Heartsick - Страница 2

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“It’s been two years. I told them that you had recovered. That you were ready to come back to work full-time.”

Archie smiled in the dark. “So you lied.”

“Power of positive thinking. You caught Gretchen Lowell, and she scared the crap out of everybody. This new guy? He’s killed three girls already. And he’s taken another one.”

“Gretchen caught me.” A rectangular brass pillbox sat on the coffee table next to a glass of water. Archie didn’t bother with coasters. The scratched-up oak coffee table had come with the apartment. Everything in Archie’s apartment was scarred.

“And you survived.” There was a pause. “Remember?”

With a delicate flick of his thumb, Archie opened the pillbox and took out three white oval pills and tucked them in his mouth. “My old job?” He took a drink of water, relaxing as he felt the pills travel down his throat. Even the glass had been there when he moved in.

“Task force supervisor.”

There was one more requirement. The most important one. “And the reporter?”

“I don’t like this,” Henry said.

Archie waited. There was too much in motion. Henry wouldn’t back down now. Besides, Archie knew that Henry would do almost anything for him.

“She’s perfect,” Henry said, relenting. “I saw her picture. You’ll like her. She’s got pink hair.”

Archie looked down at the files on his lap. He could do this. All he had to do was to keep it together long enough for his plan to work. He opened the top file. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could make out the vague image of a ghostly body in the mud. The killer’s first victim. Archie’s mind filled in the color: the strawberry ligature marks on her neck, the blushed, blistered skin. “How old is the girl?”

“Fifteen. Disappeared on her way home from school. Along with her bike.” Henry paused. Archie could hear his frustration in his silence. “We’ve got nothing.”

“Amber alert?” Archie asked.

“Issued a half hour ago,” Henry said.

“Canvass the neighborhood. Dogs, everything. Send uniforms door-to-door. See if anyone saw anything along the route she would have taken.”

“Technically, you’re not on the job until morning.”

“Do it anyway,” Archie said.

Henry hesitated. “You’re up for this, right?”

“How long has she been missing?” Archie asked.

“Since six-fifteen.”

She’s dead, Archie thought. “Pick me up in a half hour,” he said.

“An hour,” Henry said after a pause. “Drink some coffee. I’ll send a car.”

Archie sat there in the dark for a few minutes after he hung up. It was quiet. No TV blaring from the upstairs apartment, no footsteps overhead; just the pulse of traffic going by in the rain, a steady blast of forced air, and the rattled hum of the dying refrigerator motor. He looked at the clock and did the math. It was just after 9:00 P.M. The girl had been gone for almost three hours. He was warm and woozy from the pills. You could do a lot of damage to someone in three hours. He reached up and slowly unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and inserted his right hand under the fabric, placing it over his ribs, running his fingers over the thick scars that webbed his skin, until he found the heart that Gretchen Lowell had carved on him.

He had spent ten years working on the Beauty Killer Task Force, tracking the Northwest’s most prolific serial killer. A quarter of his life spent standing over corpses at crime scenes, paging through autopsy reports, sifting through clues; all that work, and Gretchen had tricked him into walking right into a trap. Now Gretchen was in prison. And Archie was free.

Funny. Sometimes it still felt like the other way around.

CHAPTER 3

Susan didn’t want to be there. Her childhood home was cluttered, and its tiny Victorian rooms reeked of cigarettes and sandalwood. She sat on the gold thrift-store couch in the parlor, occasionally looking at her watch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, twisting her hair around her fingers.

“Are you done yet?” she finally asked her mother.

Susan’s mother, Bliss, looked up from the project she had spread out on the large wooden wire spool that served as a coffee table. “Soon,” Bliss said.

On the same night every year, Bliss burned a likeness of Susan’s father in effigy. Susan knew it was crazy. But with Bliss, it was easier to just go along. Bliss made the foot-tall father figure out of bundled straw, wound round with brown packing string. It had been an evolving process. The first year, she had used dead bear grass from the yard, and it had been too wet and hadn’t burned. Kerosene had been required to get the thing ablaze and sparks had set the compost pile on fire and the neighbors had called 911. Now Bliss bought straw ready-packaged at a pet-supply store. It came in a plastic bag with a picture of a rabbit on it.

Susan had said she wouldn’t come this year, but there she sat, watching her mother wrap the packing string tighter and tighter around the little straw man’s femurs.

