Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

Lisa turned away. “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

“That campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

“Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.

Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

“Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good,” she said.

“Mine, neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

“I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents, too.”

The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

“God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped-”

“Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.

“Whatever,” she said, “like I wasn’t the president of that dumb club. I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm relax a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

“You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

“Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

The young man fell to the pavement. One of the crutches was just out of reach.

“Can I give you a hand?” Lisa asked.

He looked up with an embarrassed half-smile.

“No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”

Lisa stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he’d thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.

“Let me help you,” Lisa said, bending down and hooking her hands under his arms. He stood wobbly on one leg, like a flamingo at the zoo. A good wind would knock him over. Lisa handed him his other crutch and picked up the backpack.

“You must be taking some heavy courses,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed about the unintended pun. She got a good look at his face. He actually was handsome with dark hair, large brown eyes, and stylish stubble above his upper lip and on the tip of his chin.

A goatee in the works?

Lisa grinned, not outwardly, but inside. The cute dork existed after all. She’ll tell Naomi the minute she helped him to his car.

“Where are you parked?” she said.

“Over there,” he said. “I’m Ted, by the way.”

So sure he was about what he was about to do that he didn’t think twice about using his father’s name.

Lisa glanced over at the burnished orange Honda Element, a boxy mini-SUV that was destined to be the VW bus of the new millennium.

“Fun car,” she said.

He shrugged, although with crutches under each arm, shrugging was not that easy an endeavor. “Good for outdoors stuff. If you go hiking and get mud in the car you can literally hose it out.”

Lisa nodded. “I guess that’s good. You like to hike?”

“I do. Sometimes I like to drive out to the middle of nowhere, pull off the road, and just find something cool to look at. A lake. A forest. Someplace where no one goes.”

“I’m Lisa, by the way. What are you taking?” she asked, moving the heavy backpack to her other shoulder

“Biology. Pre-med,” he said, though it was a lie. Inside his backpack were the A, B, and C volumes of old, outdated encyclopedias from his basement recreation room.

He was looking even more handsome.

When they arrived next to his car, he directed her to the passenger side.

“Can you put my books there?” he asked. “Easier to get to later.”

She nodded.

He pushed the electronic door lock button on his key fob and Lisa popped open the door.

“Did some other good Samaritan take a nap in here?” she said, a little teasingly, as she set the backpack on a seat that had been completely reclined to form a bed.

He didn’t answer and Lisa turned to look over her shoulder.

The young man was standing without crutches, framed by a lamp partially blocked by a dying cedar tree. Braided shadows crisscrossed his face like a spider web. He was holding one of the crutches like a Louisville Slugger.

“What the-” Lisa started to say, but her words were cut short.

He’d filled the aluminum tube of the crutch with his grandfather’s lead fishing weights, thinking that a little more heft would be helpful when he swung it at his victim’s head.

Which he did.

And it was.

Lisa’s shoulder bag fell into the gutter and her cell phone cartwheeled on the pavement and broke into pieces. The college student offered no final scream. No real sound but the slumping of her body against the doorjamb of the Element.

In a moment marked by a blur of swift movements and a gasp of air from the victim’s lungs, he had her inside.

He looked at her through the passenger window, satisfied and excited. He fixed the image in his memory like a photograph that he’d retrieve later. Moments like this were to be savored and relived over and over.

Lisa Lancaster was so beautiful. Sleeping. Like a doll with a swirl of lovely dark hair and perfect little features. He owned her right then, and a broad and unexpected smile came to his face. Not fear. Not a thumping heart sequestered behind a rib cage. None of that.

At that moment, the young man understood something about the power of the hunt that had eluded him as he’d planned and stalked his first kill. The rush. The excitement of doing something few dared to do.

And doing it better than the father he’d admired, though never known. He climbed behind the wheel and turned the key in the car’s ignition. He let out a little laugh at the pun that came to him just then.

He really was in his element. In every way.

At ten minutes before midnight, the 911 communications center received an anguished call from the mother of a missing young woman. The operator, Mary-Jo Danforth, thirty-one, took down the information provided and created a file she’d pass along to law enforcement. It was close to break time and Mary-Jo was feeling bored and restless. After she hung up the call, she swiveled her chair to talk to her friend and co-worker, Kirk Aldean.

A video camera installed for training purposes captured their conversation.

MARY-JO: Some mother thinks her daughter’s been abducted or something. Didn’t come home from college today.

KIRK: Probably out whoring around.

MARY-JO: You said it. I didn’t. I just told her that we usually don’t get involved if someone’s only been gone a few hours. I mean, Jesus, if my old man called every time I was late getting home from shopping…

KIRK: Shopping? So that’s what you call whoring around?

MARY-JO: You’re such a brat. Anyway, she was crying and saying it wasn’t like her daughter to be so, you know, irresponsible.

KIRK: Such a ho.

MARY-JO: You want to have coffee?

KIRK: You hitting on me, MJ?

MARY-JO: I guess. Let me finish the report. We can take our break out back.

She returned to her keyboard and finished her record by typing in the name: LISA LANCASTER.

One of the highlights of the lobby of the Tacoma Police Department was without question the Mug Shot Cafe. Forget the historic placards and the tributes to the fallen officers that filled part of a wall. The espresso shop served up decent lattes and cappuccinos to the men and women of the department that perpetually seemed understaffed-it was appreciated and needed, especially after late-night investigations that turned into early-morning case reviews. The officer who greeted visitors from behind a bulletproof glass enclosure had summoned Grace to come downstairs.