Unspeakable (27 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: Unspeakable
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C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
Seattle—Sunday, October 7, 4:50 p.m.
A
t 8:20 on the morning of July 9, 1962, Maria Ramirez, a housekeeper at the El Mar Hotel in Capitol Hill, ran screaming from room 20. It was a second-floor unit of the small, two-story rambler-style hotel. The entrances to all the rooms were from the outside.
A young couple in the hotel's parking lot heard the shrieks. They looked up to see Maria as she clung to the walkway railing. “They're dead!” she cried. “They're all dead in here!”
Olivia read six different articles in
The Seattle Times
and the
Post-Intelligencer
about the murders of Ron and Betty Freitag and their two children. Bound, gagged, and stabbed repeatedly, Ron and Betty had been found on top of their bed with the sheet half-covering them. In the connecting room, their children's bodies had been similarly tied and tucked in their respective beds. Olivia knew more details about the murders than she cared to. Stab wounds to the children had been deadly and few. Early reports from the coroner indicated that they'd died quickly. But Ron Freitag had been stabbed twenty-three times. Betty had nineteen stab wounds.
Because all the bodies had been found in their beds, each one partially covered with a sheet, someone in the Seattle police force had dubbed them the
Rockabye Killings
.
Investigators had concluded the killer must have had a gun and surprised Ron and Betty while they were sleeping. He'd forced one or both parents to tie up the children, and then tie up each other. They'd assumed Betty was the last to be bound, lying on her stomach with her hands behind her. The rope secured around her wrists had been tighter than any of the others—and the only one with a sailor knot. They'd figured it was the only knot actually tied by the killer that night.
Other guests at the El Mar had been questioned. According to a follow-up article,
“a dark-haired man with an olive complexion and a crew cut, between 25 and 30, wearing a red T-shirt and jeans”
had been seen in the parking lot late on the night of the murders. One witness had said he looked intoxicated.
Olivia studied the crude police sketch, which made the suspect look like a flat-faced zombie. He didn't resemble Collin Cox in the least.
Apparently, the sailor knot had led the police to the local Maritime Union and several taverns frequented by seamen. But from what Olivia could tell, there were no significant developments in the case until two months later, when the police went after seventeen-year-old Wade Grinnell.
She figured somewhere along the line, the investigators must have changed their minds about the dark-haired man in the red T-shirt. The newspaper accounts of Wade Grinnell's involvement in the El Mar murders were frustratingly vague. They merely pointed out that the teenager was a suspect, and the police had already questioned him once in connection with the slayings. On the afternoon of October 11, 1962, two detectives had arrived at the hotel-kitchen apartment Wade shared with his older sister, Sheri. They had a warrant for his arrest.
Wade slipped out a back window. The detectives chased him on foot several blocks to Interbay Railroad Yard. By that time, several patrol cars joined in the pursuit. It seemed as if they'd trapped their suspect. But Wade Grinnell was struck and killed by a speeding train in a last-ditch effort to elude the police.
The newspaper articles portrayed Wade as a juvenile delinquent with a four-time arrest record. Olivia figured the newspapers didn't list the arrest charges or carry a photo of him because he was a minor.
For the past two hours, she'd been sitting at the microfiche viewer, near the racks of magazines and newspapers in the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. The vast room's modern, glass-and-steel walls looked out at the surrounding buildings, the Sound, and the darkening skies.
So far, Olivia had gone through about twenty microfiche files and an entire roll of Butter Rum Life Savers. She stretched, and rubbed her neck. Her auburn hair was in a ponytail. She wore a striped long-sleeved tee and jeans. Her comfy black cardigan hung on the back of her chair.
Collin had returned her call last night and left a message that he'd be at her office at five o'clock Monday. He'd also confirmed that Ian Haggerty was indeed a cop and he'd guarded his grandparents' house for a month. But Olivia still wondered what this policeman's angle was and why he'd been grilling her about Collin on the ferry yesterday.
