Heartsick (5 page)

There was a story every day for the next week: rumors, leads, neighbors remembering how lovely Lee was, classmate vigils, church services, a growing reward fund for information leading to the killer.

“On February second, Dana Stamp finished up a Lincoln High dance-team practice,” Derek said. “She showered, said goodbye to friends, and headed to her car, which was parked in the student parking lot. She never made it home. Her mother, a real estate agent, was showing a house on the east side and didn’t get home until nine
P
.
M
. She called the police just before midnight.” Slide.
ANOTHER GIRL MISSING
screamed the front page of the February 3 issue of the
Herald.

Another school photograph. Susan sat forward a little and examined the girl on the wall. The similarities were striking. Dana didn’t have the braces or the acne, so at first glance, she seemed prettier than Lee, but once you looked more closely, they could have been related. Dana was the girl Lee was going to be, once the braces came off and the pimples cleared up. They had the same oval face, wide-set eyes, small, unremarkable nose, and brown hair. Both were skinny, with the awkward beginning of breasts. Dana smiled in her picture. Lee didn’t.

Susan had followed the story. You couldn’t live in Portland and avoid it. As the days slipped by without any clues as to Dana’s whereabouts, they blended into one girl: DanaandLee. A grave mantra repeated again and again by local newscasters, the lead story, regardless of what was happening nationally or internationally. The police would say publicly only that they were considering the possibility that the two cases may be related, but in everyone’s minds, there was no doubt. Their school pictures always appeared side by side. They were referred to as “the girls.”

Derek looked dramatically from person to person. “A kayaker found the body partially obscured by brush on the bank of the Esplanade on February fourteenth. Nice, huh? She had been raped and strangled to death.”

The slide dissolved to that day’s paper, March 8.
THIRD GIRL VANISHES: CITY RECONVENES BEAUTY KILLER TASK FORCE.
Derek summarized: “Kristy Mathers left school yesterday at six-fifteen
P
.
M
. after a play rehearsal. She was supposed to ride right home on her bike. Her father’s a cabbie. Works late. He stopped by the house around seven
P
.
M
., after he wasn’t able to reach her by phone. He called the police at seven-thirty
P
.
M
. She’s still missing.”

Susan gazed at the girl’s photograph. She was chubbier than Dana and Lee, but she had the same brown hair and wide-set eyes. Susan glanced up at the round white clock that hummed on the far wall above the door. The black minute hand jumped forward. It was almost 6:30. Kristy Mathers had been missing for over twelve hours. A cold chill folded down Susan’s spine as she realized that there probably wasn’t going to be any happy reunion at the end of this story.

Ian turned to Susan. “Your subject’s Archie Sheridan. Not the girls. The girls are”—he ran his hand over his hair back to his ponytail—“background. You write this right, it’ll make your career.”

Derek looked confused. “What do you mean? You said that this was my story. I was up half the night working on this presentation.”

“Change of plans,” Ian said. He shot Derek one of his handsome smiles. “Nice PowerPoint, though.”

Derek’s entire forehead constricted.

“Relax,” Ian said with a sigh. “You can update the Web site. We’re setting up a blog.”

Two perfect red spots appeared on Derek’s cheeks and Susan could see his jaw tighten. He looked from Ian to Clay. Clay busied himself with another doughnut. Derek looked balefully at Susan. She shrugged and gave him a half smile. She could afford it.

“Okay,” Derek said with a resigned little nod. He snapped his laptop shut and began to coil its cord around his hand. Then he paused, the cord a strangled knot around his fist. “The After School Strangler,” he said. They all looked at him. He grinned, pleased with himself. “For the name. I just thought of it.”

Ian looked at Clay, head cocked questioningly.

No, Susan thought. Don’t let this bozo name him. Not Derek the Square.

Clay nodded a few times. “The After School Strangler.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “It’s corny. But I like it.” His laughter faded and he sat perfectly still for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Someone should write an obituary,” he said softly. “Just in case.”

Clay picked up his cup of cold coffee and stared into it glumly. Derek looked at his hands. Ian worried his ponytail. Susan glanced up at the clock. The hand snapped forward another minute. The sound it made echoed in the small, suddenly quiet room.

CHAPTER

6

A
rchie counted out
the Vicodin. Thirteen. He placed two of the white oval pills on the back of the toilet and nestled the other eleven in the brass pillbox, padding them carefully in cotton so they wouldn’t rattle. Then he put the pillbox in the pocket of his blazer. Thirteen extra-strength Vicodin. It should be enough. He sighed and pulled the pillbox out of his pocket, counted out another five pills from the large amber plastic prescription bottle, added these to the pillbox, and dropped it back in his pocket. Eighteen Vicodin. Ten milligrams of codeine and 750 milligrams acetaminophen in every dose. The maximum acetaminophen dosage human kidneys could handle was four thousand milligrams in twenty-four hours. He’d done the math. That was 5.33 pills per day. Not nearly enough. So he played at controlling his habit. He would allow himself one more every few days. Up to twenty-five; then he would wean himself, break pills in half, get back down to the recommended four or five a day. Then work his way up again. It was a game. King of the Hill. Everyone took turns. Vicodin for the pain. Xanax for the panic attacks. Zantac for his stomach. Ambien to sleep. They all went into the pillbox.

