The Fear Collector (16 page)

WONG: Yeah. Like I said earlier, he jumped out of his car to pump his own gas even though he was at the full-serve pump. The dick said, “I’ll do it myself. No oil needed.” Then he actually pushed me back from the car like he thought I was going to fight him for the dipstick or something.

MONTROSE: Was he aggressive with you?

WONG: No, and it doesn’t matter if he was. I pack a thirty-eight. You practically have to, working at a gas station or mini-mart these days. Customers will kill you if they don’t like the way you screw on their gas tank lid. And yes, in case you’re going to ask it, I have a CW permit.

MONTROSE: Good. Did you get a look inside the car?

WONG: Not really. I mean, I sort of think he had someone sleeping in the backseat. I can’t be sure because I didn’t get a real look. You know, out of the corner of my eye when he was hassling me about the oil fill-up.

MONTROSE: So you didn’t see anyone, really? Just more like an
impression
?

WONG: Yeah, an impression. That’s a good way of looking at it. I got the impression of a girl sleeping in the back. Now . . .

MONTROSE: Now, what?

WONG: Now, I guess I wonder a little if it might have been a girl. Maybe a dead one. If she was dead, then I’m sorry for her family. If she was alive, well, I don’t even want to think about how bad I feel. You know, how I could have maybe done something.

MONTROSE: You would have no way of knowing, either way. Don’t beat yourself up.

WONG: Okay. Thanks.

[End of transcript.]

And then there were the letters. The Ted Letters.

“Can I take these, Mom?”

Sissy scrunched up her brow and thought a moment. “Oh, I don’t know. I loaned them to
The National Enquirer
and it took more than a year to get them back. Goodness, I was stupid. I should have photocopied them.”

“I’m not the
Enquirer
. I’m your daughter. Besides, the
Enquirer
paid you. I seem to recall that you got ten thousand dollars for your group.”

“I’m a tough negotiator,” Sissy said, a slight smile on her face. “Yes, you can borrow them. Not sure what you’re looking for, but yes, if you think it will help, take them.”

Grace looked down at the letters. Her mother had tied them with a periwinkle blue ribbon, like some young girl might have done to a batch of love letters. These, however, were far from love letters. These were letters from the devil.

“I’ll bring them back in a few days, Mom,” Grace said as they walked back up the stairs, away from the pool table that wasn’t really a pool table, from a war room that had never ceased to be the central location for a group of men and women bonded by the murders of their children.

“Don’t forget to turn out the light,” Sissy said.

“Lights out, Mom. Lights out.” Grace turned down the switch and the room behind them went completely black.

S
issy O’Hare wore a platinum locket around her neck. A gift from Conner the year after everything happened, the locket was heart-shaped and when opened revealed a photograph of the child she would mourn forever. Grace had never known a time when her mother hadn’t worn the locket. She’d also seen her open it, look at it, and with tears streaming down her cheeks, snap it shut and close her eyes. Grace, though jealous of her murdered sister, always hoped that Sissy was remembering something beautiful about Tricia. As jealous as she could be—and as foolish as it was—she loved her mother. Some solace was needed. The locket was a symbol of loss, love, and the awareness that everything precious could be taken away by anyone, at any time. There was never any doubt that when her mother passed on, she would be buried with the locket around her neck. It was such a part of her.

Although Sissy’s memories of her eldest daughter varied, as those of most mothers do, there were two etched in her brain so deeply that for the longest time others struggled to surface. The first was the day Tricia had gone missing.

It was the first of October. Vine and big leaf maples had started to turn the previous week, and the snap of autumn made all Pacific Northwesterners think of New England and what truly splendid fall colors might look like if the region had more deciduous trees. Pumpkins for carving and apple cider served in big, red mugs fueled the fantasy. Conner had gone to work, and Sissy and Tricia were alone at the breakfast table. Sissy had made her daughter’s favorite—a toad-in-the-hole fried in so much butter that if the cholesterol police had been invented back then they surely would have handcuffed Sissy and taken her away to serve time for overindulging her daughter.

