Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“None taken,” Grace said. Her mother was venting and that was a good thing. Her mother had always been the kind to hold things deep inside, and then, when she could no longer do so, explode. “Who do you think knows the motivation, then?” she asked, knowing full well what her mother was going to say.

“Only another monster knows. Only they can understand their own kind.”

“I thought so. That’s why I’m here, Mom. There’s a monster out there and we have to stop him.”

“Understood,” Sissy said, offering some extra cheese that she’d grated before dinner.

Grace shook her head. “What did Ted tell you?”

“I knew that was coming,” Sissy said, setting down her fork and searching her daughter’s eyes. “I knew you were going to ask me.”

“I’m sorry, Mom, but maybe you can help. You faced him.”

Sissy nodded. “Yes, I did. A lot of good it did, but yes, I did.”

After dinner, Grace and her mother went downstairs to the basement where the O’Hares had kept a war room for the sole purpose of finding out who had taken Tricia. In more than three decades, it had barely changed. On one wall was a whiteboard, the kind that uses erasable markers. It had long since been wiped clean, though in the light coming in from the window wells, the faint tracings of letters emerged. Wiped off, but not removed.

Suspects… Location… Detective in charge…

Standing there against the whiteboard and the collection of Rubbermaid tubs labeled with a Sharpie pen. Some indicated newspaper clippings, some held photos, still more had the clunky video technology that had long since disappeared-VHS tapes. As her mother moved toward a stack of the plastic boxes, Grace was clear on at least two things. There was no way she could have grown up in that house and become anything other than a police officer. Trying to catch Tricia’s killer was a family obsession. The other certainty was that her parents had never ever been able to move on from their search for justice.

Conner O’Hare’s last words on his deathbed were incontrovertible proof of that.

“When I’m in heaven, I will finally be able to ask Tricia who killed her,” he’d said.

Grace watched her mother pick up a medium-sized box and slide it on top of the pool table that Conner had covered with a sheet of wood so they could use it as a meeting table for the victims’ families meetings.

No one played pool in the house after Tricia vanished, anyway. She and her father had loved the game. Grace had learned never to acknowledge that the table had once had a function other than being a place for the grieving and angry to meet once a week.

On the top and sides of the plastic box, Sissy had written, in block lettering, TED.

In the family they’d always been known as the Ted Letters. They were a collection of missives written by Ted Bundy while he was on death row in Florida. Grace had been led to believe that it was some kind of cat-and-mouse game that her mother employed to get Ted to tell her if he, in fact, had killed her daughter. There were other potential Bundy Girls and she would have liked to have closed the case on any of them. She wrote to Ted more than fifty times over a two-year period. He never failed to answer. And while she loathed Theodore Robert Bundy over any other human being in the world, she never told him so. Ted might have thought they were friends. On the morning after Ted’s execution, a prison chaplain called her with a message from Ted.

“He wanted me to tell you thank you for the correspondence over the years. He also said that he wished he could have helped you find out who killed your daughter.”

“He didn’t say anything about Tricia? The other girls?”

The chaplain sucked in more air. He wasn’t being impatient, just resigned to the fact that the monster that he had tried to lead toward salvation had done nothing to ease the minds of those who needed it the most. “No. Just that he wanted to wish you well. To wish you peace.”

“Nothing?” she asked, pressing the question to the chaplain one more time.

“No, sorry. Ted said nothing specific.”

“I have something specific for him. In case you pray for his soul,” she said.

“I do and I will.”

“Tell him I hope he rots in hell. Good-bye.”

Sissy had hung up the phone feeling angry and numb at the same time. If Ted had the truth somewhere in his evil and diseased brain, it was possible that he was making one final attempt to show up the world that he was gentle and misunderstood. A feeble attempt, for sure. Deep down, Sissy was sure that the nation’s most notorious serial killer had been responsible for Tricia’s death.

It wasn’t just wishful thinking, either. Her daughter fit the profile of Ted’s so-called type-not only in her physical appearance, but her personality, too. Most of the girls whom he’d killed were the kind who could be called upon to be helpful. Tricia was without question the kind of girl to give a stranger directions, help an injured student with his books, provide money for an emergency phone call.

There was one more bit that played into the possibility that Ted had been Tricia’s captor and murderer. After Bundy was apprehended, a detailed accounting had been made of every traceable moment of his life. Every receipt with his name on it, every phone call that he’d made or answered, was logged into a master file by the King County Sheriff ’s Department, which had assembled a major task force to catch the man who’d been murdering pretty young women in Washington state.

On the day that Tricia disappeared, a credit card receipt from a gas station in Shelton was logged into evidence. Shelton was less than an hour away from the Pacific Lutheran University campus. While it didn’t carry as much weight as a charge slip from Tacoma, it was very, very close.

A clerk who’d sold Ted seven dollars of gas and a Mars candy bar said that he hadn’t been traveling alone. It provided the third leg of the stool on which the possibility that Tricia O’Hare had been a Bundy victim rested. The transcription between King County Detective Gerry Montrose and Super Seven Gas station attendant Lee Wong was the go-to piece of evidence for Sissy and Conner O’Hare, and later, Grace. The choicest bit of the transcript appeared on the twentieth page of the twenty-page document.

DETECTIVE MONTROSE: Did you actually talk to Mr. Bundy?

LEE WONG: Weird that you call him mister. Guy’s a real dick. Yeah, I did talk to him. I remember how he waved me away when I approached his car. I went over to him, you know, to see if he wanted oil. MONTROSE: Waved you away?

WONG: Yeah. Like I said earlier, he jumped out of his car to pump his own gas even though he was at the full-serve pump. The dick said, “I’ll do it myself. No oil needed.” Then he actually pushed me back from the car like he thought I was going to fight him for the dipstick or something.

MONTROSE: Was he aggressive with you?

WONG: No, and it doesn’t matter if he was. I pack a thirty-eight. You practically have to, working at a gas station or mini-mart these days. Customers will kill you if they don’t like the way you screw on their gas tank lid. And yes, in case you’re going to ask it, I have a CW permit.

MONTROSE: Good. Did you get a look inside the car?

WONG: Not really. I mean, I sort of think he had someone sleeping in the backseat. I can’t be sure because I didn’t get a real look. You know, out of the corner of my eye when he was hassling me about the oil fill-up.

MONTROSE: So you didn’t see anyone, really? Just more like an impression?

WONG: Yeah, an impression. That’s a good way of looking at it. I got the impression of a girl sleeping in the back. Now…

MONTROSE: Now, what?