Heartsick

by Chelsea Cain

  “You want to tell me how you knew about Reston?” he asked, looking up.

  Gretchen’s eyes widened innocently. “Lucky guess?”

  “You’re intuitive,” Archie said. “Not psychic.”

  Gretchen rolled her eyes and gave him a bored half smile. “She mentioned her dead daddy in a story in the Herald about a year ago. And just look at her. The pink hair. The clothes. She’s completely arrested. It screams sexual abuse.” She leaned forward. “The way she looks at you—that longing for a father figure to take her in his strong, protective arms. It was obvious. I just had to guess the right teacher.” She smiled, delighted with herself. “And, darling, it’s always the English teacher or the drama teacher.”

  Archie’s head throbbed. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a coincidence. That it might be related to a case I’m working on.”

  “You’re tired.”

  That was a safe bet. “You have no idea.”

  “Maybe you should up your antidepressant dosage.”

  “I’ll defer to Fergus for my medical advice, thank you.”

  She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her manacled hands. Then she glanced at the observation window before settling her attention back on Archie. “I pulled her small intestine out. I cut an inch-wide hole in her abdominal wall with a scalpel and I pulled her small intestine out inch by inch with a crochet hook, slicing it from the mesentery an inch at a time. An H crochet hook. You want something big enough to be able to get a grip on the intestine because it’s slippery and you don’t want to perforate it.” She never looked away during the confessions. She maintained eye contact with Archie always. She never glanced to the side to recover some memory; never looked away in revulsion at what she had done; never allowed him a moment’s respite. “Seven meters. That’s what they say the average length is. I’ve never been able to pull out more than three.” She smiled, licking her lips as if they were dry. “It’s beautiful, though. So pink and delicate. Like something waiting to be born. The metallic smell of blood? Remember it, darling?” She sat forward, a blush of pleasure settling in her cheeks. “When she begged me to stop, I started burning her.”

  He tried to tune out for the confession. To shut off. Ignore the graphic images she tried to paint for him. He just watched her. She was very beautiful. And if he could manage to stop himself from hearing her, he could enjoy this part. He could enjoy the excuse to just sit and look at a beautiful woman. But he had to be careful when he did. That his eyes didn’t slip from her face, didn’t slide down her neck to her collarbone or breasts.

  She knew, of course. She knew everything.

  “Are you listening?” she asked, a smile flirting on her lips.

  “Yeah,” he said. He pulled the pillbox out of his pocket and set it back on the table. “I’m listening.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Susan rolled off Ian and onto her back. She had called him as soon as she’d gotten home and he’d come over within the hour. She’d had him in her mouth before she even said hello. Susan found that sex was an excellent reliever of stress, and if Gretchen Lowell had anything to say about that, she could go fuck herself.

  Ian picked his glasses up off the bedside table and put them on. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  Susan did not consider for a moment telling Ian about Reston, or how Gretchen had emotionally filleted her without even looking like she was trying. “It could have gone better,” she said. She rifled around on her bedside table until she found a half-smoked joint on a saucer on top of a paperback volume of William Stafford poetry. She lit it and inhaled. She liked smoking pot naked. It made her feel bohemian.

  “Ever think you smoke too much dope?” Ian asked.

  “We’re in Oregon,” Susan said. “It’s our main agricultural export.” She smiled. “I’m supporting local farmers.”

  “You’re not in college anymore, Susan.”

  “Exactly,” Susan said, annoyed. “Everyone smokes pot in college. It’s totally average. Smoking dope after college, now that takes a certain level of commitment. Besides, my mother still smokes pot.”

  “You have a mother?”

  Susan smiled to herself. “I’d introduce you, but she distrusts men who don’t have beards.”

  Ian found his boxers on the floor beside the bed and pulled them on. He didn’t seem that disappointed about not getting to meet Bliss. “Did you learn anything from the serial killer beauty queen?”

  Susan felt a wave of nausea at the thought of her run-in with Gretchen and pushed it aside. “It took you long enough to ask.”

