Heartsick

  CHAPTER 39

  How does it feel?” Archie asks. The codeine had made things better. He is only barely present now. The wounds on his abdomen are red and hard with fluid. He can feel the burning pain of the infections, but he doesn’t mind it. He doesn’t even mind the heavy smell of decomposition that suffocates everything. Sweat clings to his clammy skin and his limbs lie lifeless, but to him, his body feels loose and warm, his blood gelatinous. There is Archie. And there is Gretchen. And there is the basement. It is like they are in a waiting room for death. So he makes conversation.

  Gretchen sits in her chair next to his bed, her hand resting on his. “Were you there when your children were born?”

  “Yes.”

  Her look grows distant as she tries to articulate her thoughts. “I think it must be like that. Intense and beautiful and wretched.” She leans toward him, until he can feel her breath against his cheek, and then brings her lips to his ear. “You think they were random. But they weren’t. There was always a chemistry. I would feel it right away.” Her breath tickles his earlobe; her hand tightens around his. “A physical connection. A death spark.” She turns and looks at their hands folded together, his wrist still bound by the leather strap. “Like they wanted it. I would pluck them out of the universe. Hold their life in my hand. What astounds me is that people get up and go to work and come home and they don’t ever kill anyone. I feel sorry for them because they aren’t alive. They will never really know what it’s like to be human.”

  “Why did you use the men?”

  She gazes at him flirtatiously. “It was better when my lovers did it. I liked to watch them kill for me.”

  “Because then you had power over two people.”

  “Yes.”

  Archie lets his eyes fall on the corpse on the floor. He can’t see the head from his vantage point, only a hand, and he has watched the flesh darken and swell until it is unrecognizable, a dead bird at the end of a sleeve. “Who’s on the floor?” Archie asks.

  She gives the corpse a disinterested glance. “Daniel. I found him on-line.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “I didn’t need him anymore,” she says, running a delicate finger over the skin of his forearm. “I had you. You’re special, darling. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Number two hundred. The bicentennial.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  He is beginning to think he understands her. As if the further he gets from his life, the more she becomes clear to him. Had she been born? Or made? “Who made you drink drain cleaner, Gretchen?”

  She laughs, but the amusement is unconvincing. “My father? Is that the answer?”

  “Do I remind you of him?” Archie asks.

  He thinks he sees her flinch. “Yes.”

  “End this,” he says, fruitlessly. “Get some help.”

  Her hand flutters in the air for a moment. “I’m not the way I am because of him. I’m not a violent person.”

  “I know,” Archie says. “You need help.”

  She picks up the scalpel, still stained with his blood, from the tray and holds it against his chest. Then she begins to carve. He can barely feel it. The blade is sharp and she is not cutting deeply. He watches as his ugly bruised skin splits beneath the blade, the blood holding for a moment, oxygenating, before it flows bright red from the wound. That’s the main sensation: the blood running down his sides, leaving trails of crimson that pool under his torso on the sweat-soaked white sheet. He watches her, her small brow furrowed with concentration, doodle on his flesh. “There,” she says finally. “It’s a heart.”

  “Who’s it for?” he asks. “I thought we were going to bury the body. Keep them guessing.”

  “It’s for you,” Gretchen says brightly. “It’s for you, darling. It’s my heart.” She glances sadly down at Archie’s swollen abdomen. “Of course it will get infected. It’s Daniel. His corpse has desterilized everything. I don’t have the proper antibiotics for a staph infection. The antibiotics I’m giving you will slow it down. But I don’t have anything strong enough to kill it.”

  Archie smiles. “You worried about me?”

  She nods. “You have to fight it. You have to stay alive.”

  “So you can kill me with drain cleaner?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she insists, her voice a thin reed of desperation. “I’m very sane. And if you die before I let you, I will kill your children, darling. Ben and Sara.” She holds the scalpel easily, as if it is an extension of her body, another finger. “Ben is in kindergarten at Clark Elementary School. I will slice him up. You will do what I say. You will stay alive until I tell you. Understand?”

