He nodded. “Yeah. I did. I told him, and he and Emma talked about it. She said she’d keep her mouth shut if he did the right thing. You know, if he had it cleaned up right away.”
“What was his reaction?”
“At first he was really mad at her, at me. Then he calmed down. He said he’d take care of it. He’d cleaned up a Superfund site. He could clean up this mess, too.”
The detectives talked to Alex a while longer, pinning down the information to make sure that had everything right. As they started up the stairs, Paul remarked about the double doors.
“Looks like that’s bolted up better than Fort Knox,” he said.
“Wine cellar. Dad has some mega expensive wines in there. And if you’re thinking he doesn’t trust me, you’d be right. Dad doesn’t trust anyone.”
Grace asked the million-dollar question. “Do you think he had anything to do with Emma’s disappearance?”
Alex got real quiet. “I don’t think so. He saw her that night. But he told me that after they talked in the parking lot she left for the bus. She was alive.”
Grace waited until the car was moving before she spoke.
“Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Maybe Emma’s not a victim of the same killer as Kelsey and Lisa.”
Paul didn’t disagree. “I don’t like Morton for the serial killer type.”
“Right,” she said, putting the car in gear and heading up the street. “He’s almost too rotten to be a serial killer.” It was a half joke, but there was a little truth to it. Serial killers, in general, spiral out of control. They are unable to hold down jobs, unable to maintain relationships. They are killing machines and unable to focus on much more than that. The idea of the serial killer as the benign neighbor next door was more an invention of Hollywood. Most were frazzled and preoccupied.
Palmer Morton was focused like a laser beam on his business. He didn’t have time to run around killing young girls.
He might have, however, had time to kill just one.
“What if he’d met her at Starbucks after work? Maybe she threatened to tell and he abducted her right then? Killed her to shut her up. A scandal over The Pointe would destroy plans for his development,” Paul said.
Grace looked down at her phone and read a text. “It could shut him down for years,” she said.
Paul nodded and looked out the window.
“Forever,” he said.
They passed a sign for Morton’s condo project as they drove back to the police department.
GET THE POINT E. KILLER VIEWS.
“That’s pretty ironic,” Paul said tapping on the glass. Grace’s mind was reeling. And it wasn’t about The Pointe or the interview they’d just conducted. It was from the text message she’d just received. She was going to see Ted Bundy’s old girlfriend.
“No kidding,” she said to Paul.
“Have you been down there?”
“No,” she said.
“Some big plans they have.”
The Pointe at Ruston Way was an enormous complex with condominiums, townhouses, and apartments flanking edges of the sparkling blue waters of Commencement Bay. No one could argue that real estate developer Palmer Morton’s vision had been realized in a beautiful way. No expense had been spared to design and build what the website and brochures promised was “World Class in the City of Destiny,” a nod to Tacoma’s motto and its reputation as being somewhat less than world class. The penthouse condos went for well over one million dollars and the cheapest rents on the apartments made living there only in the reach of BMW-driving professionals. No one without a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salary need apply.
The bulk of The Pointe at Ruston Way was built on the cleaned-up land that surrounded the former ASARCO smelter. Getting it built had been a battle-the EPA, the old-timers who didn’t want any change (even though the previous landholder had poisoned the air, soil, and water, hardly something to champion), and a considerable consortium of homegrown environmental groups who wanted the land cleaned up and returned to its pristine state.
Palmer Morton had been in it for the long haul. He dug in and fought all warring factions and prevailed. He had money. He had balls of steel. He just wouldn’t lose.
CHAPTER 42
Grace stopped for gas at a mini-mart just off the freeway in Redmond. She scanned the area by the cashier and grabbed a package of barbecue potato chips, regretting it the instant she pushed it across the dingy counter. The clerk told her that she could get a bigger bag for “just forty-nine cents more.”
Grace smiled. “I really should save the two dollars and skip the chips altogether, but I’m hungry.”
“We have some good Polish dogs,” said the clerk, a large woman who apparently never got off her chair. She indicated a hotdog machine that turned two sad, shrunken hotdogs on hot rollers.
Grace shook her head and smiled politely. She was an expert at hiding her feelings. Her stomach was rumbling and the chips, bad choice as they were, were all she had time for. “Vegan,” she lied, not even sure why. It just seemed better than saying “your hotdogs look like they’ve been there since Bush was in office,” which is what she was really thinking. The pit of her stomach was sour, but it had nothing to do with hunger pangs. It was all Ted. Ted Bundy was like an insidious virus. Once more she was moving through her life chasing a man who already had been killed by the executioner.
She paid and went back to her car, checking the address she’d printed out on Google maps before leaving Tacoma.
212 Marymoor Lane
Everything he touched became infected with evil. People who studied Ted-law enforcement and serial killer groupies alike-considered Daphne Middleton to be victim zero. Daphne had been Ted’s girlfriend, his confidante, the one he trusted above all others.
It wasn’t hard for Grace to find her. Daphne had changed her name, but not her Social Security number. She’d moved around the Pacific Northwest and back to her home town of Des Moines, Iowa, before returning to Redmond, Washington, and the condo at 21 Marymoor Lane.
Grace didn’t call ahead, but she kept her badge in her palm when she knocked on the door.
The door opened a crack and a slender woman with short gray hair answered.
“Daphne?” Grace asked.
A split second of fear came over the woman, but she quickly dismissed it. “There’s no one here by that name.” Her eyes, nestled in crinkled folds of over-tanned skin, flickered in that way that lets a person with genuine sensitivity see that a lie is being told.
Grace knew that she was trying to force something open that Daphne Middleton wanted sealed forever. Her past. Her history. Ted. Yet she persisted, because persistence when it came to Bundy was in her DNA.
“Daphne, my name is Grace Alexander. I’m with the Tacoma Police Department,” she said, proffering her badge.
Daphne shrugged; her shoulders were tent poles holding up the loose cotton blouse that she wore untucked over a pair of faded blue jeans.
“I guess that’s supposed to impress me,” she finally said. “And, if I were Daphne, I’d probably be inclined to be so. But, as I said, my name is Jennifer.”
She hadn’t said her name was Jennifer.
“Daphne, please,” Grace said, her tone more businesslike than pleading. “I’m here to talk to you about my sister. I’m here to talk to you about Ted.”
