by Chelsea Cain
The truth was that he usually turned back at that log, but sometimes, every once in a while, he decided to go farther, to the point where the beach went around a bend and he could see the lighthouse up ahead. Today, when he stood up, reveling in his stoned, naked body, Fred knew that it was one of those days.
He usually walked on the inner beach, where the sand was finer and more pleasant on bare feet, but when he went on the longer route, he often walked closer to the water on the clay beds, where he had once found an arrowhead and hoped to again. Visibility wasn’t bad. The fog had been dense when he started out, but all that was left now was a thick ridge of white that hovered over the river. The cold clay was slippery and the beach was rank, as it sometimes was. Dead fish washed up occasionally and rotted. Seaweed clumped and putrefied, infested with bugs. Birds eviscerated crabs and then left the carcasses to decompose.
Fred was walking along the clay, face pursed in absolute concentration, reddened eyes scanning the ground, studiously ignoring the mounting stench, when he found Kristy Mathers. He saw the bottom of her foot first, half-submerged in the clay, and followed the foot to her leg and torso. He would have believed it sooner if he hadn’t fantasized so many times about coming across a dead body on that beach. It just always seemed to him a probable event, somehow. Now, looking at the pale, almost unrecognizable figure at his feet, a horrible new feeling washed over him: sobriety. Fred Doud had never felt so naked.
Heart pounding, and suddenly thoroughly chilled, he turned and looked down the beach, where he had come from and then up toward the lighthouse. The isolation he had just minutes before been enjoying now filled him with terror. He had to get help. He had to get back to his truck. He started running.
CHAPTER 15
Henry, Archie, and Susan drove to Cleveland High in an unmarked police car, Henry behind the wheel, Archie in the passenger seat, and Susan furiously scribbling notes in the back. They parked on the street in front of the three-story tan-brick school and got out of the car. Henry waved at a couple of cops who sat in a patrol car directly in front of the school. One of them waved back.
The day had changed. The clammy morning fog had given way to a clear blue sky and tiny blazing sun. The temperature was in the mid-fifties. In this bright mid-morning light, Cleveland High looked grand and picture-perfect. Whereas Jefferson looked institutional, Cleveland had a sort of architectural elegance, replete with pillars, arched front doors, and a sliver of front lawn. But it still made Susan think of prison.
“We’re going this way.”
Susan glanced up. Archie and Henry were several steps down the sidewalk, and Archie was looking over his shoulder at her. She was still standing facing the school, lost in her own memories.
“Sorry,” she said. “I went here.”
Archie raised his eyebrows. “You went to Cleveland?”
“Ten years ago. Yeah.” She caught up with them. “I’m still recovering.”
“Not a prom queen?” asked Henry.
“Hardly,” said Susan. She had been a troubled teenager, hysterical 15 percent of the time. She didn’t know how parents did it. “Do you have kids?” she asked Henry.
“One,” Henry said. “He grew up with his mom. In Alaska.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Nah,” he said. “I just ended up there.”
Archie grinned. “It was the seventies. Back when he had a truck camper. And hair.”
Susan laughed and scribbled a sentence in her notebook. Henry’s jolly face grew serious. “No,” he said, looking between Susan and Archie. “My life is off the record. Period.”
Susan closed the notebook.
“Henry doesn’t want to be interviewed,” Archie said.
“I get that,” Susan said.
They continued walking, turning the corner along the side of the school. Susan could see in the large windows, replaced with new glass since she had been a student, where kids sat staring, in various states of repose, at the front of the room. God, she had loathed high school. “Lee Robinson hated it here, didn’t she?”
“Why do you say that?” asked Archie peering up at the school.
“I saw her school picture. I remember what it was like being that girl.”
“That’s the door,” said Henry, pointing toward the metal fire doors on the side of the building. “Band rehearsal was on the first floor. She came out through there.”
