The Fear Collector (35 page)

“So what did you do?”

“I didn’t cut it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Daphne said. “No man was going to tell me how to dress or wear my hair. I made a decision a little bit later that Ted wasn’t the man for me. He wasn’t mature.”

“You didn’t think he was violent or that he would hurt you?”

Daphne shook her head. “I wish I could be as dramatic as some of those Bundy girls who got away from him—what are there now, about ten thousand who almost got murdered by Ted?”

It was a true statement, a kind of proof that Ted had morphed into Pacific Northwest folklore status like D. B. Cooper and Bigfoot.

“Probably,” Grace said.

“I just dumped him. I told him that he needed to grow up. And that was that.”

“How did he take that?”

“Not very well. He basically gave me the big FU. I honestly didn’t care. He was immature and he was creepy.”

There was at least one other question that never seemed to have the benefit of a decent answer. None that Grace could find. None that her mother could uncover. After Ted was released on bond in late 1975 and was awaiting his trial in Utah, he split his time between the house in Tacoma and Daphne Middleton’s place in Seattle.

The question was short.

“Why?” Grace asked.

Daphne nodded slowly. “Why did I let him stay with me? Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that a million times?”

“I’m sure you have, but why? Why did you? Did you think he was dangerous? Did you think that he would hurt you if you told him to get out of your life?”

Daphne fiddled with the stars around her neck again. “No, it wasn’t that. I would like to lay blame on the concept of a battered woman and the fear that makes someone stay close to the enemy instead of retreating. But that wasn’t it.”

“Then why?”

“It sounds so foolish, but it’s true. It was my own vanity, I guess. I think I thought that I picked him and it said something awful about me if I admitted to the world that I was going to bed with a killer.”

“But you were,” Grace said, coming very close to crossing the line. “And you did.”

“Right. Right. But seriously, the whole time I was with him, I was pretending. That’s what’s so messed up about it. I was pretending that I supported him, when all I was doing—I swear to God—was telling myself that he couldn’t have done what they were saying.”

“But you saw all those things that bothered you—the plaster of Paris, for example.”

“Yes, I know. And I talked to investigators—one right after another. They all told me what I just couldn’t admit. I was kind of trapped. The truth about the whole thing was that if he got convicted, I felt only then I could drop him. Only after that could—please understand—could I be free.”

Shane was waiting for Grace at the bottom of the staircase at Salmon Beach. She’d phoned that she’d be home at seven and it was nearly right on the dot when they met at the landing. Her interview with Daphne had made for a long and unsettling day.

“It’s been a long time since I had a greeting this nice,” Grace said, before reading the concerned expression on his face. “Something’s wrong. Is it my mom?”

Shane held her. “No, baby. Not your mom. It’s your sister.”

Grace pushed him away a little. “What do you mean?”

“The bones,” he said. “A friend at the bureau tipped me off. The bones were Tricia’s.”

Shane’s mouth was still moving, but Grace couldn’t hear anything more. Her mind zipped through images of her sister. The flash cards. Ted Bundy. Her bedroom. The dove necklace. Her mother’s face. The last time she’d seen her father.

Tears came to her eyes and rained down her cheeks. Shane was still talking, holding her close.

“Are you, are
they
, sure?” she finally said.

“Yes. It wasn’t the bones that did it. There were three strands of hair wrapped around the femur. Not intentionally, just there by luck. One had an intact follicle. That’s how they did the match, Grace. She’s found. You found her.”

Grace nodded. “We have to tell Mom,” she said.

Sissy O’Hare didn’t shed a single tear. She simply sat there on the sofa next to her daughter and listened, her fingertips barely touching the strand of pearls she always wore. The big clock ticked. The room shrunk. But she just sat there. Calmly. Quietly. Shane excused him-self and stepped into the kitchen to give mother and daughter a little time alone.

Finally Sissy spoke; her words came softly. “I’ve always known she was gone, Grace. I stopped looking for her twenty years ago. I knew in my heart that she loved me and she loved your father and she never would have left us. She had to be dead.”

