Heartsick

CHAPTER 20

Susan sat at the Great Writer’s blue desk near the window, watching the pedestrian lunchtime traffic go in and out of the Whole Foods that was catty-corner to her building. The first story was written and sent. She hated this part. She hated waiting for the affirmation from Ian, but she craved it. She hit REFRESH on her E-mail display. Nothing. She was filled with a sudden overwhelming certainty that he hated it. He abhorred her pathetic attempt at literary journalism. She had blown her one shot to write something big. They would probably fire her. She couldn’t even bring herself to reread it-sure that she would see every typo, every passive voice, every lame excuse for a sentence. She hit REFRESH again. Nothing. Catching the time on the monitor, she scrambled to the Great Writer’s velvet sofa, curled up, and turned on the midday news. Archie Sheridan’s face filled the screen and a crawl announced that this was a special report. He looked tired. Or was the word weary? But he had shaved and brushed his dark hair and his lined, hangdog face held a certain authority. She longed to feel that in control.

She watched Archie grimly confirm the death of Kristy Mathers, and then the screen switched back to a pair of daytime local news anchors who bantered in trepidation about the human monster at large and then segued right into a special report on the sudden dearth of rain in the Willamette Valley. The press conference had been at ten o’clock, which meant that it had been over for almost two hours. She wondered what Archie Sheridan was doing now.

The phone rang, and Susan nearly tripped trying to get to it before the third ring, when the voice mail would pick up. She saw the caller ID and knew immediately who it was.

“I love it,” Ian said without introduction.

Susan felt the morning’s tension bleed from her shoulders in an instant. “Really?”

“It’s great. That juxtaposition of walking in the dead girl’s steps at Cleveland and then finding Kristy Mathers’s body-it’s exactly what we wanted, babe. There’s not much about Sheridan in here. You’ve hooked us: Now I want Sheridan dismembered, so we can see his beating heart.”

“That’s for next week,” Susan said happily, pouring herself a cup of cold coffee and putting it in the microwave. “Leave the assholes wanting more, right?”

“The assholes?”

Susan laughed. “The readers.”

“Oh,” said Ian. “Right.”

Susan dressed for the day in cowboy boots, jeans, a Pixies T-shirt, and a red velvet blazer. She put a reporter’s notebook in the front right pocket of the blazer and two blue Bic ballpoints in the left. She even blow-dried her pink hair and put on makeup.

When she was ready to go, she opened her notebook to a poorly scrawled list of names and telephone numbers that Archie Sheridan had given her. She paused, wondering for a moment what he would think of that first story when it ran, then quashed her anxiety. He was a subject. She was a writer. One story down. Three to go. She dialed the phone.

“Hi,” Susan said brightly. “Is this Debbie Sheridan?”

There was a slight hesitation. “Yes?”

“I’m Susan Ward. With the Herald? Did your husband tell you I might be calling?”

“He mentioned something.”

She didn’t correct the husband thing, thought Susan. She didn’t say, You mean my ex-husband. We’re divorced. I’d have the marriage annulled if I could, the son of a bitch. Susan wrote the word husband in her notebook, followed by a question mark.

She forced a big smile, hoping that Debbie could hear it in her voice. It was an old phone interview trick that Parker had taught her. “Well, I’m writing a profile about him, and I was hoping to ask you a few questions. Just to flesh him out a bit. Give the piece some personality.”

“Can you-can you call me back later?” Debbie asked.

“Sorry. You’re at work, aren’t you? Is there a better time I can call you back?”

There was a pause. “No. I just need to think about it.”

“You mean talk to Archie? Because I asked him, and he said he didn’t mind if I spoke to you.”

“No. No. I just don’t like going over all those memories. Let me give it some thought.” Debbie’s voice warmed. “Call me later, okay?”

“Okay,” Susan agreed ruefully.

She hung up, and immediately dialed the next number on the list before she lost her nerve. Archie’s doctor was unavailable, so Susan left her name and cell phone number with his receptionist.

