by Gregg Olsen
“In here,” he said, leading them past a double door, to a smaller room. “My dad keeps an office down here. That’s where Emma saw it.”
“Saw what?”
Alex led them over to the computer. “My dad changed the password. So I can’t get it to work now, but when Emma was over his password was Trump 1234.”
Paul suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Palmer Morton was an egomaniac. He had better hair than Donald Trump, but there was no way he was going to best the New York real estate developer when it came to financial success.
“What did she see?” Grace asked.
“It was an email. My dad had left his email screen up. I normally don’t care about his crap, but Emma sat down and started reading. She blew up at me. I had to get her to calm down. She told me that she was going to the police, the papers.”
“Alex, what did she see?” Grace asked.
“When was this?” Paul asked.
“It was a week before she disappeared.”
“Right, okay. But what was it?”
“It was about the cleanup going on at The Pointe. My dad had paid some contractors to get rid of the last bit of contaminated dirt. The contractor screwed up. They hired out a sub. Some cheap labor so they could rake in the dough. The subcontractor took the last tailings from the cleanup and dumped them into Puget Sound.”
“Do you know where?” Grace asked.
Alex shook his head. “Not sure. Somewhere around Point Defiance, I think.”
“What did Emma do?” Paul asked.
“She told me that my dad wouldn’t go to jail if he didn’t know about it. She thought that he was making a big mistake by keeping it quiet.”
“Did you tell your dad about this?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I did. I told him, and he and Emma talked about it. She said she’d keep her mouth shut if he did the right thing. You know, if he had it cleaned up right away.”
“What was his reaction?”
“At first he was really mad at her, at me. Then he calmed down. He said he’d take care of it. He’d cleaned up a Superfund site. He could clean up this mess, too.”
The detectives talked to Alex a while longer, pinning down the information to make sure that had everything right. As they started up the stairs, Paul remarked about the double doors.
“Looks like that’s bolted up better than Fort Knox,” he said.
“Wine cellar. Dad has some mega expensive wines in there. And if you’re thinking he doesn’t trust me, you’d be right. Dad doesn’t trust anyone.”
Grace asked the million-dollar question. “Do you think he had anything to do with Emma’s disappearance?”
Alex got real quiet. “I don’t think so. He saw her that night. But he told me that after they talked in the parking lot she left for the bus. She was alive.”
Grace waited until the car was moving before she spoke.
“Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Maybe Emma’s not a victim of the same killer as Kelsey and Lisa.”
Paul didn’t disagree. “I don’t like Morton for the serial killer type.”
“Right,” she said, putting the car in gear and heading up the street. “He’s almost too rotten to be a serial killer.” It was a half joke, but there was a little truth to it. Serial killers, in general, spiral out of control. They are unable to hold down jobs, unable to maintain relationships. They are killing machines and unable to focus on much more than that. The idea of the serial killer as the benign neighbor next door was more an invention of Hollywood. Most were frazzled and preoccupied.
Palmer Morton was focused like a laser beam on his business. He didn’t have time to run around killing young girls.
He might have, however, had time to kill just one.
“What if he’d met her at Starbucks after work? Maybe she threatened to tell and he abducted her right then? Killed her to shut her up. A scandal over The Pointe would destroy plans for his development,” Paul said.
Grace looked down at her phone and read a text. “It could shut him down for years,” she said.
Paul nodded and looked out the window.
“Forever,” he said.
They passed a sign for Morton’s condo project as they drove back to the police department.
GET THE POINTE. KILLER VIEWS.
“That’s pretty ironic,” Paul said tapping on the glass. Grace’s mind was reeling. And it wasn’t about The Pointe or the interview they’d just conducted. It was from the text message she’d just received. She was going to see Ted Bundy’s old girlfriend.
“No kidding,” she said to Paul.
“Have you been down there?”
“No,” she said.
“Some big plans they have.”
The Pointe at Ruston Way was an enormous complex with condominiums, townhouses, and apartments flanking edges of the sparkling blue waters of Commencement Bay. No one could argue that real estate developer Palmer Morton’s vision had been realized in a beautiful way. No expense had been spared to design and build what the website and brochures promised was “World Class in the City of Destiny,” a nod to Tacoma’s motto and its reputation as being somewhat less than world class. The penthouse condos went for well over one million dollars and the cheapest rents on the apartments made living there only in the reach of BMW-driving professionals. No one without a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salary need apply.
The bulk of The Pointe at Ruston Way was built on the cleaned-up land that surrounded the former ASARCO smelter. Getting it built had been a battle—the EPA, the old-timers who didn’t want any change (even though the previous landholder had poisoned the air, soil, and water, hardly something to champion), and a considerable consortium of homegrown environmental groups who wanted the land cleaned up and returned to its pristine state.
Palmer Morton had been in it for the long haul. He dug in and fought all warring factions and prevailed. He had money. He had balls of steel. He just wouldn’t lose.
