Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

The Pointe at Ruston Way was an enormous complex with condominiums, townhouses, and apartments flanking edges of the sparkling blue waters of Commencement Bay. No one could argue that real estate developer Palmer Morton’s vision had been realized in a beautiful way. No expense had been spared to design and build what the website and brochures promised was “World Class in the City of Destiny,” a nod to Tacoma’s motto and its reputation as being somewhat less than world class. The penthouse condos went for well over one million dollars and the cheapest rents on the apartments made living there only in the reach of BMW-driving professionals. No one without a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salary need apply.

The bulk of The Pointe at Ruston Way was built on the cleaned-up land that surrounded the former ASARCO smelter. Getting it built had been a battle-the EPA, the old-timers who didn’t want any change (even though the previous landholder had poisoned the air, soil, and water, hardly something to champion), and a considerable consortium of homegrown environmental groups who wanted the land cleaned up and returned to its pristine state.

Palmer Morton had been in it for the long haul. He dug in and fought all warring factions and prevailed. He had money. He had balls of steel. He just wouldn’t lose.

Grace stopped for gas at a mini-mart just off the freeway in Redmond. She scanned the area by the cashier and grabbed a package of barbecue potato chips, regretting it the instant she pushed it across the dingy counter. The clerk told her that she could get a bigger bag for “just forty-nine cents more.”

Grace smiled. “I really should save the two dollars and skip the chips altogether, but I’m hungry.”

“We have some good Polish dogs,” said the clerk, a large woman who apparently never got off her chair. She indicated a hotdog machine that turned two sad, shrunken hotdogs on hot rollers.

Grace shook her head and smiled politely. She was an expert at hiding her feelings. Her stomach was rumbling and the chips, bad choice as they were, were all she had time for. “Vegan,” she lied, not even sure why. It just seemed better than saying “your hotdogs look like they’ve been there since Bush was in office,” which is what she was really thinking. The pit of her stomach was sour, but it had nothing to do with hunger pangs. It was all Ted. Ted Bundy was like an insidious virus. Once more she was moving through her life chasing a man who already had been killed by the executioner.

She paid and went back to her car, checking the address she’d printed out on Google maps before leaving Tacoma.

212 Marymoor Lane

Everything he touched became infected with evil. People who studied Ted-law enforcement and serial killer groupies alike-considered Daphne Middleton to be victim zero. Daphne had been Ted’s girlfriend, his confidante, the one he trusted above all others.

It wasn’t hard for Grace to find her. Daphne had changed her name, but not her Social Security number. She’d moved around the Pacific Northwest and back to her home town of Des Moines, Iowa, before returning to Redmond, Washington, and the condo at 21 Marymoor Lane.

Grace didn’t call ahead, but she kept her badge in her palm when she knocked on the door.

The door opened a crack and a slender woman with short gray hair answered.

“Daphne?” Grace asked.

A split second of fear came over the woman, but she quickly dismissed it. “There’s no one here by that name.” Her eyes, nestled in crinkled folds of over-tanned skin, flickered in that way that lets a person with genuine sensitivity see that a lie is being told.

Grace knew that she was trying to force something open that Daphne Middleton wanted sealed forever. Her past. Her history. Ted. Yet she persisted, because persistence when it came to Bundy was in her DNA.

“Daphne, my name is Grace Alexander. I’m with the Tacoma Police Department,” she said, proffering her badge.

Daphne shrugged; her shoulders were tent poles holding up the loose cotton blouse that she wore untucked over a pair of faded blue jeans.

“I guess that’s supposed to impress me,” she finally said. “And, if I were Daphne, I’d probably be inclined to be so. But, as I said, my name is Jennifer.”

She hadn’t said her name was Jennifer.

“Daphne, please,” Grace said, her tone more businesslike than pleading. “I’m here to talk to you about my sister. I’m here to talk to you about Ted.”

Daphne/Jennifer looked around, past Grace. She scanned the parking lot.

Looking for a TV crew maybe?

“Why are you doing this to me?”

If there was a moment in which Grace knew that her obsession didn’t trump the rights of others to just be left alone, that was it. She knew that while she meant Daphne Middleton no harm whatsoever, there was no way that her appearance on her doorstep could be anything but harmful. She was there to get something. She wasn’t there to give Daphne anything-not new information, not closure, not comfort. She was a leech, a parasite.

And yet she persisted.

“I’m not,” Grace said. “I’m doing this to help my sister.” Even those words rang a little hollow. It was true that she’d been counseled her entire life that she was doing this for her sister’s memory, that the truth that had eluded her family was something that was owed to Sissy. It was no longer about that. Not really. It was really about what she had to prove.

Daphne moved the door open a bit more, letting the light fall on her face. “Come in,” she said, her tone more resigned than welcoming. “But please, don’t make me have to move again. Don’t tell anyone you’ve found me. You have no idea what it’s like living in the shadow of that man.”

Grace didn’t say what was going through her mind just then: Yes, I do.

The condo was spotless and modern. A pair of black Barcelona chairs flanked a gas fireplace. A glass coffee table with a Nambe bowl as its centerpiece was placed in front of a bright red leather sofa, also Italian, like the Barcelona chairs. Daphne Middleton had excellent taste and a flair for the dramatic.

“Coffee’s brewing,” she said. “Follow me.”

Daphne led Grace to the kitchen, where an automatic coffeemaker beeped, indicating that it had just finished brewing. She poured a cup for herself and one for the detective. They sat at the kitchen table and talked. First Grace told her about Tricia and her mother, and how their lives had been wrapped up in the drama of a serial killer. It was part therapy, part fact finding.

“I think your mother wrote to me back in the late 1980s,” Daphne said.

Grace nodded. “I’m sure she did. My mother wrote to anyone with a connection to him, from his grade school teachers on up to a cellmate he had in Florida.”

“I see. I’m in excellent company, then,” Daphne said without a bit of irony.

Grace liked Daphne. Despite all of it, she could still find something in the darkness that made one smile.

Daphne looked up. “Sugar? Milk?”

Grace shook her head. In the middle of the conversation they were having there was room for the mundane. It was odd and comforting at the same time.

“Black’s fine,” she said.

She examined the woman in early sixties across from her. She wore a pair of gold hoops and a necklace fashioned of stars linked together. Her brows were dark and they moved as she spoke. She was beautiful and expressive and she’d been through a lot.

Daphne was the only Ted victim who had chosen to be with him, then rejected him.

“I know what you’re thinking. I know what everyone thinks. If I didn’t kick him to the curb, those girls would still be alive. Your sister would still be alive. All of them. Live with that for a little while and come back here and tell me how that feels.”