She heaved a deep sigh, sank back down at the Great Writer’s desk and Googled Gretchen Lowell. Over eighty thousand links came up. She spent a half hour skimming through the interesting ones. It was astonishing how many Web sites were dedicated to the exploits of serial killers.

Susan was staring at an on-line case study recounting the Beauty Killer case investigation when something caught her eye. Gretchen Lowell called 911 to turn herself in and call for an ambulance.

Susan picked up the phone and dialed Ian on his cell.

“I’m in a news meeting,” he answered.

“How do I get a nine-one-one tape?” Susan asked.

“Which one?”

“Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said. “Have you heard it?”

“They didn’t release it. We ran a transcript.”

“I want the actual call. Can I get it?”

Ian made a clucking sound. “Let me try.”

Susan hung up and Googled “Oregon State Penitentiary.” She copied the address of the prison on a piece of paper beside her computer and then opened a Word document. “Dear Ms. Lowell,” she wrote. “I am writing a profile about Detective Archie Sheridan, and I am hoping to ask you a couple of questions.” She worked on the letter for almost twenty minutes. When she was done, she placed it in an envelope, stamped it, and wrote out the address.

She paid a few bills and then drove to the post office and mailed them, along with the letter to the Beauty Killer. Then she drove to Cleveland High School. She wanted to open the next story with some personal anecdote, a memory of her own days at Cleveland. And she thought that going there might bring back some details she could incorporate. But the truth was that she had been avoiding it.

The final bell had just rung and the wide main hallway was thronged with students, cramming items from their lockers into their backpacks, standing in tight groups, making out against the wall, slugging back soft drinks, talking loudly, and hurtling their way out of the building into the light. They moved with the loose-limbed ease of teenagers in their natural setting, something that Susan did not recall ever actually experiencing. The difference between the freshmen and seniors was staggering. The freshmen seemed so young. Which was funny to Susan, because at fourteen she had considered herself very much an adult.

A few of the kids sent sideways glances Susan’s way as she passed. But most didn’t even blink. In their world, pink hair was pretty ordinary. Susan took a few notes for her story, recording details and impressions of the school. Atmosphere.

When she reached the dark brown double doors that led into the theater, she paused for a moment, hand on the door, overcome by a flood of teenage memories. She had left high school behind so long ago; it was amazing to her what mixed emotions the place now conjured. She ran a hand through her hair, put on her best grown-up face, and walked through the doors.

It smelled the same. Like paint and sawdust and orange-scented carpet cleaner.

The theater sat 250 in red vinyl seats that terraced up from a small black stage. The stage lights were on, and a partially built set constructed out of plywood and canvas gave the vague impression of a turn-of-the-century parlor. She recognized the same old Queen Anne sofa that they had used in “Arsenic and Old Lace” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” The sconces from “Murder at the Vicarage.” And the same staircase. Always the same staircase. It just switched sides.

She had hated high school, but she had loved this place. It floored her now to think of all the time she’d spent there, hours after school in rehearsal for play after play. It had been her whole world, especially after her father had died.

There wasn’t anyone in the auditorium today. The emptiness of the place made her feel a splinter of sadness. She walked to the last row of chairs and knelt down to examine the underside of the second chair in from the aisle. There, scratched in the metal, were her initials: S.W. After all these years, her name was still carved into this place. She felt a sudden wash of self-consciousness and stood up. She didn’t want someone walking in, finding her there. She didn’t want any old reunions. It was a mistake to have even come to Cleveland. The story was about Archie, not her. She took one last look around, and then turned and fled back into the hallway.

A voice called, “Ms. Ward.” She recognized it immediately. It was the voice that had launched a thousand detentions.

“Mr. McCallum,” she said.

He looked the same. He was a short barrel of a man, with an enormous mustache and a ring of keys that pulled down one side of his pants, requiring constant adjustment. “Walk with us,” he said. “I’m just escorting Mr. Schmidt to detention.” Susan then noticed the teenage boy walking behind McCallum. He smiled at her shyly, a painful trail of acne making its way up his neck.