Archie stood with his hands on his hips, looking at the door. Susan could make out a gun in a leather holster clipped to the waist of his pants. He gazed up at the school and spun slowly around on his heels, absorbing every detail. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
Henry led them down the sidewalk. “She walked this way.” Susan followed Archie, who was following Henry. They walked in silence. Susan stepped around a puddle that glittered in the light. It had been weeks since the sun had been out. Under the usual cloud cover, the world looked tamped down, flatteringly lit. Without it, every color sparkled. The conifers were a darker, richer green; the bright leaf buds on the plum trees were verdant, promising spring and roses and riverfront festivals. Even the gray sidewalk, buckling in places from the gnarled roots of trees planted a hundred years ago, looked somehow more vivid.
Susan stepped around another puddle and squinted up at the sky. Sun in March in Portland, Oregon, was almost unheard of. It was supposed to be gloomy and overcast. It was supposed to rain.
When they came to a spot halfway down the fifth block, Henry stopped.
“This is it,” he said. “This is where the dogs lost the scent.”
“So she got into a car?” asked Susan.
“Probably,” said Henry. “Or on a bicycle. Or a motorcycle. Or she flagged down a bus. Or the rain washed her scent away. Or maybe the dogs just weren’t tracking well that day.”
Again, Archie spun slowly around. After a few minutes, he turned to Henry. “What do you think?”
“I think he was on foot.” Henry pointed to a thick laurel hedge that framed the yard of a house just behind the point where the dogs had lost Lee Robinson’s scent. “I think he was waiting for her behind there.”
“It would be risky,” Archie said doubtfully. He walked over to behind the hedge. “This about how thick the foliage was?”
“It’s evergreen.”
Archie considered this. “So he waited for her behind the hedge,” he said tracing his hand along the thick leaves of the bushes. “Appeared. Then what? Talked her into a nearby vehicle?”
“A guy pops out from behind a bush and she gets into his car? Not when I was a teenager,” Susan said.
“No,” Henry said. “He doesn’t pop out.”
Archie nodded, thinking. “He sees her. He comes out on the other side of the hedge. Over here.” He walked along the hedge to the far side, almost around the corner. “Then he makes like he was just turning the corner,” he says, reenacting it. “Happens upon her.”
“He knows her,” said Henry.
“He knows her,” agreed Archie. They were quiet for a moment. “Or”—Archie shrugged—“maybe he popped out and held a knife to her throat and forced her into the back of a van.”
“Or maybe that,” said Henry.
“You look for fibers on the leaves?”
“Four days of rain too late.”
Archie spun around to Susan. “Did you walk home from school?”
“Just the first two years. Until I got a car.”
“Yeah,” Archie mused, his eyes on the hedge. “That’s when you walk, isn’t it? The first two years.” He cocked his head. “Did you like Cleveland?”
“I already told you, I hated Cleveland,” Susan said.
“No. You said you hated high school. Would you have hated high school anywhere, or was there something about Cleveland?”
Susan groaned. “I don’t know. There were some things I liked. I was in drama club. And, if you must know, I was on the Knowledge Bowl team. But only my freshman year. Before I ungeeked.”
“The drama teacher’s been there awhile,” said Henry. “Reston.”
“Yeah,” Susan said. “I had him.”
“You ever go by?” asked Henry. “Say hello?”
“Drop in on my old high school teachers?” asked Susan incredulously. “I have a life, thanks.” Then a terrible thought struck her. “He’s not a suspect, is he?”
Henry shook his head. “Not unless he got nine teenagers to lie for him. He was rehearsing a school play each of the evenings a girl was taken. So you don’t have to take your apple back. How about the physics teacher, Dan McCallum? You have him?”
Susan opened her mouth to answer but was interrupted by Archie’s cell phone ringing. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket, snapped it opened, and turned and walked a few steps away. “Yeah?” he said. He listened for a minute. Henry and Susan watched him with rapt attention. Susan felt some almost unperceivable shift. She wasn’t sure if it was in Archie’s body language or a charge in the air, or maybe just a projection of her own mind, but she knew for certain that something had changed. Archie nodded several times. “Okay. We’re on our way.” He snapped the phone shut, dropped it carefully back into his pocket, and slowly rotated back toward them.
“They find her?” asked Henry, his face impassive.
Archie nodded.
“Where?” asked Henry.
“Sauvie Island.”
