by Gregg Olsen
Grace smiled. “You look lovely, Mrs. Sherman.”
“Anna,” said the elderly woman with glossy white hair and bright-red fingernail polish—a trademark look she’d held on to all of her adult life. “You’re not a child anymore.”
“Fine, Anna, then.” She took a seat across from Anna’s wheelchair. A nurse’s aide looked in and nodded.
“How is your mom getting along without your father?” Anna asked, inching the wheelchair a little closer.
“About the same,” Grace said. “She has her good days and bad days.”
“I was sorry to read about your father’s passing. He was a kind, decent man.”
“Thank you, Anna.”
“You’re not here about Susie, are you?”
Grace shook her head. “No.”
“The three girls I’ve been reading about.”
Grace nodded sadly. “Right,” she said, not even a little surprised that Anna Sherman read the paper. Of the members of her parents’ group, she was unquestionably the best informed. In another time and place, Anna Sherman could have been a female version of John Walsh. Whenever a new missing girl was reported, Anna already had in hand whatever public information she could glean. She had friends at the police department who routinely copied public information files for her—through whatever channels she was able to create on the sly.
“I know it sounds far-fetched, but when I read about Emma Rose—that’s her name, right?”
Grace smiled inwardly; Anna Sherman hadn’t changed one bit.
“Right,” she said. “Emma Rose.”
Anna looked away at the dog in the parking lot. She wasn’t distracted by the animal. She was thinking, pulling together the threads of what she wanted to say.
“When I read about the circumstances of her vanishing, I thought it seemed a lot like what happened to Susie. That Lancaster girl reminded me of your sister’s disappearance.”
Grace, of course, had thought the same thing. Emma and Susie had been taken after closing at their respective jobs. Emma, Starbucks. Susie, a produce stand and gift shop on the west side of Tacoma. Lisa Lancaster and Tricia O’Hare were both college students last seen in a Pacific Lutheran University parking lot. All four girls had never given the authorities any reason to suspect that they’d run off willingly. If any had a secret boyfriend or lover, it would have been news to their families. Big news.
And all four girls had one thing in common—their physical appearance. Susie, Lisa, Kelsey, Tricia . . . all were brunettes of a similar body type and build. They were lovely girls; two lost forever. One was still missing—waiting patiently for someone to find her dead or alive.
“I’m thinking that you came here for help of some kind, Grace,” the elderly woman said.
“Yes,” Grace said, hesitating a little. It was the reason she’d come. Anna Sherman could read people better than anyone. “This is hard to ask, but I’ve been thinking about Ted Bundy and . . .” Her voice trailed off and the look of recognition came to Anna’s face. Her dusty blue eyes were instantly full of emotion. Even all those years after everything happened, the name still brought back a flood of memories. None of them good.
Anna locked her eyes on Grace. She didn’t say anything. She just looked.
“I was thinking about the similarities of the cases . . . and, you know, the letters to and from Ted.”
“Tell me about the letters,” Grace said.
“You’re interested, then?”
She nodded and looked at the blue plastic box. “Yes, that’s why I’m here.”
By the looks of them, the letters had been typed on a manual typewriter. Some letters, most notably the E and R, seemed to stick and were rendered slightly above the baseline of the words in which they were used. It was double spaced and signed: peace, Ted.
Dear Mrs. Sherman:
I want to call you Anna, but I don’t know if you want me to do that. I look forward to each of your letters and though I wish I had some information to ease your mind, I know I don’t. Every time I write to you without the response that you are looking for, I think you will stop writing to me. I would hate for our friendship, however tenuous, to end because I will not make up a story about your daughter just to give you peace of mind. I guess everyone wants peace of mind. Even me.
Especially me.
So that we can continue our correspondence, I will offer you something. Not an admission of course—because that’s not the truth—but I will offer you my most sincere, my most heartfelt, most genuine condolences for your loss. Your daughter was a beautiful girl and undoubtedly loved by many. Whoever killed her is a complete monster.
But I am not that monster. I’m a guy who made some mistakes and now I am paying the price for it. I’m not saying that my mistakes weren’t big ones, but the measure of my supposed crimes is far less than those who want to kill me would have.
I am sorry about Susie. I have seen her photograph many, many times over the years. She’s always put up with the string of girls from Oregon to Washington. I admit that she looks like whatever the world seems to think I’m responsible for, but I never would have killed her.
He scratched out the last few words and wrote with pen: never would have killed anyone.
The correction was very telling. Anna knew it when she read it the first time. It was a slipup. Ted had edited himself. A sociopath of the highest order, yet devious enough to know the denial of killing a particular girl was not a strong enough protestation on its own. A normal person—one who didn’t suckle on the bloodlust of a murder spree—would dismiss the entirety of the question.
Ted was good at reading people. He was always good at second-guessing what someone would think or do. That was how he’d been able to pick the victims who would help him with his sailboat, change a tire, carry some books as if he were on his way to some political science class.
Ted Bundy, the up-and-comer. Ted, the young Republican. Ted, the manipulator. But more than anything, Ted the predator.
