by Chelsea Cain
She was a block from the house.
She looked around again, and still saw no one. A thousand feet below, the people and cars and urban kerfuffle of the city made a constant hum. Carol remembered the sound, but she could no longer hear it.
She glanced up the block, toward home. Five hundred feet. It might be close enough.
She lifted the handkerchief from her mouth, her red lipstick smeared on it like blood, found the plastic pendant with a trembling hand, and pushed the button.
C H A P T E R 26
Archie held the brass pillbox in his hand, feeling the weight of it. He had carried it in his pocket for two years. Pulled painkiller after painkiller from it. It had been the first thing he reached for in the morning, and the last thing that left his hand at night. Now it was empty. Just a relic from his past life. He looked at it for another moment, then dropped it in the bag at his feet and pulled the next item from the box of personal items that had just been returned to him at the nurses’ station. His belt. A dead cell phone. Keys. Shoes.
He was threading his belt through his belt loops when Henry came around the corner, his phone in his hand. He didn’t look happy. “There’s a body at the Rose Garden,” he said.
“The arena?” Archie asked. The Blazers played at an arena called the “Rose Garden.”
“No,” Henry said. “The actual Rose Garden. The one with the flowers.”
Gretchen had murdered a woman and left her in the Rose Garden in 2003. “That makes two repeat locations,” Archie said. “The Rose Garden and Pittock Mansion.” Archie buckled the belt. It buckled a notch tighter than it had the last time he’d had it on.
“I know,” Henry said.
“Just give me a second,” Archie said, dropping a shoe and slipping a foot into it.
“You’re a civilian,” Henry said. “Remember?”
Archie looked up from tying his shoe.
Henry handed him his house key. Then he looked over Archie’s shoulder. “Here comes your ride.”
Archie twisted around to see Susan Ward walking down the hall toward him. She was wearing red jeans, a white T-shirt, black boots that laced up her shins, and was carrying a giant red purse. And she’d dyed her hair purple.
“Hi,” she said, touching her hair.
Susan Ward. Archie hadn’t seen her since he’d checked in. But he’d known that she was out there, in the waiting room, most mornings. He’d refused to see her. But if he allowed himself to acknowledge it, the truth was he liked knowing she was just on the other side of the wall.
“You shouldn’t involve her,” he said to Henry.
Henry was checking a message on his BlackBerry. “She’s already involved,” he said.
“I’m doing a story on the murdered inmate,” Susan said.
“Patient,” Archie said with a sigh. “Not inmate.”
Henry looked up from his BlackBerry. “Take him to my house,” he said to Susan. “Okay? Go inside. Lock the doors.” He turned to Archie. “I’m sending a patrol car to sit out front.”
The way he said it, Archie wasn’t sure if the patrol unit was supposed to keep Gretchen out, or Archie in.
“Did you get the pot brownies my mom sent?” Susan asked Archie.
“I didn’t hear that,” Henry said, walking away.
C H A P T E R 27
It had been two months since Susan had laid eyes on Archie Sheridan. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been in a hospital bed with forty stitches in his neck and a belly full of Vicodin. He looked better than that. But there were people in hospice who looked better than that.
“So how’s it going?” Susan asked lamely.
They were in her Saab, heading out of the hospital compound. Susan had no idea where Henry lived, so Archie was navigating.
They had just turned east onto Glisan, and the on-ramp to I-84 had cars backed up for half a mile. Archie squinted into the late morning sun. “What’s all the traffic?” he asked.
No “Hey, how are you. I missed you. Sorry for making you wait in the lobby all those mornings”? “The freeway’s jammed,” Susan said. “People trying to get out of the city.”
They were passing the billboard advertisement for the upcoming episode of America’s Sexiest Serial Killers starring Gretchen Lowell.
She noticed Archie’s gaze linger on it as they drove by.
“What is wrong with everybody?” he asked.
Susan slid a look over at him. “I want to write a book about it—our cultural obsession with the Beauty Killer. Maybe Henry told you?”
Archie reached down under his foot and lifted up the pink envelope. “What’s this?” he asked.
Susan rolled her eyes. She’d tossed all the crap from her in-box on the car floor. “Some kind of dorky valentine,” she said. “It was in my box at the Herald. I think it’s from Derek. I mean, who gives someone a valentine in August? I guess it’s sort of romantic, but Jesus, right?”
Archie flipped it over and examined the return address. Susan hadn’t recognized it. Some street in Southwest Portland. He pulled the card out of the envelope.
“Are you going through my mail?” Susan asked. She didn’t really care. She’d already opened it. There wasn’t writing inside—just some blank, ugly old-fashioned card with two hearts connected by a gold chain.
