The Fear Collector Read online

  “Not like this is a fresh kill and there’s any evidence to be had,” he said.

  “Are you an idiot or is your brain running low on fuel because you skipped a meal?” Grace asked. “We don’t wait for the weather when we find a body.”

  The tech turned defensive. “You don’t have to get all high and mighty with me. I’m just saying the obvious. Bones that old probably belong to an Indian or something.”

  Grace held her tongue. She could have reminded him that “Native American” was the preferred term, but there was no point in coming off as a bitch.

  Or high and mighty, as the twerp put it.

  By the end of the day, the bones recovered—nine of them—were tagged and bundled in a plastic lidded box of the same kind many home owners use to store their Christmas decorations. The femur had been the largest bone; ribs and fragments of a pelvis were also recovered from the beach. Techs moved up to the top of the cliff, at Grace’s request.

  “No telling what happened,” she said, “but if those bones are from a homicide victim I’d say it was a good bet that the body was buried up there.”

  The cliff had sloughed off a van-sized chunk of earth.

  Paul Bateman nodded.

  “We don’t even know if the remains are human, you know. And don’t you go thinking that it’s her.”

  Grace nodded. Her partner knew her so well.

  “Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” she lied.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Salmon Beach neighborhood of Tacoma was all about the eclectic. The different drum. The doing your own thing. The charm of the neighborhood just north of Point Defiance had long been its hippie and hipness factor. Some of the houses had been brought in by barge, rejects that found new lives and the astounding view that came with being on the beach. Most, however, had been built there on stilts over the water as fishing cabins. It was a tiny village of some eighty homes with wind socks and birdfeeders, and people with strong hearts. They needed them. No cars could make their way down the sharp cliff to anyone’s front door. It was a couple hundred steps down, and more important, when there was something to carry up, a couple hundred steps to get to the top.

  Grace and Shane Alexander weren’t at all like the couples on either side of their 1940s house perched on pilings. She was a Tacoma Police detective, he an FBI agent working out of the Seattle field office. Their lives were certainly law and order, but they were very much a live-and-let-live couple. If they smelled a little pot smoke from the older couple with the tie-dyed curtains a few doors down, they never said a word about it.

  Their house, a cabin really, was only twelve hundred square feet. Cozy or cramped? That always depended on the mood of its occupants. When they disagreed—which was more than occasionally—no house, not even Aaron Spelling’s former mansion in Hollywood, would be large enough for either to find solace in a quiet corner.

  The discovery of Samantha Maxwell’s body and the sad call she and her partner had made to the Maxwell home in nearby Spanaway had left Grace edgy. Telling a mother the worst possible news always did. And yet as bad as that was, Shane knew what was really percolating around his wife’s mind.

  “When will the lab have the results back on the bones?” he asked, finishing a beer and slipping past his wife for another in the refrigerator. He opened the freezer and retrieved a second ice-cold pilsner glass, a habit he’d had since college days at the University of Washington.

  Grace, who had been mincing some chives snipped from a deck planter for Dungeness crab cakes she was making, looked up, but only for a second.

  “A few days,” she said. “They’ll be in Olympia tomorrow.”

  The state crime lab was located in Olympia, a half hour’s drive from Tacoma.

  “Are you doing all right?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder and stopping her from her task.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Slim to none,” he said.

  Grace stopped a beat. “Excuse me?”

  He took a drink and swallowed. “Chances are the bones aren’t hers.”

  Grace scraped the chives from a wooden cutting board into the bowl of luscious pink and white crabmeat.

  “I know,” she said.

  He looked at her with those eyes, the eyes that could tap in to her soul like no others.

  “Do you really know that?” he asked, taking that first foamy sip from the second beer.

  “Yeah,” Grace said, looking up as the news came on. “Hang on.” She reached for the remote and turned up the sound on the wall-mounted TV over a living room fireplace that was as fake as a reality show. Fireplaces were not a good idea in a place as hard to get to as Salmon Beach. Several beach homes had burned to the ground over the years because the fire department couldn’t reach them in time.

  “Tonight the coroner identified the body of Samantha Maxwell, missing from Point Defiance. While there has not been an official ruling, sources tell KING-5 News that the death will likely be ruled as a swimming accident.”

  Behind the reporter was a shot of Grace and the other police at the scene.

  “Hey, you’re on TV,” Shane said.