  “I was playing it cool,” Ian said. “As if I might be more interested in your body than one of the biggest stories I’ve ever edited.”

  Susan delighted in the double compliment, striking a cheesecake pose, arching her back and placing one hand on her nude hip. “As if.”

  “So what did you learn?”

  Her stomach clenched again. She rolled onto her belly, stretched out diagonally across the bed, and pulled a loose blanket over her naked body. “That I’m a bad reporter. I totally let her get to me.”

  “You’ve still got a story, though, right? Facing the cold stare of death and all that.”

  She was up on her elbows, the joint held over the edge of the bed. A tiny chunk of ash drifted to the floor and landed on one of the Great Writer’s Persian eBay carpets. Susan watched it fall without even the faintest thought of picking it up. “Oh yeah. She gave up another body. Some college girl in Nebraska.” Susan remembered the smiling girl. The peace sign. The arm around her shoulder that belonged to some left-behind friend who had been cropped out of the photograph. She gave herself a mental shake and took another hit off the joint. “They found her buried on top of an old grave in a cemetery off the highway.” The pot was smoothing all the hard edges, and she felt the stress of the day start to bleed from her body. With it went the need for her companion. “Shouldn’t you be getting home?” she asked, raising an eyebrow purposefully at Ian.

  He had settled back onto the bed in his boxers, feet crossed at the ankles. “Sharon’s at the coast. I can’t spend the night?”

  “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow. Claire Masland is picking me up.”

  “She’s a dyke, you know.”

  “Why? Because she has short hair?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Go home, Ian.”

  Ian swung his feet on the floor and found the rest of his clothes. He pulled on one of his black socks. “I thought I told you to leave the Molly Palmer thing alone,” he said, pulling on the other sock, not looking at her.

  Susan was taken aback. Molly Palmer? “Okay,” she said, raising her hands in mock defensiveness. “You got me. I left a few messages for Ethan Poole.”

  “I’m talking about Justin Johnson,” he said, an irritated edge to his voice.

  It took a minute for Susan to process this. Justin Johnson? And then the confusion lifted and she thought, Holy shit. All this time, she’d thought that Justin had something to do with the After School Strangler case. She had connected him to the wrong story. Justin Johnson had nothing to do with Lee Robinson, nothing to do with Cleveland. “What does Justin have to do with Molly Palmer?” she asked.

  Ian laughed. “You don’t know?”

  She felt stupid, and stupid for feeling stupid. “What’s going on, Ian?”

  He stood and pulled on his black jeans. “Ethan gave Molly your messages. She called the senator’s lawyer. He called Howard Jenkins.” He zipped and buttoned the jeans, then bent and picked his black belt up off the floor and began to thread it through the belt loops. “Jenkins called me. I told him that you weren’t working the story anymore. But apparently little Justin’s mother hired a PI to watch him.” He finished buckling the belt and sat on the edge of the bed. “She thinks he’s dealing pot, see. And who shows up at school to talk to him but Susan Ward from the Oregon Herald. They recognized the pink hair.” He pulled on a black Converse. T
ied it. “So now everyone thinks you’re on the story. That it’s all going to break wide open.” Pulled the other Converse on. Tied it. “So the lawyer gets the bright idea of slipping you a note with the kid’s juvie record file number on it. With the thought that if you know he has a record, you might not trust the little bastard’s story.”

  “Seriously?” Susan said, trying not to smile. “That guy really was a lawyer?”

  Ian stood up, half-dressed, and faced her. “You’re going to get us both fired. You know that, right?”

  Susan scrambled into a seated position, forgetting about the blanket, letting it fall around her waist. “What does Justin know about Molly Palmer?”

  “He was the senator’s son’s best friend. When they were kids. Inseparable. Molly Palmer used to baby-sit them both. So I’m suspecting he saw or heard something he shouldn’t. You might recognize Justin’s mother’s maiden name. Overlook?”

  Susan’s heart sank. “As in the family who owns the Herald?”

  “She’s a cousin.”

  “Castle really did it, didn’t he?”

