kelsey’s sister.”

  Paul nodded as he bent closer to get a better view. “Same eyes. Same hair. Same everything.”

  “Right, same everything,” she said. “Except this one’s unsolved. We’re going to solve our homicides?”

  “Case still active?”

  Grace looked back at the photograph of the dead girl from Yakima. She and Kelsey were a lot alike, except for one vital detail. Kelsey’s dad was not about to rest until someone led them to their daughter’s killer. Catalina Sanchez had no such champion. It made a difference, and every member of the media and law enforcement knew it. There were the moms of victims who had made it their lives’ missions not only to remember their daughters, but to make sure that every single person out there did, too. Beth Holloway never missed a moment to fan the flames of publicity surrounding the disappearance of her daughter Natalee while away on a school-sanctioned party trip to Aruba. Beth had gone so far as to even confront the chief suspect, a Dutch ne’er-do-well named Joran van der Sloot, while he awaited justice in a Peruvian prison. Same with Sharon Rocha, who had taken up the task of ensuring her pregnant daughter Laci Peterson’s murderer was brought to justice. Scott Peterson, a fertilizer salesman who’d wanted to be free of the constrictions of a family, awaited execution on death row in California.

  And yet there was no one, it seemed, to mourn Catalina. The biographical background on the Yakima victim was devoid of any helpful information. For her parents it merely stated, migrants, address unknown. Her last place of employment was Jonogold Orchards in Selah. And as if it needed to be noted, Catalina Sanchez’s “illegal status” was listed by the report writer, the responding officer.

  “Let’s find out what happened to Catalina,” she said, picking up the phone.

  “You really are something,” Paul said, with a tiny trace of sheepishness.

 
“How do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You started it, now go on.”

  “Something Lynnette once said.”

  “Pillow talk,” Grace said. “Great. I love the idea of you and her cuddled up talking about me.”

  “Not so much about you. About the kind of person you are. The kind of cop.”

  She kept her eyes on him, barely blinking. In a way, it felt a little good to make him squirm. “What’s that?”

  “She said you were the kind who never left a stone unturned, a dog with a bone.”

  Grace exhaled. The comment was either a compliment or a derogatory remark. She just didn’t know which.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, what was it about the caller that makes you think it’s worthwhile to follow it up now? We got hotter stuff to work, you know.”

  “Really? That’s news to me. Anyway, there was a kind of pleading in his voice. He might not know who killed Kelsey, but my bet is that he knows exactly who killed Catalina Sanchez.” She looked down at the photo on her computer screen. “She deserves justice, too.”

  Paul thought of saying something about Lynnette once telling him that she thought Grace was not only a by-the-booker, but a little self-righteous. He held his tongue. Even though Grace’s statement hadn’t needed to be said, there was no getting around it.

  She was absolutely right.

  A report from the Washington State Patrol crime lab landed in Grace Alexander’s overstuffed email in-box. It brought with it the kind of news that no homicide investigator ever wanted to read. Her heart sank with each word. The DNA sample taken from Catalina Sanchez’s rape and murder had been lost among scores of other pending evidence in what had been the state’s criminal justice Armageddon the previous year. A small fire had broken out in the lab and the sprinkler system had done what it was supposed to do . . . gone off. And off. And off. It had ended up drenching and destroying evidence from almost every county in the state. Particularly hard-hit were counties with lesser means: counties that wholly relied on the state crime lab.

  While the memorandum from the lab in Olympia indicated that, in fact, there had been a sample taken, it had been destroyed. Even the supporting documentation had been destroyed when a couple of employees had had the bright idea of using hair dryers to mitigate the loss of the original documents. Unbelievably, the electric dryers manned by none-too-bright, but well-meaning, workers had sparked a second fire.

  Catalina’s case was among many relegated to complete and tragic limbo.

  As Grace scrolled through the electronic file she noticed that only one item had survived—a partial witness statement indicating someone had seen a couple of young men carrying something to the river’s edge the night of Catalina’s disappearance. The witness, a Hispanic man named Tomas Martinez, had provided no address. He’d indicated he was following the harvest and would be in Central Oregon the next week. He had no phone, but he promised that he would contact the police again when he could.

  But, it appeared, he never had.

  Grace wondered if this Tomas Martinez had been the man who’d called her with the tip.

  She printed out a photograph of Catalina and added her to the others pinned under the fluorescent tube that ran under the bookshelf of her cubicle.

  Kelsey, Lisa, Catalina, Emma.

  The similarities could not be denied. Each of the pretty girls was dark eyed. All had long dark hair, parted in the middle. She ran her finger along the row of photos thinking to herself that they had so much more in common than their mere physical resemblance and their youth. Each had died in a violent manner. Each had been violated in the worst possible way. Each girl was a victim who cried out for justice.

  I hear you, she thought. I hear all of you.

  Grace hated the crime pundits who immediately jumped on the “serial killer among us” bandwagon whenever even the hint of similarity became apparent. It was too much. Serial killers were exceedingly rare. While endless books were churned out about Gacy, Bundy, Ramirez, and the other big-league killers, among serial-killer aficionados there seemed to be the hope that a new one would emerge. The idea of it disgusted Grace Alexander. Serial killers were the ultimate evil. While she faced the victims with an unblinking eye, she wanted to tell each of them that she hoped they were not killed by the same man. The sum of three individual killers was far less a man whose sole predatory focus was to kill a stranger.

