The Fear Collector Page 13

  Tricia didn’t have classes until noon, so mother and daughter used the extra time to talk about everything that interested them—Tricia had just switched her major to art history, the same degree that Sissy had earned at Western Washington State College in Bellingham. They talked about the merits of Cézanne over Van Gogh.

  “Van enough already,” Sissy had teased.

  “I know you don’t like his work, but you have to admit he had an ear for good painting,” Tricia joked lamely.

  Her mother laughed anyway. Tricia kissed her mother on the cheek, picked up her backpack, and went to wait along the curb for her friend, Carrie, to take her to work.

  As she went out the door, Sissy made a comment about Tricia’s attire, and that was it.

  It wasn’t until after 7 PM that day that Sissy began to worry about Tricia. She was usually home from class by five—and if she was going to be late, there was never a time that she didn’t phone her or Conner to let them know.

  “Carrie and I are going to hang out on campus for a while. There’s a cute guy that she wants to accidentally meet,” she’d said one time, quickly adding, “Again.”

  “How’s that accidentally meeting someone actually working for her?” Sissy asked.

  “You know Carrie, Mom. She’s no quitter.”

  “That she’s not,” Sissy said.

  Sissy and Conner ate dinner without her that night. Though later others would insist their observations were tainted by the eventual tragic outcome, the O’Hares were quite nervous. Scared even. They made the first of three calls to the Tacoma Police Department at 9 PM. Two others followed at ten, and then, finally at three minutes to midnight.

  With each call the fear had been ratcheted up. With each connection, the cool voice of a desk officer answered in the same way.

  “Girls these days do stuff like that. She probably ran off with a boy to a party or something.”

  “My daughter isn’t like that,” Conner said.

  The officer sighed. “She’s a girl, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Conner said, bile rising in his throat over the insinuation that he didn’t know Tricia very well. They were close. Extremely so.

  “Trust me, she’s like that. These are different times than when we grew up. Kids take more risks. They don’t want to be like us.”

  “My daughter is a good girl.”

  “Wasn’t implying that she’s not. Besides, she’s not missing until she hasn’t been seen for twenty-four hours. That’s the statute.”

  “All right,” Conner said, knowing that anger over what he was hearing wouldn’t advance his cause. Anger never did. It wasn’t a pissing match over who was right, either. It was simply a plea from a father trying to get some help.

  The third call was made by Sissy, who had been coached by her husband.

  “My daughter Tricia O’Hare has been missing since Tuesday morning. I have no idea where she is.”

  That worked. The dispatcher sent a cop out to make a missing persons report.

  And yet, resourcefulness and a little white lie aside, there was very little to be gained by getting the police to respond right away in the first place. The reason for that, Sissy would later tell her victims’ families support group, was that “girls abducted by a madman have about a 10 percent chance of recovery.”

  “Ten percent?” asked Sheila Vinton, whose daughter, Shelley Ann, had been murdered by a stranger who’d held the fourteen-year-old hostage for seventeen days in a cabin in the foothills of Mount Rainier. “Not very good odds.”

  “No,” Sissy said, folding her arms across her chest, a little unhappy with Sheila’s response. She knew that Sheila had been accused of being a bad mother because she hadn’t reported her daughter’s disappearance for two days. The reason, she insisted, was that her ex-husband had visitation. He committed suicide, which Sheila only admitted to herself, gave her a sense of relief—a way to put all the blame where she could.

  Not on herself.

  All of that would come back to Sissy whenever she thought of her daughter and that terrible night she went missing. Ten percent! Ten percent! How could that be? What kind of police force do we have here in Tacoma?

  She would later learn that the Tacoma Police Department was one of the best in the country, but law enforcement is seldom a match for someone who seeks to do evil. Catching an abductor is a million times easier than finding a killer before he kills.

  Sissy, bleary-eyed but wired like Grand Coulee Dam, stayed by the phone in the kitchen all night praying and hoping. A couple of neighbor ladies sat with her for part of the evening, though they left when she lay down on the sofa to pretend to get some rest. She didn’t eat, either. She couldn’t. Something inside told her that there would be no good outcome.

  No 10 percent.

  Conner got into his silver Mazda 626—the one in which he’d taught Tricia to drive—and drove all over the PLU campus, the streets of Tacoma, and even as far as Lakewood, south of the city. He was armed with an anguished look on his suddenly haggard face and Tricia’s Stadium High School senior portrait, pulled from the hallway in its honey oak frame. In time, most Tacoma residents could identify the image of the girl, either by name or just with a sad shake of recognition.

  “Is that the girl who . . . ?”

  Grace returned to her sister’s case file, the one her mother had made. Sissy had once told her that the collection had been made over time—whenever a detective on the case retired she’d make a play for more access. Open investigation files were never shared with victims’ families or the press. Not anyone. There was good reason for that, too, but Sissy had a way about her. She could be the freshly-baked-cookies-in-hand type with teary eyes and a need to know, or she could turn those eyes to glacial ice and criticize the cops for not doing their jobs. Whatever worked. It was always about that.

