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.
You will put up any kind of piece of garbage that you want to and then try to justify it with some quick cutaways to people who really didn’t know me at all. That’s mostly everyone. I just wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to be part of the in crowd. I didn’t think that there really was an in crowd at that second-rate high school anyway. I had more going for me. So, yeah, I understand that you will do what you do. I did the minimum to just get through high school. Probably, Dan [the producer], you were a lot like me. Most people are. I know you are asking me to be introspective and I guess there is one thing that I could give you in that regards. I honestly didn’t see the point in having any of those people as friends. Or why I’d even want to? peace, Ted
It was after two in the morning, when Grace’s phone rang on the bedside table of the Alexanders’ Salmon Beach house. Shane stirred, but didn’t awaken completely. Among the many things they had in common, were nighttime calls from dispatchers, special agents in charge, partners, anyone who carried a badge and worked a case. At least a few times a month either’s phone would ring at this hour. This time it was her turn. Grace dropped her feet into her perfectly positioned slippers and grabbed the pink terry robe she left slung over a chair and started for the hallway.
It was Paul.
“What is it?” she asked, in a whisper.
“We found Emma or Kelsey, or maybe someone else.”
Grace had expected to hear this, but even as she did, it sickened her.
“Where?” she asked.
Some dogs barked; wherever he was calling from, the canine unit was there.
“The other side of the river,” Paul said. “Where that guy was fishing.”
“What?”
“Right. I’m there now. You want to come down.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Be there in twenty.”
“Make it twenty-five. Stop for coffee. Could use some out here. Colder than crap.”
The river’s surface was striated and black, like wide-wale corduroy stretched between the banks on either side. Nine police and sheriffs’ units, dogs, and personnel were congregated there. Paul’s ex-wife, Lynnette Bateman, was there, too. Watching the two interact was usually fun, but it wasn’t going to be just then. Not with a dead teenager on the edges of the Puyallup.
“Over there,” Sergeant Lynnette Bateman said. “Detective Bateman is with the medical examiner.”
Grace nodded and went toward the lights that pierced the starry sky like a supermarket’s grand opening.
Paul thanked her for the coffee and took a swallow before he spoke. “Pretty sure it’s Kelsey,” he said. “Tech says left hand is missing.”
“Just the left hand?”
He nodded and drank some more.
“She wasn’t completely dismembered like Lisa?”
“Guess not.”
“What else?”
“They think she might have been frozen. She’s in pretty good condition. You know, considering how long she’s been dead. No decomp. The bastard.”
“So you think it’s a man who did this?” Grace said.
Paul pulled off the top of his Styrofoam cup so he could guzzle the coffee more quickly. He was a man in dire need. “You got me,” he said. “No more PC. Only a seriously messed-up maniac of a dude would do this to a little girl.”
Grace nodded. “Who found her?”
“Transient over there,” he said, raising a shoulder to indicate a figure with short dark hair sitting on the bumper of a cruiser.
“Talk to him?” she asked.
Paul allowed a smile to come to his face. “It’s a she.”
“Right.”
“She said she was looking for cans for recycling along the river and, well, found something I doubt she’ll ever forget. I know I won’t.”
“Techs process her?”
“Yeah. She had this on her.” He held up a T-shirt inside a plastic bag.
Grace pressed her fingertips to the plastic to read what was printed on it.
Save the Sound
“She said she found it near the body, but not on it. She said she actually found it first, before the body.”
“Where?”
“Almost on the road.” Paul suddenly turned his attention to the coroner’s assistant, who was preparing a gurney and a body bag to transport Kelsey’s remains to the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy. “Hold on! My partner needs to see the vic.”
The men backed off and Grace followed Paul over to where the body was lying.
It was Kelsey Caldwell, all right. No need for forensics to verify it, though the techs would do just that during the autopsy. Her eyes were open staring up at the stars; her long dark hair shimmered as if she’d been placed there after a salon blow dry. And while she was nude, her most intimate parts had been covered by bunches of grass.
“The transient did that,” Paul said, looking back over at the woman sitting on the cruiser’s bumper. “She said she didn’t think it was right to leave that girl naked like that.”
The scene had been compromised, which was frustrating, but Grace understood the sentiments, too. Nothing about what had happened to the seventeen-year-old was right at all.
“Somebody’s going to have to call the father,” she said. “This will be in the papers faster than you guzzled that coffee.”
CHAPTER 21
Emma Rose was no longer consumed by fear. She was beyond that. She hadn’t been raped. And as far as she knew she hadn’t been murdered. It was possible that she had been murdered, of course, and that she’d done something so terrible that she’d been assigned to a space in purgatory. She dismissed that after the first two hours of her captivity. She was not exactly sure how long she’d been held in that dark place, a mattress on the floor, a bucket to use for her toilet. Her captor had provided copies of People magazine, a reading light, and a green, unbearably scratchy army blanket. She’d been fed a cheese sandwich-American cheese, which she thought was completely disgusting-and Sam’s Club diet cola.
It surprised her that she even thought that the American cheese was terrible, considering that it really was the least of her most pressing concerns. She was also surprised that she’d gotten used to the bucket so soon. Since there was no window, she had no idea what day it was, how many days had passed.
And then there was the matter of her captor. He came to her with only a single whispered utterance- “Stay back or I’ll fill your apartment with poisonous gas and you’ll be dead in five seconds.”
Apartment? That hole? An apartment?
Calling it that scared Emma a little. If that was his idea of an apartment, he was even more whacked than she might have thought. Besides being a girl snatcher. And if he was calling it an apartment, did that mean she was going to be held there forever?
“Did you contact my mom?”
