Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  While the memorandum from the lab in Olympia indicated that, in fact, there had been a sample taken, it had been destroyed. Even the supporting documentation had been destroyed when a couple of employees had had the bright idea of using hair dryers to mitigate the loss of the original documents. Unbelievably, the electric dryers manned by none-too-bright, but well-meaning, workers had sparked a second fire.

  Catalina’s case was among many relegated to complete and tragic limbo.

  As Grace scrolled through the electronic file she noticed that only one item had survived—a partial witness statement indicating someone had seen a couple of young men carrying something to the river’s edge the night of Catalina’s disappearance. The witness, a Hispanic man named Tomas Martinez, had provided no address. He’d indicated he was following the harvest and would be in Central Oregon the next week. He had no phone, but he promised that he would contact the police again when he could.

  But, it appeared, he never had.

  Grace wondered if this Tomas Martinez had been the man who’d called her with the tip.

  She printed out a photograph of Catalina and added her to the others pinned under the fluorescent tube that ran under the bookshelf of her cubicle.

  Kelsey, Lisa, Catalina, Emma.

  The similarities could not be denied. Each of the pretty girls was dark eyed. All had long dark hair, parted in the middle. She ran her finger along the row of photos thinking to herself that they had so much more in common than their mere physical resemblance and their youth. Each had died in a violent manner. Each had been violated in the worst possible way. Each girl was a victim who cried out for justice.

  I hear you, she thought. I hear all of you.

  Grace hated the crime pundits who immediately jumped on the “serial killer among us” bandwagon whenever even the hint of similarity became apparent. It was too much. Serial killers were exceedingly rare. While endless books were churned out about Gacy, Bundy, Ramirez, and the other big-league killers, among serial-killer aficionados there seemed to be the hope that a new one would emerge. The idea of it disgusted Grace Alexander. Serial killers were the ultimate evil. While she faced the victims with an unblinking eye, she wanted to tell each of them that she hoped they were not killed by the same man. The sum of three individual killers was far less a man whose sole predatory focus was to kill a stranger.

  It just was.

  It rained all night and the wind knocked over the neighbor’s old-school galvanized aluminum garbage can, but that wasn’t what kept Grace awake. It was the rotating series of the faces of the dead girls that clicked through her mind. They morphed into one another like an old MTV video—back in the day when the cable channel actually played music videos. The girls were so, so young. So pretty. So much like the sister she both loved and hated. It was so strange, the rotation of faces and how Tricia had been one of them.

  She woke up her husband.

  “Honey,” she said.

  His sleepy eyes stayed shut.

  She turned on the light and nudged him once more.

  “Are you asleep?”

  Shane pulled one eye open and looked at his wife.

  “I was,” he said, trying to hold his sarcasm. It wasn’t easy to do. He looked over at the bedside clock. It was after three.

  “Sorry,” she said, rolling closer.

  “I know it’s the case,” he said, “but what about it?” Again, he tried to keep his feelings in check. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Grace’s work or what troubled her. It was that it had become more than fifty-fifty in their relationship. More like eighty-twenty. It had become increasingly difficult for Shane to share about his work, his colleagues in the field office, whatever was bothering him.

  “I keep thinking of my sister,” she said, her voice nighttime soft.

  “What about her?” he asked, a little surprised to hear that Tricia was the source of Grace’s insomnia.

  “It sounds silly, I know.”

  “What does?”

  “That I keep thinking of the similarities in the case and how no matter what outcome there will be sisters like me. Mothers like my mom. You know, people who will carry the tragedy in some way for the rest of their lives.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. You’ll solve the cases,” he said.

  “They didn’t,” she said.

  “They aren’t you. Besides, the killer isn’t Ted. Get some sleep.”

  “I know.” She turned away from him, and looked out at the black water of Puget Sound.

  CHAPTER 31

  Grace felt a slow leaking of air coming from her lungs as she looked at the report from the Washington state crime lab in Olympia. It was both interesting and disappointing. In reality, the report indicated little more than what she’d surmised already—at least about the bones themselves. The bones were female. Young. The report didn’t say exactly how long the victim had been dead, but indicated the skeletal remains were likely less than fifty years old. What she needed and wanted to know more than anything, wasn’t there, of course. The lab didn’t have the capability to determine whose bones they’d recovered from the shoreline near where Samantha Maxwell’s body had been recovered. DNA extracted from bones was possible, but not an easy endeavor. Even a single hair follicle would have been a better bet.

  Maybe the FBI can do better, she thought.

  The report itself was brief, only three pages. It was the last page that held her interest came near the end of the document:

  Significant traces of arsenic and lead were recorded with the bone sample. The soil samples collected from the immediate vicinity do not carry those metals; however, locations near the former site of the ASARCO smelter do.

