by Chelsea Cain
No one in the newspaper offices moved.
Susan wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at Derek, who sat surfing the Internet three desks over.
“Hey!” Derek said, rubbing his ear where she’d hit him.
“Put some more coffee on,” Susan said.
Derek got up and slumped off toward the break room.
Susan had been at the Herald all night. She had insisted that she be allowed to work, with the agreement that she’d return to lockdown to sleep. Gretchen Lowell was on the run. Susan was convinced that she was the last thing on the Beauty Killer’s mind. Bliss remained at the Arlington. She still felt endangered, she said. Susan was pretty sure she just liked the room service.
Susan sat at her computer. She had worn the L and the S off the keyboard and her palms had left permanent dirty prints on the laptop’s white hand rests. She had a PC desktop at the paper, but she didn’t use it. It was a Pentium II. Parker, who’d had as much seniority as anyone on the floor, had a Pentium III, and they were all just waiting for a tasteful moment to make a play for it.
The Herald had broken the story of Archie Sheridan’s disappearance on the Web site eight minutes before Charlene Wood had gone live in the alley. That was something at least. It was the longest Susan had gone without pestering Ian about the Castle story. Instead, she had written a longer personal account of the events in the alley. Ian liked to do that New York Times thing where the reporter always refers to himself in the third person, as in “According to this reporter the car in question was silver,” or “This reporter was outside smoking a cigarette and witnessed the event.”
Susan thought it made her sound like an asshole. So she ignored Ian and wrote the piece in the first person, but left out the smoking.
They had been able to control it. She had agreed with Henry to omit the part about Archie getting into the car on his own. For now. As it was, the public story implied that Gretchen had again taken him by force. Which was possible. She could have had a gun. Susan couldn’t see. It wasn’t lying. It just wasn’t fully exploring all the scenarios. And God knew the press did that all the time.
Ian came over and sat next to her on her desk. He sat too close to her. He’d done that when they were sleeping together and she’d liked it. It had felt naughty. She had thought it was their little secret. Now she wondered if everyone in the newsroom had known. Probably.
“There’s a press conference at six,” Ian said. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt he’d bought at the MoMA gift store. “You want it?”
“Yes,” Susan said. Was he just trying to keep her distracted?
“Then go home,” Ian said.
Susan didn’t want to go home. And she sure as hell didn’t want to go back to the Arlington. “I’m waiting on a source,” she said.
“Go home, Susan,” Ian said gently. “Get some rest. Take a shower. Put some clothes on. Be at the justice center at six.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “I know that Sheridan is important to you,” he said.
Susan’s back stiffened as she realized what he was thinking. “I’m not sleeping with him,” she said quickly.
Ian lifted his hands. “It’s none of my business.”
“No,” Susan said. She shook her head. “Don’t make it tawdry.” She didn’t like him thinking of Archie like that, like he was just another one of her inappropriate crushes. “He’s my friend.” She reached under her desk and pulled her laptop cord free from the power strip with a jerk of her hand. “It’s not like how it was with us.”
Derek appeared with a Herald mug in each hand. One had a plastic stir stick and so much milk it looked like Nesquik. The other coffee was black. He handed her the black one.
“Dark and bitter, right?” he said.
CHAPTER
45
Susan stood with her hand poised, ready to knock, an inch from the door to Debbie Sheridan’s room at the Arlington. Bennett was in his chair watching her encouragingly.
She had almost worked up the nerve to follow through with it—she wanted to see how Debbie was doing, but didn’t want to seem like a stalker—when the door fell away and there stood Henry Sobol. Susan caught a glimpse of Debbie, red-eyed, on the couch, with her children curled up on either side of her, before Henry closed the door behind him.
“It’s not a real good time,” he said, his tone leaving little room for argument.
Susan ran her raised hand through her turquoise hair. “What’s the latest?” she asked.
She could tell that Henry hadn’t slept, either. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before, and his shaved head had five-o’clock shadow. His voice was thick and flat. “There’s a press conference at six,” he said.
“It’s not your fault,” Susan said. She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth, but continued awkwardly. “That you weren’t with him. He would have found a time to slip away if that’s what he wanted.”
Henry’s blue eyes darkened. He glanced back at the closed door and lowered his voice to a growl. “He didn’t slip away. She took him by force. Got it?”
Susan took a tiny step back. “Yes.”
Henry’s big eyebrows lifted and then he turned and started to walk away.
“I want in,” Susan said, surprising herself.
Henry stopped. “What?”
Susan set her shoulders back a little. “I want in on the investigation,” she said. “That’s my price.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “I can help. I’ll stay out of the way. I just want to do something.”
Henry closed his eyes for a moment. “Don’t pull this bullshit right now.”
“I will go public with everything,” Susan said, gaining confidence. “Unless you allow me access to the investigation. I know Archie. I know a lot about the BK case. I can help find them.” In that moment, she even believed it. Molly was dead. The Castle story was stalled. But she could help with this. She could do this. “I have to help find them. Please.”
