by Chelsea Cain
“Ever been married?” Archie asked.
Reston pulled a glass down from a cabinet and filled it at the sink. Above the sink hung a framed print of a blond Varga pinup girl. “She left me. Took everything I had,” he said, handing Archie the glass of water.
Archie took a sip. “Girlfriend?”
“Not currently. My last relationship ended suddenly.”
“Did you murder her?”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
Archie took another sip. “No.” He drained the last of the water and handed the glass to Reston. He immediately rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher. Archie noticed another blond Varga girl hanging on the other side of the kitchen. She was wearing tiny shorts and a tight blouse and stood in impossibly high heels, back arched, flirtatious smile on her red lips.
“You like blondes,” Archie observed.
“For Christ’s sake,” Reston said, running an anxious hand through his hair. “What do you want from me? I’m a teacher. I answered your questions. I’ve already been interviewed by two other cops. I let you in my house.” He looked at Archie plaintively. “Are you going to arrest me?”
“No.”
Reston planted his hands on his hips. “Then leave me the hell alone.”
“Fine,” Archie said, starting back toward the porch.
As he moved through the house, Reston a step behind him, Archie searched for any clue to the truth, any insight into the man. The house was a hundred years old, but it was decorated in a mid-century style. Original light fixtures had been replaced with chrome space-age fixtures that looked as retro as they did futuristic. The dining room set looked like it was made out of thick plastic. On the table, a bouquet of daffodils sprang out of a round red vase. Archie couldn’t tell if the furniture was expensive or if it had all come in a box from Ikea. But he knew enough to know that it was stylish. The living room was less photo-ready. The gold sectional appeared to be a thrift-store find. Its gold cord bottom fringe had detached in places and still hung unmended. A rose-colored corduroy chair and ottoman sat next to a space-age lamp. It was as if someone had offered to help Reston redecorate and then they’d had a falling-out. It was still far nicer than Archie’s squalid rental. The room still had the original built-ins. Archie scanned the shelves. Just a few books, perfectly straight and flush. But Archie knew that spine anywhere. It was The Last Victim. It didn’t mean anything. A lot of people had that book.
“Look,” Reston was saying. “Susan was very promiscuous in school. So she may have had a relationship with a teacher. It’s very possible. I’m just saying that it wasn’t me.”
“Okay,” Archie said, distractedly. “It wasn’t you.”
“Where to?” the cabbie asked when Archie got back in the car.
“Wait here,” Archie said. The cab was non-smoking but reeked of old cigarettes and pine deodorizer. No one ever followed the rules. Archie pulled out his cell phone and called Claire. “I want Reston’s alibis double-checked. And I want surveillance on him,” he said. “And when I say surveillance, I mean I want all entrances covered.” He squinted up at Reston’s charming wisteria-covered house. “I want to know if he even thinks about leaving that house.”
“I’ll send Heil and Flannigan.”
“Good,” Archie said, settling back in the cab’s sticky vinyl seat. “I’ll wait.”
It was dark by the time Archie made it home. Still no messages. He decided against more coffee and instead drank a beer. Was Susan lying? No. Could she have convinced herself that her story was true? Maybe.
Either way, Gretchen had seen it. He found a sort of solace in the fact that she could see through anybody. It wasn’t that there was something intrinsically weak about him.
He stared at the merry face of Gloria Juarez. Another mystery solved; that was something at least. He touched her forehead and then stepped back from where he had tacked her photograph on his bedroom wall.
There were forty-two photographs on that wall, forty-two murder victims, forty-two families with answers. They stared at him from DMV photos and family snapshots and school pictures. It was a lurid, gruesome spectacle and Archie knew it. He didn’t care. He needed to see them all, to give himself a reason why he went back to that prison week after week. It was that or admit to himself that Gretchen’s draw was something else entirely. Something far more troubling.
Archie’s head throbbed and his body felt heavy and tired. But it was Sunday night and the week would start and girls would go to school, and that meant that their killer would be hunting.