She'd come here to the library to prepare for the appointment tomorrow. If Wade Grinnell emerged again, she wanted to know who she was dealing with.
In addition to the El Mar murders, she'd also read several accounts of the fire at the Hotel Aurora Vista, which had wiped out Irene Pollack's family. All the news stories blamed the fire on a stray cigarette. It didn't make sense to Olivia that in the Century 21 Exposition timeline she'd read yesterday, Wade Grinnell was named as a suspect in this fire—when there was nothing connecting him to it in any of these older articles. Obviously, that timeline didn't have the complete story.
Then it dawned on her. The timeline had been compiled forty years after the fact. Sometime between 1962 and 2002, something must have happened to implicate the late Wade Grinnell in that fire—as well as the El Mar murders.
Olivia took the microfiche files back to the desk, where a neatly coiffed, forty-something woman had been helping her—and begrudgingly so. She wore a Ralph Lauren blouse and a tan skirt. She also had a superior,
I-can't-be-bothered
attitude that didn't go well with her job helping people. When Olivia asked for the
Times
and
Post-Intelligencer
microfiche index files for 1963 through 1968, the lady seemed annoyed. “This is going to take me a few minutes, you know,” she muttered, pushing the request form at Olivia.
“That's fine, thank you very much,” Olivia said—though the woman had already turned away. She filled out the form and waited five minutes for Ms. Attitude to retrieve the files. Returning to the viewer, Olivia didn't find anything for Wade Grinnell or Sheri Grinnell for 1963. But they both had a listing for page three of
The Seattle Times
on 9/20/64
.
There was nothing else for either newspaper through 1968.
She filled out the request form for the September 1964 microfiche file. Once again, the snooty librarian acted as if it was a big imposition. Once again, Olivia thanked her.
Back at the viewing machine, she scanned down the file until she found the front page for Sunday, September 20. Olivia inched the viewer lever down to page three and saw the headline:
SCREAMS UNHEARD: THE SEATTLE WORLD'S FAIR MURDERS
Kept Under the Radar, and Never Officially
Solved,
Grisly “Rockabye” Killings Claimed the Lives
of Several Families
“What?” she murmured, hunched close to the monitor.
According to the article, from June through late September 1962, three different families—including a pair of newlyweds—were tied up and slaughtered in their Seattle hotel rooms. Two more families died when their hotel suites caught fire. It broke Olivia's heart to see the photographs of the victims, the young parents and their doomed children—a total of eighteen lives snuffed out.
The 1964 article used a then-current serial killer's reign of terror to point out the relevance of these murders from two years before. She was pretty sure the term
serial killer
hadn't even been coined yet:
In Boston, women have been alerted to the strangler who has held the city in the grip of fear since last year. However, two years ago, while hundreds of thousands of visitors poured into Seattle to attend the Century 21 Exposition, a killer preyed on tourists in several local hotels, and very few people knew about it. Police investigators worked diligently to track down this maniac, but they also put an enormous effort into keeping news of the murders from the general public. Fearing World's Fair attendance numbers might plummet if the grisly killings made headlines, the press (including this newspaper) cooperated. The murders were reported, but never made the front pages. The notion that a mass murderer was haunting Seattle hotels was never introduced to an unsuspecting public.
The news story pointed out that the only suspect in the murders had been killed—and had never been formally charged. Seventeen-year-old Wade Grinnell and his sister, Sheri, had lived in the Gilbert Arms Apartments before the place had been converted into the Gilbert Arms Hotel for the World's Fair. The Gilbert Arms was also where the first victims, Stuart and Tracy Compton, newlyweds from Bowling Green, Ohio, had been bound, gagged, and stabbed to death on the evening of June 23, 1962. Stuart's wrists had been tied together behind him with a traditional double knot. The rope around Tracy's wrists was secured with a sailor knot.
Investigators didn't begin to suspect Wade Grinnell until the Holleran family of Denver was murdered in the King's View Hotel on September 29. The Hollerans were attending the fair with friends, who said the Holleran sisters, Rebecca, sixteen, and Patricia, twelve, spent some time at the fair with a local teenager who called himself Wayne. The other couple from Denver later identified Wade Grinnell, from a 1961 arrest mug shot, as the young man named Wayne.