Susan hurried along behind. The jostling kids in the hall parted for McCallum, who didn’t break stride.

“I see your byline,” he said to Susan.

Susan cringed. “Oh?” she said.

“Are you here about Lee Robinson?”

Susan brightened and opened her notebook. “Did you know her?”

“Never laid eyes on her,” McCallum said.

Susan turned hopefully to the kid. “You?”

The kid shrugged. “Not really. I mean, I knew who she was.”

McCallum whipped around. “What did I tell you, Mr. Schmidt?”

The kid reddened. “Not a word?”

“I don’t want to see your mouth open or hear words come out of your face until sixth period tomorrow,” McCallum said. He turned to Susan. “Mr. Schmidt has a talking problem.”

Susan was about to fall prey to her own talking problem, when she was distracted by a glass display case in the hallway. “Look,” Susan said, pressing a finger against the glass. “All the Knowledge Bowl trophies.”

McCallum nodded proudly, his chin and neck converging into one. “We won state last year. So they were forced to move a few football trophies to make room in the display case.”

The case was full of trophies, the largest a wide silver bowl with the name of the school and the year engraved in fancy calligraphy. “I really loved Knowledge Bowl,” she said quietly.

“You quit the team,” McCallum pointed out.

Susan swallowed a ball of sorrow in her throat. “I had a lot going on.”

“It’s difficult to lose a parent so young.”

She laid her hand flat on the glass. The trophies were polished to a shine and her distorted reflection stared back at her a dozen times. When she lifted her hand, a faint greasy palm print marked where it had been. “Yeah.”

“That’s harsh,” the kid said.

McCallum looked at the kid and raised a finger to his lips. “Not a word,” he said.

The physics teacher spun back to Susan and jabbed a thumb at a brown door across the hall. “This is us,” he said. He held out a thick, hairy hand. Susan took it. “Ms. Ward,” he said. “I wish you the best in your future endeavors.”

“Thanks, Mr. McCallum,” Susan said.

McCallum walked the kid over to the door and opened it for him. The kid waved limply at Susan as he was led inside.

“Sorry about bailing on Knowledge Bowl,” she called after them, but the door had already shut.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Susan stood with her hands on her hips, examining her old Saab. It had been booted. The metal device was firmly affixed to her left front wheel. She squeezed her eyes shut and emitted a low growl. She had parked in a reserved teacher spot, sure. But it was after school. And she’d been fifteen minutes. She shuffled around for a few minutes, collecting herself.

“Booted, huh?”

Startled, Susan looked up to see a kid leaning against the hood of a boxy orange BMW parked a few spaces behind her. The kid was nice-looking: a mop of longish hair, clear skin, tall. But the car was beautiful, one of those old 2002 models from the 1970s. It was shiny tangerine, unmarred; the chrome details twinkled elegantly. The vanity plate read JAY2.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he said. “From my dad. To make up for leaving my mom for the real estate lady.”

“Did it help?”

“It helped him.” He nodded at her car. “You have to go inside to the admin office. Pay a fine. Then they’ll call one of the custodians to unboot your car for you. You better hurry. There’s a basketball game, so the office is closing early.” He pushed away from the car and took a few steps toward her. Looked at the ground. Then up at her again. Squinted. “Listen. You wanna buy some weed?”

Susan took a small step back and glanced around to see if anyone was within earshot. There were cops everywhere. Two patrol cars were parked on either side of the school. Plus, Susan had noticed a man sitting in a sedan in front of the school, not thirty feet from where she now stood. Was he a cop? A dad waiting to pick up a kid? This was exactly how innocent reporters got themselves arrested. “I’m a grown-up,” she whispered loudly.

His eyes traveled up to her pink hair, then down at her Pixies T-shirt, the cowboy boots, the beat-up car behind her. “You sure? It’s from B.C.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. Then, more definitively: “Yes.” She looked back at the boot on her car. Why did these things always have to happen to her? “The admin office?” she said.

