Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  “Well, the hair came from nearby. Birds don’t travel far for nesting material. Most nests get made in a couple of days. There’s no advantage to flying long distances.” Monroe looked up the hill. “No, this hair came from the woods. I’d say, within three hundred yards of here.”

  Susan felt goose bumps rise on her arms.

  “Any idea how old the nest is?” Archie asked.

  “No more than a year or two.”

  “How can you tell?” Henry said.

  “Because nests disintegrate,” Monroe explained. “If they didn’t, we’d be standing on like a hundred of them right now.”

  “So all we have to do is search three hundred yards in every direction,” Archie said.

  Henry groaned. “That’s a football field.”

  “Maybe we should call Search and Rescue,” Archie said.

  Henry looked at him for a minute and then pulled his phone out of his waist clip and started dialing. “Maybe I’ll get a cadaver dog, too,” he said.

  Susan saw Archie smile. “Good idea,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  10

  The throbbing pain in Archie’s abdomen was back. The rain was steady. It made everyone’s skin look slick. It made the ground suck at their shoes. It had soaked through all of their clothing. Archie could feel the cold slime in his socks every time he took a step. His mud-caked pants batted at his calves. His hair stuck to his forehead. At least he’d had the presence of mind to hide the book behind a log. The last thing he wanted was for Henry to find him wandering the woods with a muddy copy of The Last Victim.

  Archie focused on the small ball of light that his flashlight threw on the forest floor and turned his mind to the task at hand.

  It was slow going. Three feet of ivy and morning glory vines blanketed everything in sight. He started left and then slowly worked the beam over the surface of the foliage inch by inch, forward, and then right. Henry was to his left, one of the patrol cops was to his right. Another patrol cop and four Search and Rescue volunteers were working in a line in the opposite direction. Even the ornithologist had been given a flashlight. So far, they had found a dead bird, half digested by ants, an empty Mountain Dew bottle, and some dog shit.

  Susan had borrowed a flashlight, too, but was holding it in her teeth so she could scribble furiously in her notebook. Archie wanted her to write a story. He still had no leads on the identity of their Jane Doe, and coverage in the local media had been limited to a single paragraph in the Metro section of the Herald. He needed coverage. And he needed a lot of it.

  Left. Forward. Right. Then Archie knelt in the mud and grime and began to pull the ivy and morning glory vines aside to look underneath them. The wet vines were heavy and hard to manipulate and Archie’s hands looked raw and dirty, like he’d been buried alive and had clawed his way out.

  He heard Henry say, “This is ridiculous.”

  And it was. They could come back in the morning. If there was a corpse out there, it could wait twelve hours. But Archie needed to know. If there was a woman dead out there, he needed to find her. He’d stay out there all night looking. At the very least, it was easier than going home.

  He shone his flashlight at his watch. They’d been searching for almost an hour.

  A dog barked. Archie looked up to see a dark figure on the path and the shadow of an animal. He swung his flashlight down toward the animal. The light reflected off its eyes, two silver orbs in the darkness.

  “His name’s Cody,” the person with the dog said. “Mine’s Ellen. Which one of you is Sheridan?”

  “I am,” Archie said.

  She stepped forward, climbing up toward him, the dog a respectful few feet behind her. They shone their flashlights in her path to light her way, and Archie got a better look at her. She was a big woman, tall and slightly plump, with a long torso that dominated her body and a broad, masculine gait. She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail and was dressed appropriately for the weather, with tall rubber boots, yellow rain pants, and a quilted down jacket. Ah, June in Portland.

  When she reached Archie she held out her hand and he shook it. “Okay,” she said. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m going to let Cody off lead. He’ll move around the area, looking for scents. If he finds something, he’ll crouch down, like this.” She looked down at the dog and said, “Cody, alert,” and the dog sank down on his elbows and yowled. Ellen looked up. “I will praise him. Then you can move in and check out what he’s found.”

