The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  The crack. The way out. The source of the air. Emma Rose woke up, her mind still zeroing in on what she needed to do above all other possibilities. Her head throbbed and she wanted to throw up. But more than that, she wanted out of the apartment. She wanted to go home. She pulled herself up from the mattress and found her way to back to the wall with the crack. At least, that’s where she was certain it had been the day before. On her knees, she ran her hands over the wall, but she couldn’t find the opening. Had she gone the wrong direction? The room was not that large. How was it that she couldn’t find the source of the airflow? It was dark as always, but she’d found it before by feeling the air pass through the opening. How was it that she couldn’t find it now?

  God, help me. Where is it? Where did it go?

  The Howells had moved to a nice middle-class neighborhood in Tacoma, on North Howard, not far away from where Ted had grown up. Donna Howell had taken her relocation money from the old neighborhood in Ruston and paid cash for the two-story house with the brick façade and bright green louvered shutters—a house that Peggy had insisted was the perfect location. After Donna died in 1994, the house was willed to Peggy, who was already living there with her adult son, Jeremy. While none of the neighbors liked Peggy, they did appreciate Jeremy’s dedication to keeping the yard in perfect shape. He never missed a mowing and, better yet, kept it sprinkled in the summer.

  “I haven’t seen you in years. Since you were a child. But I know who you are,” Peggy said, when she answered the door. “You look a lot like Tricia, not quite as pretty, but a lot like her.”

  “Hi, Peggy,” Grace said, looking her over. Peggy wore jeans and a sweatshirt. Her skin was wrinkled and her hair was long, but very thin. It dawned on her that her sister would be showing signs of aging by then—had she not been murdered. “May I come in?”

  Peggy nodded. “If you must. I’m surprised you’ve come by. Your mom pretty much disowned me. Shoved me to the side when all I wanted to do was help bring Tricia back home.”

  “That was a long time ago, Peggy.”

  “Yeah, well, it still hurts,” Peggy said, searching for her cigarettes. “I worked my ass off putting up flyers, you know. I did everything I was asked to do and then some.”

  “I came here to talk about my sister.”

  “You want a cigarette or a beer or something? I have some thick-cut potato chips if you’re hungry.”

  “I’m not hungry, Peggy. But I am here for something.”

  “For what?”

  “The truth.”

  “What kind of truth?”

  “The truth that only you know. The truth that the only living witness knows.”

  Peggy, still looking for her cigarettes, gave up. “You’re talking in riddles. Can you get to the point? I have to take my son out for a haircut later.”

  “Jeremy?”

  “Yes, Jeremy.”

  “Is his father home?”

  “No. His father is dead. Now you’re going to have to leave. You’re making me uncomfortable and I don’t like feeling that way in my own home,” Peggy said.

  “I thought that this was your mother’s house.”

  “She’s dead. It’s mine now.”

  “Right. She was bought out by The Pointe developers, is that right?”

  Peggy nodded. “She was. And they really screwed her over. They were supposed to give us six months before they tore down the house so we could salvage those gorgeous old leaded windows by the fireplace. But no, they didn’t. Really made my mom mad.”

  There were several ways to conduct interviews. One way was to build up to the key question, one little drop at a time, until there was a bucket of water to toss over the witness. The other tactic was to just go for the jugular.

  Grace used the second technique.

  “You killed my sister, Peggy. Didn’t you?”

  Peggy stepped backward. “Jesus! Where did that come from?”

  Grace had Peggy where she wanted her.

  “Tricia wanted you to stop messing around with the professor, didn’t she? Did she say she was going to tell? Did you kill her because of that?”

  Peggy looked flustered and angry.

  Where were those damn cigarettes?

  “I have no flipping idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. I think you killed her and buried her at your mom’s house on Ruby Street in Ruston.”

  “What are you talking about? Killed her? Buried her? You are really going to have to leave now. My son is at work and when he gets home he’s going to rip you a new one for treating me like this.”

  “The bones found at the beach were full of lead and arsenic. They came from your yard. You know what I’m talking about. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Emma Rose could hear yelling going on above her. It wasn’t the TV. It was louder, continuous. Two women were yelling at each other. She heard footsteps. Someone other than him was there. This was her chance. Her only chance.

  She took the People magazine with Selena Gomez on the cover and rolled it up into a megaphone.

  “Help!” she screamed. “I’m down here!”

  She stopped and listened for movement, but there wasn’t any.

  Next, she did what she had to do. It was her last chance. Her only hope. The stakes could not have been higher. If she failed, she would die.

  She took the match she’d found up from the floor and ran it against the concrete, but nothing happened. Only a white line.

  You have to light! she thought. Light! Please!

  She tried it again. She could smell the scent of a burning match, but there was no flame.

  God, why don’t you love me? she asked.

  She thought of Elizabeth Smart. She’d made it. She’d found freedom.