Grace’s eyes met Anna’s, and she went on to the next letter.
Dear Mrs. Sherman:
Tell me more about you. I want to know what kind of home Susie was raised in? Did she have a lot of friends? Was she as pretty as her picture? Did she seem to have a bright future? Do you think you will ever stop hurting because she is gone?
Sometimes when I was a kid I thought that the world was a big ugly place. I had no real idea how ugly it was, how petty people could be. I tried my best to fit in wherever I could. Sometimes I thought that people were just jealous of me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an egomaniac. I’m good looking. That’s one thing I got from my dad, I guess. People used to say that I looked like Johnnie Bundy. What a joke that was. He wasn’t even my dad. I was nothing like him. He was a goody-goody, all right. My mom . . . my mom. Hard to even talk about her. I know she did the best that she could for me, given the times. Yet, she was the one who spread her legs and nine months later out popped me! Sometimes I wonder if she was easy and didn’t know who my dad was or if it was just that she was naïve about sex. I don’t like slamming my mom. She stood by me through all of my troubles and that’s better than the rest of the Bundy clan.
I bet your family never stopped praying for Susie. Did you decide if you can send me her picture? I’d like to see what she looked like in a decent photograph. The ones I saw in the paper were always her high school senior photograph. Those always look cheesy. I know mine did. Mrs. Sherman, it would mean a lot to me if I could see her photo. Will you please, please send me one? You mentioned that you vacationed with Susie the summer before she died. . . . Was it on the beach on the Oregon Coast? Maybe you have a photograph from that trip you could send me? Did she wear a bikini?
Grace felt her stomach turn somersaults. It was beyond belief that Ted Bundy would seek a swimsuit photograph of a girl he’d probably killed. She could only imagine that he’d wanted to relive whatever he’d done to Susie Sherman. It was disgusting, vile, reprehensible.
“You didn’t send him a photo, did you?” she asked
Anna shook her head and motioned for Grace to pour her some water from a plastic pitcher on a tray next to her bed. It was the first time that Grace noticed the oxygen tank—at the ready, but not in use.
“Of course not. I thought of sending a picture of some minor TV actress or even another family member and saying it was Susie. Someone who looked like her. I wondered what he would do if he knew that I didn’t trust him.”
“But you didn’t trust him, did you?”
Anna sipped her water and set down the glass. “Of course not. But I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want him to go away. You know how you cops on TV sometimes try to keep someone talking on the phone so you can get more info?”
Grace nodded. “Yes, to trace them?”
Anna took another sip of her water. “Right. Well, I know with a letter you can’t trace anything, but I thought that the more I could get him to write, the more he’d tell me. Maybe among his garden of lies, I’d be able to weed out a little bit of truth. Maybe I’d be able to get him to admit that he’d killed my Susie.”
Grace understood completely. In so many ways, Anna was like her own mother. She wondered just how many others were out there wondering about their daughters and if Ted had been their killer.
A nurse came in with a small loaf of banana bread.
“We’ll each have a piece,” Anna said. “They make it from my recipe. Susie loved the cinnamon butter.”
Grace smiled. It was a sad smile, but it was all she could manage. While the nurse set down the banana bread, she read another letter.
Dear Mrs. Sherman,
You are well, I hope. They want to kill me, as you probably have heard. All I want is peace. Did you know that I’ve been corresponding with other friends of yours? I know that you are a game-player. That’s all right. While I prefer people be direct, I’m sure that there are others who are less inclined to be honest. I’m not saying that you’re a liar, Anna Sherman, I just know that you can’t be trusted.
peace, Ted
Grace put down the short letter, a note really, and fastened her eyes on Mrs. Sherman’s.
“Was he talking about my mother?” she asked, a little unsure. “She was playing him, too.”
Anna finished a bite of banana bread and brushed a crumb from her chin.
“Honestly, I don’t know. The way I always looked at it, Ted probably got more mail than Santa Claus back then. Everyone—reporters, victims’ families, groupies, what have you—wrote to him.”
“If he wasn’t referring to my mother, what other ‘friends of yours’ was he getting at? If you know?”
Anna shook her head. “Not sure. It could have been Peggy Howell.”
Grace put the letter back into the envelope, the look of recognition washing over her face. “Peggy?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Her. I know your family has a history with the girl. I guess I did, too. She befriended me over Susie’s death, and, of course, you know your sister’s connection to Peggy.”
Emma Rose hadn’t given up all hope. Not completely. As dire as things had been, there was still plenty for which she could be grateful. Yes, she’d been tied up and her skin was colored by bruises that had passed from blue and black to a ghastly yellow hue. But he, the creeper, hadn’t tied her up for a while. As she lay on the smelly mattress in the dank subterranean space, the so-called apartment, Emma had taken to keeping her eyes tightly shut. Truth be told, what was there to really see? The only time she bothered to open her eyes was when he came down the stairs. When the door opened and the stabbing light cascaded against the walls, Emma would run her eyes over every surface. Was there a door? A boarded-up window? Was there a way out of there?
She’d never seen any.
