The Fear Collector (3 page)

“Had her body been found earlier,” Shane said, pausing to click to the next image, one of a young woman with a halo of blond hair and piercing green eyes, “I think that Cassandra Kincaid would likely not have been killed.”

A hand shot up.

It belonged to a young Tacoma Police detective named Grace O’Hare. It was the first time she’d spoken to the man who she had considered an idol, then later, her husband.

“Yes, in the front row,” Shane said, his blue eyes squinting a little in the dark.

Grace nodded, and a woman with a microphone came toward her.

“Yes, Special Agent, I still don’t understand why—with all of the vast resources at the bureau—that you were unable to ascertain what became obvious years later, that Toni was Ronald Chase Mitchell’s girlfriend and that all the victims after her were dead ringers for her?”

Shane Alexander nodded a little. He’d heard that question before.

“Look,” he said, his tone even and not the least bit defensive, “we are really learning the truth of what’s behind the mask. What is obvious after the fact is sometimes painfully so.”

The comment was a none-too-subtle reference to the
New York Times
profile that had led to his book deal.

“I guess,” Grace said, holding on to the microphone. The young woman next to her, whose job it was to pass it to the next person, made an irritated face. “What you’re saying is that as much as we know about sociopathic personality disorder, we really don’t know enough to actually stop them from killing.”

Shane stepped closer to get a better look at her. She wasn’t going to back down. He knew he hadn’t seen the last of her, and in that minute, that was just fine.

“No, I guess we don’t,” he said, as politely as possible. He turned around and indicated a young man in the second row. “Question?”

After the lights went up, Grace found her place at the end of the line for the book signing. She let several others go ahead of her, even putting up with the crime groupies and their over-the-top gushing about the agent’s work at the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

One young woman, a reasonably attractive redhead who had a too-heavy hand with her eyeliner and slashes of blush that looked like they’d been applied with a stencil, served up the line of the night.

“That analysis would be above my pay grade,” he said.

“I don’t know which is sexier,” she cooed, “serial killers or the hotties who catch them.”

Grace watched the special agent deal with the crime groupie. He smiled and signed her book.

After she departed, clutching a book that she’d likely fall asleep while reading, he looked up at Grace.

“I don’t know what is more repulsive, serial killers or the groupies they attract,” he said.

“Your job puts you in danger a lot. I guess that’s sexy to some,” she said.

“We’re well trained,” he said.

“I didn’t mean the FBI. I meant your job as an author and lecturer. That’s the scary one.”

He laughed. “I’m Shane Alexander,” he said, stating the obvious, but doing so to break the ice and get her to say her name—without being too forward.

Grace nodded. “I know. I read your book.”

“And you are?”

She looked at him with those eyes that could never tell a lie. “Grace O’Hare. My sister, Tricia, was one of Ted Bundy’s victims. At least we think so.”

“You want to talk?”

Grace, back in the moment, offered Shane the last crab cake. The sun was down and the water had turned from golden to black.

“You made ’em, you have the last one,” he said, patting his slightly expanding midsection.

“You could burn off the calories by going up to my car. I left my book up there.”

“You need to get an e-reader, Grace. We don’t have the storage for any more books around here anyway.”

He was right about that. The north wall of their small house was floor-to-ceiling books, most of them nonfiction crime, though there was the occasional serial-killer thriller—more for a diversion from the reality of the dark professions they’d both chosen.

Grace had always been interested in crime, murder especially.

“I think it’s in my blood,” she’d told Shane when they first met.

“Me too, but not because of personal connection. Just a deep need to be close enough to the bad stuff to be able to stop the bad guys from doing whatever it is they’re doing again.”

“I understand,” she’d said. “For me, for my family, murder has always been personal.”

Some saw their strange alliance as a linkage between two individuals who were obsessed with crime. What those people missed was that they needed each other. He loved and understood her.

She loved him with all her heart, but she also knew that he could help her.

I
t was dusk when Lisa Lancaster looked at the newspaper vending box. The headlines of the day’s
News Tribune
touted a state legislator’s brilliant/bogus idea to sell the naming rights of the Narrows Bridge to ease a disastrous state budget shortfall. She wondered why Tacoma was so provincial. Why Washington was so backwards. New Yorkers would never think to sell the naming rights to the Empire State Building. No one would ever give voice to such a ridiculous scheme.

While Lisa got most of her news from Internet sites like Gawker and TMZ, she did crouch down to read a little of a news story that caught her interest in that kind of ghoulish way that some stories do.

The article detailed the discovery of the bones and how the Tacoma Police Department was looking into a number of missing persons cases involving young women from as far back as the 1950s.

Lisa, a willowy brunette with shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, stopped reading because the idea of an old body grossed her out. She turned her thoughts inward as she stood outside the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do.

With her hair.

Her major.

Her life.

Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had to do with the wide breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in student loans.

And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

Lisa roulette dialed until someone picked up. Her best friend of the moment, Naomi, took the call and promptly used up half of her “bonus” minutes talking about her boyfriend and how selfish he was.

“Like he acts like I’m supposed run right over to his parents’ garage whenever he’s horny,” she said. “I told him if he’s looking for a hookup then he should go on Craigslist like every other loser.”

As she listened, Lisa watched a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.

Lisa turned away. “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

“That campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

“Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.

Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

“Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good,” she said.

“Mine, neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

“I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents, too.”

The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

“God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”

“Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.

“Whatever,” she said, “like I wasn’t the president of that dumb club. I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm relax a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

“You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

“Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

The young man fell to the pavement. One of the crutches was just out of reach.

“Can I give you a hand?” Lisa asked.

He looked up with an embarrassed half-smile.

“No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”

Lisa stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he’d thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.

“Let me help you,” Lisa said, bending down and hooking her hands under his arms. He stood wobbly on one leg, like a flamingo at the zoo. A good wind would knock him over. Lisa handed him his other crutch and picked up the backpack.

“You must be taking some heavy courses,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed about the unintended pun. She got a good look at his face. He actually was handsome with dark hair, large brown eyes, and stylish stubble above his upper lip and on the tip of his chin.

A goatee in the works?

Lisa grinned, not outwardly, but inside. The cute dork existed after all. She’ll tell Naomi the minute she helped him to his car.

“Where are you parked?” she said.

“Over there,” he said. “I’m Ted, by the way.”

So sure he was about what he was about to do that he didn’t think twice about using his father’s name.

Lisa glanced over at the burnished orange Honda Element, a boxy mini-SUV that was destined to be the VW bus of the new millennium.

“Fun car,” she said.

He shrugged, although with crutches under each arm, shrugging was not that easy an endeavor. “Good for outdoors stuff. If you go hiking and get mud in the car you can literally hose it out.”

Lisa nodded. “I guess that’s good. You like to hike?”

“I do. Sometimes I like to drive out to the middle of nowhere, pull off the road, and just find something cool to look at. A lake. A forest. Someplace where no one goes.”

“I’m Lisa, by the way. What are you taking?” she asked, moving the heavy backpack to her other shoulder

“Biology. Pre-med,” he said, though it was a lie. Inside his backpack were the A, B, and C volumes of old, outdated encyclopedias from his basement recreation room.

He was looking even more handsome.

When they arrived next to his car, he directed her to the passenger side.

“Can you put my books there?” he asked. “Easier to get to later.”

She nodded.

He pushed the electronic door lock button on his key fob and Lisa popped open the door.

“Did some other good Samaritan take a nap in here?” she said, a little teasingly, as she set the backpack on a seat that had been completely reclined to form a bed.

He didn’t answer and Lisa turned to look over her shoulder.

The young man was standing without crutches, framed by a lamp partially blocked by a dying cedar tree. Braided shadows crisscrossed his face like a spider web. He was holding one of the crutches like a Louisville Slugger.

“What the—” Lisa started to say, but her words were cut short.

He’d filled the aluminum tube of the crutch with his grandfather’s lead fishing weights, thinking that a little more heft would be helpful when he swung it at his victim’s head.

Which he did.

And it was.

Lisa’s shoulder bag fell into the gutter and her cell phone cartwheeled on the pavement and broke into pieces. The college student offered no final scream. No real sound but the slumping of her body against the doorjamb of the Element.

In a moment marked by a blur of swift movements and a gasp of air from the victim’s lungs, he had her inside.

He looked at her through the passenger window, satisfied and excited. He fixed the image in his memory like a photograph that he’d retrieve later. Moments like this were to be savored and relived over and over.

Lisa Lancaster was so beautiful.
Sleeping
. Like a doll with a swirl of lovely dark hair and perfect little features. He owned her right then, and a broad and unexpected smile came to his face.
Not fear
. Not a thumping heart sequestered behind a rib cage. None of that.

At that moment, the young man understood something about the power of the hunt that had eluded him as he’d planned and stalked his first kill. The rush. The excitement of doing something few dared to do.

And doing it better than the father he’d admired, though never known. He climbed behind the wheel and turned the key in the car’s ignition. He let out a little laugh at the pun that came to him just then.

He really was in his element. In every way.

At ten minutes before midnight, the 911 communications center received an anguished call from the mother of a missing young woman. The operator, Mary-Jo Danforth, thirty-one, took down the information provided and created a file she’d pass along to law enforcement. It was close to break time and Mary-Jo was feeling bored and restless. After she hung up the call, she swiveled her chair to talk to her friend and co-worker, Kirk Aldean.

A video camera installed for training purposes captured their conversation.

MARY-JO: Some mother thinks her daughter’s been abducted or something. Didn’t come home from college today.