The Fear Collector (13 page)

Never.

Carefully, as if she didn’t want to spill its contents, Grace opened the sandwich container and took out the first three-by-five card, its edges no longer crisp, but soft and fuzzy from wear.

She had held those cards so many times.

Written in her mother’s handwriting:

What is Ted Bundy’s favorite novel?

She didn’t have to flip it over to see the answer. It was emblazoned on her brain.

“
Treasure Island
,” she said softly, as though she didn’t want anyone to hear.

She remembered how she’d despised that book, not because it was a boy’s book—the reason her friends hadn’t liked it—but because it was Ted’s book. She hated everything about him; everything that brought him joy, or sadness, brought her the opposite emotions.

Grace set it down and looked at the next card. She recalled sitting at the big kitchen table, her mother facing her with her sweet but steely eyes, urging her to get it right.

What was the make of Ted’s family’s car in Tacoma (the car he was embarrassed to be seen in)?

That one was easy. Her father always pointed them out on the rare occasion when one was on the roadway, once when he’d been scavenging for parts at a junkyard and she’d accompanied him there. The answer was a Nash Rambler.

So many of Grace’s own memories were blended with Ted’s life that sometimes it was hard to separate her own from what she’d been taught about the serial killer by her parents. She turned the cards over one by one and flipped through the answers.

By age ten he was dragging girls to the woods to urinate on them.

He was a Cub Scout.

He stole ski equipment in high school.

None of his teenage friends ever visited his bedroom in the basement of his childhood home.

He hated the way Tacoma smelled.

Grace smiled at that one. Who, but the owners of the smelter that gave Tacoma a nose-plugging reputation, didn’t hate the stink, the so-called aroma of Tacoma?

She looked back down at the cards.

He picked through garbage cans in search of porn.

He was jealous of his cousins because they had a piano in their home.

He never bonded with his stepfather—refusing to call him Dad.

Grace knew all of those things and more. She probably knew Ted better than he knew himself. She knew every tragic, disgusting, disturbing detail of his life. She knew how he’d come into the world as an imposter, something less than a human being. She knew how cunning he could be when it came to winning over the sympathy of a pretty young girl. She knew that he understood that as a perceived weakness, like an arm in a sling, was a far better approach than the thuggish behavior of wrestling a woman down in broad daylight. Later, that lesson would be forgotten as his rage escalated into a frenzied rampage at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida.

The next index card was about Chi Omega, the location of the second to the last gasp of Ted Bundy’s toxic life.

Grace ran her fingertip over the image of an owl, the mascot for the sorority on the card. She’d researched the sorority at the Tacoma Public Library. She decided that if she were ever going to pledge, it would be to Chi-O. She’d drawn the owl on the card, not to cheat or remind her with an obvious clue. She was only a girl then. She drew the owl because she liked the bird. Nothing deeper. Nothing that drilled down into anything more than just that. She thought about how her mother had let her paint a big mural behind her bed, the gnarly branches of a maple tree with four owls against a daisy yellow moon. A brief smile came to her lips, but it passed the instant she flipped over the card. The answer printed, again in Sissy’s controlled penmanship:

Fifteen minutes.

Just fifteen minutes
. Grace knew that was the length of time it had taken for Ted Bundy to slip into the sorority house in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978 and molest and rape and murder. He used a wooden club, something that he’d found en route. It wasn’t planned and it was beyond risky. Four sorority sisters had been beaten, two of them had died. Survivors said that Bundy had worn panty hose over his face to disguise his appearance.

Only nine hundred seconds.
That’s all he’d needed.

Grace drew a short breath. It was the last card that always got to her.

Who killed your sister?

The answer to that one was all incumbent upon her. It always had been. It was the reason she’d been born and it was the driving force behind everything she did. It was a curse, and yet it was also empowering. She needed to succeed where others had failed. At times she felt that her parents had created her for the purpose of hunting their prey, but that didn’t always bother her. She felt sorry for people born into the world without any kind of purpose whatsoever. What was the point of being on the planet, if not to do something right and good for someone else? All other options seemed hedonistic, selfish.

