Let Me Go (2 page)

Over the years, Archie had gotten good at projecting calm. He'd developed that skill first as head of the Beauty Killer Task Force, dealing with relatives of victims, his bosses, other cops. Then, after he finally went home from the hospital, after Gretchen Lowell had held him captive for ten days while she tortured him, he had again come to rely on that particular expertise, so he could pretend to be normal for his family. Two years later, when he'd come back to work after medical leave, addicted to pain pills, he pretended every day. He could look anyone in the eye and assure that person, with absolute confidence, that he was fine. He had learned to lie.

That skill had come in handy. He had Gretchen to thank for that.

Now Archie forced himself not to hurry. He relaxed his limbs. Henry transferred the evidence bag to one of the patrol cops and Archie and Henry exited through the side door. Archie searched for anyone watching, anyone out of place. It was almost eight
P.M
. on Friday night. Four patrol cars were parked in front of the Meridian on Hawthorne Boulevard. If Portland was hipster central, then the Meridian was Portland condensed down to its hipster nucleus. The vibe was midcentury, but the zeitgeist was 1970s cocktail lounge. An oil portrait of a topless pinup girl hung just inside the door. There was a crowd out on the sidewalk most nights. But tonight's crowd was different. The patrons who'd been interviewed and released were now milling around out front. Many were in costume. A man dressed like Jesus Christ was hitting on a young woman in braids and a brass breastplate. Thor was arguing with a woman whose costume of strategically placed green fabric led Archie to presume that she was either a superhero or some kind of saucy leprechaun. Cleopatra was taking video with her cell phone. Three zombies stood chain-smoking on the sidewalk. The bar had clearly been hosting some sort of Halloween event. Then there were the array of pedestrians who'd stumbled upon the scene—people with take-out boxes, cyclists, dog-walkers, and diners from nearby restaurants who'd wandered out to rubberneck. Some of them had cell phones out and were taking pictures. Cars slowed as they passed.

Archie and Henry walked around the corner past a Lebanese restaurant housed in a restored Queen Anne Victorian. In the restaurant's yard, stainless steel patio heaters glowed dark orange over the outside dining area.

As they rounded the corner, the street turned residential. There were fewer people around. Maybe someone was watching; maybe someone wasn't. But Archie didn't want to take chances. He unlocked his car, and they got in. He didn't turn on the car. He didn't want the dash lights to illuminate their faces.

The dead man in the bathroom was Carl Richmond. He was a DEA agent.

“We can't blow his cover,” Archie said.

“I'm guessing it was already blown,” Henry said.

Archie rubbed his face with his hands. “We don't know that.”

“This was an assassination, Archie,” Henry said. “The bartender saw him. Says he was alone. He met someone in that bathroom. The toilet lid was down. He wasn't in there pissing. He met someone, and that someone shot him in the head. No one heard anything, so I'm guessing our killer used a silencer. No one saw anything. Body was discovered by the next guy who went in there to expel some Miller Lite. This was planned. It was a hit.”

Henry was right. But it didn't change anything. Richmond had been running a deep cover operation. Drugs. Dirty cops. It had been years in the making. Henry didn't know the half of it. “We don't do anything,” Archie said. “We follow DEA's lead on this.” If they didn't know Richmond was dead, they'd know soon enough. “We let this play out,” Archie said. He peered out the car window. An upstairs light was on in the house across the street.

“You think they're watching?” Henry asked. He wasn't talking about the DEA.

“If I imported massive amounts of heroin,” Archie said, “and I suspected someone was a cop, and I had him killed, that's what I'd do.” A woman walked by the car with a black Lab. “I'd wait for twenty guys in DEA jackets to show up. Because if they do, I know for sure that I was right.”

“Either way, everyone your buddy worked with is in danger.”

“He wasn't my buddy,” Archie said. He'd known Carl for fifteen years. But he had never liked him. Carl put his investigations ahead of everything, and he was willing to sacrifice anyone to make the case. A decade before, Archie had delivered Carl an intelligence jackpot—Leo Reynolds, the twenty-one-year-old heir apparent of the family that had controlled the drug business in the Pacific Northwest for the last quarter century. Leo had come to Archie for help getting away from his father; instead Archie and Carl had sent Leo back to operate under deep cover for the DEA. Ten years later, Leo Reynolds was still living a lie. If Archie had it to do over, he would have told the twenty-one-year-old Leo Reynolds to change his name and walk away.