  Grace held her hand up. “Shh! I need to hear this.”

  “While investigators were at the beach,” the reporter said in the kind of exaggerated earnestness that never seemed even remotely genuine, “they made the discovery of human remains, unrelated to drowning victim Maxwell.”

  Colette Robinson, the woman jilted by her husband for a dog sitter, appeared on the screen.

  “I saw the dead girl first,” she said, her eyes wandering from the camera lens to the interviewer. “Poor thing. I’ve seen her picture on TV. Beautiful. So, so tragic. I never saw the bones, but I watched the police detectives collect them.”

  The reporter finished the short segment by saying that “the bones are of unknown age and origin. They might not even be human.”

  Grace turned on the stove and poured some olive oil from a ceramic decanter.

  “Have you talked to your mother about it?” he asked.

  “Of course I did. She had a right to know before it came on TV, Shane.”

  Shane took another drink. “You shouldn’t get her hopes up.”

  The skillet smoked. Grace reached for it and in doing so, knocked over the oil.

  “Damn! Look what you made me do!” she said, going for the dishcloth that hung on the oven door’s handle.

  Shane took the skillet off the heat to let it cool a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he knew he really hadn’t done anything wrong. “I just want to be a help to you and your mom. I’m on your side.”

  “What side is that?” she asked, immediately wishing that her tone had been absent of any impatience or sarcasm.

  To his credit, Shane ignored it.

  “The side of truth and peace,” he said.

  * * *

  As she looked across the table at Shane that night, Grace couldn’t help but remember that day she’d first laid eyes on him. It had been years ago, but not long enough to be a distant memory. Shane was on leave from the FBI at the time, promoting his book, Birth of a Serial Killer, a compendium of cases he’d worked on at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Shane wasn’t a “profiler,” at least he didn’t like to use the label. He felt that the status that came with that particular moniker was beyond the true grasp of those working in the field trying their best to catch a killer. He considered himself “more of a criminal genealogist” than a profiler.

  To understand what makes a serial killer, he’d written in the introduction to his book, law enforcement and other interested parties need to dig in to the killer’s family tree. No one becomes the ultimate evil merely because they were born bad; they become evil because it is almost a part of their DNA.

  As he talked to a sizable group in the auditorium on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University the night he met his future wife, Special Agent Alexander showed slides of the crimes that he’d worked in his relatively yo
ung and exulted career at the FBI.

  “Toni Caswell, nineteen, was the first victim of the Naperville Strangler, Ronald Chase Mitchell,” he said, his voice projecting low and deep in the darkness of the auditorium. “The nineteen-year-old college student was not the first victim to be discovered, but actually the fourth.” He paused, not for dramatic emphasis, as Grace would later learn, but because of the devastating guilt that came with his next words, an admission of sorts.

  “Had her body been found earlier,” Shane said, pausing to click to the next image, one of a young woman with a halo of blond hair and piercing green eyes, “I think that Cassandra Kincaid would likely not have been killed.”

  A hand shot up.

  It belonged to a young Tacoma Police detective named Grace O’Hare. It was the first time she’d spoken to the man who she had considered an idol, then later, her husband.

  “Yes, in the front row,” Shane said, his blue eyes squinting a little in the dark.

  Grace nodded, and a woman with a microphone came toward her.

  “Yes, Special Agent, I still don’t understand why—with all of the vast resources at the bureau—that you were unable to ascertain what became obvious years later, that Toni was Ronald Chase Mitchell’s girlfriend and that all the victims after her were dead ringers for her?”

  Shane Alexander nodded a little. He’d heard that question before.

  “Look,” he said, his tone even and not the least bit defensive, “we are really learning the truth of what’s behind the mask. What is obvious after the fact is sometimes painfully so.”

  The comment was a none-too-subtle reference to the New York Times profile that had led to his book deal.

  “I guess,” Grace said, holding on to the microphone. The young woman next to her, whose job it was to pass it to the next person, made an irritated face. “What you’re saying is that as much as we know about sociopathic personality disorder, we really don’t know enough to actually stop them from killing.”

  Shane stepped closer to get a better look at her. She wasn’t going to back down. He knew he hadn’t seen the last of her, and in that minute, that was just fine.

  “No, I guess we don’t,” he said, as politely as possible. He turned around and indicated a young man in the second row. “Question?”

