It had not been easy. She’d had nightmares for two months after the flood: dark waters, creatures she couldn’t see, Heil’s limp corpse sinking beneath the surface. Bliss had fed her ginger tea, played Deepak Chopra audiobooks day and night, and convinced Susan to float in a sensory deprivation tank for three hours a week. Now, even with the anxiety gone, Susan still avoided that stretch of Division Street. She still kept her eyes on the bridge when she crossed the river, careful not to let her eyes wander down to the water below.
Archie didn’t talk about it. She hadn’t heard him mention Heil’s name since the funeral. She wondered if it bothered him, living in that apartment, with all those windows looking out over the river that had almost killed them.
She was relieved when they got to Archie’s office and he closed the door. Susan could take a lecture, but she never liked the bit leading up to one. She sat right down in one of the chairs facing his desk and braced herself.
Archie took his time walking around and taking a seat in his desk chair. He leaned back and folded his hands across his chest. He looked at her. “So you saw Gretchen,” he said with a slow smile. “How did she look?”
There was something about the pleasure he took in the question that made Susan think he knew exactly how she looked.
“She’s looked better,” Susan said.
Archie’s hands lifted and fell as he breathed. He’d taken the bandage off from the night before. She could barely see the scabs. He was watching her. He looked like he wanted to hear more, but Susan didn’t offer. And Archie didn’t ask.
After a moment he extended one hand across the desk, palm up. The smile was gone. “The tape?” he said.
“There is no tape,” Susan said, rummaging in her purse for the recorder. “It’s a digital file.” She found the recorder and held it up for Archie. “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” she said. She looked away then, her eyes shifting back to her purse, suddenly sure that she’d given away something more than she’d intended. She tried to make her question sound casual. It was reasonable enough. “Do you have a flash drive?”
“No,” Archie said.
Susan glanced back at the closed door. “Perhaps one of your minions?”
Archie looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Okay.” He gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself up. He said, “I can get one.” He walked around the desk, behind Susan, and left the office, presumably to commune with some sort of office supply cabinet.
He’d left the door ajar. The venetian blinds on the office’s interior window were angled three-quarters open. Susan was already rehearsing excuses in case she was caught: I just got my period and I was looking for a tissue to stuff in my underpants. Men didn’t question menstruation stories. Ever. You probably could get into the White House if you said you needed a tampon ASAP.
Susan scurried around to the other side of the desk and pulled open the desk drawer. It was full of crap. Pens. Papers. Rubber bands. Files. Wite-Out. (Who even used Wite-Out anymore?) There were loose staples and thumbtacks. That was so like Archie, orderly at first glance, but a mess just under the surface. It had been three months since Susan had accidentally come across the sleek silver flash drive hidden under a photograph of Gretchen, under some papers in Archie’s desk. Now Susan shoved her fingers underneath the clutter until she touched something hard and smooth, the size of a pack of gum. She pulled it out.
The flash drive was still there.
Susan checked the door and then palmed the flash drive and put it in her purse. She was back in her seat a moment later when Archie returned, a brand-new flash drive in his hand. It was one of those cheap black plastic ones, nothing like the one in his desk.
Archie handed her the black flash drive and Susan focused her attention on downloading the audio file, her heart pounding in her chest. She didn’t dare even glance at her purse. She felt guiltier than she thought she would. It would have been easier if he’d been mad at her.
“She talks about killing this guy named James Beaton in St. Helens when she was sixteen,” Susan said. “I looked him up.” She decided not to mention that she’d done this Internet research while she was zooming up 1-5. “There was a James Beaton in St. Helens who disappeared eighteen years ago. They never found a body.”
“What are you going to do with the interview?” Archie asked.
Wasn’t it obvious? “Write a story,” Susan said. Publish it. Make money. Be famous. “The Times magazine is interested.”
Archie sat down in the chair next to her. He had never done that. He always sat in his chair, the desk between them. Susan nudged her purse under her chair with her foot.
