by Gregg Olsen
“Have you named your baby?” she asked.
Peggy brightened a bit. Her baby. That was someone wonderful. He was only a few hours old, but already he was the best thing that had ever happened to her. “No. I was thinking of a name, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What name are you thinking of now? There’s no rush, of course. I mean, it is nice to have a name before you leave the hospital. It helps with the paperwork, you know.”
“I had thought of Theodore,” Peggy said slowly as she measured her words.
The nurse didn’t say anything right away. The hesitation clearly bothered Peggy.
“You don’t like it, either,” Peggy said, pushing the button to lower her head in the motorized bed. The hydraulics rumbled.
“It isn’t that,” the nurse answered. “I dated a guy named Ted once and it wasn’t the best experience of my life. Kind of a control freak who thought he was better than anyone else. But that’s got nothing to do with your naming your little boy. Just a reaction. Sorry.”
Peggy wondered if it was her Ted that the nurse was indicating. Her heart beat a little faster and the monitor at her bedside began to pulse more rapidly. Certainly there were plenty of Teds around Tacoma, but even so the idea of another girl being involved with her Ted was a painfully sore subject. She wanted to be the only one for him, the only one he ever needed. Indeed, the only one who ever really understood his deep, deep hurt.
“Was that here in town?” Peggy finally asked. Her voice was soft and a little shaky. The monitor’s light quickened.
The nurse set down the chart, looked at the monitor, and shook her head. “Oh no, back in Detroit. Just kind of funny how names carry the weight of past experiences—good and bad.”
Peggy turned toward the window again, looking out and thinking.
“My mother was dead set against Theodore, too.”
The monitor slowed.
“None of my business, but she seems like a very negative woman. She probably wouldn’t like any name you selected. I’m thinking out loud, of course. And I have no standing here. Just putting it out there. A lot of families pressure each other, you know. You’d be surprised at how many change their minds on the names they’d once thought were perfect.”
Peggy nodded. “Understood. Thank you. When can I see my son? When can I see Jeremy?”
The nurse smiled. “I like that name,” she said. “Let me ask the doctor if your son can come into your room.”
“He’s better?”
“He’s just fine. We were just keeping an eye on him. Rough delivery, but I don’t have to tell you that.”
Peggy allowed a smile to return to the pretty blond nurse. She liked the name Jeremy. And as much as Peggy hated her mother, she didn’t want to make her a greater enemy. Jeremy might need family someday. The boy didn’t need his father’s name to prove a damn thing. Being Ted’s son was greater than a mere label.
* * *
Outside Peggy’s room, the nurse met up with her supervisor, an African American woman of about fifty who had been working at Tacoma General for almost three decades.
“How’s she doing?” the older woman asked.
“Better, no thanks to her mother,” the younger nurse said.
The supervisor ran her glasses down the bridge of her nose. “Was that the jogger?” she asked.
The blonde looked on as a woman and her husband walked by dragging the IV unit along the gleaming floor way toward the nursery. “Sorry?”
“The woman in the black tracksuit?” the supervisor asked.
“Yeah. What a bitch she was. So mean to her.” The blond nurse hesitated, thinking about the tail end of the encounter she’d witnessed with the mother and the conversation she’d had with Peggy about naming her son Theodore. “Weird thing about it was that her mother reamed her and Peggy, the patient, just took it. Barely reacted. But when we started talking about my boyfriend, Ted, her heart rate escalated big time.”
For the first time, the older woman looked half-interested. “Your boyfriend? Didn’t know you had one.”
She shook her head. “That’s just it. I don’t. But Peggy’s vitals shot up when I mentioned his name. It was like she was jealous or something when she had no cause to be. My Ted was a doofus I dumped back in Detroit. You know, before I came out here to this lovely job.”
The charge nurse looked down at the paperwork assigned to Peggy Howell. She ignored the younger woman’s dig about the job. As if Detroit was some prize, after all.
“Says the father’s name is Theodore Bundy.”
The younger woman nodded as she processed the information. “Name seems familiar,” she said.
The supervisor pushed the paper back into the folder. “She probably made it up. She’s not wearing a ring and she isn’t married, anyway. I don’t know why these young girls bother. A few years ago they did the right thing and gave them up for adoption. Better for the kid. I mean, most of the time.”
“Her mother was so mean to her,” the blonde said. “I mean really, really mean.”
“Some mothers are,” she said.
Before passwords and Internet sites, some men kept porn physically hidden away from their wives and girlfriends. Stashes were kept in private places where a man, and some women, could pleasure themselves without fear of discovery. Peggy had a stash like that. It wasn’t porn, however. It was her bundle of Ted letters. Jeremy had seen her put them under the false bottom of a dresser in the guest room upstairs.
He read them one time, looking over his father’s words with both reverence and disgust.