CHAPTER 42
Grace stopped for gas at a mini-mart just off the freeway in Redmond. She scanned the area by the cashier and grabbed a package of barbecue potato chips, regretting it the instant she pushed it across the dingy counter. The clerk told her that she could get a bigger bag for “just forty-nine cents more.”
Grace smiled. “I really should save the two dollars and skip the chips altogether, but I’m hungry.”
“We have some good Polish dogs,” said the clerk, a large woman who apparently never got off her chair. She indicated a hotdog machine that turned two sad, shrunken hotdogs on hot rollers.
Grace shook her head and smiled politely. She was an expert at hiding her feelings. Her stomach was rumbling and the chips, bad choice as they were, were all she had time for. “Vegan,” she lied, not even sure why. It just seemed better than saying “your hotdogs look like they’ve been there since Bush was in office,” which is what she was really thinking. The pit of her stomach was sour, but it had nothing to do with hunger pangs. It was all Ted. Ted Bundy was like an insidious virus. Once more she was moving through her life chasing a man who already had been killed by the executioner.
She paid and went back to her car, checking the address she’d printed out on Google maps before leaving Tacoma.
212 Marymoor Lane
Everything he touched became infected with evil. People who studied Ted—law enforcement and serial killer groupies alike—considered Daphne Middleton to be victim zero. Daphne had been Ted’s girlfriend, his confidante, the one he trusted above all others.
It wasn’t hard for Grace to find her. Daphne had changed her name, but not her Social Security number. She’d moved around the Pacific Northwest and back to her home town of Des Moines, Iowa, before returning to Redmond, Washington, and the condo at 21 Marymoor Lane.
Grace didn’t call ahead, but she kept her badge in her palm when she knocked on the door.
The door opened a crack and a slender woman with short gray hair answered.
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��Daphne?” Grace asked.
A split second of fear came over the woman, but she quickly dismissed it. “There’s no one here by that name.” Her eyes, nestled in crinkled folds of over-tanned skin, flickered in that way that lets a person with genuine sensitivity see that a lie is being told.
Grace knew that she was trying to force something open that Daphne Middleton wanted sealed forever. Her past. Her history. Ted. Yet she persisted, because persistence when it came to Bundy was in her DNA.
“Daphne, my name is Grace Alexander. I’m with the Tacoma Police Department,” she said, proffering her badge.
Daphne shrugged; her shoulders were tent poles holding up the loose cotton blouse that she wore untucked over a pair of faded blue jeans.
“I guess that’s supposed to impress me,” she finally said. “And, if I were Daphne, I’d probably be inclined to be so. But, as I said, my name is Jennifer.”
She hadn’t said her name was Jennifer.
“Daphne, please,” Grace said, her tone more businesslike than pleading. “I’m here to talk to you about my sister. I’m here to talk to you about Ted.”
Daphne/Jennifer looked around, past Grace. She scanned the parking lot.
Looking for a TV crew maybe?
“Why are you doing this to me?”
If there was a moment in which Grace knew that her obsession didn’t trump the rights of others to just be left alone, that was it. She knew that while she meant Daphne Middleton no harm whatsoever, there was no way that her appearance on her doorstep could be anything but harmful. She was there to get something. She wasn’t there to give Daphne anything—not new information, not closure, not comfort. She was a leech, a parasite.
And yet she persisted.
“I’m not,” Grace said. “I’m doing this to help my sister.” Even those words rang a little hollow. It was true that she’d been counseled her entire life that she was doing this for her sister’s memory, that the truth that had eluded her family was something that was owed to Sissy. It was no longer about that. Not really. It was really about what she had to prove.
Daphne moved the door open a bit more, letting the light fall on her face. “Come in,” she said, her tone more resigned than welcoming. “But please, don’t make me have to move again. Don’t tell anyone you’ve found me. You have no idea what it’s like living in the shadow of that man.”
Grace didn’t say what was going through her mind just then: Yes, I do.
The condo was spotless and modern. A pair of black Barcelona chairs flanked a gas fireplace. A glass coffee table with a Nambé bowl as its centerpiece was placed in front of a bright red leather sofa, also Italian, like the Barcelona chairs. Daphne Middleton had excellent taste and a flair for the dramatic.
“Coffee’s brewing,” she said. “Follow me.”
Daphne led Grace to the kitchen, where an automatic coffeemaker beeped, indicating that it had just finished brewing. She poured a cup for herself and one for the detective. They sat at the kitchen table and talked. First Grace told her about Tricia and her mother, and how their lives had been wrapped up in the drama of a serial killer. It was part therapy, part fact finding.
“I think your mother wrote to me back in the late 1980s,” Daphne said.
Grace nodded. “I’m sure she did. My mother wrote to anyone with a connection to him, from his grade school teachers on up to a cellmate he had in Florida.”
“I see. I’m in excellent company, then,” Daphne said without a bit of irony.
Grace liked Daphne. Despite all of it, she could still find something in the darkness that made one smile.
Daphne looked up. “Sugar? Milk?”
Grace shook her head. In the middle of the conversation they were having there was room for the mundane. It was odd and comforting at the same time.
“Black’s fine,” she said.
