jagged-looking computer game. That was cool. It was about the cool factor and the fame that came with being the best, being better than his father, a man he had never even met, but one he’d admired and fantasized about from the time his mother told him the truth. He’d been cheated a little and he knew it. Other serial killers had unwittingly or purposefully involved their family members. When he read about Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s proclivity for bringing his little boy while hunting prostitutes along the SeaTac strip, he felt a pang of jealousy. He’d never had that time with his dad.
That had been taken from him when he was but a child and his father was strapped into Florida’s Old Sparky. The flip was switched. Human flesh burned and his dad was electrocuted to death. That moment, as much as anything, set things in motion. Not right away, of course. He was a sleeper cell and it was that night on the Pacific Lutheran University campus, he was awakened.
The dark-haired girl with the pretty eyes had done that. She was a shot of adrenaline. She was just like the others.
The day after Kelsey Caldwell’s father called the Thurston County detective with the suspicion that his daughter’s case might have a connection to Lisa Lancaster’s disappearance, detectives from the Tacoma Police Department and the Pierce and Thurston County Sheriff’s Offices conferenced by phone. Grace and Paul were among those on the call, a brief one to make sure that all were aware of the purported similarities in the two cases. After a number of serial cases had gone undetected in the Northwest for a number of years, no law enforcement professionals wanted the blood of future victims on their hands. Most of the connecting of dots among the counties along Puget Sound yielded nothing more than increased awareness. The chances that a true serial was at work were slim to none.
Serial killers, or rather the proliferation of them, was a kind of Hollywood invention. There just weren’t that many. And yet, in reality, the gloomy Pacific Northwest had had more than its share of famous cases. To many crime aficionados, the Northwest was serial-killer central. Seemingly mild-mannered Spokane resident and military man Robert Lee Yates had killed sixteen women, all prostitutes, in a two-year string that started in 1996. Gary Leon Ridgway was granddaddy of them all, at least in terms of confirmed victim count. The dull-witted truck painter, like Yates, also hunted and murdered prostitutes-a common prey among those who kill for sport. While the Seattle man was eventually convicted of killing forty-nine, he confessed to almost a hundred victims in total. There was no real diabolical brilliance displayed by Yates or Ridgway, yet they managed to elude capture for a number of years because of the victims they selected, girls and women on the fringes trying to survive by selling the only thing they felt they could offer-their bodies.
Of course, the most infamous of all serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, and possibly in the entire world, was Tacoma’s own dark son, Theodore Robert Bundy. While most serial killers were stuck with the perpetual and requisite use of their entire formal names, Tacoma’s killer was simply known as Ted.
Grace’s connection to Ted was deep and personal, and until her sister’s case was resolved, she knew it always would be.
The Tacoma detective shut out the world around her and put her laser-like focus on the electronic case files of the two missing girls on her computer screen. Lisa’s had been a missing persons case, initiated by Detective Goodman. It also included updates from the interviews she and Paul conducted with her mother and best friend. Next, she turned her attention to Kelsey’s file, a more detailed accounting of the seventeen-year-old’s sudden absence from the planet. While Grace could see similarities in their physical descriptions-serial killers frequently stalk a specific type-there was something else that jumped out at her. Something she was sure was merely a coincidence.
The circumstances of the girls’ abductions were more than familiar. They mirrored what Ted Bundy had done when he took a Washington girl and a girl from Colorado.
Grace put it out of her mind.
Or rather she tried to.
Grace felt that saying much more about it would only serve to bolster her reputation for being obsessed with Ted Bundy. One time when she was in the bathroom, she’d heard a couple of other women, a records clerk and a lab assistant, talking about her.
“I think she’s kind of weird,” the records clerk said.
“I don’t know,” the lab assistant said. “I guess she seems nice enough.”
“I read her file. You want to know what’s in it?”
“You aren’t supposed to disclose that stuff.”
“We work here. It’s all right for us to share. We’re not supposed to tell anyone outside. It’s okay to talk about stuff here because we’re all, you know, working together.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Really kind of interesting.”
“Okay. I guess you can tell me,” the lab assistant said, lowering her voice.
“Now you’re making me feel bad.”
A long, seemingly, exasperated pause followed before the lab assistant gave up. “Just tell me.”
“Fine,” said the records clerk. “Says that she had to be evaluated by the shrink twice because of her sister’s disappearance. They’ve cleared her. No reprimands. But they told her to stay out of the Ted Bundy files. I read her files. Interesting and disgusting stuff. Anyway, there is a lot of crap in there about how her mom, Sissy O’Hare, kept pestering our guys here back then. She was sure that her daughter was a Ted victim. Never proved it. Maybe she was. Grace was digging around trying to see if they missed any clues.”
“I guess I could understand why she’d do that. You know, why she’d want to know.”
“Don’t you think it’s creepy?” the records clerk said.
“Probably. But really, you shouldn’t look in her personnel files.”
“I have clearance. I’m very responsible. I’ve never told anyone what I’ve seen. I would never, ever breach my duty to be confidential.”
Grace waited for the women to leave. She didn’t report them. To do so, she’d felt, would only make matters worse. She believed her background was an asset, one that made her a more effective investigator and victim interviewer. She could connect with anyone who’d felt his brand of incompressible and evil influence in the trajectory of their lives.
After reading the Lancaster and Caldwell files, she needed a moment.
“Paul,” she said standing behind him as he finished a phone call in his cubicle adjacent to hers.
“What’s up?”
“I’m heading out early. Hold down the fort, will you?”
Paul nodded. He’d seen that look before.
“Anything new on the bones?” he asked.
Grace pulled her coat from the hook next to her chair and shook her head.
“Not yet,” she said, heading out the door. “Might take a while. If anything, I’m patient.”
PART TWO
“We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”