  The ASARCO smelter had been a Tacoma landmark, though not an especially lauded one, since the turn of the previous century. In its day, the 562-foot smokestack spewed the foul by-products of copper smelting into the air, giving the city its “Aroma of Tacoma” nickname. The smelter dumped lead and other chemicals into the atmosphere, sending a toxic cloud over much of the immediate vicinity. Prevailing winds sent the plume points farther. Arsenic, a heavy metal by-product of the copper smelting process, was collected by the company for use in insecticides. At least some of it was. Over time, tons of arsenic sprinkled over the water, shoreline, forests, and the front yards of homeowners closest to the smelter. In the early 1980s, the United States Environmental Protection Agency named the former smelter a Superfund site—one of the most toxic in the country.

  As Grace dialed the number for the crime lab, she remembered how she and her mother gathered with friends on Verde Avenue and watched in awe as the massive smokestack was reduced to rubble in 1993. The town of Ruston, just below the bluff along Commencement Bay, had been freed from a dark shadow cast by the monolith.

  “Detective Alexander,” she said.

  The lab supervisor, a nice woman named Bea Carter, answered.

  “You’re fast. Got the report, I take it?”

  “Yes,” Grace said.

  “I figured you’d have a question or two.”

  “You know me well.”

  “I know your case. And I really wanted to find out who those bones belonged to. I was hoping right along with you.”

  “Will you send them to the FBI?”

  “Already on their way,” Bea said. “No telling when they’ll get to them. They don’t exactly pounce on everything, especially something this old.”

  “I know. Thanks. One thing I was wondering about on the report. The arsenic. Are you saying that the victim was killed by arsenic poisoning, or were the bones contaminated by the soil?”

  “No. No. Not poisoning. The arsenic had leached into the bones, but had settled in after death. This was not a poisoning death at all. My feeling, based on what the techs found and sent along for our lab, is that the victim was buried elsewhere. Shallow grave, too.”

  That detail puzzled her. “Why shallow?”

  “Most lead and arsenic from the smelter—and
that’s where this came from, I’m almost sure of it—only penetrated the top eight to twelve inches of the soil. I’m thinking that whoever killed our Jane Doe barely buried her.”

  “And then moved her later?”

  “That’s what it looks like. None of the soils around the point of discovery have anything like those parts per million found in the femur.”

  “Just the femur?”

  “I think so. Hang on. Let me look. I’ll put you on hold. Sorry for the Muzak.”

  A moment later, Bea came back on the line.

  “Just the femur. The other bones were mostly clear.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “Good question. I’ve thought about it a lot. We all talked about it at lunch today. I think the body was buried with the arms folded up and over the victim’s chest. On her back. In repose. Not with the arms at the side. I don’t know, rain, or water, or some way it leached around the body, settling on the legs—and I’d say the back and the back of the skull if we could find anything else.”

  “And then moved later?”

  “Right. Dug up. Moved. Long after death.”

  “Why do you say that?” Grace asked.

  “Because of the way the heavy metals leached into only the lower part of the femur. Somebody dug up that body—and remember it wasn’t very deep—and moved it.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  Bea paused before answering. “Maybe they were afraid someone would find it.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Mimi Navarro, smelling a little like the paint she’d used on the baby’s room, nuzzled her husband and whispered in Tavio’s ear as he faced the wall and tried to calm his heartbeat with a prayer of forgiveness for what he’d done. On any other occasion, Tavio would see his wife’s movement as an invitation to make love. He wasn’t interested in that. Not at all. Not when he felt so sick to his stomach for making the call to the police. It felt like a betrayal and there was no getting around that.

  “Tavio, you didn’t leave your name?” she asked.

  “No, Mimi. No.”

  “You didn’t use your cell phone?”

  “No, no, I did not.”

  She slid closer and wrapped her leg over his. “The police cannot find you.”

  Tavio felt the baby kick, but he didn’t remark on it. He had been so torn up over the whole thing. The suspicions were eating him alive. If Michael had been doing what Tavio thought he might be, then his brother was a monster and had to be stopped. And yet, there was the possibility that he was innocent. Tavio had hoped for that. Whenever that hope tried to stir, he thought more about the night Catalina died.

  They were driving back to pack their belongings. They didn’t have much beyond a few changes of clothes and a couple of family photographs, a Bible, and a small pistol that traveled with them from orchard to orchard. Just in case. As Tavio drove in the blush of the morning light, he felt his face grow hot. His tears sizzled against his burning skin. He didn’t cry out. He rolled down the window to let the air dry his face while his brother started singing along on the radio.

  “You cannot be singing now! Catalina is dead!”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said, switching on a sad and confused demeanor that was alarming in its swift change. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Tavio had felt funny from the minute he’d seen his brother and the scratches on his face. How was it that he was scratched? The only reason could be that Catalina had tried to stop him. He had noticed something else that was strange, too. Michael said that Catalina had fallen on a rock when they were making love.

  “Rough sex, yes, that’s what it is called,” Michael had said, altering his story for the second time.

  Catalina’s injury was not on the back of her head. It was on the front. It was there not because she’d fallen while they were making love. It was there because Michael had likely slammed a rock into her face.