Of course Susan would never have betrayed Archie. But she was banking on the fact that Henry wouldn’t risk that. She wanted him to agree, and at the same time she wanted him to call her bluff. Because if he agreed, it meant he didn’t trust her.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re in.”
Susan hadn’t been to the task force offices since the After School Strangler case had ended. It was in an old bank on the east side that the city had bought and turned over to the department as extra office space. The bank was one story and square, and centered in a parking lot. There was an ATM on the east side of the building where you could still get cash.
They had done a little work on the place: ripped up old carpet, pulled out the cashier’s counter, and installed desks and flat-screen computers. But it still looked like a bank. It still had the old vault. The old bank clock still read TIME TO BANK WITH FRIENDS. It was still lit with fluorescent lights bright enough to count every pimple of a bank robber’s face off surveillance tapes. Not very flattering. Susan pulled at her T-shirt. She’d left right away with Henry, no time to change. Now she was regretting not taking the time to put on a bra.
Claire Masland sat down next to Susan at the conference table in the bank’s old break room. The room was packed with cops. No one had slept. They smelled like a sports team. Susan lifted a paper cup of coffee to her mouth. She had gotten the coffee from an air pot on the counter. It was hazelnut. What kind of cops drank flavored coffee?
“New Kids on the Block?” Claire said.
Susan looked down at her T-shirt. “It’s ironic,” she said.
“Okay,” Henry said. “Let’s get started.” He leaned over and unrolled a map of Oregon onto the conference table. It was covered with different color Post-it notes. “Roadblocks are marked,” he said. “We’ve got bulletins at all airports, bus stations, train stations, and shipyards. We’ve got both their photographs on the wire. Media coverage.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the group. “What are we missing?”<
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Jeff Heil examined the map over Henry’s shoulder. “You think she’s still in the state?” he asked skeptically. The map featured only a sliver of Washington above and California below, and to the right, the edge of Idaho, pressing against Oregon, the border forming a vague human profile gazing toward the Pacific.
“She didn’t go far last time,” Claire said.
“Maybe we should search all the basements in Gresham,” someone else said.
Henry shook his head and looked down at the map. “Don’t think I’ve ruled it out,” he said. His shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. Then he looked up around the room until his eyes rested on Lorenzo Robbins, from the ME’s office. He’d come in while Henry was talking, and was standing just inside the door. “What do we have on the heart?” Henry asked him.
Robbins crossed his arms and leaned back against the door. Several manila folders were stuck under one armpit. Susan didn’t know him, but she’d seen him around. His dreadlocks made him easy to recognize. “It’s a human male’s. Mid-thirties. We matched it to a DNA sample taken from the missing transport guard’s house. Name’s Rick Yost.”
“Can you tell how he died?” Henry asked.
“He didn’t die of a heart attack,” Robbins said.
Henry sighed heavily and moved on. “Anything from the cell phone battery and ammo?” he asked Mike Flannigan.
Susan suddenly felt more awake. She sat up a little. The fact that they’d found a cell phone battery and ammo hadn’t been released to the media. She raised her hand.
Henry saw her hand in the air and winced. “We found Archie’s phone battery and a handful of bullets in a gutter near the park,” he explained. “Can we wait on questions?”
Susan lowered her hand and picked up her cup of hazelnut coffee.
“Just his prints,” Flannigan said. “He must have tossed them from the car.”
Susan hated hazelnut coffee almost as much as she hated vanilla coffee, which was almost as much as she hated all flavored coffees. But she took a sip and swallowed it anyway. Just Archie’s prints. He’d gotten into the car of his own free will. And then thrown the battery and ammo out on his own.
“Okay,” Henry said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “We keep that quiet for now.” He looked around the room at the assembled cops. He looked tired, Susan thought. His blue eyes were bloodshot; the stubble that peppered his bald head was gray. “Let’s get ready for the press conference,” he said.
He stepped away from the table and the cops all got up and started to move out of the room. Susan stared at her coffee. Then she felt someone brush her arm and she looked up and saw Lorenzo Robbins standing between Claire and her. He thrust a manila folder at Claire. “This go to you now?” he asked. “It’s my findings on the park bodies.”
Susan twisted around. “The case Archie was working?”
Robbins looked to Claire. Claire shrugged. “Go ahead,” she said. “She practically works here now.”
“It was a couple,” Robbins told Susan. “One male, one female, in their late twenties. Been dead about two years.”
“Huh,” Claire said matter-of-factly.
Susan looked between Robbins and Claire. “So are they related to Molly’s murder or not?” she asked.
Claire took the folder from Robbins and leafed through its contents. “I don’t know. There are a lot of fucked-up people in the world, and it’s a great place to dump a body.”
“So what are you going to do?” Susan asked.
Claire closed the folder. “It’s a cold case. It can wait a couple of days.”
Susan thought of Molly’s body on the slab in the morgue. “Molly’s murder isn’t cold,” she said.
