Fear Collector by Gregg Olsen Page A

victims’ group, her father drink until he could no longer walk. She’d heard the arguments that ran from the darkness of night to the first splinter of morning light.
    “If you’d loved her more, she wouldn’t have left us.”
    It was her mother’s voice, accusing and cuttingly cruel.
    “Sissy, you’re out of line and you know it.”
    Her dad, sober for once, had a point. Grace knew it, even as a teenager. Her sister’s disappearance was the fault of no one—other than the perpetrator—and her mother’s anger was completely unfair. Her sister’s vanishing had been random. She’d been a type of girl—pretty, slender, fine-featured, dark haired—that had been favored by a potential serial killer, one who’d never had the kind of name recognition that Tacoma’s most infamous son, Ted Bundy, enjoyed once he was finally arrested for a string of murders. Investigators had tried to link Tricia’s case and the disappearance of another Tacoma girl, Susie Sherman, to Bundy, but there was no real connection—at least none that anyone could find. After Bundy was arrested in Florida and the spotlight once more shined on potential crimes he might have committed, investigators took another run at trying to make a case that he’d been the perpetrator.
    The Tacoma News Tribune ran a story about the possibility with the headline: D ID T ED K ILL T WO T ACOMA G IRLS ?
    The article indicated the similarities among Ted’s murders in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah and how the Sherman and O’Hare cases might have fit into the time line. Ted had been in the area off and on, but a gas receipt in Ellensburg on the other side of the Cascades at the time of Susie’s disappearance put her case in doubt. Ted, had, in fact, been in Tacoma visiting family when Tricia disappeared. That didn’t mean anyone had a shred of evidence, but a shred wasn’t needed when it came to what many saw as the country’s most prolific serial killer. Ted was always good for speculation. He was kind of the spaghetti serial killer—attribute a case to his name, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks.
    “Look, we’re not saying he killed every girl who ever died in the Pacific Northwest,” a Tacoma PD detective said in the news article, “but only a fool would ignore the distinct possibility that he could have been a particular killer. After all, the guy really got around.”
    The statement was made in 1974, what cops and crime writers later called the “Summer of Ted.” That was before Theodore Robert Bundy was Ted Bundy , of course. He was simply an almost mythological man with a bright white smile, a gimpy arm in a sling, and a metallic VW bug. After the hysteria swung into full gear when two young women vanished on the same day, there wasn’t a sorority girl with long, dark hair, parted in the middle who wasn’t halfway certain that she had encountered Ted somewhere during that time. And, if a girl didn’t actually have a Ted sighting of her own, there was always a friend who’d escaped being his victim.
    Whoever Ted was. Wherever he was. He was like a handsome boogey man. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He was, many thought even at the time, a legend in the making.
    Not long after Grace met Shane they went for a long walk along Ruston Way, a stretch of restaurants and beachfront park along Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. It hadn’t really been love at first sight when they’d met at the University of Washington. He was dark, handsome, and had the kind of disarming smile that put everyone at ease. He was tall, too. In fact, more than a foot taller than she, which was a huge relief. Although she’d always planned a career in law enforcement, she still wanted a life that included heels. During that walk after dinner, Grace truly opened up the first time about her sister’s death and its impact on her life.
    “She died before you were born, but you still mourn her,” he said, as they took a place on a bench. A