  It just was.

  It rained all night and the wind knocked over the neighbor’s old-school galvanized aluminum garbage can, but that wasn’t what kept Grace awake. It was the rotating series of the faces of the dead girls that clicked through her mind. They morphed into one another like an old MTV video—back in the day when the cable channel actually played music videos. The girls were so, so young. So pretty. So much like the sister she both loved and hated. It was so strange, the rotation of faces and how Tricia had been one of them.

  She woke up her husband.

  “Honey,” she said.

  His sleepy eyes stayed shut.

  She turned on the light and nudged him once more.

  “Are you asleep?”

  Shane pulled one eye open and looked at his wife.

  “I was,” he said, trying to hold his sarcasm. It wasn’t easy to do. He looked over at the bedside clock. It was after three.

  “Sorry,” she said, rolling closer.

  “I know it’s the case,” he said, “but what about it?” Again, he tried to keep his feelings in check. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Grace’s work or what troubled her. It was that it had become more than fifty-fifty in their relationship. More like eighty-twenty. It had become increasingly difficult for Shane to share about his work, his colleagues in the field office, whatever was bothering him.

  “I keep thinking of my sister,” she said, her voice nighttime soft.

  “What about her?” he asked, a little surprised to hear that Tricia was the source of Grace’s insomnia.

  “It sounds silly, I know.”

  “What does?”

  “That I keep thinking of the similarities in the case and how no matter what outcome there will be sisters like me. Mothers like my mom. You know, people who will carry the tragedy in some way for the rest of their lives.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. You’ll solve the cases,” he said.

  “They didn’t,” she said.

  “They aren’t you. Besides, the killer isn’t Ted. Get some sleep.”

  “I know.” She turned away from him, and looked out at the black water of Puget Sound.

  CHAPTER 31

  Grace felt a slow leaking of air coming from her lungs as she looked at the report from the Washington state crime lab in Olympia. It was both interesting and disappointing. In reality, the report indicated little more than what she’d surmised already—at least about the bones themselves. The bones were female. Young. The report didn’t say exactly how long the victim had been dead, but indicated the skeletal remains were likely less than fifty years old. What she needed and wanted to know more than anything, wasn’t there, of course. The lab didn’t have the capability to determine whose bones they’d recovered from the shoreline near where Samantha Maxwell’s body had been recovered. DNA extracted from bones was possible, but not an easy endeavor. Even a single hair follicle would have been a better bet.

  Maybe the FBI can do better, she thought.

  The report itself was brief, only three pages. It was the last page that held her interest came near the end of the document:

  Significant traces of arsenic and lead were recorded with the bone sample. The soil samples collected from the immediate vicinity do not carry those metals; however, locations near the former site of the ASARCO smelter do.

  The ASARCO smelter had been a Tacoma landmark, though not an especially lauded one, since the turn of the previous century. In its day, the 562-foot smokestack spewed the foul by-products of copper s
melting into the air, giving the city its “Aroma of Tacoma” nickname. The smelter dumped lead and other chemicals into the atmosphere, sending a toxic cloud over much of the immediate vicinity. Prevailing winds sent the plume points farther. Arsenic, a heavy metal by-product of the copper smelting process, was collected by the company for use in insecticides. At least some of it was. Over time, tons of arsenic sprinkled over the water, shoreline, forests, and the front yards of homeowners closest to the smelter. In the early 1980s, the United States Environmental Protection Agency named the former smelter a Superfund site—one of the most toxic in the country.

  As Grace dialed the number for the crime lab, she remembered how she and her mother gathered with friends on Verde Avenue and watched in awe as the massive smokestack was reduced to rubble in 1993. The town of Ruston, just below the bluff along Commencement Bay, had been freed from a dark shadow cast by the monolith.

  “Detective Alexander,” she said.

  The lab supervisor, a nice woman named Bea Carter, answered.

  “You’re fast. Got the report, I take it?”

  “Yes,” Grace said.

  “I figured you’d have a question or two.”

  “You know me well.”

  “I know your case. And I really wanted to find out who those bones belonged to. I was hoping right along with you.”

  “Will you send them to the FBI?”

  “Already on their way,” Bea said. “No telling when they’ll get to them. They don’t exactly pounce on everything, especially something this old.”

  “I know. Thanks. One thing I was wondering about on the report. The arsenic. Are you saying that the victim was killed by arsenic poisoning, or were the bones contaminated by the soil?”

  “No. No. Not poisoning. The arsenic had leached into the bones, but had settled in after death. This was not a poisoning death at all. My feeling, based on what the techs found and sent along for our lab, is that the victim was buried elsewhere. Shallow grave, too.”

  That detail puzzled her. “Why shallow?”

  “Most lead and arsenic from the smelter—and that’s where this came from, I’m almost sure of it—only penetrated the top eight to twelve inches of the soil. I’m thinking that whoever killed our Jane Doe barely buried her.”