Olivia studied Wade's mug shot on page four of the article. With his hair slicked back in a pompadour, the teenager could have passed for someone in his mid-twenties. He wore a T-shirt that showed off his wide shoulders. For the camera, he had a defiant smirk. Collin Cox didn't resemble him—except for the cocky grin that had emerged while he'd been in the trance. The expression was almost exactly the same.
A quick look at Wade Grinnell's background explained why the Seattle Police thought he might be responsible for the murders and the deadly fires. At age eleven, he'd burned down a neighbor's doghouse. One of his arrests, at age fifteen, was for malicious mischief after starting a fire in a wastebasket at a five-and-dime store. He'd also tried to steal several items from the store. His father was a seaman, and hot tempered. Before dying in a knife fight, Wade Senior could have taught his son something about knives, and how to tie a sailor knot. But it was the police interview—in which Wade contradicted himself one too many times—that really raised the investigators' suspicions.
“My brother had his problems and his scrapes with the law,”
Sheri Grinnell had said. She was twenty-two at the time of the article.
“But Wade wasn't a monster. He couldn't have murdered those families.”
Olivia pulled out two quarters and put them in the slot on the side of the machine to copy both pages of the article. Then she scribbled a note along the side of the paper:
Sheri Grinnell—married? Alive or dead?
She'd noticed that in three cases out of five, a teenage girl had been among the victims. Loretta Pollack—who died in the Hotel Aurora Vista fire along with her older brother, nieces, and nephew—had been seventeen. Rebecca “Becky” Holleran had just had her Sweet Sixteen party a week before she and her family were butchered in the King's View Hotel. And Cynthia Helms was about to start her freshman year at the University of Washington. Her parents had accompanied her by train from Redding, California. They were staying at the Pioneer Motor Inn when a blaze swept through their connecting rooms on the night of August 31. All three perished.
Olivia circled the names and wrote another note on the margin:
 
Ask Collin/Wade if he remembers these girls.
 
The witnesses from Denver had said they'd seen Wade hanging around with Becky and her kid sister. Had he gotten to know the other two teenage victims as well?
Olivia had already read about the El Mar murders and the fire at the Hotel Aurora Vista. But the other Rockabye Murders were news to her. She wanted to find out as much as she could about the other two hotel murders and the second fire. Returning the microfiche files to the librarian, Olivia filled out the request form for files covering June, August, and September 1962.
The woman rolled her eyes and then went to retrieve the files. She took longer this time. She finally came back to the counter and shoved the files toward Olivia. “The library's closing in a half hour, you know,” she said.
“Thank you, I'll keep that in mind,” Olivia said, gathering up the microfiche envelopes.
With a sigh, she sat down at the viewing machine. She took out the file for June 1962 and flicked on the switch at the side of the machine. Nothing happened. The light didn't go on. The fan in the machine wasn't humming. Had she broken it?
She reached over and flicked the switch on the viewing machine next to it. Nothing. It was dead, too.
“Crap,” she muttered under her breath, standing up again. The last thing she wanted to do was ask that sourpuss woman for more help. She plodded back to the reference desk. “I
really
hate to bother you,” she said.
The woman behind the desk glared up at her from her chair.
“I went back to the machine to view the files you just gave me,” Olivia explained, “and suddenly the machine isn't working—and neither is the one next to it.”
Getting to her feet, the woman came around from the back of the desk. “What did you do to it?” she asked.
“I didn't do anything to it,” Olivia replied defensively. “It was working fine when I finished up with the last batch of files. Then I came back—and nothing.”
They walked past the periodical shelves, to the desks with the viewers. The woman flicked the switch on the side of the machine—and then tried the next machine over. Nothing happened. She walked around in back. “Well, here's the problem,” she announced, holding up the plug. She raised an eyebrow. “Did you unplug this?”

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