Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“The other side of the river,” Paul said. “Where that guy was fishing.”

“What?”

“Right. I’m there now. You want to come down.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Be there in twenty.”

“Make it twenty-five. Stop for coffee. Could use some out here. Colder than crap.”

The river’s surface was striated and black, like wide-wale corduroy stretched between the banks on either side. Nine police and sheriffs’ units, dogs, and personnel were congregated there. Paul’s ex-wife, Lynnette Bateman, was there, too. Watching the two interact was usually fun, but it wasn’t going to be just then. Not with a dead teenager on the edges of the Puyallup.

“Over there,” Sergeant Lynnette Bateman said. “Detective Bateman is with the medical examiner.”

Grace nodded and went toward the lights that pierced the starry sky like a supermarket’s grand opening.

Paul thanked her for the coffee and took a swallow before he spoke. “Pretty sure it’s Kelsey,” he said. “Tech says left hand is missing.”

“Just the left hand?”

He nodded and drank some more.

“She wasn’t completely dismembered like Lisa?”

“Guess not.”

“What else?”

“They think she might have been frozen. She’s in pretty good condition. You know, considering how long she’s been dead. No decomp. The bastard.”

“So you think it’s a man who did this?” Grace said.

Paul pulled off the top of his Styrofoam cup so he could guzzle the coffee more quickly. He was a man in dire need. “You got me,” he said. “No more PC. Only a seriously messed-up maniac of a dude would do this to a little girl.”

Grace nodded. “Who found her?”

“Transient over there,” he said, raising a shoulder to indicate a figure with short dark hair sitting on the bumper of a cruiser.

“Talk to him?” she asked.

Paul allowed a smile to come to his face. “It’s a she.”

“Right.”

“She said she was looking for cans for recycling along the river and, well, found something I doubt she’ll ever forget. I know I won’t.”

“Techs process her?”

“Yeah. She had this on her.” He held up a T-shirt inside a plastic bag.

Grace pressed her fingertips to the plastic to read what was printed on it.

Save the Sound

“She said she found it near the body, but not on it. She said she actually found it first, before the body.”

“Where?”

“Almost on the road.” Paul suddenly turned his attention to the coroner’s assistant, who was preparing a gurney and a body bag to transport Kelsey’s remains to the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy. “Hold on! My partner needs to see the vic.”

The men backed off and Grace followed Paul over to where the body was lying.

It was Kelsey Caldwell, all right. No need for forensics to verify it, though the techs would do just that during the autopsy. Her eyes were open staring up at the stars; her long dark hair shimmered as if she’d been placed there after a salon blow dry. And while she was nude, her most intimate parts had been covered by bunches of grass.

“The transient did that,” Paul said, looking back over at the woman sitting on the cruiser’s bumper. “She said she didn’t think it was right to leave that girl naked like that.”

The scene had been compromised, which was frustrating, but Grace understood the sentiments, too. Nothing about what had happened to the seventeen-year-old was right at all.

“Somebody’s going to have to call the father,” she said. “This will be in the papers faster than you guzzled that coffee.”

Emma Rose was no longer consumed by fear. She was beyond that. She hadn’t been raped. And as far as she knew she hadn’t been murdered. It was possible that she had been murdered, of course, and that she’d done something so terrible that she’d been assigned to a space in purgatory. She dismissed that after the first two hours of her captivity. She was not exactly sure how long she’d been held in that dark place, a mattress on the floor, a bucket to use for her toilet. Her captor had provided copies of People magazine, a reading light, and a green, unbearably scratchy army blanket. She’d been fed a cheese sandwich-American cheese, which she thought was completely disgusting-and Sam’s Club diet cola.

It surprised her that she even thought that the American cheese was terrible, considering that it really was the least of her most pressing concerns. She was also surprised that she’d gotten used to the bucket so soon. Since there was no window, she had no idea what day it was, how many days had passed.

And then there was the matter of her captor. He came to her with only a single whispered utterance- “Stay back or I’ll fill your apartment with poisonous gas and you’ll be dead in five seconds.”

Apartment? That hole? An apartment?

Calling it that scared Emma a little. If that was his idea of an apartment, he was even more whacked than she might have thought. Besides being a girl snatcher. And if he was calling it an apartment, did that mean she was going to be held there forever?

“Did you contact my mom?”

No answer.

“Hey, I want to go home,” she said, trying not to cry.

Silence.

“I know you are listening. I want to know what you’re going to do to me. I mean, I want you to let me go home. I haven’t seen you. I don’t even know what it is that you want from me. Please. Call my mom!”

Like all of the times she tried to start a conversation with him, whoever he was, he ignored her. She could hear his breathing, or at least she thought it was his breathing. A small fan had been installed in the “apartment” presumably to provide fresh air intake. It was on all the time, whirring and spinning.

Emma waited, thinking it all out. She considered that maybe a more submissive approach might be more to the creeper’s liking.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “I wish you would say something. I’m a very good listener. My teachers always said that I had excellent listening skills.”

Nothing.

Emma pushed on. She was not a quitter.

“I wonder if you’re as lonely as I am. I know you’re smart and talented. You made this really nice apartment,” she said, nearly choking on the phrase. “Please, sir, talk to me.”

Sir, she thought, was a nice touch.

And still nothing.

Emma got up and walked to the entrance to the apartment. Her captor had fashioned some kind of a narrow horizontal hatch on the door. It was only wide enough for a soda can turned on its side.

“Please,” she said, trying to remain as calm as she could. Freaking out, Emma believed, might make whoever it was breathing on the other side of the wall see that she wasn’t a threat.

For a second, when she heard the twisting of the lock on the other side of the hatch, she thought she was finally getting somewhere.

The hatch opened and the tray pushed forth.

Emma looked down at a People magazine with Selena Gomez on the cover. It was an article about some troubles the young actress had overcome recently. Emma took the magazine and went to her mattress. She twisted the gooseneck of the reading lamp and slumped against the army blanket.

God, Emma thought as she fanned open the magazine, this girl thinks she has problems. I’m probably going to be raped and murdered.

As she read, her mind wandered all over the place. She tried as hard as she could to remember exactly what she’d been doing before she blacked out. She remembered being at Starbucks and getting ready to close for the night. She remembered how she and Oliver had raged about the customers who had the nerve to bring their own food in to the coffee place that they now used as home offices. One guy had even had the gall to bring a thermos of coffee from home.