by Chelsea Cain
“They were all freshmen last year?” Henry guessed.
Archie stopped walking. Could it be that simple? He snapped his fingers. “You’re right,” he said.
Henry scratched his bald head. This time of day, it started to get a little gray stubble. “I was kidding.”
“Tell me we checked to see if they all transferred from the same freshman class.”
“All three went to their respective schools the year before,” Henry said.
“Is there a test they all take freshman year?” Archie asked.
“You want me to see if some deranged proctor is killing them?”
Archie fished an antacid out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It tasted like citrus-flavored chalk. “I don’t know,” he said. He forced himself to chew the tablet and swallow it. He turned on the flashlight, holding it at an oblique angle against the sand. Several tiny crabs scrambled from the light. “I just want to catch the motherfucker.” Archie liked to use a flashlight to go over a crime scene, even in broad daylight. It shrank his focus, made him look at things one square inch at a time. “Throw more surveillance at the schools. I don’t care if we have to drive every kid home.”
Henry hooked his thumbs behind his turquoise belt buckle, leaned back, and looked up at the dark sky. “Should we head back?” he asked hopefully.
“You have someone waiting for you at home?” Archie asked.
“Hey,” Henry said. “My depressing apartment is nicer than yours.”
“Touché,” Archie said. “Remind me how many times you’ve been married?”
Henry grinned. “Three. Four if you count the one that was annulled, and five if you count the one that was just legal on the reservation.”
“Yeah, I think it’s better to keep you busy,” Archie said. He swung the flashlight beam around, watching the crabs scatter. “Besides, we haven’t searched the crime scene yet.”
“The crime-scene investigators have already done that,” Henry said.
“So we’ll see if they’ve missed anything.”
“It’s dark.”
Archie shined the beam under his chin. He looked like a horror-show ghoul. “That’s why we have a flashlight.”
CHAPTER 21
Susan woke up, shrugged on her old kimono, took the elevator downstairs, and systematically dug through the pile of Herald s on the granite floor of the lobby until she found the one with her name on it. She waited until she was back upstairs in her apartment before she pulled the newspaper out of its plastic bag. She always felt butterflies when she looked for a story she had written. It was a mix of anticipation and fear, pride and embarrassment. Most of the time, she didn’t even like to read her work once it appeared in print. But the hot janitor’s SmackDown had fanned the flame of her familiar self-doubt. The truth was, sometimes she did feel like a fraud. And sometimes she did feel like she exploited her subjects. She had pissed the hell out of a city councilman she had profiled and described as “balding and gnomelike.” (He was.) But this was different.
The task force story was the first byline she had ever had on the front page. She sat down on her bed, and with a heavy, nervous breath, she unfolded the Herald, half-expecting the story to have been killed, but there it was, below the fold, with a jump to the Metro section. The front page. A-1. An aerial photograph of the crime scene on Sauvie Island accompanied the story. With a startled laugh, she recognized herself, a small figure in the photo, and next to her, among the other detectives, Archie Sheridan. Screw the janitor. She was delighted.
She found herself wishing she had someone with whom she could share her little journalistic triumph. Bliss had canceled her subscription to the Herald years ago, after the paper’s owners had controversially clear-cut some old-growth forest. She would have bought a copy of the paper. If she’d known. But Susan hadn’t told her about the series. And wouldn’t. Susan traced the newspaper image of Archie Sheridan with her fingers and found herself wondering if he had seen it yet. The thought made her feel self-conscious and she shook it loose.
She got up and brewed herself a pot of coffee and then sat back down and flipped through the paper to find the Metro section, where the story jumped, and an envelope fell on the rug. At first, she thought it was a pack of coupons or some other silly promotion the paper had agreed to in exchange for advertising dollars. Then she saw that her name was on it. Typed. Not typed on a label. Typed on the envelope itself. “Susan Ward.” Who typed an envelope? She picked it up.
It was a regular white business-size envelope. She turned it over a few times in her hands and then opened it. A piece of white copy paper was folded neatly inside. There was one line typed in the center of the page: “Justin Johnson: 031038299.”
Who the fuck was Justin Johnson?
Seriously. Who was he? And why, if she didn’t know that, would someone slip her a secret note with his name and a bunch of numbers?
Susan was aware of her heart suddenly racing. She wrote the digits down on the edge of the newspaper in the hope that the act of writing them down would help her make sense of them. There were nine of them. It wasn’t a phone number. Could a Social Security number begin with zero? She looked at it for a while longer and then she picked up the phone and called Quentin Parker’s direct line at the Herald.
“Parker,” he barked.
“It’s Susan. I’m going to read you some numbers and I want you to tell me what you think they are.” She read the numbers.
“Court-case file number,” Parker said immediately. “The first two numbers are the year—2003.”
Susan told Parker the story of the mysterious envelope.
“Looks like someone’s got herself an anonymous source,” Parker teased. “Let me call my guy at the courthouse and see what I can find out about your file.”
Her laptop was sitting on the coffee table. She opened it up and Googled “Justin Johnson.” Over 150,000 links came up. She Googled “Justin Johnson, Portland.” This time, only eleven hundred. She started scrolling through them.
