by Chelsea Cain
Claire nodded, pulled her cell phone off her belt, and walked outside to make the calls.
Susan stole another look at Archie. “You went to see him,” she said.
Archie snapped his pen shut and dropped it in his coat pocket. “Of course,” he said. “What did you think I’d do?”
“What did he say?”
“He denied it.”
Susan felt her face flush. “Good,” she said, her voice faltering just a little. “He’s protecting himself. That’s good.” And then: “I told you he’d deny it.”
“That’s what you told me,” said Archie.
Claire reappeared. “Kent’s at home. But Dan McCallum didn’t show today at Cleveland.” She glanced from face to face. “What?”
Archie looked at his watch. “How late is he?” he asked.
“Mr. McCallum?” Susan said. “There’s no way.”
Claire ignored her. “His first class started ten minutes ago. He didn’t call in sick, just didn’t show up. The school called his house and no one’s answering.”
“I think that might be suspicious,” Archie said.
CHAPTER 36
Archie knocked on the door of McCallum’s 1950s bungalow hard enough that he thought his knuckles might split. It was a diminutive one-story tan-brick house set in the middle of an expansive and obsessively tended yard. A row of rosebushes, just returning after being cut back for winter, lined the paved walkway to the wide cement stoop at the front of the house. The door, in a lonely splash of personality, was painted a glossy red. A doorbell that looked like it had not been operational since shortly after the house was built was taped over with a weathered piece of electrician’s tape. Monday’s Oregon Herald, untouched in its plastic sleeve, still lay in front of the door. “Dan?” Archie called. He knocked again. The door had a large glass window, but it was curtained and Archie couldn’t see more than a sliver of the interior of the house. He motioned with two fingers for the Hardy Boys to go around to the back door. Henry stood on the steps. Claire stood beside Archie. Susan, attired in a yellow vest with the words RIDE ALONG emblazoned in black on the back, had wedged herself next to Claire. Archie gestured for Susan to stand back, which she did. Then he drew his gun and knocked again. “Dan, it’s the police. Open up.” Nothing.
He tried the door. It was locked. A gray tabby appeared on the porch and snaked her way between Archie’s legs. “Hello, beautiful,” he said. Then he noticed the faint trail of paw prints she’d left behind. He knelt down and looked at the prints, pale red against the glossy mud green paint of the stoop.
“It’s blood,” he said to Claire. “You want to get it?”
He stood up and stepped back as Claire shielded her face with her elbow and gave the door window a hard whack with the handle of her gun. The window splintered and broke into five pieces, which slid from the framing and fell to the inside floor in an explosion of shattered glass. The moment the glass was broken, the stench of death hit them. They all recognized it. Archie reached inside and unlocked the door. He swung the door open and raised his gun.
He carried a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. He preferred a revolver to an automatic. They were reliable and didn’t require as much upkeep. Archie didn’t like guns. He’d never had to fire his off range. And he didn’t want to spend half his waking hours at the kitchen table cleaning his service weapon. But a .38 wasn’t as powerful as a 9-mm, and Archie found his loyalty suddenly wavering.
“Dan,” he called out. “This is the police. Are you in here? We’re coming in.” Nothing.
The front door opened into a living room, which led into a kitchen. Archie could see paw prints straying diagonally across the linoleum. He turned to Susan. “Stay here,” he said in his most commanding voice. Then he nodded to Claire and Henry. “You ready?” They both nodded back.
He moved inside.
Archie loved this part. Even all his pills couldn’t compete with a natural surge of adrenaline and endorphins. His body felt alive with energy. His heart rate and breathing increased; his muscles tightened. He was never more alert. He moved through the house, taking in every detail. Bookcases filled the far side of the living room. The shelves were stacked with books as well as other objects—old coffee cups and papers and what looked like mail that had been tucked in any available cranny. Four easy chairs in varying shades of green and pedigrees sat around a square coffee table, which was layered with newspapers. Framed line drawings of tall ships hung on one wall, one on top of the next. Archie moved through the hallway, his back against the wall, with Claire following so close behind that he could hear her breathing. Henry followed behind Claire. Archie called out again, “Dan? It’s the police.” Nothing.