Tricia didn’t have classes until noon, so mother and daughter used the extra time to talk about everything that interested them—Tricia had just switched her major to art history, the same degree that Sissy had earned at Western Washington State College in Bellingham. They talked about the merits of Cézanne over Van Gogh.

“Van enough already,” Sissy had teased.

“I know you don’t like his work, but you have to admit he had an ear for good painting,” Tricia joked lamely.

Her mother laughed anyway. Tricia kissed her mother on the cheek, picked up her backpack, and went to wait along the curb for her friend, Carrie, to take her to work.

As she went out the door, Sissy made a comment about Tricia’s attire, and that was it.

It wasn’t until after 7
PM
that day that Sissy began to worry about Tricia. She was usually home from class by five—and if she was going to be late, there was never a time that she didn’t phone her or Conner to let them know.

“Carrie and I are going to hang out on campus for a while. There’s a cute guy that she wants to accidentally meet,” she’d said one time, quickly adding, “Again.”

“How’s that accidentally meeting someone actually working for her?” Sissy asked.

“You know Carrie, Mom. She’s no quitter.”

“That she’s not,” Sissy said.

Sissy and Conner ate dinner without her that night. Though later others would insist their observations were tainted by the eventual tragic outcome, the O’Hares were quite nervous. Scared even. They made the first of three calls to the Tacoma Police Department at 9 PM. Two others followed at ten, and then, finally at three minutes to midnight.

With each call the fear had been ratcheted up. With each connection, the cool voice of a desk officer answered in the same way.

“Girls these days do stuff like that. She probably ran off with a boy to a party or something.”

“My daughter isn’t like that,” Conner said.

The officer sighed. “She’s a girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Conner said, bile rising in his throat over the insinuation that he didn’t know Tricia very well. They were close. Extremely so.

“Trust me, she’s like that. These are different times than when we grew up. Kids take more risks. They don’t want to be like us.”

“My daughter is a good girl.”

“Wasn’t implying that she’s not. Besides, she’s not missing until she hasn’t been seen for twenty-four hours. That’s the statute.”

“All right,” Conner said, knowing that anger over what he was hearing wouldn’t advance his cause. Anger never did. It wasn’t a pissing match over who was right, either. It was simply a plea from a father trying to get some help.

The third call was made by Sissy, who had been coached by her husband.

“My daughter Tricia O’Hare has been missing since Tuesday morning. I have no idea where she is.”

That worked. The dispatcher sent a cop out to make a missing persons report.

And yet, resourcefulness and a little white lie aside, there was very little to be gained by getting the police to respond right away in the first place. The reason for that, Sissy would later tell her victims’ families support group, was that “girls abducted by a madman have about a 10 percent chance of recovery.”

“Ten percent?” asked Sheila Vinton, whose daughter, Shelley Ann, had been murdered by a stranger who’d held the fourteen-year-old hostage for seventeen days in a cabin in the foothills of Mount Rainier. “Not very good odds.”

“No,” Sissy said, folding her arms across her chest, a little unhappy with Sheila’s response. She knew that Sheila had been accused of being a bad mother because she hadn’t reported her daughter’s disappearance for two days. The reason, she insisted, was that her ex-husband had visitation. He committed suicide, which Sheila only admitted to herself, gave her a sense of relief—a way to put all the blame where she could.

Not on herself.

All of that would come back to Sissy whenever she thought of her daughter and that terrible night she went missing.
Ten percent! Ten percent! How could that be? What kind of police force do we have here in Tacoma?

She would later learn that the Tacoma Police Department was one of the best in the country, but law enforcement is seldom a match for someone who seeks to do evil. Catching an abductor is a million times easier than finding a killer
before
he kills.

Sissy, bleary-eyed but wired like Grand Coulee Dam, stayed by the phone in the kitchen all night praying and hoping. A couple of neighbor ladies sat with her for part of the evening, though they left when she lay down on the sofa to pretend to get some rest. She didn’t eat, either. She couldn’t. Something inside told her that there would be no good outcome.

No 10 percent.