  Archie had worked with cadaver dogs before. Once Gretchen had mutilated a man and left his heart and spleen in a shoebox, tied with a red ribbon, on a bed in a motel room in North Portland. Tied to the box was a typed gift tag addressed to Detective Archie Sheridan. The hotel staff called 911 within moments of finding the package. Gretchen had wrapped the organs in plastic but it had leaked and the box was soaked with blood. Archie opened the box and then brought in a dog to try to locate any other pieces. It had worked. The dog found the man’s tongue in the ice machine, his penis in the key drop-off box, and the rest of him in the Dumpster of the restaurant next door.

  “Assuming there are remains,” Henry said, “how long is this going to take?”

  “Could be minutes,” Ellen said. “Could be days.”

  “Days,” Henry said.

  “Longer maybe,” Ellen said. She bent down and unhooked the dog’s lead. “Cody, go,” she said.

  The dog put his nose to the ground and began rooting through the vegetation.

  Susan stepped forward and took her flashlight out of her mouth. “How long have you been with Search and Rescue?” she asked Ellen.

  “I’m not,” Ellen said.

  “She’s a volunteer,” Archie said. “We don’t have the money to fund a cadaver dog unit. So people like Ellen take some training courses with their dogs and volunteer.”

  “I work at Home Depot,” Ellen said.

  “We found a body a few days ago about a quarter mile down the creek,” Archie said. “Is that going to distract him?”

  “Did you remove the remains?” Ellen asked.

  “Yeah,” Archie said.

  “Should be fine,” Ellen said. “There,” she said suddenly. She turned her flashlight to Cody, who was crouching a few feet from where Archie and Henry had just been searching. “Good boy,” Ellen said. She walked up behind the dog, clipped his lead back on, and gave his head a vigorous rub.

  The area that Cody was indicating was covered with vines. Archie walked up and sank down to his hands and knees. “Shine your lights here,” he said to the others. One by one they all stood around him, Susan, the ornithologist, Henry, Ellen, the patrol cops, the Search and Rescue workers, each shone a flashlight on the spot where the dog had knelt, until the ten yellow circles of light joined into one. Archie moved the ivy and morning glory vines aside with his hands. He started out slowly, methodically, careful not to disturb anything he didn’t have to, and then began pulling at the vines, uprooting them and tossing them to the side. When he had cleared the area he sat back on his knees.

  Susan leaned forward. “There’s nothing there,” she said.

  Archie turned to the dog. “Should we dig, boy?” he asked, scratching the dog’s head with his muddy hand. “Is it buried?”

  Cody cocked his head and looked at Archie and then looked at the now bare spot of earth.

  “I’ll get the shovels,” one of the Search and Rescue volunteers said, and he headed noisily for the path.

  Archie looked at the mud. It was rough, thick with pebbles and roots. Archie picked up a pebble and rolled it between his fingers. It was light and porous. He touched it to his tongue.

  “Why are you eating that rock?” Susan asked.

  “It’s not a rock,” Archie said. Rocks were dense and wouldn’t stick to saliva. This was porous. “It’s bone.”

  Cody whined and pulled at his lead.

  Archie looked up at the dog. Anything that would chip bone like this wouldn’t leave hair like what they
’d seen in the nest. There was another body. “Let him go,” he told Ellen.

  She unclipped Cody’s lead and he bounded off, nose down, about thirty feet up the hillside, and then crouched down.

  Archie picked up his flashlight and scrambled after him, barely aware of the others behind him, their flashlights bobbing in the darkness. The hillside was thick with ferns, almost prehistoric in their enormity. He pulled himself up the slope by grabbing hand-fuls of fern fronds, using their root systems as leverage. Their tiny seeds stuck to his hands. When he got to Cody, he knelt down beside him and the dog licked his face. Then the dog whined again and nosed at a large fern that abutted a cedar bent cockeyed from the hillside. Archie reached out and pushed a fern frond aside and pointed his flashlight underneath.

  “See anything?” Henry called from behind him.

  “Yeah,” said Archie.

