Evil at Heart

by Chelsea Cain

  Parker had told her that back in the golden age of newspaper reporting, reporters had had to use reverse phone books to look up addresses from phone numbers. These were massive bound books provided by the phone company and kept under lock and key in a conference room cabinet. You had to get an editor to unlock the cabinet for you and then you had to look up what you wanted right then because you couldn’t take the books back to your desk. The phone company sent new directories every year, so there was no guarantee the information was even up-to-date. But it was still a cool trick. Something to show people on the tour. Tell me your phone number and I’ll tell you your address. Before Google, it was like magic.

  Now anyone with a phone number could plug the digits into a free Internet search engine and have the corresponding address online in an instant. Plug the address into Google Earth and you could see a 360-degree street view of the house.

  It sort of took the fun out of it.

  Susan’s search of the number from her phone log had not turned up a house. It had turned up a pay phone in North Portland.

  There had been 2.1 million pay phones in the U.S. in 1998. Now there were less than 840,000. (Probably even fewer, as it had been a few months since Susan had done her big pay-phone feature.) Cell phones hadn’t been real good for Superman that way. But Oregon had thought ahead, and when pay phones started going the way of Big Mouth Billy Bass and laser discs, Oregon had passed legislation to preserve “public interest pay phones” in areas where not everyone had the latest BlackBerry. Places like North Portland.

  Susan plugged a nearby address into Google Earth and fooled around until she found an image with the pay phone in the background. No booth—just one of those half-shells with a big black phone-book binder dangling from a silver cord.

  Then, on a lark, she plugged in the address of the house: 397 North Fargo. She was surprised by what came up.

  Nothing.

  No such address.

  “Where’s my copy?” Ian said.

  Two o’clock.

  Susan looked up to see her editor, Ian Harper, leaning a skinny hip on the edge of her desk. He pulled at his ponytail, a habit Susan had once found endearing and now just annoyed her. There were editors who didn’t bother you until deadline, and editors who hovered. Ian was a helicopter.

  She pried off her boots and pulled her legs up into a cross-legged position on her chair. “How’s the wife?” she asked.

  Ian’s mouth tensed. He looked around. No one had looked up. No one cared. The intern was busy tweeting his latest Gretchen Lowell joke. Most of the Herald staff listened to iPods while they worked. The vast and carpeted fifth floor was a cube farm of people sitting in silence, staring at glowing monitors.

  “I want my thirty inches in a half hour,” he said. He reached up and slid a stray piece of brown hair back into his ponytail.

  “I’m working on it,” Susan said.

  He started reading over her shoulder. Susan positioned herself between him and the monitor.

  “Don’t bury the lead,” Ian said, tapping in the air toward the screen. “That’s your hook. Make the most of those two inches.”

  Susan smiled sweetly. “You would know,” she said.

  The intern laughed.

  Ian pushed off her desk and started back to his office. “I want to see typing,” he said, not looking back.

  Susan swiveled back to her monitor, wondering how she’d ever slept with him. “It’s called ‘keyboarding’ now,” she said.

  A newspaper column inch was about thirty-five words. Thirty inches was 1,050 words. Susan always had to do the math. She kept a solar calculator on her desk for just that purpose. Five hundred words in, five hundred fifty to go.

  A stack of envelopes hit her desk. Derek. He grinned at her. He had a cleft in his chin. An actual cleft. Like Kirk Douglas. Susan had never met anyone with an actual cleft before Derek.

  She caught him one morning in her bathroom cleaning out his cleft with a Q-tip.

  “You got mail,” he said.

  She glanced down at the pile of envelopes—some obviously press releases, some coaster-sized white envelopes with little-old-lady handwriting, and one bright pink envelope that looked to be some sort of card. “You checked my box?”

  “I was checking my box,” he said with a shrug. “Our boxes are right next to each other.” He paused and gazed at her meaningfully, like their box proximity might be some sort of cosmic sign.

  Susan threw a look at her overflowing in-box. “Just put it in the pile,” she said.

  Derek frowned. “You need to reply to readers,” he said. “It’s part of marketing.”

  “I would,” Susan said, “but I’m out of Garfield stationery.”

  Derek smoothed out a wrinkle in his khakis. “You hate Garfield,” he said.

  Susan splayed her hands. “But I love lasagna,” she said. “Ironic.” She pushed away from her desk and leaned back in her chair. “I need to work, Derek. I’m on deadline.”

  His eyes fell to her jeans. “You’ve got blood on your pants,” he said.

  She looked down at her shins. The blood had hardened into a smooth rust-colored stain. Susan uncrossed her legs and lowered her socked feet to the floor. “Thanks,” she said.

  “I’ve got some OxiClean in my desk,” Derek said.

  “That’s good on stains,” the intern said.

