Evil at Heart

by Chelsea Cain

  “Some docent from the house,” Ngyun said, adjusting the bill of his Blazers cap against the rain. “Seventy-two years old. Jumped the fence and climbed down the hillside with a fire extinguisher.”

  Henry extended a hand, palm up. “It’s raining,” he said.

  “Hadn’t started yet,” Ngyun said.

  The head had been severed from its body close to the jawbone. The rain was melting the fire-extinguisher foam and Henry could see that the skull showed through in places, and the hair had thinned and was matted with dirt. It was facedown, resting against the root of a weed. Henry looked up the hillside again. “My guess is someone tossed it over the fence,” he said, his eyes following the angle of the slope. “And it rolled down here.”

  “Lucky it didn’t roll any farther,” Ngyun said. “Never would have found it.” He frowned at the tangle of blackberries below. “Probably dozens of heads down there.”

  “I’ll talk to the mayor about curfew,” Henry said. This was the new mayor. He’d taken the job two months ago, after the old mayor had blown his brains out in front of Archie.

  “Yeah,” Ngyun said. “Because no one gets murdered during the daytime.”

  “It will appease the citizenry,” Henry said. He squatted, trying to get a better look at the head’s features, but the angle of the face in the mud made it hard. “Where’s the ME?”

  “On his way,” Ngyun said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s eleven. They said eleven-fifteen.”

  Henry hesitated. He knew he’d catch hell from Robbins for moving the remains. But fuck it. He pushed the thing with the toe of his shoe, until it rolled faceup.

  The holes where its nose, eyes, and mouth used to be were crawling with wiggling yellow maggots. No telling if the thing had its eyes gouged out, or just lost them to worms.

  Claire called his name, and Henry looked up to see her standing with her hands on her hips looking down at them. Next to her, in a white Tyvek suit, was Lorenzo Robbins, of the Medical Examiner’s department.

  “Did you just kick my head?” Robbins said in disbelief.

  Henry’s phone rang. He’d never been so happy to get a phone call in his life. He smiled up at Robbins, held a finger out in a “just a minute” gesture, and picked it up.

  It was a sergeant from the North Portland precinct. “We have something your task force might be interested in,” the sergeant said. “A Herald reporter found a body that looks like it might be Beauty Killer–related.”

  A Herald reporter. Take precautions, he’d told her. Be safe. Don’t do anything stupid. “Let me guess,” Henry said. “Susan Ward.”

  C H A P T E R 13

  Archie sat on the floor, leaning up against the mauve wall in a bathroom on the first floor of the hospital.

  He held the phone in his lap, rereading the text. “DARLING, FEEL BETTER?”

  Archie put his head in his hands. Two years had passed and his ribs still ached from where she’d broken them. They probably always would. He moved his hands to his neck, and felt the length of the scar there, his freshest scar, two months old and still tender to the touch. Then he reached under the waist of his shirt and moved one of his hands over his older scars: the one that ran up his midsection, the smaller scars on his flank, and finally the heart-shaped reminder on his chest.

  His mind turned to the butchery at the rest stop.

  She would not stop killing.

  Archie picked the phone up and pressed the top of it against his forehead, digging into the skin until his skull felt like it might split, and his head cleared. Fuck it.

  He sat up and punched in a text. “Where are you?”

  He hit send and waited.

  The toilet was beige with a mismatched white seat. There was a handicap grab bar next to it, and a hook to hang a purse on, and a feminine-hygiene-product waste receptacle. Archie looked up at the ceiling. White corkboard panels. A smoke detector. A sprinkler valve. Two white air vents were layered with years’ worth of dust and grime. No one ever bothered to clean up there.

  He glanced back at the phone. Nothing.

  The rose-tile floor gleamed, even though the grout was brown. There was a round silver drain in the middle of the floor.

  Someone rattled the handle of the bathroom door.

  Archie looked up, startled. “Occupied,” he called.

  The phone vibrated. He looked at the screen. “Do you miss me?”

  Archie stared at the phone, calculating how to respond. A thousand options flew through his mind. He needed her to show herself. He needed her to think he was still in her thrall.

  There was a knock on the door. “Just a second,” Archie said.

  A small brown house spider crawled out of the drain on the floor and scurried over the tiles toward the sink.

  Archie typed, “I WANT TO SEE YOU,” and hit send.

  An hourglass rotated on the phone screen. Then popped out of view. Message sent.

  He looked up at the door, stood, flushed the toilet, and then held his hands under the faucet sensor to turn on the water. The countertop was speckled peach and black Formica, the same color and pattern that Courtenay had dug into her neck. It had probably come off the same roll.

  Archie checked the phone. The only thing on the screen was the time: 11:23, 11:24, 11:25. He dried his hands with a paper towel and threw it in the gray rectangular trash can. A caricature of a lady skunk stared down at Archie from the Aire-Master air freshener.

  Someone tried the door again. “Just a second,” Archie called again, this time more loudly.

