Heartsick

CHAPTER 11

The friends were Maria Viello and Jennifer Washington. Maria, Jen, and Kristy had been inseparable since middle school, and high school had not yet soured their friendship. Maria’s house was just a few blocks from Jefferson, so the detectives went there first. She lived in a rented 1920s wooden bungalow surrounded by a chain-link fence. The house needed painting, but the yard was neatly kept and the sidewalk out front was clean of the usual debris of litter that clotted much of the neighborhood. Her father, Armando Viello, answered the door. He was shorter than Archie, with a square torso and hands rough from manual labor. His face was deeply ravaged by acne scars. He spoke English fluently, though with a heavy accent. His wife, to Archie’s knowledge, did not speak English at all. They were probably illegals, a fact that escaped none of the cops who had called on the house in the last twenty-four hours, but did not make it into any of their reports.

Armando Viello stared gravely at Archie and the others through the battered aluminum screen door. The porch light flickered and then went out.

“You were here this morning,” Viello said.

“We have some new questions,” Archie explained.

Armando opened the door and the detectives walked in. It was a brave thing, Archie thought, to know you could be deported but let cop after cop inside your house anyway, on the off chance it might help find someone else’s missing kid.

“Maria is in her bedroom,” Armando said, heading down a short hallway in his stocking feet. Dinner was cooking in the kitchen, something spicy. “You want to talk to Jennifer, too?”

“Jennifer’s here?” Claire asked.

“They’re studying. They did not go to school today.” Armando rapped on Maria’s bedroom door and said something in Spanish. In a minute the door opened. Her elbow-length straight black hair was pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing the same purple velour sweatpants and yellow T-shirt that she had on when Archie had interviewed her that morning after his less than inspirational staff meeting.

“Have you found her?” she asked immediately.

“Not yet,” Archie said kindly. Kids were often overlooked in police investigations. The thinking was that they made bad witnesses, but Archie had found that they noticed things that adults didn’t. As long as they were interviewed appropriately, assured that they didn’t have to know the answers, so they wouldn’t make up what they thought the interviewer wanted to hear, kids as young as six could offer valuable observations. But Maria was fifteen. Teenage girls were unpredictable. Archie had never communicated well with them. He had spent most of his teen years attempting to start conversations with girls and flubbing miserably. He hadn’t really gotten much better. “Can we talk to you some more?” he asked Maria.

She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. Well, you’ve still got the magic touch, thought Archie.

Then Maria sniffled and nodded. Archie looked at Claire and Henry and then the three followed Maria into her bedroom.

It was a square yellow room with a single-paned window that looked out into the window of the bungalow next door. A paisley twin-size sheet was tacked up in place of a curtain.

Jen Washington sat on the bed, under the window, holding an old and well-loved stuffed alligator on her lap, a relic of childhood. Her hair was styled in a short Afro and she wore an Indian-style shirt and jeans with beaded fringed cuffs. She was a beautiful girl, but the lack of any spark dampened her prettiness.

They had all been in the high school auditorium together. Jen was painting scenery for the play. Maria was in charge of props. They had all auditioned. Kristy was the only one who had been cast. So she was the one who had left early. The one who was, by now, most probably dead. But Archie didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want them to see it on his face.

Maria walked over to the bed and flung herself down on the Mexican blanket beside Jen, who laid a skinny arm protectively across Maria’s calf. Archie walked over to the wooden desk next to the bed, flipped the desk chair around, and sat in it. Henry leaned back against the door, arms folded over his chest. Claire perched on the Mexican blanket on the corner of the bed.

Archie opened his red notebook. “Did Kristy have a boyfriend?” he asked softly.

“You already asked us that,” Jen said, twisting the alligator. She glared at Archie with contempt. Archie didn’t blame her. Fifteen was too young to find out how fucked up the world was.

“Tell me again.”

Jen glowered. The alligator looked bored. Maria adjusted herself into a cross-legged position, pulling her long ponytail over her shoulder and absentmindedly wrapping it around her fingers. “No,” she said finally. “There was no one.” Unlike her father, she had no trace of a Mexican accent.

Claire smiled conspiratorially at the girls. “No one? Not even someone maybe that her parents might disapprove of? Someone secret.”

Jen rolled her eyes. “No one means no one.”

“And you’re sure that Kristy left rehearsal at six-fifteen?” Archie asked.

Maria stopped fidgeting with her hair and looked at Archie, certainty flashing in her dark eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Why?”

“Someone saw Kristy a few blocks away almost forty minutes later,” Archie explained. “Any idea what she might have been doing?”

Jen lifted her arm from Maria’s calf, sat up, and shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“But you didn’t see her ride off, right?” asked Claire. “You just saw her leave the auditorium.”

“Right,” Maria said. “They finished blocking all her scenes. Ms. Sanders let her go.”

“And no one left with her?” Archie asked.

Maria shook her head. “Like we said. All the actors got to go once their scenes were blocked. Kristy went first. Most of us had to stay until seven-thirty. But you talked to all them, right?”

“No one saw her,” Archie said.

“So what was she doing all that time?” asked Jen, staring hard at the yellow wall. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Does she smoke?” asked Claire.