  Susan turned to the intern. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing a sidebar on spleens?” she said.

  “Sorry,” the intern said.

  “You get anything out of the PIO?” Susan asked Derek. One of the great things about covering real news was getting to use nifty acronyms for things like “police information officer.”

  “Nothing you didn’t get from Sobol. They haven’t identified the body yet. I did a little digging and found out that the house is owned by an old lady. She’s been in a home for over fifteen years. Place has been vacant since she left. There’s an oil tank on the property and radon in the basement. She couldn’t sell it.” He scratched the cleft in his chin. “I might go interview her. Human-interest angle. Funny thing is, she said that she’d already gotten two offers for the house since the news broke. I guess people want their very own Beauty Killer crime scene.”

  “Sure,” Susan said. “Open up a little B and B.”

  Derek shrugged. “What are you going to do,” he said. He turned and walked away, and sat back down at the desk he’d inherited from Parker a few months ago.

  He never looked comfortable in it. It was too big for him.

  C H A P T E R 19

  They had cleaned up the blood spattered on the floor in the break room. Archie could still smell the bleach. Word on the ward was the counselor had needed stitches; Courtenay hadn’t. She was back in her room, in lockdown. She’d been singing the same song all afternoon. “High Hopes.” You could hear it all the way down the hall.

  He’s got high hopes . . . high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

  Archie hoped it was intended to be funny.

  “My sister’s coming to visit,” Frank said from the couch.

  “Yeah, Frank,” Archie said.

  Archie had showered and put on clean clothes and brushed his teeth after dinner. They ate at five o’clock, like old people. Now he was drinking coffee out of a mug that had a cartoon of letters spelling MONDAY laid out on a psychiatrist’s couch. In a voice balloon, Monday is saying, “Everybody hates me.”

  Archie took a sip out of the mug and glanced up at the clock. Six-thirty. Debbie was always on time. He watched the clock’s hands meet at the bottom of the clock, then looked over at the door to the break room. Debbie stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, smiling at him. Her summer tan, acquired from gardening, had faded. No garden at her secure Vancouver apartment. Still, she was more beautiful than ever. Short dark hair, a black sundress, bare arms crossed, silver bracelets on her wrists. She looked younger, almost happy.

  Ben and Sara burst in on either side of her and ran to Archie. As time p
assed, they looked more and more like her. Her freckles. Her fine, straight hair. Her long limbs. It made Archie glad to see so little of himself in them, as if they might be spared some essential suffering. He hugged them both, inhaling the sweet smell of shampoo in their dark hair, holding them each a second longer than they wanted.

  They were changing schools in the fall. But even if Debbie hadn’t moved, she’d never have allowed them to go back to their old elementary school. Not after what had happened there. It was the first place Gretchen had gone after her escape.

  “Give your dad and me a minute,” Debbie said. The kids looked back at her, and Archie nodded and kissed them both again on the tops of their heads and watched as they went and sat on the couch in front of the television.

  Sara pried her sneakers off and pulled her legs up under her on the couch and sat down next to Frank. It was after dinner and everyone except Frank and Archie was outside smoking. Free period.

  Emergency Vets was still on. It must have been a marathon.

  “Is this the one where the cat dies?” Sara asked Frank.

  “Ferret episode,” Frank said.

  “Good,” Sara said.

  Debbie waited a moment, until the kids were absorbed in the show, and then walked over to where Archie was sitting. “What’s going on?” she asked him. Her arms were still crossed. He could smell her. The same shampoo as the kids, but other scents mixed in—a musky lotion, and a perfume he didn’t recognize.

  They’d fallen in love in college, nearly twenty years ago. He still had a hard time imagining his life without her. But he was careful that she didn’t see it. He didn’t want to make things harder than they already were.

  “What?” he said, thinking of the phone in his pocket.

  “She’s back,” Debbie said.

  “She’s a serial killer,” Archie said. “It was just a matter of time before it started again.”

  “I thought she’d run,” Debbie said. “That she was far away.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “On an ice raft somewhere.”

  “I guess she got bored killing Inuit,” Archie said.

  The door to the balcony opened and two women came in and sat down at a table near the TV. One of the women had been in the hallway during Courtenay’s breakdown.

  “When will this end?” Debbie said, closing her eyes.

  “When she’s dead,” Archie said simply.

  Debbie opened her eyes and looked at him. Then she turned and looked at the kids. The vets on TV were operating on a ferret who’d swallowed a Matchbox police car. Ben and Sara and Frank were sitting side by side, riveted.

  “I’ll fix this,” Archie said quietly. “No matter what it takes.”

  Debbie slowly turned back to Archie. “How will you fix it?” she said. “You’re in a mental hospital.”

  “I like to think of it more as a ‘booby hatch,’ ” Archie said.