She flipped the little white card over.

Theodore Robert Bundy.

Grace was thirteen when it should have ended. She and her mother were watching TV nonstop, waiting for Ted to die. It was January 24, 1989. She remembered seeing on TV a man from Florida who was standing next to a hand-lettered sign that said F
RY
D
AY IS
T
UESDAY
and wearing a B
URN
, T
ED
, B
URN
T-shirt, which he was selling (twenty dollars for two). He unflinchingly told a reporter that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with selling the shirts. After all, Bundy was a killer, and that certainly was far worse than making money off one.

Sissy O’Hare didn’t agree with the man and told Grace so. She didn’t agree with all the profiteering that came with Ted. The authors who insisted their books were about “educating” rather than making money, the movie people who wanted their films to “tell the true story” and ghoulish women who followed Ted like he was some kind of Pied Piper to hell. All of them sickened her. All of them. There was something so very wrong about those people who were making their livelihoods off someone who made a sport of killing young women.

“See that man selling T-shirts?” she asked Grace as they watched the pending execution unfold on TV.

Grace nodded her head, her eyes glued to her mother’s.

“He’s doing something evil and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know about the pain behind what Bundy did. He doesn’t understand that turning Bundy’s execution into a carnival only celebrates what he did.”

Grace nodded.

“There is only one type of person with any honor in this, that’s the man—or woman—who carries a badge.”

Grace looked a little unsure.

“Police, honey. They are the only ones I want to see happy in a mess like this one. They are the ones I want to see smile because they put the bad guy right where he belongs.”

I
n the second-floor offices at the Tacoma Police Department, Grace Alexander and Paul Bateman looked at the photographs of the three faces who’d commanded the attention of the homicide unit for the past few weeks. The first, though this had been unknown to Tacoma police, had been Kelsey Caldwell, seventeen. The second to go missing had been twenty-four-year-old Lisa Lancaster. The newest face put up on the wall, adjacent to the pictures of every member of the police department, belonged to Emma Rose. They were in the war room, the detective’s conference room. It was the place where cases were discussed, evidence was weighed, and theories were shared. Until the possibility of a third missing girl made its way to that room, there had not been a pattern. Two does not make a pattern. Two can be a coincidence. Random. Just one bad bit of bad luck after the other.

But three?
Everyone knew that like in the old game tic-tac-toe, three in a row was significant. All three girls were similar in age, size, build. Their facial features were blandly pretty, their hair long and dark. On their own they might not have been noticed, but in a group of three everything that was common about them became remarkable.

“They guy’s obviously hung up on a type,” Detective Bateman said. Coming from him, the comment was almost funny. After his wife ditched him, he’d hooked up with a woman who looked so much like her a few people thought they’d gotten back together.

No one had used the “S” word yet. Calling something a serial killer case was the epitome of TV-style police chatter. But there they were. Three young women, girls really. Pretty maids all in a row.

“The newest girl has been missing for a little more than a day. Parents called it in after they found out that she didn’t get to work,” Grace said.

Paul nodded. “Yeah. Last seen at her job,” he said.

“Where does she work?” she asked.

“Starbucks. Lakewood Town Center.”

Grace went for her coat. “Good. I could use a cup of coffee.”

Just before they left, Paul picked up the phone. The call was brief. He locked his eyes on Grace’s.

“ME’s office. Tissue’s a match. It was Kelsey’s hand.”

Grace didn’t say anything. In her bones, she’d already known that.

Where were the rest of Kelsey’s remains? And, more important, who would have done that to her?

The Lakewood Towne Center Starbucks was like a lot of such places—loud with people talking, blenders buzzing, and a thick layer of the aroma of coffee permeating everything and everyone. The only thing of note was that one of its workers was missing and the staff that was behind the counter was jittery when the police detectives arrived. Not jittery in the overcaffeinated way that its patrons often were, but the kind of jittery that came from deep concern.