“No,” Maria said. “She hates it.”

Jen examined the plastic eyes of the stuffed alligator, scratching at an invisible imperfection on the hard black plastic of its pupil. “Maybe she had trouble with her bike.” She shrugged, not looking up.

Archie leaned forward. “Why do you say that, Jen?”

Jen smoothed the matted green fur of the alligator. “She’d been having trouble with the chain coming off. It was a shitty bike. She had to drag it home a couple of times.” A single tear rolled down her brown cheek. She wiped it away with her sleeve and shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s probably a stupid answer.”

Archie reached out and gently put his hand on Jen’s. She looked up. And he saw, in her hard eyes, a fissure, and, behind it, a tiny bit of hope. “I think it’s a really smart guess,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”

“So her bike is broken,” Claire said when they were back in the car. It was dark and the windows were glassy with rain. “She tries to fix it for a while, then gives up and decides to walk it home. Our guy stops, offers her a ride, or to help fix the bike, and he grabs her.”

“But that’s a crime of opportunity,” Henry said from the driver’s seat of the unmarked Crown Vic. Henry hated Crown Vics. And yet somehow he always ended up with one. “She fits his profile. You think he just drives around looking for high school girls who look right enough to snatch? That he just got lucky?”

“He broke the bike,” Archie said quietly from the backseat. He pulled the pillbox out his pocket and absentmindedly rotated it between his thumb and forefinger.

“He broke the bike,” Henry agreed emphatically, nodding. “Which means he had her picked out. Knew she had the bike. Knew which bike was hers. Maybe even knew it was crappy. That she’d drag the thing home like usual. He’s watching them.”

“Still leaves us with some missing time,” Claire said. “Next kid left rehearsal at six-thirty. Didn’t see her. The bike rack is right by the door.”

Archie’s head throbbed. “We’ll do the roadblock again tomorrow. Maybe someone else saw her.” He extracted three pills from the pillbox and put them in his mouth one by one.

“You okay, boss?” Henry asked, glancing back at Archie in the rearview mirror.

“Zantac,” Archie lied. “For my stomach.” He leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. If the killer had stalked Kristy, then he’d probably start looking for another girl soon. “You sure the other high schools are secure?” Archie asked, eyes still closed.

“ Fort Knox,” Claire confirmed.

“Set up surveillance at all four tomorrow,” Archie told them. “Run the plates of every car that goes by Jefferson between five and seven.” He opened his eyes, rubbed his face with an open hand, and leaned forward between the two front seats. “I want to go through the autopsy reports again. And let’s go door-to-door again tonight. Maybe someone’s remembered something.”

Henry glanced over at him. “We should all get some sleep. We’ve got people working tonight. Smart people. Awake people. I’ll have them call if anything turns up.”

Archie was too tired to argue. He could do the work back at the apartment. “I’ll go home,” he said. “If you take me by the office so I can pick up the reports.”

“She’s still out there, right?” Claire said. “It’s not all for nothing? There’s a chance. Right?”

There was a long silence and then Henry said, “Right.”

The phone was ringing when Archie got back to the apartment. He had an armload full of police reports and citizen tips he planned to read that night and he stacked them perilously on the hallway table, picked up the cordless, and set his keys on the table next to the charger.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Hey, Debbie,” Archie said to his ex-wife, grateful for the momentary distraction. He walked through the kitchen, got a beer out of the fridge, and opened it.

“How was your first day?”

“Futile,” Archie said. He unclipped his gun from his belt and set it on the coffee table and sat down on the couch in front of it.

“I saw you on TV. You were very intimidating.”

“I wore that tie you bought me.”

“I noticed that.” She paused. “Are you coming to Ben’s thing on Sunday?”

He swallowed hard. “You know I can’t.”

He could hear the sigh in her voice. “Because you’ll be with her.”

They had been through this before. There wasn’t anything left to say. He let the phone slide down his face, his neck, until the base of the receiver rested against his breastbone. He pressed it hard against the bone until it hurt. He could still hear her, muffled and distant, like someone talking underwater.

“You know how sick that is, right?”

The vibration of her voice deep inside his chest made him feel better, like there was something alive in there.

“What do you two talk about?”

She had asked before. He had never told her, would never tell her. He lifted the phone back to his ear. He could hear her breathing. She said, “I just don’t know how you’re going to get better until you cleanse her from your life.”

I’m not going to get better, he thought. “I can’t just yet.”

“I love you, Archie. Ben loves you. Sara loves you.”

He tried to say something. I know. But he wanted to say something more, and he couldn’t, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“Are you going to come out and see us?”

“As soon as I can.” They both knew what he meant. He felt the splinters of another headache starting. “There’s this reporter, though,” he continued. “Susan Ward. She’s doing a series about me for the Herald. She’ll probably call you.”

“What should I tell her?”

“Tell her you won’t talk to her. And then, later, when she tries again, tell her anything she wants to know.”

“You want me to tell her the truth?”

He ran his fingers over the nubby fabric of his cheerless couch and imagined Debbie sitting on their couch, in their house, in his old life. “Yeah.”

“You want that published in the Herald?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you up to, Archie?”

He took a swig of his beer. “Closure,” he said with a hollow laugh.