He emptied the pillbox on his dresser and lined the pills up by type. Then he took off his shirt, undershirt, pants, until he was sitting on the edge of the bed naked. There was a big square mirror above the dresser and he could see his reflection from the mid-chest up. The scars that had so long been a brutal pale purple had lightened to a translucent white. He was almost starting to think of them as part of his body. He let his hand find the heart, the raised tissue sensitive beneath his fingertips, sending shivers down his thighs.
He settled back on the bed and let his memory of her smell wash over him. Lilacs. Her breath against his face. Her touch. His hand found its way lower. He had resisted this for a long time. Until he and Debbie had separated. And then he was alone. And he could think only of Gretchen. Every time he closed his eyes, there she would be, this ghostly presence, wanting him, so beautiful that it took his breath away. Until one day, finally, he gave in, and in his mind he pulled her to him, onto him. He knew it was wrong. That he was sick. That he needed help. But he was beyond help. So what did it matter? It wasn’t real.
The pills grinned at him from the dresser. There weren’t enough to kill him. But he had enough in the bathroom. He liked to think about that sometimes at night. It was cold comfort.
CHAPTER 34
Susan had ground her teeth all night. She could tell the moment she woke up, because she could barely move her jaw, barely open her mouth, and her teeth felt like she’d spent the night chewing gravel. She held a heating pad against her face until she felt her sore muscles loosen and the pain in her face subside. But the heat left her face looking raw and sunburned.
It was only just getting light outside, and the forecast in the paper was a row of smiling yellow suns on squares of blue sky. Sure enough, a glance beyond the loft’s wall of glass revealed fragments of clear blue behind the Pearl District’s skyline of brick, glass, stone, and steel. Susan was unimpressed. People didn’t appreciate rain until it was gone.
She sat on her bed and watched the pedestrians struggle by with their paper coffee cups down below. She should have been working. The next story was due tomorrow. But the digital recorder that Archie had recovered for her still sat on her bedside table, and she had yet to listen to the recording of her encounter with Gretchen Lowell. The thought of it made her a little sick to her stomach.
Claire rang the doorbell at exactly 8:00 A.M. Next to her was Anne Boyd.
Despite the unseasonably warm forecast, Susan was wearing what she thought of as her TV-cop clothes: black pants, a crisp black button-down shirt, and an honest-to-God tan trench coat. She didn’t care if it was going to be sixty-five degrees; she was wearing that coat. Claire was dressed, per usual, as if she had just come down off the mountain, and Anne was wearing a zebra-print blouse, black pants, and leopard-print boots, and she had about a dozen gold bracelets squeezed on each wrist. “I love your boots,” Susan said.
“I know,” Anne said. “They’re fabulous.”
“Yeah,” said Claire with a sigh. “You two are going to get along fine.” She introduced Anne and Susan and the three women headed downstairs to where Claire’s city-issued Chevy Caprice was parked.
The plan was to check on the security at the city’s ten public high schools. Many parents were keeping their daughters at home; all kids were encouraged not to walk to or from school, or if they did, to have a buddy. The whole city was on edge. The anticipation was so palpable that it felt to Susa
n as if people were actually willing another girl to be taken so that they could watch it on the news. A good kidnapping and murder made for excellent televised entertainment as long as it didn’t preempt anything more interesting.
They drove to Roosevelt High first. Claire had a paper cup of coffee from the coffee place next door to Susan’s building, and the nutty aroma filled the car, making Susan’s mouth water. She got her notebook out and set it on her lap. She hated riding in the back. It reminded her of being a child. She unlocked her seat belt so she could lean forward between the seats, the better to ask questions.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Claire chided. “Seat belt.”
Susan sat back with a heavy sigh and resnapped the belt in place. The front seats were light blue cloth, but the backseat was dark blue vinyl. Easier to clean up if someone you were transporting started vomiting. “So this guy,” she said to Anne. “You think he’s a nut job, or what?”