  “Oh he did it. It’s just not a story that will ever run in this town.” He reached into the pocket of his gray wool jacket and withdrew something and tossed it on the bed.

  “What’s that?” Susan asked.

  “It’s your nine-one-one tape. If I were you, I’d get back on the story we’ll actually run, and dance with the fella who brung ya.”

  Susan picked up the cassette and turned it over in her hands. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Derek. He spent all day tracking it down for you.” Ian gave his Columbia Journalism School T-shirt a shake, the way he always did, to get out the wrinkles. “I think he likes you.”

  Susan took another drag off the joint. “Well, if I ever want to fuck a frat boy ex-football star,” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs, “I’ll know who to call.”

  “Whom,” said Ian.

  After Ian was gone, Susan sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. The worst of it was that the Molly Palmer story actually mattered. It wasn’t exploitation. It wasn’t advertising. It wasn’t another disposable feature. It could make a difference. A teenager had been wronged, and the man responsible was going to enormous lengths to cover it up. A man with power. A man elected by a public who had a right to know that he was the kind of man who would take advantage of that power to screw a fourteen-year-old. So okay, yes, maybe she had something personal at stake. And now Susan had somehow both landed the Molly Palmer story and lost it at exactly the same time. Justin was in Palm Springs, or wherever. Molly wasn’t talking. Ethan wasn’t even returning her calls. She wanted to nail Senator Castle. More than Ian even knew. She didn’t care if it got her fired. She was going to get someone, somewhere, to go on the record. She looked down at the cassette tape in her hands. Gretchen’s 911 tape. And that’s when Susan Ward was filled with a sudden desire that was entirely foreign to her. She didn’t care about prizes or prose or voice. She didn’t care about a book deal. She didn’t care about impressing Ian.

  She wanted, for the first time in her professional life, to be a good reporter.

  She padded over to the living area and, sitting on her bare heels, popped the tape into the stereo. She had read the transcript of the call dozens of times. But it was still thrilling to finally get a glimpse into the real-time moment. She pressed PLAY.

  “Nine one one. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “My name is Gretchen Lowell. I’m calling on behalf of Detective Archie Sheridan. Do you know who I am?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Good. Your detective needs to get to a trauma center. I’m at two three three nine Magnolia Lane in Gresham. We’re in the basement. There’s a school two blocks away where you should be able to land a helicopter. If you get people here in the next fifteen minutes, he just might live.” She hung up.

  Susan sank back into a seated position on the floor and ran her hands over her forearms, which were scattered with tiny goose bumps. Gretchen had sounded so calm. When Susan had heard Gretchen’s voice in her mind, it had been more panicked, frantic. She was, in effect, turning herself into the police, giving up the ghost. She could have been killed. But she hadn’t seemed concerned at all. Her voice did not bear a single tremor. She did not stammer or search for words. She was direct, articulate, and professional. Her call almost sounded rehearsed.

  Archie didn’t ask Henry to go with him to interview Reston. It was Sunday afternoon and he felt bad enough about dragging Henry to the state pen every weekend, though he knew Henry would never let him go alone. He also wanted, if at all possible, to protect Susan’s privacy. So Archie let Henry drop him off at his apartment. He was numb and tired from the pills, so he made a pot of coffee. Then he checked his voice mail for messages. There were none, which meant that Debbie had never called back. Archie didn’t blame her. It was a mistake to talk to her at all on Sundays. He had promised himself that he’d keep Debbie and Gretchen separate, compartmentalized; it was the only way this would work. But he was selfish. He needed Debbie, wanted to hear her voice, to be reminded of his old life. But the phone calls would have to stop eventually. They both knew it. They just prolonged the pain of their emotional entanglement. He would stop the calls. He just couldn’t bear to do it yet.

  He called Claire and checked in. There were no leads. The tip line was quiet. Even prank callers took Sundays off. It had been four days since they had discovered Kristy Mathers’s body. Which meant that the killer was probably already looking for another victim. Archie sat alone in his kitchen and drank half the pot of coffee, pausing only long enough to refill his cup. When he felt suitably revived, he took two more Vicodin and called a cab.