Bliss cut the string, tied it in a knot around the straw man’s ankle, and took a drag off her cigarette. That was Bliss for you: She drank green algae every day and smoked menthols. She embraced contradictions. She wore no make-up except for bloodred lipstick, which she wore every day without fail. She refused to wear fur except for her vintage leopard-skin coat. She was a vegan, but she ate milk chocolate. She had always made Susan feel, in comparison, less beautiful, less glamorous, less crazy.

Susan would admit that she and Bliss did have two things in common: a shared belief in the artistic potential of hair, and poor taste in men. Bliss cut hair for a living and wore her bleached hippie dreads down to her waist. Susan colored her own hair, dyeing her chin-length bob colors like Green Envy or Ultra Violet or, most recently, Cotton Candy Pink.

Bliss appraised her handiwork with a satisfied nod. “There,” she said. She got up from her cross-legged position on the floor and bounced into the kitchen, her dreadlocks flapping behind her. She reappeared a moment later with a photograph.

“I thought you might want to have this,” she said.

Susan took the color snapshot. It was a photograph of her as a toddler, standing in the yard with her father. He still had his heavy beard and was bending down so he could hold her hand; she was looking up at him and beaming, all plump cheeks and tiny teeth. Her brown hair was tied up in messy pigtails, and her red dress was dirty; he was wearing a T-shirt and holey jeans. They were both sunburned and barefoot, and they appeared completely happy. Susan had never seen the photograph before.

She felt a wave of sorrow wash over her. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

“It was in a box of his old papers.”

Susan’s father had died when she was fourteen. Now when Susan thought of him, he was always kind and wise, a picture of paternal perfection. She knew it wasn’t that simple. But after he was gone, both she and Bliss had fallen apart, so he must have had some leveling influence.

“He loved you so much,” Bliss said quietly.

Susan wanted a cigarette, but after spending her childhood lecturing Bliss about lung cancer, she didn’t like to smoke around her. It seemed an admission of defeat.

Bliss looked like she wanted to say something motherly. She reached up and sweetly smoothed a piece of Susan’s pink hair. “The color’s faded. Come into the salon and I’ll touch it up. The pink is flattering on you. You’re so pretty.”

“I’m not pretty,” Susan said, turning away. “I’m striking. There’s a difference.”

Bliss withdrew her hand.

It was dark and wet in the backyard. The back porch light illuminated a half circle of muddy grass and dead sedum planted too close to the house. The straw man was in the copper fire bowl. Bliss leaned over and set the straw on fire with a white plastic lighter and then stood back. The straw crackled and burned and then the flames crept up the little straw man’s torso until they engulfed him fully. His little arms were splayed wide, as if in panic. Then all human shape was lost to the orange blaze. Susan and Bliss burned Susan’s father every year so that they could let him go, start fresh. At least that was the idea. Maybe they would stop if it ever took.

Susan’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away. That was the thing. You thought you were emotionally steady, and then your dead father went and had a birthday and your crazy mother went and set a straw doll on fire in his memory.

“I’ve got to go,” Susan said. “There’s someone I need to meet.”

CHAPTER 4

The club was choked with cigarette smoke. Susan’s eyes stung from it. She pulled another cigarette out of a pack on the bar, lit it and took a drag. The music pounded through the floor. It snaked along the walls and up the stools and tunneled its way through Susan’s legs and vibrated the copper surface of the bar. Susan watched the yellow pack of cigarettes jump. It was dark. It was always dark in that club. She liked the way that you could be there and hide in plain sight from the person right next to you. She was good at drinking. But she’d had one drink too many. She considered this. It had probably been the blackberry martini. Or possibly the Pabst. Her mind blurred from the booze and she placed a hand flat on the bar until the sensation passed.

“I’m going outside for some air,” she said to the man next to her. She yelled it to be heard over the music, but the club’s throbbing baseline sucked the life out of all other sound.

The front door was on the other side of the dance floor, and as she made her way through the Monday-night DJ crowd, she compensated for the drinking with a too-careful stride, head held high, level, arms extended a few inches from her sides, eyes straight ahead, cigarette burning. No one danced at that club. They just stood around, shoulder-to-shoulder, nodding their heads to the beat. Susan had to touch people to get them to part for her, a shoulder, an upper arm, and they would melt a few inches back so she could pass. She could feel their eyes follow her. Susan knew she attracted attention. It wasn’t that she was pretty exactly. Her look belonged in the 1920s: a wide face with a large forehead that tapered to a small chin, skinny limbs, a rosebud mouth, and a flat chest. Her chin-length hair and very short bangs made her look even more like a deranged flapper. Striking was definitely the word for it. Without the pink hair, she might even have been beautiful. But it distracted from the sweetness of her features, making her look harder. Which was sort of the point.