Grace knew that wasn’t completely true. Her mom never changed their phone number. When she finally got a cell phone in the mid-nineties she made sure that the mobile carrier provided the same number—in case Tricia ever called. Her mother barely made a change to her sister’s bedroom—and only did anything major when a leak in the window frame caused some water damage and the entire room had to be repainted. Sissy had chosen the same color, but it didn’t look exactly the same.

“I know, Mom. I know.”

Sissy stared into Grace’s eyes. “Will you be able to tell anything else?”

Grace knew that had been coming, but still she clarified. “How she died? Is that what you mean?”

Sissy nodded. “Yes, and who killed her?”

Grace shook her head. “No. No, we won’t. There’s not enough there.”

“That’s all right. I already know. I’ve always known that Ted killed her. Ted killed all the pretty girls that year.”

In the car on the way back home, Shane asked Grace if her mother would be all right.

“Maybe we should stay with her?”

“She’ll be fine,” Grace said. “She’ll probably sleep better tonight now that she knows for sure Tricia is gone forever.”

“Are you doing all right?”

She looked out the window at the Tacoma skyline as they drove toward home.

“I think so. I didn’t know her. I’m just relieved for my mom. I wish my dad had lived long enough to know.”

“Don’t you think they’ve always known?” he asked.

“Probably. You know as well as I do that hope makes a joke out of logic.”

“Do you still think Ted’s the killer?” he asked.

“I’m not so sure.”

And she wasn’t. Not at all.

E
mma Rose wasn’t sure exactly how many days she’d been in the so-called apartment. It likely wasn’t more than a few, but with no daytime and nighttime indicators in that windowless, airless room, it was hard to really know.
Three? Or ten?
Emma plotted and schemed all the scenarios that would free her from her captor, but she didn’t know if she had the strength to carry them out. The fact of the matter—and she knew it deep in her soul—was Emma was running out of time. With each passing hour or day or whatever measure of time there was in the real world, Emma was feeling weaker and weaker. While fear still coursed through her body, it did so at an increasingly sluggish pace. She knew that her captor was going to rape, torture, and kill her, but her body reacted slowly to the urgent messages that her brain was sending.
Get out! Kill him first! You only have one chance.
What was wrong with her? She’d taken self-defense classes in high school. She knew that every second she was alive there was still the hope that she could survive, no matter what he was planning.

When she thought about her weakening state, her grogginess, she wondered if she’d been drugged by those awful sandwiches. She told herself that she shouldn’t eat any more, but when she left food on the plate, he screamed at her.

“You are no good to anyone dead! Eat!”

“Not hungry,” Emma said.

“Liar! You do what
I
say. Not what
you
want to do.”

Still holding on to her resolve never to cry again, Emma protested.

“But I can’t,” she said.

Though it seemed impossible, his tone grew harsher and his voice louder.

“Eat or I’ll force it down your throat!” he railed.

Though she hoped that he couldn’t see her obvious fear in the dim light, her hands were shaking as she picked up the paper plate. Sitting in the dank dungeon, Emma worked with birdlike bites on the sandwich that she was sure was taking away her will to fight.

She vowed to seize the moment, whenever it came.

Emma’s chance came when he left the door open when he thought she was asleep or passed out. Like her body had been wrapped in lead and she couldn’t move. She could barely lift her head toward the brightness. Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? A slice of light pierced the dank apartment and somehow, Emma was able to crawl on her hands and knees to the spot where she could get a better look at the world outside.

Where she could escape to freedom. Go home to her mother. Get out of there and never ever come back.

The teen dragged herself a few feet and looked upward at the dagger of light that came into the room.
What was out there?
The images blurred like the TV set that her grandmother had in her back bedroom, sparking the only thought of something happy since her abduction.

Her abduction.
A flicker of a memory came from soft to sharper focus. She remembered how she and Oliver had closed Starbucks. Then another. A confrontation with Alex’s dad. Palmer Morton promised to fix the contamination of the Sound. And finally, something else . . . a man with a sling on his arm asked for help in putting packages from shopping into his SUV . . . and then nothing.