  He nods.

  “Say it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” she says, her face softening. “It’s just that I’m worried.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the murders.”

  His throat and abdomen throb. Swallowing has become excruciating. “I don’t care anymore, Gretchen.”

  Her mouth falters. She almost looks a little hurt. “You’re the head of my task force. You don’t want to take my confession?”

  He stares past her, at the ceiling: the pipes, the ducts, the fluorescent light panels. “I’m trying to fight my staph infection.”

  “Do you want to watch the news? I could bring a TV down.”

  “No.” The thought of seeing his widow on the television news fills him with dread.

  “Come on. There’s a vigil for you today. It will cheer you up.”

  “No.” His mind searches for something to distract her with. “Let me drink the drain cleaner.” He gives her a pleading look. It isn’t faked. “Come on.” He is so tired. “I want to.”

  “You want to?” She smiles with satisfaction.

  “I want to drink the drain cleaner,” Archie says emphatically. “Feed it to me.”

  She rises and makes the preparations, humming softly under her breath. In the codeine haze, he is unattached to any of it. It is like watching it all happen in a rearview mirror. When she returns, they repeat the exercise from the previous day. This time, the pain is more intense, and Archie vomits onto the bed.

  “It’s blood,” Gretchen observes, pleased. “The poison is eating through your esophagus.”

  Good, thinks Archie. Good.

  He is dying. Gretchen has him on a morphine drip because he can’t keep the pills down anymore. He is coughing blood. He cannot remember the last time she left his side. She just sits there, holding a white washcloth to his face to catch the blood when he coughs, the drool of saliva he can’t swallow. He can smell the corpse and he can hear her voice, but that is it. There is no other sensation. No pain. No taste. His vision has narrowed to a circle a few feet around his head. He is aware of her when she touches him, her blond hair, her hand, her bare forearm. There are no more lilacs.

  Gretchen puts her face next to his and gently turns his head so that he can see her, her face shimmering and folding in the light. “It’s time again,” she says.

  He blinks slowly. He is bathed in soft, thick, warm blackness. He doesn’t even register what she has said until he feels the spoon in his mouth. This time, he cannot swallow the poison. She pours water down his throat after it, but he chokes and vomits all the fluid up. His entire body spasms, sending a black wall of pain from his groin to his shoulders. He fights for oxygen, and in his alarm, his consciousness is forced back into his body and all of his senses come horribly alive. He screams.

  Gretchen holds his head against the bed, her forehead pressed hard against his cheek. He lurches against her hand, screaming as loudly as he can, letting all the pain and fear drive out of his body through his lungs. The effort tears at his throat and the screams turn into choking and the choking to dry heaves. When his breathing returns to normal, Gretchen looks up, and slowly
begins to wipe the sweat and blood and tears off his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasps stupidly.

  She sits, her attention fixed on him for a time, and then stands up and walks away. When she returns, she has a hypodermic. “I think you’re ready now,” she says. Gretchen holds the hypodermic up for him to see. “It’s digitalis. It will stop your heart. Then you’ll die.” She touches his face tenderly with the back of her hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay here with you until it’s over.”

  He is relieved. He watches as she injects the digitalis into his IV tube and then takes her seat at his deathbed, one hand resting lightly on his pale knuckles, the other on his forehead.

  He does not think about Debbie or Ben or Sara or Detective Archie Sheridan or the Beauty Killer Task Force. He just concentrates on her. Gretchen is all there is. His only thread. If he can stay focused, he thinks, he will not be afraid. His heartbeat increases, coming faster and faster, until it loses all rhythm to him—so foreign and wrong that it doesn’t even feel like his heart anymore. It is just someone knocking, panicked, desperate, on a faraway door. Gretchen’s face is the last thing he sees when the sudden pain seizes him by the chest and neck. The pressure grows. Then there is a blinding, excruciating white burn and finally, peace.

