Heartsick (18 page)

“I cleaned her vomit up once in the nurse’s office.”

“Seriously?” Susan asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “And once she brought me a Hallmark card on National Janitor Appreciation Day.”

“Really?”

They’d reached the parking lot. The kid and the orange Beemer were gone. The guy in the sedan was gone, too.

The hot janitor knelt down next to her car. “No.”

“You’re funny.”

“Thanks.” He bent over the boot, unlocked it, and in a swift, almost violent motion pulled it off the front wheel. Then he stood, holding the heavy boot under one arm, and waited.

Susan fidgeted self-consciously with her purse. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, his eyes turning cold. “I’ll let you off free and clear if you agree not to exploit a dead kid for a newspaper story.”

Susan felt like she’d been slapped in the face. She was speechless. He just stood there looking handsome in his coveralls. “It’s not really exploitation,” she stammered. She wanted to defend herself. To explain the importance of what she was doing. The public right to know. The beauty of shared humanity. The role of the witness. But suddenly, she had to admit that it all seemed pretty lame.

He pulled a ticket out of one of his many pockets and held it out to her. She took it and flipped the ticket over in her hand. Fifty dollars! And it would probably go to the fucking football team or something.

She wanted to say something clever. Something that would make her feel less like a bottom-feeder. But before she could, she heard the distant music of Kiss. She stopped and listened. It was the Kiss song “Calling Dr. Love.” She saw a flash of embarrassment cross the janitor’s face as he fumbled in his pants pocket. It was his cell phone ring.

And he thought she was a teenager.

He pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID. “Better take this,” he said to Susan. “It’s my boss, calling to fire me.”

Then he lifted the phone to his ear and walked away.

Susan watched him go, puzzled, and then got into her car. The Kiss song rattled in her head: “Even though I’m full of sin/ In the end you’ll let me in…”

As she pulled her car out of the parking lot, she had an idle thought: Janitors probably had a lot of access to bleach.

“What do they
have in common?” Archie asked Henry.

They were walking along the Sauvie Island beach where Kristy Mathers had been found. It was Archie’s default. No clues? No clear avenues of exploration? Return to the scene of the crime. He had probably spent whole years of his life walking in Gretchen Lowell’s steps. It got him in the right headspace, and there was always a chance they’d find a clue. He needed a clue.

The river lapped at the beach, where a squiggle of foam and muck marked the tide line. A freighter with Asian characters on the side slid by in the distance. Above the Asian characters was the translation:
Sunshine Success.
No one was on the beach. It was dusk and the light was low, though the winter sky in the Northwest had a way of holding light, so that no matter what time of night it was, it always looked like the sun had just set. Still, it would soon be too dark to be out there. Archie held a flashlight so they could find their way back to the car.

“They look alike,” said Henry.

“Is it that simple? He stalks the schools? Picks girls out that fit a type?” After Archie and Henry had left Jefferson, they had spent the morning interviewing teachers and staff members at Cleveland who fit the profile. There were ten in all. It had yielded nothing. Claire had tracked down Evan Kent’s roommate, who had confirmed his story about the jump-started Dart. But he put it earlier, more like 5:30. Which left him enough time to get north to Jefferson.

“They’re all sophomores.”

“So what do sophomores have in common?” Archie asked. Seven of the Cleveland staffers had alibis. Four didn’t. He had gone over the alibis again and they had held up. That left three suspects in play at Cleveland: a school bus driver, a physics teacher, and a math teacher/volleyball coach. Plus Kent who worked at both Cleveland and Jefferson. Plus about ten thousand other perverts loose in the city. They would watch Kent, and check out the other three. The ten thousand perverts were on their own.

“They were all freshmen last year?” Henry guessed.

Archie stopped walking. Could it be that simple? He snapped his fingers. “You’re right,” he said.

Henry scratched his bald head. This time of day, it started to get a little gray stubble. “I was kidding.”

“Tell me we checked to see if they all transferred from the same freshman class.”

“All three went to their respective schools the year before,” Henry said.

“Is there a test they all take freshman year?” Archie asked.

“You want me to see if some deranged proctor is killing them?”

Archie fished an antacid out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It tasted like citrus-flavored chalk. “I don’t know,” he said. He forced himself to chew the tablet and swallow it. He turned on the flashlight, holding it at an oblique angle against the sand. Several tiny crabs scrambled from the light. “I just want to catch the motherfucker.” Archie liked to use a flashlight to go over a crime scene, even in broad daylight. It shrank his focus, made him look at things one square inch at a time. “Throw more surveillance at the schools. I don’t care if we have to drive every kid home.”

Henry hooked his thumbs behind his turquoise belt buckle, leaned back, and looked up at the dark sky. “Should we head back?” he asked hopefully.

“You have someone waiting for you at home?” Archie asked.

“Hey,” Henry said. “My depressing apartment is nicer than yours.”

“Touché,” Archie said. “Remind me how many times you’ve been married?”

