Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  And what might have been taken when Emma Rose vanished from the Starbucks at the Lakewood Towne Center.

  Tracy and her father had been killed in a car accident coming off the Nalley Valley viaduct four summers before.

  Grace never could rationalize why some families were a lightning rod for tragedy. It wasn’t that people were cursed with bad luck. She didn’t think that, no, not at all. And yet, there was something about the way cosmic forces conspired to pile on tragedy. It was more than someone being on the track to disaster; it was like the skids were greased and it was harder and harder to avoid calamity. It had nothing to do with socioeconomic status. The Roses were upper middle class. Arthur Rose had had a good-paying job. Tracy had been a straight-A student at Stadium High School. Father and daughter had been coming home from Spanaway. Tracy had been attending orientation at Pacific Lutheran University, where she’d intended to enroll the next fall.

  They were T-boned by a drunk driver and the downward spiral, a hurricane of bad luck and disaster, sucked the life and the joy from what had once seemed the perfect life. Perfect girls. Perfect husband. Perfect house. Everything anyone would have wanted. And now, all that was left of it was the perfect house.

  “Ms. Rose,” Grace said, close enough to the trembling mother to touch her, but feeling reluctant to do so. “We haven’t found Emma, but we found this and we need you to identify it.”

  Grace looked over at Paul and he handed her a plastic bag. It was plain its contents were familiar to the missing girl’s mother. It was a powder-blue T-shirt with faded graphics depicting a circle of seven dolphins swirling around SAVE THE SOUND logo.

  “That’s Tracy’s,” Diana said, reaching for it, feeling the crinkling plastic as she massaged the garment through its protective covering.

  “You mean Emma’s?” Paul asked.

  Grace shot him a look, one that she hoped conveyed that he’d promised that she could run the investigation insofar as victims’ families were concerned.

  “It was Tracy’s. She bought it the year before she and my husband were killed in the accident. Emma wore it. Often. It was kind of her way of staying close to her sister,” she said, moving her gaze from the detectives to the photograph of the sisters on Mount Rainier. “They both loved the mountains and water. They were close.”

  Grace didn’t say so right then, probably because Paul was incapable of understanding just what that might feel like. She easily could.

  My sister is gone, too.

  Grace gently pulled the bagged and tagged garment from the fingers of the grieving and anxious mother. “You said she was wearing a white blouse when she went to work. Was she wearing this, too?”

  Diana snapped her attention back to the detectives, and shook her head. She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her temples.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said, her words now coated in the distinct aguish of a mother who doesn’t know where her child is. “I mean, I’m sure that the T-shirt was hers, was Tracy’s. Where did you find it?”

  Grace set the bag on her lap. “Some blues found it a quarter mile from the latte stand,” she said.

  Diana looked confused. “Blues?”

  “Sorry,” Grace said. “Patrol officers.”

  Diana didn’t ask the question that both detectives were sure she was thinking. If her daughter was wearing a blouse with the blue T-shirt as an extra layer underneath, how was it that the T-shirt was no longer on her body? Had she taken it off? Or had someone else?

  “May we see her room?”

  “You think someone took her, don’t you?”

  “We don’t know what happened, Ms. Rose,” Grace said.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  It was obvious it was hard for Ms. Rose to let that phrase pass her lips, but she managed. It was almost like she was practicing. Preparing. Not wanting it to be true, but given the way her life had been going for the past two years, it was so sadly possible.

  “Can we see her room?” Paul asked.

  Diana got up and the detectives followed.

  Emma’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It was painted a peachy pink, a color that was somewhere between a little girl’s dream hue and a more sophisticated young woman’s idea of what was pretty. The room had a large bay window that overlooked the garden with just a hint of a view of Commencement Bay. The bed was an antique, painted white iron with small shabby-chic flecks of the metal showing. On the right side of the headboard someone had tied streamers of blue and white ribbons. Grace wondered if Emma had been a bridesmaid earlier that spring.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Diana asked.

  “Whatever makes you the most comfortable,” Paul said.

  “You speak,” the mother said.

  “When she lets me,” he said, looking over at Grace, who had moved to the desk across from the bed. She was either engrossed in something or pretending not to hear. Diana left the room.

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.

  Grace turned over some cards and papers on the desk, but didn’t look up.

  “If we’re going to find her, we need to know her. And if . . .” She hesitated and looked over at her partner, making sure that the mother was gone. “. . . and if she’s the victim of an abduction of some kind we will need to know why she was picked up.”

  “If she was.”

  “Right. If.” She held out a card. On the front was a photograph of a kitten sniffing a white rose.

  “Cute,” Paul said, though he really didn’t think so.

  “Ms. Rose?” she called out. A beat later, Diana Rose stood in the doorway. Her red eyes gave her away. She’d been crying quietly in the hallway.

  “Did you find something?”

  “Who is Alex?”

  “Her boyfriend. They only dated a few months. She broke it off with him.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I don’t know. I think she was tired of being tied down. She wanted to go out with other guys. Have fun. You know, you remember when you were a teenager, don’t you?”