“Prescott set it up?” Archie asked.
Susan looked at him sideways. “Yep.”
Their knees were almost touching.
“Was he in the room?” Archie asked.
“He insisted on staying,” Susan lied.
Archie slumped back in the chair. “It’s privileged,” he said.
“What?”
“She might be able to claim that it’s privileged. She was talking to her shrink. You just happened to be in the room.”
“She was talking to me,” Susan insisted. “He just happened to be in the room. Besides, I’m not entering it into evidence in court.”
“I was talking about me,” Archie said. “I can’t use the confession.”
Susan blinked a few times, sorting this out. “Oh.”
He stood up and walked behind her, back around to his desk chair. “I need you to wait a few days before you do anything with this,” he said as he sat down.
It would take her a few days to write the story anyway. “Okay,” she agreed. She frowned, as if she’d just thought of something. And, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, she asked, “Who’s Ryan Motley?”
Archie reached out and adjusted the framed photograph of his family he kept on his desk. Susan knew the picture: Debbie, the two dark-haired smiling kids, Archie nowhere in sight. Archie shrugged, as if the name meant nothing to him. “A figment of Gretchen’s imagination,” he said.
CHAPTER
21
Bliss was waiting in the living room when Susan got home, her bare feet propped up on the industrial wire spool they had repurposed as a coffee table, a jam jar full of red wine in her hand, and naked as a jaybird. Her elbow-length peroxide-blond dreadlocks were wound on top of her head like a large bird’s nest. She was pushing sixty, but her thirty years of yoga had made her body lean, and the Sauvie Island nude beach had given her a late summer tan. Bliss secured her jar of wine between her legs so she could turn the page of the book she was reading, and Susan caught a glimpse of something she was sure she would spend the next ten years trying to burn from her mind: her mother’s artistically groomed pubic hair.
“What do you have going on there?” Susan asked, waving her finger at her mother’s nether region. Someone at the salon Bliss worked at had started a cottage industry of “novelty” bikini waxing. Bliss, who until a few years ago had been proud of an untamed seventies-style bush the size of a salad plate, was now an enthusiast of artistic pruning.
“It’s Mick Jagger’s profile,” Bliss said.
Sometimes Susan wished she had been born to Pentecostals. “Of course it is,” she said.
Susan’s laptop was on the coffee table, under Bliss’s feet. “Excuse me,” Susan said, kneeling before it. Her mother lifted her feet and Susan slid the laptop to a clear spot between a Tibetan skull cup full of walnuts and a ten-year-old copy of the Whole Earth Catalog.
Moving back in with her mother had been temporary, until Susan had lost her job. Now, on a freelancer’s income, she didn’t have a lot of options.
She pulled the flash drive out of her purse, opened up her laptop, and inserted the drive into the USB port.
“What’s that?” Bliss asked.
“Do you have to be naked?” Susan said. “I mean, what if the UPS guy comes by?”
Bliss fanned her hand in front
of her chest. “It’s hot.”
In fact the Victorian that Susan had grown up in was relatively bearable in the summer. As long as they remembered to keep the windows all closed and the curtains drawn during the day, and then to open the windows—at least the ones that hadn’t been painted shut—at night. Sure, the indoor plants all died by August, and the open windows drew in flies and moths and the occasional panicked bird, but it worked. The house was only intolerably hot for maybe a week a year. This just happened to be that week.
“Get a place with air-conditioning,” Bliss said. “If you’re so concerned.”
Susan barely heard her.
The flash drive had seven files on it, all PDFs.
Seven files, all with the same name:
Ryan Motley1.
Ryan Motley2.
Ryan Motley3.
Etc.
“Shit,” Susan said under her breath.
What had she been hoping for? Family photographs? A secret novel Archie was working on? (She had been hoping for the secret novel.)
