Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

They all looked down at the list, and the photograph that depicted each item in Ted’s arsenal.

“Handcuffs? What about those?” Grace’s father asked. Conner usually let Sissy do the talking, like she was the lead investigator and he was merely there to keep the ball rolling in the event that there was a slack moment.

“Dumpster diving. Yeah, that was his brilliant answer on that one. You know everyone talks about how smart he is, I’m not so convinced. I mean, think about it, who tosses handcuffs into the trash? Those things cost beaucoup bucks.”

And of course the next items, those were the ones that would send anyone with a scintilla of compassion into a panic at the thought of how they’d been used-a crowbar and an icepick.

“His depravity knew no bounds,” Sissy said. “I used to pray that he just strangled Tricia and killed her that way. I hoped that she could stare into his eyes and let him know that she was good, and he was a soulless piece of garbage. He didn’t do that, did he, Cass?”

Cass didn’t answer right away. He was one of the world’s foremost experts on Bundy and his crimes. Others proclaimed that designation, even kind of fought for it, as if there were some kind of honor in knowing evil better than anyone else. But he knew. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ted’s violence was never measured slowly. It was always a deluge.

“Sissy,” he said, “you’ve always known the answer. Don’t think about that. Don’t let what he did to your little girl live on like that. She’s at peace. It doesn’t matter how she got there.”

“It does to me,” Grace said, putting Taco down and stepping toward her mother and father. “I would like him to suffer more than my sister did. In order to do that, we have to find out what it was that he did to her.”

Cass nodded. “I understand, Grace. I really do. But there is no way someone without a conscience can be made to suffer. You have to be among the human race to feel, and Ted Bundy was one of those aberrations that come along every hundred thousand births. Maybe a million. He looked human, I’ll give him that. I’ll give him that some of the ladies thought he was easy on the eyes. He acted like he was. But really, it was an act. He was mimicking what others do.”

“Honey,” Sissy said, looking at her daughter, “I love you. I know that you understand.”

Sissy squeezed Grace’s hand and looked over at her husband.

It was a proud, proud moment.

“ You’ve found Emma, haven’t you? She’s dead, isn’t she? My baby’s dead!”

Grace Alexander took a step toward the door that had swung open before she could even knock. She put her hand up and shook her head.

“No. No, Ms. Rose, we haven’t found her.”

“I saw the paper today,” she said, holding up a copy of the News Tribune, its headline running across the top of the page:

SECOND GIRL FOUND BY PUYALLUP RIVER

“It isn’t Emma,” Grace said. “I promise.”

A look of relief came over Diana Rose. She opened the door wider, and let the detectives inside. She indicated a pair of chairs across from a black sofa draped with an orange afghan-a look that gave the North End Craftsman home a distinct Halloween vibe. On the table next to the sofa was a photograph of Emma and her sister, Tracy. The two of them posed beaming in a mountain meadow-probably Mount Rainier, Grace guessed noticing the ocean wave of purple lupine behind them. It was a cruel reminder of what had already been stolen from that particular family.

And what might have been taken when Emma Rose vanished from the Starbucks at the Lakewood Towne Center.

Tracy and her father had been killed in a car accident coming off the Nalley Valley viaduct four summers before.

Grace never could rationalize why some families were a lightning rod for tragedy. It wasn’t that people were cursed with bad luck. She didn’t think that, no, not at all. And yet, there was something about the way cosmic forces conspired to pile on tragedy. It was more than someone being on the track to disaster; it was like the skids were greased and it was harder and harder to avoid calamity. It had nothing to do with socioeconomic status. The Roses were upper middle class. Arthur Rose had had a good-paying job. Tracy had been a straight-A student at Stadium High School. Father and daughter had been coming home from Spanaway. Tracy had been attending orientation at Pacific Lutheran University, where she’d intended to enroll the next fall.

They were T-boned by a drunk driver and the downward spiral, a hurricane of bad luck and disaster, sucked the life and the joy from what had once seemed the perfect life. Perfect girls. Perfect husband. Perfect house. Everything anyone would have wanted. And now, all that was left of it was the perfect house.

“Ms. Rose,” Grace said, close enough to the trembling mother to touch her, but feeling reluctant to do so. “We haven’t found Emma, but we found this and we need you to identify it.”

Grace looked over at Paul and he handed her a plastic bag. It was plain its contents were familiar to the missing girl’s mother. It was a powder-blue T-shirt with faded graphics depicting a circle of seven dolphins swirling around S AVE THE S OUND logo.

“That’s Tracy’s,” Diana said, reaching for it, feeling the crinkling plastic as she massaged the garment through its protective covering.

“You mean Emma’s?” Paul asked.

Grace shot him a look, one that she hoped conveyed that he’d promised that she could run the investigation insofar as victims’ families were concerned.

“It was Tracy’s. She bought it the year before she and my husband were killed in the accident. Emma wore it. Often. It was kind of her way of staying close to her sister,” she said, moving her gaze from the detectives to the photograph of the sisters on Mount Rainier. “They both loved the mountains and water. They were close.”

Grace didn’t say so right then, probably because Paul was incapable of understanding just what that might feel like. She easily could.

My sister is gone, too.

Grace gently pulled the bagged and tagged garment from the fingers of the grieving and anxious mother. “You said she was wearing a white blouse when she went to work. Was she wearing this, too?”

Diana snapped her attention back to the detectives, and shook her head. She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her temples.

“I can’t be sure,” she said, her words now coated in the distinct aguish of a mother who doesn’t know where her child is. “I mean, I’m sure that the T-shirt was hers, was Tracy’s. Where did you find it?”

Grace set the bag on her lap. “Some blues found it a quarter mile from the latte stand,” she said.

Diana looked confused. “Blues?”

“Sorry,” Grace said. “Patrol officers.”

Diana didn’t ask the question that both detectives were sure she was thinking. If her daughter was wearing a blouse with the blue T-shirt as an extra layer underneath, how was it that the T-shirt was no longer on her body? Had she taken it off? Or had someone else?

“May we see her room?”

“You think someone took her, don’t you?”

“We don’t know what happened, Ms. Rose,” Grace said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

It was obvious it was hard for Ms. Rose to let that phrase pass her lips, but she managed. It was almost like she was practicing. Preparing. Not wanting it to be true, but given the way her life had been going for the past two years, it was so sadly possible.

“Can we see her room?” Paul asked.

Diana got up and the detectives followed.

Emma’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It was painted a peachy pink, a color that was somewhere between a little girl’s dream hue and a more sophisticated young woman’s idea of what was pretty. The room had a large bay window that overlooked the garden with just a hint of a view of Commencement Bay. The bed was an antique, painted white iron with small shabby-chic flecks of the metal showing. On the right side of the headboard someone had tied streamers of blue and white ribbons. Grace wondered if Emma had been a bridesmaid earlier that spring.