  CHAPTER 40

  Ian pulled into a parking spot in front of Susan’s building. Susan picked a strand of ginger pet hair off her black pants, feeling it between her fingers for a moment before she let it float onto the floor mat below. Ian’s Subaru smelled like Armor All and his wife’s Welsh Corgi. Chic twentysomethings slumped in the afternoon sun outside the coffeehouse on the corner, smoking cigarettes and thumbing through alt weeklies. They worked as waiters or at galleries, or didn’t have jobs, and always seemed to have a great deal of disposable time. Susan envied them. They were like some marvelous high school clique that Susan’s reputation kept her from joining. She looked up at the old brewery building with its large windows like yawning mouths. Its brick facade seemed embarrassed by all the glass and steel that surrounded it.

  “Do you want to come up?” she asked Ian.

  Ian made an apologetic face. “I’ve got copy to look at.”

  “Later?” Susan asked, carefully shaving the edge of neediness off of her voice.

  “Sharon’s having people over for dinner,” Ian explained. “I’ve got to go right home after work. She’s making some kind of meal that involves boiled chard. I said I’d stop and pick up cheese.”

  “Boiled chard and cheese? It must be important.”

  “Tomorrow?” Ian asked.

  “Forget it.”

  “No,” Ian said awkwardly. “I mean you’ll have the story for me tomorrow, right? The next installment?”

  Susan picked another dog hair off her pants and flicked it on the floor mat. “Oh, right. Sure.”

  “By noon, okay? Seriously.”

  “No problem,” Susan said. Then she got out of the car and walked inside.

  Archie walked back outside into the backyard. The mayor was nowhere to be seen, presumably off in a quiet corner preparing for the press conference. The Hardy Boys were standing with their hands on their hips in the door of the garage, and Anne was now standing with Claire near the shed. Archie saw Henry emerge from the garage with McCallum’s gray cat in his arms, and he waved him over.

  “They fingerprint the bike yet?” Archie asked.

  The cat nuzzled its head under Henry’s chin and purred. “Yeah. It’s clean.”

  “Totally?” Archie asked.

  “Yep,” Henry said. The cat gave Archie a suspicious, doubtful glance. “Wiped down. Not a print on it.”

  Archie chewed on his bottom lip and stood with his hands on his hips, facing the house. It didn’t make sense. Why go through the trouble of wiping the bike down and then go ahead and keep it? If you were worried about evidence, why keep what amounted to a smoking gun? “Why would he do that do you think?” Archie mused aloud.

  Henry shrugged. “Neat freak?”

  “They print the gun?”

  “Not yet.” Henry gave the cat an absentminded scratch on the head. “They’ll do that back at the lab, after they’ve picked the brain matter off.”

  “Good idea,” Archie said.

  The cat began the task of licking Henry’s neck clean. “You seen Animal Control?” he asked hopefully.

  “Nope.”

  Archie hopped off the back stoop and walked over to where Anne and Claire stood near the shed in the corner of the backyard. A couple of toddlers, unimpressed by the police activity and the helicopters and the news vans, chased each other in circles beyond the fence. Their mother stood in the middle of her yard, hugging her arms and watching the show. Was he crazy to think that McCallum wasn’t the guy? Anne and Claire were in the throes of conversation, but Archie didn’t have time for niceties. He needed Anne’s profiling skills. And he knew that she needed him to still need her.

  “Does McCallum fit?” he asked.

  Claire and Anne stopped talking, surprised at the interruption. Claire’s eyes widened. Anne drew her jaw back slightly; then she tilted her head and said, “Yes.” She stopped herself. The lines around her eyes deepened and she added, “Except he’s not quite right.”

  “Not quite right?” Archie repeated.

  She made a helpless gesture. “If you were a fifteen-year-old girl and Dan McCallum offered to give you a ride, would you go with him? He looked like a toad. He wasn’t well liked. And how did he know the girls at the other schools?”

  Archie thought of the handsome custodian, Evan Kent.

  “Jesus Christ,” Claire said. “You think it isn’t suicide.”

  They all looked at one another, waiting.

  Archie caught the gray cat streaking through the backyard in the periphery of his vision.

