Heartsick

CHAPTER 16

You know, there are actually tons of dead bodies on Sauvie Island,” Susan said from the backseat. “A lot of the gay guys who used to go to the nude beach died of AIDS and had their ashes scattered there. The upper beach? Above the tide line? All bone chips and charcoal.” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “Sunbathers oil up and lie down and end up with tiny fragments of dead guy in their crevices.” She waited. “I did a story about it. Maybe you read it?”

No one answered. Henry, she realized, had tuned her out about ten miles ago. Archie was on the phone.

She crossed her arms and tried not to yammer. It was the curse of the feature writer. Useless facts. And she had done plenty of stories about Sauvie Island: organic farmers, the cornfield maze, the nude beach, bicyclist clubs, eagles’ nests, u-pick berry fields. Herald readers loved all that crap. Consequently, Susan knew more about the island than most of the people living on it. It was 24,000 acres. A so-called agricultural oasis flanked by the Columbia and the polluted Multnomah Channel, and about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Portland. To preserve the island’s natural wilderness, the state had set aside twelve thousand acres as the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It was there, far from the farmhouses that made the island seem like a slice of Iowa, that the dead girl was found. Susan had never liked the place. There were too many open spaces.

The road turned to gravel. “Yes,” Archie said into his phone. “When?…Where?…Yes.” It didn’t make for sensational note taking. “No…We don’t know yet… I’ll find out.” The gravel made for excruciatingly slow going and the steady spray of grit on the car was punctuated only by the occasional small rock that bounced off the windshield. Archie was still on the phone. “Are you there now?…About five minutes.” Every time he hung the thing up, it rang. Susan let her gaze fall on the roadside, a thick wall of blackberry bushes, backed by river oaks. It blinked by like a zoetrope. Finally, Susan could see a cluster of police cruisers, an old pickup, and an ambulance already parked along the side of the road up ahead. A Sheriff ’s Department vehicle was blocking the road, and a young state cop was stopping traffic. Susan craned her head to see more, her notebook open on her lap. Henry pulled to a stop and flashed a badge at the cop. The cop nodded and waved them through.

Henry pulled the car next to a police cruiser and with one fluid motion he and Archie were out of the vehicle, leaving Susan to scurry after them, wishing that she had worn more practical shoes. She reached into her purse and dug out some lipstick. Nothing dramatic. Just a little natural color. She put some on as she walked and immediately felt like a jerk for it. Beyond the police cruiser, a bearded young man in a terry-cloth robe stood with a patrol cop. He was barefoot. Susan smiled. He flashed her a peace sign.

The path to the beach had been trampled over time through a natural part in the brambles and it cut diagonally through the tall dead grass down to the sand below. The sand was loose, and Archie had to secure his footing with each step. All bone chips and charcoal. Ahead lay the Columbia, still and brown, and, on the other side, Washington State. He could see a group of state patrol cops standing about a quarter mile down the beach on the clay flats.

Claire Masland was waiting for them on the beach. She was wearing jeans and a solid red T-shirt, and had taken off her waterproof North Face jacket and tied it around her waist. Archie had never asked her, but he imagined that she hiked and camped. Maybe even skied. Hell, she probably snowshoed. Her badge was clipped to her waistband. Sweat stains had formed at her armpits. She matched their stride as they continued toward the body.

“A nudist found her at about ten,” she said. “He had to get back to his vehicle and then home to phone us, so we didn’t get the call until ten twenty-eight.”

“She look like the others?”

“Identical.”

Archie’s mind was racing. It didn’t make sense. The acceleration was too rapid. He liked to hold on to them. Why didn’t he want to keep this one longer? Did he think he needed to dump her? “He’s scared,” Archie concluded. “We’ve scared him.”

“So he watches the evening news,” Henry said.

They’d spooked him. They’d spooked him into dumping the body. So now what? He would take another one. He’d have to take another one. Acid rose in Archie’s throat. He reached into his pocket, fished out an antacid tablet, and chewed it fretfully. They’d rushed him. And now he’d have to kill another girl.

“Who’s here?” Archie asked.

“Greg. Josh. Martin. Anne’s running about ten minutes behind you.”

“Good,” Archie said. “I want to talk to her.”

He stopped short and the group stopped with him. They were about fifteen yards from the crime scene. He listened.

“What is it?” asked Claire.

“News helicopters,” said Archie, looking up, face pained, as two helicopters cleared the tree line. “Better get a tent up.” Claire nodded and hurried back toward the road. Archie turned to Susan. She was writing in her notebook, flipping pages frequently as she filled them with large cursive observations. Archie could sense her excitement and he remembered the feeling when he and Henry had responded to that first Beauty Killer case. It wasn’t like that anymore.

“Susan,” he said. She was working furiously to finish a thought in her notebook and made a motion with her finger that she would be with him in a second.