Archie reached into the backseat and pulled his overnight bag onto his lap, dug into it, pulled out a card, and showed it to Susan.
It was the same card.
“Someone dropped this off at the hospital for me yesterday,” he said. He pointed at the return address on his card. Three-nine-seven North Fargo.
“That’s where I found the body,” Susan said.
Then he pointed at the address on her card. It was in the same handwriting.
“We need to go to this address,” Archie said.
Susan shook her head. She had copy to write. She didn’t have time to be murdered by Gretchen Lowell. “You’re out of your mind,” she said. “You should call Henry.”
Archie reached back to the floor and came up with that morning’s edition of the Herald. Susan really needed to keep her car cleaner. He pointed to the sketch on the front page. “It’s where this guy lives,” he said.
“How do you know that?” Susan asked.
“Trust me,” Archie said.
“What about Henry?” Susan asked.
“We’ll call him after we check it out,” he said. “If we tell him now, he won’t let either of us go.”
Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. She knew that. Then again, the more time she spent with him, the more time she’d have to talk him into cooperating with the book.
“Okay,” she said.
“On the way, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the body in the house,” Archie said.
Susan pulled out of traffic onto a side street so they could turn around and head west. “I dyed my hair purple,” she said.
She thought she saw Archie smile. “I noticed,” he said.
C H A P T E R 28
Agathering crowd pressed against the police perimeter at the Rose Garden. There were plenty of microphones and notebooks—Henry had counted twelve news vans on his way up the hill—but mostly it was just rubberneckers.
Portland seemed divided into two groups of people these days—people who wanted to get as far away from Gretchen’s crime scenes as possible, and people who wanted to rub up against her corpses.
Henry parked his car and got out and ducked under the tape. “Whatley,” he yelled to a red-haired patrol cop. “Get these people out of here.”
Whatley looked around helplessly at the crowd.
“Move the tape,” Henry said. “Use pepper spray if you have to.”
Claire met him at the entrance to the park and led him to the crime scene. She was wearing a T-shirt with an
image of the state of Alaska on it. Henry’s third wife had bought it for him. They’d gotten dressed quickly when the call came in about the murder at the psych ward. The T-shirt almost came down to Claire’s knees. She’d scrunched it up on one side, so she could clip her gun to her waist, along with a pair of red Ray-Bans.
“How’s he doing?” she asked.
“He’s going to stay with me for a while,” Henry said.
“So I shouldn’t leave my panty hose hanging in the shower?” Claire asked.
“You don’t wear panty hose,” Henry said.
“I know,” she said. “But it sounded funny.”
They cleared a hedge and Henry could see a group of cops gathered around a couple sitting on a bench.
Henry popped a piece of licorice gum and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “What do we have?” he asked Claire.
They rounded the bench. The other cops stepped back. “Meet Mr. and Mrs. Doe,” Claire said.
Henry took in the gruesome scene. The bodies had obviously been buried. They were practically mummified in grave wax, a sign they had been buried somewhere moist, probably sealed in something that protected them from bacteria. The features on the faces were beyond recognition, grins revealing brown teeth. That was good. That made dental records a possibility.
“Obviously not the clothes they died in,” Claire continued. “I checked the labels and pockets. Nothing. But I did find this.” She held up an evidence bag with a tiny thread of plastic in it. “It’s one of those plastic thingies that hold tags.”
“Plastic thingies?” Henry said.
“I don’t think that’s the technical name,” Claire said. “But they use them a lot at thrift stores to attach price tags. So I’m sending a few units around to some of the major stores to see if any of these lovely items seem familiar.”
“She bought them outfits and dressed them up so it would take longer for them to get noticed?” Henry said. It didn’t make sense. The smell was sure to tip someone off pretty quickly.
Claire looked down at the bodies. She wasn’t chewing gum. Henry had always admired that about her. She had a stomach of steel. “You think they’ll match the victim list?” she said.
Gretchen had confessed to a lot of murders, but she’d committed even more. And the task force maintained a list of people who’d gone missing during her ten-year killing spree. None of it made sense. Why would Gretchen be digging up her old victims? Unless they weren’t victims.
“You have anyone checking with the cemeteries?” Henry asked.
“Already on it,” Claire said. “So far, no one’s reporting any unauthorized exhumations.”
Henry smacked his licorice gum and leaned in close to get a look at the bodies.
It was impossible for him to tell if they’d had eyes when they were buried.
Henry heard Lorenzo Robbins’s voice behind him. “Easy there, Quincy,” he said. “That’s my job.”
Henry stepped aside and Robbins knelt down in his white Tyvek suit next to the corpses. Robbins tied his dreads back with a rubber band that looked like it had come off a newspaper, pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves, and gave the bodies a visual once-over.
