The Fear Collector Read online

  Before they got to the car, Grace turned to Paul.

  “You know what it means?” she asked.

  “That Morton kid is a creep?”

  “Maybe. But not that. The T-shirt was Emma’s. That means whoever killed Kelsey has Emma. Whoever killed Lisa killed Kelsey. The girls are linked. There’s no doubt.”

  And there was no doubt that they didn’t have much time.

  Tricia O’Hare’s yearbook photograph from her senior year at Stadium High stared up from atop the papers Grace had spread out on the kitchen table overlooking the water off the front of the house on Salmon Beach. Her sister’s photograph. She could so very easily draw that exact image from memory. From the way her sister’s long hair rested just past her right shoulder, the left side pushed back. The leotard top Tricia wore offered a classic and elegant neckline. The dove necklace, the only real adornment. Her ears had been pierced after the photo was taken. Conner O’Hare wouldn’t let his daughter get them done until her eighteenth birthday. Grace could see herself in her sister’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, looking up at her in a serene gaze that could never have hinted what was to come. The image was in color, but over time the photograph had taken on a kind of pinky and orange cast, which only served to make Tricia seem even further away.

  She was familiar, but there was no doubt she was from another time, another era.

  If Tricia hadn’t vanished, Grace knew without an iota of doubt that she would not be sitting there. She wouldn’t exist at all. She loved her life. Her mother. Her husband. Yet gratitude for her very existence wasn’t in the offing. Anger was. She’d lived in the shadow of a phantom. Two of them, in fact. Her sister and the deliberate stranger.

  She flipped over the photograph to vanquish it from her thoughts just then, to put Tricia out of her mind.

  As if.

  The coffeepot beeped and she poured herself another cup. The day hadn’t even started, but it already felt so heavy. She looked at the photo of Ted Bundy that her mother had taped to the outside of one of the folders. Sissy had used a thick red pen to write the words: HE TOOK HER.

  If he did, the answers were there somewhere in the twisted story of the killer from down the street. She knew his story, but still she reread the pages her mother had written.

  After a period of rootless travel, Ted returned to the University of Washington and focused his studies on psychology in 1970. He’d found his niche, and his grades reflected it. It was as if there was something in those classes that pushed him to dig in deep and actually do the work. He didn’t skate on his handsome face, facile tongue. Later, in a moment of introspection, Ted would tell a confidant that he didn’t know exactly what drew him to that area of study—or what it was that sucked him into it so deeply.

  “It wasn’t as if I wanted to be a shrink or anything. I guess I just wanted to know what it was that motivated people to do whatever it was they did.”

  The friend didn’t answer back with the obvious. It was too inflammatory.

  Ted, do you think you were looking for what made you into a monster? Ted, did you ever find out what it was?

  In 1971, Ted Bundy took a job that always carried the ultimate in irony. At the time, Seattle was one of a few major U.S. cities with a suicide prevention crisis line. The Suicide Hotline, as it was known, was that number the brokenhearted and desperate called when they could think of no other way out of their misery.

  One call, two months into his tenure there, was like so many of them. It came from a young woman at her wit’s end, deep into the drama and depression that had enveloped her since a breakup with a boyfriend.

  GIRL: I think I might hurt myself. I really do.

  TED: Talk to me. I’m Ted. I care.

  GIRL: I have a bottle of sleeping pills and I just want to take them and, you know, never, ever wake up.

  TED: I’ve felt that way, too. Everyone has. What’s your name?

  GIRL: You have? But you’re working at the crisis hotline.

  TED: Everyone has their moments of despair. But this call isn’t about me. I didn’t catch your name.

  GIRL: Annette, my name is Annette.

  TED: Annette, what happened? I want to know how to help you. I don’t want you to take those pills. I want you to live through this, all right?”

  GIRL: I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I want to live.

  TED: Are you alone?

  GIRL: My mom and dad are asleep.

  TED: Where are the pills? Can you put them someplace away from where you are?