Conner got into his silver Mazda 626—the one in which he’d taught Tricia to drive—and drove all over the PLU campus, the streets of Tacoma, and even as far as Lakewood, south of the city. He was armed with an anguished look on his suddenly haggard face and Tricia’s Stadium High School senior portrait, pulled from the hallway in its honey oak frame. In time, most Tacoma residents could identify the image of the girl, either by name or just with a sad shake of recognition.

“Is that the girl who . . . ?”

Grace returned to her sister’s case file, the one her mother had made. Sissy had once told her that the collection had been made over time—whenever a detective on the case retired she’d make a play for more access. Open investigation files were never shared with victims’ families or the press. Not anyone. There was good reason for that, too, but Sissy had a way about her. She could be the freshly-baked-cookies-in-hand type with teary eyes and a need to know, or she could turn those eyes to glacial ice and criticize the cops for not doing their jobs. Whatever worked. It was always about that.

Grace supplemented the file, page by page, over time, with trips into the records room. She didn’t care if the nosy records clerk turned her in. There were worse violations that could be written up about any number of the people who worked at the Tacoma Police Department—all the way to a famous case in which the chief of police sexually harassed and abused his staff and murdered his wife when he could no longer control her. That was huge, of course, and had been covered widely by the media. The other transgressions were smaller. One police officer routinely viewed porn on his laptop. One stole from a fallen officers’ fund. Grace only took what she felt was rightly hers—her family’s history.

She studied the witness statements. Her mother’s was twice as long as her father’s.

She was supposed to be here Saturday morning, 10 am sharp. Like always. We were going to get my hair done and go out to lunch. . . .

Grace could never remember a time when she and her mother had done that sort of mother/daughter activity. Their relationship, while close, was a bond formed because of tragedy, not because of her mother’s loving nature. Certainly, her mother loved her; there was no doubt about that. The difference was they didn’t do things like get their nails done or go to the salon for a color and style.

A student at the university, Melissa Reardon, twenty-two, had told detectives how she’d found Tricia’s purse and keys—the first concrete proof that Tricia was not a runaway, but a victim of something terrible. Melissa’s statement had been taken in her dorm room on Sunday, a full day after Tricia hadn’t shown up for the appointment with her mom.

My work study job requires me to pick up trash in the parking lot on Saturday mornings. The school doesn’t want any parents to see any evidence of drinking and whatnot. I found Tricia’s purse. I know it was Tricia’s purse because when I opened it, it still had her wallet and ID. I took it to campus security for lost and found. . . .

Close friend Peggy Howell’s interview was more innocuous, not really adding much to the investigation—though Peggy would tell her story over and over to the media. A female detective, who died in a tragic accident on Interstate 5 a year later, had interviewed Peggy at her mother’s place on Ruby Street in Ruston.

Tricia and I had talked about going to a party off campus that night, but when I saw her around 6 pm, she’d changed her mind. Said she had a stomachache. I think she was going off to see a boy or something. We were best friends, but I don’t know who it was.

It was Phillip Marciano, a world literature professor at the university, whose statement put him in the hot seat during the early part of the investigation. His voice was recorded during three interviews at his office on campus and one, a very short one at his home near Browns Point, north Tacoma.

She was one of my best students. We had coffee—nothing more—two or three times a week. I last saw her Friday afternoon after class. She’d been over at her parents’ house, was upset with her mother or father about something. I don’t know what. I think she wanted to talk a little, but I didn’t think that boundary should be crossed.

As Grace well knew, Dr. Marciano had become the subject of considerable scrutiny for a couple of reasons. First, his wife, Jackie Marciano, had, only four weeks before Tricia disappeared, made a complaint to the university that he’d been involved with a student. Second, the class for which Tricia had been enrolled convened on Thursdays.
Not Friday
. Investigators put the screws to the professor, but he never faltered, never changed his story. Detectives were all but certain they’d caught him in a lie, but they were wrong. The reporting officer had made an error when transcribing his handwritten notes to the typed report. The professor had, in fact, said he’d last seen the missing young woman on Thursday. Further digging turned up another error in his favor—his wife had lied. She had been the one having an affair with a neighbor and thought by casting aspersions on her husband, she’d be in a better position to retain a larger chunk of his state pension.