Henry grinned. “Three. Four if you count the one that was annulled, and five if you count the one that was just legal on the reservation.”

“Yeah, I think it’s better to keep you busy,” Archie said. He swung the flashlight beam around, watching the crabs scatter. “Besides, we haven’t searched the crime scene yet.”

“The crime-scene investigators have already done that,” Henry said.

“So we’ll see if they’ve missed anything.”

“It’s dark.”

Archie shined the beam under his chin. He looked like a horror-show ghoul. “That’s why we have a flashlight.”

CHAPTER

21

S
usan woke up,
shrugged on her old kimono, took the elevator downstairs, and systematically dug through the pile of
Herald
s on the granite floor of the lobby until she found the one with her name on it. She waited until she was back upstairs in her apartment before she pulled the newspaper out of its plastic bag. She always felt butterflies when she looked for a story she had written. It was a mix of anticipation and fear, pride and embarrassment. Most of the time, she didn’t even like to read her work once it appeared in print. But the hot janitor’s SmackDown had fanned the flame of her familiar self-doubt. The truth was, sometimes she did feel like a fraud. And sometimes she did feel like she exploited her subjects. She had pissed the hell out of a city councilman she had profiled and described as “balding and gnomelike.” (He was.) But this was different.

The task force story was the first byline she had ever had on the front page. She sat down on her bed, and with a heavy, nervous breath, she unfolded the
Herald,
half-expecting the story to have been killed, but there it was, below the fold, with a jump to the Metro section. The front page. A-1. An aerial photograph of the crime scene on Sauvie Island accompanied the story. With a startled laugh, she recognized herself, a small figure in the photo, and next to her, among the other detectives, Archie Sheridan. Screw the janitor. She was delighted.

She found herself wishing she had someone with whom she could share her little journalistic triumph. Bliss had canceled her subscription to the
Herald
years ago, after the paper’s owners had controversially clear-cut some old-growth forest. She would have bought a copy of the paper. If she’d known. But Susan hadn’t told her about the series. And wouldn’t. Susan traced the newspaper image of Archie Sheridan with her fingers and found herself wondering if he had seen it yet. The thought made her feel self-conscious and she shook it loose.

She got up and brewed herself a pot of coffee and then sat back down and flipped through the paper to find the Metro section, where the story jumped, and an envelope fell on the rug. At first, she thought it was a pack of coupons or some other silly promotion the paper had agreed to in exchange for advertising dollars. Then she saw that her name was on it. Typed. Not typed on a label. Typed on the envelope itself. “Susan Ward.” Who typed an envelope? She picked it up.

It was a regular white business-size envelope. She turned it over a few times in her hands and then opened it. A piece of white copy paper was folded neatly inside. There was one line typed in the center of the page: “Justin Johnson: 031038299.”

Who the fuck was Justin Johnson?

Seriously. Who was he? And why, if she didn’t know that, would someone slip her a secret note with his name and a bunch of numbers?

Susan was aware of her heart suddenly racing. She wrote the digits down on the edge of the newspaper in the hope that the act of writing them down would help her make sense of them. There were nine of them. It wasn’t a phone number. Could a Social Security number begin with zero? She looked at it for a while longer and then she picked up the phone and called Quentin Parker’s direct line at the
Herald.

“Parker,” he barked.

“It’s Susan. I’m going to read you some numbers and I want you to tell me what you think they are.” She read the numbers.

“Court-case file number,” Parker said immediately. “The first two numbers are the year—2003.”

Susan told Parker the story of the mysterious envelope.

“Looks like someone’s got herself an anonymous source,” Parker teased. “Let me call my guy at the courthouse and see what I can find out about your file.”

Her laptop was sitting on the coffee table. She opened it up and Googled “Justin Johnson.” Over 150,000 links came up. She Googled “Justin Johnson, Portland.” This time, only eleven hundred. She started scrolling through them.

The phone rang. Susan picked it up.

“It’s a juvie record,” Parker said. “Sealed. Sorry.”

“A juvie record,” Susan said. “What kind of crime?”

“Sealed. As in ‘cannot be opened.’”

“Right.” She hung up and looked at the name and numbers some more. Drank some coffee. Looked at the name. A juvie record. Why would someone want her to know about Justin Johnson’s juvie record? Could it have something to do with the After School Strangler? Should she call Archie? About what? Some weird envelope she’d found in her newspaper? It could be about anything. It could be a prank. She didn’t even know any Justins. Then she remembered the student pot dealer in the Cleveland High parking lot. His vanity plate had read
JAY
2. The letter
J
squared? It was worth checking out. She dialed the number for the Cleveland High administration office.

“Hi,” Susan said. “This is Mrs. Johnson. We’ve been having some truancy issues and I was wondering if you could tell me if my son Justin had made it to school today?”

The student office volunteer told Susan to hang on a minute and then came back on the line. “Mrs. Johnson?” she said. “Yeah. No worries. Justin’s here today.”