Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

A beat of silence.

“No. Not really, but he told me enough that made me feel that the world was a safer place for everyone when they finally put him out of his miserable existence. I don’t mind telling you I had a glass of champagne the night he cooked on the electric chair.”

“I understand,” Grace said, though she never admitted to anyone that she didn’t believe in the death penalty. Her job had been about tragedy and death and there was no need to add to it by taking another’s life.

Even Theodore Robert Bundy’s.

“Anyway,” Anna said, again with a wheeze, “I think Ted might be able to help you better understand what might have happened to the missing girls.”

The words were perplexing. Ted is dead.

“Sorry?” she asked.

“Come and read the letters. I have a stack of them. Better than some hifalutin profiler on the Today show. I know all about you. I think you’re smart. Besides, I make pretty good banana bread and I’ll have some out of the oven by the time you get here.”

Anna Sherman was in the Island Home retirement center not far from the Target off Union in Tacoma. Grace knew the location; she had visited there with her seventh-grade choir to sing Christmas carols to the elderly residents. As she went inside to find Anna, the wafting smell of old people filled her nose. It was as if the scent of the people who had been there two decades prior still lingered like summertime lavender and, she thought, a little bleach. That wasn’t the case, of course. Places like the Island Home always smelled that way. Anna lived in the assisted-living section of the community. She had been moved from the “live alone” to “needs a little more help” series of buildings cheerfully painted in red, blue, and yellow-a color combination that Anna thought must have been a painter’s mistake.

“If they were going for something patriotic, they blew it big time. I mean, really, yellow? Who pairs yellow with blue and red?” she’d asked when her daughter and son-in-law moved her there four years ago.

Grace found a place to park under a big fir tree. A yard keeper ran a leaf blower over the sidewalk and a couple of young people went toward their car, the woman crying. It was, Grace imagined, a typical morning in a place that always needed to look pretty for someone’s final days.

Anna was in Rosedale Bungalow, room fourteen. A nurse’s aide named Brigitte let Grace inside. In a wheelchair by the window, a small gray-haired woman with driftwood-gnarled hands and hunched shoulders brightened. At her side was a blue plastic file box. Anna was an impossibly tiny woman. She sat ramrod straight watching a dog chase a cat across the parking lot. It wasn’t a pretty view, but it held her interest.

She turned to the detective and smiled.

“You look like you did when you were a little girl, Grace. Just as pretty as a picture.”

“I thought you wouldn’t remember me,” Grace said, bending down to give the old woman a gentle, but heartfelt hug.

“I’m as old as the hills,” she said, pointing to her temple, “but I’ve still got everything right upstairs. Knock on wood.” She looked around and smiled at the obvious fact that there was no real wood in her room. “All vinyl and plastic. Ugh. I don’t know why they think everything has to be completely hose-able around here.”

Grace smiled. “You look lovely, Mrs. Sherman.”

“Anna,” said the elderly woman with glossy white hair and bright-red fingernail polish-a trademark look she’d held on to all of her adult life. “You’re not a child anymore.”

“Fine, Anna, then.” She took a seat across from Anna’s wheelchair. A nurse’s aide looked in and nodded.

“How is your mom getting along without your father?” Anna asked, inching the wheelchair a little closer.

“About the same,” Grace said. “She has her good days and bad days.”

“I was sorry to read about your father’s passing. He was a kind, decent man.”

“Thank you, Anna.”

“You’re not here about Susie, are you?”

Grace shook her head. “No.”

“The three girls I’ve been reading about.”

Grace nodded sadly. “Right,” she said, not even a little surprised that Anna Sherman read the paper. Of the members of her parents’ group, she was unquestionably the best informed. In another time and place, Anna Sherman could have been a female version of John Walsh. Whenever a new missing girl was reported, Anna already had in hand whatever public information she could glean. She had friends at the police department who routinely copied public information files for her-through whatever channels she was able to create on the sly.

“I know it sounds far-fetched, but when I read about Emma Rose-that’s her name, right?”

Grace smiled inwardly; Anna Sherman hadn’t changed one bit.

“Right,” she said. “Emma Rose.”

Anna looked away at the dog in the parking lot. She wasn’t distracted by the animal. She was thinking, pulling together the threads of what she wanted to say.

“When I read about the circumstances of her vanishing, I thought it seemed a lot like what happened to Susie. That Lancaster girl reminded me of your sister’s disappearance.”

Grace, of course, had thought the same thing. Emma and Susie had been taken after closing at their respective jobs. Emma, Starbucks. Susie, a produce stand and gift shop on the west side of Tacoma. Lisa Lancaster and Tricia O’Hare were both college students last seen in a Pacific Lutheran University parking lot. All four girls had never given the authorities any reason to suspect that they’d run off willingly. If any had a secret boyfriend or lover, it would have been news to their families. Big news.

And all four girls had one thing in common-their physical appearance. Susie, Lisa, Kelsey, Tricia… all were brunettes of a similar body type and build. They were lovely girls; two lost forever. One was still missing-waiting patiently for someone to find her dead or alive.

“I’m thinking that you came here for help of some kind, Grace,” the elderly woman said.

“Yes,” Grace said, hesitating a little. It was the reason she’d come. Anna Sherman could read people better than anyone. “This is hard to ask, but I’ve been thinking about Ted Bundy and…” Her voice trailed off and the look of recognition came to Anna’s face. Her dusty blue eyes were instantly full of emotion. Even all those years after everything happened, the name still brought back a flood of memories. None of them good.

Anna locked her eyes on Grace. She didn’t say anything. She just looked.

“I was thinking about the similarities of the cases… and, you know, the letters to and from Ted.”

“Tell me about the letters,” Grace said.

“You’re interested, then?”

She nodded and looked at the blue plastic box. “Yes, that’s why I’m here.”

By the looks of them, the letters had been typed on a manual typewriter. Some letters, most notably the E and R, seemed to stick and were rendered slightly above the baseline of the words in which they were used. It was double spaced and signed: peace, Ted.

Dear Mrs. Sherman:

I want to call you Anna, but I don’t know if you want me to do that. I look forward to each of your letters and though I wish I had some information to ease your mind, I know I don’t. Every time I write to you without the response that you are looking for, I think you will stop writing to me. I would hate for our friendship, however tenuous, to end because I will not make up a story about your daughter just to give you peace of mind. I guess everyone wants peace of mind. Even me.

Especially me.

So that we can continue our correspondence, I will offer you something. Not an admission of course-because that’s not the truth-but I will offer you my most sincere, my most heartfelt, most genuine condolences for your loss. Your daughter was a beautiful girl and undoubtedly loved by many. Whoever killed her is a complete monster.