“Look at me,” Archie said. She looked up, her green eyes large. He felt, suddenly, very protective of this strange pink-haired girl who pretended to be so much tougher than he thought she was, and, at the same time, ridiculous for the presumption. He held her eye contact for a moment, until she focused on him. “Whatever you think that’s going to be up there,” he said, gesturing to where Kristy Mathers lay naked in the mud, “it’s going to be worse.”

Susan nodded. “I know.”

“Have you ever been around a corpse?” Archie asked.

She nodded some more. “My dad. He died when I was a kid. Of cancer.”

“It’s going to be different than that,” Archie said gently.

“I can handle it.” She lifted her head and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?” she asked. “Clorox?”

Archie and Henry exchanged a look. Then Henry pulled two pairs of latex gloves out of the pocket of his coat and handed a pair to Archie. Archie looked out once more at the calm river glinting in the late-morning sun, took a deep breath through his mouth, and exhaled.

“Don’t breath through your nose,” he said to Susan. “And don’t get in my way.”

Squatting there beside Kristy’s body, Archie felt absolutely lucid. His head cleared. His gut relaxed. His concentration focused. He realized that he’d actually gone a few minutes without thinking about Gretchen Lowell. He had missed this.

She had been strangled and then soaked in bleach, like the others. She lay five feet from the water’s edge, on her back, head to the side, one plump arm tucked behind her torso, skin and hair coated with sand, as if she had been rolled a few feet. The other arm was delicately bent at the elbow, her curled hand resting just below her chin, chewed nails still flecked with glittery polish. That arm made her look almost human. Archie continued, taking in every detail, working his way from her head to her toes. One leg was slightly bent, the other straight, tangled in river weed. He noted the blood at her nose and mouth, and grotesquely swollen tongue, and the same horizontal mark low on the neck, indicating the use of a ligature they thought was a belt. The underside of her neck and shoulder showed the purplish stain of livor mortis, where her blood had settled after she died. A greenish red coloration had started to bloom around her abdomen; her mouth, nose, vagina, and ears were black. The bleach had slowed down the decomposition by killing some of the bacteria that caused distention and rupture of the soft tissues, so he could still see something of Kristy in the corpse. Something recognizable in the cheek and profile. But the bleach had not deterred the bugs. Tiny insects batted at her mouth and eyes and swarmed over her genitals. Crabs scrambled through her hair. Dark jelly was all that remained of one eye socket, the skin on her forehead and cheek torn from where a bird had stood, hooking its claws in the meat for leverage. Archie looked up, to see a gull standing watchfully a few feet beyond the body. It met Archie’s stare and took a few impatient steps before flapping back to a safer vantage.

Henry cleared his throat. “He dumped her on the beach,” he theorized, “not in the water.”

Archie nodded.

“How do you know?” Susan asked.

Archie looked up at Susan. Her face was pale, all lipstick and freckles, but she was holding together better than he had that first time. “She’d still be out there,” he said.

“Corpses sink,” Henry explained. “They surface three days to a week later because of gases released in the body. It’s only been two days since she disappeared.”

Archie looked up and down the beach. The helicopters circled overhead. He thought he caught the flash reflection of a telephoto lens. “He must have dumped her out here last night, while it was still raining. Early enough that the rain and tide would wash away any trace evidence he’d left on the hike.”

“He wanted us to find her,” Henry said.

“Why is she like that?” Susan asked, her voice quavering for the first time.

Archie looked down at the body, her brown hair now a shade of pale orange, her skin burned. All identical to the crime photographs of Lee Robinson and Dana Stamp. “He bleaches them,” he said quietly. “He kills them. He sexually assaults them. And he soaks them in a tub of bleach until he decides to dump them.” He could taste it in his mouth; the eye-watering burn of the bleach blended with the putrefaction of flesh and muscle.

He saw Susan waver, just a small adjustment in her stance, a catch. “You haven’t released that.”

Archie gave her a tired smile. “I just did.”

“So he kills them right away,” Susan said almost to herself. “Once anyone knows they’re missing, they’re already dead.”

“Yep.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You let everyone keep on hoping. Even though you knew she was dead.” Then she bit her lip and wrote something in the notebook. “What a sick fuck,” she said under her breath.

Archie wasn’t sure if she was referring to the killer, or to him. It didn’t really matter. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said.

“If he did dump her here,” Henry said to Archie, “he must have parked where we did. Used the same path. He couldn’t have carried her from any other point. Unless he waded in from a boat.”

“Go door-to-door. See if anyone drove by, noticed a vehicle. Including a boat. Also have the Hardy Boys canvass the area for condoms. He may not have been able to resist.”

“You want them to search a nude beach for condoms?” asked Henry dubiously. “And maybe while they’re at it, they could search a few college dorms for bongs.”

Archie smiled. “Send anything you find to the lab. Then run the DNA through CODUS. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Archie tucked another Vicodin in his mouth.

“Another Zantac?” Henry asked.

Archie looked away. “Aspirin.”