by Chelsea Cain
A porch light came on, splashing yellow light into the darkness. The front door opened and an elderly woman appeared. She wore her gray hair loose and was wearing a wool button-down shirt decorated with Indian totems.
“Yes?” she said.
Henry stepped forward and showed her his badge. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Detective Sobol. I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions.” He smiled amiably. “Do you live here?”
“Yes, son,” she said, her pale blue eyes alert and amused. “For fifty-four years now.”
“Have you noticed anything strange lately?” Henry asked. He ran a hand over his bald head. “Activity in the woods?”
The folds in her face deepened. “Is this connected to the senator’s death?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “We’ve found some remains in the woods.”
“What sort of remains?” she asked.
Henry cleared his throat. “Human.”
The old woman turned and craned her head back toward the park. Then she looked over at Susan. Susan tried to smile amiably, too. “Is this your wife?” the woman asked Henry.
Susan laughed out loud.
“No, ma’am,” Henry said. “She’s a reporter.”
Susan held up her notebook and wiggled her other hand in hello.
Henry continued, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Notice anything out of the ordinary? Hear anything? Smell anything?”
Missing any relatives, Susan thought but didn’t say.
The woman considered Henry’s questions. “Bill has been acting strange lately.”
“Is that your husband?” Henry asked.
“My standard poodle,” she said.
Susan saw the corners of Henry’s mouth twitch up for an instant. “Strange, how?” Henry asked.
The woman frowned. “He just stands in front of his doghouse. Barks some. Won’t let me near it.”
“Do you let him run loose in the woods?” Henry asked.
“He jumps the fence sometimes,” she said. “Always comes back, though.”
“Where is Bill now?” Henry asked.
She motioned for them to follow, and then led them around down an old brick path that ran along the side of the house. She was wearing sheepskin boots, and Susan noticed Henry move close in behind her, in case the old woman slipped on the uneven wet bricks. The path was lit with solar yard lights that cast a pale blue glow, but did little to provide illumination. However, the woman was steady on her feet and didn’t miss a step.
They came to a gate in the cedar fence that boxed in the backyard and the woman opened it, and the gate swung in with a rusty sigh. There weren’t any lights back there and it was dark. Henry snapped his flashlight back on as the woman disappeared into the blackness.
“Ma’am?” Henry said.
A floodlight turned on, revealing an ivy-clotted backyard, and the woman appeared on her back stoop.
“Bill,” she said to the backyard, “I’ve brought a friend to meet you.”
Susan searched the yard for the poodle. The ivy from the park had crawled over the fence and snaked halfway across the yard. It was like some sort of intractable green tide. You could chop it back, sure, but it would just keep creeping forward, an inch a day, until it covered everything again. Susan heard a dog bark and she realized that the doghouse was half-covered with ivy, too. A large black poodle stood in the doghouse’s open doorway. The dog had been recently groomed and his coat had been trimmed into a series of lumps and balls, a weird living topiary.
Susan saw Henry wince. “Is Bill friendly?” he asked.
“As a lamb,” the woman said.
Henry shook his head, set his shoulders, and walked toward the doghouse.
Bill growled.
Henry stopped. “As a lamb?” he asked.
“Don’t let him intimidate you, son,” the woman said. “You don’t have a cat, do you?”
“I have three cats,” Henry said.
The woman clucked. “Bill doesn’t like cats,” she said ominously.
“Susan?” Henry called. “A little help?”
Susan had never had any pets. She hesitated. “I’m not good with dogs,” she said.
“Get the hell over here,” Henry said.
Susan walked slowly over to the poodle. “Hi, Bill,” she said. “Good Bill.” She reached out to let the dog smell her hand. “Nice Bill.”
“You probably don’t want to touch him,” the old woman called from the porch.
Susan froze and the dog looked at her outstretched hand and bared his teeth. He didn’t growl. He didn’t make a sound.
“He’s probably scared of your hair,” Henry said, as he attempted to squeeze his large frame around the dog far enough that he could aim his flashlight around to see inside the doghouse. He got down on his hands and knees and managed to wedge himself halfway into the doghouse. Then he backed out, sat down next to the dog, and punched a number into his cell phone.
“Archie,” he said into the phone. “It’s me. The blonde.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “Is she missing an arm?”
Susan heard Archie’s voice say, “Yeah.”
Henry glanced back over his shoulder into the doghouse. Then he looked at Susan. The dog growled and eyed them both suspiciously. “I found it,” Henry said.
CHAPTER
12
The old woman’s name was Trudy Schuyler. Susan had filled a few pages of her notebook with information about her. Her husband had died five years before. She didn’t have a wood chipper. She didn’t know a kid who fit the description of the kid Archie had seen in the woods. She had been a meter maid, but she had retired twenty years before. She had three grown children. The cops had taken the dog into custody so they could monitor its output, lest the furry topiary had managed to digest a clue or two while gnawing on the dead woman’s radius bone. With this in mind, they had started bagging dog shit from the yard. That was about the time that Susan left.