  Grace supplemented the file, page by page, over time, with trips into the records room. She didn’t care if the nosy records clerk turned her in. There were worse violations that could be written up about any number of the people who worked at the Tacoma Police Department—all the way to a famous case in which the chief of police sexually harassed and abused his staff and murdered his wife when he could no longer control her. That was huge, of course, and had been covered widely by the media. The other transgressions were smaller. One police officer routinely viewed porn on his laptop. One stole from a fallen officers’ fund. Grace only took what she felt was rightly hers—her family’s history.

  She studied the witness statements. Her mother’s was twice as long as her father’s.

  She was supposed to be here Saturday morning, 10 am sharp. Like always. We were going to get my hair done and go out to lunch. . . .

  Grace could never remember a time when she and her mother had done that sort of mother/daughter activity. Their relationship, while close, was a bond formed because of tragedy, not because of her mother’s loving nature. Certainly, her mother loved her; there was no doubt about that. The difference was they didn’t do things like get their nails done or go to the salon for a color and style.

  A student at the university, Melissa Reardon, twenty-two, had told detectives how she’d found Tricia’s purse and keys—the first concrete proof that Tricia was not a runaway, but a victim of something terrible. Melissa’s statement had been taken in her dorm room on Sunday, a full day after Tricia hadn’t shown up for the appointment with her mom.

  My work study job requires me to pick up trash in the parking lot on Saturday mornings. The school doesn’t want any parents to see any evidence of drinking and whatnot. I found Tricia’s purse. I know it was Tricia’s purse because when I opened it, it still had her wallet and ID. I took it to campus security for lost and found. . . .

  Close friend Peggy Howell’s interview was more innocuous, not really adding much to the investigation—though Peggy would tell her story over and over to the media. A female detective, who died in a tragic accident on Interstate 5 a year later, had interviewed Peg
gy at her mother’s place on Ruby Street in Ruston.

  Tricia and I had talked about going to a party off campus that night, but when I saw her around 6 pm, she’d changed her mind. Said she had a stomachache. I think she was going off to see a boy or something. We were best friends, but I don’t know who it was.

  It was Phillip Marciano, a world literature professor at the university, whose statement put him in the hot seat during the early part of the investigation. His voice was recorded during three interviews at his office on campus and one, a very short one at his home near Browns Point, north Tacoma.

  She was one of my best students. We had coffee—nothing more—two or three times a week. I last saw her Friday afternoon after class. She’d been over at her parents’ house, was upset with her mother or father about something. I don’t know what. I think she wanted to talk a little, but I didn’t think that boundary should be crossed.

  As Grace well knew, Dr. Marciano had become the subject of considerable scrutiny for a couple of reasons. First, his wife, Jackie Marciano, had, only four weeks before Tricia disappeared, made a complaint to the university that he’d been involved with a student. Second, the class for which Tricia had been enrolled convened on Thursdays. Not Friday. Investigators put the screws to the professor, but he never faltered, never changed his story. Detectives were all but certain they’d caught him in a lie, but they were wrong. The reporting officer had made an error when transcribing his handwritten notes to the typed report. The professor had, in fact, said he’d last seen the missing young woman on Thursday. Further digging turned up another error in his favor—his wife had lied. She had been the one having an affair with a neighbor and thought by casting aspersions on her husband, she’d be in a better position to retain a larger chunk of his state pension.

  The file was thick, at least two hundred pages by Grace’s estimation. Page after page of false hope, innuendo, and empty promises of resolution stared up at her—and all the others who read the documents trying to tie Tricia’s disappearance to a crime—Ted Bundy? Another killer? Kidnapping? It could have been any of those things.

  Or none of them.

  It was possible that she’d just vanished because she’d wanted to. Maybe she’d been sleeping with the professor? Maybe he’d told her that it was over? Maybe she’d been so hurt she’d just decided to go away and never be found. People did that. Not often. But they did. Parking attendants at airports all over the world find cars whose drivers never, ever return to claim them. They just get on a plane and leave.

  Did Tricia do that?

  Though her sister’s case file had been started before she was born, Grace could see how some of her own files might turn into the kind of documents that she’d scattered about to study and read, long after the fact.

  She knew she’d be judged by those who still loved their missing and who still ached for a resolution.

  The families want an answer. Even the worst possible answer.

  CHAPTER 20

  Grace sat up in bed reading. Shane was doing the same thing. Neither gave a single thought to the idea that they might have sex or even talk about what had transpired throughout the day. They’d kept in touch with text messages already. Grace had come from dinner at her mother’s and Shane from a long day dealing with bureau politics at the Seattle field office. Their bedroom window faced the water, and when an enormous freighter bound for Asia passed—an occurrence that usually stopped them from doing whatever they were doing to watch—it was barely noticed. Both were deeply immersed in what they were reading. Shane was editing an afterword that he’d written for a book by a forensic pathologist, a friend from his days before Grace. Grace, maybe rightly so, was normally skeptical about the pretty and accomplished author/friend, but that night she made no mention of her. No slightly sarcastic quip along the lines of “You’re not bringing her into our bed, are you?”

  Her tired eyes were glued to the letters her mother had loaned her. She’d seen some of them before when she was a teenager, but this time urgency drove her, not curiosity.

