Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“Do you know anything about my daughter?” she said.

Louise tightened her grip on her purse and stepped back a little. She kept her eyes fastened on Sissy.

“I know what it’s like to lose a child,” Louise said, her voice a slight croak. “If I could ease any mother’s pain, I would.”

Sissy, who had imagined all sorts of scenarios had she ever had a moment alone with Ted’s mother, hadn’t expected that she would feel pity. She told Grace that’s just what happened. While it spun through her mind to shoot back a cold remark about how Louise couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have her child missing or murdered by a monster, Louise had experienced a profound loss, too.

“I imagine that you and your family have suffered a great deal, too,” Sissy said, finally, and not without compassion in her heart.

A salesclerk interrupted the conversation.

“Can I help you two find anything?” she asked.

Both women shook their heads. Louise loosened her grip on the sheet set and put it back on the shelf. There was an irony to the younger woman’s question, of course. Both women had needed help in finding answers-Sissy, for the identity of the killer; Louise, for the reason her beautiful boy had turned into the worst kind of evil.

And yet, as her mother replayed that encounter with Grace when she was a little older, it was clear that she didn’t hold Louise responsible. Grace was in the middle of a social studies course at school that introduced the nature versus nurture debate.

“We don’t know everything about what makes a person evil,” Sissy said.

“That’s only partially true, Mom,” she said.

“If you’re thinking that Ted’s mother is a factor in what he ended up doing later in life, I think you’re overstating things.”

“She abandoned him when he was a baby, Mom.”

Sissy nodded. “Yes, but she went back for him. She didn’t leave him at the home. She loved him enough to bring him home.”

Grace pressed her mother. “She led him to believe that he was her brother.”

“Those were the times, Grace.”

“He never knew who his father was. His family had wrapped up his entire young life in lie after lie.”

Sissy knew where her daughter was going, and she knew that she was probably right. And yet, she debated her right then. Grace was smart, tenacious, and well equipped to do what Sissy wanted her to do above everything else. She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t. She didn’t want Grace to think that her own environment, her own upbringing in the shadow of Tricia’s murder, was artificial. The love between them was genuine.

Louise Bundy may have given birth to a monster, and she’d certainly played a role in the miserable trajectory of his life, but not all of it was her doing. Grace and her mother parted company on that. Sissy felt that there was such a thing as “a bad seed” and that Ted had been evil from the outset.

One time when Grace was a teen, a story about a young woman who grew into adulthood not knowing that her grandfather was in fact her father appeared on a TV talk show. The young woman had lived a life of crime, unable to resolve just why it was that everything she touched turned ugly.

“She was born evil,” Sissy said as mother and daughter pulled weeds from a garden bed under a beloved pear tree.

“Maybe she was bad because her mother hated her?”

Sissy stopped what she was doing.

“You mean, her mother’s hidden feelings were not so hidden? Is that what you are saying?”

Grace dropped a dandelion into an old galvanized bucket. “Think about it, Mom. If she was treated like she was garbage, like she was vile, maybe she would grow up to be that way.”

“A self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe?”

“I guess it might be. Maybe we can never understand what makes people do the ugly things they do. We try, though. Don’t we?”

It wasn’t the greatest mystery in the annals of crime, but it was one that Grace pondered over and over as she tried to understand the man who would have such an influence on her life. Ted was an obsession, one that had been passed on through her own personal history and the desires of her own mother. They kept coming back to this: Who was Theodore Robert Cowell, Ted Bundy? Really? Was he the son of an Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall? A sailor named Jack Worthington? Both were names that Ted’s mother had ascribed to the man who’d made her pregnant. Over the years, the Cowells suggested that Ted was the result of incest between Louise and her father, Sam.

“He hated his mother for doing that to him,” Grace had said once, revisiting a familiar conversation with Shane when they took a drive to the peninsula to visit friends. It was summer, hot, dry. It was the kind of day that would bring out young women in bathing suits and predators on the hunt for them. Somewhere. Anywhere. There was always someone on the hunt. Those days often evoked Ted.

“I never talked to Ted,” Shane said, his eye on the road. “So I wouldn’t know for sure.”

“You’ve profiled him. You know.”

“When he found out that he was a bastard-his words, not mine-I expect it was an epic betrayal. He probably knew he wasn’t one of Johnnie Bundy’s kids-he didn’t look like them. He probably entered the room more than once when things fell silent. He knew that there was a secret about him.”

“If he hated his mother so much,” Grace said, “maybe it was her that he was killing. Maybe everyone had it all wrong. Maybe it was his way to get Louise to pay for her lies.”

“We’ll need to stop for gas,” Shane said, flipping on the turn indicator.

“I’d like a pop, too,” she said.

Shane took the next exit. “Back to what you were saying, babe. I get it. I can see his rage directed toward Louise, but I think it was toward all women. All the women in his life. He was selecting a kind of everywoman, to stand in for Louise, maybe his grandmother, his girlfriends. Remember, as much as we know about him we really can’t say for sure any of it is absolute.”

“He was all contradictions,” she said. She was thinking about how Ted had professed a deep love for his grandfather-a man who some family members were all but certain was his actual father. In some ways, that kind of misplaced devotion fit the profile. But there was more to it. If there had been a genetic component to Ted’s aberrant behavior, it came from his grandfather. Family members talked about how Sam Cowell abused his wife, children, and even family pets.

“Brain studies indicate a fundamental difference between sociopaths and normal brains,” Shane said.

“I’ve done the same reading,” Grace said, her tone a little defensive. She regretted it the second the words passed her lips.

Shane didn’t take the bait.

“Sociopaths like Ted sometimes learn the behavior from a family member,” he said.

“Sam literally pushed one of his daughters down a flight of stairs because she dared to oversleep,” Grace said. “Another said he swung a cat by its tail like a lariat.”

Being a young woman in Tacoma had gotten decidedly more terrifying. Lisa Lancaster had been found butchered along the river. An unknown female’s remains had been uncovered along the beach. Emma Rose was missing. Farther south of the county, Olympia teenager Kelsey Caldwell’s name had been aligned with the missing girls cases, but that was more by the press than the genuine belief of law enforcement. She wasn’t a part of the Tacoma cases.

That all changed one morning.

“How did we miss this?” Grace said, studying the highlighted section of the autopsy report that Paul Bateman had planted in her hand the minute she’d sat at her desk.

“A mistake,” he said, almost more of a question than an answer.