  The match lit and she held it the edge of the People cover. She knew that Selena had been through a lot of things in her life, and she would forgive her.

  It was a torch. She was the Statue of Liberty. Emma Rose knew that the smoke would need to find the nose of someone who would help her. Someone upstairs. Someone yelling. For good measure, she took off her T-shirt and doused it with Sam’s Club diet cola and held it over her mouth and nose. Next, she carried the blanket to the chair under the furnace vent and lit it on fire.

  If she died of smoke inhalation or even if she’d burned alive, it would be better than dying at the hand of the sicko who held her in the apartment. She held the Sam’s Club-diet-cola-soaked T-shirt and waited by the door. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t even that scared. She knew that whatever happened would be for the best.

  Whatever happened, she would be free.

  Grace stopped talking. She breathed in cautiously.

  “I smell smoke,” she said.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Peggy said. She was angry. Her face contorted. “I want you to leave.”

  “We need the fire department.” Grace reached for her phone and Peggy shoved her, knocking it out of her hand. It spun across the floor like a gyro.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Get the hell out of my house.”

  “The smoke must be coming from the basement.”

  “No, it’s not. I was cooking earlier. Get out of my house!”

  Grace picked up the phone with one hand, and pulled out her police issue. She pointed the gun at Peggy.

  “What’s downstairs, Peggy?”

  She punched in 911 with her thumb and put the phone on speaker.

  “I’m at 2121 North Howard and there’s a fire. This is Detective Grace Alexander with the Tacoma PD. I need backup, too. This is an emergency.”

  Grace didn’t wait for the dispatcher response other than to hear that “help is on the way.”

  By then Peggy was gone.

  With her gun drawn, Grace made her way first to the kitchen, where the back door had swung open. The door to the basement was locked. She kicked at it, but it didn’t budge. She stepped back a couple of feet and fired
in the lock. It took only one shot and the door was open. She turned on the light.

  Smoke oozed from the slot in the steel door.

  “I’m down here!” It was a scream, but it was soft, muffled. It was not Peggy’s voice, but even if it had been, Grace would have gone down there to get her. She wanted her in prison for what she’d done. Dying in a fire was too good for her sister’s supposed best friend.

  Her murderer.

  The basement lights were dimmed by the curtain of smoke and Grace called out to whoever it was who was trapped down there.

  “I can’t see very well. Tell me where you are.”

  Emma started banging against the door with her shoulder. She screamed out. “I’m here! I’m in here. In the apartment.”

  The apartment?

  Grace crawled on her hands and knees and found the door. Her hands felt for the knob, but it, too, was locked.

  “Back away,” she said. “I’m going to fire my weapon to unlock the door.”

  A muffled cry came through the wall. “Hurry.”

  The gun fired and Grace pushed at the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  “I’m going to try again. Please stay away from the door. Do you hear me?”

  There was no response.

  “Please stay away. I’m going to fire.”

  Grace steadied herself in the smoke and shot once more. This time, the lock split and the door crashed open.

  Inside, she found a teenage girl, unconscious and half naked.

  Emma Rose was alive.

  Paramedics carried Emma out on a stretcher into the yard, next to a maple that had already started to turn yellow. Flashing lights and sirens had turned what had been tranquil and beautiful into a nightmare of sorts. Several neighbors had gathered to gawk. One of them was a blond girl, young, pretty. She looked like an angel. When Emma looked up at her she smiled through the oxygen mask. She spoke, but no one could hear her.

  “Thank you, Elizabeth Smart,” Emma said.

  Grace Alexander sat on the back of the fire truck taking in some oxygen and insisting she was just fine.

  “I need to call my husband,” she said. “We need to catch Peggy Howell. She’s responsible.”

  The paramedic put his hand on her shoulder; it was a soft, reassuring touch. “Husband’s on his way. Your partner Detective Bateman’s over there.”

  Grace looked over as Paul made his way through the chaos of the fire. A neighbor on the west side of the Howells’ house had the stream from a garden hose aimed at the roof of his garage, but that was hardly necessary. The Howell blaze was small, contained to the basement.

  “We found the body. We found Emma’s kidnapper. Weird thing. Coroner says he’s been dead five days. Not long after he snatched Emma. This sick SOB.”

  She got up. “What body?”

  “Her son, I guess. Maybe a boyfriend. Two neighbors had differing ideas about the relationship.”

  “Jeremy’s dead?”

  “Yes, been dead a while.”

  “Did you find his mother?”

  “Sit tight. You’ve been through a lot today. But, yeah, we got her. Blues picked her up by the Safeway trying to buy, isn’t this ironic, a pack of smokes with a stolen credit card . . . Diana Rose’s Visa card.”

  Grace felt so much relief, she felt her legs go weak. She sat back down. She wanted to call her mother, too. She wanted her to know that it was finally over. Peggy had been the killer. She’d betrayed them all.

