The Fear Collector (6 page)

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.

Mother and daughter had argued that last day. It was a silly argument, one that Sissy was all but certain had not been the cause of whatever it was that had happened to her. It was so silly, yet so painful; she’d never told Conner or the police about it.

“That top, honey,” she had said, “makes you look like a streetwalker.”

“Everyone is wearing them,” Tricia answered.

The top in question showed a four-inch band of skin on her midriff.

“March yourself into the bedroom and get yourself something decent. I don’t want your father to see you looking like that.”

“I hate you, Mom. You’re always telling me what to do.”

“I love you, Tricia, that’s why. Now, go.”

She expected Tricia to come back into the kitchen wearing a more sensible top and give her a hug before she left. She didn’t. She slipped out the front door.

Sissy never saw her again.

F
or most of Grace’s life, Tricia’s room had been off-limits. She was able to go inside only when her mother and father allowed her to do so. That was once a year, when the family would gather to observe the anniversary of Tricia’s birthday. When she looked back on it later in life, she could envision that the entire bedroom was but a shadowbox of her phantom sister’s life. Her high school diploma was framed above a desk. On top of the desk were miscellaneous papers—a letter, a drawing of a cat, and other things that were so mundane that even though Grace had never known Tricia, she was sure that those things would have been thrown in the trash. They were not keepsakes at all. There were some items that truly were—her Bible, a desiccated corsage from her senior prom. The rose was no longer red, but black and brown, with petals that clung to the stem with fragility.

Her sister’s room was the larger of the two secondary bedrooms. When she was younger, Grace had resented how even in death, Tricia would always trump her for everything—a larger bedroom, a closer relationship with her parents, even a dog. When Grace was five, the family poodle, Mirabelle, succumbed to cancer at sixteen. Mirabelle had always been known as Tricia’s dog, a trusted companion, a possible witness to whatever had happened the night of her disappearance. Grace cried a fountain after the dog died, and begged for another puppy. Her parents said no. It had been too hard to say good-bye to Mirabelle.

Tricia’s beloved dog would be the only pet the family would have.

A photo of Tricia taken when she was fifteen, her mouth a train track of braces, Mirabelle at her side, hung above the desk.

Grace’s teeth were crooked, too. Yet her parents didn’t get her the benefit of orthodontics. Tricia, she had everything.

And yet whenever she snuck into the bedroom and sat on the bed, Grace wondered how it was that for all the reasons she could conjure about why she could hate her sister, she didn’t. Instead, she felt the kind of aching loss that her parents did.
Why
, she asked herself over and over,
did Tricia have to die?
She couldn’t compete with a dead sister and she didn’t really want to. She simply wanted to know the same things that her parents agonized over.

Who had taken her? Why hadn’t she been found? Was she still alive?

It didn’t take a radio shrink to figure out the genesis of Grace’s interest in a career in law enforcement. She’d grown up inside a family subsisting on tragedy and anger. She’d seen her mother stuff envelopes for a crime victims’ group, her father drink until he could no longer walk. She’d heard the arguments that ran from the darkness of night to the first splinter of morning light.

“If you’d loved her more, she wouldn’t have left us.”

It was her mother’s voice, accusing and cuttingly cruel.

“Sissy, you’re out of line and you know it.”

Her dad, sober for once, had a point. Grace knew it, even as a teenager. Her sister’s disappearance was the fault of no one—other than the perpetrator—and her mother’s anger was completely unfair. Her sister’s vanishing had been random. She’d been a type of girl—pretty, slender, fine-featured, dark haired—that had been favored by a potential serial killer, one who’d never had the kind of name recognition that Tacoma’s most infamous son, Ted Bundy, enjoyed once he was finally arrested for a string of murders. Investigators had tried to link Tricia’s case and the disappearance of another Tacoma girl, Susie Sherman, to Bundy, but there was no real connection—at least none that anyone could find. After Bundy was arrested in Florida and the spotlight once more shined on potential crimes he might have committed, investigators took another run at trying to make a case that he’d been the perpetrator.

The Tacoma News Tribune
ran a story about the possibility with the headline: D
ID
T
ED
K
ILL
T
WO
T
ACOMA
G
IRLS
?