  GIRL: I don’t want to.

  TED: What happened to make you so sad, Annette?

  GIRL: My boyfriend, Brian, dropped me. Said I was “too much work” and that he didn’t want me anymore.

  TED: You don’t sound like too much work to me, Annette.

  GIRL: You’re nice.

  TED: Thank you, but this call’s about you, Annette. I think you are nice. Tell me, are you really going to hurt yourself?

  GIRL: (long pause) No, I guess not. I was just mad. I just wanted someone to talk to.

  TED: Call me anytime you are sad.

  GIRL: I’m sad a lot. I don’t know what time you work.

  TED: I’ll give you my home number.

  After the conversation was over, Ted set down the phone and swiveled his chair to face one of the other operators on the line, a pretty young woman with blond hair and light eyes.

  “Ted Bundy, I should report you for giving out your phone number to that girl,” Iris O’Neal said, nearly wagging her finger in Ted’s direction.

  Ted grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Iris. It just came out.”

  “Well, I won’t turn you in,” she said, looking over at another of the counselors, a Goody Two-shoes who walked around with a clipboard marking down everything that happened on the lines.

  “Thanks. Why not?” he asked.

  Iris smiled. “Because I know you. I know that you can’t help but empathizing with these callers. You just can’t help but do good, Ted. You’ll be a legend around here, long after you’re gone.”

  She’d thought about her way out of wherever she was from the moment she’d regained consciousness. Every conceivable scenario ran through Emma’s first groggy and confused, then sharper and more determined, mind. She considered a myriad of remedies she could pursue to subdue her captor, that is, if she could only get close enough to strike. Emma didn’t have many weapons at her disposal in the so-called apartment. There was the gooseneck lamp, of course. It was the most likely candidate. The teenager imagined how the fixture could do double duty. She could pick it up, hide it behind her back, and when the moment was right strike him over the head with it. In her mind’s eye in that scenario, her captor would fall to the floor after a single blow. She was a better hitter than Alex Rodriguez. She’d been infatuated with the ballplayer before he became a Yankee. She was sure, like A-Rod, she could swing, swing hard, over the fence. He’s out! Dead. Home run! Then, Emma believed with complete certainty, she would be able to take the cord and wrap it around her abductor’s veiny neck, cutting off his air supply until he was absolutely, positively, for sure, dead. When he was dead she felt pretty sure no one would blame her. Although he hadn’t raped her, she would say that he did—as if being held hostage God-knows-where wasn’t enough of a reason to kill him.

  She looked around the dimly lit space. The only other weapon was the bucket that she’d used as a toilet. She’d like to drown the pig in the stinking bucket, but as disgusting and fitting as that was, it wasn’t practical. Her captor emptied it every other day. He filled it with fresh bleach-water and made her lay on the mattress while he took it and brought it back. She remembered how she’d been so embarrassed that someone had seen her feces in a bucket, but that kind of modesty was over by the first or second day. When Emma Rose came to grips with the fact that she had but one chance to get out of there she vowed not to blow it.

  She just wasn’t sure when that chance would present itself.

  Emma lay s
till on the mattress listening. For a second she thought she heard the voice of Ellen De-Generes. Yes, it is Ellen! She loved Ellen’s show and the comedienne’s voice calmed her. She listened more carefully. She was pretty sure that the man who held her captive had gone out. If he was out, then maybe there was someone else in the house. Someone, somewhere, watching Ellen. Maybe whoever it was would save her.

  She screamed as loudly as she could. “Help me! Get me out of here! I’m being held prisoner by some creeper! Help me.”

  She stopped and listened. Ellen was no longer talking. The house was quiet.

  Had she misheard? Was she hallucinating?

  The space above her was soundless.

  Emma started to tear up a little, but she fought the emotion. She didn’t want to be weak. She didn’t want to succumb to her worst fears. He would rape her, probably. He would kill her, too. And whoever was watching Ellen DeGeneres didn’t give a rat’s ass about her.

