Fear Collector

CHAPTER 12

It was almost dark when the detectives arrived at the Lancaster house. Grace scanned the street for any of the usual suspects-the press, that is. Thankfully, there weren’t any. One vehicle did catch her eye. Marty Keillor’s souped-up Honda Accord was parked behind Ms. Lancaster’s car.

“Marty’s here,” Paul said. “Hope we don’t wake ’em up.”

“Enough of that,” Grace said, though she’d thought the same thing.

“Just saying,” he said.

Catherine Lancaster opened the door. She was wearing a white cotton blouse and jeans. It didn’t escape Grace’s eyes that the second button from the bottom was unfastened.

“Is it true?” she asked, her voice trying to find a breath. Her eyes were ablaze with a curious mix of anger and fear.

While both detectives knew to what she was referring, they didn’t give any indication. A rookie would blurt out that they’d found a body when the mother might only have asked if it was true that they’d eaten at the local Sonic. Never, ever give up any information first. Always, both knew, wait and see what the subject is really talking about.

“What?” Paul asked.

“I heard that someone found a body,” she said.

Marty Keillor appeared behind her.

“Is it Lisa?” he asked.

“May we come inside?” Grace asked, and Lisa’s mother opened the door wide to allow them entrance into the living room. She stopped them with a cry.

“I knew she was dead!” she said. “I knew it in my bones. My girl’s gone. My only baby! Gone!”

“Ms. Lancaster,” Paul said, trying to calm her.

“Are you going to tell me everything is going to be okay? Maybe you’d know how I feel if this had ever happened to you. Lisa is gone.” She glanced at Marty. “Except for Marty, I’m alone.”

The remark was strange. Why acknowledge Marty as her boyfriend now? If that was, in fact, what she was doing?

“We aren’t sure it is her,” Grace said. “The medical examiner will be analyzing”-she stopped herself short of saying the body or body parts, which sounded as horrific as it really indeed was-“analyzing the, uh, evidence.”

By then Ms. Lancaster was inconsolable. Marty Keillor slumped silently into the sofa where Lisa’s mother had sunk in a sobbing heap. On the coffee table adjacent to the sofa were an ashtray and a stack of laser prints with images of beaches and tropical flowers, printouts from a travel website.

As the detectives left the house, Paul leaned close to Grace’s ear.

“Looks like Ms. Lancaster and Marty were planning a vacation.”

“Saw that,” she said, walking down the driveway a few yards before stopping. She started for the pair of galvanized garbage cans that sat next to the curb.

“What are you doing? Dumpster diving at a time like this?”

“Hardly,” she said, prying off one of the lids and peering inside. “Look here,” she said, hoisting up a half-full black plastic bag. “Look familiar?”

Paul shrugged a little. “Like who doesn’t use those bags?”

“I admit Shane and I use them, too, but let’s bring this in to the lab to see if they are the same manufacturing lot as the one recovered from the scene.”

“You really don’t think that Ms. Lancaster and that creepola Marty offed Lisa,” he said.

“Maybe. You saw the printouts on the table.”

“Maui does sound nice,” he said.

She nodded. “Yeah, a great place to run away to.”

“Okay, so the daughter’s ex-boyfriend is shagging her mother,” Paul said. “Disgusting on all grounds, but why kill her? If anyone should have been hacked up it would have been Party Marty.”

Grace smiled grimly at the mention of the nickname Naomi had given Lisa’s ex.

“Agreed. There something more going on here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a conspiracy here? Maybe Mom was mad at Lisa.”

“She said she was a saint on that TV news report.”

Grace glanced back at the house. “She oversold that, didn’t she? The guilty often overdo it when it comes to lauding the victim.”

“Right. But why kill the girl?”

Grace opened the trunk and put the plastic bag and its smelly contents inside. “Maybe there was a money reason.”

A money reason. Aside from jealousy and rage, money was the most frequent flash point for crimes that led to murder. People killed because they had too little money. Because they were afraid someone would take some of their money. Sometimes they killed for profit. Although children were rarely murdered by their parents for insurance proceeds, there had been cases in which that had occurred. Indeed, more than one wary insurance salesperson had begrudgingly sold a policy in the tens of thousands on a child whose earning power-the measure of a person’s worth-was nil. How they slept at night was beyond Grace Alexander’s comprehension. In one notorious Northwest case, a couple purchased nearly a million dollars on the life of a child who later died in a terrible and suspicious house fire.

The kicker there was the little girl had been adopted only seven months before the fire swept through the couple’s house in Yelm, southeast of Tacoma. Law enforcement speculated that they had adopted the girl only to kill her for the insurance money. The case could never be proved and National Life had to make good on its policy. The couple took the proceeds and disappeared, leaving observers to wonder if they’d do it again somewhere else.

Could Lisa’s mother be one of those coldhearted people? By all accounts she was a devoted nurse, a caring soul whose compassion for others knew no limits. Why was she sleeping with her daughter’s ex? Why was she going to take a trip to Maui? And if she wasn’t the worst kind of a mother in the world, was Party Marty the ultimate evil?