Claire moved close to Susan. She was shorter than Susan, but she was stronger, and Susan had to fight the instinct to take a small step back. The room had cleared out except for a few cops who still stood around the map. But Claire still lowered her voice. “Archie’s out there with Gretchen Lowell,” she said to Susan. Her voice was calm, her eyes level, but there was something unrelenting in her posture that gripped Susan by the throat. “She’s had him all night. How many nails do you think she has in him by now?”
Susan wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Molly’s death may be related to Parker’s and the senator’s murders,” she said.
Claire rolled her eyes in frustration. “They weren’t murdered, Susan. They went off the road. It might have been suicide. It might have been an accident. But we don’t have any evidence that it was anything more than that.”
Susan shook her head. “Gretchen Lowell dumped Heather Gerber there. Some killer dumped a couple there two years ago. And now Molly Palmer?”
“Just because you hear hoofbeats, doesn’t mean it’s a zebra.”
“What does that even mean?” Susan asked.
“It’s almost always a horse,” Claire said, hands splayed. “The hoofbeats.” She ran a hand through her short hair. “I’ve got to clean up. Henry wants me at the press conference.”
The press conference. “Me, too,” Susan said. “Give me a minute.” She turned and started to pack up her notebook, in the process knocking over her cup of coffee, which spread across the table, splattering the map. Susan gasped in horror and lunged for some napkins on the counter next to the microwave.
“Jesus,” Claire said. “I’ll meet you out there.” She turned and left the room.
Two cops still hovering next to the map, one of them Mike Flannigan, lifted the map off the wet table. Susan flung the napkins onto the puddle of coffee on the table and then ran over and began to dab up the coffee off the map, which the two men had laid out on the carpet.
She’d managed to splatter coffee all the way into Central Oregon. Santiam Pass. Bend. Prineville. She fumbled with the napkins, careful not to disturb the Post-its that marked roadblocks. As she soaked up the coffee, she noticed there wasn’t a Post-it at the intersection of I-5 and Highway 22. “There’s no roadblock on 22,” she said.
“Twenty-two doesn’t go anywhere,” Flannigan explained. “Just up into the mountains.” He took the map from Susan and began to carefully roll it up. “There’s a fire up there.”
“I thought they were getting that under control,” Susan said.
“Wind changed,” Flannigan said. “Fire’s almost four hundred acres. We don’t need a roadblock. The Forest Service closed 22 this morning.”
CHAPTER
46
When Archie woke up he was on his back on a bed. It was dark, but the door was open and light poured in through what looked to be a hallway. A ceiling fan spun overhead, the fixture loose, so that it knocked softly against the ceiling as it rotated. The ceiling and walls were cedar, like in a cabin. There was a wooden dresser and a framed picture of an old rodeo poster and a window with a shade that was drawn. He was alone, but he could smell a fire burning. She was there somewhere.
He had been asleep awhile. He could tell because his body ached and he felt cold and jittery. He needed more pills. He put his socked feet on the carpet. She had taken his shoes off and he saw them sitting side by side next to the bed and he reached down to put them on. His head pounded and he had to pause for a moment before he could move. Then he put his feet into his shoes and tied them and sat up. He glanced for the pill bottles from the car but they weren’t on the dresser or the bedside table. The closet door was cedar plank. He opened it and found it full of clothes. He wondered who they belonged to and then realized that they were all new. She had bought them for him. She was either planning on his being around awhile, or she wanted him to think she was. Corduroys. Tan pants. Blue button-down shirts, white button-down shirts, sweaters, and a few professorial sport coats. It looked just like his closet at home. Predictability was always one of his flaws.
He turned and walked to the window and opened the shade. It was dusk or early morning. He saw only trees. Ponderosa pines. They didn’t grow west of the mountains. She’d taken him east. Into the high desert. Maybe they were st
ill in Oregon. Maybe not.
There was music. Classical. It was faint but definitely coming from somewhere in the house. He glanced back at the window. He could open it. Climb out. Walk away. They could be miles from anywhere. But he could still do it. He could still abandon his plan, still leave her. Try to get home.
He considered it for another moment, before he turned back toward the light streaming from the open door and walked into the hallway. There were several doors. The hallway was also cedar plank. The hallway floor was gray carpet, the kind of speckled industrial stuff you’d put in a rental or vacation house. The music was coming from down the hall, where the hallway opened into a living space.
He walked toward it.
There was a bank of windows in the living room that looked out onto a deck and more trees. The light had darkened another notch. It was evening, not morning. A staircase with a wrought-iron banister led up to a loft that overlooked the living room. There was a leather sectional and a fireplace with a huge stone mantel. A fire crackled and growled in the fireplace. Gretchen was sitting in a leather chair next to it, a laptop on her lap. Her hair was loose and she wasn’t wearing makeup and the glow of the fire made her flawless skin look angelic.
She glanced up at him and smiled. “Your pills are in the kitchen,” she said. She looked to the left, and he followed her gaze to where the floor lifted a step and he could see a kitchen that opened out onto the main room. The pill bottles were lined up on the counter by the sink. He walked over and opened a few cupboards before he found a glass. He filled it with water from the sink and took four Vicodin. Then reconsidered and took one more.
“Do you want a drink?” he heard her ask.