He turned the corner, gun raised, and immediately saw the source of the bloody paw prints.
Dan McCallum was dead. He lay cheek-down on the oak kitchen table, his head resting in a pool of thick blood. One arm was stretched across the table; the other was folded at the elbow, the gun still in his hand. His was facing Archie, eyes open, but there was no question that he had been dead much of the night.
“Fuck.” Archie sighed. He reholstered his gun, threaded his fingers behind his neck, and walked in a small circle, willing himself to let go of his frustration. If McCallum was their killer, it was over. But where was the girl? He snapped back to the present. “Call it in,” he said to Claire.
He could hear Claire on the radio behind him as he approached the body. Careful not to step in the blood that had pooled on the floor, he squatted beside the corpse. Archie recognized the gun in McCallum’s hand right away. It was a .38. The heart can continue to pump for up to two minutes with a brain injury like that, which explained the extensive bleeding.
Archie had once found the body of a man who’d punched his fist through a plate-glass window after an argument with his wife. He’d severed the artery in his arm and bled to death because she had stormed out of the house and he was too proud to call an ambulance. The blood had sprayed in a wide arc across the kitchen when the artery was severed and then continued to throb out of his body despite the several dish towels he’d tried to use as tourniquets. His wife had returned the next morning and called 911. When Archie got there, he found the man dead, slumped against a kitchen cabinet. Blood splattered the yellow kitchen curtains and the white walls and spread across the entire kitchen floor. Archie hadn’t known that one body could produce that much blood. It had looked like the scene of a chainsaw homicide.
Different kitchen. Archie leaned in close to examine the muzzle imprint of the contact wound near the mouth and an exit wound in the back of the head. A .38 will go right through the skull, whereas a .22 will bounce around for a while. McCallum’s hazel eyes stared sightless, the pupils dilated, the lids pulling back in full rigor. His jaw, too, had tightened, giving his mouth a disapproving grimace. The skin of his face was bruised with livor mortis, like he’d laid his head down to rest after a bad fight. He was wearing red sweatpants and what appeared to be a Cleveland Warriors sweatshirt. His feet were clad only in white sweat socks, their toes wet with blood. There was no coffee cup on the table.
Archie’s gaze returned to the body. Paw prints indicated where the cat had ambled across the table, leaving in her wake blood dusted with a fine gray cat hair. The brown hair above McCallum’s left temple was flattened and wet where the cat appeared to have licked him. Poor thing. Archie tracked the paw prints from the table to a cat door in the back door.
He stood up. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Henry had opened the back door and the Hardy Boys stood waiting, along with Susan Ward. They were waiting for him to say something. “Turn this place upside down,” Archie said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll still be here.” But he didn’t believe it. “And call Animal Control,” he added. “Someone’s going to have to take care of that cat.”
CHAPTER 37
It seemed, to Susan, that every cop in the city had descended on Dan McCallum’s small house. Canary yellow crime-scene tape zigzagg
ed around the yard to keep the growing throng of spectators at bay. In the distance, TV reporters positioned themselves in front of the action for their live-remote reports. Susan was sitting on a wrought-iron bench on McCallum’s front stoop, smoking a cigarette. She had her cell phone pressed against her ear explaining the whole situation to Ian, when they found Kristy Mathers’s bike.
A patrol cop searching the garage discovered it leaning up against the wall, hidden under a blue tarp. A yellow girl’s bike, with a banana seat and a busted chain. The cops all gathered around it, scratching their heads and looking taciturn, while newspaper photographers snapped digital pictures and neighbors took snapshots with their camera phones.
