Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  The families want an answer. Even the worst possible answer.

  CHAPTER 20

  Grace sat up in bed reading. Shane was doing the same thing. Neither gave a single thought to the idea that they might have sex or even talk about what had transpired throughout the day. They’d kept in touch with text messages already. Grace had come from dinner at her mother’s and Shane from a long day dealing with bureau politics at the Seattle field office. Their bedroom window faced the water, and when an enormous freighter bound for Asia passed—an occurrence that usually stopped them from doing whatever they were doing to watch—it was barely noticed. Both were deeply immersed in what they were reading. Shane was editing an afterword that he’d written for a book by a forensic pathologist, a friend from his days before Grace. Grace, maybe rightly so, was normally skeptical about the pretty and accomplished author/friend, but that night she made no mention of her. No slightly sarcastic quip along the lines of “You’re not bringing her into our bed, are you?”

  Her tired eyes were glued to the letters her mother had loaned her. She’d seen some of them before when she was a teenager, but this time urgency drove her, not curiosity.

  “Didn’t realize that serial killers had such great penmanship,” he said. “Thought they were more erratic in their letterforms. At least that’s been my experience.”

  Grace looked over, a sly smile on her face.

  “My mother wrote this,” she said, barely looking in his direction.

  “Your mother? You said these were Bundy Letters.”

  She nodded and started to fold the thin white paper with the florid cursive writing. “My mother is one smart woman. She actually copied the letters before she sent them so that she’d know exactly what Ted was responding to.”

  “That doesn’t look like a photocopy,” he said.

  Grace nodded. “I know. Get this, my mom hand-copied them. They didn’t have access to a home copy machine back then and dad didn’t want to spend ten cents a copy. Less money for the cause. Plus, I don’t think he thought this writing to Ted Bundy would get them anywhere.”

  “It didn’t,” Shane said.

  “It did,” she argued.

  “How? In what way? He never admitted anything.”

  “Not Tricia’s murder. There were some other tidbits that he spread throughout the letters that actually did help close cases in Utah and Oregon.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said, a little surprised by her disclosure. What else didn’t he know? They’d talked about Tricia’s disappearance hundreds of times.

  Grace didn’t say so out loud. She didn’t need to. Somewhere in the letters of a crafty lunatic were the answers to what had happened to her sister . . . and just maybe what had happened to Kelsey, Lisa, and Emma.

  A line her mother had written was both poignant and devastatingly true.

  Sometimes, Ted, I think all of us are products of the good and bad done to us as children. Maybe that’s your story, too.

  The other side of murder, the side from which the darkness was born, is not the need for some measure of sympathy. While most people blamed the mother, the father, the environment from which the murder emerged, Grace always considered homicidal tendencies to be generational. The road that Ted Bundy had been on when he killed his first victim had been one that was paved with the messy combination of evil and mental illness that his parents and their parents likely had unwittingly laid down before Ted was a sorry glare in his father’s eyes. Ted’s own grandmother had reportedly been treated for depression with electroshock therapy. She was also an agoraphobic, refusing to leave the safe confines of the family home. And while the confusion of his paternity would certainly traumatize any young person, Ted had exhibited a pathology and propensity for violence long before that issue emerged.

  A relative, a teenage aunt, told the story of how she’d stirred from an afternoon nap to find Ted, only three, smiling at her in that way that really isn’t a smile, but an acknowledgment of something he’d done—or intended to do.

  All around her were kitchen knives.

  No one knows for sure why Louise left Philadelphia with five-year-old Teddy in 1951, although it is easy to guess. Shame and abuse had likely reached a level she could no longer endure. Louise needed a new life. She didn’t need to be the woman with the little boy who never knew his father. She could not have gone a greater distance than Tacoma, and that probably figured into her thinking, too. When she met Johnnie Bundy, a cook for a local hospital, he was everything she’d ever wanted. A Steady Eddie. A man who kept his promises. Decent with a capital D.

  “Ted was grandiose even as a kid. He must have hated having a dad who was a hospital cook, not an airline pilot,” Grace said while Shane shifted his weight on the mattress and doubled up the pillow under his head.

  “Or a lawyer,” Shane said.

  “Right, one of those glamour jobs that he could brag about with the other boys. His dad worked in a hospital cafeteria. Even in working-class Tacoma that had to have been at the lower end of things,” she said.

  “In a way, he always thought he was better than the Bundys,” Shane said. “He thought his stepfather was boring, didn’t make enough money, and wasn’t too smart.”

  “Ted wanted to be better than them. Johnnie Bundy wasn’t sophisticated. He was just the quintessential average Joe, but his averageness was his goodness. He married Louise and adopted her son and raised him as his own.”

  Shane shook his head. “He didn’t know what he was getting into.”

  “No one could have seen what was coming.” Grace reached over and turned off the bedside light.

