The Fear Collector (7 page)

“How old is your little girl?”

“Nine,” her father said.

“My Tracy would be about her age now.”

“My Danny would be driving a car.”

“Paula would be married by now.”

It was always that way. The parents talking about their loss in terms of what their children would be doing at that very moment had they survived their killers. Yet, like Tricia, the reality was that they were frozen in time. Forever stuck. Just like the pictures that hung in all the sad little bedrooms of those kids who never came home—always there, as if waiting for the inevitable and relentless tears of those who mourned them.

E
mma Rose set out a pair of black pants, a white cotton blouse, a S
AVE THE
S
OUND
T-shirt, a black sweater, and a pair of black heels. She was short and no matter what the occasion, heels were always in order. Even for work at the Starbucks adjacent to the Lakewood Towne Center, just outside Tacoma. Starbucks dress code was much more relaxed than her clothes indicated, but Emma was the kind of girl who liked buying her work attire at Target in batches of threes. It just made everything easier not to worry about what she was going to wear when working. There was no disputing that she was a creature of habit. Never late. Always ate at the same place—on a bench in the parking lot in front of the coffee place. Emma always wore her long, dark hair the same way too—parted in the middle and held in the back with a loose clip.

She worked with Oliver Angstrom until just after nine.

“Do you hate this place as much as I do?” she asked as they wiped down the counter space and loaded the dishwasher for the last cycle of the night.

Oliver, a twenty-five-year-old in search of a publisher for a graphic novel about the end of the world, looked up. “I don’t even like coffee,” he said.

“I used to. Now the smell of it makes me sick,” she said. “I don’t know which I hate more—the people who come in here or the coffee.”

“Tell me about it. I think that fat guy that sat over there,” Oliver said, pointing across the room to a leather lounge chair under the plasma screen that touted the supposedly hip music that provided atmosphere all day long, “was actually watching porn with his hand in his pants.”

“You’re kidding me,” Emma said, clearly disgusted.

Oliver nodded. “No lie. No one complained, though. Everyone who comes in here is too self-absorbed to pay attention to what anyone else is doing.”

“Coffee-drinking Facebookers!” Emma said, with mock outrage. “Why don’t they just go home to do their social networking?”

Oliver nodded in agreement. Emma was right. Over the past couple of years Starbucks had changed from a place where people breezed in, got a latte, and left for work. Oliver theorized that the declining economy was an invitation for whole groups of patrons who didn’t have anywhere to go. No rush to get anywhere. Now people planted themselves at a table and Facebooked. Sometimes they didn’t even buy a drink, which totally sucked in a business plan built on making people think they could sit and visit, when really turnover was needed.

“What did you think of the woman who bitched that her quadruple-pumped caramel macchiato didn’t have enough syrup in it?”

“Gag me, is what I thought,” Emma said.

Oliver laughed. “Or the dude who spilled his mocha and told us it was all our fault.”

“Like we were going to argue with him, even though I saw the whole thing, too.” Emma stood across the counter and surveyed the scene. She liked Oliver, but she could feel what was coming next. Some girls have a kind of sixth sense about when a guy is going to hit on them. Emma did.

“You want to hang out some time?” Oliver asked. It was a question that he’d wanted to ask for weeks, but until that moment he just hadn’t had the nerve. He’d even asked his manager what he ought to do and she’d told him to go for it. He stopped what he was doing and looked over at her.

She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. Oliver wasn’t bad looking. He had a lean build, nice features, dark, expressive eyes magnified through horn-rimmed lenses. So the physical side wasn’t bad. Neither was his personality. One thing bugged her, however, and she couldn’t get past it. He was a video game developer and graphic novel geek who lived at home with his mom and splurged once a year for a trip to Comic-Con. She lived in the real world—and she wanted to fix it. The T-shirt she wore under her work blouse said it all.

She wasn’t really interested, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. Emma Rose simply didn’t want to live in the world of geekdom. She didn’t even want to visit it. Oliver was too, too into it. He’d once brought everyone out one at a time to look at his latest purchase in the trunk of his car.