There wasn’t that much going on at the Herald building at 1:00 A.M. The ambulance chasers who’d been on hand to help put together the issue on Castle and Parker were all tucked neatly in bed. Even the janitors were done for the day. A security guard had let Susan in through the loading dock entrance. She had taken the elevator up to the fifth floor, where Ian was already huddled in his office with a copy editor, a headline editor, a designer, and a photo editor, all of whom had been called in to help pull the story together. They all looked tired and a little annoyed. Susan was trying not to look tired and annoyed. She was trying to look cheery. She had pissed Ian off enough already. And pissing Ian off was not going to get the Molly Palmer story published. Being nice might help. It was so crazy, it just might work.
The late filing was called a “hot chase,” meaning that as soon as Susan was done with the story, they would stop the presses, slip in a new plate, and then continue the press run. She’d have a story in the Dead Senator issue after all. Just not the story she wanted.
Susan started to walk over to Ian’s office, but Ian saw her through his office’s glass wall. He held up a hand for her to stop, then pointed to his watch, and then to her desk.
She obediently walked over to her desk, threw her purse at her feet, set her notebook next to her keyboard, and called Molly Palmer. Nothing. If Ian was going to run the story, Susan knew it had to be solid, triple-checked, every i dotted. She left a voice mail. “Seriously, Molly,” Susan said. “You need to call me back.” She wrapped the phone cord around her finger, circling the knuckle so tight that the finger started to turn red. “It’s going to be okay. He’s dead. Let’s go public with this.” She thought of the ensuing press mayhem Molly was sure to endure. “You care about stories more than people,” Henry had said.
Susan bit her lip. “If you want to drop out for a while, fine,” she said into the phone. “But I need you to talk to some people first, okay?” Susan disentangled her finger and hung up. The lights weren’t all on and the floor was quiet and you had to look hard to see across t
he room. Besides the huddle in Ian’s office, the only other human being on the floor was a guy from sports, who sat wearing headphones and keyboarding something even he didn’t seem interested in.
She began to type furiously. The Jane Doe. The two new bodies. The possibility of a Forest Park serial killer. It was the kind of story that Parker would have loved. Thinking of him made her pause, fingers poised over the keyboard, and she glanced up from her computer monitor to the lights on the West Hills outside the Herald’s large windows.
She glanced back at Parker’s desk. There were two new bouquets of flowers. It was starting to look like a grave. Susan got up and went into the break room and dug around in the kitchenette cabinets until she found a glass vase, a coffee can, and three tall water glasses. She filled them with water and took a few trips to carry them back to Parker’s desk. She did her best to arrange the wilted flowers in the vessels, but the stems were soft and the flowers drooped forlornly over the sides.
The flowers made her think of Archie Sheridan, whose yard was buried in floral arrangements during the ten days he was missing, and how Debbie Sheridan had once told her that she couldn’t stand the smell of flowers anymore. They made her think of death.
Susan sat down in Parker’s task chair, rolling in small circles, trying to get into his head, to figure out how he’d write the Forest Park murders story, when her knee bumped against Parker’s desk’s filing drawer. Each desk had one. They were always kept locked. Susan kept her key under a mug full of pens on her desk. She had learned that from Parker.
She reached out and lifted up the Hooters’ mug of number two pencils that sat on Parker’s desk, revealing a tiny silver key. Then she put the key in the file drawer lock and turned it. It opened. Inside, toward the front of the drawer, were thickly packed files marked with names that Susan recognized as being connected to stories that Parker covered. She walked her fingers along the files until she came to a large, black three-ring binder that had been jammed in the back of the drawer. There was a label on the spine, and in Parker’s slanted handwriting, the words “Beauty Killer.”
Jackpot.
She pulled the binder out of the drawer, locked it, replaced the key, and carried the heavy binder over to her desk, just as Ian popped his head out of his office and hollered, “I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”
“Almost done,” Susan said. She slipped the binder onto the floor next to her purse, resting one foot on it protectively. Her face was flushed with excitement, but it was dark and Susan didn’t think that Ian could tell.
CHAPTER
13
Archie still wasn’t sure if he’d agreed to let Sarah Rosenberg treat him because he needed the help, or because he wanted an excuse to sit in the room where Gretchen Lowell had drugged him and taken him captive.
This was his Monday morning ritual. No more Sundays at the state pen with the Beauty Killer, but every Monday he spent an hour sitting across from Gretchen’s big wooden desk. In one of her overstuffed striped chairs. He watched her grandfather clock, the time still stuck at 3:30. He looked between the heavy green velvet curtains, out to the cherry trees thick with green leaves outside her window.
Only none of it was Gretchen’s. She had rented the house under a false name from a psychologist who was spending the season in Italy. It had been the last place the police could trace Archie to. But by then, Gretchen had already taken him to another house. The psychologist, Dr. Sarah Rosenberg, and her family came back; the carpet, onto which Archie had spilled his drugged coffee, had been replaced.
“I want to talk about Gretchen Lowell today,” Rosenberg said.
It was their fourth session. It was the first time she had mentioned Gretchen. Archie had admired her restraint. He took a slow sip of the paper cup of coffee he held on the arm of the chair. “Okay,” he said. He felt warm and pleasant, just high enough that he could relax, and not high enough that Rosenberg would notice.
