Heartsick

CHAPTER 23

See something?” Anne asked.

She watched as Claire Masland stood on the cement walkway of the Eastbank Esplanade overlooking the Willamette, where Dana Stamp had been found. Claire had a Greek fisherman’s cap pulled low over her short hair and she was gazing across the river to the west side of the city, where Waterfront Park formed a band of green around the mélange of new and historic buildings that made up the downtown corridor.

“No,” Claire said. “Just smelling the river. Sewage has a special aroma, doesn’t it?”

Anne had asked Claire to take her to the sites where they had found the bodies. It was something that she had picked up from Archie when they worked the Beauty Killer case. Walk the scene of the crime. They had been to Ross Island and Sauvie Island and now it was late morning and Anne’s boots were wet and her feet were cold and it looked like it might rain. She sighed and pulled her leather coat tighter around her torso. A jogger ran past, not giving the two women a second glance. Below them, two enormous dirty seagulls paddled in circles in the muddy brown water.

“What do these sites have in common?” Anne mused aloud.

Claire sighed. “They’re all on the Willamette, Anne. He’s got a boat. We know that.”

“It’s not convenient. Ross Island. The Esplanade. Sauvie Island. He’s working his way north. But why? Killers dispose of bodies in places they feel safe. Ross Island and Sauvie Island may be off the beaten path at night, but this place isn’t.” She squinted behind her at the freeway overpass that squeezed above the Esplanade and up at the old-fashioned streetlights that illuminated the Esplanade at night. The sound of the traffic was deafening.

“You can’t see the riverbank from here,” Claire said. “If he was on a small boat, he would have been obscured from anyone walking by. So no one on this side could see him dump the body. And he’d be too far away for anyone to make out what he was doing from the other side.”

“But why risk it?” Anne asked. “If you’ve got a boat. Why not dump the body somewhere safe like the other two locations?”

Claire shrugged. “He wanted her to be found sooner than Lee Robinson?”

“Maybe. It just doesn’t make sense. This guy’s an organized killer. Maybe the first site is random, but after that, there’d be some method to it. Disposing of a body out in the open like this? It’s risky. You don’t do it unless you’re familiar enough with the area that you think you can get away with it. There’s some kind of method to it.” One of the seagulls suddenly squawked and flew off toward the Steel Bridge. The other one stared up at Anne with its beady little eyes.

“How long do we have, do you think?” Claire asked.

“Before he takes another girl? A week. Two if we’re lucky.” Anne buttoned her coat, feeling a sudden chill. “Could be sooner.”

Archie had read Susan’s article the moment he got up. It wasn’t a bad article. It evoked a certain outsider’s perspective of the investigation. The photo was good. But despite what he had told her over the phone, it was not what he had needed. Justin Johnson? That was interesting. He’d been busted, as a thirteen-year-old, for selling pot to an undercover cop. A pound of pot. And had gotten off on probation, which was interesting in and of itself. So they had checked him out. But his alibi was rock-solid, so the note concerned Archie less than the person who had left it. Someone was trying to manipulate Susan’s story or the investigation. Someone with access to the kid’s juvie record. Archie made a call and asked a patrol to make a few extra passes past Susan’s place for the next couple of nights. It was probably overreacting, but it made him feel better. Now he sat at his desk in the task force offices, surrounded by photographs of murdered girls, barely aware of the bustle around him. His team was exhausted and growing demoralized. There were no new leads. Kent had been fired for lying about his record on his application and, according to the cops tailing him, had spent the last twenty-four hours playing his guitar. The Jefferson checkpoint had turned up nothing else. They had been unable to find any out-of-state rapes that fit their MO, and so far none of the Sauvie Island condoms had matched the DNA of anyone on CODUS. The phone on his desk rang. He glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Debbie.

“Hello,” he said.

“Your biographer just left. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Did you tell her how fucked up I am?”

“I did.”

“Good.”

“I’ll talk to you tonight.”

“Yes.”

Archie hung up the phone. He had taken six Vicodin and he had an unsteady buoyant sensation in his arms and at the back of his head. It was the first wave of codeine that was the best. It made all of the hard edges soften. When he was a patrol cop, he’d dealt with a lot of junkies. They were always breaking into cars to steal coins or whatever crap had been left on the backseat-books, old clothes, bottles that could be turned in for a deposit refund. They’d break a window and risk arrest for thirty-five cents. One of the first things cops learned was that junkies had their own system of reason. They would risk enormous consequences for even a slim chance of a fix. This made them unpredictable. Archie had never understood the mind-set. But he thought he was getting closer.