“What is it?” Emma had asked. “Looks like a lamp.”

“Are you shitting me?” Oliver had looked at her like she didn’t know what day it was.

“Er, no,” she’d said. “Not shitting you at all.”

“This is a lamp used on the set of the
Green Lantern
movie.”

“Oh,” she’d said, looking at the ordinary desk lamp with some feigned interest. “I heard that movie got terrible reviews.”

“It wasn’t a masterpiece, but this is genuine movie history. Got it online. Paid a lot for it.”

As she played that memory over in her head, she tried to find the right words to let him down easy. A lie seemed to be the best course of action.

“I’m seeing someone,” she said.

Oliver nodded, his face turning pink with embarrassment. Right then he wanted to kill the manager who had told him to go for it. Some great advice.

“Oh,” he said, looking down. “I didn’t know.”

Emma didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings. “It’s kind of new,” she said quickly. “He lives in Seattle. Goes to the U.”

“Cool,” he said, lying through his teeth. He watched Emma as she went to fetch her coat.

“Yeah, don’t know where it’s going. I mean, I know it isn’t serious, but it is kind of new and I want to focus on hanging out with him.”

Oliver finished what he was doing and he gave the restaurant one last once-over. It was clean, ordered, and, he thought, perfectly bland. Just right for the customers who started the next day’s shift. He dimmed the lights and the pair exited. Emma went toward the bus stop and Oliver left on foot to wherever it was that he’d parked his mom’s car.

He stood still a moment and watched her, wondering why it was that no one had told him about her boyfriend.

Before turning in for the night, Dan Walton and Diana Rose checked all the locks on the windows and doors in their two-story Craftsman on Proctor in North Tacoma. It was a lovely neighborhood of fine old homes, a couple nice restaurants, and antique shops, but there had been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood over the past few months and caution had segued into routine. It wasn’t that the Roses were the kind of family to leave the front door unlocked at night, but neither were they the paranoid type who insisted on doing a perimeter sweep every time the sun dipped down behind the Olympics to the west.

Lately everyone was feeling a little uneasy. Tacoma neighborhoods had been experiencing a rash of violent crime—including the murder of a man who’d simply posted an ad for his late wife’s diamond tennis bracelet. He’d been robbed and bludgeoned five blocks away from the Roses’ house. Another case that had made headlines in the
News Tribune
was the story about a missing Pacific Lutheran University student, Lisa Lancaster. The last time anyone had seen the slender brunette had been in a campus parking lot.

Dan was an engineer with the city and Diana taught music at Annie Wright, an ivy-clad private girls’ school not far from their home. Diana had been depressed the past few weeks as her fiftieth birthday was approaching. She’d had breast cancer three years prior and had more cause to celebrate her half-century milestone than most, but Diana Rose was vain enough to try to thwart any semblance of advancing age. She readily admitted to friends that she’d had Botox treatments a time or two, but lately she’d been contemplating something a little more extreme than having toxins injected into her face. She wanted something more permanent. At least as permanent as could be, given the fact that no matter what anyone did, time did not stand still.

“You are as beautiful as the day I met you,” Dan said to his wife when she ruminated on getting older, losing their daughter to college in the fall, being empty nesters. Dan was a heavyset fellow, with stout arms, grey eyes, and hair that he combed over with such meticulousness each morning that many people who noticed it wondered just how it was that he’d managed to stretch so little so very far.

Diana, who was rail thin with angular features and wiry black hair, looked at the clock with a fixed gaze. Much longer than needed to determine it was ten-thirty.

“Emma must be out with friends,” she said. She’d always been a worrier, which, of course, accounted for the lines she wanted erased from her face.

“She’s fine,” Dan said, touching her shoulder gently. “She’s nineteen and you can’t control every minute of her life.” The words were said with more love than harshness and Diana quickly nodded. He was right. Emma was very, very responsible.

“Usually she texts me,” she said, “when she’s going to be late.”