  He raised his eyebrows apologetically. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” He saw Mike Flannigan and called him over to join them. He’d pulled the Hardy Boys off Reston when they’d found McCallum’s body. Now Archie was kicking himself for it. “Anyone else not show up at Cleveland today?” he asked Flannigan.

  Flannigan was chewing a fresh piece of gum that made him smell like he’d sucked down a tube of spearmint toothpaste. It was something they taught you at the Academy: chewing gum to mask the odor of death. “No,” Flannigan said. “But that janitor you’ve got Josh tailing just hopped a train to Seattle with a backpack and a guitar case. And another thing’s a little weird.” He jabbed his thumb at the house. “We searched the house, and for an unpopular teacher, he sure dug his students.”

  “What do you mean?” Archie asked.

  Flannigan unwrapped another piece of gum and put it in his mouth. “On the bookcases in the front room, he’s got every yearbook for the past twenty years,” he said. He snorted and gave the gum a chew. “That’s quite a memory walk for a guy who supposedly hated his job.”

  Archie raised a questioning eyebrow at Anne. She frowned a little and turned to Flannigan. “Show me,” she said.

  Archie ran his hand over his mouth. “After that,” he said, “I want you and Jeff back on Paul Reston.”

  Flannigan’s brows shot up. “What about Kent?” he asked.

  “It’s not Kent,” Archie said.

  “Why?” Flannigan asked.

  “Because I say so.”

  Flannigan worked the gum with his tongue. “We were on him from six last night to nine-thirty this morning,” he insisted. “I’m telling you, Reston didn’t leave his house last night. He couldn’t have taken the girl.”

  Archie sighed. “Humor me.”

  “We always do,” Flannigan muttered as he and Anne walked away.

  “I heard that,” Archie called after him.

  Archie walked over to where the mayor was in a deep confab with an aide.

  “I think you should cancel the press conference,” Archie said, breaking in.

  The mayor visibly blanched. “Yeah? How about no?”

  “T
his is going to sound crazy,” Archie said calmly. “So I’m going to have to ask you to trust that I’m feeling exceedingly rational right now. But I’m having doubts as to whether McCallum’s our guy.”

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” the mayor said, punctuating the statement by dramatically removing his sunglasses.

  “I think there’s a rather significant chance that it’s a setup.”

  The mayoral aide was glancing around helplessly. His suit was cheap and looked shiny in the sun.

  The mayor leaned forward toward Archie and spoke in an urgent whisper. “I can’t cancel the press conference. The story’s out. A teacher’s dead. A dead girl’s bike is in his garage. They’re live with it right now. It’s on TV.” He gave TV an agonized emphasis.

  “Then hedge our bets,” Archie said.

  The veins in the mayor’s neck thickened and raised. “‘Hedge our bets’?”

  Archie reached out and patted the hood of the silver Ford Escort that sat, parked just in front of the garage. “The car’s not big enough,” he said to the mayor. “How’d he get the bike and the girl in a compact, hmm?”

  The mayor began to rub some imaginary object between his fingers. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “You’re a politician, Buddy. You’ve always been a politician. Find a way to tell them that we don’t know what the fuck is going on in a way that makes it look like we know what the fuck is going on.” Archie gave the mayor an I-know-you-can-do-this arm squeeze and backed away.

  CHAPTER 41

  Susan sat on the couch with her laptop and a glass of red wine and started writing about Gretchen Lowell. As far as she was concerned, the After School Strangler story had ended with Dan McCallum’s suicide. She was sure they’d find Addy Jackson’s body somewhere. He’d killed her and dumped her like he had the others, and she was in the mud, waiting to be discovered by some unlucky jogger or Boy Scout troop. The image of Addy’s half-buried corpse flashed in her mind, and she felt her eyes burn with tears. Crap. She was not going to let this get to her, not now. She wiped the image clean, but it was replaced by Kristy Mathers’s damaged naked body twisted on the dark Sauvie Island sand. And then by Addy’s parents, and how they had looked at Archie with such despair and expectation, wanting him to save their daughter, to save them. And then by her own father.