Fear Collector

CHAPTER 41

A mong the data collected from Emma Rose’s laptop were the usual musings of a teenage girl. She had a blog-with only one entry. She had a Facebook account with a respectable two hundred friends, most of whom she actually knew. She had a Twitter account, but used it only for following various affinity groups.

Grace looked at the report provided by the forensic computer specialist, Darian Hecla, a brainy twenty-five-year-old who many thought should be writing code instead of cracking it. There was a little truth to that, but circumstances had sent him to law enforcement, a job he actually liked. His personnel file had been sealed so that even the nosiest records clerk couldn’t get his or her prying eyes on it, but Darian was working there as a part of a plea agreement. When he was twenty, he’d hacked into the office of the governor and read things that would have been extremely embarrassing for her. The secret plea deal was the best solution for everyone.

Darian went through Emma’s laptop, leaving no one or zero unturned.

Hunched over the printout, Grace used a yellow highlighter to mark what she thought might bring the investigation closer to a resolution. To her way of thinking, the only resolution would be bringing Emma home.

Alive.

“Anything interesting?” Paul asked as he looked over her shoulder.

Grace looked up. “I think so,” she said taking the yellow marker and rubbing its tip through a passage in the report. “Read this.”

Laptop owner had three primary interests, at least two of which intersected. She routinely re-tweeted Tweets posted by @SafeSound and@Envi_Live. Both are local environmental action organizations based in the Pacific Northwest. Both promote clean Puget Sound water.

“We all like clean water, Grace,” Paul said, lifting his eyes from the report.

Grace made a face. “Read on, please.” She tapped her fingertip to the next paragraph, one she’d also highlighted.

Laptop owner’s last three emails were to Alex Morton. Verbatim:

“Alex, I’m really upset. Why don’t we try to work something out?”

“You have to care. This is more important than money. You have to tell.”

“If you don’t do something about it. I will.”

Paul finished reading. Grace turned in her chair to meet his gaze head-on.

“Something’s not right here,” he said. “What’s she talking about?”

“I don’t know, but we need to talk to Alex.”

Grace Alexander and Paul Bateman parked around the corner from the Morton mansion-or “manse”: the detectives had suddenly taken a perverse liking to referring to it this way.

When Morton’s BMW 3 passed by in a black smear even in the residential neighborhood, they circled back to the house and knocked on the door.

“Shouldn’t the kid be in school?” Paul asked as they waited.

“Kids like Alex don’t think they need to learn anything more,” Grace said. “They have it all handed to them.”

“As much as I hate his prick of a dad, at least he worked hard for all this.”

She nodded.

The door knob twisted, and Alex Morton stood there.

“I figured you’d be back. Dad said you’d try to do an end run on me. On him.”

“You saw us through the video cam, didn’t you?” Grace asked.

Alex indicated he had.

“You opened the door.”

“Yeah. I did. I don’t think you need to be here, but I figured if I told you the truth you’d get off of our backs and go find Emma. She’s cool. I liked her.”

“You liked her so much you killed her?” Paul said.

“You got that all wrong.”

Grace looked at Paul. They were inside the house. The kid was talking. She tried to telegraph to her partner to ease up.

“We’re here to listen, Alex,” she said.

“Come on,” he said, nodding in the direction of the stairs to the basement. “Let’s talk downstairs. I have something to show you. I’m really, really sorry. I am. I know you think I’m a big piece of crap, and I guess I deserve that. I really am sorry.”

Grace was all ears.

“Sorry for what, Alex? Tell us, what happened?”

Alex Morton told the detectives that he had seen Emma Rose at school the previous year, but they’d never spoken. He’d run into her at a few parties. Despite all his bravado, the kid hadn’t had enough gumption to ask her out. She was too pretty. She didn’t seem to care about his money or who his father was. Emma seemed more interested in saving the planet or ensuring that those in third world countries had safe drinking water.

“She had interests, plans. I guess that impressed me. I never really thought about anything other than the next video game that came out or how I might squeeze my parents for some extra dough so I could buy something. Dumb things. I just wanted stuff. Emma didn’t give a crap about stuff. She just wanted to do right.”

“You said you wanted to show us something,” Grace said as they stood in the cool air of his basement crash pad. A big-screen TV was on mute, playing some kind of hair band music video from the eighties.

“In here,” he said, leading them past a double door, to a smaller room. “My dad keeps an office down here. That’s where Emma saw it.”

“Saw what?”

Alex led them over to the computer. “My dad changed the password. So I can’t get it to work now, but when Emma was over his password was Trump 1234.”

