Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“It’s Starbucks coffee,” the young man said. “What’s the big deal if I buy it here or at Safeway? You’re still getting the profits.”

She remembered leaving Starbucks and walking toward the bus stop. After that, nothing. Her memory was a complete void. She felt the back of her head. The bump where she surmised she’d been struck had shrunk by then. The touch of her hand made her wince. Her long dark hair was getting tangled, the back strands turning into a white girl’s bad idea of dreads. When she adjusted the lamp, Emma noticed the shade’s interior was lined with reflective silver.

It was hard to see her face with the bulb glowing right in her eyes. But in a fleeting instance she saw what she looked like just then.

Around her eyes were dark circles. Emma gasped. She’d seen that kind of bruising around a woman’s eyes before when a neighbor had been battered by her husband.

“What did you do to me?” she asked softly, sure that the creeper couldn’t hear her above the omnipresent din of the running air intake fan. A tear fell down onto Selena Gomez’s pretty face. Emma refused to cry out. If she’d had thought for one moment that she had a chance to get out of there, she knew it was wishful thinking.

No one who captures a girl, beats her, and traps her in a so-called apartment ever lets her go.

The next day, Olympic Security, the company with the contract to monitor the parking lot-and to tow cars that had stayed too long-gave up the video without so much as a whisper that they needed a subpoena in order to do so.

“Quality is the shits,” said the office manager, a big fat guy whose butt seemed permanently affixed to an office chair on wheels.

“That’s all right,” Grace said, as she took a small box of tapes. “We’re used to that.”

She’d arrived alone. Paul was back in the office “working,” whatever that meant. She wasn’t so sure.

“You want to watch it here? I have a TV in the back room,” the manager said, pushing off in his chair like a hermit crab toward the doorway.

“No. No thanks. We’ll watch it back at the office.”

Grace got in her car and started to drive, the box of small videotapes on the seat next to her. It really was a long shot, of course, but she hoped that the feed would show whatever had happened to the young woman. What had caused her to leave her purse behind? Had there been a struggle? Had she fought for her life only to succumb to someone stronger, more powerful than she was?

Oliver Angstrom was a complete weirdo, but the world was full of those types. Being weird was often an affectation. Like nipple rings on some accountant. That might only show when he took off his jacket, just a hint. Just something to get one noticed. More often than not, weirdoes simply ended up living benign, unremarkable, lives. Few were abductors or criminals, though they might have looked the part. Grace knew that it was the average guy or gal who was the biggest threat. They lived among everyone, their averageness a mask.

Weirdos like Oliver were too, too obvious in their quest for perpetual attention. They were on everyone’s radar.

Oliver was just some lame kid with a crush. He could not have butchered two girls and dumped them by the river.

Or could he? Ted killed his first victim as a teenager.

Grace and Paul sequestered themselves in a conference room and fed the videotape into the player. It was not lost on either one of them that video, like other technology, was changing. Most of the video feeds collected for evidence now had been handed over on thumb drives and disks. This was old school, like a lot of Tacoma was. The black-and-white images were not HD quality. They looked nearly as bad as the video that one of the blues had brought to show her sonogram.

“Right there!” she’d said. “See that? It’s a boy!”

Paul had turned to Grace and lowered his head. “You see anything?” he asked.

She shook her head and whispered back. “Looks like a girl to me.”

Paul grinned. “Hope she doesn’t name the baby Rocky or something.”

Grace smiled back. There were times when she and Paul really got each other. Not often, but enough to ensure that they had each other’s backs. When he and his wife split up, it was easy for Grace to choose whose side to be on. Paul could be a doofus, but he was real at least part of the time. His wife? Not so much. She was all about getting ahead.

Thankfully the parking lot videotape had a counter that actually had been reset to reflect the correct time of day when the images were recorded.

“This almost never happens,” Grace said. “Remember that time when we watched eighteen hours of tape because they’d failed to reset the counter?”

“Don’t remind me,” Paul said. “I about busted a nut when that idiot admitted that he was too lazy to change the time stamp and didn’t tell us because he didn’t want to ruin his chances for the employee of the month prize.”

“Oh yeah,” Grace said. “I remember that. That was the worst.” Grace fast-forwarded the video to 9 PM.

“Closing time,” Paul said. “Let’s settle in for some more exciting police work.”

Grace pushed a bottle of water toward her partner and he sucked it down like it was oxygen.

“Thanks. Must have eaten a pound of salt today.”

“Stay away from the chips,” she said. “You’ll live longer.”

“You my mother now?”

“No,” she said. “Not your wife, either. You need to pull yourself together. You shouldn’t be letting yourself go.” She looked over at his gut, which hung over his belt buckle like a sagging car bumper.

Paul ignored her gaze.

“Sylvia said that they close at nine,” she said, “but it takes the crew about forty minutes or so to clean up.”

“Right,” Paul said, getting up to dim the lights, his eyes on the photos of the missing Tacoma girls. “Movie time.”

The first few minutes were run-of-the-mill parking lot scenes. Busier than either detective might have guessed, but considering that the mall closed around that same time it should not have been much of a mystery.

“God, how many people take the bus these days?” Paul asked, his glasses on and his eyes scrutinizing the plasma screen set up for PowerPoint presentations and the projection of evidence photos. “I’ve never seen so many people in uniform.”

He was indicating all of the food service workers, dressed like they’d come from behind the Epcot attraction showcasing the world’s cuisines.

They sat in silence for a few minutes as the cars left, the bus pulled away, and there was no sign of Emma Rose.

“Did we miss her?” Paul asked.

Grace noted the time. 9:45.

“Maybe. Let’s give it another minute.”

Just as she was about to press the rewind button, Emma Rose came into view. Even in the grainy eye of the camera, one could see that she was a pretty girl. Long dark hair, balanced facial features, a lithe figure.

“She’s making a beeline for the bus stop,” Paul said.

“Wait a sec,” Grace said, now moving closer to the screen.

Emma Rose stopped and turned. She was saying something to someone out of view of the camera.

“She doesn’t look agitated.”

“Someone she knows?” Paul asked.

“Oliver?”

He nodded.

A second later Emma walked out of the reach of the camera’s unblinking eye.

No one who lived in the Northwest during 1974’s summer of terror could ever forget the parade of missing girls whose photographs appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers in Washington. Before that summer, the people of Washington had assumed that killers did their evil for a purpose. To get money? To cover up another crime? Before that time, people had thought that victims carried some of the blame for their demise. They’d used drugs. They were prostitutes. The idea that a white college or high school girl could be stalked and murdered was beyond the comprehension of really anyone outside a psychology classroom or a police detective’s office.