Fear Collector Read Free Page B

Olympia, a half hour’s drive from Tacoma.
    “Are you doing all right?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder and stopping her from her task.
    “Fine,” she said.
    “Slim to none,” he said.
    Grace stopped a beat. “Excuse me?”
    He took a drink and swallowed. “Chances are the bones aren’t hers.”
    Grace scraped the chives from a wooden cutting board into the bowl of luscious pink and white crabmeat.
    “I know,” she said.
    He looked at her with those eyes, the eyes that could tap in to her soul like no others.
    “Do you really know that?” he asked, taking that first foamy sip from the second beer.
    “Yeah,” Grace said, looking up as the news came on. “Hang on.” She reached for the remote and turned up the sound on the wall-mounted TV over a living room fireplace that was as fake as a reality show. Fireplaces were not a good idea in a place as hard to get to as Salmon Beach. Several beach homes had burned to the ground over the years because the fire department couldn’t reach them in time.
    “Tonight the coroner identified the body of Samantha Maxwell, missing from Point Defiance. While there has not been an official ruling, sources tell KING-5 News that the death will likely be ruled as a swimming accident.”
    Behind the reporter was a shot of Grace and the other police at the scene.
    “Hey, you’re on TV,” Shane said.
    Grace held her hand up. “Shh! I need to hear this.”
    “While investigators were at the beach,” the reporter said in the kind of exaggerated earnestness that never seemed even remotely genuine, “they made the discovery of human remains, unrelated to drowning victim Maxwell.”
    Colette Robinson, the woman jilted by her husband for a dog sitter, appeared on the screen.
    “I saw the dead girl first,” she said, her eyes wandering from the camera lens to the interviewer. “Poor thing. I’ve seen her picture on TV. Beautiful. So, so tragic. I never saw the bones, but I watched the police detectives collect them.”
    The reporter finished the short segment by saying that “the bones are of unknown age and origin. They might not even be human.”
    Grace turned on the stove and poured some olive oil from a ceramic decanter.
    “Have you talked to your mother about it?” he asked.
    “Of course I did. She had a right to know before it came on TV, Shane.”
    Shane took another drink. “You shouldn’t get her hopes up.”
    The skillet smoked. Grace reached for it and in doing so, knocked over the oil.
    “Damn! Look what you made me do!” she said, going for the dishcloth that hung on the oven door’s handle.
    Shane took the skillet off the heat to let it cool a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he knew he really hadn’t done anything wrong. “I just want to be a help to you and your mom. I’m on your side.”
    “What side is that?” she asked, immediately wishing that her tone had been absent of any impatience or sarcasm.
    To his credit, Shane ignored it.
    “The side of truth and peace,” he said.

    As she looked across the table at Shane that night, Grace couldn’t help but remember that day she’d first laid eyes on him. It had been years ago, but not long enough to be a distant memory. Shane was on leave from the FBI at the time, promoting his book, Birth of a Serial Killer , a compendium of cases he’d worked on at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Shane wasn’t a “profiler,” at least he didn’t like to use the label. He felt that the status that came with that particular moniker was beyond the true grasp of those working in the field trying their best to catch a killer. He considered himself “more of a criminal genealogist” than a profiler.
    To understand what makes a serial killer, he’d written in the introduction to his book, law enforcement and other interested parties need to dig in to the killer’s family tree. No one becomes the ultimate evil merely because they were born bad; they become evil because