Heartsick

  Henry cleared his throat. “He dumped her on the beach,” he theorized, “not in the water.”

  Archie nodded.

  “How do you know?” Susan asked.

  Archie looked up at Susan. Her face was pale, all lipstick and freckles, but she was holding together better than he had that first time. “She’d still be out there,” he said.

  “Corpses sink,” Henry explained. “They surface three days to a week later because of gases released in the body. It’s only been two days since she disappeared.”

  Archie looked up and down the beach. The helicopters circled overhead. He thought he caught the flash reflection of a telephoto lens. “He must have dumped her out here last night, while it was still raining. Early enough that the rain and tide would wash away any trace evidence he’d left on the hike.”

  “He wanted us to find her,” Henry said.

  “Why is she like that?” Susan asked, her voice quavering for the first time.

  Archie looked down at the body, her brown hair now a shade of pale orange, her skin burned. All identical to the crime photographs of Lee Robinson and Dana Stamp. “He bleaches them,” he said quietly. “He kills them. He sexually assaults them. And he soaks them in a tub of bleach until he decides to dump them.” He could taste it in his mouth; the eye-watering burn of the bleach blended with the putrefaction of flesh and muscle.

  He saw Susan waver, just a small adjustment in her stance, a catch. “You haven’t released that.”

  Archie gave her a tired smile. “I just did.”

  “So he kills them right away,” Susan said almost to herself. “Once anyone knows they’re missing, they’re already dead.”

  “Yep.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You let everyone keep on hoping. Even though you knew she was dead.” Then she bit her lip and wrote something in the notebook. “What a sick fuck,” she said under her breath.

  Archie wasn’t sure if she was referring to the killer, or to him. It didn’t really matter. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said.

  “If he did dump her here,” Henry said to Archie, “he must have parked where we did. Used the same path. He couldn’t have carried her from any other point. Unless he waded in from a boat.”

  “Go door-to-door. See if anyone drove by, noticed a vehicle. Including a boat. Also have the Hardy Boys canvass the area for condoms. He may not have been able to resist.”

  “You want them to search a nude beach for condoms?” asked Henry dubiously. “And maybe while they’re at it, they could search a few college dorms for bongs.”

  Archie smiled. “Send anything you find to the lab. Then run the DNA through CODUS. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Archie tucked another Vicodin in his mouth.

  “Another Zantac?” Henry asked.

  Archie looked away. “Aspirin.”

  CHAPTER 17

  On what Archie thinks is the third day, when Gretchen slams the funnel down his throat and drops the pills in, he swallows them without fighting it. She puts the funnel aside, and quickly tapes his mouth shut again with a precut piece of duct tape she has ready. She has said nothing today. She uses a white hand towel to wipe off the saliva that has run down his face, and then she leaves. He waits for the pills to kick in, every cell alert to change. It is another way to measure time. He doesn’t know what the pills are, but suspects speed, a painkiller, some sort of hallucinogen. The tingling starts at his nose and creeps its way up to the top of his head. He forces himself to give in to it.

  His mind is starting to go. He thinks he sees a dark-haired man in the basement with them. He is just a shadow. He flits behind Gretchen and then is gone. Archie wonders if the corpse has come to life, a walking man of rotting, bloated flesh and bone. But he tells himself that it is just a hallucination. Nothing is real.

  He imagines the crime scene. Henry and Claire. They would have traced him to the big yellow house that Gretchen had leased on Vista. Crime tape. Media. Forensics. Evidence markers. He moves through the scene, directing the task force as if he were just another Beauty Killer victim. “It’s been too long already,” he tells Claire. “I’m dead.” They are all so grim and desperate-looking. “Lighten up! It’s all good! At least we know who the fuck the killer is! Right? Right?” They stare at him blankly. Claire cries. “You have to see this is connected to the case,” Archie tells them, his voice anxious. “It’s not a coincidence.”

  They comb the entire property for clues. “Piece it together,” Archie pleads. They would have Gretchen’s name, her ID badge photograph. He replays his visit, mining his memory for any surface he had touched, fibers he had left, some trace that he had been there. The coffee. He had spilled it on the rug. Archie points to the darkened stain. “See it?” he cries to Henry. Henry stops. Squats. Waves a technician over. The lab would find traces of whatever she’d slipped him. It would confirm their suspicions. Had anyone seen him going in? What had happened to his car? Archie squats next to Henry. “When the results come back, you have to do everything you can to connect her to the other murders. Release her photograph everywhere. When I’m dead, she’ll leave the house. And when she leaves the house, you can catch her.”

  “You’re hallucinating,” Gretchen says.

  He is wrenched from his dream back to the basement. She is there again, pressing a cool cloth against his forehead. He doesn’t feel hot, but he realizes that he’s sweating.

  “You’re mumbling,” Gretchen says.

  Archie is grateful for the duct tape. Grateful that she can’t hear his half-cracked ramblings.

