prize.”
“Oh yeah,” Grace said. “I remember that. That was the worst.” Grace fast-forwarded the video to 9 PM.
“Closing time,” Paul said. “Let’s settle in for some more exciting police work.”
Grace pushed a bottle of water toward her partner and he sucked it down like it was oxygen.
“Thanks. Must have eaten a pound of salt today.”
“Stay away from the chips,” she said. “You’ll live longer.”
“You my mother now?”
“No,” she said. “Not your wife, either. You need to pull yourself together. You shouldn’t be letting yourself go.” She looked over at his gut, which hung over his belt buckle like a sagging car bumper.
Paul ignored her gaze.
“Sylvia said that they close at nine,” she said, “but it takes the crew about forty minutes or so to clean up.”
“Right,” Paul said, getting up to dim the lights, his eyes on the photos of the missing Tacoma girls. “Movie time.”
The first few minutes were run-of-the-mill parking lot scenes. Busier than either detective might have guessed, but considering that the mall closed around that same time it should not have been much of a mystery.
“God, how many people take the bus these days?” Paul asked, his glasses on and his eyes scrutinizing the plasma screen set up for PowerPoint presentations and the projection of evidence photos. “I’ve never seen so many people in uniform.”
He was indicating all of the food service workers, dressed like they’d come from behind the Epcot attraction showcasing the world’s cuisines.
They sat in silence for a few minutes as the cars left, the bus pulled away, and there was no sign of Emma Rose.
“Did we miss her?” Paul asked.
Grace noted the time. 9:45.
“Maybe. Let’s give it another minute.”
Just as she was about to press the rewind button, Emma Rose came into view. Even in the grainy eye of the camera, one could see that she was a pretty girl. Long dark hair, balanced facial features, a lithe figure.
“She’s making a beeline for the bus stop,” Paul said.
“Wait a sec,” Grace said, now moving closer to the screen.
Emma Rose stopped and turned. She was saying something to someone out of view of the camera.
“She doesn’t look agitated.”
“Someone she knows?” Paul asked.
“Oliver?”
He nodded.
A second later Emma walked out of the reach of the camera’s unblinking eye.
CHAPTER 23
No one who lived in the Northwest during 1974’s summer of terror could ever forget the parade of missing girls whose photographs appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers in Washington. Before that summer, the people of Washington had assumed that killers did their evil for a purpose. To get money? To cover up another crime? Before that time, people had thought that victims carried some of the blame for their demise. They’d used drugs. They were prostitutes. The idea that a white college or high school girl could be stalked and murdered was beyond the comprehension of really anyone outside a psychology classroom or a police detective’s office.
The first of the murdered girls had disappeared from her apartment in Seattle. She was young, pretty. She had long hair parted in the middle. While she was the first of the known victims, at least seven more followed.
Daughters and sisters, just like Tricia, disappeared. Their screams were never heard. One by one. Girl by girl. Gone.
It was a long drive, better than an hour from Tacoma to Lake Sammamish State Park near Issaquah. Long after Ted Bundy was named as the suspect for the string of murders throughout the western United States, Sissy drove Grace out there. It was a field trip of sorts-the kind of excursion that they embarked on more often than those more typical of mother and daughters. Sure, they’d gone to movies together. They went ice skating at Sprinker in Spanaway. They even went to a mother/ daughter fashion show at the PLU campus. Many of their trips together, however, held a more specific purpose.
Sissy had to know what happened to Tricia. Wondering and waiting would never suffice.
They parked in the lot, their car facing the blue waters of the lake that had been the site of Ted’s most notorious and brazen kills. He’d abducted two young women, one after another, from the park in the middle of a hot July day in 1974.
Sissy led her daughter to a picnic table near the restrooms. A couple of kids played horseshoes a few yards away. A teenage boy yelled at his mother for telling him what to do. A radio played an old Beatles song. The weather wasn’t particularly great that day, but it didn’t matter to Sissy. She hadn’t brought Grace there for that kind of an outing.
“I came here with your father after we heard the news about Ted being arrested. I didn’t know where your sister was,” she said, looking up at the Cascade foothills behind them, “but I felt like we should honor the girls who came from here.”
Grace didn’t say anything. Her mother didn’t need her to respond. It was more about Sissy getting out the words and just letting them kick around in the wind until she was finished. It wasn’t that she didn’t value Grace’s input; it was that the endless loop of her obsession had no place for another person. There was no pause. Just a stream.
“He told the girls that he needed help. And they helped him. They had been raised by loving and kind parents. It was their kindness that attracted him to them. I know that. I know that as much as I’ve ever known anything. Kindness can be a weakness, Grace. Please listen to me. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want you to be harsh, uncaring. Not at all. I don’t want you to be indifferent to the needs of others. I just don’t want you to put anyone else above yourself.”
Grace nodded.
“Okay, I guess I understand,” she said.
When the words slipped from her lips they felt hollow. Deep down she knew that her mom did want her to put someone else above herself. Tricia. Her whole life was about her sister.
Sissy had brought a bag of stale bread and they walked to the shore where a small flock of mallards and one big white duck congregated. Sissy handed Grace a piece of bread.
“Break off small bits. You don’t want to choke them.” She stopped a moment and looked out at a water-skier zipping by a couple hundred yards away.
Grace met her mother’s gaze and she did what she’d been doing too much of lately-she read into it what her mom might really be thinking.
Did Ted choke Tricia?
Were the girls who disappeared from the park in 1974 aware of their fate or were they knocked unconscious?
Did they enjoy the summer sun on their faces like the water-skier that day?
Did they know their families had never, would never, forget them?
When Grace O’Hare was fourteen, her parents took her on a car trip to Utah. Coming from Washington State, where the landscape was dipped in green and splattered in blue, Utah’s vast vistas of orange, red, and salmon seemed completely otherworldly. The landscape itself suggested Mars. They’d played road games along the way-all but Slug Bug, because of the VW’s connection to Bundy. The stayed in motels with swimming pools, and one in Sandy that had a Jacuzzi-Grace’s first time in a tub of hot oscillating water.
