Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

Grace narrowed her brows. “Told you, specifically?”

Sienna nodded. “Yeah. She said she was going to just walk away and disappear. She was going to start over somewhere. New name. New everything. She said she’d never be found because if she ever did her bitch of a mom would be right there telling her what to do.”

The dog, whose name they learned was Toby, started to scratch and Grace was sure that she was going to end up with fleabites on her ankles. Bugs of all kinds loved her blood. She was a veritable smorgasbord for mosquitos, too.

“When did she say this to you?” Paul asked

“When didn’t she? She was always complaining about her mother. She thought her stepdad was nice, but stupid to be stuck with that witch of a wife.”

“Did she share this with anyone else?”

“How would I know? I told you that we weren’t that close.”

Grace made a few notes, asked a few follow-up questions, and the interview was over.

When they got out to the car, she stopped before getting inside.

“She’s such a liar,” she said. “If she’s not, then I can’t read people at all. Diana Rose is no bitch mommie dearest. She just isn’t.”

Paul got inside and turned the key.

“Get in, let’s go.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah. I am. But honestly, you know that no one has a clue about what goes on behind closed doors. Remember Candee?”

Grace slid into the seat. How could she forget?

Candee Getz was a seven-year-old girl who had been held captive by her father and stepmother for four years in a back bedroom of her Browns Point home. Patty Getz simply hated any reminder of the first Mrs. Getz, a woman who had died in a traffic accident and had never even been a rival of Mrs. Getz number two. When she and Don Getz married, she sold everything that was even remotely connected to Geneva Getz. Literally everything. Every. Little. Thing. Geneva’s family would have loved to have had the old silver, the china, the family antiques, but Patty couldn’t be bothered with returning any of the treasures. She wanted it all gone and she wanted it done fast. She ran an advertisement on Craigslist and let complete strangers pick the bones of her husband’s first wife’s memory. All gone but Candee, of course.

And yet, the small blond toddler simply disappeared. As far as the neighbors knew, Candee had gone off to live with relatives in Idaho. The Idaho family had given up on trying to stay connected to their sister’s little girl.

Don Getz had been adamant that it was better for Candee to start over.

“She’s been through enough. She needs to be part of a new family.”

The family, heartbroken beyond words, didn’t know what else to do. Don had always been a decent guy. If he’d wanted to start over, then they’d let him.

All of that changed when one sunny July afternoon a young man hired to clean the pool next door heard cries coming from the Getz house. At first it sounded like a wounded animal.

A coyote? Maybe?

Jorge Martinez knocked on the door, but no answer. He noticed a stack of Tacoma News Tribune newspapers heaped up on the steps, indicating that whoever lived there hadn’t been home. The cries were so loud that he let himself in the side gate and wound his way around the house. At the back of the house was a bedroom with its windows covered with aluminum foil from the outside.

The sound was unrelenting.

“Hello?” he said.

The noise stopped. It was sudden. Just off.

“Hello?”

Jorge heard the sound of something moving beyond the aluminum-covered window. He rapped on the glass, a dull thud rather than the clear sound of a fist against glass.

Then he heard a sound that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise.

“Help,” the voice cried.

It was no coyote, but the sound of a very scared child.

It didn’t take Jorge much time at all to do the right thing.

“Move back,” he said. “Move away from the window. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” the voice said.

Jorge pulled the concrete top off a bird bath and pushed it hard into the window.

From the opening he could see her. She was small. Pale. Frightened. Candee had been found.

The neighbors did what they always did. They told the police, the reporters, even Oprah Winfrey, that they’d had no idea she was held captive. No idea that the ideal family unit next door was nothing as it had seemed.

Grace ran the story through her mind. She knew that people like Don and Patty Getz existed. They had jobs. They put up Christmas lights. They attended the annual block watch meeting. And yet inside their beautiful home, with its stunning gardens and views of Commencement Bay, was a dark secret. No one could have seen it coming. No one would have ever guessed in a million years.

Grace looked over at Paul as he started to drive. They’d both worked the Candee Getz case. It was one of those cases that stayed with everyone a long, long time. Probably forever. That wasn’t true of most cases. Most came and went. A good detective knew that when his work was done, it was done. To dwell on something terrible, as most such cases were, was to invite nightmares and regret.

“I heard from Geneva’s sister. Candee’s doing great,” she said.

“Great or as great as could be expected?”

Grace looked out the window. “No, great. Really. She’s going to be okay.”

“Let’s go see if Palmer Morton’s kid is home,” Paul said.

“Sounds good.”

Emma Rose woke with a jolt. The clicking sound and the sense that someone was watching her had become familiar. She looked up, then over at the door. The hatch opened and a sandwich, American cheese on white bread with the crust trimmed, was presented on a paper plate. Alongside it was a can of cola. Emma took the items from the tray and watched it pull away, disappearing on the other side of the door. The hatch snapped shut. She turned away and started for the mattress when the hatch opened again.

That was unusual. The creeper normally waited about an hour or longer before the tray was submitted for the paper plate and the cola can.

Emma went back to the door and looked down at the tray. It was empty except for a single Hershey’s Kiss candy, its shiny silver foil wrapping caught the light from the reading lamp by the mattress. There was a long list of things that she missed by then-her mother, her friends, her sense of feeling safe. Free. On the list, somewhere past everything else, was chocolate.

Had she said something about it to the creeper? She wasn’t sure. In those first days of captivity, Emma had sputtered out a flurry of things amid her protestations that she didn’t deserve this. She’d said over and over that she would do whatever he wanted if he only let her go. She’d screamed into her thin pillow how much she wanted to go home and how she never wanted to see an American cheese sandwich again. She might have mentioned she wanted some coffee or candy or something along those lines.

Had he given her the Kiss for any reason other than to be kind? Had he given it to her so that she would do something for him? To him?

In that moment, she didn’t care. She unwrapped the foil and put the candy into her mouth. The first bite was silky, creamy, so wonderfully sweet. Then it tasted slightly chalky. She disregarded the texture of the candy. She wanted something that gave her a little bit of pleasure. Something that tasted good.

As she walked toward the mattress she felt a strange sensation. Her knees began to weaken.

The Morton mansion sat defiantly on the edge of the bluff overlooking Tacoma’s sparkling, but decidedly working-class, Commencement Bay. It was, arguably, the most magnificent setting for any home in the City of Destiny, as Tacoma boosters had nicknamed Seattle’s stepsister to the south. It wasn’t just a large home, but a true mansion with seventeen rooms, including a ballroom. The house had come with a bit of history, too. It had been the site of a famous kidnapping of a doctor’s son in the 1930s-a crime that had never been solved. The home was painted an eggshell white with black shutters and was set off by a circular drive that wound around a fountain that was a replica of some Italianate antiquity that the original owners had sculpted on the spot. Before Palmer Morton bought the place, the home had been a regular on the historic homes tour. The incontrovertible diamond of the tour, patrons of the annual event agreed.