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.
№ 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 Peggy 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.
