Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

What was it?

She turned away from the water’s foamy brink and started toward the base of the cliff. As she drew closer, she set down her Albertsons plastic grocery bag of sea glass and bone-white sand dollars. This is special. She’d read in the paper how the flotsam and jetsam of the tragic Japanese tsunami was headed for Washington’s coast. Among the silver mass of driftwood that barricaded the cliff from the water, Colette saw the arm of what she was all but convinced was a doll. She ventured a bit closer. Not a mannequin, smaller, maybe a doll. It was white with amber-colored fingernails. Pretty, but creepy. Twenty feet away from what she was all but certain was the find of the day-find of the week even-Colette stopped and screamed. It wasn’t just an arm. The arm was attached to a body. A girl’s body. Nearly out of breath, she dug her phone from her pocket and called 911.

Colette Robinson had found Samantha Maxwell. That wasn’t all she discovered. Colette didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Samantha wasn’t alone. She had company.

Tacoma Police Detective Grace Alexander braced herself against the suddenly very cold wind coming off Puget Sound. Summer was over. The weather had turned nasty in the afternoon in the way that it does in Washington whenever a rare sunny day managed to sneak in to bring sunburns and happy memories. The sky looked more silver than gray, but make no mistake about it, rain was coming. Rain had always been the price for the green surroundings and everyone who lived there knew that all too well. Grace was an attractive woman, small in stature, but with the kind of open face that invited people into her brown eyes. She had the eyes of someone who had seen a lot, more than most, but still invited people inside. Her ability to remain open was her greatest gift when interviewing witnesses.

She brought empathy. With empathy, came trust.

The petite brunette detective bent down, setting her right knee on the driftwood log that had caught the girl’s other arm and kept her body from being pulled away by the outgoing tide.

The victim was wearing a bright yellow one-piece bathing suit that had somehow managed to stay in nearly pristine condition in the tides that had carried her away, then brought her back. Neither detective touched the body, but it was clear by its position tucked in among the logs that rigor had come and gone. She was not a floater, or bloater, a puffed-up figure, a kind of gas-filled balloon that a body becomes when left out in the elements. She looked like a young, albeit slightly blue and white, teenager. It was as if she’d been tossed there and then fallen asleep.

“Drowning vic,” she said to her partner, Paul Bateman, a skyscraper of a man with pointed eyebrows that always made him look slightly perturbed, even when he wasn’t. “Samantha Maxwell, nineteen. Missing for four days.”

Paul studied the body, face down, the dead girl’s dark hair melding with scraggly bits of seaweed. A crab crawled out from under her slackened curls. It was disgusting, but both detectives had seen far, far worse. Neither gave it a second thought.

“How can you be positive it’s her?” Paul asked.

“The ink,” Grace said, “here.” She pointed to the small four-leaf clover on Samantha’s right shoulder. “Don’t you ever read the paperwork? It’s in the report.”

Paul turned up his jacket collar to ward off the breeze. “She wasn’t all that lucky,” he said.

“Understatement of the year.”

Grace got up and looked around, scanning the lonely section of beach. She knew that the area wasn’t a crime scene per se, only the sad site of the discovery of a dead girl.

“Accidental drowning?” Paul asked, as the coroner’s techs made their way over the rocks and logs to collect the body. A seagull screamed overhead. A little more rain fell. The detectives took a few steps back to let the others do their work.

“Autopsy will determine what happened,” Grace said. “Nothing to suggest anything other than an accident, at least nothing I’ve read in the missing persons report. Boyfriend said she was drinking a little and went toward the water to swim. Never saw her again.”

“Not going to see her now,” Paul said, pulling away from the putrid odor that rose up from Samantha’s remains as the coroner’s team cocooned the body in a bright blue neoprene bag. It zipped silently with the kind of closure found on a sandwich bag.

“Beachcomber over there found her,” Grace said, indicating the woman who was sitting on a log clutching her plastic bag of shells and glass. “Officers are getting her information.”

Paul walked a few yards down the beach toward the base of a cliff.

Grace called over to him. “You coming?” She repeated her question, but Detective Bateman didn’t say anything.

She let out a sigh and followed him.

He was on one knee, looking at something.

“What is it?” she asked.

Paul looked up. “Not sure,” he said, his eyes staying locked on hers. “Looks like a femur.”

She shook her head. “Driftwood,” she said. “Not a bone.”

“Really,” he said. “I think so.”

“Human?” she asked, now joining him on her knees to get a closer view. Neither touched the bone. If it was human, it was evidence of a possible crime. It was likely that it had been dragged there by an animal, far from where it had been hidden. That is, if it had been hidden at all.

And if it was human.

“Not sure,” Paul said. “But I think so. Been out here a while.”

Grace got up and went a couple more yards west of the femur and, almost immediately, found another bone, a rib.

“It is human, isn’t it?” she asked, feeling that mix of excitement and horror that comes every time discoveries like bones on a beach were made.

“A woman? A child, maybe.”

Grace stepped back and studied the outcropping above the breach. A cedar and a fir had sloughed off the top of the cliff and lodged themselves in a ledge about fifty feet above where Paul had seen the first bone. If the bones had once been concealed in a grave, it was a good bet they had literally come from above.

Samantha Maxwell had been the victim of a tragic accident. There was no doubt about that. She was a dead girl. A teenager. A daughter. But she was something else in that moment.

Samantha had been a messenger.

“It was like she led us here,” Grace said.

Paul didn’t care for that kind of woo-woo sentimentality, but he let Grace go on about her “feelings” and intuition. She’d been more right than wrong when it came to moving a possibility into something real, turning a “what-if ” into a scenario that made sense-and helped solve crimes.

“I guess so,” he said.

“We’re going to need some techs over here,” Grace said, calling across the windy rocky beach to the investigators who’d come to collect Samantha’s remains. Samantha Maxwell wasn’t going home alone.

She had company.

Grace wouldn’t have told anyone-not her partner, her husband, even her mother-that it passed through her mind, as the bones were recovered amid the seaweed and silver-colored driftwood that had also cradled the remains of Samantha Maxwell. The it was like the grandfather clock in her parent’s Tacoma home, always ticking, always there. The it was like a kind of leech that had planted itself on her skin and just never let go. She drew a deep breath as she tried to put it out of her mind. While Samantha Maxwell’s case was never considered foul play, only a terrible accident, the scene had to be processed with the skill and decorum befitting the tragedy that had stolen the pretty young teenager’s life.

The clouds had darkened and rain began to fall through a tear in the sky. The techs were dressed in dark blue rain gear as they methodically worked over an area that had been cordoned off with bright yellow tape. No telling how long the bones had been there. One young cop suggested they wait out the rain.