Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“I know this is hard. And I am sorry. Really I am.”

“Thank you.”

“All right. Can I ask you about your hair?”

Daphne, now composed, nodded. It was as if she knew that one was coming. If she’d been the inspiration for the killings, why didn’t she look like it? Her hair was cropped, not long.

“Even if I wasn’t involved with Ted,” she said, “I doubt very much that I’d be one of those women with the same hairstyle they had in high school. You know the type. You see them everywhere at the market. I cut my hair short after the Ted stuff hit the news, but I would have anyway.”

“Was he fixated on your hair? Was that part of his obsession? You know, some people think that the hairstyle was so common back then that it couldn’t really be crucial for why Ted stalked the girls that he did. My sister wore her hair long, parted in the middle, too. When I looked at her yearbook, about half the girls wore some variation of that style.”

Daphne set down her mug and looked directly at Grace. Her eyebrows stopped moving and she spoke in hushed tones.

“I know. But I think so. I really do. I think that Ted was fixated on my hair. One time I told him that I was going to get a new haircut. Lots of girls were going shorter then. Girls on TV, girls in sports. Not everyone had to look like Jaclyn Smith.”

Grace didn’t get the Jaclyn Smith reference, but she’d look it up later online. She thought of the row after row of victims and their dark, long hair, parted in the middle. She knew from reading about Daphne that she’d had that look once, too.

She pressed Daphne for more. “Go on, what did he do?”

“He had a fit,” she said. “An absolute freak-out fit. It was completely over the top. It was almost like a tantrum. I remember him saying that if I cut my hair he’d go crazy and he might do something drastic.”

“Kill someone?” Grace asked.

“No. Don’t be silly, Detective. I thought that he was going to get drunk or something. Get on his hands and knees and beg me not to do it. He actually looked like he was going to cry. Ted had pulled that kind of stunt before-you know, acting like he was crying when all he was doing was pretending to be so, so upset.”

“So what did you do?”

“I didn’t cut it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Daphne said. “No man was going to tell me how to dress or wear my hair. I made a decision a little bit later that Ted wasn’t the man for me. He wasn’t mature.”

“You didn’t think he was violent or that he would hurt you?”

Daphne shook her head. “I wish I could be as dramatic as some of those Bundy girls who got away from him-what are there now, about ten thousand who almost got murdered by Ted?”

It was a true statement, a kind of proof that Ted had morphed into Pacific Northwest folklore status like D. B. Cooper and Bigfoot.

“Probably,” Grace said.

“I just dumped him. I told him that he needed to grow up. And that was that.”

“How did he take that?”

“Not very well. He basically gave me the big FU. I honestly didn’t care. He was immature and he was creepy.”

There was at least one other question that never seemed to have the benefit of a decent answer. None that Grace could find. None that her mother could uncover. After Ted was released on bond in late 1975 and was awaiting his trial in Utah, he split his time between the house in Tacoma and Daphne Middleton’s place in Seattle.

The question was short.

“Why?” Grace asked.

Daphne nodded slowly. “Why did I let him stay with me? Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that a million times?”

“I’m sure you have, but why? Why did you? Did you think he was dangerous? Did you think that he would hurt you if you told him to get out of your life?”

Daphne fiddled with the stars around her neck again. “No, it wasn’t that. I would like to lay blame on the concept of a battered woman and the fear that makes someone stay close to the enemy instead of retreating. But that wasn’t it.”

“Then why?”

“It sounds so foolish, but it’s true. It was my own vanity, I guess. I think I thought that I picked him and it said something awful about me if I admitted to the world that I was going to bed with a killer.”

“But you were,” Grace said, coming very close to crossing the line. “And you did.”

“Right. Right. But seriously, the whole time I was with him, I was pretending. That’s what’s so messed up about it. I was pretending that I supported him, when all I was doing-I swear to God-was telling myself that he couldn’t have done what they were saying.”

“But you saw all those things that bothered you-the plaster of Paris, for example.”

“Yes, I know. And I talked to investigators-one right after another. They all told me what I just couldn’t admit. I was kind of trapped. The truth about the whole thing was that if he got convicted, I felt only then I could drop him. Only after that could-please understand-could I be free.”

Shane was waiting for Grace at the bottom of the staircase at Salmon Beach. She’d phoned that she’d be home at seven and it was nearly right on the dot when they met at the landing. Her interview with Daphne had made for a long and unsettling day.

“It’s been a long time since I had a greeting this nice,” Grace said, before reading the concerned expression on his face. “Something’s wrong. Is it my mom?”

Shane held her. “No, baby. Not your mom. It’s your sister.”

Grace pushed him away a little. “What do you mean?”

“The bones,” he said. “A friend at the bureau tipped me off. The bones were Tricia’s.”

Shane’s mouth was still moving, but Grace couldn’t hear anything more. Her mind zipped through images of her sister. The flash cards. Ted Bundy. Her bedroom. The dove necklace. Her mother’s face. The last time she’d seen her father.

Tears came to her eyes and rained down her cheeks. Shane was still talking, holding her close.

“Are you, are they, sure?” she finally said.

“Yes. It wasn’t the bones that did it. There were three strands of hair wrapped around the femur. Not intentionally, just there by luck. One had an intact follicle. That’s how they did the match, Grace. She’s found. You found her.”

Grace nodded. “We have to tell Mom,” she said.

Sissy O’Hare didn’t shed a single tear. She simply sat there on the sofa next to her daughter and listened, her fingertips barely touching the strand of pearls she always wore. The big clock ticked. The room shrunk. But she just sat there. Calmly. Quietly. Shane excused himself and stepped into the kitchen to give mother and daughter a little time alone.

Finally Sissy spoke; her words came softly. “I’ve always known she was gone, Grace. I stopped looking for her twenty years ago. I knew in my heart that she loved me and she loved your father and she never would have left us. She had to be dead.”

Grace knew that wasn’t completely true. Her mom never changed their phone number. When she finally got a cell phone in the mid-nineties she made sure that the mobile carrier provided the same number-in case Tricia ever called. Her mother barely made a change to her sister’s bedroom-and only did anything major when a leak in the window frame caused some water damage and the entire room had to be repainted. Sissy had chosen the same color, but it didn’t look exactly the same.

“I know, Mom. I know.”

Sissy stared into Grace’s eyes. “Will you be able to tell anything else?”

Grace knew that had been coming, but still she clarified. “How she died? Is that what you mean?”

Sissy nodded. “Yes, and who killed her?”

Grace shook her head. “No. No, we won’t. There’s not enough there.”