Fear Collector

CHAPTER 40

Peggy Howell took a deep drag on her cigarette and watched her son as he toweled off after showering. She’d removed the bathroom door by then, telling Jeremy that any need for privacy was merely a desire to deceive her. She was not having any of that. Steam curled against the ceiling and he pulled the shower curtain closed. He’d long thought that his mother’s control of him was beyond what others could imagine. He didn’t know for sure, though. Jeremy had no close friends. In his entire life he’d never had a single friend come over to hang out in his room. He stopped asking his mother if he could. After a while there was no reason to ask anymore.

All he had was her.

“You have to man up if you are going to fulfill your destiny,” she said, the smoke coming from her lips like a dragon. Her eyes stayed on his naked body. “You have your father’s lean physique.”

Jeremy tied the towel around his waist. “You talk like a freak, Mom.”

“When your father was your age, he was already taking chances. You just come home from school and watch TV.”

“I don’t have any friends, Mom. I don’t want any friends,” he said, a lie he learned to tell.

She nodded. “Friends can only hurt you, they are deceivers and users.”

“I know,” he said.

Another lie.

“By the time your father was your age, he’d been arrested for burglary, auto theft. Dumb, yes, but he was learning from his mistakes. You have to make mistakes in order to get better. Don’t you understand that?”

“I guess so,” Jeremy said, moving past her toward his bedroom. “But I’m afraid.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. He dropped his towel and started to dress. He hated her just then.

“Good,” she said. “That’s good. Feed on that. Feed on the fear you have, and gather it up for those around you. Fear, you idiot, is absolute power. Use it. Sometimes I give my head a shake and wonder to myself if you are stupid or just weak.”

He nodded. He wasn’t sure how to even answer her half the time. If answering made any difference at all?

“Jeremy, after you’re dressed,” Peggy said, “I want you to massage my feet.”

As the water swirled down the sink, through the strands of hair that collected in a fuzzy, matted circular shape, Peggy Howell thought of the man that she loved above all others. Her life was running through the drain. She’d loved Ted with everything she had. She knew that he didn’t see her as he saw the others. The girls before her. The girls before everything happened.

She traced his history long before crime writers sought to weave a marketable tale of his life story. After high school graduation in 1965, Ted went to a succession of universities. First, he enrolled in the University of Puget Sound, but after only a year he felt it too small, too local. He wanted out of Tacoma, away from his past. He told acquaintances-as by his own admission he had few, if any, real friends-that he wanted more, that he deserved more. In 1966, Ted made good on his grandiose vision for himself and transferred from UPS to the University of Washington in Seattle, ostensibly to study Chinese.

Peggy found that part of Ted’s history so utterly appealing. Chinese? It was such a difficult language. Who but the most brilliant would even think to take on such a demanding course of study? Only Ted. Ted. So ahead of his time, her Ted.

The girls who were Peggy’s rivals were not on anyone’s list of Bundy victims, at least not in the true sense. Ted never spoke of the girls; only one time did he reference them in a letter to Peggy written four months before his execution.

My Peggy,

Daphne and Liz were never anything to me. At least not to the degree that some of my detractors and the leeches who make money off my name will have the masses believe. I was young, a college student. I wasn’t in love. I didn’t get dumped by either of those girls. Stephanie, in particular, has slung some mud in my direction, but I’m not a game player. I won’t even give her the dignity of a reply. When she’s talking about someone who is immature and directionless, she’s talking about herself. Whatever you have read about the influence these women had on my life is so totally overstated as to border on the absurd. I’m laughing to myself right now as I write this. Peg, you have been everything to me. You have stood by me. That’s love. That’s what keeps me going. In you, my legacy will continue. You are a great gift. peace, Ted

In 1973, Ted was accepted into the law schools of the University of Puget Sound and the University of Utah. It wasn’t his grades that got him there, but the letters of recommendation from Republican Party leaders in Washington, the foremost of which was Governor Dan Evans. Ted earned Evans’s accolades by way of his support during the governor’s reelection campaign. His support was either clever or devious depending on whether one wore a donkey or an elephant on his or her lapel.

Ted, masquerading as a college student, followed Evans’s democratic opponent throughout the campaign of 1972, recording speeches from the inside and passing them along to the state Republican offices. He was ingratiating. Smart. Always there when he needed be. There were times when staffers would find themselves next to him, as if he were some kind of phantom who came and went on footsteps that made no sound.

Peggy Howell never felt more disappointed than when Jeremy failed his LSATs, precluding him from following his father’s path to law school. Her blood simmered whenever she recalled the day she’d beaten him to the mailbox and found the rejection letter, in its starchy crisp envelope. It was a knife in the back, a betrayal that only served to make her seethe with disappointment and rage.

Though years had passed, every now and then it all resurfaced and she’d pull a bloody tipped arrow from her quiver and aim it at him.

“You’re nothing but a telemarketer! A goddamn annoyance to everyone who has the misfortune of picking up the phone when you call with some piece of crap that you want them to buy! Sometimes I go to bed at night and thank God that your father never had to see the man you’ve become. It makes me sick. Your dad was a lawyer! You’re supposed to do better than your father, not worse!”

Jeremy knew enough about his father and he also knew that to challenge his mother was a mistake he would never make more than once. He could have stopped her right there and told her the truth.

Ted Bundy never got his JD! He had too many distractions in the form of pretty young brunettes, Mom! Pretty ones! Not like you, Mom!

And yet he held his tongue, tight like it was ensnared in a woodworker’s vise. To challenge her was too, too dangerous.

“You are the prettiest by far,” he said.

His words came at Emma like poisoned darts. He’d barely said anything up to that point, and now, when he did she wished he hadn’t. She knew that horror movies were often considered more frightening because of what they didn’t show. The unknown was always scarier than something visible in the light of day. Once the shark in the old movie Jaws was actually shown on screen, his menace palled. It didn’t matter that he was snacking on an old sea captain or half-naked swimmer. It was scarier when his presence was hidden under the inky confines of the sea.

Emma’s captor no longer wanted to be as anonymous as he had been from the minute that he took her. And the choice of his words in that first real utterance made his intentions all too clear.

Emma broke it all down.

“The prettiest” indicated that there was a component in his aberrant behavior that encompassed her physical beauty. He was attracted to her. That part was easy enough to decipher. He’d given her a brush and mirror. He wanted her to look a specific way.

“By far” was also telling and perhaps the most frightening thing she’d ever heard directed at her in her life. It seemed clear to Emma right then in the dim light of the room that she had not been the first. There had been other girls.

In the apartment?

And if so, where were they now?

“Thank you,” she said to the man on the other side of the room. She did so because of her mother’s advice for dealing with a school bully one time.

“Kill him with kindness,” her mom had said. “I know it seems lame, but I know for a fact that it works every time.”

“You’re welcome, Emma Rose,” the man said.

She stiffened at the use of her full name. He’d never really called her by name, at least that she could be certain about. She searched the darkness, trying to see him. To see what it was that he wanted.

“Why don’t you come out of the darkness and talk to me?” she asked, still a little frightened about what the perv might look like. Old, nasty, wrinkly, fat, and smelly. She knew Beauty and the Beast from the ice show that her mom took her to in Tacoma.

She also knew the Silence of the Lambs.

Both scenarios ratcheted up the fear and disgust that swelled inside her whenever she felt the air move in the apartment.

“Later,” he said.

“When is later? It isn’t like I have a lot to do here but read these stupid magazines.”

“When I’m ready. When you are ready. I promise. You are the prettiest by far.”

Emma saw the shadow move and she moved toward it. But it was too late. The door shut and the dead bolt fell like a thunderclap.