“We need to get one of these,” she told her mother.
“If we don’t get to Granger tomorrow, we’ll all be in hot water,” her father said, with a laugh at his own pun.
Grace climbed out of the water and took one, then two of the thin white towels supplied by the Best Western. “What’s in Granger?”
“Meeting an old friend,” Sissy said.
“What old friend? Someone I know, too?”
Grace’s dad got up and went toward the gate around the pool and Jacuzzi.
“Someone who feels as we do about Ted, honey,” Sissy said.
Grace didn’t ask anything more. In fact, she felt deflated. The tone in her mother’s voice was familiar. It was if her vocal cords tightened and airflow was restricted. She spoke through lips held tautly over her teeth. Grace knew then that there would be no time in their lives in which her parents’ obsession would take a backseat to anything else. They were in a pinball game and every bumper they touched was the serial killer from Tacoma.
There was no getting away from Ted.
In August of 1975, after he’d murdered in the Pacific Northwest and moved on to kill in Colorado and Utah, Ted was arrested for the first time. It was the first instance that anyone back home in Seattle and Tacoma knew that the handsome stranger who called himself Ted was, in fact, named Ted. He drove a VW bug, too. That also fit what witnesses had told investigators that summer day at Lake Sammamish when two had disappeared. “Ted” had had his arm in a sling and asked several young women to help him retrieve his small sailboat from his car. One girl had refused because she’d seen that there was no boat and she didn’t feel comfortable getting in his car to “drive up to his parents’ house” to retrieve it. Two girls, whose only crime was the compassion they showed a man who asked for help, had agreed.
Their bodies were found on a mountain slope only four miles from the last place they’d been seen alive.
The detective who caught Ted in Granger had only done so after Ted refused to stop for a traffic violation.
Sissy started corresponding with Caswell Moriarty in 1977. She didn’t like to spend money on long-distance calls, but she never failed in having a book of stamps at the ready. She’d written to others over the years, too, but this man was a true believer in her cause. She needed that. She needed her husband and daughter to see it, too.
“See, I’m not the only one who knows that Ted killed Tricia,” she said more than one time when she needed to rally the flagging troops.
Caswell, or Cass, as his friends called him, was a pint-sized man with a walrus moustache and a swirl of molasses-colored hair. He’d taken medical retirement from the Utah Highway Patrol after blowing out his kneecap in pursuit of a jail escapee.
“The double irony here,” he said when letting the O’Hares inside his tidy house on the edge of Granger, “was that scumbag’s name was Ed Dundee. Welcome to my life.”
While her parents sat in the living room, Grace played with Cass’s dog, a small shivery creature named Taco.
“I took the file from the office. Made you a copy,” Cass said. “Figured you’d get more use out of it now than the authorities here. Florida’s got dibs on him. The SOB couldn’t have picked a better state to kill in, if you want the ultimate justice, that is.”
Sissy nodded, her eyes riveted to the eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph of the objects Cass had found in the car.
“What did he say that ski mask was all about?” Sissy asked.
Cass shrugged and rolled his eyes upward. “He was a big-time skier, that’s what. Funny thing, no skis or poles in the car.”
They all looked down at the list, and the photograph that depicted each item in Ted’s arsenal.
“Handcuffs? What about those?” Grace’s father asked. Conner usually let Sissy do the talking, like she was the lead investigator and he was merely there to keep the ball rolling in the event that there was a slack moment.
“Dumpster diving. Yeah, that was his brilliant answer on that one. You know everyone talks about how smart he is, I’m not so convinced. I mean, think about it, who tosses handcuffs into the trash? Those things cost beaucoup bucks.”
And of course the next items, those were the ones that would send anyone with a scintilla of compassion into a panic at the thought of how they’d been used-a crowbar and an icepick.
“His depravity knew no bounds,” Sissy said. “I used to pray that he just strangled Tricia and killed her that way. I hoped that she could stare into his eyes and let him know that she was good, and he was a soulless piece of garbage. He didn’t do that, did he, Cass?”
Cass didn’t answer right away. He was one of the world’s foremost experts on Bundy and his crimes. Others proclaimed that designation, even kind of fought for it, as if there were some kind of honor in knowing evil better than anyone else. But he knew. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ted’s violence was never measured slowly. It was always a deluge.
“Sissy,” he said, “you’ve always known the answer. Don’t think about that. Don’t let what he did to your little girl live on like that. She’s at peace. It doesn’t matter how she got there.”
“It does to me,” Grace said, putting Taco down and stepping toward her mother and father. “I would like him to suffer more than my sister did. In order to do that, we have to find out what it was that he did to her.”
Cass nodded. “I understand, Grace. I really do. But there is no way someone without a conscience can be made to suffer. You have to be among the human race to feel, and Ted Bundy was one of those aberrations that come along every hundred thousand births. Maybe a million. He looked human, I’ll give him that. I’ll give him that some of the ladies thought he was easy on the eyes. He acted like he was. But really, it was an act. He was mimicking what others do.”
“Honey,” Sissy said, looking at her daughter, “I love you. I know that you understand.”
Sissy squeezed Grace’s hand and looked over at her husband.
It was a proud, proud moment.
CHAPTER 24
“ You’ve found Emma, haven’t you? She’s dead, isn’t she? My baby’s dead!”
Grace Alexander took a step toward the door that had swung open before she could even knock. She put her hand up and shook her head.
“No. No, Ms. Rose, we haven’t found her.”
“I saw the paper today,” she said, holding up a copy of the News Tribune, its headline running across the top of the page:
SECOND GIRL FOUND BY PUYALLUP RIVER
“It isn’t Emma,” Grace said. “I promise.”
A look of relief came over Diana Rose. She opened the door wider, and let the detectives inside. She indicated a pair of chairs across from a black sofa draped with an orange afghan-a look that gave the North End Craftsman home a distinct Halloween vibe. On the table next to the sofa was a photograph of Emma and her sister, Tracy. The two of them posed beaming in a mountain meadow-probably Mount Rainier, Grace guessed noticing the ocean wave of purple lupine behind them. It was a cruel reminder of what had already been stolen from that particular family.
And what might have been taken when Emma Rose vanished from the Starbucks at the Lakewood Towne Center.
Tracy and her father had been killed in a car accident coming off the Nalley Valley viaduct four summers before.
Grace never could rationalize why some families were a lightning rod for tragedy. It wasn’t that people were cursed with bad luck. She didn’t think that, no, not at all. And yet, there was something about the way cosmic
