Evil at Heart

by Chelsea Cain

  people,” he said to Cousin. “It’s important to the old man. Put the word out. I want them to know we’re looking for them.” He turned to Susan. “Let’s go,” he said. “Before you get us all arrested.”

  They stood up and Susan followed him toward the door.

  “You have interesting friends,” she said to Leo.

  “My job involves a lot of community outreach,” Leo said.

  They took a few more steps.

  “Star?” Susan said.

  Leo’s eyes fell away from her and he made a noncommittal motion with his hand. “We slept together once or twice,” he said.

  Susan felt a ball of disappointment in her stomach. It was stupid. So he’d had sex with a hot stripper with implants. She had other things to worry about besides another inappropriate crush. She had to focus on finding Archie.

  They passed the dancers’ dressing room door. A green street sign over the door read

  STRIPPER ALLEY.

  Susan’s mind was going a mile a minute.

  Leo Reynolds didn’t know she existed. Not that way. She had purple hair and the body of a ten-year-old boy. He slept with strippers and was, apparently, some sort of drug lawyer. His sister had been murdered. His brother was part of some fucked-up Gretchen Lowell Love Club killing spree. And his father was a drug kingpin.

  Leo had led the police to Jeremy’s room. He’d been there. He knew about the collage, about the notebook. Now everyone would know. Jeremy’s face, his story, his family, would be all over the news. It would not be good for business.

  Something wasn’t right.

  They walked past Paul-Bunyan-the-doorman and out into the early morning light. The entire sky glowed tangerine, bathing the Paul Bunyan statue across the street in a fiery light that made him look even more like an axe murderer.

  It was almost six. Archie had been missing for over five hours.

  As they walked to the car, Leo handed her a perfectly folded white handkerchief. “Your nose is running,” he said.

  Susan sniffled and wiped her nose with the handkerchief, then handed it back to him. He raised an eyebrow at the snotty handkerchief, but folded it and put it back in his pocket.

  When they got to the car, he opened the door for her, and she got in. “Does your father know you’re helping the police?” Susan asked him.

  He closed her door, walked around the back of the car, and got in the driver’s seat. He looked at her. “Yep,” he said.

  “Do you do anything without your father’s approval?” Susan said.

  Leo started the car. “He would not approve of you.”

  C H A P T E R 49

  The coke had worn off and Susan had to will herself to look passably alert. Ian had started holding the editorial meetings in his office instead of the conference room, so he could sit behind his desk and make everyone else gaze in awe at his authority. There were only two extra chairs in Ian’s office and there were six reporters who had to come to the meeting, which meant that four of them had to stand or sit on the floor.

  Susan usually came early to get one of the chairs. But she’d come straight here after Leo had dropped her at her car, and there was only space left on the floor.

  “So,” Ian was saying. “Apparently what we have on our hands here is a serial-killer cult. These are all people of interest in all of the recent murders we’ve been attributing to the Beauty Killer. Two have been identified.” Ian had a dry-erase board he’d hauled in from the conference room and propped behind his desk so he could write down story ideas and then cross them out or circle them, and he’d taped pictures of Jeremy and Pearl on it. “Jeremy Reynolds. From Lake Oswego. His father’s a bigwig in real estate and venture

  capital. Margaux Clinton. Sixteen. Runaway from Eugene.” He held his pen frozen in midair. “Who are they? What led them astray? We’ve also got three victims.” He didn’t have their pictures on his board. “Let’s wrap them into a story about the victimization of the homeless—bum fights, violence against transients, et cetera.

  “And, obviously, I think the time has come to examine our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell.”

  Susan looked around the room. It was neat by newspaper-office standards. A New York Yankees pennant on the wall. An Absence of Malice poster. A framed copy of the Oregon Herald from the day Ian was born (1963—God, he was old). And two waist-high stacks of newspapers. On a bulletin board on the wall, next to a five-year-old press release announcing his Pulitzer win, Ian had tacked up a quote that he’d scrawled on a piece of copy paper. “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why”—Bernard Baruch. Next to that was a cartoon from The New Yorker of a guy who was supposed to be Archie Sheridan sitting at a bar. The bartender was handing him a drink and saying, “Gretchen Lowell wants to buy you a beer.”

  “I know the answer,” Susan said.

  Ian, who had been going on about the role of the antihero in society, stopped talking and looked down at her, annoyed.

  “I know the answer,” Susan said again.

  “Excuse me?” Ian said.

  “We’re the ones who did it,” Susan said. “It was us.” The walls at the Herald were paper thin, and everyone could hear everything anyone said over a whisper. She didn’t care. “We glamorized Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said. “We made her into a celebrity.”

  Ian remained perfectly motionless, pen still aloft. He was always perfectly motionless when he was pissed. Susan didn’t care. She had a hole in her cheek and Archie was missing and she was at a stupid story meeting and they were all going to be laid off anyway. “There are people out there who think she’s a hero,” she said. She

  looked around at all of them. Sitting on the floor, leaning awkwardly against the wall. Derek sat in one of the chairs. Derek almost never got a chair. Susan could only imagine how early he’d gotten there to get one. And why? No one wanted to be there. This was a joke.