Someone had hit her from behind. But it wasn’t the creeper. He had been in front of her.

It was so bright outside the hellhole in which he held her captive. She was a grunion following the moonlight. She was a mule deer staring into the headlights of a rapidly approaching car with a driver unable to swerve. Emma could barely move her limbs, but she could see and her mind was processing it like the world’s slowest computer.

An old rolltop desk like the kind she’d seen in a museum had been placed on the other side of the room. It was like Emma was looking through a tunnel and she saw nothing else but the desk and the photographs that hung in a crisp row above it. Black and whites. A series of them that at first all looked the same. Young women. All Caucasian. All with long dark hair, parted in the middle. They were old photographs, like the kind that came out of high school yearbooks before color printing was readily available. The girls were pretty. Who were they? Why displayed in a row like that? As her stomach undulated and her now bloody knees ached, she lowered her head and summoned the strength to try to press onward. She heard the TV going again and the sound of footsteps above.

Where was she?

Who had taken her?

Emma told herself that this moment might be her only chance. She had to get out of there. She inched closer to the door and looked upward.
A window
. It was one of those basement openings that was narrow and cut into the earth by the foundation. It was the source of the beautiful streaming light. The light that was her pathway to freedom, her way to Elizabeth Smart.

The eyes of the eight photographs appeared to look at her. The young women with the dark hair all seemed to speak to Emma, telling her to run as fast as she could. To get out of that horrible place before it was too late for her . . . as it had been too late for them.

Who are those girls?

A shadow fell and a fast-moving figure eclipsed the light from the window. Emma looked up, groggy and terrified, and she started to lunge toward the brightness.

“You like my collection, do you?” he said, shoving her so hard she fell backward, her head barely missing the bed frame. She looked up at him, trying with all she had to see his face, to see if there was something about him that she could recall. There was something in his voice. Something . . . what it was she wasn’t sure.

He slammed the door shut with such force that the air in the room pummeled her as she tried to stand.

And then the terrible sound of the lock made her prisoner once more.

* * *

Peg Howell opened drawer after drawer. Her eyes popped in anger and her gnarled fingers poked like hooks through the contents of a junk drawer—which was most of the drawers in her decidedly unkempt kitchen.
Where are my goddamn cigarettes?
She pawed through sewing bobbins, rubber bands, golf balls, and a bunch of other useless stuff.
Where are they?
For a second she was slightly distracted by a copy of a book on tape that she’d once listened to relentlessly. It was a former FBI behavior psychologist’s take on serial killers. She was fascinated by the book because it could not have been more wrong. The female author’s pseudo analysis traced the origin of Bundy, Gacy, and Ramirez and their ritualized killings to some psychosexual trauma that occurred when they were young.

This is not to say that all serial killers are victims of sexual abuse any more than it would be fair to characterize each major serial killer as a bed wetter. . . .

That line always made Peg laugh out loud when she played the cassette tape in her car on the way to work. Ted was no bed wetter. She’d asked him directly during one of those phone conversations when he was in jail in Colorado.

“Baby,” she said, “I’ve been reading a lot lately.”

“Reading is good, Peggy. I’d like to read more, but the crap they have here in jail is an insult to my intelligence. Only a person dumber than a bag of hammers would want to put up with the likes of
Reader’s Digest
and the same four Louis L’Amour adventure novels.”

“Can I send you something?” she asked, letting go of what she’d wanted to share about her own reading.

“No,” he said. “They’d probably just steal it. Bunch of thieves in here.”

She winced at the irony. “Were you abused? You know sexually?”

“Whoa! Where did that come from?”

“My reading. Just some FBI perv thinks that a lot of people like you, you know, have been abused.”

It was his turn to let it slide. The “people like you” comment was made without judgment.

“Wish I could be with you. I’d like to take you for a drive. Maybe up in the mountains.”