The phone rang. Susan picked it up.
“It’s a juvie record,” Parker said. “Sealed. Sorry.”
“A juvie record,” Susan said. “What kind of crime?”
“Sealed. As in ‘cannot be opened.’”
“Right.” She hung up and looked at the name and numbers some more. Drank some coffee. Looked at the name. A juvie record. Why would someone want her to know about Justin Johnson’s juvie record? Could it have something to do with the After School Strangler? Should she call Archie? About what? Some weird envelope she’d found in her newspaper? It could be about anything. It could be a prank. She didn’t even know any Justins. Then she remembered the student pot dealer in the Cleveland High parking lot. His vanity plate had read JAY2. The letter J squared? It was worth checking out. She dialed the number for the Cleveland High administration office.
“Hi,” Susan said. “This is Mrs. Johnson. We’ve been having some truancy issues and I was wondering if you could tell me if my son Justin had made it to school today?”
The student office volunteer told Susan to hang on a minute and then came back on the line. “Mrs. Johnson?” she said. “Yeah. No worries. Justin’s here today.”
Well, what do you know? Justin Johnson went to Cleveland High. And he had a criminal record.
She punched in Archie’s cell phone number. He answered on the second ring. “This is going to sound weird,” she said, and she relayed the story of the parking lot and the envelope.
“He’s alibied,” Archie said.
“You know this off the top of your head?”
“We looked into him,” Archie said. “He was in detention. All three days in question. He’s accounted for.”
“Don’t you want the case number?”
“I know about his record,” Archie said.
“You do?”
“Susan, I’m a cop.”
She couldn’t resist. “Did you see my story?”
“I liked it very much
.”
Susan hung up and squirmed with pleasure. He had liked her story. She set the envelope on a stack of mail on the coffee table. It was just before 10:00 A.M. Justin Johnson would be out of school in about five and a half more hours. And she would be waiting for him. In the meantime, she was much more interested in Archie Sheridan. She poured herself some more coffee and called Debbie Sheridan back on her landline. It was Friday, but Archie had said that his ex-wife worked at home on Fridays. Sure enough, Debbie picked up.
“Hi,” Susan said. “It’s Susan Ward again. You said to call back?”
“Oh, hi,” Debbie said.
“Is this a better time? I’d still really love to get together to talk.”
There was a brief pause. Then Debbie sighed. “Can you come now? The kids are at school.”
Susan beamed. “That sounds great. Where do you live?”
She got directions, pulled on skinny jeans, a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt, and red ankle boots, grabbed her black pea coat, and took the elevator downstairs. It was a gorgeous elevator, all steel and glass. Susan watched as the numbers blinked from 6 down to the subterranean garage, and then at the last moment, she had an idea and she hit L. The doors slid open and she stepped out into the lobby and walked into the building’s chic administrative and sales office. Good. Monica was working.
Susan put on her best sorority-girl face (it was pretty good, even with the pink hair) and approached the bamboo counter, where Monica sat frowning over a fashion magazine.
“Hi,” Susan said, stretching the word out to four syllables.
Monica looked up. She was a committed platinum blonde. No roots. Ever. With the kind of automatic smile that becomes meaningless by definition. Susan wasn’t sure what exactly she did besides read magazines. She seemed to function as bait for the building’s sales team. Like pumping a cookie-baking smell into a model home. Susan guessed she was in her mid-twenties, but with the amount of makeup she wore, it was hard to tell. Susan knew that Monica didn’t know quite how to process her. The pink hair obviously confused the hell out of her. It must have appeared, to Monica, that Susan had engaged in some sort of self-mutilation. But this seemed to make her all the more determined to be nice.
“Listen,” Susan said. “I’ve got a secret admirer.”
Monica perked up. “No way!”
“Totally. And he left me a love note in my newspaper this morning.”
“Oh my God!”
“I know! So I was wondering if you could run through this morning’s security video of the lobby so I can see who he is.”
Monica clapped her hands excitedly and rolled her faux zebra-skin task chair over to a gleaming white monitor. This was the kind of project that gave her job meaning. She picked up a matching remote, and the black-and-white image on the screen began to jump back in time. They watched for a few minutes as people walked backward into elevators, until the lobby was quiet, the newspapers in their little stack below the mailboxes. Then a man walked backward into the building and bent down over the newspapers.
“There,” said Susan.
They rewound the tape a bit more and watched as a woman carrying a travel mug walked out of the elevator, through the lobby, and out the front door. As she exited, a man in a dark suit walked into the building, over to the newspapers, rooted through them, and clearly deposited something inside. He’d been waiting out front and caught the door as the woman had gone out.
“He’s cute!” squealed Monica.
“How can you tell?” asked Susan, disappointed. “You can’t see his face.”
“He’s got a nice suit on. I bet he’s a lawyer. A rich one.”
“Can you print this image for me?”
“Totally,” Monica gushed. She hit a button and rolled over to the white printer and waited while the image spit out, then handed the printout to Susan. Susan examined it. Totally unidentifiable. Still, she’d show it to Justin Johnson and see if it sparked a discussion. She folded it up and slipped it into her purse.