  Susan uncrossed her legs and stood up. “They maintain fan sites,” she said. “They update her Wikipedia page. They write fan fiction about her. The audio of the nine-one-one call she made when she turned herself in? Someone remixed it and made a music video. You can watch it on YouTube. There are T-shirts with her face on them that say ‘I “heart” the Beauty Killer.’ ” She got her foot in one boot, and then pulled on the other one. “Not just T-shirts. Baby onesies. Esquire magazine put her in their ‘Women We Love’ issue last year. I put her name into eBay and I found someone selling a set of scalpels they claimed Gretchen had used to slice someone up. The bidding was up to nine hundred dollars.”

  She stood there, nose running, bandage on her cheek. She was so fired. She was beyond fired. She would be blacklisted. But she couldn’t stop herself. It all just came blubbering out. “We put all that out there,” she said, flailing a hand. “Story after story after story. The same stale crap. Anything to have an excuse to run her picture, because everyone knows that her picture increases the newsstand pickup by twenty-five percent. So when there wasn’t news, we found other reasons to write about her. ‘How to Make a Gretchen Lowell Halloween Costume.’ ” She forced a laugh and wiped her nose with her wrist. “I wrote that one.”

  Ian capped his pen and set it on his desk. He did it with a little too much emphasis, and it rolled across the desk and off the front of it and dropped to the carpet. No one made a move to pick it up for him. No one moved at all.

  “We are in the business of selling ads,” Ian said. “We can charge more for our ads if we sell more papers. Gretchen Lowell sells papers.

  The Baltimore Sun. The Chicago Trib. The L.A. Times. Their newsrooms have been gutted. You want to take a buyout? Or do you want to write a story lots of people will read so the ad department can go to Starbucks and talk them into running quarter-page ads in our dying little medium? Because you can either sell Frappuccino ads, or you can sell Frappuccinos. So do you want to be a newspaper reporter, or do you want to be a barista?”

  “I want to be a journalist,” Susan said. It sounded absur
d even as she said it. Someone leaning against the wall smirked.

  “Then write me a story about why you were treated for a puncture wound in the Produce District at two

  A.M. this morning. Then write me seventy-five inches on our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell. You can put in everything you just said.”

  “Seventy-five inches?” Susan said.

  “Do you think you can fill it?” Ian asked.

  “Absolutely,” Susan said.

  “Then go, get out of here,” Ian said.

  She looked at Ian. Maybe he wasn’t a total asshole, after all.

  One of the other reporters raised his hand. “Can I go?” he said.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ian said.

  Susan backed out of the room and closed the door behind her before Ian could change his mind.

  C H A P T E R 50

  Anne Boyd was the best criminal profiler that Henry knew. She’d been the third one the FBI had sent to work on the Beauty Killer Task Force, and had spent months at a time in Portland, away from her husband and two boys. Henry called her from a table outside Taco Del Mar on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The taco stand was in an old gas station. Everything in Portland was in an old something. The task force offices were in an old bank. You could get a burger and see a movie inside an old elementary school. Even the old Henry Weinhard’s brewery downtown had been turned into green certified condos. Everything was repurposed. Portlanders loved to recycle.

  It was 11

  A.M. PST. Two o’clock in Virginia.

  Henry punched in Anne’s number.

  She picked up right away.

  “Henry,” she said. “Did they catch her?”

  “No,” Henry said. “No.”

  He could hear the bustle of food preparation and teenaged boys

  in the background. “Well,” she said, “you’re not calling to ask for fashion tips.”

  “What do you remember about Jeremy Reynolds?” Henry asked.

  “Hold on,” Anne said. Henry heard a door close and it got quiet. “Want to let me in on what’s going on?” she said.

  “Archie checked himself out of the hospital,” Henry said.

  “He can do that, Henry,” Anne said. “He was there voluntarily.”

  A woman came out of the taco place with a burrito, looked around at the outdoor seating options, and took the spot farthest from Henry. “There’s this group of, I don’t know . . .” He rested his forehead on his hand. It was hot and he wasn’t wearing a jacket and he could feel sweat forming under his shoulder holster. “It’s sort of a Gretchen Lowell fan club.” Fuck, the world was getting weird. “They got ahold of this poor fuck who’d been fantasizing about getting his spleen removed.”

  “Body integrity identity disorder,” Anne said with a whistle. “I’ve never heard of an organ focus before.”

  Henry waved his hand. “Whatever. They found each other over the Internet. They took out his spleen for him. Only he died. Because, you know, they’re not fucking doctors.” The woman with the burrito was pretending to read an issue of the Portland Mercury, but she kept stealing looks at him. “Susan Ward found the body, courtesy of an anonymous tip. Archie found out who the kid was, courtesy of an anonymous tip.”

  “That’s an interesting confluence of anonymous tips,” Anne said softly.

  “I was going to say that,” Henry said, “but not so fancy.”

  “Go on,” Anne said.

  “Turns out the dead kid was a friend of Jeremy Reynolds’s.”