Dear Peggy,
I don’t know the song you mentioned in the last letter, but I do like the message of it. I’m doing fine. I have been getting all of your letters, but don’t have the time to answer them. Just not enough time, I guess. The days are filled with all kinds of legal wrangling between the prison staff, the lawyers. Barbara Walters wants to come and talk to me, and I told the warden to tell her to take a hike. I don’t want to be put up on TV until I’m exonerated. If I go on TV now, they’ll just try to trip me up. A couple of authors have tried to get ahold of me to write a book about my experiences, and I might talk to them. My story isn’t what the world thinks it is. You know the truth. You are the only one who knows the real me. My mom thinks she knows me, but she doesn’t. Not really. Anyway, I was wondering if you could send me a picture of Tricia. You’ve told me so much about her that I’d like to see a photo if you can manage one. I bet you’re a thousand times prettier than her, but I’d still like to put a face to the name. Don’t put her name on the photograph, but yours. Bye for now.
peace, Ted
Dear Peggy,
I know you understand me. You understand my place in history. I know that. I know you understand that my cases are more intricate; more involved than someone like that piddly-ass Boston Strangler. Mine involved girls all over the country. Look at the TV, for God’s sake. I’m as big as the Beatles and they were bigger than Jesus Christ. I’m not a braggart. I just want some recognition, some confirmation that I am the best at something. I don’t know for certain, but it might be fair to say that Michelangelo or Leonardo were the world’s greatest artists. Is it that much of a stretch, Peggy, to acknowledge that I too have held some great place in this world? Everyone wants to talk to me. Figure me out. They want to cut out my goddamn brain to see what makes me tick. They ask me if I wet the bed when I was a little kid. They asked me if Johnnie gave me the belt. Do you think they’d pick apart some other kind of genius? No. I’ll tell you what. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare. Sometimes, Peggy, greatness just has to be accepted, appreciated, and revered for what it is.
By then Ted had jumped onto the genius bandwagon, and although what he was writing to her would have offended most of the world, Peggy didn’t care. She loved him. She agreed with him. She understood above all others that something could be beautiful and very, very dark. If Ted Bundy was some kind of an evil genius, she was content being part of his life.
She felt a charge, a thrill, at his words. She felt love.
If Ted had been consumed by murder “twenty-four hours a day,” as the lead investigator in the Washington cases had said so pointedly as the hours ticked toward the electric chair, Peggy had found herself consumed by Ted. There was no water, no air. No food. No sleep. All that existed in her world was Ted and the hope that if the law did what it had set out to do that his legacy of greatness would live on in some very real, tangible way.
He was Leonardo. She was his Mona Lisa.
* * *
Grace Alexander looked at the fax sent by Anna Sherman’s nurse.
“What’s that?” Paul asked as he hovered over her, dirty coffee mug in hand.
“Nothing,” she said.
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
“Paul, this is personal.”
“You’ve been doing something personal a lot lately.”
She wanted to tell him, but it felt foolish. They were in the middle of a major investigation. She had Emma, Kelsey, and Lisa to think about. And while their cases were at the forefront, she had that need to find out who had killed her sister.
“I’m leaving for a meeting.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
It was time to go see Peggy Howell. Peggy had lived with her mother in Ruston, in the heart of the smelter’s toxic zone. The arsenic in Tricia’s bones had come from the smelter.
She looked up Peggy’s address. Of course, she’d moved. She had to move.
So did the bones.
A second later, Grace was out the door.
CHAPTER 45
In January 1989 the air in Tacoma was heavy with the stench of the Simpson paper mill, an acrid odor to which residents of Washington’s toughest city, Grit City, had somehow become immune. The air had been especially chilly after temperatures dropped following a green Christmas. Ice pricked at the edges of lawns and vapors melted into frozen masses where the O’Hares’ dryer duct fed moist air outside. And yet as cold as it had become outside, the scene on the TV set in the O’Hare family living room was beyond chilly. Sissy, Conner, and their little girl watched the spectacle coming from Florida.
Burn, Ted, burn!
Conner held Sissy’s hand and leaned closer to her. He spoke in a whisper so that Grace couldn’t hear.
“His time has run out,” he said.
“He’ll get another stay,” Sissy said, her face knotted with worry.
“No, he’s out of time. I’m telling you, he’ll die tonight.”
She shook her head. “Not so sure about that,” she said. “He always manages to find a way to survive.”
Conner looked at his daughter.
“The man who killed your sister is going to finally be punished.”
Grace didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what she could say that would matter. She looked at the TV, but kept most of her attention on her parents. They carried such a strange mixture of fear, hate, and hope. They seemed both elated and miserable at the same.
“He didn’t answer my last letter,” Sissy said.
“He’s been busy,” Conner said, and a grim smile came over his face.
When Jeremy Howell looked into his mother’s eyes it was with fear and respect, rather than love. Peggy had told her son over and over that he was special and that his specialness had to be fulfilled. If he was to be what he was born to be, to follow in his father’s bloody footprints, then he had to do more than seize the moment. He had to create it. He had to be wily, crafty, smart. He had to be ruthless. When Jeremy looked into his mother’s eyes it was with the kind of respect and fear that came with hate.
And yet he loved her. He knew her struggles. She’d told him repeatedly that loving Ted had been the hardest part of her hard-fought life.