“Thanks,” Susan said, already half-turned to go.
“You know,” Monica said, her face a picture of helpfulness, “you should dye your hair blond. You would look so much prettier.”
Susan looked at Monica for a minute. Monica looked back obliviously. “I was thinking about it,” Susan said. “But then I heard that story on the news about platinum hair dye causing cancer in lab kittens.”
“Lab kittens?” Monica said, eyes wide.
Susan shrugged. “Gotta run.”
CHAPTER 22
Debbie Sheridan lived in a stucco ranch-style house in Hillsboro, a few minutes off the highway. Susan had lived in Portland most of her life, and she could count on both hands the number of times she had been to Hillsboro. It was a suburb Susan drove through on the way to the coast; she didn’t think of it as a destination. Just being in the suburbs made Susan nervous. Debbie Sheridan’s house was typical for its neighborhood. The lawn was green and well groomed, with the sharp edges and dearth of weeds that screamed professional maintenance. There was a box hedge, a Japanese maple tree, some blue spruce, and several beds of ornamental grasses. A two-car garage was attached to the house. It was the picture of domestic bliss, and a home in which Susan could not even conceive of ever living.
She locked her car, walked to the medieval-looking front door, and rang the bell.
Debbie Sheridan opened the door and thrust out a hand in greeting. Susan took it. Debbie was not what Susan had imagined. In her late thirties, she had stylish very short dark hair and a trim, athletic body. She was wearing black leggings and a T-shirt and sneakers. She was attractive and chic and not at all suburban-looking. Susan followed her into the house. It was filled with art. Large abstract oil paintings on stretched canvas lined the white walls. The floors were layered with Oriental rugs. Books were stacked on every flat surface. It was all very cosmopolitan. Very world traveler. And very much not what Susan had expected.
“I like your art,” Susan commented. She always felt a little uneasy around women who were more sophisticated than she was.
“Thanks,” said Debbie amiably. “I’m a designer out at Nike. This is what I do when I want to feel like an artist again.”
It was only then that Susan noticed the “D. Sheridan” scrawled in the corners of the canvases. “They’re amazing.”
“They keep me busy. Sometimes I think my kids are more talented.”
Debbie led Susan down a hallway, past framed black-and-white photographs of two attractive dark-haired children. Some of the photographs featured just the children; some were of Archie and Debbie and the children. They all looked deliriously happy and delighted with one another.
They reached a bright modern kitchen with French doors that overlooked a backyard with a big English cottage garden. “Do you want some coffee?” Debbie asked.
“Sure,” Susan said, accepting a cup Debbie poured from a French press and then taking a seat on one of the tall chairs at the kitchen bar. She noticed a completed New York Times crossword sitting out on the counter.
Debbie continued to stand.
There was a family room on the other side of the bar. It also had French doors that opened out onto the garden. Judging by the drafting table and wall of tacked-up sketches, Debbie used the room as a home office. But the floor was strewn with toys. Debbie noticed Susan looking at the sketches and smiled sheepishly. “I’m designing a yoga shoe,” she explained.
“Aren’t you supposed to do yoga barefoot?”
Debbie grinned. “Let’s just say that it’s an untapped market.”
“Is that what you design mostly? Shoes?”
“Not the structural stuff. I just take what the lab guys give me and try to make it look pretty. I read your story today. It was interesting. Well written.”
“Thanks,” Susan said, embarrassed. “It was just laying the groundwork. I want to go a little deeper in the next few. Do you want to sit down?”
Debbie put a tentative hand on a chair bu
t then hesitated and removed it. She looked in the family room. At the toys on the carpet. “I should pick up after the kids,” she said. She walked behind Susan around the bar into the family room and bent over to pick up a stuffed gorilla. “So what do you want to know?” she asked.
Susan produced a small digital recorder from her purse. “Do you mind if I record this? It’s easier than having to take notes.”
“Go ahead,” said Debbie. She continued with her task, plucking up a stuffed cat, a rabbit, a panda.
“So,” Susan said. Dive right in. Full speed ahead. “It must have been hard.”
Debbie stood up, her arms teeming with plush animals, and sighed. “When he was missing? Yes.” She walked over to a small red table with two child-size red chairs and began placing the stuffed animals on top of it one by one. “He called me, you know, right before he went in to see her. Then he didn’t come home.” She paused and looked at the gorilla still in her arms. It was the size of a baby. She spoke carefully. “I thought it was traffic at first. It’s close to Nike out here, but the commute on Twenty-six can be murder. I called his cell phone about a hundred times, but he wasn’t picking up.” She looked up at Susan and forced a smile. “This was not entirely unusual. I thought they might have found another body. But then…” She paused and took a breath that caught for a moment in her throat. “Finally, I called Henry. Henry went to her house. They found Archie’s car out front, but the house was empty. That’s when it all started to fall apart.” She looked at the gorilla for another moment and then slowly placed it on the table, positioning it snugly between the panda and the cat. “They didn’t know what had happened, of course. That it had anything to do with Gretchen Lowell. But they were able to piece it together.” Her voice grew tight. “But they couldn’t find him.”