Paul suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Palmer Morton was an egomaniac. He had better hair than Donald Trump, but there was no way he was going to best the New York real estate developer when it came to financial success.

“What did she see?” Grace asked.

“It was an email. My dad had left his email screen up. I normally don’t care about his crap, but Emma sat down and started reading. She blew up at me. I had to get her to calm down. She told me that she was going to the police, the papers.”

“Alex, what did she see?” Grace asked.

“When was this?” Paul asked.

“It was a week before she disappeared.”

“Right, okay. But what was it?”

“It was about the cleanup going on at The Pointe. My dad had paid some contractors to get rid of the last bit of contaminated dirt. The contractor screwed up. They hired out a sub. Some cheap labor so they could rake in the dough. The subcontractor took the last tailings from the cleanup and dumped them into Puget Sound.”

“Do you know where?” Grace asked.

Alex shook his head. “Not sure. Somewhere around Point Defiance, I think.”

“What did Emma do?” Paul asked.

“She told me that my dad wouldn’t go to jail if he didn’t know about it. She thought that he was making a big mistake by keeping it quiet.”

“Did you tell your dad about this?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I did. I told him, and he and Emma talked about it. She said she’d keep her mouth shut if he did the right thing. You know, if he had it cleaned up right away.”

“What was his reaction?”

“At first he was really mad at her, at me. Then he calmed down. He said he’d take care of it. He’d cleaned up a Superfund site. He could clean up this mess, too.”

The detectives talked to Alex a while longer, pinning down the information to make sure that had everything right. As they started up the stairs, Paul remarked about the double doors.

“Looks like that’s bolted up better than Fort Knox,” he said.

“Wine cellar. Dad has some mega expensive wines in there. And if you’re thinking he doesn’t trust me, you’d be right. Dad doesn’t trust anyone.”

Grace asked the million-dollar question. “Do you think he had anything to do with Emma’s disappearance?”

Alex got real quiet. “I don’t think so. He saw her that night. But he told me that after they talked in the parking lot she left for the bus. She was alive.”

Grace waited until the car was moving before she spoke.

“Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Maybe Emma’s not a victim of the same killer as Kelsey and Lisa.”

Paul didn’t disagree. “I don’t like Morton for the serial killer type.”

“Right,” she said, putting the car in gear and heading up the street. “He’s almost too rotten to be a serial killer.” It was a half joke, but there was a little truth to it. Serial killers, in general, spiral out of control. They are unable to hold down jobs, unable to maintain relationships. They are killing machines and unable to focus on much more than that. The idea of the serial killer as the benign neighbor next door was more an invention of Hollywood. Most were frazzled and preoccupied.

Palmer Morton was focused like a laser beam on his business. He didn’t have time to run around killing young girls.

He might have, however, had time to kill just one.

“What if he’d met her at Starbucks after work? Maybe she threatened to tell and he abducted her right then? Killed her to shut her up. A scandal over The Pointe would destroy plans for his development,” Paul said.

Grace looked down at her phone and read a text. “It could shut him down for years,” she said.

Paul nodded and looked out the window.

“Forever,” he said.

They passed a sign for Morton’s condo project as they drove back to the police department.

GET THE POINT E. KILLER VIEWS.

“That’s pretty ironic,” Paul said tapping on the glass. Grace’s mind was reeling. And it wasn’t about The Pointe or the interview they’d just conducted. It was from the text message she’d just received. She was going to see Ted Bundy’s old girlfriend.

“No kidding,” she said to Paul.

“Have you been down there?”

“No,” she said.

“Some big plans they have.”

The Pointe at Ruston Way was an enormous complex with condominiums, townhouses, and apartments flanking edges of the sparkling blue waters of Commencement Bay. No one could argue that real estate developer Palmer Morton’s vision had been realized in a beautiful way. No expense had been spared to design and build what the website and brochures promised was “World Class in the City of Destiny,” a nod to Tacoma’s motto and its reputation as being somewhat less than world class. The penthouse condos went for well over one million dollars and the cheapest rents on the apartments made living there only in the reach of BMW-driving professionals. No one without a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salary need apply.

The bulk of The Pointe at Ruston Way was built on the cleaned-up land that surrounded the former ASARCO smelter. Getting it built had been a battle-the EPA, the old-timers who didn’t want any change (even though the previous landholder had poisoned the air, soil, and water, hardly something to champion), and a considerable consortium of homegrown environmental groups who wanted the land cleaned up and returned to its pristine state.

Palmer Morton had been in it for the long haul. He dug in and fought all warring factions and prevailed. He had money. He had balls of steel. He just wouldn’t lose.