Henry rolled his eyes toward Susan. “You want to drop her off back at the bank?”
Susan stared at Archie, willing him to let her come along. She can come. She can come. She can come. She longed for his lips to form the words. Her first crime scene. A first-person account. It would make a great lead for the first story. What was it like to look at a murder victim? The stench of a corpse. The legion of investigators examining the scene. Yellow crime tape. She smiled, feeling that familiar hum in her belly again. Then caught herself and quickly forced the pleasure out of her face. But Archie had already seen it.
She looked at him, her eyes pleading, but his face showed nothing.
He started walking toward the car. Fuck. She’d blown it. Her first fucking day with him and he already thought she was some sort of blood hungry asshole.
“She can come,” he said, still walking. He turned and glanced purposefully back at Susan. “But don’t expect her to look like her photo.”
CHAPTER 16
You know, there are actually tons of dead bodies on Sauvie Island,” Susan said from the backseat. “A lot of the gay guys who used to go to the nude beach died of AIDS and had their ashes scattered there. The upper beach? Above the tide line? All bone chips and charcoal.” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “Sunbathers oil up and lie down and end up with tiny fragments of dead guy in their crevices.” She waited. “I did a story about it. Maybe you read it?”
No one answered. Henry, she realized, had tuned her out about ten miles ago. Archie was on the phone.
She crossed her arms and tried not to yammer. It was the curse of the feature writer. Useless facts. And she had done plenty of stories about Sauvie Island: organic farmers, the cornfield maze, the nude beach, bicyclist clubs, eagles’ nests, u-pick berry fields. Herald readers loved all that crap. Consequently, Susan knew more about the island than most of the people living on it. It was 24,000 acres. A so-called agricultural oasis flanked by the Columbia and the polluted Multnomah Channel, and about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Portland. To preserve the island’s natural wilderness, the state had set aside twelve thousand acres as the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It was there, far from the farmhouses that made the island seem like a slice of Iowa, that the dead girl was found. Susan had never liked the place. There were too many open spaces.
The road turned to gravel. “Yes,” Archie said into his phone. “When?…Where?…Yes.” It didn’t make for sensational note taking. “No…We don’t know yet…. I’ll find out.” The gravel made for excruciatingly slow going and the steady spray of grit on the car was punctuated only by the occasional small rock that bounced off the windshield. Archie was still on the phone. “Are you there now?…About five minutes.” Every time he hung the thing up, it rang. Susan let her gaze fall on the roadside, a thick wall of blackberry bushes, backed by river oaks. It blinked by like a zoetrope. Finally, Susan could see a cluster of police cruisers, an old pickup, and an ambulance already parked along the side of the road up ahead. A Sheriff ’s Department vehicle was blocking the road, and a young state cop was stopping traffic. Susan craned her head to see more, her notebook open on her lap. Henry pulled to a stop and flashed a badge at the cop. The cop nodded and waved them through.
Henry pulled the car next to a police cruiser and with one fluid motion he and Archie were out of the vehicle, leaving Susan to scurry after them, wishing that she had worn more practical shoes. She reached into her purse and dug out some lipstick. Nothing dramatic. Just a little natural color. She put some on as she walked and immediately felt like a jerk for it. Beyond the police cruiser, a bearded young man in a terry-cloth robe stood with a patrol cop. He was barefoot. Susan smiled. He flashed her a peace sign.
The path to the beach had been trampled over time through a natural part in the brambles and it cut diagonally through the tall dead grass down to the sand below. The sand was loose, and Archie had to secure his footing with each step. All bone chips and charcoal. Ahead lay the Columbia, still and brown, and, on the other side, Washington State. He could see a group of state patrol cops standing about a quarter mile down the beach on the clay flats.
Claire Masland was waiting for them on the beach. She was wearing jeans and a solid red T-shirt, and had taken off her waterproof North Face jacket and tied it around her waist. Archie had never asked her, but he imagined that she hiked and camped. Maybe even skied. Hell, she probably snowshoed. Her badge was clipped to her waistband. Sweat stains had formed at her armpits. She matched their stride as they continued toward the body.