As she lay there, something else crossed the young woman’s mind. At first, she wasn’t sure if it had been a dream, a hallucination. Emma felt something. Air. Air ran over her cheek. It was cold, not the hot breath of the creeper who’d held her. Cool. She licked her palm and pressed her hand outward; turning it slightly like it was a metal detector or radar device.
There.
Emma felt the unambiguous movement of air. Air! It brushed against her in a slight, but steady stream. Air! Emma felt her pulse quicken and she instinctively turned to listen for her captor. Was he coming? Was she dreaming? No. All quiet. Next, she slid her feet to meet the floor and she stepped slowly and quietly closer to the moving air. She moistened her palm a second time, no longer reviled by the filth of her own skin. She ran her hands, cut and sore, over the cement and cinderblock wall. She held her breath.
And there it was, air was pouring in through a crack at about knee height. She stuck a finger into the jagged fissure.
Could this be a way out?
Had God answered her prayers?
Or was this just a cruel joke made by a man who’d kept her like a zoo animal?
She heard his footsteps and she hurried back to the mattress. If it was the promise of a way out, she wasn’t going to squander it by lamely standing next to it. She wouldn’t tip off the man. She’d kill him first.
He opened the door.
“Stay down,” he said. “Or I’ll beat you until you can’t stand without being bound to a two-by-four.”
He set down the tray and shut the door. The lock dropped back into place. Her mind on the fissure in the wall, Emma Rose still needed to eat and drink. She started on the sandwich and washed it down with a different drink, a citrus-flavored soda.
Her legs started to wobble and she went back to the mattress.
CHAPTER 35
Grace Alexander studied the man across from her. They didn’t get many like him in an interview room at the Tacoma Police Department. Paul Bateman looked at her and nodded. Palmer Morton, dressed in a European cut suit with shoes that probably cost a week’s wages—a detective’s wages, that is—was a smug little prick. He was puffed up and trying to appear as if he was a gracious sort of person.
It wasn’t a good fit for his personality.
“Glad we could have a little talk,” he said.
“Frankly, we’re surprised to see you,” Paul said. “You know, without an attorney.”
Palmer smiled and shrugged a little, his perfectly fitting suit flowing effortlessly with each muscle movement. “If you ask me, attorneys and accountants have ruined the world.”
The remark was meant to be a kind of “everyman” statement. But he was far from everyman status.
“Real estate developers haven’t been so great, either,” Paul said, with a slight laugh. It was meant to be a little dig, but Palmer didn’t bite. He was there for a reason and taking the obvious bait was a fool’s mistake. He prided himself on being a smooth negotiator and that’s just what he was there to do. He considered Alex a piece of crap, but the boy was his piece of crap. If his kid went down, he’d go down along with him.
“It’s nice of you to stop by. But really, we’d like to interview Alex,” Grace said. “Maybe you can call him and have him come down.”
“He’s a kid,” Palmer said.
“He’s nineteen. He’s an adult.”
Palmer ignored the detective’s remark and didn’t say anything. It was strategic, a way to get the detectives to reveal more about their motives in talking to Alex in the first place.
“We’re surprised that you wanted to see us,” she said.
Palmer Morton folded his hands on top of the table. “I was on my way to a meeting and I thought I’d stop by. A little out of the blue, I guess. Hope I didn’t interfere with any of your investigation into the disappearance of the girl.”
“That girl is Emma Rose,” Paul said.
A look of obvious recognition over his face, Palmer nodded. “Yes, Emma. Nice girl. Some problems, but nice.”
Grace could have guessed it. Palmer Morton was there with a gas can. He was going to douse Emma Rose’s character and drop a lit match. It made her even more suspicious of Alex an
d what kind of role he might have played in her disappearance.
“What kind of problems?” Grace asked, not giving away her irritation.
“I don’t know how to say this, because I want to be PC,” he said, looking first at Grace then at Paul.
“We’re trying to find her, so tell us what you know,” Grace said.
“I hate talking about anyone like this, but she was like a lot of girls. She wasn’t interested in my son at all. She was just using him.”
“Using him how?” she asked.
Palmer shrugged a shoulder. “Using him, you know . . .” His voice trailed off. “Look, my son’s not the brightest bulb in the box and he sure as hell didn’t inherit much of anything from me. Looks like his mother’s side, that’s for sure.”
“I’m sure your family tree is fascinating, Mr. Morton,” Grace said, her tone a little less polite than she’d intended. “But what, exactly, are you getting at?”
Palmer stared hard at Grace. “She was a little bit of a whore, a gold digger. She just cozied up to my son because of his big, fat trust fund.”
“I see,” she said, barely believing she’d heard him correctly, but knowing full well that she had.
He didn’t like her tone and bristled right away. “Don’t look at me like that, Ms. Alexander.”
“Detective,” she said, coolly correcting him. “How do you know this?”
“I know it because I saw it. Look, I don’t want to embarrass my boy. He’s already embarrassed. But Emma hit on me.”
“Hit on you?” Grace asked, suppressing the desire to roll her eyes at her partner. The man across from them really was the biggest jerk in Tacoma. Bar none.