She examined the woman in early sixties across from her. She wore a pair of gold hoops and a necklace fashioned of stars linked together. Her brows were dark and they moved as she spoke. She was beautiful and expressive and she’d been through a lot.
Daphne was the only Ted victim who had chosen to be with him, then rejected him.
“I know what you’re thinking. I know what everyone thinks. If I didn’t kick him to the curb, those girls would still be alive. Your sister would still be alive. All of them. Live with that for a little while and come back here and tell me how that feels.”
“No one blames you,” Grace said.
Daphne laughed, but it was forced and as fake as the fur trim on the coat that hung on the hook in the kitchen.
“They do,” she said. “You’re a cop. You know better, but deep down you probably do, too. It’s always been about when the killings happened. The date always comes back to me. Authors and TV people have speculated over the years that a broken heart might have been the trigger for his madness, or whatever it was.”
“When you broke up with him,” Grace said.
“That’s been completely overstated, Detective.”
“Grace, please.”
Daphne nodded and swallowed her coffee. “Right, Grace. Just so you know—and no one seems to listen to me on this—the breakup with Ted was less dramatic. He was immature. He needed growing up, you know, to find his own way. When we parted he didn’t seem upset. He just vanished. Later, when I tried to reconnect—after he’d started law school and become a bigwig in the Republican Party, he acted like we’d never met. Some traumatic breakup.”
Grace looked around the kitchen. Daphne had planted an herb garden in the window. The smell of mint and oregano perfumed the tidy space.
“All right, fair enough. But tell me, what was Ted really like?”
“Exactly why are you here? I mean, really. Missing girl in Tacoma? I read the papers.”
Grace thought for a moment. The answer was more complicated than any one case. It was her sister’s, the others, the life that her parents fashioned for her when she was growing up. She had a need to know people who knew Ted.
“Yes, the Tacoma case. But also,” she said, “my sister’s case. Tell me about him, please.”
Daphne rummaged in a cupboard for a package of Lorna Doones.
“The only connection that exists from my time with Ted is our fondness for shortbread. His favorite. I stopped eating them for ten years, maybe longer. I started buying it again a few years ago. Funny how innocent things can sometimes feel evil for a time.”
She put them on a plate and inched them over to Grace. She took one for herself and watched as Grace, her stomach still rumbling from the mini-mart snack, declined.
“Tell me about him,” she asked. “I need to understand him from someone who knew him.”
Daphne set down a cookie. “All right. There were two Teds. Maybe more. There was the Ted who could charm the socks off of anyone. He just could. He was quick. Funny. He had the kind of charisma that made people feel they were close to him even if they weren’t.”
“Like you?” Grace asked.
Daphne hesitated. “Yes, like me.”
The look on her face spoke volumes. It was clear that even though none of it was her fault, even though she knew in her heart of hearts that Ted had been a monster before she ever met him, she felt that twinge that comes with responsibility—no matter how off-base.
“You say there were two Teds. What was the other? How did that other personality differ?”
Daphne indicated the coffeepot and Grace shook her head.
“The other was the Ted that killed your sister,” she said. “The monster, the man without a conscience. The one who told me that he’d break my neck because I confronted him one time about stealing a TV. I knew he didn’t buy it. I wasn’t stupid. He was a thief. He stole other things, too; skis come to mind. I was pretty sure of it. After I saw that look in his eyes when I asked him where he got the goods, I knew I was never, ever going to push him again.”
Grace was in full detective mode just then. “Was he violent?”
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“That’s the thing. Not violent in the way abusers are. Ted’s rage was always under the surface, his anger poking through just enough so that you would take two steps backwards just to save yourself from the possibility.”
“Please, go on. What else did you observe?”
Daphne picked at the necklace of stars that shifted and shimmered when she moved and thought for a second before answering. “You mean in the way he acted?”
“Either. Both.”
“All right,” Daphne said. “Weird stuff. Stuff that he shouldn’t have or didn’t have a real reason to have.”
“Like what?
“You’ll know the second I say it, but back then I didn’t know what it meant. If it meant anything at all. I saw medical stuff around the house. Plaster of Paris, crutches. It was strange, but I didn’t really say anything. Later, you know, after everything came out, I knew that those things were items he used to set his trap for those girls.”
Weak Ted. Weak Ted was really strong, clever Ted.
“What else?”
“Oh and he had surgical gloves, too. Why did he need those?”
Both women knew the answer.
“I didn’t ask him, you know,” Daphne said, on a roll. “I just looked at the knives, the meat cleaver, the ropes and stuff he kept in his car and just accepted it. He even had a bag of women’s clothes. I just accepted his excuse that he was gathering things up to give to St. Vincent’s. I didn’t even think about whose clothing it might have been. It wasn’t mine. Oh, yes, he also had a wrench that he’d fashioned with a better handle for gripping. Today, of course, I probably would have looked for blood on it, but that was back then. Before CSI. Before serial killers, really.” She stopped herself and considered the obvious, her audience. “Ted changed a lot of things, didn’t he?”