“They didn’t die at the same time,” Robbins said. “One, maybe three or four years ago, the other more like two.”
Henry squinted at the corpses. They looked the same to him. “How do you know?” he said.
“Because I’m an ME,” Robbins said. “And you’re not.” He pulled out a penlight and shone it in the eye sockets of each body. “Also,” he said, “someone took their eyes out.”
Henry leaned in close to look in the eye sockets.
Robbins shooed him away. “Go do cop stuff,” he said.
Henry turned to Claire. “What’s our time frame?”
“Park opens at seven-thirty,” Claire said. “Not hard to get in before then. You just have to jump the gate. Groundskeepers say they cleared the park at closing last night—nine P.M. So the bodies were set up sometime between nine and when the old lady found them just after eight. She hit her medic alert alarm. The site was pretty well trampled. She told them what she’d found and they thought she’d had a stroke. Sent fire trucks. EMTs. The whole nine yards.”
Henry looked out over the grand vista of Portland. The city skyline. The mountains. Take away the news helicopters he could see approaching from the distance, and it was something to behold. Henry ticked off the crime scenes on his hand. “The Gorge,” he said. “Pittock Mansion. The Rose Garden. What do all of them have in common?”
Robbins looked up. “The letter O?”
Claire glanced out over the city. “They all have great views,” she said.
“And no eyes to see them,” Henry said.
“They couldn’t see anyway,” Robbins said. “They’re dead.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Henry said. “It’s a metaphor.”
C H A P T E R 29
The address on Susan’s card was on the other side of the river in Southwest Portland in a neighborhood that didn’t have trees or sidewalks. They’d had to take three freeways to get there. Susan peered through the windshield at the squat, ugly building. The windshield was dirty—you could trace the arcs of eyelash-sized legs and yellow juice where the wipers had ground dead bugs into the glass. That’s what rain did in the summer—it just sort of smeared everything around.
“Sorry about the windshield,” she said.
Archie didn’t answer. He looked at the valentine in his hand and then up at the building. “This is it,” he said.
“Which side?” Susan asked. The square, flat-roofed 1980s duplex sat at the end of a dead-end street. Nothing about the place worked. The first floor’s multicolored bricks didn’t match the second story’s gray vinyl siding. There were two front doors, one gray, one blue, each with a concrete stoop. The stoop with the gray door was bare; the stoop with the blue door was lined with plants in terra-cotta pots. Tattered Buddhist prayer flags fluttered from the railing.
“Four-A,” Archie said.
The blue door.
He started to get out of the car.
“Wait,” Susan said. “Don’t you have a gun?”
Archie gave her a patient smile. “The psych ward isn’t really big on guns,” he said. “Besides, I turned mine in when I took my leave of absence.”
“Well, go buy one at Wal-Mart or something,” Susan said.
Archie raised his eyebrows.
“Fine,” Susan said. “But I’m coming with you. Someone needs to keep you from getting murdered.”
He didn’t seem in the mood to argue. Susan had a special way of wearing people down like that. She got out of the car and followed him up the concrete walkway to 4A. There was no one around. A single squirrel ran across the yard and under a dying laurel hedge by the street.
Archie climbed the three steps up to the stoop and rang the doorbell. Susan heard it—an insistent buzz, like an oven timer—coming from the other side of the door. But no one answered.
“You’re not going to break in, are you?” Susan asked. “Because I’ve already broken into one house this week.” She choked back a nervous laugh. Archie wouldn’t break into a house. He was a grown-up. And a cop. He’d call Henry. Any minute now.
Susan glanced back at the street. Still no one around. No cars. The squirrel was gone.
Archie dropped to his haunches. Susan’s stomach knotted. He was going to break in. He was going to pick the lock. She imagined him asking her for a hairpin. That’s what they always did in the movies. She felt bad. She didn’t have a hairpin. He’d have to use a credit card.
But he didn’t ask for a hairpin. He flipped up the doormat. It was made of hemp fiber—she’d know it anywhere. Underneath the mat was an envelope. The corner of the envelope had been exposed, she now realized, though she hadn’t noticed it.
“What is it?” Susan asked.
Archie picked up the envelope, holding it by the edges, and flipped it over so she could see it. There,
in what appeared to be the same handwriting as the valentine, was Archie’s name. He held the envelope up to the sky and looked at it. Then he smiled.
“Do you have a pen?” Archie asked.
Susan reached into the outside pocket of her purse and extracted a black felt-tip. Archie took the pen and slid it under the flap of the envelope and worked it along the glue line until the flap lifted. Still holding the envelope by the edges, he peered inside, then turned the envelope over. A key fell out into his other palm.