  The door handle jiggled uselessly against the lock.

  Archie ignored it this time. It was a hospital. There were dozens of public restrooms.

  He set the phone on the speckled Formica and fixed his eyes on the screen, willing Gretchen to respond. “Come on,” he said softly, gripping the edge of the counter. “Come to me.”

  The phone buzzed in his hand and a new text popped up.

  “KNOCK KNOCK.”

  Archie studied the words on the phone, and then, slowly, gazed up at the door. She was in the hospital. She was watching him right now. He put the phone back in his pocket and turned and took a step toward the door.

  “Gretchen?” he said.

  There was no response. Archie extended his arm, reached his hand out, and carefully turned the lock. Then he folded his hand around the handle, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open.

  There was no one on the other side. He turned his head. The hallway was empty. He reached up and touched his forehead. He was sweating. He was letting her get to him again. It was a guess. She’d guessed that he’d call her from a locked room. It hadn’t been her at the door. The person who’d been waiting had gotten impatient and left.

  He had enough problems without adding paranoia to the list.

  Archie could see a gift store at the far end of the corridor. He squinted at it, and recognized the book displayed in the window—The Last Victim. It had been two months since Archie had read a paper. If he was going to have a chance at finding her, he needed to catch up on the news. He started walking. Halfway down the corridor, he stopped and did a three-sixty. There was no one of interest around, but he could not escape the disquieting feeling that he was being watched.

  C H A P T E R 14

  Gretchen’s photograph graced the front page of every newspaper the hospital gift store sold.

  Archie picked up a copy of the Herald. DAY NUMBER SEVENTY-SIX, screamed the headline below her front-page photo. Archie leafed through it. No story about the rest stop. That would be in tomorrow’s edition. There were four stories about Gretchen. But nothing new. Just the same rehashed details, the same quotes.

  Archie closed the paper and looked at her picture on the front page again. It was her mug shot from two years ago. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on in his final memories of being tortured. When she’d held him, and stroked his head, when he thought he was finally dying, and was so grateful to her for letting him.

/>   Her blond hair was brushed into a smooth ponytail, not a hair out of place.

  Gretchen took a beautiful mug shot.

  Something caught Archie’s eye inside the gift store. Her image again, multiplied. He put the paper down and stepped inside, and then made his way past the gleaming Mylar balloons, the stuffed animals, the candy and sentimental cards, past the white-haired woman sitting behind a knickknack-jammed counter, watching TV, and stopped in front of the magazine rack.

  Twenty different magazines were displayed in plastic pockets on the wall. Almost every issue featured Gretchen as its cover girl.

  The press had always loved Gretchen. She’d made headlines around the world. But he had never seen anything like this.

  Newsmagazines promised stories of her crimes and updates on the manhunt. Fashion magazines promised to help women make their hair look like hers. Cultural magazines questioned her influence. Entertainment magazines mused about potential casting for an upcoming feature about her.

  The cover of Portland Monthly had an image of a tour bus plastered with Gretchen’s face on it. gretchen lowell, the headline read. PORTLAND’S NEXT BIG TOURIST ATTRACTION?

  But the magazine that caught his eye was the current issue of Newsweek. It wasn’t her airbrushed headshot on the cover that made his gut twist. It was the huge bold letter headline—a single word:

  INNOCENT?

  C H A P T E R 15

  The fingerprint tech rolled Susan’s right index finger, left to right, over the sponge of dark purple ink. He’d done her thumb first, and was working his way to her pinkie. Elimination prints, they called them. Next time she broke into a house she was definitely wearing gloves.

  “This better come off,” Susan said.

  She was perched on the back of a police van, the cab’s double doors open on either side of her, blocking the view of the gawkers who already lined the police tape that had just gone up a half hour ago. The rain had stopped, but not before Susan’s hair had gotten frizzy. Police radios cracked, emergency lights flashed. Everyone walked with purpose. The blood on Susan’s jeans had started to dry, stiffening the denim against her knees. She was trying to ignore it.

  The fingerprint tech was sitting next to her, a police fingerprint card on the bed of the van between them. His hooded eyes didn’t waver from his work, his balding head bowed over her hand beside her. “Hold still,” he told Susan.

  Henry cleared his throat and tapped his notebook with his pen. He’d come out of the house ten minutes before, mouth set, eyes masked behind sunglasses, and had been grilling her ever since.

  “How did this guy get your cell-phone number?” Henry asked.

  “Everyone has it,” Susan said. “It’s on my e-mail signature. I’m a reporter. I need to be reachable.” She craned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of his notes. She should be the one asking him questions. For a reporter, she spent an awful lot of time being interviewed. “So, I hear you found a head,” she said.

  Henry angled his notebook toward his chest. “I should arrest you for trespassing,” he said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “I played the odds,” Susan said. She looked at her boots. They were caked with mud. She had probably tracked it all through the house. “Who’s the dead guy?” she asked.

  Henry rubbed the back of his neck like it hurt.