He traced his fingers along his jawline. He had never been good at shaving, but lately he had become almost dangerous. He pulled at a small piece of toilet paper that was stuck to a razor nick. It came off, but the wound immediately started bleeding again. He splashed some cold water on his face, tore another square of toilet paper off the roll, held it to his chin, and looked in the mirror. Archie had never had the ability to appraise his own appearance. His gifts were appraising other people’s appearances: empathy, recall, and an obsessive, dogged determination that required him to pursue every possible outcome until, like a peeled scab, the truth was exposed. It had rarely occurred to him, during his strange career as a homicide detective, to pay attention to how he might appear to others. Now he turned his eye for detail to his own image. He had sad, dark eyes. He’d had sad eyes long before he’d heard of Gretchen Lowell, long before he’d become a cop. His grandfather, a defrocked priest, had fled Northern Ireland, and they were his eyes: homesick, no matter how many people were around him. Archie had always had sad eyes, but it was as if in the last few years his other features had withdrawn, so now the eyes stood out more. He had the strong chin from his mother’s side and a nose that had been broken in a car accident, and cheeks that dimpled when he permitted a lopsided smile. He wasn’t pretty. But he wasn’t unhandsome if you liked sort of average-looking, depressed people.

He smiled at his image and immediately cringed at the result. Who was he kidding? But he tried to make an effort. He tried to flatten the cowlick at the front of his thick head of curly brown hair and smooth his eyebrows. He wore a ridiculously professorial tan corduroy blazer, and a brown-and-silver silk tie purchased by his ex-wife, who he knew had good taste only because he had heard people comment on it. The blazer, which had once fit perfectly, now hung too loose in the shoulders. But his socks were clean. He appeared, to himself at least, to look almost normal. He hadn’t felt rested in two years. He was forty, but looked at least five years older. He was fighting a losing battle with pills. He could not bear to touch his children. And he looked almost normal. Yes. He could carry it off. He was a cop, he reminded himself.
I can bullshit beautifully.

He pulled the toilet paper off his face and tossed it in the wastebasket under the sink. Then he gripped either side of the sink and examined his reflection. The nick was barely noticeable, really. He smiled. Lifted his full eyebrows.
Hello! Good to see you again! Yep! Feeling fine! All better!
He sighed and let his face fall back into its natural slack expression, and then absentmindedly picked up the two pills off the toilet and swallowed them without water. It was 6:30
A
.
M
. More than twelve hours had passed since the last time anyone had seen Kristy Mathers.

The new task
force offices turned out to be in a former bank building, which the city had leased months before for overflow office space. The cement-block building was a one-story rectangle with few windows, surrounded on all sides by parking lot. Its drive-through ATM was still in operation.

Archie glanced at his watch: almost seven o’clock.

The nighttime house-to-house had turned up nothing but tired, scared neighbors. Henry had dropped Archie off at 3:00
A
.
M
. with the address of the new task force offices. “Get a good night’s sleep,” Henry had said. And they had both laughed.

Now Archie stood across the street, hands deep in his pockets, surveying the spectacle. A cab had dropped him off—his compromise to the pills. He was an addict, but he was a responsible one. A smile passed his lips. A. Fucking. Bank. There were already three local news vans parked in the lot around the bank building.
ALL THE NEWS WORTH KNOWING,
read a slogan on one of the vans. No national news yet, he noticed. But if he was right, it would only be a matter of time. He watched the reporters, clad in absurdly warm and waterproof coats, confer with their bearded cameramen. They lurched forward expectantly every time a car pulled up, then settled back to cigarettes and thermoses of coffee when the occupant became clear. They were waiting for him, he realized. Not the girls. Not the task force. Not, to be fucking sure, a story. They wanted him. The Beauty Killer’s last victim. The bones in his fingers went cold. He ran a hand through his hair and noticed it was wet. He had been standing in the slow rain for ten minutes.
You’ll catch your death,
he thought to himself. The words were not in his voice, but hers. Lilting. Teasing.
You’ll catch your death, darling.
He took a deep breath, pushed her, for a moment, from his mind, and started toward his new office.

The mob of reporters swarmed around him as soon as his shoes hit the wet concrete of the parking lot. He ignored the questions and the cameras, walking as fast as he could through the gauntlet, shoulders hunched against the rain.
“How does it feel to be back?” “How’s your health?” “Have you been in contact with Gretchen Lowell?”
Don’t get distracted, he told himself. He fingered the pillbox in his pocket, gaining solace from its presence. Just keep moving.

He showed his badge to the uniformed officer at the door, and slid in past the reporters kept firmly at bay outside. The bank was full of people—cleaning, tearing down the old transaction counter, moving furniture. The air was dense with the dust of smashed drywall and the hum of power tools. Archie’s eyes burned from the particulate matter as he scanned the room. Henry was standing just inside the door, waiting for him. He had shown Archie the ropes when Archie made detective and he had been looking out for him ever since. A large man with a gleaming shaved head and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, Henry could cut an imposing figure when he chose. But his crinkled grin and kind blue eyes belied his warmer nature. Henry knew both facades, and he used them to his advantage. Today, he was dressed in a black turtleneck, black leather jacket, and black jeans. He wore a hand-tooled black leather belt with a silver and turquoise belt buckle. It was an ensemble Henry revisited with little variation.

Henry was attentively brushing white dust off his black pants when he saw Archie. “Make it past the local newsies?” he asked with amusement.