Leo.

“Carl was Leo's only contact,” Archie said, feeling his stomach tighten. If they had gone after Carl, Leo might be next. Archie fished his phone out of his jacket pocket and started to punch in Leo's number. But halfway through pressing the digits, Archie stopped, his fingers hovering uncertainly over the phone's keypad.

A couple walked past the car, holding hands. She was already a little tipsy, and stumbled and then laughed.

It gave Archie an idea. He deleted the partial number he'd entered, and called a different telephone number instead.

Susan Ward picked up right away.

“Hey,” she said. “You never call me. Have you noticed that? I am always calling you. But you never call me. Is that weird?”

“Is Leo with you?” Archie asked.

“Seriously?” Susan said. “You're calling my phone and it's not even to talk to me? Do you know how strange that is?”

“Is he with you?” Archie asked again. He glanced over at Henry, who was sitting in the passenger seat, watching him. It was chilly. The car was dark. The windows were fogging up.

“Yeah,” Susan said. “Why?”

Archie could hear her reporter's instincts kicking in and knew he had to get off the phone before she got too interested. The last thing he wanted was Susan getting involved in this.

“I need you to tell him that I have to cancel lunch, okay?” Archie said. “Tell him that exactly. Archie needs to cancel lunch.”

“He has a phone,” Susan said. “Call him and tell him yourself.”

“Susan,” Archie said. “Please.”

He needed Susan to do this for him, and he needed her not to ask questions.

Susan groaned. “Fine,” she said.

“Thank you,” Archie said, trying not to let her hear the relief in his voice. He ended the call and started the car.

Henry had found the piece of birthday cake on the dash and had unwrapped the tinfoil and was eating it with his fingers. “Tell me that's code,” Henry said, his mouth full, “and that you really didn't just call to cancel lunch.”

Archie wiped some condensation off the windshield with his forearm. “We need to go celebrate my birthday,” he said.

“Your birthday isn't until tomorrow,” Henry said.

“Do you have cash?” Archie asked, eyes on the rearview mirror as he put the car in reverse. “Small bills?”

“For what?”

Archie allowed himself a smile as he pulled away from the curb. “The strippers,” he said.

 

CHAPTER

3

 

Why Leo suddenly
wanted to go to the Dancin' Bare, Susan didn't know, but she wasn't happy about it.

She was dressed for the opera.

They weren't going to the opera. They were supposed to be going to a musical stage adaptation of the Patrick Swayze eighties movie
Road House,
but she had just bought an embroidered silk cape at a thrift store and she was determined to wear it. It was silver, with a red lining and a rhinestone clip at the neck, and it grazed the back of her knees when she walked. She had paired it with a black sleeveless shift, hot pink tights, and her silver twenty-eight-eye Doc Martens. She had recently dyed her hair black with a white skunk stripe down the middle, and the whole look was very Cruella De Vil meets Daphne Guinness. It was perfect for a fringe theater performance. It was not ideal for a strip club.

Leo breezed past the doorman, while Susan stalked sullenly behind him, through the wood-paneled entryway into the dark bar. Posters on the way in advertised the chance to meet girls “up close.”

She did not like to go to strip clubs with Leo. It wasn't that she had anything against strip clubs per se. She just didn't like the way that everyone at the strip clubs seemed to know her boyfriend. Leo's father owned some of those clubs. Leo did business at some of them. But there was more to it than that. Leo liked these clubs. He liked them in a way that Susan knew she could never fully understand.

It certainly had nothing to do with the decor.