  “The brother of Isabel Reynolds.”

  Henry nodded even though Anne couldn’t see him. “Apparently he’s part of the fan club. Yesterday Archie checks himself out of the hospital, goes out to see Papa Jack and tells him to find Jeremy, and also gets a gun. And then last night he and Susan Ward go to a club meeting, or whatever the fuck.”

  “They were expecting them,” Anne said.

  “Of course they were expecting them.” Henry slammed his hand on the table. “They’d anonymous-tipped them right there. Susan got herself pierced in the face.”

  “Pierced in the face?” Anne said.

  “Like with a piercing needle,” Henry said. The woman with the burrito had put down the Mercury and now sat staring at him openly. “The group’s leader, who is wearing—get this—a nylon footy over his head, wants Archie to cut him. At least two of these assholes have carved up their own torsos, Gretchen style. Archie agrees, if they let Susan go. Susan runs. She thinks she hears Archie cry out, but it could have been anyone. She calls me. But when we get there, everyone’s cleared out, Archie’s gone. Gun’s on the floor.”

  “And you think Archie went off with them, of his own accord?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “I thought he was recovering. But it’s a Gretchen Lowell fan club. He’s like an honorary lifetime member. And if he wants to get Jeremy Reynolds out of this, he’d do whatever it takes. You know him.”

  “He always seemed very protective of Jeremy,” Anne said.

  “The kid saw his sister murdered. I would imagine he’s a little scarred.” The woman with the burrito picked it up and went inside. Henry shot at her with his finger when she went by. “So now we’ve got reason to believe these people are involved in the recent killings out here. That they’re copycat murders.”

  Anne paused. “I’m going to tell you something completely unprofessional,” she said.

  “I’m on the edge of my seat,” said Henry.

  “Jeremy Reynolds is dangerous,” Anne said.

  “No shit,” Henry said.

  Anne sighed deeply. “He suffered a dissociative fugue. He survived a life-altering event. He was sure to be traumatized, which is why I never drew darker conclusions in any of my reports.”

  Henry was no shrink, but he’d seen enough violence to know that it did a number on people. “He’d just seen his sister murdered,” he said.

  “His affect was off,” Anne said. She hesitated. “And this is not my professional opinion. My opinion as a psychologist was in the reports: dissociative fugue. My opinion as a mother? Jeremy Reynolds is dangerous.”

  “Susan said his memory’s come back,” Henry said. He told Anne what Susan had said about the chest carvings apparently matching the marks on Isabel’s torso.

  “In a kid like Jeremy,” Anne said, “without the proper support, that could send him reeling. He’d look for alternative support structures. Like the Internet, the fan club. And he’d look for people he could talk to.”

  Henry finished the thought. “Like Archie. The one person who understands.” Archie had left the hospital and gone into that basement looking for Jeremy. Someone had to know the connection he and Jeremy had shared. Someone had to figure that Archie, knowing what Jeremy had gone through, would do almost anything to save him.

  “Susan thinks Jeremy was the man in the mask,” Henry said.

  “Well, duh,” Anne said.

  C H A P T E R 51

  After a while, Archie found that the pain from the hooks became a sort of physical white noise. He relaxed his body, letting his arms dangle, fingertips almost brushing the floor, and he took slow, deep breaths. The weightlessness was disorienting and he was getting dizzier and increasingly light-headed. His mind skittered. When he tried to focus on the floor, his vision blurred.

  His blood pressure was dropping.

  At this rate, he wouldn’t be conscious much longer.

  “I can let you down now,” Jeremy said.

  Archie lifted his head. The room spun. “I think that would be an excellent idea,” he said.

  Jeremy pulled at a mechanism Archie couldn’t see and after a painful jerk, he was lowered blissfully to the concrete. Archie lay on his belly, his arms under his torso, his cheek on the floor. The concrete was cool. Jeremy lifted his head and held a sports bottle to his lips. “It’s sugar water,” he said. “To get your glucose up.”

  Archie parted his lips and Jeremy pressed the nozzle into his mouth and sq
ueezed the bottle. The sugar water was room temperature

  and sweet, like flat cola, but Archie suckled at it feverishly, his mind clearing as the fluid found its way down his throat. When Jeremy pulled the bottle away, Archie managed to sit up, his bare knees pulled to his chest. “Take the hooks out,” he said.

  Jeremy knelt behind him. “I have to do it fast,” Jeremy said. “The faster you take them out, the less it hurts.” Archie could feel him working, feel the pressure as Jeremy held a cloth to his skin to stop the bleeding, but he didn’t feel any pain. He knew each hook was out only because of the sound it made as Jeremy dropped it into an empty Nancy’s Yogurt container.

  “I’m going to massage the air out of your skin,” Jeremy said. “To help prevent infection. It’s going to hurt a little.” Jeremy pushed around the puncture wounds, with a circular motion. It was more unsettling than painful, like Rice Krispies popping under his skin. The air made a burping sound as it exited his flesh, and warm blood spurted from the wounds, splattering and running down Archie’s back. Archie rested his forehead against his knees and hugged his shins.