The article indicated the similarities among Ted’s murders in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah and how the Sherman and O’Hare cases might have fit into the time line. Ted had been in the area off and on, but a gas receipt in Ellensburg on the other side of the Cascades at the time of Susie’s disappearance put her case in doubt. Ted, had, in fact, been in Tacoma visiting family when Tricia disappeared. That didn’t mean anyone had a shred of evidence, but a shred wasn’t needed when it came to what many saw as the country’s most prolific serial killer. Ted was always good for speculation. He was kind of the spaghetti serial killer—attribute a case to his name, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks.

“Look, we’re not saying he killed every girl who ever died in the Pacific Northwest,” a Tacoma PD detective said in the news article, “but only a fool would ignore the distinct possibility that he could have been a particular killer. After all, the guy really got around.”

The statement was made in 1974, what cops and crime writers later called the “Summer of Ted.” That was before Theodore Robert Bundy was
Ted Bundy
, of course. He was simply an almost mythological man with a bright white smile, a gimpy arm in a sling, and a metallic VW bug. After the hysteria swung into full gear when two young women vanished on the same day, there wasn’t a sorority girl with long, dark hair, parted in the middle who wasn’t halfway certain that she had encountered Ted somewhere during that time. And, if a girl didn’t actually have a Ted sighting of her own, there was always a friend who’d escaped being his victim.

Whoever Ted was.
Wherever
he was. He was like a handsome boogey man. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He was, many thought even at the time, a legend in the making.

Not long after Grace met Shane they went for a long walk along Ruston Way, a stretch of restaurants and beachfront park along Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. It hadn’t really been love at first sight when they’d met at the University of Washington. He was dark, handsome, and had the kind of disarming smile that put everyone at ease. He was tall, too. In fact, more than a foot taller than she, which was a huge relief. Although she’d always planned a career in law enforcement, she still wanted a life that included heels. During that walk after dinner, Grace truly opened up the first time about her sister’s death and its impact on her life.

“She died before you were born, but you still mourn her,” he said, as they took a place on a bench. A group of teenagers roughhoused nearby and a continual parade of couples, just like them, strolled by.

“It is hard to explain, but it really isn’t mourning. Sure, sometimes I’m sad about Tricia, but most times she just casts a big shadow,” Grace said. “Remember that case where a couple had a baby because their older daughter had leukemia and there was no donor?”

“Kind of,” he said. “They needed a match for her bone marrow and they decided to take a chance and have another child.” He put his arm around her and said, “Just in case.” It wasn’t supposed to be a sexy move, just a kind of reassuring gesture from someone who cared about her. Grace could feel it.

“Right,” she said. “Just in case. And, you know that it worked. The little girl was a match.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Grace,” he said, after a pause.

“I’m not saying it is exactly the same thing, but I grew up knowing that I was a kind of replacement for Tricia. Don’t get me wrong, I know my parents loved me. But they just missed her so much, loved her so much, that I was there to fill the void. You know, like a family sometimes rushes out and gets a new cat the day after their cat is run over.”

Shane looked off at the water, thinking.

“That’s a little severe, Grace.”

“Maybe, but that’s how I felt. It was always Tricia this, Tricia that. Do you know that Tricia and I wore the same outfit to our first day of school? It was a pink sweater with a poodle appliqué. I thought it was cool because it matched Mirabelle. I didn’t even know it was the same sweater until years later when I was going through an album tucked away in the basement.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that is a little creepy,” he said.

“That’s not all. I mean, I could tell you stories all night about what it was like being the sister of a dead girl. Even though she was gone and had been gone before I was even born, there was never a time when her name didn’t bring my dad to tears. There never was a time when I didn’t feel that they wanted her so much that if there was a knock on the door from someone with a potion or promise that could bring her back and the only caveat would be that I was to be traded for her, they would have done so without so much as a thought.”

Grace held Shane’s gaze for a while. She could see trust, understanding in his eyes. Yet she was unsure how much she could really say. She had never been abused or anything like that; she understood that a parent’s loss was undoubtedly greater than whatever anyone could imagine unless they’d been there themselves. As she grew older she could see a haunted look in the eyes of those who had suffered great loss. When she was a small girl, her parents hosted a support group for mothers and fathers of murdered children. Her mom had her serve cookies at many of the meetings and she could feel the longing stares coming from the club members as they watched her move from the kitchen to the living room, where a semicircle of chairs had been set up.