  “It isn’t right,” she said, crying as softly as possible into the smelly mattress while pulling the scratchy blanket over her. “Ellen would never have let me suffer.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Sometimes memories are manufactured. Sometimes it isn’t intentional. Grace knew that from cases she worked for the Tacoma Police Department. Manufactured memories were different from so-called repressed memories. Grace’s own life history had one. She had been only a small child when it happened, but it had been told to her so many times, it seemed real. Vivid. True. On June 8, 1977. Sissy O’Hare had braided her daughter’s damp hair the night before so she could have “wavy hair.” She dressed in her prettiest pink top with brand-new cropped blue jeans. It was a special day, the beginning of summer vacation. Sunlight poured through the open curtains and a robin pecked at its reflection on the glass, an occurrence that had brought more interest than annoyance to the O’Hares.

  When the phone rang, Sissy set down the hairbrush and went to answer. Instantly, her cheerful demeanor fell like a stone tossed into a very still pond.

  “He what?” She looked over at Grace, then turned away toward the window and the robin. The rest of the words came from her amid gasps, in a rapid-fire fashion that pelted the glass windowpane.

  “No,” she said.

  And then: “What time?”

  “Did he hurt anyone?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Why is this happening?”

  “Why does God hate all of us?”

  By then her mother was crying. Sissy let the phone fall into the cradle of the receiver. Her tears were twin streams, just moving down her cheeks and dropping onto the floor.

  “Mommy,” Grace said, rushing to comfort her. “Daddy?”

  Conner was away on a business trip.

  “No. Worse than that, baby. Something terrible has happened.”

  “Mommy?”

  Sissy steadied herself, her hands finding the back of a dining chair. She bent close to her daughter and held her, and then pressed her lips to her ear.

  “Do not be afraid,” she whispered. “Ted escaped.”

  Later the “memory” would become more complete as the bits and pieces of Ted Bundy’s story emerged and filled her memory bank. Ted’s incarceration had been short-lived. He was transferred from Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, an hour away to the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, for a preliminary hearing. Ted was full-on Ted then—the Ted he wanted the world to see. He was acting as his own lawyer and in doing so was granted special—and, ultimately, foolish—privileges. He was able to shed the shackles and handcuffs that prisoners wore—items he said that were not only prejudicial, but made it impossible for him to maneuver around the second-floor law library. Moments later, the Pacific Northwest’s least favorite son jumped from the window, landing on the ground and disappearing into the mundane spring day.

  Later when she played the exchange between her and her mother, Grace escalated her vocabulary to concepts beyond her age.

  “They’ll catch him, right?” she asked when her mother told her what happened.

  Sissy had pulled herself together and looked into her daughter’s brown eyes and nodded.

  “Yes. I think so. The police know that they can’t let him be free. No one is safe. They told me they have already set up roadblocks all around Aspen. He can’t go far.”

  The next morning the Tacoma News Tribune ran a story on the front page:

  IS TED BUNDY THE REINCARNATION OF HARRY HOUDINI?

  That brought a memory, too. Sissy immediately called the newspaper and screamed at the nice girl who answered the phone, telling her that in no uncertain terms the paper was glorifying a monster and in doing so diminishing the unspeakable evil that he’d done to an untold number of women and girls.

  “If he killed your daughter,” Sissy said, almost screaming into the phone after being transferred to the city editor’s desk, “I doubt you’d be writing headlines like that!”

  The first week of summer had not been as Grace had dreamed it would be. There were no trips to Titlow Beach and the massive saltwater swimming pool there. Her mother didn’t take her to Point Defiance for the picnic that she’d promised for that first Saturday. Instead, they sat around the house staring at the phone and playing Chinese checkers for six days—six days in which her mother ratcheted up her obsession with the man she was sure had been her daughter’s killer.

