Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“That Lisa had two left hands?”

Paul didn’t say anything more. It was all there. The medical examiner’s report noted that there had been body parts from more than one victim recovered from the dump site along the Puyallup River. An assistant taking autopsy photos had been the first to discover what should have been patently obvious-that the hands that had been severed and recovered from the site were both lefties.

“This is a colossal screwup,” Paul said, facial muscles tightening.

Tissue samples had been analyzed and hand number one was a match for Lisa. The other, hand number two, was not a tissue or DNA match at all.

“The hand’s size, overall condition, and traces of pale pink nail polish, indicate a female in her teens or early twenties…”

Grace’s blood was boiling too. “We’re going back,” she said.

Paul nodded.

“To the river,” she said.

A half hour later, the two parked on the same dusty shoulder alongside River Road. The crime scene tape had been removed and rainfall had washed away the evidence of hundreds of footprints of the crime scene techs, coroner’s staff, and police detectives who’d been there when Lisa’s remains had been tagged and bagged.

Grace walked over to the river’s edge. Paul finished up a call and followed.

The river had swollen and sloshed over the thin shelf that served as its bank. A fisherman, unaware of the fact that they were police detectives or the grisly reason that had brought them there, paused and waved from the other side.

“Thurston County is sending a sample of Dennis Caldwell’s DNA right now,” Paul said, getting off the phone. “No one is telling him, though. The detective there, Jonathan Stevens, knows how to keep his mouth shut. We don’t want this out.”

“If it’s a match,” she said, “it’ll get out anyway. Probably sometime today.”

She studied the bank and looked over humps of grass and Himalayan blackberry vines that rambled around the perimeter of the river.

“The rest of Kelsey’s got to be around here,” she said, her eyes tracing the scene, inch by inch.

“Maybe just that one part was ditched here,” Paul offered.

Grace didn’t think so. She shook her head and started walking. “Ridgway and Bundy both dumped bodies in clusters. They went to places they knew would be undetected, places where they could go back.”

“And defile the bodies,” he said.

Grace nodded. “That, too. But I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about how they liked to relive the conquests, from the hunt to the kill. At the after-party.”

“They really got off on it,” Paul said.

It made her sick to her stomach, thinking of Ridgway and Bundy’s victims, their final moments. How even in death they’d been made to suffer the worst indignities that anyone could imagine. In fact, no normal person could even conjure up the activities that Ted had enjoyed with the dead girls.

“Sick pieces of crap, those two,” she finally said, stopping and bending at her knees to get a closer look at a piece of paper that had attached itself to the damp earth. It was narrow and white, probably a receipt.

“Let’s collect that,” she said, pointing to it with the tip of her shoe.

Paul shrugged a little. “Wasn’t there when we processed the scene.”

She looked at it and gave her head a slight shake. “Exactly. Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe he’s come back.”

“I hate that you always call the unknown subject a he.”

Grace shot Paul an irritated look. “Jesus. You’re going PC on me now? Fact is ninety-nine percent of these twisted pukes are male, Paul. No offense meant.”

“Just kidding you,” he said, the smile falling from his face. “Don’t you laugh anymore?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t heard anything funny for a long time.”

With that, she walked ahead, and Paul returned to the car to get the requisite supplies for collecting the receipt or anything else they might find. With each step on the nutrient-rich river soil, Grace Alexander thought about the kind of person who would come back to relive his murders. She knew that both Bundy and Ridgway had had sex with their victims post-homicide. Yates had emphatically denied that he had, as if that was some kind of an accolade he could give himself. There were differences detected in the clusters, too. Ridgway had posed his dead women. Bundy had admitted to moving his victims’ bodies, but never in a ritualistic manner.

Again, as if there was a distinction between being merely a serial killer and being sick enough to pose a body in a provocative and shocking way.

Kelsey Caldwell was out there. She just had to be.

Unsurprisingly, Lifetime was not Grace Alexander’s go-to cable channel. She was more of an Investigation Discovery viewer. Yet when scrolling through the TV channel guide while she waited for Shane to get home, she noticed the umpteenth rerun of The Deliberate Stranger, the TV miniseries about Ted Bundy. She had watched the two-part series once with her mother, who hadn’t thought the facts were at odds with the truth. Or at least some TV writer’s version of the truth. One thing that had rankled Grace however, had been Sissy’s insistence that Mark Harmon was too handsome to play Tacoma’s evilest native son.

“Bundy was not that good looking,” Sissy had said when they’d watched the marathon of serial-killer TV movies one day, the pinnacle of which had been The Deliberate Stranger. “He wasn’t some ogre, I’ll give him that. They always tried to glamorize the bastard.”

Grace cringed whenever her mother swore. It just didn’t seem to fit her personality. Her mother was tough, but gentle. She lived her life like she was from the South or England-tea in the afternoon, sandwiches with the crusts removed, pinochle games, and ladies’ auxiliary meetings. Not women’s, but ladies’. Grace knew the source of the bitterness that came from her mouth was because of the hurt of losing Tricia.

The one she loved more than me.

“Just a movie, Mom,” she said.

“More than a movie,” Sissy said, snuggling next to Grace on the sofa that commanded most of the living room in their cozy house. “It is a reminder.”

Grace thought about it. She was just a girl then, but she knew that she probably shouldn’t push too much even when she wanted to know more.

“A reminder of what?” she asked anyway.

Sissy looked at her, in that unblinking way that she did when she needed to prove a point. “That sometimes the bad guy gets away.”

“But they caught him,” Grace said.

Sissy didn’t blink. “They didn’t catch him for all that he’s done.”

Grace was aware that her mom was writing to Ted at that time. She knew that she was trying to get the death row inmate to confess to his crimes-all of them, including the murder of her sister. It wasn’t that Grace wasn’t interested in what her mom was doing, but she really didn’t talk to her about the letters. At the time, talking to either of her parents about anything related to Tricia just made her feel so second place.

“Mom,” she finally said, “maybe you’ll never, ever know.”

Sissy O’Hare glanced away from the TV and held her daughter’s gaze.

“That’s not acceptable,” she said, her eyes dampening a little. “I will never rest until I know. I need you to understand this. I need you to stand with me on this. We can’t ever rest until Ted Bundy has admitted to everything that he did to us. To your sister. To all of the people who were so unfortunate to have met him, talked to him, got into his car.”

Grace just sat there. Her mom was obsessed. There was no doubt about it. What could she say to calm her?

She swallowed. “I love you, Mom.” She put her hand on her mother’s and gripped it. “Stop. You’re scaring me.”