“My own family disowned me,” she said one time when they sat in the car parked in front of his grandmother’s house. “And when they disowned me, they disowned you. I hate them. I know you don’t know them and you never will, but, honey, trust me.”
It was always about trust. Jeremy had never talked to his father, of course. By the time Peggy had told her son about his important father, Old Sparky had zapped Ted into oblivion.
“They killed him. No one would kill a lion for doing what he does naturally, exquisitely. No one thinks anything of a killer whale eating a seal, for God’s sake. It is what they do. Your father was like that. You’re like that.”
“Like that?” he asked.
His mother’s face tightened. “Don’t be stupid. What don’t you understand here?”
He thought a moment, wondering if he’d had the ability to say what he was really thinking.
“What if I don’t want to be like that?” he finally asked.
She looked at him, with those cold eyes. She took a moment, too. Conversations between mother and son were always like that. Long gaps between utterances, rather than quick exchanges fueled by any real connection.
Her eyes narrowed once more and she shrugged. He was a bug. A gnat. His questions were annoyances. “You will struggle for the rest of your life. You will die being a nothing. Nothing is worse than a promise or birthright unfulfilled.”
The words didn’t track and Peggy Howell could see that.
“Being your mother isn’t easy,” she said. “What I did for you just doesn’t seem to matter.”
She turned away and looked out at the house that she grew up in.
“I hate my parents and you’ll probably hate me, too.”
“I could never hate you, Mom,” he said, lying.
“I could hate you,” she said.
“You couldn’t.”
“Don’t mess with your birthright,” she said. “If you do, you’ll be alone forever.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
She lit a cigarette and cracked the window.
“Except for Ted, I’ve been alone my entire life,” she said.
“What about my sister? My stepdad?”
“He’s dead and your sister Cecilia might as well be.” She pushed smoke out of her nostrils, reminding Jeremy of a dragon. “Are you going to let me down, too?”
“I guess not,” he said, still unsure of what she wanted.
“When Ted was only a little older than you he killed a girl.”
Jeremy felt his pulse quicken. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
Peggy turned away. “Then you’re nothing. You’re dead to me. And you know what? I’ll be kind of relieved. Nothing I loathe more than a loser. Especially a loser who’s been handed greatness on a silver platter. Be nothing. Fine with me.”
Jeremy remembered going to his bedroom after that encounter with his mother in the car, his sister playing in the room next door. He’d cried a little, but the tears were oddly forced. He went to Cecilia, who was playing with her Barbie, and he took his belt and slipped it around her neck. Cecilia started to scream and Peggy came in, yanked the belt from her daughter’s neck, and slapped Jeremy as hard as she could.
“Dogs don’t poop in their kennel,” she said.
He touched his face where the stinging pain came. “Huh?”
Peggy’s eyes bulged. “You heard me. Now get out of here!”
“But, Mom.”
“Don’t ‘but’ me, or I’ll beat the crap out of you.”
“I was doing what—”
Later that same night, Cecilia came into Jeremy’s bedroom, her neck still pink from the belt that had he’d twined around it. Her saucer eyes absorbed her brother.
“Jeremy, why did you hurt me?” she asked. Her tone was plaintive, but she didn’t cry.
“I don’t know,” he said, now barely looking at her.
She touched him, but he pulled back a little. “Please don’t hurt me ever again,” she said, looking at him as she tried to understand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His words came at her, hollow and empty.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know.”
&n
bsp; In that moment even Jeremy Howell’s kid sister could see that there was nothing to her brother’s apology. He had meant to hurt her. He wanted to hurt her.
Years later after Cecilia married and found fewer and fewer excuses to come home she told her husband about the time her brother tried to choke her with a belt.
“I don’t want that sick SOB around our kids,” Kirk Morris said.
“I don’t, either, but I don’t blame him. Not really. I think that the stuff my mom was doing to him was making him that way.”
“What was she doing to him?”
“Not that,” she said emphatically. “She was always whispering in his ear. Telling him things.”
“What was she saying?”
“Empowerment stuff. I watched her lean next to him and say, ‘You’re better than the rest. You are special.’ ”
“What’s so creepy about that?”
“It wasn’t in the words,” she said. “It was in how she said things and how he reacted. It was like something secret, maybe forbidden, dark. I don’t know.”
“Now you’re acting weird.”
“Maybe I am. I was a kid. Maybe I just didn’t get it. But on more than one occasion I remember my mother telling him that being the best was a lonely endeavor, one that few could understand. She said, ‘Your work will only be known if you get caught.’ ”
“Get caught?”
“Something like that. I don’t know for sure. It was a long time ago. Really, when I look back, my brother never really had a chance.”
“I don’t feel sorry for him and I don’t want him around our kids.”
“I do feel sorry for him, but I agree. I don’t want him around the children, either.”
Although the Morrises lived only across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Gig Harbor, they never saw much of Uncle Jeremy. Their mother said he was too busy. A recluse. He had a demanding job. She never told her children that their grandmother actually lived with their uncle. Oddly, they never asked about her. They assumed that she, along with their grandfather, was dead. After all, why wouldn’t their grandma come to see them if she was alive?
* * *