Bliss took her feet off the table and sat forward, shoulder to shoulder with Susan. She smelled like patchouli and eucalyptus oil and red wine, combined with a faint hint of marijuana.
“Who’s Ryan Motley?” she asked.
Susan opened her Web browser and typed Ryan Motley into the search field. Over eleven thousand results came up.
“I have no idea,” Susan said.
But she was going to find out.
CHAPTER
22
The Multnomah County morgue had only recently been reopened after being closed for almost three months due to flood damage. On the surface, it looked the same as it did before, but cleaner, the clutter having not yet had time enough to accumulate. But the floors had been laid with a new, gleaming white linoleum and the concrete block walls had a fresh coat of white paint. The effect made the basement facilities seem brighter, though Archie wasn’t sure it was in a good way. Archie had also heard that the city had replaced the conveyor tray cadaver storage system with a walk-in refrigeration unit, the better to store more bodies.
It was dinnertime, and the morgue had a skeleton staff, but Archie found Robbins in the autopsy room, standing over the charcoaled remains of Gabby Meester. Robbins was almost entirely obscured behind his gear: a surgical gown over scrubs, shoe covers, a hairnet, a face shield in front of a surgical mask, surgical gloves.
“How’d you get in here?” Robbins asked, looking up from the steel autopsy table. Gabby was just a head and torso. With only stumps where her legs and arms should be, she looked small, like a child.
Archie walked up to the table waving a white plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back. “I have an access card,” he said.
“You get that when they gave you the key to the city?” Robbins asked.
Robbins had opened Gabby up. Her charred skin was peeled back, and her ribs were removed. She was pink inside, like steak that had been burned on a high heat but remained raw in the middle. Her large intestine bulged where her belly had been.
“It’s one of my perks,” Archie said, putting the card back in his wallet. “They also paid for rehab.”
Robbins chuckled. “I might quit my job and start catching serial killers.” He cut Gabby’s heart free and bagged it, then quickly removed one of her lungs. Archie was always amazed at how fast this part was. A sharp blade and a few flicks of the wrist. It only took ten minutes to cut open and disembowel a corpse.
“You do your part,” Archie said. He reached into the shoulder bag he was carrying and pulled out a brown paper lunch sack. “Mind if I eat?” he asked.
Robbins raised his eyebrows. “Man, you have been doing this too long.”
Archie pulled out the cold chicken burrito that Claire had brought back for him from a food cart. Mostly he just wanted another taste in his mouth besides burned flesh. He took a bite and chewed.
“You notify the family?” Robbins asked, snipping out another lung.
Robbins had confirmed Gabby Meester’s identity through dental records just before lunch. Archie had been at the house within a half hour. “Husband and sister,” Archie said, swallowing. “The kids were upstairs.”
Robbins stopped what he was doing. “Hard?” he asked.
Archie could hear the kids playing upstairs, two girls, younger than Sara. They had no idea their world was about to come down on top of them. “It’s always hard,” he said.
“Any leads?” Robbins asked, going back to his task.
“We spent the day interviewing her coworkers, her husband, her clients, canvassing for witnesses,” Archie said. “We’ve tracked down ex-boyfriends. Went through her cell phone and bank records, credit cards. She left the house early this morning. No one saw her after that.” Archie threw the rest of the burrito back into the bag and tossed it into a red plastic biohazard bag by the table. “She didn’t know her killer,” he said.
“I’m not going to have anything for you until tomorrow,” Robbins said.
“I know,” Archie said. He looked down at Gabby Meester, her insides flaked with charcoal from the bone saw cutting through her charred rib cage, the flesh of her neck separated from the muscle and peeled up over her chin. It didn’t turn his stomach. It made him feel more tenderly toward her. In the chaotic push of a homicide investigation, the victims sometimes got overlooked. Archie liked to remind himself that they were more than photographs. They were flesh and blood and meat. He rubbed his face. “I just needed to see her,” he said.
“Go home,” Robbins said.
