“Yes, I know. And I talked to investigators-one right after another. They all told me what I just couldn’t admit. I was kind of trapped. The truth about the whole thing was that if he got convicted, I felt only then I could drop him. Only after that could-please understand-could I be free.”
Shane was waiting for Grace at the bottom of the staircase at Salmon Beach. She’d phoned that she’d be home at seven and it was nearly right on the dot when they met at the landing. Her interview with Daphne had made for a long and unsettling day.
“It’s been a long time since I had a greeting this nice,” Grace said, before reading the concerned expression on his face. “Something’s wrong. Is it my mom?”
Shane held her. “No, baby. Not your mom. It’s your sister.”
Grace pushed him away a little. “What do you mean?”
“The bones,” he said. “A friend at the bureau tipped me off. The bones were Tricia’s.”
Shane’s mouth was still moving, but Grace couldn’t hear anything more. Her mind zipped through images of her sister. The flash cards. Ted Bundy. Her bedroom. The dove necklace. Her mother’s face. The last time she’d seen her father.
Tears came to her eyes and rained down her cheeks. Shane was still talking, holding her close.
“Are you, are they, sure?” she finally said.
“Yes. It wasn’t the bones that did it. There were three strands of hair wrapped around the femur. Not intentionally, just there by luck. One had an intact follicle. That’s how they did the match, Grace. She’s found. You found her.”
Grace nodded. “We have to tell Mom,” she said.
Sissy O’Hare didn’t shed a single tear. She simply sat there on the sofa next to her daughter and listened, her fingertips barely touching the strand of pearls she always wore. The big clock ticked. The room shrunk. But she just sat there. Calmly. Quietly. Shane excused himself and stepped into the kitchen to give mother and daughter a little time alone.
Finally Sissy spoke; her words came softly. “I’ve always known she was gone, Grace. I stopped looking for her twenty years ago. I knew in my heart that she loved me and she loved your father and she never would have left us. She had to be dead.”
Grace knew that wasn’t completely true. Her mom never changed their phone number. When she finally got a cell phone in the mid-nineties she made sure that the mobile carrier provided the same number-in case Tricia ever called. Her mother barely made a change to her sister’s bedroom-and only did anything major when a leak in the window frame caused some water damage and the entire room had to be repainted. Sissy had chosen the same color, but it didn’t look exactly the same.
“I know, Mom. I know.”
Sissy stared into Grace’s eyes. “Will you be able to tell anything else?”
Grace knew that had been coming, but still she clarified. “How she died? Is that what you mean?”
Sissy nodded. “Yes, and who killed her?”
Grace shook her head. “No. No, we won’t. There’s not enough there.”
“That’s all right. I already know. I’ve always known that Ted killed her. Ted killed all the pretty girls that year.”
In the car on the way back home, Shane asked Grace if her mother would be all right.
“Maybe we should stay with her?”
“She’ll be fine,” Grace said. “She’ll probably sleep better tonight now that she knows for sure Tricia is gone forever.”
“Are you doing all right?”
She looked out the window at the Tacoma skyline as they drove toward home.
“I think so. I didn’t know her. I’m just relieved for my mom. I wish my dad had lived long enough to know.”
“Don’t you think they’ve always known?” he asked.
“Probably. You know as well as I do that hope makes a joke out of logic.”
“Do you still think Ted’s the killer?” he asked.
“I’m not so sure.”
And she wasn’t. Not at all.
CHAPTER 43
Emma Rose wasn’t sure exactly how many days she’d been in the so-called apartment. It likely wasn’t more than a few, but with no daytime and nighttime indicators in that windowless, airless room, it was hard to really know. Three? Or ten? Emma plotted and schemed all the scenarios that would free her from her captor, but she didn’t know if she had the strength to carry them out. The fact of the matter-and she knew it deep in her soul-was Emma was running out of time. With each passing hour or day or whatever measure of time there was in the real world, Emma was feeling weaker and weaker. While fear still coursed through her body, it did so at an increasingly sluggish pace. She knew that her captor was going to rape, torture, and kill her, but her body reacted slowly to the urgent messages that her brain was sending. Get out! Kill him first! You only have one chance. What was wrong with her? She’d taken self-defense classes in high school. She knew that every second she was alive there was still the hope that she could survive, no matter what he was planning.
When she thought about her weakening state, her grogginess, she wondered if she’d been drugged by those awful sandwiches. She told herself that she shouldn’t eat any more, but when she left food on the plate, he screamed at her.
“You are no good to anyone dead! Eat!”
“Not hungry,” Emma said.
“Liar! You do what I say. Not what you want to do.”
Still holding on to her resolve never to cry again, Emma protested.
“But I can’t,” she said.
Though it seemed impossible, his tone grew harsher and his voice louder.
“Eat or I’ll force it down your throat!” he railed.
Though she hoped that he couldn’t see her obvious fear in the dim light, her hands were shaking as she picked up the paper plate. Sitting in the dank dungeon, Emma worked with birdlike bites on the sandwich that she was sure was taking away her will to fight.
She vowed to seize the moment, whenever it came.
Emma’s chance came when he left the door open when he thought she was asleep or passed out. Like her body had been wrapped in lead and she couldn’t move. She could barely lift her head toward the brightness. Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? A slice of light pierced the dank apartment and somehow, Emma was able to crawl on her hands and knees to the spot where she could get a better look at the world outside.
Where she could escape to freedom. Go home to her mother. Get out of there and never ever come back.
The teen dragged herself a few feet and looked upward at the dagger of light that came into the room. What was out there? The images blurred like the TV set that her grandmother had in her back bedroom, sparking the only thought of something happy since her abduction.
Her abduction. A flicker of a memory came from soft to sharper focus. She remembered how she and Oliver had closed Starbucks. Then another. A confrontation with Alex’s dad. Palmer Morton promised to fix the contamination of the Sound. And finally, something else… a man with a sling on his arm asked for help in putting packages from shopping into his SUV… and then nothing.
Someone had hit her from behind. But it wasn’t the creeper. He had been in front of her.
It was so bright outside the hellhole in which he held her captive. She was a grunion following the moonlight. She was a mule deer staring into the headlights of a rapidly approaching car with a driver unable to swerve. Emma
