Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

Grace’s connection to Ted was deep and personal, and until her sister’s case was resolved, she knew it always would be.

The Tacoma detective shut out the world around her and put her laser-like focus on the electronic case files of the two missing girls on her computer screen. Lisa’s had been a missing persons case, initiated by Detective Goodman. It also included updates from the interviews she and Paul conducted with her mother and best friend. Next, she turned her attention to Kelsey’s file, a more detailed accounting of the seventeen-year-old’s sudden absence from the planet. While Grace could see similarities in their physical descriptions-serial killers frequently stalk a specific type-there was something else that jumped out at her. Something she was sure was merely a coincidence.

The circumstances of the girls’ abductions were more than familiar. They mirrored what Ted Bundy had done when he took a Washington girl and a girl from Colorado.

Grace put it out of her mind.

Or rather she tried to.

Grace felt that saying much more about it would only serve to bolster her reputation for being obsessed with Ted Bundy. One time when she was in the bathroom, she’d heard a couple of other women, a records clerk and a lab assistant, talking about her.

“I think she’s kind of weird,” the records clerk said.

“I don’t know,” the lab assistant said. “I guess she seems nice enough.”

“I read her file. You want to know what’s in it?”

“You aren’t supposed to disclose that stuff.”

“We work here. It’s all right for us to share. We’re not supposed to tell anyone outside. It’s okay to talk about stuff here because we’re all, you know, working together.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Really kind of interesting.”

“Okay. I guess you can tell me,” the lab assistant said, lowering her voice.

“Now you’re making me feel bad.”

A long, seemingly, exasperated pause followed before the lab assistant gave up. “Just tell me.”

“Fine,” said the records clerk. “Says that she had to be evaluated by the shrink twice because of her sister’s disappearance. They’ve cleared her. No reprimands. But they told her to stay out of the Ted Bundy files. I read her files. Interesting and disgusting stuff. Anyway, there is a lot of crap in there about how her mom, Sissy O’Hare, kept pestering our guys here back then. She was sure that her daughter was a Ted victim. Never proved it. Maybe she was. Grace was digging around trying to see if they missed any clues.”

“I guess I could understand why she’d do that. You know, why she’d want to know.”

“Don’t you think it’s creepy?” the records clerk said.

“Probably. But really, you shouldn’t look in her personnel files.”

“I have clearance. I’m very responsible. I’ve never told anyone what I’ve seen. I would never, ever breach my duty to be confidential.”

Grace waited for the women to leave. She didn’t report them. To do so, she’d felt, would only make matters worse. She believed her background was an asset, one that made her a more effective investigator and victim interviewer. She could connect with anyone who’d felt his brand of incompressible and evil influence in the trajectory of their lives.

After reading the Lancaster and Caldwell files, she needed a moment.

“Paul,” she said standing behind him as he finished a phone call in his cubicle adjacent to hers.

“What’s up?”

“I’m heading out early. Hold down the fort, will you?”

Paul nodded. He’d seen that look before.

“Anything new on the bones?” he asked.

Grace pulled her coat from the hook next to her chair and shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said, heading out the door. “Might take a while. If anything, I’m patient.”

Grace Alexander had read every book written on Ted Bundy. In fact, true-crime author Ann Rule’s famous account of her friendship with Ted, The Stranger Beside Me, had been required reading when she was growing up in the family’s white and gray Craftsman home in North Tacoma. It sat on the shelf alongside first editions of Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The novels were genuine and undisputed classics, of course. Grace’s mother, Sissy, insisted that Rule’s book was on par with those famous tomes.

“A story like Bundy’s deserved the ring of truth,” she’d said one night when Grace was eleven and reading the book for the first time. “ Stranger is a choir bell.”

Later, Grace wondered about a mother who would have her not only read such a book, but discuss it as if they were having a chardonnay and Brie book club meeting.

What do you think motivated Ted to lie about things that weren’t even important?

Do you think Ted has any feelings whatsoever?

What kind of a mother was Louise Bundy?

Grace had immersed herself in Ted’s life. Given the circumstances of her birth, had there ever been another path to follow? It had all been ordained by heartbroken parents, who had lost their oldest daughter, their firstborn, to a phantom.

Grace knew how Ted had been born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, in November of 1946. His mother’s Christian name was Eleanor Louise Cowell-though later she was known only as Louise. Grace imagined what it might have been like for a young woman finding herself pregnant. Louise more than likely lied on the birth certificate that Theodore Robert was the son of an airman named Lloyd Marshall. While no one from her family ever gave voice to the rumors, some suspected that the pregnancy was darker than a mere casual relationship between a young woman and a serviceman.

Grace’s feelings regarding Louise were like wipers, moving back and forth over an oily windshield. Louise hadn’t set out to give birth to a monster. No mother does. Sometimes Grace felt sorry for her; other times, mostly because of her mother’s stories, she hated Louise. She had a vivid recollection of the time her mother actually confronted Louise when they were out shopping. Grace was eleven at the time. Louise, dressed in a plain cotton shirtdress and shoes that were so sensible they could easily have been worn to work on a factory floor, was shopping in the linens department of the Bon Marche at the Tacoma Mall. Sissy, looking for a wedding gift and dragging Grace along, spotted Ted’s mother from a table of marked-down china.

“Stay close,” she said. She set down the oh-so-slightly chipped platter, and walked over.

Louise’s eyes fluttered a little, but she offered no indication that she knew Sissy.

“I know who you are,” Sissy said.

“Excuse me?” Louise answered without really even looking up. Ted’s mother ran her fingertips over a piece of the fabric exposed through a small slit in its plastic wrapping.

Grace’s mother reached over and touched Louise’s hand.

She was trembling a little.

When their eyes finally met, Sissy saw something that she hadn’t expected to see.

Fear and recognition.

“I know who you are, too,” Louise said, finally and softly. “I know what you believe and I know in my heart that nothing I can say would make a bit of difference to you.”

Sissy O’Hare’s heart rate had accelerated by then. She had seen the picture of Louise on the night of Ted’s execution, the phone pressed to her ear, around her the simple furnishings of a hardworking couple’s life.