Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“Capper?”

Naomi shrugged. “He had a broken leg or something. She was talking to me when she was going to her car and said she’d call me later, but I fell asleep. I never even looked to see if she called until the next day.”

“What did she say about the guy with the broken leg?”

“Just that he was a dork and she was going to help him. She used to be in a club that helped those people.”

“The ‘cappers,’ ” Paul said with obvious disdain for the young woman’s choice of words for handicapped individuals.

“Don’t be a judger,” she said, her eyes now icy. “Just do your job and find her.”

Grace cut the tension with a question. “What did she say about the guy?”

“Not much. She went to help him because he dropped his books. I guess some of our diversity training actually took root. I would have just let him struggle. I don’t believe in helping people who you don’t know.”

Naomi was a jerk, but she’d been the last one to talk to the vanished girl.

“Marty and Lisa’s mother seem very close,” Paul said.

Naomi shrugged. “I guess so. I’m sort of creeped out by the two of them.”

“Creeped out?”

“Yeah. There were a few times when I was over there in high school that I thought they were a little too close. I told Lisa and she didn’t care. She was just using Marty for his car anyway.”

Grace checked her messages when she and Paul returned to the car. None from the state crime lab. And thankfully, none from her mother. While the possibility was always out there that her sister’s remains would be discovered sometime, somewhere, Grace also knew that for many family members of the missing and presumed dead, there was never a final answer.

“Let’s go back to the office,” she said.

Dismembering a human body was much harder than it appeared. It was messy, took considerable strength, and no matter how tough one thought he or she was, it took a very, very strong stomach to get the job done.

And yet, when the endeavor was part of the family business, there was no getting around it. It must be done.

The man looked down at his tool kit-knives, a handsaw, kitchen shears-and the oozing red that flowed like a sluggish river toward a rusted, hair-clogged basement drain.

He let out a sigh.

The Saw slasher films, the charming but bloody cable TV show Dexter, and assorted episodes of Criminal Minds had done him wrong. They’d not prepared him for the smell of torn human flesh. They’d done a poor job putting him in the picture to see what it felt like doing the necessary but nasty. He winced slightly as he moved the blade deeper into the widening crimson canyon of the dead woman’s abdomen. The vibration that came from a serrated blade against the impasse of a bone rankled him whenever the steel of the blade met one. Femurs were particularly resilient. He hated femurs because they called for the swinging of an axe.

Hoisting an axe overhead and driving it into his victim meant breaking a sweat.

He hated to sweat.

The young man had read everything he could on the subject, at least subjects that were parallel to what he was undertaking. He’d watched videos of hunters dismembering deer on YouTube. He’d even practiced on the turkey that his mother had served that Thanksgiving. It was a twenty-five-pound tom, fresh, not frozen.

A very uncooperative turkey at that.

“Poultry can be tricky. Aim for the joints,” his mother said, pulling all the air in the room through her cigarette. “The leg will come right off.”

He’d glared at her back then. Never a beauty, any looks she’d had were long gone. She was dour, with lifeless eyes. She had the kind of smoker’s mouth that looked more like a shrunken gash than a smile.

“Hmm,” she said, as the juices ran in the platter. “Might not be done,” she said, snuffing out her cigarette into raw giblets in the sink. “Looks red, not clear.”

He ignored her.

He liked red.

Everything was red.

That evening Grace and Shane Alexander shared a bottle of Riesling and a wedge of creamy Brie that she had somehow found the time to bake with pecans and brown sugar. It was gooey, salty, sweet, and completely decadent. Something wonderful that she thought would help take their minds off the long day. Shane had finished a weeklong special project for the bureau and wanted just to forget about all the politics that came with the job that he’d once thought was about catching the bad guys and making the world a better, safer place. Grace had office politics to contend with, too, and the crumbled marriage of Paul and Lynnette Bateman had been dissected over and over. There was nothing more to say about it. Besides, she had the concerns of the missing girl on her mind.

“So you think there might be some liability with the Lancaster girl’s investigation stalling because of Goodman’s accident?” Shane asked as they sat on the deck of their Salmon Beach home and watched the seagulls and boaters pass by.

“That’s what the mother thinks,” Grace said. “If Lisa’s been abducted and some scuzzball has her and kills her you can bet she’ll file a wrongful death on the department.”

Shane offered her more wine and she held out her glass.

“Any leads?” he asked. “That is, any you can tell me about?”

She smiled and shook her head. It was kind of a game they played. Their lives were about crime, murder, violence, and the cases that consumed them, but they pretended that the information they held couldn’t really be shared-not if it hadn’t already been on the news or disclosed by someone else. Bureau policy carried more weight than the edicts issued by Lynnette Bateman.

“No,” Grace said. “One minute she was on the phone and the next minute she was gone.”

He put his hand in hers.

“I’m sure this, even more than the bones at the beach, dredges up bad memories,” he said.

She nodded. “Not my memories, but yeah. Bad ones.”

“You’ll catch the guy,” he said.

“I hope so. I wouldn’t want Ms. Lancaster to live through all the stuff we have had to endure in our family.”

He nodded. “No one should have to,” he said.

Grace took a big sip of her wine. “No one should have to live with a ghost.” She stopped as a kayaker came close enough to hear. She waited until the coast was clear, until it was safe to speak. “The funny thing about ghosts is that they can seem so real. Always there. Hanging over you. Almost taunting you.”

“You’ll solve this, Grace. And you’ll solve the other one, too.”

She nodded. Her mind racing back to the memories that were such a part of her. So deep. So entrenched. And yet like a ghost, not really there.

Her phone vibrated and she looked down.

“Mom calling. Did I tell you she came to see me today?”

Shane shook his head. “Take the call. She needs you.”

Grace wanted to say something about how she needed him right then, but she didn’t. She picked up the phone.

“Hi, Mom, just talking about you…”

After hanging up the phone, Sissy O’Hare looked out her kitchen window at the same view she’d seen in the O’Hares’ backyard since she and her husband, Conner, bought the house shortly after Tricia was born. The pregnancy had been a difficult one and doctors told her she should not have any more children. The house was for Tricia, a place to spoil an only child. A swing. A kiddie pool. A patio for riding her tricycle. Sissy held those memories and turned on the water. Steam rose and she squirted dish soap into the water. The pear tree on the far side of the yard was no longer producing decent fruit, but it was too pretty during its spring bloom to cut down. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering. Tricia had begged to be pushed skyward there, higher and higher. Grace, too. The branch where Conner had strung a swing had broken off in a storm and a massive burl had formed, a gnarled hump of healed wood. As she looked out that window, she wondered about the bones that were being pored over by the scientists in the lab in Olympia. She wondered if her little girl had been found. As the tap water filled the sink and a billowy cloud of suds heaped over the water’s surface, Sissy knew her firstborn was dead. She’d known so for decades. Yet in that moment, she half prayed that the bones were not Tricia’s. If they were, it would really be over. Final. There would be no little drop of hope that Tricia had run away and started a new life somewhere. Tears came to her eyes. She turned off the water.