The kid nodded.

“Thanks.” She turned and marched toward the building, passing the man in the sedan, who had produced a Herald and was suddenly studying it. Definitely a cop, Susan decided. She climbed the wide front stairs, pushed open one of the front doors, turned down the hall, and found the admin office. But the door was locked. “Seriously?” she demanded aloud. “Seriously?” She slammed the door with the flat of her hand. The impact made a dull, loud thwap. Susan cried out and pulled her stinging hand to her chest.

“Can I help you?”

She spun around to face a custodian who was wheeling an enormous green plastic garbage bin through the hall.

“You can take the fucking boot off my car,” she said. The custodian had slick dark hair, a goatee, and what they used to call a “matinee idol” profile. The Cleveland custodians hadn’t looked like that when Susan had gone there. In fact, he was almost handsome enough to distract Susan from her frustration. Almost.

His dark eyes widened. “That’s your Saab in the teachers’ parking lot?”

“Yeah,” Susan said.

“Sorry,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “I assumed that it belonged to a student.”

“Because it’s crappy.”

He grinned. “That, and the Blink 182 bumper sticker.”

Susan looked at the floor. “That was on there when I bought it.” “Anyway, we have a zero-tolerance policy on the teachers’ spaces. Otherwise, the students would all park there.” He was still grinning at her. “But I guess I can cut you loose.” He pulled out the biggest ring of keys that Susan had ever seen. “Come on,” he said, and he started down the hall toward the front door of the building, leaving the garbage bin pushed against the wall. He stopped in front of the Knowledge Bowl trophy case and pulled a white rag out of his pocket and rubbed it on the glass. She caught a glimpse of a colorful tattoo on his arm: the Virgin Mary. He smiled at her and shook his head. “Handprint. It’s like cleaning up after toddlers sometimes.”

Susan busied her hand in her hair, on the off chance that he might be able to match her palm to the greasy print, and then hurried to catch up with him. “So, do you like being a custodian?” she asked, wincing even as the question left her mouth.

“I love it,” he deadpanned. “Though it’s just something to do while I work my way through my doctorate in French literature.”

“Really?” Susan said brightly.

He opened the front door and let her pass through. “No.”

A cold wind was picking up, and Susan struggled to jam her hands into the tiny pockets of her velvet blazer. “Did you know Lee Robinson?”

He seemed to bristle. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m doing a story for the Herald. Did you know her?”

“I cleaned her vomit up once in the nurse’s office.”

“Seriously?” Susan asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “And once she brought me a Hallmark card on National Janitor Appreciation Day.”

“Really?”

They’d reached the parking lot. The kid and the orange Beemer were gone. The guy in the sedan was gone, too.

The hot janitor knelt down next to her car. “No.”

“You’re funny.”

“Thanks.” He bent over the boot, unlocked it, and in a swift, almost violent motion pulled it off the front wheel. Then he stood, holding the heavy boot under one arm, and waited.

Susan fidgeted self-consciously with her purse. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, his eyes turning cold. “I’ll let you off free and clear if you agree not to exploit a dead kid for a newspaper story.”

Susan felt like she’d been slapped in the face. She was speechless. He just stood there looking handsome in his coveralls. “It’s not really exploitation,” she stammered. She wanted to defend herself. To explain the importance of what she was doing. The public right to know. The beauty of shared humanity. The role of the witness. But suddenly, she had to admit that it all seemed pretty lame.

He pulled a ticket out of one of his many pockets and held it out to her. She took it and flipped the ticket over in her hand. Fifty dollars! And it would probably go to the fucking football team or something.

She wanted to say something clever. Something that would make her feel less like a bottom-feeder. But before she could, she heard the distant music of Kiss. She stopped and listened. It was the Kiss song “Calling Dr. Love.” She saw a flash of embarrassment cross the janitor’s face as he fumbled in his pants pocket. It was his cell phone ring.