Susan thought of Addy Jackson and where she was right then and felt sick. She was surely dead, half-buried in some river muck somewhere. Charlene Wood from Channel 8 stood in front of the house, her back to Susan, reporting live. Susan couldn’t hear what she was saying but could imagine the cheesy dramatic graphics and local news hysteria. The state of humanity, it seemed to Susan recently, was looking pretty bleak.
After a while, Archie left the circle of cops and came over to where Susan sat.
“You not covering this?” he asked, sitting down next to her on the bench.
She shook her head. “It’s news. They want a reporter. They’re sending Parker over.” She bent her knees, lifted them to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs, and took a drag off her cigarette. “The ride along vest sat in a heap beside her. So he killed himself?”
“Looks like it.”
“I didn’t see a note.”
“Most suicides don’t leave notes,” Archie said. “You’d be surprised.”
“Really?”
Archie rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and looked out into the front yard. “I think it’s hard to know what to say.”
“I saw him the other day,” Susan said sadly. “At Cleveland.”
Archie raised his eyebrows. “Did he say anything?”
“Just small talk,” Susan said, ashing her cigarette off the side of the stoop.
“You’re ashing on my crime scene,” Archie said.
“Oh shit,” Susan said. “I’m sorry.” She ground her cigarette out on a piece of notebook paper, folded the paper carefully around it, and deposited the package in her purse. She was aware of Archie watching her, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Instead, she looked at her hands. The skin around the small wound on her finger from the wineglass was red, like it was getting infected. “Don’t you want to ask me?”
“What?” he asked.
She lifted the finger to her mouth and sucked on it for a moment, a flash of salty skin and tinny dried blood. “If it really happened.”
He shook his head, a tiny movement, barely noticeable. “No.”
Naturally. He would be gallant about it. Susan wished she hadn’t ground out the cigarette. She wanted something to do with her hands. She fidgeted with the sash of her trench coat. “McCallum coached my Knowledge Bowl team. I quit the day before State. I was the only one who knew anything about geography.”
Archie hesitated. “This thing with Reston. I’m going to report it to the school. He shouldn’t be teaching, at the very least.”
Susan steeled herself. “I lied. I made the whole thing up.”
Archie closed his eyes sadly. “Susan, don’t do this.”
“Please, just leave it alone,” Susan begged him. “I already feel like such a fool. I’m such a fucking moron when it comes to men.” She looked Archie in the eye. “I had a crush on him. And I made the affair up. I wanted it to happen. But it didn’t.” She held his gaze, her expression pleading. “So leave it alone, okay? Seriously. I’m a fuckup. You have no idea.”
He shook his head. “Susan—”
“I made it up,” she said again.
Archie was motionless.
“Archie,” she said carefully. “Please believe me. It was all a story. I’m a liar.” She stressed each word, each syllable, wanting him to understand. “I’ve always been a liar.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
She had fucked everything up. Royally. As usual. “Don’t feel bad. I’m a lost cause.” Susan tried to smile at Archie, but felt her eyes tear. She rolled them and laughed. “My mother thinks that I just need to find a nice boy with a hybrid car.”
Archie seemed to consider this. “Good gas mileage is an important attribute in a potential mate.” He smiled gingerly at Susan and then gazed back out into the yard, where Charlene Wood had just finished her live shot. “I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ll get someone to give you a ride home.”
“It’s okay. I called Ian.”
Archie stood and then turned back toward Susan. “You sure you’re okay?”
She squinted up at the blue sky. “Do you think this sunshine will ever break?”
“It’ll rain,” Archie said. “It always does.”
CHAPTER 38
Archie was standing in the backyard with Henry and Anne when the mayor arrived with half a page of handwritten notes, ready for a press conference. Like the front yard, the backyard was mowed to within an inch of its life. It took a serious commitment to keep a lawn that manicured during the rainy season. A small ready-made aluminum shed sat in the back corner, its contents removed by police and stacked around its perimeter. A cedar fence with a lattice top ran along the property line. Archie saw the mayor spot him and head over. He was wearing a black suit and tie, and his silver hair was plastered into place. Buddy had always been able to pull off the suit and tie thing. The first words out of the mayor’s mouth when he reached Archie were, “This the guy?”
