Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“I love you, baby. And you should be scared. When the monster comes into your house he doesn’t ever leave. I need you to help me. I need you to take up the cause-if anything ever happens to me. You need to find out what happened to your sister.”

Handsome Mark Harmon grinned on the TV screen. Mother and daughter sat in silence as the actor in tennis whites charmed a young woman. The woman was a brunette, slender, and very, very pretty.

“Don’t go with him,” Sissy said to the screen. She squeezed Grace’s hand, pulsing it a little so as not to put a full-on hand lock.

“She can’t help it,” Grace said. “She doesn’t know what kind of person he is.”

“That’s right,” Sissy said, now turning back to her daughter. “Remember that. Remember that no one who knew him could believe he was so heinous. He looks like he couldn’t hurt a fly, but he’s worse than a spider. Spinning, spinning, spinning.”

Her mother’s statement was a warning, but it also carried a challenge. Was stopping Ted Bundy something that she could do? Or if not Ted, could she stop another killer?

Whenever she looked back on watching The Deliberate Stranger with her mom, Grace could see why she became a detective. It wasn’t so much for her sister, it was for her mother. It was for all the mothers out there curled up and crying at some stupid movie that reminded them of the baby someone had taken.

In the days before Trivial Pursuit, Sissy O’Hare had created homemade flash cards to teach her daughter both the mundane and shocking facts about the man she was sure had murdered her beloved Tricia. Later, when Grace thought of it, she wondered if her mother’s obsession was almost a form of child abuse-even though her mother’s intentions had never been evil. She only wanted her daughter to understand as much as she could.

The devil is always in the details, she could say.

Yes, the details.

Grace had found the index cards tucked away in a plastic sandwich container years ago when she was sorting things for the Goodwill after her father died. She was in the garage, where she had placed a piece of plywood atop two sawhorses. On one end were the boxes of clothing that were to be given away. She pondered over a few of the items as the memories associated with a particular garment came back to her. A dress she’d worn to a job interview at Nordstrom when she was in high school. She’d gotten the job, and immediately found that liked it-but not for the reasons that many her age assumed, the generous discount on new clothing. The girls she worked with were studying fashion merchandising and were giddy when the newest arrivals came in from New York. She mirrored their own enthusiasm, in the way that people do so as not to ruin a moment of joy for another. Yet their ambitions and desires seemed so inconsequential. A pair of white pants made her grimace. White pants were never a good idea.

Never.

Carefully, as if she didn’t want to spill its contents, Grace opened the sandwich container and took out the first three-by-five card, its edges no longer crisp, but soft and fuzzy from wear.

She had held those cards so many times.

Written in her mother’s handwriting:

What is Ted Bundy’s favorite novel?

She didn’t have to flip it over to see the answer. It was emblazoned on her brain.

“ Treasure Island,” she said softly, as though she didn’t want anyone to hear.

She remembered how she’d despised that book, not because it was a boy’s book-the reason her friends hadn’t liked it-but because it was Ted’s book. She hated everything about him; everything that brought him joy, or sadness, brought her the opposite emotions.

Grace set it down and looked at the next card. She recalled sitting at the big kitchen table, her mother facing her with her sweet but steely eyes, urging her to get it right.

What was the make of Ted’s family’s car in Tacoma (the car he was embarrassed to be seen in)?

That one was easy. Her father always pointed them out on the rare occasion when one was on the roadway, once when he’d been scavenging for parts at a junkyard and she’d accompanied him there. The answer was a Nash Rambler.

So many of Grace’s own memories were blended with Ted’s life that sometimes it was hard to separate her own from what she’d been taught about the serial killer by her parents. She turned the cards over one by one and flipped through the answers.

By age ten he was dragging girls to the woods to urinate on them.

He was a Cub Scout.

He stole ski equipment in high school.

None of his teenage friends ever visited his bedroom in the basement of his childhood home.

He hated the way Tacoma smelled.

Grace smiled at that one. Who, but the owners of the smelter that gave Tacoma a nose-plugging reputation, didn’t hate the stink, the so-called aroma of Tacoma?

She looked back down at the cards.

He picked through garbage cans in search of porn.

He was jealous of his cousins because they had a piano in their home.

He never bonded with his stepfather-refusing to call him Dad.

Grace knew all of those things and more. She probably knew Ted better than he knew himself. She knew every tragic, disgusting, disturbing detail of his life. She knew how he’d come into the world as an imposter, something less than a human being. She knew how cunning he could be when it came to winning over the sympathy of a pretty young girl. She knew that he understood that as a perceived weakness, like an arm in a sling, was a far better approach than the thuggish behavior of wrestling a woman down in broad daylight. Later, that lesson would be forgotten as his rage escalated into a frenzied rampage at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida.

The next index card was about Chi Omega, the location of the second to the last gasp of Ted Bundy’s toxic life.

Grace ran her fingertip over the image of an owl, the mascot for the sorority on the card. She’d researched the sorority at the Tacoma Public Library. She decided that if she were ever going to pledge, it would be to Chi-O. She’d drawn the owl on the card, not to cheat or remind her with an obvious clue. She was only a girl then. She drew the owl because she liked the bird. Nothing deeper. Nothing that drilled down into anything more than just that. She thought about how her mother had let her paint a big mural behind her bed, the gnarly branches of a maple tree with four owls against a daisy yellow moon. A brief smile came to her lips, but it passed the instant she flipped over the card. The answer printed, again in Sissy’s controlled penmanship:

Fifteen minutes.

Just fifteen minutes. Grace knew that was the length of time it had taken for Ted Bundy to slip into the sorority house in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978 and molest and rape and murder. He used a wooden club, something that he’d found en route. It wasn’t planned and it was beyond risky. Four sorority sisters had been beaten, two of them had died. Survivors said that Bundy had worn panty hose over his face to disguise his appearance.

Only nine hundred seconds. That’s all he’d needed.

Grace drew a short breath. It was the last card that always got to her.

Who killed your sister?

The answer to that one was all incumbent upon her. It always had been. It was the reason she’d been born and it was the driving force behind everything she did. It was a curse, and yet it was also empowering. She needed to succeed where others had failed. At times she felt that her parents had created her for the purpose of hunting their prey, but that didn’t always bother her. She felt sorry for people born into the world without any kind of purpose whatsoever. What was the point of being on the planet, if not to do something right and good for someone else? All other options seemed hedonistic, selfish.