  “I don’t know how you stand the stench down here,” Gretchen says, sliding her eyes to where the corpse still lies on the floor.

  She starts to say something else, but he is tired of her, so he turns back into his mind.

  And he goes to see Debbie.

  She is sitting on the couch wrapped in a fleece blanket, eyes red from crying. “Have you found him?” she asks quickly when Archie walks in.

  “No,” he says. Archie gets a beer from the fridge and sits down beside her. Debbie’s face is smooth and empty and her hands shake where she holds the blanket under her chin.

  “He’s still alive,” Debbie says adamantly. The steely optimism in her voice breaks his heart. “I know it.”

  Archie considers this. He wants to be kind to her. But he can’t lie. “Actually, chances are I’m dead,” he tells her. “You have to prepare yourself.”

  Debbie looks at him in horror, her posture hardening.

  Flummoxed, he tries again to comfort her. “It’s for the best,” he says. “The sooner she kills me, the better. Believe me.”

  Debbie’s eyes fill with tears and her mouth gets small. “I think you’d better go now,” she says.

  “Look at me .” It’s Gretchen. He is back in the basement again. Reality folds and skitters on the periphery of his vision. He doesn’t want to give in to her, but he has learned his lesson, so he turns his head and gives her his attention.

  There is nothing in her face. No anger. No pleasure. No pity. Nothing. “Are you scared?” Gretchen asks. She dabs his forehead with the cloth, his cheek, the back of his neck, his collarbone. He thinks he sees a flash of emotion in her eyes. Sympathy?

  Then it’s gone. “Whatever you think this is going to be like,” she whispers. “It’s going to be worse.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The first thing Susan did when she arrived home from Sauvie Island was to unzip her tall, black leather boots, kick them off, and fling them on top of a pile of other shoes that had been abandoned at the door. Stained and reeking of bleach, the boots were ruined.

  Susan lived in what she liked to call a loft but what was actually a large studio apartment in the Pearl District, just north of downtown on Portland’s west side. The building, once a turn-of-the-century brewery, had been redeveloped several years before. The facade still stood, hulking and brick, along with the old smokestack, but the rest of the structure had been replaced to provide residents with the
most modern amenities. Susan’s loft was on the third floor. Technically, it belonged to an ex-professor of hers who was on a yearlong sabbatical in Europe with his wife, writing another book. He lived in Eugene, where he was the lauded head of the M.F.A. writing program at U of O, but he kept the place in Portland ostensibly as a writing getaway, though it was rarely used for literary pursuits. Susan had wanted it to be hers from that first weekend she’d spent there. The open kitchen had the latest appliances, a stainless-steel fridge and an impressive, gleaming range. It was everything the house she had grown up in wasn’t. Sure, the countertops were Corian, not granite, and the range was a Frigidaire knockoff of a Viking, but from a distance, the place still looked chic and urban. She loved the Great Writer’s blue desk. She loved the built-in bookcase that took up an entire wall and was stacked with the Great Writer’s books, two layers deep. She loved the framed photographs of the Great Writer with other great writers. The bed was walled off with a Japanese screen, leaving the rest of the space a living area, which consisted of a blue velvet sofa, a red leather club chair, a coffee table, and a small TV set. Everything that was actually hers in that apartment could fit in two suitcases.

  She pulled her shirt over her head, pulled off her black pants, her socks, her underpants, her bra. She could still smell it, the bleach. It was on everything, soaked into everything. God she had loved those boots. She stood for a moment naked, shivering, her clothes a pile at her feet, and then she wrapped herself in the kimono that hung on a brass hook on the bathroom door, gathered up her clothes, the expensive beautiful boots, walked barefoot out into the hallway, down to the small rectangular door marked GARBAGE by the elevator, opened it, and threw the whole bundle down the chute. She didn’t wait like she usually did to listen to the bundle fall; she went straight back to her apartment, into the bathroom, turned on the tub, let the kimono fall in the corner next to the door. Only an inch of steaming water had accumulated, but Susan climbed into the tub anyway, squatting in the hot water and watching her feet redden. She sat down slowly, wincing a little as she did, and then inched backward, stretching her skinny legs out in front of her. Her naked body only made her think of them. Does he bleach them in a tub like this? The waterline was just at her hips now and she leaned back against the cold porcelain, forcing herself to press against it until it warmed to her body temperature. Her arms were covered with goose bumps, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to stop the damn shivering. She turned the faucet off with her toes, closed her eyes, and tried not to think about the pale, bruised thing that had once been Kristy Mathers.

  Archie sat at his new desk, listening to his taped interview with Fred Doud. Kristy Mathers was dead. And now the clock restarted. The killer would take another girl. It was just a matter of time. It was always a matter of time.