Dan turned off the dining room light. “Ten-thirty isn’t late and she is—hate it or not—a grown woman.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “You’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

Diana knew Dan was right. She
did
have an early day. She was helping their church get things in order for a big fund-raiser, an auction. She had no one to blame but herself for the fact that she’d worked countless hours on the project. When no one wanted to take the lead on getting everything organized, Diana Rose raised her hand. Nearly from the minute she did, she remembered why it was she hated to lead anything at church or school. Leading meant doing all the work and getting all the blame when things went the slightest bit off course.

Diana picked up her phone and started to text a message.

“You need to give her some space,” Dan said.

“Just a minute.” She pushed the buttons on her phone and sent a message.

Be gone early for the auction setup. See you tomorrow night. Love you.

Diana followed Dan upstairs, passing by Emma’s shut bedroom door. Emma had become allergic to cats and Mocha, a brown and white Persian mix, had been banished from her bedroom—something neither Mocha nor Emma really liked. She loved their cat.

Diana set her phone on her bedside table just in case Emma texted back.

The next morning, Dan and Diana left the house in tiptoe-like fashion. Emma’s door was still shut. She had probably gotten in very, very late. Mocha was curled up in the downstairs bathroom sink. The house was quiet and very peaceful.

Diana made a mental note to remind Emma that while she was a grown woman, she still needed to be a courteous one. Throughout the day, Diana texted her daughter four times. Each time the note was a short missive about what to put out for dinner, to remember to feed the fish in the tank in the sunroom, and finally, a simple I love you.

When Emma didn’t respond, Diana figured that she’d probably forgotten to charge her phone.

She’d talk to her about that later, too.

At 7:40
AM
, that same morning, a parking lot maintenance crew cleaning that section of the Lakewood Towne Center recovered a small black purse. Inside were a set of house keys, a tampon, a pack of Life Savers, and a wallet containing twenty-one dollars. The wallet also held a Target credit card imprinted with the name D
IANA
L. R
OSE
. The crew collected the purse and put it in a locked box along with a pair of glasses and a dog collar they’d found on their rounds. By the end of the day the purse would be buried under an avalanche of things discovered in the acres and acres of parking—a family album, a baby rattle, a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, four jackets, a baseball mitt, and a six-pack of beer.

The beer was the only thing that didn’t get earmarked for the Lost and Found department at the mall’s headquarters. No one was going to ID a six-pack and since it was pretty good beer, the two guys working that day figured it was something they’d split later when they kicked back to talk about how much they hated their jobs.

The purse and the other things sat in the back of the crew’s maintenance vehicle until the end of their shift, about 2:30
PM
.

T
avio Navarro knew he’d had too much to drink and was never going to make it home from a landscaping job in Puyallup, just east of Tacoma. He’d been crewless that afternoon as he worked on a small rock wall that he’d been hired to build. The rocks he’d been moving into position were known as “two man” rocks and he could surely understand that they were aptly named. His shoulders ached and his forearms, unprotected by long sleeves, were beat up. All afternoon, he’d been guzzling sweet tea from McDonald’s. Not because he loved it so much, but because it only cost a buck. Tavio wanted to save every penny possible for his family—both in Spanaway and back home in small village south of Guadalajara, Mexico. He’d been in the United States for more years than he had spent growing up in Mexico. And yet, even though he’d earned a green card, married, and started a family, he still kept his distance from some things American.

The law was one of them. It wasn’t about him or his papers, of course, but about the extended family that lived in and around the mobile home he rented at the end of a dusty lane in Spanaway.

Tavio’s legs started twitching as he drove and he winced. He’d missed his last chance to take a leak at the McDonald’s he’d passed ten minutes ago as he drove the long stretch of flat roadway along the Puyallup River. It was dusk, the end of the day, and he knew when he pulled off the roadway to relieve himself, he’d be able to do so in complete privacy. It was a familiar place to him. He and his brother Michael had often stopped there on their way to and from the Indian smoke shop where they bought discount cigarettes.