  Tacoma is called Grit City, and it’s a nickname that fit like a grimy garden glove. And while there are stately mansions in the north end—places that were the homes of the lumber barons like the Weyerhaeusers—Ted’s world as a boy and a teen was decidedly more prosaic. Johnnie Bundy’s living was modest and their home, clothing, and cars reflected that. Ted’s true young adulthood is bit of a mystery. He’d tell people that he was addicted to magazines of murder and bondage, pornography with the most disgusting and vile images of evil done to women for the gratification of a small segment of the male audience. He immersed himself in true-crime documentaries, reveling in the depictions of lifeless, bloodied, female bodies.

  And then, like a switch, he’d put on the mask and deny it all.

  Ted was a teenager of the night, a junior night stalker. He’d steal beer, guzzle it down, and then start the walk. He’d follow the sliver of light from parted curtains and press up close to get a glimpse of a girl or woman in a state of undress. A voyeur, a peeper, whatever it was that Ted Bundy was before he became a killer, he perfected it.

  A hunter. That was Ted.

  Among Grace’s mother’s files was a photocopy of a letter that Ted had written to a television producer who had promised “to set the record straight” and tell the true story of Theodore Robert Bundy. In this missive, Ted reflected on his teenage years at Woodrow Wilson High.

  You will put up any kind of piece of garbage that you want to and then try to justify it with some quick cutaways to people who really didn’t know me at all. That’s mostly everyone. I just wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to be part of the in crowd. I didn’t think that there really was an in crowd at that second-rate high school anyway. I had more going for me. So, yeah, I understand that you will do what you do. I did the minimum to just get through high school. Probably, Dan [the producer], you were a lot like me. Most people are. I know you are asking me to be introspective and I guess there is one thing that I could give you in that regards. I honestly didn’t see the point in having any of those people as friends. Or why I’d even want to?

  peace, Ted

  It was after two in the morning, when Grace’s phone rang on the bedside table of the Alexanders’ Salmon Beach house. Shane stirred, but didn’t awaken completely. Among the many things they had in common, were nighttime calls from dispatchers, special agents in charge, par
tners, anyone who carried a badge and worked a case. At least a few times a month either’s phone would ring at this hour. This time it was her turn. Grace dropped her feet into her perfectly positioned slippers and grabbed the pink terry robe she left slung over a chair and started for the hallway.

  It was Paul.

  “What is it?” she asked, in a whisper.

  “We found Emma or Kelsey, or maybe someone else.”

  Grace had expected to hear this, but even as she did, it sickened her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  Some dogs barked; wherever he was calling from, the canine unit was there.

  “The other side of the river,” Paul said. “Where that guy was fishing.”

  “What?”

  “Right. I’m there now. You want to come down.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Be there in twenty.”

  “Make it twenty-five. Stop for coffee. Could use some out here. Colder than crap.”

  The river’s surface was striated and black, like wide-wale corduroy stretched between the banks on either side. Nine police and sheriffs’ units, dogs, and personnel were congregated there. Paul’s ex-wife, Lynnette Bateman, was there, too. Watching the two interact was usually fun, but it wasn’t going to be just then. Not with a dead teenager on the edges of the Puyallup.

  “Over there,” Sergeant Lynnette Bateman said. “Detective Bateman is with the medical examiner.”

  Grace nodded and went toward the lights that pierced the starry sky like a supermarket’s grand opening.

  Paul thanked her for the coffee and took a swallow before he spoke. “Pretty sure it’s Kelsey,” he said. “Tech says left hand is missing.”

  “Just the left hand?”

  He nodded and drank some more.

  “She wasn’t completely dismembered like Lisa?”

  “Guess not.”

  “What else?”

  “They think she might have been frozen. She’s in pretty good condition. You know, considering how long she’s been dead. No decomp. The bastard.”

  “So you think it’s a man who did this?” Grace said.

  Paul pulled off the top of his Styrofoam cup so he could guzzle the coffee more quickly. He was a man in dire need. “You got me,” he said. “No more PC. Only a seriously messed-up maniac of a dude would do this to a little girl.”

  Grace nodded. “Who found her?”

  “Transient over there,” he said, raising a shoulder to indicate a figure with short dark hair sitting on the bumper of a cruiser.

  “Talk to him?” she asked.

  Paul allowed a smile to come to his face. “It’s a she.”

  “Right.”

  “She said she was looking for cans for recycling along the river and, well, found something I doubt she’ll ever forget. I know I won’t.”

  “Techs process her?”

  “Yeah. She had this on her.” He held up a T-shirt inside a plastic bag.

  Grace pressed her fingertips to the plastic to read what was printed on it.

  Save the Sound

  “She said she found it near the body, but not on it. She said she actually found it first, before the body.”

  “Where?”

  “Almost on the road.” Paul suddenly turned his attention to the coroner’s assistant, who was preparing a gurney and a body bag to transport Kelsey’s remains to the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy. “Hold on! My partner needs to see the vic.”

  The men backed off and Grace followed Paul over to where the body was lying.

  It was Kelsey Caldwell, all right. No need for forensics to verify it, though the techs would do just that during the autopsy. Her eyes were open staring up at the stars; her long dark hair shimmered as if she’d been placed there after a salon blow dry. And while she was nude, her most intimate parts had been covered by bunches of grass.

