Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“How’s she doing?” the older woman asked.

“Better, no thanks to her mother,” the younger nurse said.

The supervisor ran her glasses down the bridge of her nose. “Was that the jogger?” she asked.

The blonde looked on as a woman and her husband walked by dragging the IV unit along the gleaming floor way toward the nursery. “Sorry?”

“The woman in the black tracksuit?” the supervisor asked.

“Yeah. What a bitch she was. So mean to her.” The blond nurse hesitated, thinking about the tail end of the encounter she’d witnessed with the mother and the conversation she’d had with Peggy about naming her son Theodore. “Weird thing about it was that her mother reamed her and Peggy, the patient, just took it. Barely reacted. But when we started talking about my boyfriend, Ted, her heart rate escalated big time.”

For the first time, the older woman looked half-interested. “Your boyfriend? Didn’t know you had one.”

She shook her head. “That’s just it. I don’t. But Peggy’s vitals shot up when I mentioned his name. It was like she was jealous or something when she had no cause to be. My Ted was a doofus I dumped back in Detroit. You know, before I came out here to this lovely job.”

The charge nurse looked down at the paperwork assigned to Peggy Howell. She ignored the younger woman’s dig about the job. As if Detroit was some prize, after all.

“Says the father’s name is Theodore Bundy.”

The younger woman nodded as she processed the information. “Name seems familiar,” she said.

The supervisor pushed the paper back into the folder. “She probably made it up. She’s not wearing a ring and she isn’t married, anyway. I don’t know why these young girls bother. A few years ago they did the right thing and gave them up for adoption. Better for the kid. I mean, most of the time.”

“Her mother was so mean to her,” the blonde said. “I mean really, really mean.”

“Some mothers are,” she said.

Before passwords and Internet sites, some men kept porn physically hidden away from their wives and girlfriends. Stashes were kept in private places where a man, and some women, could pleasure themselves without fear of discovery. Peggy had a stash like that. It wasn’t porn, however. It was her bundle of Ted letters. Jeremy had seen her put them under the false bottom of a dresser in the guest room upstairs.

He read them one time, looking over his father’s words with both reverence and disgust.

Dear Peggy,

I don’t know the song you mentioned in the last letter, but I do like the message of it. I’m doing fine. I have been getting all of your letters, but don’t have the time to answer them. Just not enough time, I guess. The days are filled with all kinds of legal wrangling between the prison staff, the lawyers. Barbara Walters wants to come and talk to me, and I told the warden to tell her to take a hike. I don’t want to be put up on TV until I’m exonerated. If I go on TV now, they’ll just try to trip me up. A couple of authors have tried to get ahold of me to write a book about my experiences, and I might talk to them. My story isn’t what the world thinks it is. You know the truth. You are the only one who knows the real me. My mom thinks she knows me, but she doesn’t. Not really. Anyway, I was wondering if you could send me a picture of Tricia. You’ve told me so much about her that I’d like to see a photo if you can manage one. I bet you’re a thousand times prettier than her, but I’d still like to put a face to the name. Don’t put her name on the photograph, but yours. Bye for now. peace, Ted

Dear Peggy,

I know you understand me. You understand my place in history. I know that. I know you understand that my cases are more intricate; more involved than someone like that piddly-ass Boston Strangler. Mine involved girls all over the country. Look at the TV, for God’s sake. I’m as big as the Beatles and they were bigger than Jesus Christ. I’m not a braggart. I just want some recognition, some confirmation that I am the best at something. I don’t know for certain, but it might be fair to say that Michelangelo or Leonardo were the world’s greatest artists. Is it that much of a stretch, Peggy, to acknowledge that I too have held some great place in this world? Everyone wants to talk to me. Figure me out. They want to cut out my goddamn brain to see what makes me tick. They ask me if I wet the bed when I was a little kid. They asked me if Johnnie gave me the belt. Do you think they’d pick apart some other kind of genius? No. I’ll tell you what. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare. Sometimes, Peggy, greatness just has to be accepted, appreciated, and revered for what it is.

By then Ted had jumped onto the genius bandwagon, and although what he was writing to her would have offended most of the world, Peggy didn’t care. She loved him. She agreed with him. She understood above all others that something could be beautiful and very, very dark. If Ted Bundy was some kind of an evil genius, she was content being part of his life. She felt a charge, a thrill, at his words. She felt love.

If Ted had been consumed by murder “twenty-four hours a day,” as the lead investigator in the Washington cases had said so pointedly as the hours ticked toward the electric chair, Peggy had found herself consumed by Ted. There was no water, no air. No food. No sleep. All that existed in her world was Ted and the hope that if the law did what it had set out to do that his legacy of greatness would live on in some very real, tangible way.

He was Leonardo. She was his Mona Lisa.

Grace Alexander looked at the fax sent by Anna Sherman’s nurse.

“What’s that?” Paul asked as he hovered over her, dirty coffee mug in hand.

“Nothing,” she said.

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Paul, this is personal.”

“You’ve been doing something personal a lot lately.”

She wanted to tell him, but it felt foolish. They were in the middle of a major investigation. She had Emma, Kelsey, and Lisa to think about. And while their cases were at the forefront, she had that need to find out who had killed her sister.

“I’m leaving for a meeting.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

It was time to go see Peggy Howell. Peggy had lived with her mother in Ruston, in the heart of the smelter’s toxic zone. The arsenic in Tricia’s bones had come from the smelter.

She looked up Peggy’s address. Of course, she’d moved. She had to move.

So did the bones.

A second later, Grace was out the door.

In January 1989 the air in Tacoma was heavy with the stench of the Simpson paper mill, an acrid odor to which residents of Washington’s toughest city, Grit City, had somehow become immune. The air had been especially chilly after temperatures dropped following a green Christmas. Ice pricked at the edges of lawns and vapors melted into frozen masses where the O’Hares’ dryer duct fed moist air outside. And yet as cold as it had become outside, the scene on the TV set in the O’Hare family living room was beyond chilly. Sissy, Conner, and their little girl watched the spectacle coming from Florida.

Burn, Ted, burn!

Conner held Sissy’s hand and leaned closer to her. He spoke in a whisper so that Grace couldn’t hear.

“His time has run out,” he said.

“He’ll get another stay,” Sissy said, her face knotted with worry.

“No, he’s out of time. I’m telling you, he’ll die tonight.”

She shook her head. “Not so sure about that,” she said. “He always manages to find a way to survive.”

Conner looked at his daughter.

“The man who killed your sister is going to finally be punished.”

Grace didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what she could say that would matter. She looked at the TV, but kept most of her attention on her parents. They carried such a strange mixture of fear, hate, and hope. They seemed both elated and miserable at the same.