  The office lights were on, but Archie had turned off the fluorescent overheads in his office and now sat in near darkness, the only light streaming in from his open door. He had finally sent Henry to drive Susan Ward back to her car, and he and Claire Masland had followed the medical examiner’s vehicle to the morgue, where they met Kristy’s father and he identified her body. Archie had become an expert at shattering families. Sometimes he didn’t have to say a word. They just looked at him and knew. Other times, he had to say it over and over again, and still they blinked at him dumbfounded, heads shaking in disbelief, eyes stubbornly bright with denial. And then, like a wave, it would crash and the truth would flood in. It took a lot of effort to remind himself that he was not the cause of their anguish.

  But Archie did not mind being around grief. Even the most blatant assholes seemed to function in a state of grace when confronted with the brutal loss of a loved one. They moved through the world differently than other people. When they looked at you, you had the feeling that they were really seeing you. Their entire universe was just this one thing, this one event, this one loss. They seemed, for a few weeks, to have things in perspective. Then the inconsequential shit of their lives would start to seep back in.

  He looked up. Anne Boyd was leaning in his doorway, watching him in that way she had, like a parent waiting for a confession.

  He rubbed his eyes, smiled wearily, and waved her in. Anne was a smart woman. He wondered if her psychological training allowed her to see through his pretense of sanity. “Sorry. Daydreaming.” He punched the tape recorder off. “You can get the light,” he added.

  She did, and the room was flooded with jumpy white light, causing the vise of pain that gripped Archie’s head to crank a turn tighter. He stiffened, and stretched his neck until he heard a satisfying pop.

  Anne flung herself down in one of the chairs facing him, crossed her legs, and flopped a fifty-page document on his desk. She was one of the few female profilers at the FBI, and the only black woman. Archie had known her for six years, since the Bureau had sent her out to profile the Beauty Killer. They had spent hundreds of hours in the rain going over crime sites together, staring at photographs of wound patterns at four o’clock in the morning, trying to get into the mind of Gretchen Lowell. Archie knew that Anne had kids. He had heard her talk to them on the phone. But they had never once, he realized, in all the time they had worked together, talked about their respective children. Their professional lives were too ugly. Talking about children seemed crude.

  “That it?” he asked, nodding at the document.

  “The fruit of my labors,” Anne said.

  Archie’s ribs hurt from sitting so long and acid burned in his stomach. Sometimes, he would wake up in the middle of the night and find himself in the right position, and realize that he wasn’t in pain. He’d try to remain still, to stretch out the blissful interlude, but eventually he’d have to turn over or bend a knee or stretch an arm out, and then there’d be that familiar twinge or burn or ache. The pills helped, and sometimes he told himself that he was almost getting used to it. But his body still proved a distraction. If he was going to concentrate on Anne’s profile, he needed some air. “Let’s take a walk. You can give me the topic sentences.”

  “Sure,” she agreed.

  They walked through the empty squad room, where a custodian was uncoiling a vacuum cleaner cord, and Archie held the big glass bank door open for Anne and then followed her out onto the sidewalk. They started walking north. It was cold and Archie tucked his bare hands in the pockets of his jacket, and there were the pills. He was, as usual, underprepared for the weather. The streetlights looked blurry in the dark, and the city looked dirty in the flat yellow light that they threw on the pavement. A car went by, going ten miles over the speed limit.

  “I think we’re dealing with a budding sociopath,” Anne said. She was wearing a long chocolate-colored leather trench coat and leopard-print boots. Anne always could put together an outfit.

  “You like them?” Anne asked, noticing him looking at her feet. She stopped and lifted her long knit skirt a few inches to show off the boots. “I got them in the ‘large and in charge’ department. They’re extra wide. For my enormous calves.”

  Archie cleared his throat. “You said he was a budding sociopath?”

  “You don’t want to talk about my calves?” Anne asked.

  Archie smiled. “I’m just trying to avoid a sexual harassment lawsuit.”

  Anne let the skirt drop and grinned at Archie. “I do believe that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile in two days.”

  They started walking again and Anne continued her profile: “He raped and murdered these girls but he feels remorse,” she said, her demeanor serious again. “He cleans them up. Returns them.”

  “But he kills again.”

  “The need overpowers him. But it’s about the rape. Not the murder. He’s a rapist who kills, not a murderer who rapes. It’s not part of his fetish. It’s not necrophilia. He kills them to spare them from experiencing the rape.”

  “What a guy,” said Archie.

  They walked past a darkened paint store, past a shuttered espresso drive-thru booth, p
ast a hipster dive bar. The window of the bar was filled with neon beer signs: PBR, RAINIER, SIERRA NEVADA. A half-assed marquee advertised a band called Missing Persons Report. Nice. Archie glanced inside as they went past and caught a flash of people, mouths open wide, laughing, the sound of drunken levity.

  Anne continued: “I don’t think the murder gives him pleasure per se. He doesn’t linger with it. He doesn’t use his hands. I think we need to look at where he came from. I think he’s raped before. And if he has, it will be within the victim profile.”