Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

WONG: Now, I guess I wonder a little if it might have been a girl. Maybe a dead one. If she was dead, then I’m sorry for her family. If she was alive, well, I don’t even want to think about how bad I feel. You know, how I could have maybe done something.

MONTROSE: You would have no way of knowing, either way. Don’t beat yourself up.

WONG: Okay. Thanks.

[End of transcript.]

And then there were the letters. The Ted Letters.

“Can I take these, Mom?”

Sissy scrunched up her brow and thought a moment. “Oh, I don’t know. I loaned them to The National Enquirer and it took more than a year to get them back. Goodness, I was stupid. I should have photocopied them.”

“I’m not the Enquirer. I’m your daughter. Besides, the Enquirer paid you. I seem to recall that you got ten thousand dollars for your group.”

“I’m a tough negotiator,” Sissy said, a slight smile on her face. “Yes, you can borrow them. Not sure what you’re looking for, but yes, if you think it will help, take them.”

Grace looked down at the letters. Her mother had tied them with a periwinkle blue ribbon, like some young girl might have done to a batch of love letters. These, however, were far from love letters. These were letters from the devil.

“I’ll bring them back in a few days, Mom,” Grace said as they walked back up the stairs, away from the pool table that wasn’t really a pool table, from a war room that had never ceased to be the central location for a group of men and women bonded by the murders of their children.

“Don’t forget to turn out the light,” Sissy said.

“Lights out, Mom. Lights out.” Grace turned down the switch and the room behind them went completely black.

Sissy O’Hare wore a platinum locket around her neck. A gift from Conner the year after everything happened, the locket was heart-shaped and when opened revealed a photograph of the child she would mourn forever. Grace had never known a time when her mother hadn’t worn the locket. She’d also seen her open it, look at it, and with tears streaming down her cheeks, snap it shut and close her eyes. Grace, though jealous of her murdered sister, always hoped that Sissy was remembering something beautiful about Tricia. As jealous as she could be-and as foolish as it was-she loved her mother. Some solace was needed. The locket was a symbol of loss, love, and the awareness that everything precious could be taken away by anyone, at any time. There was never any doubt that when her mother passed on, she would be buried with the locket around her neck. It was such a part of her.

Although Sissy’s memories of her eldest daughter varied, as those of most mothers do, there were two etched in her brain so deeply that for the longest time others struggled to surface. The first was the day Tricia had gone missing.

It was the first of October. Vine and big leaf maples had started to turn the previous week, and the snap of autumn made all Pacific Northwesterners think of New England and what truly splendid fall colors might look like if the region had more deciduous trees. Pumpkins for carving and apple cider served in big, red mugs fueled the fantasy. Conner had gone to work, and Sissy and Tricia were alone at the breakfast table. Sissy had made her daughter’s favorite-a toad-in-the-hole fried in so much butter that if the cholesterol police had been invented back then they surely would have handcuffed Sissy and taken her away to serve time for overindulging her daughter.

Tricia didn’t have classes until noon, so mother and daughter used the extra time to talk about everything that interested them-Tricia had just switched her major to art history, the same degree that Sissy had earned at Western Washington State College in Bellingham. They talked about the merits of Cezanne over Van Gogh.

“Van enough already,” Sissy had teased.

“I know you don’t like his work, but you have to admit he had an ear for good painting,” Tricia joked lamely.

Her mother laughed anyway. Tricia kissed her mother on the cheek, picked up her backpack, and went to wait along the curb for her friend, Carrie, to take her to work.

As she went out the door, Sissy made a comment about Tricia’s attire, and that was it.

It wasn’t until after 7 PM that day that Sissy began to worry about Tricia. She was usually home from class by five-and if she was going to be late, there was never a time that she didn’t phone her or Conner to let them know.

“Carrie and I are going to hang out on campus for a while. There’s a cute guy that she wants to accidentally meet,” she’d said one time, quickly adding, “Again.”

“How’s that accidentally meeting someone actually working for her?” Sissy asked.

“You know Carrie, Mom. She’s no quitter.”

“That she’s not,” Sissy said.

Sissy and Conner ate dinner without her that night. Though later others would insist their observations were tainted by the eventual tragic outcome, the O’Hares were quite nervous. Scared even. They made the first of three calls to the Tacoma Police Department at 9 PM. Two others followed at ten, and then, finally at three minutes to midnight.

With each call the fear had been ratcheted up. With each connection, the cool voice of a desk officer answered in the same way.

“Girls these days do stuff like that. She probably ran off with a boy to a party or something.”

“My daughter isn’t like that,” Conner said.

The officer sighed. “She’s a girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Conner said, bile rising in his throat over the insinuation that he didn’t know Tricia very well. They were close. Extremely so.

“Trust me, she’s like that. These are different times than when we grew up. Kids take more risks. They don’t want to be like us.”

“My daughter is a good girl.”

“Wasn’t implying that she’s not. Besides, she’s not missing until she hasn’t been seen for twenty-four hours. That’s the statute.”

“All right,” Conner said, knowing that anger over what he was hearing wouldn’t advance his cause. Anger never did. It wasn’t a pissing match over who was right, either. It was simply a plea from a father trying to get some help.

The third call was made by Sissy, who had been coached by her husband.

“My daughter Tricia O’Hare has been missing since Tuesday morning. I have no idea where she is.”

That worked. The dispatcher sent a cop out to make a missing persons report.

And yet, resourcefulness and a little white lie aside, there was very little to be gained by getting the police to respond right away in the first place. The reason for that, Sissy would later tell her victims’ families support group, was that “girls abducted by a madman have about a 10 percent chance of recovery.”

“Ten percent?” asked Sheila Vinton, whose daughter, Shelley Ann, had been murdered by a stranger who’d held the fourteen-year-old hostage for seventeen days in a cabin in the foothills of Mount Rainier. “Not very good odds.”

“No,” Sissy said, folding her arms across her chest, a little unhappy with Sheila’s response. She knew that Sheila had been accused of being a bad mother because she hadn’t reported her daughter’s disappearance for two days. The reason, she insisted, was that her ex-husband had visitation. He committed suicide, which Sheila only admitted to herself, gave her a sense of relief-a way to put all the blame where she could.

Not on herself.

All of that would come back to Sissy whenever she thought of her daughter and that terrible night she went missing. Ten percent! Ten percent! How could that be? What kind of police force do we have here in Tacoma?

She would later learn that the Tacoma Police Department was one of the best in the country, but law enforcement is seldom a match for someone who seeks to do evil. Catching an abductor is a million times easier than finding a killer before he kills.