  The skeleton was partial, but it was definitely human. He could see a foot, the remaining skin dark and leathery, which is why it hadn’t been eaten. The calf bones were picked clean above the ankle, so the foot looked odd, like a grotesque shoe. He swung the flashlight farther under the fern and saw what was left of a shrunken leather face, black lips, the cracked hide of a cheek, an eye socket, a half-crushed skull. And there, still rooted to the dehydrated scalp tissue, a tangle of blond hair.

  “There you are,” he said quietly.

  Susan and Henry appeared on either side of him. Susan sank down next to him, her leg touching his. He was getting used to having her around.

  “Three bodies all within a hundred yards,” she said, pen pressed against her notebook. “Are they connected?”

  “Maybe,” Archie said. “Or maybe not.” He looked up into the dark woods. It had stopped raining and the clouds had parted, revealing a bright shard of moon. In the distance, through the trees at the edge of the woods, he could make out the light of a house.

  “Find out who lives there,” he said to Henry. “And then find out if they have a wood chipper.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  Susan trudged after Henry. The ME had shown up, just behind the crime scene investigators and about a dozen other cops. The crime scene had been lit and taped off, and they were using sifters to separate the bone chips from the dirt. She wasn’t allowed beyond the crime scene tape, and Archie was too busy to talk, so she had decided to trail Henry. Not that she’d been invited.

  “Listen,” she was saying to Ian on her cell phone. “I can get it in. I’ll be there in an hour.” She glanced at her watch, but it was too dark to see it, so she held her phone down to her wrist and read her watch by the phone’s LCD light. Ten P.M. The outlying editions started printing at 11:00 P.M., but the metro area sunrise edition didn’t go to press until 2:00 A.M. She had plenty of time. Plus, she wanted to keep Ian happy right now, at least until after the story about Molly and Castle ran.

  Henry was hurrying up the long cement staircase that led out of the park up to street level. Was he trying to ditch her?

  She held the phone back to her ear. “We’re doing a spread on Castle’s death,” Ian was saying. “Eight stories. I can get you on the front page of Metro, below the fold.”

  “Below the fold?”

  “There’s a fire up near Sisters,” Ian said. “That’s the Metro lead.”

  She took the stairs two at a time. “Three bodies,” she said, exasperated. “How is that not A-one? And who gives a shit about a fire in Central Oregon?”

  “Spoken like someone without a second house in Central Oregon,” Ian said with a snort. “And you don’t know the bodies are connected,” he added. “And they’re nobody.”

  Bugs bounced off the yellow streetlights that lit the stairs. The bugs probably spent their whole life cycle doing that, Susan thought. Smacking against the grate that covered the bulb, again and again. “Nobody?” she said.

  Ian sounded bored. “Word is the first girl was a prostitute. The other two probably are, too. Or homeless. No one cares, Susan. Dead politicians sell papers. Dead hookers don’t.”

  “Castle was a sexual predator,” Susan reminded Ian. She tried to make her voice sound steely with resolve.

  “We’re not running that story when the entire state is mourning him,” Ian said.

  Sometimes Susan couldn’t remember why she’d ever slept with Ian. (He had let her hold his Pulitzer.) “You’re a hypocrite, Ian,” she said.

  “While I have you on the phone,” Ian said, ignoring her. “The fact checkers can’t get ahold of Molly Palmer. They keep getting her voice mail. You have another number for her?”

  Susan’s stomach clenched and she forced some more bravado into her voice. “She’s a stripper, Ian. She doesn’t carry her phone on her when she’s naked.” She made a mental note to find Molly, before her skittishness cost Susan her story.

  “I’m hanging up now,” Ian said.

  The line went dead and Susan pushed the phone back into her sweatshirt pocket and groaned in frustration. So much for keeping Ian happy.

  “It’s called a ‘high-risk lifestyle,’ ” Henry said. He had turned to wait for her at the top of the stairs.

  “What?” Susan said, jogging up the last few steps. She bent over for a minute to catch her breath. Her sneakers were covered with mud. She’d ruined more shoes in this job. …

  “Prostitutes,” Henry said. “Addicts. Homeless. They live ‘high-risk lifestyles.’ So we look hard for a couple of days after one of them gets stabbed in the neck with a fork, and then we move on to the more important cases involving honor students.” He started walking away again, up the street. “You know how many black teenage gang members and hookers end up dead without more than a line of copy in your newspaper?”