Rosenberg smiled. She was lean with dark curly hair she wore back in a low ponytail, maybe a little older than Archie, though he probably looked older to anyone guessing. He liked her. She was better than the department shrink he’d seen for six months. But then, for some reason, Archie was always more comfortable talking to women.
“I want to talk about the six weeks you knew her before she revealed who she was,” she said.
It was something the department didn’t like to talk about, the fact that Gretchen had infiltrated the investigation for that long before she revealed herself. It didn’t make them look exactly sharp. Archie sighed and looked behind Rosenberg, out the window. “She just showed up one day,” he said. “She said she was a psychiatrist. She ran a couple of group counseling sessions. I also conferred with her about the profile.” He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled. The smell of coffee wafted up from the cup. He brought the coffee because when he didn’t he thought sometimes he could still smell the lilacs. “She seemed to have some insights,” he said.
Rosenberg sat in the other striped chair, where Gretchen used to sit. She crossed her legs and leaned forward. “Like what?” she asked.
A squirrel bolted up one of the cherry trees, sending the leaves rippling. Archie took another sip of coffee and then rested it back on the arm of the chair. “She was the first person who suggested that the killer might be a woman,” he said.
Rosenberg kept a yellow legal pad on her lap and she wrote something down on it. She was wearing black slacks and a green turtleneck and yellow socks the same color as the notebook. “What was your reaction to that?” she asked.
Archie noticed that his left leg had developed a restless bounce. He pushed his heel into the floor. “We had exhausted pretty much everything else,” he said.
“Did she offer individual counseling?” Rosenberg asked.
“Yes,” Archie said.
“Did she counsel you?” she asked.
He inched the pillbox out of his pocket and held it in his fist on his lap. “Yes.”
“Just you?”
“Yes.” If Rosenberg noticed the box, she didn’t say anything.
“What did you two talk about?” she asked.
“The same stuff you and I do,” Archie said. “My work.” In fact he’d been more up front with Gretchen. He had shared everything. The stress of the investigation. The pressure it put on his relationship with Debbie. “My marriage.”
Rosenberg raised an eyebrow. “It must have been quite upsetting to realize that you had shared all of those personal thoughts with a killer.”
Quite upsetting. That was one way of putting it. The funny thing was, at the time, it had been nice to have someone to talk to. Too bad she carved people up for fun. “She was a good listener,” Archie said.
“So you spent more time with her than the others did,” Rosenberg said, her pen poised over the notebook.
“Yes,” Archie said. “I guess so.”
“Where did you have your counseling sessions?” she asked.
Archie lifted a hand. “Right here.”
Rosenberg sat up and looked around her home office. “I understand why she would consult with you about a case here, but that’s unusual. That she would actually treat you in her home.”
“Why?” Archie asked. “You do.”
“I’m a psychologist,” Rosenberg said. “She said she was a psy-chiatrist.” She wrote something on the legal pad, shaking her head.
“She wasn’t really a psychiatrist,” Archie reminded her.
Rosenberg looked up from the legal pad. “Did you ever suspect her?” she asked.
There went the leg again. Archie didn’t bother to stop it. It felt good, somewhere for the nervous energy to go. He lifted his cup of coffee, but didn’t take a drink. “About the time the paralytic drug she slipped in my coffee kicked in,” he said. He set the paper coffee cup on the floor, opened the pillbox on his lap, removed a pill, and swallowed it.
“What was that?” Rosenberg asked.
“An Altoid,” Archie said.
Rosenberg smiled. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to swallow those.”
Archie smiled back. “I was hungry.”
Rosenberg leaned forward and then uncrossed and crossed her legs again. “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me,” she said.
Archie looked down at his hands. Sometimes he thought he could still see the faint tan line where his wedding ring had been. “I think about her sometimes,” he said softly.
“About Gretchen Lowell,” Rosenberg said.
Archie looked up. “I fantasize about fucking her,” he said.
Rosenberg laid the pen down on the pad. “She held you captive for ten days,” she said. “You were powerless. Perhaps your fantasies are a way of having power over her.”
“So it’s perfectly healthy,” Archie said.
“It’s understandable,” Rosenberg said. “I didn’t say it was healthy.” She reached across and put a hand on Archie’s forearm. She wore rings on all her fingers. “Do you want to get past this? To give up the pills? To get over what happened to you? To be happy with your family?”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“That’s the first step.”
Archie rubbed the back of his neck. “How many are there?”
Rosenberg smiled. “One less.”
There were five Vicodin lined up like little piano keys on Archie’s office desk. Archie swept them into his hand and washed them down with the dregs of the cold coffee he had left from his session with Rosenberg.
It was mid-morning and they were still waiting on the crime lab report on the new bodies. Archie glanced down at Susan Ward’s story in the Herald in his lap. MYSTERY KID LEADS COPS TO NEW BODIES. It didn’t even make the front page. It was in the Metro section, dwarfed by ongoing coverage of the senator’s death. Maybe the mystery kid’s parents would see the story and piece it together. Archie wanted to at least prove to Henry that he wasn’t going crazy. In the meantime they had the standard poodle in custody. On the off chance he passed any clues.