Heartsick

CHAPTER 21

Susan woke up, shrugged on her old kimono, took the elevator downstairs, and systematically dug through the pile of Herald s on the granite floor of the lobby until she found the one with her name on it. She waited until she was back upstairs in her apartment before she pulled the newspaper out of its plastic bag. She always felt butterflies when she looked for a story she had written. It was a mix of anticipation and fear, pride and embarrassment. Most of the time, she didn’t even like to read her work once it appeared in print. But the hot janitor’s SmackDown had fanned the flame of her familiar self-doubt. The truth was, sometimes she did feel like a fraud. And sometimes she did feel like she exploited her subjects. She had pissed the hell out of a city councilman she had profiled and described as “balding and gnomelike.” (He was.) But this was different.

The task force story was the first byline she had ever had on the front page. She sat down on her bed, and with a heavy, nervous breath, she unfolded the Herald, half-expecting the story to have been killed, but there it was, below the fold, with a jump to the Metro section. The front page. A-1. An aerial photograph of the crime scene on Sauvie Island accompanied the story. With a startled laugh, she recognized herself, a small figure in the photo, and next to her, among the other detectives, Archie Sheridan. Screw the janitor. She was delighted.

She found herself wishing she had someone with whom she could share her little journalistic triumph. Bliss had canceled her subscription to the Herald years ago, after the paper’s owners had controversially clear-cut some old-growth forest. She would have bought a copy of the paper. If she’d known. But Susan hadn’t told her about the series. And wouldn’t. Susan traced the newspaper image of Archie Sheridan with her fingers and found herself wondering if he had seen it yet. The thought made her feel self-conscious and she shook it loose.

She got up and brewed herself a pot of coffee and then sat back down and flipped through the paper to find the Metro section, where the story jumped, and an envelope fell on the rug. At first, she thought it was a pack of coupons or some other silly promotion the paper had agreed to in exchange for advertising dollars. Then she saw that her name was on it. Typed. Not typed on a label. Typed on the envelope itself. “Susan Ward.” Who typed an envelope? She picked it up.

It was a regular white business-size envelope. She turned it over a few times in her hands and then opened it. A piece of white copy paper was folded neatly inside. There was one line typed in the center of the page: “Justin Johnson: 031038299.”

Who the fuck was Justin Johnson?

Seriously. Who was he? And why, if she didn’t know that, would someone slip her a secret note with his name and a bunch of numbers?

Susan was aware of her heart suddenly racing. She wrote the digits down on the edge of the newspaper in the hope that the act of writing them down would help her make sense of them. There were nine of them. It wasn’t a phone number. Could a Social Security number begin with zero? She looked at it for a while longer and then she picked up the phone and called Quentin Parker’s direct line at the Herald.

“Parker,” he barked.

“It’s Susan. I’m going to read you some numbers and I want you to tell me what you think they are.” She read the numbers.

“Court-case file number,” Parker said immediately. “The first two numbers are the year-2003.”

Susan told Parker the story of the mysterious envelope.

“Looks like someone’s got herself an anonymous source,” Parker teased. “Let me call my guy at the courthouse and see what I can find out about your file.”

Her laptop was sitting on the coffee table. She opened it up and Googled “Justin Johnson.” Over 150,000 links came up. She Googled “Justin Johnson, Portland.” This time, only eleven hundred. She started scrolling through them.

The phone rang. Susan picked it up.

“It’s a juvie record,” Parker said. “Sealed. Sorry.”

“A juvie record,” Susan said. “What kind of crime?”

“Sealed. As in ‘cannot be opened.’”

“Right.” She hung up and looked at the name and numbers some more. Drank some coffee. Looked at the name. A juvie record. Why would someone want her to know about Justin Johnson’s juvie record? Could it have something to do with the After School Strangler? Should she call Archie? About what? Some weird envelope she’d found in her newspaper? It could be about anything. It could be a prank. She didn’t even know any Justins. Then she remembered the student pot dealer in the Cleveland High parking lot. His vanity plate had read JAY2. The letter J squared? It was worth checking out. She dialed the number for the Cleveland High administration office.

“Hi,” Susan said. “This is Mrs. Johnson. We’ve been having some truancy issues and I was wondering if you could tell me if my son Justin had made it to school today?”

The student office volunteer told Susan to hang on a minute and then came back on the line. “Mrs. Johnson?” she said. “Yeah. No worries. Justin’s here today.”

Well, what do you know? Justin Johnson went to Cleveland High. And he had a criminal record.