“My professional opinion?” Anne said, looking out the window. “I think he may have an issue or two.”
“He’s going to kill another girl?” Susan asked.
Anne leaned around to look at Susan, her expression skeptical. “Why would he stop?”
Roosevelt was a large brick school with white pillars, a half acre of green lawn, and a steeple. It looked a bit like Monticello. Three patrol cars were out front.
“They should have called this one Jefferson,” Susan joked.
Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m going to go check on things,” she announced. “You guys want to wait here?”
Susan, seeing an opportunity for some one-on-one time with Anne, jumped at the opportunity. “Sure,” she said. She unclasped her seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats so that she was inches away from Anne.
Claire got out of the car and walked over to one of the patrol cars.
“So you think that he works at one of the schools?” Susan asked Anne.
Anne extracted a diet Coke from her large purse and opened it. A tiny spray of sticky brown liquid shot out in a two-inch diameter. “I don’t know.” She gave Susan a look. “And don’t start with me about the diet Coke. I know. I just have one a day. To kick-start my morning.”
“I think that warm diet Coke is delicious,” Susan lied. She pushed ahead. “So do you like profiling?”
“Yeah.” Anne smiled and took a sip of the Coke. “I’m good at it most of the time. And every workday is different.”
“How did you get into it?”
“I went to med school. I wanted to be a pediatrician. I thought they were so cool. They were always the nicest docs at the hospital. No ego. Weren’t in it for the money.”
“So you wanted to be a pediatrician so you could hang out with other pediatricians?” Susan asked.
Anne laughed and her bracelets jingled. “Basically.” She leaned her head back on the headrest and looked thoughtfully at Susan. “The first day of my pediatrics rotation, I diagnosed a kid with lymphoma. Stage four. She was seven years old. Completely adorable. One of those kids with old souls, you know? I was devastated, and by devastated, I mean crying-in-the-bathroom devastated.” Anne was quiet for a minute, lost in thought. Susan could hear her soda fizzing. Then she shrugged. “So I decided to go into psychiatry. My husband’s people are in Virginia. He got a job there and I needed one and Quantico was looking to train some women in the dark arts. Turned out I wasn’t bad at it.”
“Profiling seems like a weird field to end up in if you wanted to get away from death.”
“Not death,” she said. She licked her thumb and ran it over a tiny stain of soda spray on her black slacks. “Pity.” She glanced out the window. A kid flew by on a skateboard. She turned back to Susan. “The victims we deal with are already dead. We do what we do to prevent other deaths. We catch killers. And I don’t feel sorry for them.”
Susan thought of Gretchen Lowell. “What makes a person do this sort of thing?”
“There was this study of prisoners serving time for B and E. They asked them all the same question: ‘Would you rather run into a dog or a person with a gun?’ You know what the majority of them said?” She spun the soda can slowly in her palm. “The person with a gun. The dog won’t hesitate. The dog will rip your throat out. Every time. Eight times out of ten, you can wrestle the gun right out of the person’s hands or just walk away. Know why?”
“Because it’s hard to shoot someone.”
Anne’s black eyes were electric. “Exactly. And that’s broken in our guy. I don’t think he works for the school district. I hope he does. Because if he does, we’ll catch him. If he doesn’t, I don’t know.”
“But how does it get broken?”
She made a small toasting motion with the can. “Nature, nurture. A combination. Take your pick.”
Susan hooked her clasped hands over her knee and leaned in even closer. “But someone can break it for you, right? Like Gretchen Lowell did. How did she do that? How did she get people to kill for her?”
“She’s a master manipulator. Psychopaths very often are. She chose particularly vulnerable men.”
“And she tortured them?”
“No,” Anne said. “Much more foolproof. She used sex.”
Claire suddenly appeared at the car door. Her cheeks were scarlet. “The fucker took another girl last night.”