  “I’ve got media camped outside my house,” Debbie said. She sat down, across from him at the table, where Henry had been earlier that morning. “That Charlene Wood person from Channel Eight showed up and started broadcasting live from in front of our building,” she said. She glanced back over at the kids and lowered her voice. “Like a pregame show. Like Gretchen’s going to show up there at the top of the hour.”

  “She won’t bother you this time,” Archie said.

  Debbie flinched and then she set her jaw and her eyes narrowed. “I forgot how well you know her,” she said. Know her. The words sat, ugly, between them. He deserved it. He deserved any vitriol she wished to dish out. His betrayal of their vows had been epic.

  Debbie shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m the adulterer,” Archie said. He was lucky, he knew, that she let him see the children at all. “What I meant to say,” he said, “is that I know how she thinks.”

  “Then go back to work,” Debbie said. “She’s been on the loose for two months. They can’t catch her without you. Apparently.”

  A staffer walked in. He didn’t look at Archie. He didn’t look at anyone. He walked over to the fridge, got a box of takeout from it, and sat down two tables away. Archie recognized him—the counselor Courtenay had stabbed.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Debbie asked.

  Behind her, another staffer walked through the door, pushing a mop. It was the orderly. George. Debbie turned around to see what Archie was looking at. “What?” she said.

  Archie felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and there was that feeling again, that he was being watched. He glanced around the room. Minutes ago, they had been alone. He tried to think back to other visits, and realized that this always happened when the kids were around—people loitering just in earshot. He was so stupid. If Gretchen were keeping an eye on him, she wouldn’t just have someone in the hospital—she’d have someone in the ward.

  Debbie brushed a piece of hair behind his ear and withdrew her hand. “You need a haircut,” she said.

  Archie gave her a distracted smile. “I’m growing a ponytail,” he said.

  “If you do,” she said, “I’ll kill you myself.”

  “That would only be justifiable homicide if we were still married,” Archie said.

  Debbie stood up. “I’m prepared to do time,” she said.

  He watched her as she walked over to the kids and kissed them both and said good-bye. He searched the faces in the room for a reaction, some hint of too much interest.

  He could use this. He could use his children as bait—see who found an excuse to get too close, to stay too long in the break room.

  Debbie had walked to the door and stood there looking back at Archie. The black sundress was thin and he could see the shadow of her thigh through the cloth.

  She listened for a moment and bent an ear down the hall toward Courtenay’s room. “Is that . . . ?” she asked.

  “ ‘High Hopes,’ ” Archie said.

  “They’ve got you guys on some good medication,” Debbie said.

  Sara squealed. On Emergency Vets, something was going wrong on the operating table for the ferret.

  Frank took Sara’s hand.

  “Wait,” Archie said to Debbie.

  He walked to her, took her by the arm and put his face next to hers, as if to kiss her on the cheek. Instead he put his lips against her ear. “Don’t leave the kids,” he whispered.

  She winced.

  Archie pulled his head back, his expression neutral, his hand still on her arm.

  Debbie looked at him, eyebrows lifted. Then, slowly, she glanced around at the other people in the room.

  Someone else might think Archie was deluded. But Debbie knew what Gretchen was capable of.

  Her gaze returned to his, and he could see a glimmer of fear in her eyes. Good. She was taking him seriously.

  “Go on a trip,” he whispered.

  Debbie gave him the tiniest nod, and he let her arm go.

  “Your dad doesn’t feel well,” she called to the kids. “Want to see a movie?”

  C H A P T E R 20

  This is Gretchen Lowell.”

  Archie is sitting in his office and he looks up to see Mayor Buddy Anderson standing in the doorway with a stunning blonde. She is maybe the most beautiful woman Archie has ever seen. Her features are perfect: mouth full, nose straight and sloped, wide cheekbones, and large eyes. The long-sleeved lilac-colored dress she is wearing rounds over her breasts, dips in deeply at the waist, and then curves around her hips to her knees. As she leans against the doorjamb, she crosses her slender legs at the ankles. Her face is shaped like a heart.

  “Gretchen,” Buddy says with his wolf grin. “This is Archie Sheridan.”

  “Detective,” she says, and she steps forward and offers an elegant hand.

  Archie stands and leans over his desk and shakes it, suddenly conscious of the roughness of his palms. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

  “She’s a psychiatrist,” Buddy explains. “She thinks she can help catch the Beauty
Killer.”

  It is eleven at night. Buddy had called and asked if he could stop by. Eleven at night, and Archie is still working. Buddy, clearly, isn’t. “We already have a profiler,” Archie says.

  Buddy chuckles. His cheeks are ruddy and he’s not wearing his coat. His bleached white teeth are stained with red wine. “She’s not after Anne’s job,” he says.

  “I’m not a criminal profiler,” she explains to Archie. “I specialize in trauma counseling.”