She punched in Archie’s cell phone number. He answered on the second ring. “This is going to sound weird,” she said, and she relayed the story of the parking lot and the envelope.

“He’s alibied,” Archie said.

“You know this off the top of your head?”

“We looked into him,” Archie said. “He was in detention. All three days in question. He’s accounted for.”

“Don’t you want the case number?”

“I know about his record,” Archie said.

“You do?”

“Susan, I’m a cop.”

She couldn’t resist. “Did you see my story?”

“I liked it very much.”

Susan hung up and squirmed with pleasure. He had liked her story. She set the envelope on a stack of mail on the coffee table. It was just before 10:00 A.M. Justin Johnson would be out of school in about five and a half more hours. And she would be waiting for him. In the meantime, she was much more interested in Archie Sheridan. She poured herself some more coffee and called Debbie Sheridan back on her landline. It was Friday, but Archie had said that his ex-wife worked at home on Fridays. Sure enough, Debbie picked up.

“Hi,” Susan said. “It’s Susan Ward again. You said to call back?”

“Oh, hi,” Debbie said.

“Is this a better time? I’d still really love to get together to talk.”

There was a brief pause. Then Debbie sighed. “Can you come now? The kids are at school.”

Susan beamed. “That sounds great. Where do you live?”

She got directions, pulled on skinny jeans, a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt, and red ankle boots, grabbed her black pea coat, and took the elevator downstairs. It was a gorgeous elevator, all steel and glass. Susan watched as the numbers blinked from 6 down to the subterranean garage, and then at the last moment, she had an idea and she hit L. The doors slid open and she stepped out into the lobby and walked into the building’s chic administrative and sales office. Good. Monica was working.

Susan put on her best sorority-girl face (it was pretty good, even with the pink hair) and approached the bamboo counter, where Monica sat frowning over a fashion magazine.

“Hi,” Susan said, stretching the word out to four syllables.

Monica looked up. She was a committed platinum blonde. No roots. Ever. With the kind of automatic smile that becomes meaningless by definition. Susan wasn’t sure what exactly she did besides read magazines. She seemed to function as bait for the building’s sales team. Like pumping a cookie-baking smell into a model home. Susan guessed she was in her mid-twenties, but with the amount of makeup she wore, it was hard to tell. Susan knew that Monica didn’t know quite how to process her. The pink hair obviously confused the hell out of her. It must have appeared, to Monica, that Susan had engaged in some sort of self-mutilation. But this seemed to make her all the more determined to be nice.

“Listen,” Susan said. “I’ve got a secret admirer.”

Monica perked up. “No way!”

“Totally. And he left me a love note in my newspaper this morning.”

“Oh my God!”

“I know! So I was wondering if you could run through this morning’s security video of the lobby so I can see who he is.”

Monica clapped her hands excitedly and rolled her faux zebra-skin task chair over to a gleaming white monitor. This was the kind of project that gave her job meaning. She picked up a matching remote, and the black-and-white image on the screen began to jump back in time. They watched for a few minutes as people walked backward into elevators, until the lobby was quiet, the newspapers in their little stack below the mailboxes. Then a man walked backward into the building and bent down over the newspapers.

“There,” said Susan.

They rewound the tape a bit more and watched as a woman carrying a travel mug walked out of the elevator, through the lobby, and out the front door. As she exited, a man in a dark suit walked into the building, over to the newspapers, rooted through them, and clearly deposited something inside. He’d been waiting out front and caught the door as the woman had gone out.

“He’s cute!” squealed Monica.

“How can you tell?” asked Susan, disappointed. “You can’t see his face.”

“He’s got a nice suit on. I bet he’s a lawyer. A rich one.”

“Can you print this image for me?”

“Totally,” Monica gushed. She hit a button and rolled over to the white printer and waited while the image spit out, then handed the printout to Susan. Susan examined it. Totally unidentifiable. Still, she’d show it to Justin Johnson and see if it sparked a discussion. She folded it up and slipped it into her purse.

“Thanks,” Susan said, already half-turned to go.

“You know,” Monica said, her face a picture of helpfulness, “you should dye your hair blond. You would look so much prettier.”

Susan looked at Monica for a minute. Monica looked back obliviously. “I was thinking about it,” Susan said. “But then I heard that story on the news about platinum hair dye causing cancer in lab kittens.”

“Lab kittens?” Monica said, eyes wide.

Susan shrugged. “Gotta run.”