CHAPTER 35
Addy Jackson’s family lived in a two-story adobe house on a terraced hill on the corner of a busy street in Southeast Portland. The house was painted pink and had a red tile roof and it looked as out of place surrounded by its Craftsman neighbors as it now did surrounded by police cars. Susan noticed a shiny black helicopter with the Channel 12 news logo on the side already circling overhead.
Claire took the cement steps that jackknifed up the hillside to the house two at a time, followed by Anne and finally Susan. It was already getting too warm for the trench coat, but Susan kept it on so she could have her notebook at the ready in one of the coat’s deep pockets. She felt sick to her stomach at the notion of walking into a budding family tragedy and she didn’t want to make herself feel worse by walking around clutching a reporter’s notebook that screamed hello-I’m-with-the-media-I’m-here-to-exploit-you. I am a serious journalist, she told herself in an effort to mollify her growing unease. A. Serious. Journalist.
The house was full of cops. Susan saw Archie was in the living room on one knee in front of a stricken couple who sat holding hands on a small sofa. They looked at him as if he were the only person in the world, as if he could save them. Susan remembered seeing her mother look at Susan’s father’s oncologist with that very same expression. But the case was terminal then, too.
She looked away. The room was beautiful, full of mission-style furniture and stained glass and jewel-toned Deco velvet. Someone had meticulously stripped and refinished the wood molding, which curved around built-in shelf nooks and over arched doors. When she looked back at Archie, he said something to the parents, touching the mother lightly on the arm, and stood up and walked over to the entryway.
“She was gone this morning,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Last they saw her was last night around ten. The bedroom window’s broken. Parents didn’t hear anything. Their bedroom is upstairs. Nothing missing but the girl. The crime-scene investigators are in there now.”
He looked better than the day before, Susan noticed, more alert. That was a good sign. Then she remembered what Debbie had said about how he would sleep so well when he got home from seeing Gretchen.
“How’d he know which room was hers?” asked Claire.
A cop wearing a crime-scene-investigation jacket walked by and Archie stepped out of the way to let him pass. “Curtains were open. She was in there doing homework last night with the lights on. Maybe he was watching. Or maybe he knows her.”
“We sure it’s our guy?” Anne asked, her face hard. “This doesn’t fit.”
Archie motioned for them to follow him into the dining room, where he removed a frame
d photograph from the wall, returned, and handed it to Anne. It was a photograph of a teenage girl with brown hair and wide-set eyes.
“Jesus,” Claire said under her breath.
“Why would he change his MO?” mused Anne.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” said Archie.
“Too much security at the schools,” Anne guessed. “He’s worried he won’t be able to get to his victims. Maybe he followed her home. But this seems really risky. He’s panicking. In the big picture, it’s good news. It means he’s getting less careful. We’re closer.”
Susan leaned back on her heels and looked through the entryway into the living room, where the parents still sat, motionless on the sofa, another detective perched across from them on an ottoman, notebook in hand.
“What school did she go to?” Claire asked.
Archie jerked his head toward Susan. “Her alma mater.”
“Cleveland?” Susan said, stomach dropping. She knew then, in a horrible rush of certainly, that Archie had confronted Paul. Of course he had. “You don’t think—”
“It wasn’t Reston,” Archie told her. “He was under surveillance from six on. Didn’t leave the house.”
Susan’s jaw ached again. Archie had put Paul under surveillance, made him a suspect, based on her dramatic performance at the prison. She mentally kicked herself for opening her big mouth. She shouldn’t have let Gretchen get to her. She should never have even taken the story. Now there was no stopping what she had set in motion. “You’re watching Paul? Based on what I told you yesterday?”
“He fits the profile better than anyone right now. Except for his unerring ability to have an alibi at the time of the crimes.” Archie turned to Claire. “Check in with our tail on Evan Kent. Then call Cleveland. Find out if anyone showed up today covered in blood and wearing a ski mask.” He smiled wanly. “Or, you know, anything out of the ordinary.”