  “We found some weird shit inside the house,” he said, stepping back a little as an aid car left. “Good thing you’re sitting down.”

  “What?”

  “You think your mother was a Bundy collector? This gal had her beat tenfold. Photographs, letters, books, it’s like a murderbilia stage show gone wild in there. She even had cue cards for Ted.”

  Grace didn’t understand. “Cue cards? What do you mean?”

  Paul held one up in a plastic evidence bag. It was an index card, much like the kind her mother had used when she made Bundy flash cards. These were slightly larger and the writing on them was a sloppy printing.

  TED: YOU ARE THE PRETTIEST BY FAR.

  “Weird huh? Like she was making up some kind of play or something.”

  “Not a play,” Grace said. “More like a fantasy come true.”

  “Grace, we also found this,” he said, holding up the silver necklace with the dove dangling in the flashing lights of the aid car. “It was with her stash of Ted stuff. Right on top. Just sitting there.”

  She reached for it and he let it fall into her palm.

  Peggy had kept a souvenir. Just like the others.

  EPILOGUE

  BONES TO DUST

  “I’m the most coldhearted son of a bitch

  you’ll ever meet.”

  —TED BUNDY

  Peggy Howell gave several interviews after she pleaded guilty to the murders of Tricia O’Hare, Kelsey Caldwell, and Lisa Lancaster, and the abduction and attempted murder of Emma Rose. She didn’t proclaim her innocence, like Ted had done at first. Instead, she rather appeared to bask in the glory of her crimes. She was not charged with her son’s murder. As it turned out, Jeremy Howell had committed suicide. His mother told a reporter for the News Tribune that “Jeremy was a wuss. He was nothing like his father.” She went on to say that she had that her biggest regret was not the murders, but the fact that “Jeremy couldn’t man up. I had to tell him what to say, what to do, how to hold a knife. When we caught Kelsey—that’s the first girl’s name, I think—he couldn’t even do what had to be done. I did. I showed him. Girl number two was no better. I gave him one last chance to be the man that he should be, but hell, he took the easy way out.”

  Jeremy Howell was cremated after the autopsy that determined he’d died of a single gunshot wound to the head. His ashes remain unclaimed.

  Emma Rose was released from Tacoma General Hospital after three days of treatment for exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and dehydration. She told People in a telephone interview from her hospital bed: “Three amazing women saved my life—Selena Gomez, Elizabeth Smart, and Grace Alexander.” She quit Starbucks and went off to college in California. Marine biology is her stated major.

  Anna Sherman died on Christmas Day, never knowing for sure if her daughter, Susie, had been a victim of Ted Bundy or not. When the staff cleaned out her room at the assisted living center, they found a box of Ted memorabilia addressed to Grace Alexander with a small note written on the top: You did it for Tricia, please do it for Susie, too.

  Tavio and Mimi Navarro welcomed their first baby, a girl, on January 14. They named her Catalina. Michael Navarro vanished. Police were able to track him to the Mexican border crossing in San Diego. After that, nothing.

  Palmer Morton was arrested two months after the fire on Howard Street and charged with twenty-seven counts of fraud in a case that halted The Pointe development. He certainly had the resources to wriggle out of the charges by blaming the subcontractor. But it was a statement made by Emma Rose that clinched the case: “When I confronted him, he said that no one would believe me because I was a kid. He said that the subcontractor was stupid and he told them to find another dump location, one farther out of town. He knew what they were doing all along.”

  Sissy O’Hare could finally really breathe again. Knowing what happened, who was responsible, had been the greatest gift of her life. She had never imagined that her daughter had been killed because she wanted someone—Peggy—to do the right thing. It seemed like Tricia.

  Grace Alexander took a leave of absence from the Tacoma Police Department. She used the time to work on a book, My Sister’s Keeper—at husband Shane’s urging. She never finished it. She found out she was pregnant. Her baby was due in the the summer. She still has dinner with her mother every Wednesday. She told Paul Bateman that “my mom and I have never been closer. We both feel free of something that took over our lives.”

  Tricia O’Hare is no longer considered a Bundy victim. The day after Peggy�
�s arrest, someone updated the victim list on Wikipedia by removing her name. Her bones were returned to Sissy the following spring, and she and Grace buried her next to Conner.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wanted to take a moment to thank some of the people who have been so instrumental to the process of writing Fear Collector. I’m grateful to my amazing editor Michaela Hamilton for her deft editing and consultation as this book came together. And I’m equally indebted to Laurie Parkin, my publisher, for her wisdom, support, and patience. Lots of each!

  My appreciation also goes to Susan Raihofer, my literary agent for almost twenty years, for being such a great partner in this writing life. Finally, I want to thank my readers and my family (including Tina Marie) for keeping the faith and sharing the adventure. I love you all.