Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

I hear you, she thought. I hear all of you.

Grace hated the crime pundits who immediately jumped on the “serial killer among us” bandwagon whenever even the hint of similarity became apparent. It was too much. Serial killers were exceedingly rare. While endless books were churned out about Gacy, Bundy, Ramirez, and the other big-league killers, among serial-killer aficionados there seemed to be the hope that a new one would emerge. The idea of it disgusted Grace Alexander. Serial killers were the ultimate evil. While she faced the victims with an unblinking eye, she wanted to tell each of them that she hoped they were not killed by the same man. The sum of three individual killers was far less a man whose sole predatory focus was to kill a stranger.

It just was.

It rained all night and the wind knocked over the neighbor’s old-school galvanized aluminum garbage can, but that wasn’t what kept Grace awake. It was the rotating series of the faces of the dead girls that clicked through her mind. They morphed into one another like an old MTV video-back in the day when the cable channel actually played music videos. The girls were so, so young. So pretty. So much like the sister she both loved and hated. It was so strange, the rotation of faces and how Tricia had been one of them.

She woke up her husband.

“Honey,” she said.

His sleepy eyes stayed shut.

She turned on the light and nudged him once more.

“Are you asleep?”

Shane pulled one eye open and looked at his wife.

“I was,” he said, trying to hold his sarcasm. It wasn’t easy to do. He looked over at the bedside clock. It was after three.

“Sorry,” she said, rolling closer.

“I know it’s the case,” he said, “but what about it?” Again, he tried to keep his feelings in check. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Grace’s work or what troubled her. It was that it had become more than fifty-fifty in their relationship. More like eighty-twenty. It had become increasingly difficult for Shane to share about his work, his colleagues in the field office, whatever was bothering him.

“I keep thinking of my sister,” she said, her voice nighttime soft.

“What about her?” he asked, a little surprised to hear that Tricia was the source of Grace’s insomnia.

“It sounds silly, I know.”

“What does?”

“That I keep thinking of the similarities in the case and how no matter what outcome there will be sisters like me. Mothers like my mom. You know, people who will carry the tragedy in some way for the rest of their lives.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. You’ll solve the cases,” he said.

“They didn’t,” she said.

“They aren’t you. Besides, the killer isn’t Ted. Get some sleep.”

“I know.” She turned away from him, and looked out at the black water of Puget Sound.

Grace felt a slow leaking of air coming from her lungs as she looked at the report from the Washington state crime lab in Olympia. It was both interesting and disappointing. In reality, the report indicated little more than what she’d surmised already-at least about the bones themselves. The bones were female. Young. The report didn’t say exactly how long the victim had been dead, but indicated the skeletal remains were likely less than fifty years old. What she needed and wanted to know more than anything, wasn’t there, of course. The lab didn’t have the capability to determine whose bones they’d recovered from the shoreline near where Samantha Maxwell’s body had been recovered. DNA extracted from bones was possible, but not an easy endeavor. Even a single hair follicle would have been a better bet.

Maybe the FBI can do better, she thought.

The report itself was brief, only three pages. It was the last page that held her interest came near the end of the document:

Significant traces of arsenic and lead were recorded with the bone sample. The soil samples collected from the immediate vicinity do not carry those metals; however, locations near the former site of the ASARCO smelter do.

The ASARCO smelter had been a Tacoma landmark, though not an especially lauded one, since the turn of the previous century. In its day, the 562-foot smokestack spewed the foul by-products of copper smelting into the air, giving the city its “Aroma of Tacoma” nickname. The smelter dumped lead and other chemicals into the atmosphere, sending a toxic cloud over much of the immediate vicinity. Prevailing winds sent the plume points farther. Arsenic, a heavy metal by-product of the copper smelting process, was collected by the company for use in insecticides. At least some of it was. Over time, tons of arsenic sprinkled over the water, shoreline, forests, and the front yards of homeowners closest to the smelter. In the early 1980s, the United States Environmental Protection Agency named the former smelter a Superfund site-one of the most toxic in the country.

As Grace dialed the number for the crime lab, she remembered how she and her mother gathered with friends on Verde Avenue and watched in awe as the massive smokestack was reduced to rubble in 1993. The town of Ruston, just below the bluff along Commencement Bay, had been freed from a dark shadow cast by the monolith.

“Detective Alexander,” she said.

The lab supervisor, a nice woman named Bea Carter, answered.

“You’re fast. Got the report, I take it?”

“Yes,” Grace said.

“I figured you’d have a question or two.”

“You know me well.”

“I know your case. And I really wanted to find out who those bones belonged to. I was hoping right along with you.”

“Will you send them to the FBI?”

“Already on their way,” Bea said. “No telling when they’ll get to them. They don’t exactly pounce on everything, especially something this old.”

“I know. Thanks. One thing I was wondering about on the report. The arsenic. Are you saying that the victim was killed by arsenic poisoning, or were the bones contaminated by the soil?”

“No. No. Not poisoning. The arsenic had leached into the bones, but had settled in after death. This was not a poisoning death at all. My feeling, based on what the techs found and sent along for our lab, is that the victim was buried elsewhere. Shallow grave, too.”

That detail puzzled her. “Why shallow?”

“Most lead and arsenic from the smelter-and that’s where this came from, I’m almost sure of it-only penetrated the top eight to twelve inches of the soil. I’m thinking that whoever killed our Jane Doe barely buried her.”

“And then moved her later?”

“That’s what it looks like. None of the soils around the point of discovery have anything like those parts per million found in the femur.”

“Just the femur?”

“I think so. Hang on. Let me look. I’ll put you on hold. Sorry for the Muzak.”

A moment later, Bea came back on the line.

“Just the femur. The other bones were mostly clear.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Good question. I’ve thought about it a lot. We all talked about it at lunch today. I think the body was buried with the arms folded up and over the victim’s chest. On her back. In repose. Not with the arms at the side. I don’t know, rain, or water, or some way it leached around the body, settling on the legs-and I’d say the back and the back of the skull if we could find anything else.”

“And then moved later?”

“Right. Dug up. Moved. Long after death.”

“Why do you say that?” Grace asked.

“Because of the way the heavy metals leached into only the lower part of the femur. Somebody dug up that body-and remember it wasn’t very deep-and moved it.”

“Why would someone do that?”