  Susan could hear more sirens in the distance. The fingerprint tech moved on to the next finger. She glanced, dismayed, at her purple fingertip. “Seriously,” she said, “that ink washes off, right?”

  “The victim doesn’t have ID,” Henry said, and Susan looked back up. “The ME says male in his early twenties. Only been dead two to six hours.” Henry leaned toward her. It was a tiny motion, a shift in his stance of an inch, imperceptible to anyone watching, but Henry was a mountain, and it was all Susan could do not to cower. “Tell me about the caller,” Henry said.

  “Tell me about the head,” she said.

  “We found a head,” Henry said. “Pittock Mansion. We had to close off part of the backyard, but you can still take a tour of the house.” He scratched one eyebrow. “I think they’re charging extra.”

  Susan pulled at her damp tank top. “He didn’t sound young,” she said of the caller. “He didn’t sound old. He said he was part of a Gretchen Lowell fan group.” She caught herself. “I mean, not specifically. He said I’d written to him on his Web site, wanting to write about his group.” Henry held his pen to his notebook, apparently still waiting for her to say something worth writing down. She wound a piece of purple hair around a finger and tried to remember any other group she might have contacted—she used the Internet endlessly—but came up only with the Gretchen story. “I’ve been contacting Beauty Killer fan sites.” She left out the part about him not recognizing Jimi Hendrix. She didn’t think Henry would be interested.

  Henry wrote something down. Susan lifted her chin to read it. “SW PC.” He circled it. “What the hell does that mean?” she asked.

  “I’m going to need your hard drive,” he said.

  He had to be kidding. “No,” Susan said. And she felt the need to add, “And I have a Mac, not a PC.”

  Henry adjusted his sunglasses, pressing them more firmly into place. It wasn’t sunny. But Susan wasn’t sure this was the time to point that out. “We need to trace your Internet history,” he said.

  Susan shook her head. “And have you find out how much time I spend Googling myself?” she said. “No way.”

  Henry lowered his head and looked up at her from under the aviators, and she knew then why he wore them. “This is a murder investigation,” he said. “You’re obstructing justice.” He gritted his teeth. “And pissing me off.”

  “I’m a journalist,” she said, straightening up. “I’m not turning my computer over to the police.” She’d told the cops when they first got there that she wasn’t showing them her incoming call log. She was protecting a source. It was the code. Once you gave up a source, you could forget about anyone ever telling you anything again. Parker taught her that. He’d gone to jail to protect a source. “Good luck getting a warrant,” she added. The fingerprint tech rolled her ring finger across the ink pad. There was dirt under the nail. “Can you tell an ape fingerprint from a human one?” she asked him.

  The tech didn’t look up. He lifted her finger off the ink and pressed it in the center of a square on the fingerprint card. Susan admired his focus. “Yes,” he said.

  Henry wrote something down. “Do you think you’d recognize the caller’s voice?” he asked.

  Susan tried to replay the caller’s voice in her head, but it eluded her. “Maybe,” she said. She gazed down at her bloodstained jeans. Thank God for black denim. It could hide anything.

  “The guy I found,” she said—she could still see his face, those egg-white eyes—“how’d he die?”

  “I think we can rule out natural causes,” Henry said.

  Susan had knelt two feet away from the body, and gotten blood on her pants. The sheet was soaked with it. The guy had bled a lot. Like he’d been cut up. No, she thought, operated on. The hearts on the wall, Gretchen’s signature, the fan site. Suddenly she knew. “His spleen’s gone, isn’t it?” Susan asked. Henry’s reaction was almost undetectable. But he flinched.

  Someone had ripped out his spleen. Just like Gretchen had done to her victims, like she’d done to Archie. She had sliced Archie open without anesthesia and cut it out of him. Then sent it to Henry in the mail. Susan’s throat tightened and she had to swallow a few times before she could speak. “Should I be in protection?” she asked.

  Henry took off the sunglasses and looked at her. His shaved head was still shiny with rain. “Leave town,” he said.

  It was a good idea. Go to Mexico for a few months. Get some writing done. Maybe she could have done it, a few months ago, before she’d met Archie. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m a journalist. I can’t.”

  Susan’s pulse was racing. The fingerprint tech must have felt it because
he looked up at her for the first time since he’d arrived. “Koalas,” he said. “You fingerprint a koala, it’s almost impossible to tell the print from a human one.”

  “Seriously?” Susan said.

  He pressed her pinkie onto the cardstock. “Fools us every time,” he said.

  “Did you know,” Susan said, “that in the past twenty years, nine children have been crushed to death by school cafeteria tables?”

  The fingerprint tech glanced up worriedly. “No,” he said.

  Susan relaxed a little, and as she did her brain started to circle the details. Who had called her? “Do you think she has a new accomplice?” Susan asked Henry. He didn’t answer. Then something occurred to her. “Accomplices?” she asked, stressing the plural. The crime scene flashed in her mind. “There were ten flashlights.”