Archie looked at his watch. “There’s something I need to do first.”
He left Robbins to do his work, stopping at an alcoholic gel dispenser on the wall at the exit to the stairway to pump a squirt into his hands.
He called Debbie as he walked up to the first floor.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said.
“I saw the news,” his ex-wife said. She paused. “I was going to call. Rough day?”
“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t elaborate. She didn’t ask. “Can I just say hi?” he asked.
“Hold on,” she said. “I’ll get them.” He heard her moving through her apartment. “Kids,” she called, “your dad’s on the phone.”
Archie heard Sara’s excited squeal. He still loved that sound more than anything else in the world.
CHAPTER
23
You’re worried about him again,” Claire said. Henry stared up at the ceiling fan. They were in his bed, naked and exhausted; Claire’s arm was draped over his chest.
Sex took more out of him these days. He sweated more. His heart worked harder. He tried to hide it from her, but of course she could tell.
Now she had clearly picked up on the fact that his mind was someplace else. He wove his hand into hers. “Sorry,” he said.
Claire sighed, settled back, and looked up at the ceiling fan with him. It had white metal blades and a light fixture that had never worked. Henry had installed it ten years ago, that first summer after he’d bought the house. The pull chain swung in slow circles. “Just talk to him,” Claire said.
Henry’s cat leapt onto the bed, stalked around, and then dropped and started purring.
Henry had thought about calling Debbie. But only for a second. Archie wouldn’t want that. He wanted his ex-wife to have a life. And she couldn’t have one if she kept getting dragged into his bullshit. That was how Archie would see it, anyway.
Claire laid her free hand flat on her bare stomach and looked down at the barely perceptible bulge. “Do you think he’s noticed?”
“No,” Henry said.
She bit her lip and looked away. “It’s not that weird. Men are slow that way.”
The ceiling fan had come loose over the years and the fan made a soft knocking sound as it rocked against the ceiling. “Not Archie,” Henry said.
They were quiet for a moment, listening to the blades of the fan, the wind lifting the pages of a woodworking magazine Henry had lef
t on the bedside table, the knocking of the fixture against the ceiling, the purring cat.
“I hate your futon,” Claire said.
Henry rolled on his side and lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “Futons are an ancient, well-loved bed, the bed of emperors,” he said.
Claire’s short brown hair was spiky with sweat. Her breasts were perfect half peaches, the nipples small and dark. Everything about her was pint-sized. She got carded every time she bought beer. But she could outrun a criminal and judo his ass into next Friday. They were going to have an extraordinary kid.
Sometimes Henry wished he’d met Claire twenty years earlier.
“He’s probably just focused on the case,” Claire said.
It was true. They’d worked all day and turned up nothing. No connection between victims whatsoever. No evidence left behind at the crime scene. No witnesses. But Archie had seemed distanced from the case, distracted from it.
It was something else.
It was like Claire had read his mind. She said, “What, then?”
The cat stood up and stretched and then rubbed against Claire’s leg, leaving a trail of gray hair on her sweaty skin. She scratched the cat’s head absentmindedly.
Henry wondered sometimes how much Claire had figured out about Archie’s relationship with Gretchen Lowell. It was one of the things they didn’t talk about.
“Did you see his phone?” Claire asked.
The duct tape. Henry had seen it.
“And his hand?” Claire said.
It looked like he’d punched a wall. Henry had put two and two together. Archie had gotten a call he didn’t like.
“Maybe he’s taking pills again,” Claire said.
“Maybe,” Henry said.
But he had known his friend for a long time, and he had a feeling it was something worse. There was only one person who could get under Archie’s skin like that, and she was locked up in the State Hospital.
Claire nuzzled against Henry’s arm, the cat between them. Henry stared at the ceiling fan and tried not to think about the fact that while he was sweating his ass off, Gretchen Lowell was luxuriating in taxpayer-subsidized air-conditioning.
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