  “What about Heather Gerber?” Susan asked, struggling to get her notebook out as she caught up with him. Heather had been Gretchen’s first victim. A runaway. A street kid. A prostitute. They had found her dead in the park, too. The Herald had certainly run stories about her.

  Henry stuffed his hands into his pockets and picked up the pace. The sidewalk was wet and his shoes slapped against the standing water as he walked. “Your paper couldn’t have cared less about Heather Gerber until Archie made the connection to the other bodies and everyone realized there was a serial killer loose. She was just another Jane Doe. Then Parker ran a story about her. The kid’s foster parents saw it. Turns out she’d been missing a year, and they’d never reported it. Just kept cashing the checks. You know who paid to have her buried?”

  “No.” The sidewalk was uphill. The street was parallel to the edge of the park and the houses on it abutted the forest. You couldn’t build houses this close to the park anymore, but these were old and grandfathered in. Their porch lights revealed large wooden porches with porch swings and pots of geraniums. The air smelled like blackberries.

  “Archie did.” Then he added, by way of an explanation, “She was his first homicide.”

  “That case is still technically unsolved, isn’t it?” Susan asked.

  “Gretchen did it,” Henry said. “She just hasn’t admitted it yet.”

  A Subaru wagon parked on the street up ahead and a man in running clothes unloaded two large dogs and headed toward the park for a night jog. “Is that why Archie kept going back to see her, all that time? Because he wanted to close that first case?”

  Henry was quiet for a moment. “No.”

  Susan wondered how much Archie talked to Henry about Gretchen. She’d seen the way he reacted when Gretchen had touched Archie’s arm at the interrogation session Susan had witnessed when she was writing the profile. Henry had been in the room in an instant, pulling Gretchen away from Archie, like she was something infectious. Susan had been terrified of her, and at the same time captivated by Gretchen and Archie’s casual rapport. There was an intimacy to their relationship that was unsettling at best.

  The sidewalk was old, buckled around tree roots, and Susan and Henry walked carefully, their eyes on the ground.

  “We sho
uld never have agreed to the plea bargain,” Henry said, almost to himself. “We should have let Washington State prosecute. She’d be dead by now.”

  “Archie closed thirty-one more cases,” Susan said.

  Henry stopped. They were at the house, a brown clapboard behemoth that looked like it had been built in the forties. She could see his face a little in the light of the streetlamp. He looked tired, shoulders hunched, his leather jacket shiny from the rain. “You didn’t know him before,” he said.

  It was hard to imagine Archie ever being very happy.

  “Parker wrote a lot about the Beauty Killer case, didn’t he?” Susan asked.

  “Hundreds of stories over the years,” Henry said with a shrug. “Jesus, probably thousands.”

  Parker was old-school. He’d have used a typewriter if they’d let him. He probably had notes. Boxes of notes. They would be invaluable to someone who, say, wanted to write a book about the Beauty Killer case someday. Once the Molly Palmer story ran, she’d have some sway at the paper. She might be able to take a sabbatical.

  “Do you remember him ever mentioning where he kept his notes?” Susan asked.

  Henry looked at her for a moment and then raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I almost forgot,” he said. He pulled a badge out of his pocket and snapped it open. Then he shone his flashlight at Susan’s face.

  She cringed, momentarily blinded, and lifted a hand over her face. “Forgot what?” she asked.

  “That you care about stories more than people,” Henry said. He snapped the light off. “Let me do the talking,” he said, and he knocked on the door.

  They waited in silence, while Susan fumed. She hadn’t meant to be insensitive. She did care about Archie. She wasn’t trying to write something trashy. That had been done already. She wanted to write a real book. A smart, compelling, illuminating book. Was that so terrible?

  “I didn’t mean to—” she started to say.

  Henry held up his hand. “Stop,” he said.