The Fear Collector (34 page)

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.

“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?”

“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?”

There was undeniable truth in what she said. Ted had altered the way people looked at a man in need. In the Seattle Summer of Ted, he’d changed how safe a young woman felt walking in her own neighborhood. In the days before Ted, the only kind of footsteps that sent chills down a young woman’s spine belonged to a man who looked scary—a bum, a hoodlum.

Not a handsome young man in a suit jacket and wingtips.

“Were you ever afraid of him?” Grace asked.

Daphne turned away, her eyes welling with tears, though none fell. It was as if that one real break in emotion could be stemmed.

“One night we were in bed,” she began, her eyes still looking out the window. “You know, just saying that makes my stomach sick. Just the idea that I was in bed with a man who would rather have sex with a dead girl, a girl that he kills, makes me want to throw up. What was I to him? Just a placeholder? Nothing at all?”

Grace wanted the rest of the story. She’d talked to crime victims before. Hundreds of times. She knew that each word was like spitting out razor blades, but getting to the essence of truth wasn’t ever an easy endeavor.

“What happened, Daphne? Tell me,” she said.

Daphne nodded. “Right. We were in bed, as I said. It was late. I just woke up. It was like some kind of a strange feeling came over me and my eyes just opened. Ted was under the covers with a flashlight, Detective. He was under the covers looking at my body with a goddamn flashlight. And you know what I did about it? I mean, I was so mortified, do you know what I said to him?”

Grace shook her head.

“Nothing. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. I pretended that I hadn’t caught him, but the rest of the night I just laid there wondering why I stayed with someone like Ted. I thought maybe there was something more wrong with me than with him. There had to be, because what kind of a woman just looks the other way?”

There were millions of reasons, of course. She was in love. She was trapped in a relationship that she was unable to escape. She was like a lot of women back then, unsure of her own worth and whether her life was somehow diminished if she was a single woman. Grace offered none of those. Instead, she changed the subject, trying to give Daphne Middleton a break from her moment of realization that Ted had literally inhabited her nightmares, both awake and asleep.

“I know this is hard. And I am sorry. Really I am.”

“Thank you.”

“All right. Can I ask you about your hair?”

Daphne, now composed, nodded. It was as if she knew that one was coming. If she’d been the inspiration for the killings, why didn’t she look like it? Her hair was cropped, not long.

“Even if I wasn’t involved with Ted,” she said, “I doubt very much that I’d be one of those women with the same hairstyle they had in high school. You know the type. You see them everywhere at the market. I cut my hair short after the Ted stuff hit the news, but I would have anyway.”

“Was he fixated on your hair? Was that part of his obsession? You know, some people think that the hairstyle was so common back then that it couldn’t really be crucial for why Ted stalked the girls that he did. My sister wore her hair long, parted in the middle, too. When I looked at her yearbook, about half the girls wore some variation of that style.”

Daphne set down her mug and looked directly at Grace. Her eyebrows stopped moving and she spoke in hushed tones.

“I know. But I think so. I really do. I think that Ted was fixated on my hair. One time I told him that I was going to get a new haircut. Lots of girls were going shorter then. Girls on TV, girls in sports. Not everyone had to look like Jaclyn Smith.”

Grace didn’t get the Jaclyn Smith reference, but she’d look it up later online. She thought of the row after row of victims and their dark, long hair, parted in the middle. She knew from reading about Daphne that she’d had that look once, too.

She pressed Daphne for more. “Go on, what did he do?”

“He had a fit,” she said. “An absolute freak-out fit. It was completely over the top. It was almost like a tantrum. I remember him saying that if I cut my hair he’d go crazy and he might do something drastic.”

“Kill someone?” Grace asked.

“No. Don’t be silly, Detective. I thought that he was going to get drunk or something. Get on his hands and knees and beg me not to do it. He actually looked like he was going to cry. Ted had pulled that kind of stunt before—you know, acting like he was crying when all he was doing was pretending to be so, so upset.”