And he thought she was a teenager.

He pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the caller ID. “Better take this,” he said to Susan. “It’s my boss, calling to fire me.”

Then he lifted the phone to his ear and walked away.

Susan watched him go, puzzled, and then got into her car. The Kiss song rattled in her head: “Even though I’m full of sin/ In the end you’ll let me in…”

As she pulled her car out of the parking lot, she had an idle thought: Janitors probably had a lot of access to bleach.

“What do they have in common?” Archie asked Henry.

They were walking along the Sauvie Island beach where Kristy Mathers had been found. It was Archie’s default. No clues? No clear avenues of exploration? Return to the scene of the crime. He had probably spent whole years of his life walking in Gretchen Lowell’s steps. It got him in the right headspace, and there was always a chance they’d find a clue. He needed a clue.

The river lapped at the beach, where a squiggle of foam and muck marked the tide line. A freighter with Asian characters on the side slid by in the distance. Above the Asian characters was the translation: Sunshine Success. No one was on the beach. It was dusk and the light was low, though the winter sky in the Northwest had a way of holding light, so that no matter what time of night it was, it always looked like the sun had just set. Still, it would soon be too dark to be out there. Archie held a flashlight so they could find their way back to the car.

“They look alike,” said Henry.

“Is it that simple? He stalks the schools? Picks girls out that fit a type?” After Archie and Henry had left Jefferson, they had spent the morning interviewing teachers and staff members at Cleveland who fit the profile. There were ten in all. It had yielded nothing. Claire had tracked down Evan Kent’s roommate, who had confirmed his story about the jump-started Dart. But he put it earlier, more like 5:30. Which left him enough time to get north to Jefferson.

“They’re all sophomores.”

“So what do sophomores have in common?” Archie asked. Seven of the Cleveland staffers had alibis. Four didn’t. He had gone over the alibis again and they had held up. That left three suspects in play at Cleveland: a school bus driver, a physics teacher, and a math teacher/volleyball coach. Plus Kent who worked at both Cleveland and Jefferson. Plus about ten thousand other perverts loose in the city. They would watch Kent, and check out the other three. The ten thousand perverts were on their own.

“They were all freshmen last year?” Henry guessed.

Archie stopped walking. Could it be that simple? He snapped his fingers. “You’re right,” he said.

Henry scratched his bald head. This time of day, it started to get a little gray stubble. “I was kidding.”

“Tell me we checked to see if they all transferred from the same freshman class.”

“All three went to their respective schools the year before,” Henry said.

“Is there a test they all take freshman year?” Archie asked.

“You want me to see if some deranged proctor is killing them?”

Archie fished an antacid out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It tasted like citrus-flavored chalk. “I don’t know,” he said. He forced himself to chew the tablet and swallow it. He turned on the flashlight, holding it at an oblique angle against the sand. Several tiny crabs scrambled from the light. “I just want to catch the motherfucker.” Archie liked to use a flashlight to go over a crime scene, even in broad daylight. It shrank his focus, made him look at things one square inch at a time. “Throw more surveillance at the schools. I don’t care if we have to drive every kid home.”

Henry hooked his thumbs behind his turquoise belt buckle, leaned back, and looked up at the dark sky. “Should we head back?” he asked hopefully.

“You have someone waiting for you at home?” Archie asked.

“Hey,” Henry said. “My depressing apartment is nicer than yours.”

“Touché,” Archie said. “Remind me how many times you’ve been married?”

Henry grinned. “Three. Four if you count the one that was annulled, and five if you count the one that was just legal on the reservation.”

“Yeah, I think it’s better to keep you busy,” Archie said. He swung the flashlight beam around, watching the crabs scatter. “Besides, we haven’t searched the crime scene yet.”

“The crime-scene investigators have already done that,” Henry said.

“So we’ll see if they’ve missed anything.”

“It’s dark.”

Archie shined the beam under his chin. He looked like a horror-show ghoul. “That’s why we have a flashlight.”