  Grace nodded. “Barely. But yes, I do. Why did she keep this card if she was so over him?”

  Diana took the card and looked at it. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen this before. Where did you get it?”

  “Just here.” Grace pointed to the desk.

  “May I see it?” Diana said, not really waiting. She took the card and her eyes met the detective’s. “You don’t think he had anything to do with her disappearance, do you?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll check it out. What is Alex’s last name? And do you know where he lives?”

  “Morton. He lives a few blocks over.”

  “Palmer Morton’s son?” Paul asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “The Palmer Morton?” Grace asked, though she knew by the way the mother and her partner were acting that it had to be the very same. Everyone in Tacoma knew Palmer Morton. He owned about a third of the downtown retail core, including a steak house named Morton’s. He’d sued the famous Morton’s chain and won a provision that there would be no Morton’s steak house in Tacoma that wasn’t his. Chicago. New York. L.A. But not in Tacoma.

  Palmer Morton was that kind of a guy. Both detectives knew his son’s reputation, too. He’d been picked up for shoplifting at the Tacoma Mall, a case that had been conveniently dropped. Something about a file being lost, though no one in the department thought it was anything other than a favor called in by a fellow who knew something about favors.

  Before they got to the car, Grace turned to Paul.

  “You know what it means?” she asked.

  “That Morton kid is a creep?”

  “Maybe. But not that. The T-shirt was Emma’s. That means whoever killed Kelsey has Emma. Whoever killed Lisa killed Kelsey. The girls are linked. There’s no doubt.”

  And there was no doubt that they didn’t have much time.

  Tricia O’Hare’s yearbook photograph fr
om her senior year at Stadium High stared up from atop the papers Grace had spread out on the kitchen table overlooking the water off the front of the house on Salmon Beach. Her sister’s photograph. She could so very easily draw that exact image from memory. From the way her sister’s long hair rested just past her right shoulder, the left side pushed back. The leotard top Tricia wore offered a classic and elegant neckline. The dove necklace, the only real adornment. Her ears had been pierced after the photo was taken. Conner O’Hare wouldn’t let his daughter get them done until her eighteenth birthday. Grace could see herself in her sister’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, looking up at her in a serene gaze that could never have hinted what was to come. The image was in color, but over time the photograph had taken on a kind of pinky and orange cast, which only served to make Tricia seem even further away.

  She was familiar, but there was no doubt she was from another time, another era.

  If Tricia hadn’t vanished, Grace knew without an iota of doubt that she would not be sitting there. She wouldn’t exist at all. She loved her life. Her mother. Her husband. Yet gratitude for her very existence wasn’t in the offing. Anger was. She’d lived in the shadow of a phantom. Two of them, in fact. Her sister and the deliberate stranger.

  She flipped over the photograph to vanquish it from her thoughts just then, to put Tricia out of her mind.

  As if.

  The coffeepot beeped and she poured herself another cup. The day hadn’t even started, but it already felt so heavy. She looked at the photo of Ted Bundy that her mother had taped to the outside of one of the folders. Sissy had used a thick red pen to write the words: HE TOOK HER.

  If he did, the answers were there somewhere in the twisted story of the killer from down the street. She knew his story, but still she reread the pages her mother had written.

  After a period of rootless travel, Ted returned to the University of Washington and focused his studies on psychology in 1970. He’d found his niche, and his grades reflected it. It was as if there was something in those classes that pushed him to dig in deep and actually do the work. He didn’t skate on his handsome face, facile tongue. Later, in a moment of introspection, Ted would tell a confidant that he didn’t know exactly what drew him to that area of study—or what it was that sucked him into it so deeply.

  “It wasn’t as if I wanted to be a shrink or anything. I guess I just wanted to know what it was that motivated people to do whatever it was they did.”

  The friend didn’t answer back with the obvious. It was too inflammatory.

  Ted, do you think you were looking for what made you into a monster? Ted, did you ever find out what it was?

  In 1971, Ted Bundy took a job that always carried the ultimate in irony. At the time, Seattle was one of a few major U.S. cities with a suicide prevention crisis line. The Suicide Hotline, as it was known, was that number the brokenhearted and desperate called when they could think of no other way out of their misery.

  One call, two months into his tenure there, was like so many of them. It came from a young woman at her wit’s end, deep into the drama and depression that had enveloped her since a breakup with a boyfriend.

  GIRL: I think I might hurt myself. I really do.

  TED: Talk to me. I’m Ted. I care.

  GIRL: I have a bottle of sleeping pills and I just want to take them and, you know, never, ever wake up.

  TED: I’ve felt that way, too. Everyone has. What’s your name?

  GIRL: You have? But you’re working at the crisis hotline.

  TED: Everyone has their moments of despair. But this call isn’t about me. I didn’t catch your name.

  GIRL: Annette, my name is Annette.

  TED: Annette, what happened? I want to know how to help you. I don’t want you to take those pills. I want you to live through this, all right?”

  GIRL: I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I want to live.

  TED: Are you alone?

  GIRL: My mom and dad are asleep.

  TED: Where are the pills? Can you put them someplace away from where you are?

  GIRL: I don’t want to.

