Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“Do you want me to leave?” Diana asked.

“Whatever makes you the most comfortable,” Paul said.

“You speak,” the mother said.

“When she lets me,” he said, looking over at Grace, who had moved to the desk across from the bed. She was either engrossed in something or pretending not to hear. Diana left the room.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.

Grace turned over some cards and papers on the desk, but didn’t look up.

“If we’re going to find her, we need to know her. And if…” She hesitated and looked over at her partner, making sure that the mother was gone. “… and if she’s the victim of an abduction of some kind we will need to know why she was picked up.”

“If she was.”

“Right. If.” She held out a card. On the front was a photograph of a kitten sniffing a white rose.

“Cute,” Paul said, though he really didn’t think so.

“Ms. Rose?” she called out. A beat later, Diana Rose stood in the doorway. Her red eyes gave her away. She’d been crying quietly in the hallway.

“Did you find something?”

“Who is Alex?”

“Her boyfriend. They only dated a few months. She broke it off with him.”

“Why was that?”

“I don’t know. I think she was tired of being tied down. She wanted to go out with other guys. Have fun. You know, you remember when you were a teenager, don’t you?”

Grace nodded. “Barely. But yes, I do. Why did she keep this card if she was so over him?”

Diana took the card and looked at it. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen this before. Where did you get it?”

“Just here.” Grace pointed to the desk.

“May I see it?” Diana said, not really waiting. She took the card and her eyes met the detective’s. “You don’t think he had anything to do with her disappearance, do you?”

“I don’t know. We’ll check it out. What is Alex’s last name? And do you know where he lives?”

“Morton. He lives a few blocks over.”

“Palmer Morton’s son?” Paul asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

“ The Palmer Morton?” Grace asked, though she knew by the way the mother and her partner were acting that it had to be the very same. Everyone in Tacoma knew Palmer Morton. He owned about a third of the downtown retail core, including a steak house named Morton’s. He’d sued the famous Morton’s chain and won a provision that there would be no Morton’s steak house in Tacoma that wasn’t his. Chicago. New York. L.A. But not in Tacoma.

Palmer Morton was that kind of a guy. Both detectives knew his son’s reputation, too. He’d been picked up for shoplifting at the Tacoma Mall, a case that had been conveniently dropped. Something about a file being lost, though no one in the department thought it was anything other than a favor called in by a fellow who knew something about favors.

Before they got to the car, Grace turned to Paul.

“You know what it means?” she asked.

“That Morton kid is a creep?”

“Maybe. But not that. The T-shirt was Emma’s. That means whoever killed Kelsey has Emma. Whoever killed Lisa killed Kelsey. The girls are linked. There’s no doubt.”

And there was no doubt that they didn’t have much time.

Tricia O’Hare’s yearbook photograph from her senior year at Stadium High stared up from atop the papers Grace had spread out on the kitchen table overlooking the water off the front of the house on Salmon Beach. Her sister’s photograph. She could so very easily draw that exact image from memory. From the way her sister’s long hair rested just past her right shoulder, the left side pushed back. The leotard top Tricia wore offered a classic and elegant neckline. The dove necklace, the only real adornment. Her ears had been pierced after the photo was taken. Conner O’Hare wouldn’t let his daughter get them done until her eighteenth birthday. Grace could see herself in her sister’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, looking up at her in a serene gaze that could never have hinted what was to come. The image was in color, but over time the photograph had taken on a kind of pinky and orange cast, which only served to make Tricia seem even further away.

She was familiar, but there was no doubt she was from another time, another era.

If Tricia hadn’t vanished, Grace knew without an iota of doubt that she would not be sitting there. She wouldn’t exist at all. She loved her life. Her mother. Her husband. Yet gratitude for her very existence wasn’t in the offing. Anger was. She’d lived in the shadow of a phantom. Two of them, in fact. Her sister and the deliberate stranger.

She flipped over the photograph to vanquish it from her thoughts just then, to put Tricia out of her mind.

As if.

The coffeepot beeped and she poured herself another cup. The day hadn’t even started, but it already felt so heavy. She looked at the photo of Ted Bundy that her mother had taped to the outside of one of the folders. Sissy had used a

thick red pen to write the words: HE TOOK HER.

If he did, the answers were there somewhere in the twisted story of the killer from down the street. She knew his story, but still she reread the pages her mother had written.

After a period of rootless travel, Ted returned to the University of Washington and focused his studies on psychology in 1970. He’d found his niche, and his grades reflected it. It was as if there was something in those classes that pushed him to dig in deep and actually do the work. He didn’t skate on his handsome face, facile tongue. Later, in a moment of introspection, Ted would tell a confidant that he didn’t know exactly what drew him to that area of study-or what it was that sucked him into it so deeply.

“It wasn’t as if I wanted to be a shrink or anything. I guess I just wanted to know what it was that motivated people to do whatever it was they did.”

The friend didn’t answer back with the obvious. It was too inflammatory.

Ted, do you think you were looking for what made you into a monster? Ted, did you ever find out what it was?

In 1971, Ted Bundy took a job that always carried the ultimate in irony. At the time, Seattle was one of a few major U.S. cities with a suicide prevention crisis line. The Suicide Hotline, as it was known, was that number the brokenhearted and desperate called when they could think of no other way out of their misery.

One call, two months into his tenure there, was like so many of them. It came from a young woman at her wit’s end, deep into the drama and depression that had enveloped her since a breakup with a boyfriend.

GIRL: I think I might hurt myself. I really do.

TED: Talk to me. I’m Ted. I care.

GIRL: I have a bottle of sleeping pills and I just want to take them and, you know, never, ever wake up.

TED: I’ve felt that way, too. Everyone has. What’s your name?

GIRL: You have? But you’re working at the crisis hotline.

TED: Everyone has their moments of despair. But this call isn’t about me. I didn’t catch your name.

GIRL: Annette, my name is Annette.

TED: Annette, what happened? I want to know how to help you. I don’t want you to take those pills. I want you to live through this, all right?”

GIRL: I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I want to live.

TED: Are you alone?

GIRL: My mom and dad are asleep.

TED: Where are the pills? Can you put them someplace away from where you are?

GIRL: I don’t want to.

TED: What happened to make you so sad, Annette?

GIRL: My boyfriend, Brian, dropped me. Said I was “too much work” and that he didn’t want me anymore.

TED: You don’t sound like too much work to me, Annette.

GIRL: You’re nice.

TED: Thank you, but this call’s about you, Annette. I think you are nice. Tell me, are you really going to hurt yourself?