  “You told me you didn’t mean to do this,” he said.

  Michael tried to shake it off. “I guess I didn’t. I can’t remember.”

  “Remember? You just killed a girl. What do you mean, you can’t remember?”

  “Quit yelling at me, Tavio. I was so mad at her. I don’t really remember what happened when.”

  “I want to ask you this, and I want a real, a true, answer.”

  Michael lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the roadway.

  “Go ask. You can ask what you want. I know what you’re going to ask. But, yes, go ahead, Tavio.”

  “Did you kill her on purpose? Did you?”

  Michael exhaled. “No.”

  “I can tell when you are lying.”

  The reality was Tavio couldn’t tell when Michael told a lie. No one could. Michael had a kind of strange skill when it came to lying. He’d always found a way to be less than truthful whenever it benefited him to do so.

  “I will answer. But I don’t think it is fair that you keep asking me.”

  “I just helped you push Catalina Sanchez into the river!”

  “That’s right, you did. And that makes you just as responsible. An accomplice.”

  Tavio could barely believe what he was hearing. “Are you serious? Are you threatening me now?”

  “Just the truth, Tavio. You seem to always want the truth.”

  Tavio knew then that his brother was not like other men. His brother did not seem to feel guilty. Not when he got extra money by mistake. Not when he cut in line to get the best row in the orchard. Not ever. Michael Navarro was not like Tavio at all. They were brothers. They had the same mother and father. In their veins the same blood flowed. Yet they were not the same.

  Not at all.

  Two years after Catalina had been murdered, Mimi was putting away laundry. It was a chore she despised, but because of her part-time schedule of work and classes, she took it on. She did most of the cooking, too. Sometimes she wondered out loud if America really was a place of equality. She did almost everything her sisters back in Mexico did—plus school and a job. Mimi almost never went inside her brother-in-law’s bedroom, but there was no getting around it that particular day. She had three stacks of laundry and only two hands. She pushed his door open with her hip and proceeded to his dresser. She set down the folded and sorted laundry and opened the top drawer. She wasn’t snooping at all. It wasn’t Mimi’s style to pry, but she couldn’t help but notice a bottle of lubricant nestled atop some photographs of girls.

  Naked girls. Not of the ilk that would pose for Playboy, but the kind of images that would grace some pervert-visited website on the Internet. Indeed, the photographs were laser printed, not from the glossy pages of a skin mag.

  Nasty, Mimi thought as she tried to set aside the unfortunately very obvious and graphic scenario of what Michael was doing with the lubricant and the photos.

  Disgusting!

  Before she shut the door—vowing never to go in his room again—she noticed something about the photographs. All were of dark-haired women. Women with long, dark hair. Mimi had never seen Catalina Sanchez, but she’d once met her sister. The girls that Michael were fixated on all had what she was sure were Catalina’s build and features. Tavio had told her the story after their wedding when they were talking about the worst things they’d ever done—the things they could never undo. Mimi was sorry that she’d once made out with a boy—not all the way, but closer than she should have.

  Tavio’s ultimate transgression was decidedly worse.

  “I helped my brother hide a body,” he had said. “He killed a girl accidentally.”

  At first, Mimi had thought it was a joke. She figured he was saying something to make her feel better. That he was conjuring up something completely absurd. Because he loved her so, so much.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  She studied his eyes.

  “You’re not?”

  Tavio shook his head, his eyes grew wet, but he did not cry. Later, he would wonder if he’d lost part of his humanity because the men
tion of what he and his brother had done no longer produced the same emotion. Shame had replaced horror by then.

  “Oh my God,” Mimi said. “You are not kidding.”

  Tavio tried to explain, but it was a difficult thing to manage. “I will regret it forever. It was an accident. At least I think so.”

  Later, he’d tell Mimi that once their baby was born, his brother would have to leave.

  “I don’t trust him,” he said. “I don’t trust him to be good.”

  Every now and then, Mimi would try to test Michael to see if he was just an immature young man or something sinister. He seemed to like girls. She and Tavio had gone out on several double dates with Michael.

  One time she asked Michael if he dreamed of getting married.

  “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t know if I will find anyone like the girlfriend I once had.”

  Mimi held her tongue. She wanted to say, “You mean the one you killed?”

  Yet she didn’t. There was something about her brother-in-law that scared her. More than what he’d done in the past. It was a fear about something he might do to her. It would probably be easier to kill a second time.

  It was late, well after midnight, when Michael Navarro returned from wherever he’d been all night. He’d been evasive about what he was doing over the past few months, but neither Tavio nor Mimi pressed the issue. There was no real need for it. After all, they’d made a deal. Michael had said that when their baby was born he’d find a new place to live. He’d volunteered and the agreement had been amicable. Michael needed a place away from his brother, to start over, to begin his own life. It was true that he and Tavio would continue working together at the landscaping company, but there would be no more long drives to and from work locations. It was, Tavio agreed, the right thing to do.