  “The transient did that,” Paul said, looking back over at the woman sitting on the cruiser’s bumper. “She said she didn’t think it was right to leave that girl naked like that.”

  The scene had been compromised, which was frustrating, but Grace understood the sentiments, too. Nothing about what had happened to the seventeen-year-old was right at all.

  “Somebody’s going to have to call the father,” she said. “This will be in the papers faster than you guzzled that coffee.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Emma Rose was no longer consumed by fear. She was beyond that. She hadn’t been raped. And as far as she knew she hadn’t been murdered. It was possible that she had been murdered, of course, and that she’d done something so terrible that she’d been assigned to a space in purgatory. She dismissed that after the first two hours of her captivity. She was not exactly sure how long she’d been held in that dark place, a mattress on the floor, a bucket to use for her toilet. Her captor had provided copies of People magazine, a reading light, and a green, unbearably scratchy army blanket. She’d been fed a cheese sandwich—American cheese, which she thought was completely disgusting—and Sam’s Club diet cola.

  It surprised her that she even thought that the American cheese was terrible, considering that it really was the least of her most pressing concerns. She was also surprised that she’d gotten used to the bucket so soon. Since there was no window, she had no idea what day it was, how many days had passed.

  And then there was the matter of her captor. He came to her with only a single whispered utterance— “Stay back or I’ll fill your apartment with poisonous gas and you’ll be dead in five seconds.”

  Apartment? That hole? An apartment?

  Calling it that scared Emma a little. If that was his idea of an apartment, he was even more whacked than she might have thought. Besides being a girl snatcher. And if he was calling it an apartment, did that mean she was going to be held there forever?

  “Did you contact my mom?”

  No answer.

  “Hey, I want to go home,” she said, trying not to cry.

  Silence.

  “I know you are listening. I want to know what you’re going to do to me. I mean, I want you to let me go home. I haven’t seen you. I don’t even know what it is that you want from me. Please. Call my mom!”

  Like all of the times she tried to start a conversation with him, whoever he was, he ignored her. She could hear his breathing, or at least she thought it was his breathing. A small fan had been installed in the “apartment” presumably to provide fresh air intake. It was on all the time, whirring and spinning.

  Emma waited, thinking it all out. She considered that maybe a more submissive approach might be more to the creeper’s liking.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “I wish you would say something. I’m a very good listener. My teachers always said that I had excellent listening skills.”

  Nothing.

  Emma pushed on. She was not a quitter.

  “I wonder if you’re as lonely as I am. I know you’re smart and talented. You made this really nice apartment,” she said, nearly choking on the phrase. “Please, sir, talk to me.”

  Sir, she thought, was a nice touch.

  And still nothing.

  Emma got up and walked to the entrance to the apartment. Her captor had fashioned some kind of a narrow horizontal hatch on the door. It was only wide enough for a soda can turned on its side.

  “Please,” she said, trying to remain as calm as she could. Freaking out, Emma believed, might make whoever it was breathing on the other side of the wall see that she wasn’t a threat.

  For a second, when she heard the twisting of the lock on the other side of the hatch, she thought she was finally getting somewhere.

  The hatch opened and the tray pushed forth.

  Emma looked down at a People magazine with Selena Gomez on the cover. It was an article about some troubles the young actress had overcome recently. Emma took the magazine and went to her mattress. She twisted the gooseneck of the reading lamp and slumped against
the army blanket.

  God, Emma thought as she fanned open the magazine, this girl thinks she has problems. I’m probably going to be raped and murdered.

  As she read, her mind wandered all over the place. She tried as hard as she could to remember exactly what she’d been doing before she blacked out. She remembered being at Starbucks and getting ready to close for the night. She remembered how she and Oliver had raged about the customers who had the nerve to bring their own food in to the coffee place that they now used as home offices. One guy had even had the gall to bring a thermos of coffee from home.

  “It’s Starbucks coffee,” the young man said. “What’s the big deal if I buy it here or at Safeway? You’re still getting the profits.”

  She remembered leaving Starbucks and walking toward the bus stop. After that, nothing. Her memory was a complete void. She felt the back of her head. The bump where she surmised she’d been struck had shrunk by then. The touch of her hand made her wince. Her long dark hair was getting tangled, the back strands turning into a white girl’s bad idea of dreads. When she adjusted the lamp, Emma noticed the shade’s interior was lined with reflective silver.

  It was hard to see her face with the bulb glowing right in her eyes. But in a fleeting instance she saw what she looked like just then.

  Around her eyes were dark circles. Emma gasped. She’d seen that kind of bruising around a woman’s eyes before when a neighbor had been battered by her husband.

  “What did you do to me?” she asked softly, sure that the creeper couldn’t hear her above the omnipresent din of the running air intake fan. A tear fell down onto Selena Gomez’s pretty face. Emma refused to cry out. If she’d had thought for one moment that she had a chance to get out of there, she knew it was wishful thinking.