You couldn't smoke in bars in Portland anymore, but the club still reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and no one had bothered to collect the black plastic ashtrays that were still stationed on every surface. Candles flickered, Italian-restaurant-style, in red glass jars on the tables. Colored Christmas lights festooned the ceiling, some blinking, some not, every string a different style from the last, seemingly hung at random, as if the whole mess had been left behind by a rowdy bachelor party of drunken elves. Rope lights outlined the bar and the stages, the PVC tubing affixed with a staple gun. All that gaudy lighting, and the place was still too dark to see properly. Leo knew where he was going, though. He led Susan around the line to play Keno, past the first stage, toward the main stage at the center of the room. The club was bustling with the usual suspects. A dozen testosterone-fueled frat boys gathered around two tables and chanted encouragement to a poor asshole wearing a candy bra over his shirt and pounding a beer. Men in suits hunched over cocktails, ties loosened, wedding rings in their pockets. A few couples leaned close, giggling. Some Portland Timbers fans were so drunk that one of them nearly tripped over his scarf. And then there were the creepy guys, the ones who sat along the stage racks, their caps pulled low, nursing beers and clutching cash in their hands.

Susan could tell that Leo was looking for someone. He wasn't obvious about it, but she noticed his eyes scanning the room. He must have settled on someone, because he beelined for a table at the far side of the main stage. A birthday boy, apparently—Susan could see the dorky paper birthday hat he was wearing. As Leo and she sidled past the stage, behind the creepy guys, Leo nodded at the stripper who was performing. She had dark hair and melon-sized breasts and a star tattooed over the pelvic bone she was swiveling. The stripper mouthed the words
Hi, Leo
. She was wearing a red headband with devil horns on it. Susan wondered if she always wore it, or if it was supposed to be some sort of Halloween costume. Maybe she'd started out in a full Satan ensemble and had slowly stripped it all away.

They got to the table and Leo put his hand on the birthday boy's back. The birthday boy turned and looked up.

“Archie?” Susan said, the sound of his name swallowed by the music.

Henry appeared then, with two beers in plastic cups, and he set the cups on the table and sat down in the chair next to Archie.

Susan looked from Henry to Archie, expecting some sort of explanation, but she didn't get one. Henry avoided her eyes.

Archie took one of the cups and lifted it in a toasting motion in her direction, and some of the beer slopped out of the cup onto the table.

Was he drunk? Was Archie Sheridan drunk in a strip club wearing a child's birthday hat?

Susan wasn't sure what to say. It was like the time she went to get her eyebrows waxed and one of her editors from back when she'd worked at the
Herald
was there making an appointment for an anal wax. She couldn't get through an editorial meeting after that without picturing his smooth, hairless sphincter. There were things about people you just weren't supposed to know.

Her face must have communicated her bafflement, because Archie pointed to the birthday hat. And then at Henry. “His idea,” Archie yelled over the music.

Susan tightened her fingers around Leo's arm. She wanted out of here. She had fled the brow wax and never gone back to that salon again. Archie could get drunk and go to strip clubs. That didn't mean she had to watch it.

Archie motioned for Leo to lean in close and then Archie said something to him.

Leo stood up and laughed and clapped Archie on the shoulder. “Let's get you a birthday present,” he said loudly. He looked up at the busty brunette humping the stripper pole and beckoned her with his finger and she smiled and slid off the stage. Archie picked up his drink and stood up next to Leo.

Everyone else around the stage jeered and wolf-whistled.

“What's going on?” Susan asked.

Leo said, “I'll be right back.”

Susan was confused. They were leaving her? “No,” Susan said. “I'll come with you guys.”

Leo leaned close to her and took her gloved hand. “I just bought Archie a lap dance,” he said. He nodded at the girl, who was now pressing her bare chest against Archie. “I think he'd be more comfortable if you stayed here.”

Susan laughed. Leo was insane. A lap dance? Archie didn't want a lap dance. Archie Sheridan didn't do lap dances. There was no way. This was some sort of miscommunication. Susan looked over at Archie, waiting for him to honorably reject the offer. The girl had her arm around Archie's waist. He didn't seem to mind. He was smiling. Susan felt her face get hot. “Oh,” she said.

She stood there stiffly, while Leo walked Archie and the girl off to one of the private rooms down the back hall, and all the creepy guys seated around the stage clapped.

Then she sank down in Archie's empty seat and peeled off her purple elbow-length gloves. She could feel herself starting to sweat, the silk cape sticking to her skin.