  After the lights went up, Grace found her place at the end of the line for the book signing. She let several others go ahead of her, even putting up with the crime groupies and their over-the-top gushing about the agent’s work at the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

  One young woman, a reasonably attractive redhead who had a too-heavy hand with her eyeliner and slashes of blush that looked like they’d been applied with a stencil, served up the line of the night.

  “That analysis would be above my pay grade,” he said.

  “I don’t know which is sexier,” she cooed, “serial killers or the hotties who catch them.”

  Grace watched the special agent deal with the crime groupie. He smiled and signed her book.

  After she departed, clutching a book that she’d likely fall asleep while reading, he looked up at Grace.

  “I don’t know what is more repulsive, serial killers or the groupies they attract,” he said.

  “Your job puts you in danger a lot. I guess that’s sexy to some,” she said.

  “We’re well trained,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean the FBI. I meant your job as an author and lecturer. That’s the scary one.”

  He laughed. “I’m Shane Alexander,” he said, stating the obvious, but doing so to break the ice and get her to say her name—without being too forward.

  Grace nodded. “I know. I read your book.”

  “And you are?”

  She looked at him with those eyes that could never tell a lie. “Grace O’Hare. My sister, Tricia, was one of Ted Bundy’s victims. At least we think so.”

  “You want to talk?”

  Grace, back in the moment, offered Shane the last crab cake. The sun was down and the water had turned from golden to black.

  “You made ’em, you have the last one,” he said, patting his slightly expanding midsection.

  “You could burn off the calories by going up to my car. I left my book up there.”

  “You need to get an e-reader, Grace. We don’t have the storage for any more books around here anyway.”

  He was right about that. The north wall of their small house was floor-to-ceiling books, most of them nonfiction crime, though there was the occasional serial-killer thriller—more for a diversion from the reality of the dark professions they’d both chosen.

  Grace had always been interested in crime, murder especially.

  “I think it’s in my blood,” she’d told Shane when they first met.

  “Me too, but not because of personal connection. Just a deep need to be close enough to the bad stuff to be able to stop the bad guys from doing whatever it is they’re doing again.”

  “I understand,” she’d said. “For me, for my family, murder has always been personal.”

  Some saw their strange alliance as a linkage between two individuals who were obsessed with crime. What those people missed was that they needed each other. He loved and understood her.

  She loved him with all her heart, but she also knew that he could help her.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was dusk when Lisa Lancaster looked at the newspaper vending box. The headlines of the day’s News Tribune touted a state legislator’s brilliant/bogus idea to sell the naming rights of the Narrows Bridge to ease a disastrous state budget shortfall. She wondered why Tacoma was so provincial. Why Washington was so backwards. New Yorkers would never think to sell the naming rights to the Empire State Building. No one would ever give voice to such a ridiculous scheme.

  While Lisa got most of her news from Internet sites like Gawker and TMZ, she did crouch down to read a little of a news story that caught her interest in that kind of ghoulish way that some stories do.

  HUMAN BONES FOUND: WHO IS JANE DOE AND HOW DID SHE DIE?

  The article detailed the discovery of the bones and how the Tacoma Police Department was looking into a number of missing persons cases involving young women from as far back as the 1950s.

  Lisa, a willowy brunette with shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, stopped reading because the idea of an old body grossed her out. She turned her thoughts inward as she stood outside the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do.

  With her hair.

  Her major.

  Her life.

  Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had to do with the wide breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in student loans.

  And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

  Lisa roulette dialed until someone picked up. Her best friend of the moment, Naomi, took the call and promptly used up half of her “bonus” minutes talking about her boyfriend and how selfish he was.

  “Like he acts like I’m supposed run right over to his parents’ garage whenever he’s horny,” she said. “I told him if he’s looking for a hookup then he should go on Craigslist like every other loser.”

  As she listened, Lisa watched a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.

  Lisa turned away. “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

  “That campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

  “Oxy-what?” N
aomi asked.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

  “Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good,” she said.

  “Mine, neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents, too.”

  The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

  “God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”

  “Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

  Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.

  “Whatever,” she said, “like I wasn’t the president of that dumb club. I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm relax a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

  “You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

  “Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

  Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

  The young man fell to the pavement. One of the crutches was just out of reach.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Lisa asked.

  He looked up with an embarrassed half-smile.

  “No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”

  Lisa stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he’d thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.