  Still later, when it came on the news that Ted Bundy had been apprehended again, it had not been because of fantastic police work. It had once again been a routine traffic stop that had been the suspected serial killer’s undoing. He’d been picked up in Aspen driving a stolen car erratically with a sprained ankle. He had stolen a rifle and taken maps, food, and whatever else he could get his hands on. If he’d had a grand plan, it was a failed and ill-conceived one.

  No one knew it at the time, of course, but it wouldn’t be his last escape.

  In Seattle and Tacoma, indeed all over the Pacific Northwest, pockets of people—law enforcement and civilians—were caught up in everything Ted. Sissy had her group of parents and siblings of murdered children and they were busy plastering photographs of Tricia and Ted on bulletin boards in supermarkets and telephone poles throughout Tacoma.

  Under the black-and-white photos were six one-syllable words:

  DID YOU SEE HIM WITH HER?

  When news came that Ted’s 1968 VW bug had been recovered from the teen in Midvale, Utah, to whom he’d sold it, the O’Hares all brightened and braced themselves. Sissy considered the VW a “kind of mobile crime scene” and she was convinced that if Tricia had gone with Ted, it had been in that evil car. She was equally sure that if Tricia had gone with him, she had not gone on her own accord. She knew better than to get into a stranger’s car. When FBI lab technicians examined the car—literally every inch of it under a microscope—they managed to recover some vital evidence. Among the dust and debris of a car that had been all over the west, the lab collected a number of hairs matching two dead girls from Utah and Colorado; in addition to those samples, they found one that was certainly a match with Mandy Deirdre, the girl who got away.

  The living witness, as she became known.

  Mandy didn’t speak of what had happened often—that was one of the distinguishing markers of a real Ted victim. The wannabes, those who needed the attention, were always there in front of a reporter’s open notebook, or the camera of TV news crew. Mandy didn’t clamber to be in front of anyone. She had come through the darkness of what-if, and didn’t want to revel in it. Because of that genuine reticence, Sissy never phoned her to find out just what was going through her mind or if Ted had mentioned her daughter’s name. It seemed like too much of an intrusion. Mandy was lucky to be alive and that kind of luck didn’t need to be sullied by the curious, or even those desperate to know something. Anything.

  In early October of 1975, potential Teds were placed in a row under the harsh glare of a jailhouse lineup. Mandy, all ninety-five pounds of her, did what no o
ne had been able to do before. She fingered him as her assailant. There was no hesitation, like there often is when reality is thrown in a victim’s face. Instead, just the confidence of a young woman with the burden of stopping evil.

  “That’s the police officer who stopped me,” she said.

  Witnesses in Colorado made additional positive IDs of Ted as the stranger who’d been lurking around the high school where Candy Detrick was last seen alive.

  Ted, it seemed, was charged with kidnapping Mandy and attempted criminal assault and, as they would always do throughout his life, his parents stood by him. Johnnie and Louise came up with the fifteen thousand dollars sought by the court and he was released to await trial in Washington.

  Grace was a girl then, but she could never forget how her mother had reacted to the news that Ted had been freed on bond. That was the day they needed a new TV.

  Sissy stood up from the sofa and yelled at the TV.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice nearly a scream.

  She picked up her husband’s trophy and slammed it down on top of the walnut console. She was so angry. So hurt. She didn’t shatter the glass, but the tube flickered and the picture faded to that measly pattern that came on the channels for which there was no reception.

  It was the first time Grace had seen her mother be aggressive like that.

  “Mommy, are you okay?”

  “How could I be okay? How could any of us be okay? He’s out. He’s going to kill another girl. Mark my words.”

  Grace unplugged the TV. Just in case.

  Sissy went for her coat and an umbrella. The weather had been nasty for two weeks, sending a cold rain over the faded fall foliage.

  “Mommy, where are you going?”

  “Come with me. We’re going over to the Bundys’. I’m going to put them on notice. I don’t care what they say. I don’t even care if they call the police. In fact, I hope they do.”