  Reston lived in Brooklyn, a neighborhood south of Cleveland High. It was a tangle of telephone wires and trees densely packed with little middle-class Victorians and eighties duplexes—a nice neighborhood. Safe.

  Archie told the cabdriver to wait and then got out and began to climb the mossy cement steps that led up the little hill to Reston’s one-story house. It was late afternoon, and while the houses across the street still glowed in the sun, long shadows streaked Reston’s terraced hillside. Reston was on the porch, painting a door that he had propped up on two sawhorses. He was wearing project clothes; paint-splattered work pants, an old gray sweatshirt, a Mariners baseball cap. His expression was relaxed, showing obvious pleasure in the task. He looked up when he saw Archie, and then he went back to painting. Of course he knew Archie was a cop. Archie looked like a cop. It didn’t matter what he wore. It wasn’t always that way. The first few years, everyone had always been surprised when they found out what he did. He wasn’t sure when the change had happened. He’d just noticed one day that he made people nervous.

  When Archie got to the top of the porch stairs, he sat down on the top step and leaned up against the square porch column a few feet from where Reston stooped over the door. An old wisteria, still leafless, its branches as thick as human wrists, knotted up the post and along the railing.

  “Ever read Lolita?” Archie asked.

  Reston dipped the brush in some white paint and slid it along the door. The wall of paint fumes pushed away every other sensation. “Who are you?” Reston asked.

  Archie opened his badge and held it out. “I’m Detective Sheridan. I have some questions for you about a former student of yours, Susan Ward.”

  Reston glanced at the badge. No one ever bothered to look at it up close. “She told you we had a relationship,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  Reston sighed and adjusted his stance so his eyes were level with the surface of the door. He applied more paint, a quick dab and drag along the wood. “Is this on the record?”

  “I’m a police detective,” Archie said. “I don’t do off the record.”

  “She’s confused.”

  “Really.”

  A rivulet of paint had collected and Reston smoothed the brush along the wood unti
l the paint was perfectly dispersed. “You know about her father? He died her freshman year. That was very hard on her. I tried to be kind. And I think she misunderstood my interest.” He frowned. “Built it up in her mind.”

  “You’re saying that you never had a sexual relationship,” Archie said.

  Reston exhaled. Looked off across the yard for a minute. And then carefully placed the brush on the paint can. The can was on top of a piece of the Herald, so that the wet end of the brush hung suspended above a corner of it, a thread of paint pooling on the newsprint. He turned to Archie. “I kissed her, okay?” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Once. It was bad judgment on my part. I never let it happen again. When I rejected her, she started a rumor that I’d had an affair with another student. It could have gotten me fired. But there was nothing to it. There was never a formal investigation, because everyone knew it was bogus. Susan was just”—he searched the air with his hand for the right word—“damaged. She was distraught by her father’s death and lashed out. But I liked her. I always did. She was a charming, pissed-off, talented kid. I understood the pain she was in. And I did everything I could to help her.”

  “How incomprehensibly generous of you,” Archie said.

  “I’m a good teacher. For what it’s worth.” He allowed himself a wry smirk. “And it’s not worth much these days.”

  “You ever kiss Lee Robinson?” Archie asked.

  Reston drew back, his mouth open. “Jesus, no. I barely knew her. I was in tech rehearsal when she disappeared. It’s all been verified.”

  Archie nodded to himself. “Okay, then.” He offered Reston a solicitous smile. “Can I get a glass of water?” It was a lazy way to try to get inside, but if Reston said no, it would at least indicate that he had something to hide.

  Reston stared at Archie for a moment. “Okay.” He stood up, brushed some muck off his paint-splattered pants, stamped a few times on the front mat, and gestured for Archie to follow him. They walked into the house and Reston led Archie through a small coatroom, then through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen. The thing that struck Archie was the level of organization. No clutter. Everything in its place. Surfaces clean of debris. No dishes in the sink.