“Looks like it,” Archie said.
Buddy took a pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses out of his interior coat pocket and put them on. “Where’s the girl?”
Archie glanced at Anne. “In the river, probably.”
“Shit,” the mayor said under his breath. He took a deep breath and nodded a few times, as if listening to a pep talk only he could hear. “Okay. So, let’s focus on the fact he’s off the streets.” He looked at Archie over his sunglasses. “You look like shit, Archie. Why don’t you throw some water on your face or something before we get started.”
Archie forced a smile. “Sure.” He shot a wry look at Henry and Anne and walked back into the house.
Inside McCallum’s kitchen, a voice said: “You Sheridan?”
Archie had to stop and take a few slow breaths to acclimate to the ripe odor. “Yeah,” he said.
A young black man with shoulder-length dreads, wearing a white Tyvek suit over his street clothes, sat on the kitchen counter, swinging his legs and writing on a clipboard. “I’m Lorenzo Robbins.”
“You’re with the ME’s office?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Look, man, I just wanted to let you know that there are a few issues with your dead guy.”
“A few issues?” Archie asked.
Robbins shrugged and wrote something on the clipboard. “A thirty-eight isn’t a small gun,” he said.
“Right,” Archie said slowly.
“It’s got a kick. With this sort of central nervous system injury, you expect to see one of two things. Either the gun’s a few feet away or your guy suffers a cadaveric spasm, right, and his hand’s frozen around the weapon.” He held a clenched latex-gloved hand out to demonstrate.
Archie turned and looked at where McCallum still lay facedown on the table. The gun was gone, already bagged. “A death grip.”
Robbins let his hand drop. “Yeah. If the body’s fresh, you can tell. The hand’s frozen. Body’s not. But when I got here, he was in full rigor. Maybe a cadaveric spasm kept that gun in his hand. It’s possible. Thing is, death grips are kinda rare. Something you see more in the movies.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Maybe nothing,” Robbins said. He started writing on the clipboard again. “He’s got a nice muzzle imprint, so the gun was definitely against his skin when it wa
s fired.” He scribbled something else. “Then again, there wasn’t any blow-back on his hand. There was blow-back on the gun. But not on his hand.”
Archie reached out and plucked Robbins’s pen out of his fist. “Are you saying that this wasn’t suicide? That someone shot him and put the gun in his hand?”
“No,” Robbins said. He looked at where Archie held his pen out, then at Archie. “I’m saying that death grips are pretty rare and he didn’t have blow-back on his hand. It was probably suicide. We’ll cut him up and have a look-see. I’m just giving you a preview. Make it more exciting.”
“Shit,” Archie muttered, leaning his head back in frustration. The ceiling was white. A single globe light fixture hung over the middle of the room. The light was off. “Did you turn off the light?” Archie asked.
Robbins looked up at the light fixture. “Do I look like it’s my first day? ’Cause it’s not.”
Archie spun around and poked his head out the back door. “Anyone turn off the light in here?” he hollered. The cops in the backyard looked at one another. No one volunteered.
He shut the door and turned back to Robbins. “So if we accept the premise that no one fucked up and hit the switch—”
Robbins took his pen from Archie’s hand and casually slipped it behind his clipboard clamp. “He probably didn’t shoot himself in the dark. Sunset’s around six, six-thirty. Sorta indicates that he did it before then.” He looked down at the corpse. “But not by much.” He smiled. His brown skin made his teeth look especially white. “Or maybe one of the dozen cops who’ve been through here turned off the light.”
Archie could taste the sour burn of stomach acid on his tongue. Addy Jackson had gone to bed at ten.
“You feel okay?” Robbins asked.
“I feel terrific,” Archie said. “Never better.” He found an antacid loose in his pocket and put it in his mouth. Its sweet chalky taste was muted by the smell of rotting flesh.