  “Didn’t realize that serial killers had such great penmanship,” he said. “Thought they were more erratic in their letterforms. At least that’s been my experience.”

  Grace looked over, a sly smile on her face.

  “My mother wrote this,” she said, barely looking in his direction.

  “Your mother? You said these were Bundy Letters.”

  She nodded and started to fold the thin white paper with the florid cursive writing. “My mother is one smart woman. She actually copied the letters before she sent them so that she’d know exactly what Ted was responding to.”

  “That doesn’t look like a photocopy,” he said.

  Grace nodded. “I know. Get this, my mom hand-copied them. They didn’t have access to a home copy machine back then and dad didn’t want to spend ten cents a copy. Less money for the cause. Plus, I don’t think he thought this writing to Ted Bundy would get them anywhere.”

  “It didn’t,” Shane said.

  “It did,” she argued.

  “How? In what way? He never admitted anything.”

  “Not Tricia’s murder. There were some other tidbits that he spread throughout the letters that actually did help close cases in Utah and Oregon.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said, a little surprised by her disclosure. What else didn’t he know? They’d talked about Tricia’s disappearance hundreds of times.

  Grace didn’t say so out loud. She didn’t need to. Somewhere in the letters of a crafty lunatic were the answers to what had happened to her sister . . . and just maybe what had happened to Kelsey, Lisa, and Emma.

  A line her mother had written was both poignant and devastatingly true.

  Sometimes, Ted, I think all of us are products of the good and bad done to us as children. Maybe that’s your story, too.

  The other side of murder, the side from which the darkness was born, is not the need for some measure of sympathy. While most people blamed the mother, the father, the environment from which the murder emerged, Grace always considered homicidal tendencies to be generational. The road that Ted Bundy had been on when he killed his first victim had been one that was paved with the messy combination of evil and mental illness that his parents and their parents likely had unwittingly laid down before Ted was a sorry glare in his father’s eyes. Ted’s own grandmother had reportedly been treated for depression with electroshock therapy. She was also an agoraphobic, refusing to leave the safe confines of the family home. And while the confusion of his paternity would certainly traumatize any young person, Ted had exhibited a pathology and propensity for violence long before that issue emerged.

  A relative, a teenage aunt, told the story of how she’d stirred from an afternoon nap to find Ted, only three, smiling at her in that way that really isn’t a smile, but an acknowledgment of something he’d done—or intended to do.

  All around her were kitchen knives.

  No one knows for sure why Louise left Philadelphia with five-year-old Teddy in 1951, although it is easy to guess. Shame and abuse had likely reached a level she could no longer endure. Louise needed a new life. She didn’t need to be the woman with the little boy who never knew his father. She could not have gone a greater distance than Tacoma, and that probably figured into her thinking, too. When she met Johnnie Bundy, a cook for a local hospital, he was everything she’d ever wanted. A Steady Eddie. A man who kept his promises. Decent with a capital D.

  “Ted was grandiose even as a kid. He must have hated having a dad who was a hospital cook, not an airline pilot,” Grace said while Shane shifted his weight on the mattress and doubled up the pillow under his head.

  “Or a lawyer,” Shane said.

  “Right, one of those glamour jobs that he could brag about with the other boys. His dad worked in a hospital cafeteria. Even in working-class Tacoma that had to have been at the lower end of things,” she said.

  “In a way, he always thought he was better than t
he Bundys,” Shane said. “He thought his stepfather was boring, didn’t make enough money, and wasn’t too smart.”

  “Ted wanted to be better than them. Johnnie Bundy wasn’t sophisticated. He was just the quintessential average Joe, but his averageness was his goodness. He married Louise and adopted her son and raised him as his own.”

  Shane shook his head. “He didn’t know what he was getting into.”

  “No one could have seen what was coming.” Grace reached over and turned off the bedside light.

  * * *

  Tacoma is called Grit City, and it’s a nickname that fit like a grimy garden glove. And while there are stately mansions in the north end—places that were the homes of the lumber barons like the Weyerhaeusers—Ted’s world as a boy and a teen was decidedly more prosaic. Johnnie Bundy’s living was modest and their home, clothing, and cars reflected that. Ted’s true young adulthood is bit of a mystery. He’d tell people that he was addicted to magazines of murder and bondage, pornography with the most disgusting and vile images of evil done to women for the gratification of a small segment of the male audience. He immersed himself in true-crime documentaries, reveling in the depictions of lifeless, bloodied, female bodies.

  And then, like a switch, he’d put on the mask and deny it all.

  Ted was a teenager of the night, a junior night stalker. He’d steal beer, guzzle it down, and then start the walk. He’d follow the sliver of light from parted curtains and press up close to get a glimpse of a girl or woman in a state of undress. A voyeur, a peeper, whatever it was that Ted Bundy was before he became a killer, he perfected it.

  A hunter. That was Ted.

  Among Grace’s mother’s files was a photocopy of a letter that Ted had written to a television producer who had promised “to set the record straight” and tell the true story of Theodore Robert Bundy. In this missive, Ted reflected on his teenage years at Woodrow Wilson High.