“A nudist found her at about ten,” she said. “He had to get back to his vehicle and then home to phone us, so we didn’t get the call until ten twenty-eight.”
“She look like the others?”
“Identical.”
Archie’s mind was racing. It didn’t make sense. The acceleration was too rapid. He liked to hold on to them. Why didn’t he want to keep this one longer? Did he think he needed to dump her? “He’s scared,” Archie concluded. “We’ve scared him.”
“So he watches the evening news,” Henry said.
They’d spooked him. They’d spooked him into dumping the body. So now what? He would take another one. He’d have to take another one. Acid rose in Archie’s throat. He reached into his pocket, fished out an antacid tablet, and chewed it fretfully. They’d rushed him. And now he’d have to kill another girl.
“Who’s here?” Archie asked.
“Greg. Josh. Martin. Anne’s running about ten minutes behind you.”
“Good,” Archie said. “I want to talk to her.”
He stopped short and the group stopped with him. They were about fifteen yards from the crime scene. He listened.
“What is it?” asked Claire.
“News helicopters,” said Archie, looking up, face pained, as two helicopters cleared the tree line. “Better get a tent up.” Claire nodded and hurried back toward the road. Archie turned to Susan. She was writing in her notebook, flipping pages frequently as she filled them with large cursive observations. Archie could sense her excitement and he remembered the feeling when he and Henry had responded to that first Beauty Killer case. It wasn’t like that anymore.
“Susan,” he said. She was working furiously to finish a thought in her notebook and made a motion with her finger that she would be with him in a second.
“Look at me,” Archie said. She looked up, her green eyes large. He felt, suddenly, very protective of this strange pink-haired girl who pretended to be so much tougher than he thought she was, and, at the same time, ridiculous for the presumption. He held her eye contact for a
moment, until she focused on him. “Whatever you think that’s going to be up there,” he said, gesturing to where Kristy Mathers lay naked in the mud, “it’s going to be worse.”
Susan nodded. “I know.”
“Have you ever been around a corpse?” Archie asked.
She nodded some more. “My dad. He died when I was a kid. Of cancer.”
“It’s going to be different than that,” Archie said gently.
“I can handle it.” She lifted her head and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?” she asked. “Clorox?”
Archie and Henry exchanged a look. Then Henry pulled two pairs of latex gloves out of the pocket of his coat and handed a pair to Archie. Archie looked out once more at the calm river glinting in the late-morning sun, took a deep breath through his mouth, and exhaled.
“Don’t breath through your nose,” he said to Susan. “And don’t get in my way.”
Squatting there beside Kristy’s body, Archie felt absolutely lucid. His head cleared. His gut relaxed. His concentration focused. He realized that he’d actually gone a few minutes without thinking about Gretchen Lowell. He had missed this.
She had been strangled and then soaked in bleach, like the others. She lay five feet from the water’s edge, on her back, head to the side, one plump arm tucked behind her torso, skin and hair coated with sand, as if she had been rolled a few feet. The other arm was delicately bent at the elbow, her curled hand resting just below her chin, chewed nails still flecked with glittery polish. That arm made her look almost human. Archie continued, taking in every detail, working his way from her head to her toes. One leg was slightly bent, the other straight, tangled in river weed. He noted the blood at her nose and mouth, and grotesquely swollen tongue, and the same horizontal mark low on the neck, indicating the use of a ligature they thought was a belt. The underside of her neck and shoulder showed the purplish stain of livor mortis, where her blood had settled after she died. A greenish red coloration had started to bloom around her abdomen; her mouth, nose, vagina, and ears were black. The bleach had slowed down the decomposition by killing some of the bacteria that caused distention and rupture of the soft tissues, so he could still see something of Kristy in the corpse. Something recognizable in the cheek and profile. But the bleach had not deterred the bugs. Tiny insects batted at her mouth and eyes and swarmed over her genitals. Crabs scrambled through her hair. Dark jelly was all that remained of one eye socket, the skin on her forehead and cheek torn from where a bird had stood, hooking its claws in the meat for leverage. Archie looked up, to see a gull standing watchfully a few feet beyond the body. It met Archie’s stare and took a few impatient steps before flapping back to a safer vantage.