  TED: What happened to make you so sad, Annette?

  GIRL: My boyfriend, Brian, dropped me. Said I was “too much work” and that he didn’t want me anymore.

  TED: You don’t sound like too much work to me, Annette.

  GIRL: You’re nice.

  TED: Thank you, but this call’s about you, Annette. I think you are nice. Tell me, are you really going to hurt yourself?

  GIRL: (long pause) No, I guess not. I was just mad. I just wanted someone to talk to.

  TED: Call me anytime you are sad.

  GIRL: I’m sad a lot. I don’t know what time you work.

  TED: I’ll give you my home number.

  After the conversation was over, Ted set down the phone and swiveled his chair to face one of the other operators on the line, a pretty young woman with blond hair and light eyes.

  “Ted Bundy, I should report you for giving out your phone number to that girl,” Iris O’Neal said, nearly wagging her finger in Ted’s direction.

  Ted grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Iris. It just came out.”

  “Well, I won’t turn you in,” she said, looking over at another of the counselors, a Goody Two-shoes who walked around with a clipboard marking down everything that happened on the lines.

  “Thanks. Why not?” he asked.

  Iris smiled. “Because I know you. I know that you can’t help but empathizing with these callers. You just can’t help but do good, Ted. You’ll be a legend around here, long after you’re gone.”

  She’d thought about her way out of wherever she was from the moment she’d regained consciousness. Every conceivable scenario ran through Emma’s first groggy and confused, then sharper and more determined, mind. She considered a myriad of remedies she could pursue to subdue her captor, that is, if she could only get close enough to strike. Emma didn’t have many weapons at her disposal in the so-called apartment. There was the gooseneck lamp, of course. It was the most likely candidate. The teenager imagined how the fixture could do double duty. She could pick it up, hide it behind her back, and when the moment was right strike him over the head with it. In her mind’s eye in that scenario, her captor would fall to the floor after a single blow. She was a better hitter than Alex Rodriguez. She’d been infatuated with the ballplayer before he became a Yankee. She was sure, like A-Rod, she could swing, swing hard, over the fence. He’s out! Dead. Home run! Then, Emma believed with complete certainty, she would be able to take the cord and wrap it around her abductor’s veiny neck, cutting off his air supply until he was absolutely, positively, for sure, dead. When he was dead she felt pretty sure no one would blame her. Although he hadn’t raped her, she would say that he did—as if being held hostage God-knows-where wasn’t enough of a reason to kill him.

  She looked around the dimly lit space. The only other weapon was the bucket that she’d used as a toilet. She’d like to drown the pig in the stinking bucket, but as disgusting and fitting as that was, it wasn’t practical. Her captor emptied it every other day. He filled it with fresh bleach-water and made her lay on the mattress while he took it and brought it back. She remembered how she’d been so embarrassed that someone had seen her feces in a bucket, but that kind of modesty was over by the first or second day. When Emma Rose came to grips with the fact that she had but one chance to get out of there she vowed not to blow it.

  She just wasn’t sure when that chance would present itself.

  Emma lay still on the mattress listening. For a second she thought she heard the voice of Ellen DeGeneres. Yes, it is Ellen! She loved Ellen’s show and the comedienne’s voice calmed her. She listened more carefully. She was pretty sure that the man who held her captive had gone out. If he was out, then maybe there was someone else in the house. Someone, somewhere, watching Ellen. Maybe whoever it was would save her.

  She screamed as loudly as she could. “Help me! Get me out of here! I’m being
held prisoner by some creeper! Help me.”

  She stopped and listened. Ellen was no longer talking. The house was quiet.

  Had she misheard? Was she hallucinating?

  The space above her was soundless.

  Emma started to tear up a little, but she fought the emotion. She didn’t want to be weak. She didn’t want to succumb to her worst fears. He would rape her, probably. He would kill her, too. And whoever was watching Ellen DeGeneres didn’t give a rat’s ass about her.

  “It isn’t right,” she said, crying as softly as possible into the smelly mattress while pulling the scratchy blanket over her. “Ellen would never have let me suffer.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Sometimes memories are manufactured. Sometimes it isn’t intentional. Grace knew that from cases she worked for the Tacoma Police Department. Manufactured memories were different from so-called repressed memories. Grace’s own life history had one. She had been only a small child when it happened, but it had been told to her so many times, it seemed real. Vivid. True. On June 8, 1977. Sissy O’Hare had braided her daughter’s damp hair the night before so she could have “wavy hair.” She dressed in her prettiest pink top with brand-new cropped blue jeans. It was a special day, the beginning of summer vacation. Sunlight poured through the open curtains and a robin pecked at its reflection on the glass, an occurrence that had brought more interest than annoyance to the O’Hares.

  When the phone rang, Sissy set down the hairbrush and went to answer. Instantly, her cheerful demeanor fell like a stone tossed into a very still pond.

  “He what?” She looked over at Grace, then turned away toward the window and the robin. The rest of the words came from her amid gasps, in a rapid-fire fashion that pelted the glass windowpane.

  “No,” she said.

  And then: “What time?”