Emma Rose was dependable. If she wasn’t at work and she wasn’t at home, no one thought there could be a good outcome.

“When she was fifteen minutes late, I texted her,” Sylvia Devonshire told the detectives.

“Did she text back?” Grace said.

Paul added three packets of Splenda to his drink and stirred. Grace looked over at him and shook her head, but said nothing.

“Is it that unusual? I mean, fifteen minutes. That’s a tight leash you’ve got on your people.”

Sylvia shrugged. “It is what it is. You try making twenty drinks for some schmo’s office suck-up and you need everyone you can.” She looked up and smiled at one of the schmos in line. “Just a second. Aphrodite is making your drinks now.”

The man nodded impatiently, obviously indifferent to anyone’s needs but his own.

“See?” she said, this time in a low voice.

Paul stopped stirring. “Okay, so Emma is dependable and you were worried. Anything you can tell us about her last shift?”

Sylvia pretended to be busy and looked away.

“Sylvia, you’re thinking about something,” Grace said.

The young woman looked up. “I don’t know,” she said.

Grace leaned a little closer. “That means you know something.”

Sylvia wrapped her arms around her chest, trying in a very real way, though unconsciously so, to hold it all inside.

“Tell me,” Grace said.

“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“No one is in trouble but Emma Rose,” Paul said.

Grace looked over at her partner. “Look, he’s right. But Emma’s parents are very, very worried.”

“Is there something going on with Emma and her parents?” Paul asked.

Sylvia shook her head. “Oh no. Her parents were cool. They used to come in and sit over there.” She pointed to a pair of leather easy chairs. “You know, hang out before she got off and then they took her out for Thai.”

“That’s nice. But something is bothering you,” Grace said. “What are you thinking? We’ve got to find her.”

“I hate to bring it up.”

“What? Sylvia, what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to cause trouble. He’s a nice kid.”

“Who? Who’s a nice kid?”

“Oliver. Oliver Angstrom. He was always talking about how hot Emma is and, you know, how he wanted to ask her out.”

“She’s a pretty girl,” Grace said. “I’m sure she got a lot of attention.”

“Right. Customers liked her, too.”

“We need you to focus now, okay? What about Oliver?”

Sylvia looked down at the counter. “He was going to ask her out. Finally. I knew she wouldn’t say yes, because, well, she’s so pretty and he’s so geeky. Sweet, but geeky. But not geeky and scary.”

Grace knew the difference. She’d once dated a geeky guy in high school. Smart, brainy, was sexy. Loving
Star Wars
too much, not so.

“I don’t know if Oliver asked her out or not, but I do know that they were together. They cleaned and closed.”

“Did you see Oliver today?”

An uneasy look came over Sylvia’s face. She shook her head. “No, I didn’t. No one did. He called in and used one of his floating holidays.”

“Was that unexpected?”

“Totally. If I’d gotten the call directly I would have told him no, but he called in the store’s voice mail and left a message before opening.”

Grace knew that approach. She’d done it a time or two herself. So had Paul. Always call in to the sergeant when you know he’s not at his desk.

Just then, another Starbucks worker made his way through from the back room. He was a thin, gawky teenager, with a faint black moustache struggling to survive on his upper lip. The goatee he’d tried cultivating was even less successful. He was carrying a small black purse.

“Talking about Emma?” he asked.

“Yes,” Grace said, looking at the teen with the purse.

“Lost and Found brought this over earlier today,” he said. “Emma’s purse. Said the maintenance crew turned it in and the guy at Lost and Found knew her name and picture ID so he brought it over here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sylvia asked the young man, whose tag identified him as Tony G.

Grace took the purse. “Did they say where they found it?”

“Yeah. She must have dropped it by the bus stop. Found it over there,” he said, indicating a place outside the front of the coffee shop. “Want me to show you where it is?” He looked at Sylvia for permission and she reluctantly nodded.