Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  Grace flashed on how Ted had signed his letters to her mother: Peace, Ted.

  Fleetingly, because giving a Bundy apologist any semblance of genuine consideration went against everything she knew to be true, Grace wondered how it was that her mother was supposed to forgive the man that she was certain in her bones was her daughter’s killer when he wouldn’t admit to it.

  I talked to Ted about his roster of victims and while everything he said to me sickened me to my soul, I did my best to remember every single word of it. He spoke to me with tears streaming down his face. This was a man in deep pain, a man with a desire to repent for his sins. Despite his chains and shackles, he got down on his knees and we prayed together. I’m no fool, Mrs. O’Hare. I know the truth when I see it. My congregants know that about me, and if you knew me personally, you’d undoubtedly agree. He told me the names of the girls whom he’d killed, the girls he was driven by demons to kill. But one of the names not on that very sad list was your daughter’s. Ted said he did not kill Tricia. He said, “Tell Mrs. O’Hare when I’m gone that she should rejoice and revel in her freedom.” He said—and he wanted me to carry this message to you as accurately as possible—“Be as free as a dove, to be anything else is to have an albatross around your neck.”

  Grace had never seen it, but the words in the stitched-together letter sparked another memory. When Tricia went missing, she’d been wearing a simple necklace with the charm pendant of a dove.

  Free as a dove. Albatross around your neck. Peace, Ted.

  Grace folded the letter, the adhesive on the cellophane tape coming undone, and inserted it back into the envelope. Her coffee cup was empty and her stomach was in need of food. She touched her abdomen to stop it from growling, a noise that seemed louder than it really was. She couldn’t shake the contents of the letter.

  Had Ted challenged her mother in some strange way?

  Had he taunted her with the mention of a dove, the albatross, and her neck?

  Grace had the distinct feeling that was just what the serial killer had had in mind.

  Grace couldn’t sleep, a condition that had become entirely too common in the days since the first of the Puget Sound girls started to vanish—and when the bones were found. Part of it was her job, of course. She played the scenarios of what the girls’ last moments might have been like, if indeed all three had had last moments. Until there was a body—or body parts—found there was hope for Emma Rose, but that hope only made it harder to sleep. Something else kept her up, too. It was the face of the sister she didn’t know, the one who had been part of her life since before she was conceived. Grace crawled out from under the bedcovers, trying hard not to wake Shane. Her restlessness should not become his problem, too. She felt wired, as if she’d consumed ten cups of sugared coffee, but she hadn’t. She just couldn’t shut off her brain. No matter how much she needed rest. Peace eluded her.

  She crept down the hall to the office that would someday, she still vaguely hoped, be converted to a nursery. She’d had plans for that space since they bought the house on Salmon Beach. She painted it in her head, blue, then pink, then yellow, then back to blue. Time was running out on that. Women were having children later and later, but she didn’t want to be a mother like her own—the one other kids in the class thought was a grandma. Sissy had been over forty when she had her. Grace hoped that if she and Shane ever became parents they’d start with a boy, a boy who would be just like Shane—responsible, caring, yet with just enough of a mischievous streak to keep things interesting.

  Her nightgown provided only the thinnest layer of warmth and she nearly turned back to get her robe. But she didn’t. The pull to the scrapbook that her mother and father had created about Tricia’s disappearance and murder was impossible to avoid.

  She opened it to the first page of the white and pink book. It was a strange color scheme, she thought. She wondered if it was a baby book that had been turned completely around and converted to a death book of sorts.

  The eyes of her sister in the missing poster stared at her. The dot pattern was large, probably from the pages of the News Tribune, but it still didn’t obliterate the lovely and haunted look in Tricia’s eyes.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Grace swiveled around and looked up at Shane, standing behind her in his underwear. “No. I guess not,” she said.

  Shane stepped closer and put his hand on her shoulder, his eyes tracing the pages of the book. “I’d be an idiot to ask what’s on your mind, because I already know. Want to talk about it?”

  Grace nodded. She felt the strange flush of emotion coming to her, but she fought it. It was like the boy who’d rescued a girl from a stabbing and held it together like a champ until he spoke to his mother. Love and a safe place always invited a person to let go.

  “Ted had something to do with my sister’s death,” she said, a single tear rolling. “I think my mom’s been right all along.”

  He turned her chair to face him. “You know that’s not true, Grace. You know Bundy and his crimes are among the most investigated cases in history. More FBI, more local PDs, historians, all of them have had a crack at trying to identify all his vics.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I think I do know that,” she said. “Thanks for the support, Shane.”

  “I’m just saying what you already know.”

  She looked up at him. No more tears had fallen, nor would she allow them. She loved Shane more than anything, but he didn’t understand what her life, a life in the shadow of a dead sibling, had been like. Nor did he really understand her need to figure out once and for all what it was that drew her to law enforcement, to homicide.

  “Look,” she said, her fingertip tapping the poster image in the scrapbook.

  He patted her shoulder, but not in a condescending way. “I’ve seen it,” he said, “very sad. It will always be sad to me.”

  “The necklace with the dove,” she said, her eyes now locked on the page.

  Shane didn’t quite get where Grace was going. He put his arm on her shoulder. “Right,” he said. “The necklace.”

  “Bundy had taunted my mom with a reference to that necklace.”

  “You can barely make out the dove,” he said.

  “In fact,” she said, now looking into her husband’s eyes, “you can’t.”

  Shane leaned closer and focused his sleepy eyes. “I guess you’re right. But I don’t think I’m following you.”

  “My mom was fixated on that letter from the minister. The dove letter.”

  “I know,” he said, trying to be patient at a very, very late hour.

  “My dad said that if Ted was trying to push her buttons from the grave he’d used the missing poster as a reference. You know some little detail to make her feel that he knew something. Or better yet, was holding something back.”

  “But if he didn’t get the dove reference from the poster, where did he get it? The newspaper?”

  Grace set down the ice-cream-store-colored album and led her husband back to the bedroom. “No. The newspapers never mentioned it. The necklace was something only the killer could have known. They were sure that Ted had kept it after Tricia’s murder.”

  “As a trophy.”

  She nodded.

  “But you’re saying now that he didn’t.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m just thinking out loud here. If Ted was taunting Mom and Dad with the dove comment it wasn’t coming from him seeing it on the poster—that was always what the original case detectives told them.”

  “So if not from the poster, from someone else?”

  “Maybe,” she said, taking Shane’s hand as they walked back to the bedroom.

  “A real possibility was someone in prison. Someone he met. He wasn’t in isolation until Florida, death row.”

  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.”

&n
bsp; 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. “Gr
eat. 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.