The Hardy Boys appeared at his office door, forcing Archie to clear his mind and put on his cop face. Both were all jittery excitement. Heil took a few tentative steps toward Archie. Archie had pegged him for the talker. He was right. “We checked the list of school staffers you gave us yesterday and one sort of stood out,” Heil announced.

“Kent?” Archie asked automatically. There was something about the custodian that made him wary.

“McCallum, the physics teacher at Cleveland. Turns out his boat isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”

“Where is it?”

“It burned down yesterday in that marina fire near Sauvie Island.”

Archie raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” said Heil. “We thought that might be a clue.”

Emanuel Hospital was one of two trauma centers for the region and it was where Archie Sheridan had been medevaced after they got him out of Gretchen Lowell’s basement. It was the hospital favored by the city’s EMTs and it was rumored that many wore T-shirts printed with the words TAKE ME TO EMANUEL, just in case they threw a blood clot. The main structure had been built in 1915, but several additions had left the original stone building almost entirely obscured by glass and steel. It was also the hospital where Susan’s father had died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma the week before she got her braces off. She parked in the visitors’ garage and made her way to the medical office building where Archie’s doctor had agreed to meet her. When she took the elevator up to the fourth floor, she was careful to press the elevator button with her elbow rather than her finger. Sick people germs. You couldn’t be too careful.

Dr. Fergus made her wait for thirty-five minutes. It wasn’t a bad waiting room. There was a view of the West Hills, Mount Hood, the meandering Willamette. But it smelled like every waiting room Susan remembered from her father’s appointments. Like carnations and iodine. It was the soap they used to cover up the smell of people dying.

A pile of InStyle magazines were fanned out seductively on an end table, but Susan resisted the impulse to waste time and instead spent twenty minutes writing and then rewriting an intro to the next story in her notebook. Then she checked her messages. None. She speed-dialed Ethan Poole. Voice mail.

“Ethan,” she said. “It’s moi. Just calling to see if you’ve had a chance to talk to Molly Palmer yet. I’m starting to take this personally.” She noticed that the receptionist was giving her a very dirty look and pointing to a sign that had a picture of a cell phone with a line through it. “Call me,” she said. Then she hung up and dropped the phone in her purse.

A Herald was laid out on a coffee table over a pile of U.S. News & World Reports. Susan had just pulled the front section from underneath the Metro section and put it on top, so her story would be properly displayed for anyone interested, when Fergus appeared with a shrug of apology and a moist handshake and ushered her back past the examining rooms to his office. He was in his mid-fifties and wore his graying hair in a bristle cut, like some sort of Texas high school football coach, and he walked quickly, at an eighty-degree angle, stethoscope swinging, his shoulders slumped and his fists in his white coat pockets. Susan had to hurry to keep pace.

His office was carefully appointed in classy baby boomer-style and overlooked the downtown skyline on the west side and the battered industrial buildings of the east side, with the wide brown river curving in between. On a clear day, you could see three mountains from Portland: Mount Hood, Mount Saint Helens and Mount Adams. But when people talked about “the mountain,” they meant Hood, and it was Hood that was visible out of Fergus’s window, a perk that was not to be underestimated. Still white with snow, it looked to Susan like a shark’s tooth tearing into the blue sky. But then, she’d never been much of a skier.

An expensive handmade Oriental rug lay over the industrial carpet; a wall of bookshelves housed medical texts, but also contemporary fiction and books about Eastern religions; and a large black-and-white photograph of Fergus leaning against a Harley-Davidson hung on one wall, dwarfing the requisite medical degrees that hung beside it. At least he had his priorities straight. Susan noticed an expensive radio on his bookshelf, and bet that it was tuned to classic rock.

“So, Archie Sheridan,” Dr. Fergus said, opening a blue folder in front of him.

Susan smiled. “I assume you’ve spoken to him?”

“Yes. He faxed over a HIPAA waiver.” Fergus touched a piece of paper on his desk. “We can’t be too careful with the privacy issues today. The insurance companies get to know everything about you. But a friend or family member? Not without the proper paperwork.”

Susan set her digital recorder on the desk, lifting her eyebrows questioningly to Fergus. He nodded. She hit RECORD. “So can I ask you anything, then?” she asked.

“I am willing to talk to you briefly about the injuries Detective Sheridan sustained in the line of duty in November of 2004.”

“Go.” Susan flipped open her notebook and smiled encouragingly.

Fergus traced through information in Sheridan’s file. His tone was brusque and businesslike. “He arrived at the ER via medevac at nine-forty-three P.M. on the thirtieth of November. He was in critical condition. Six fractured ribs, lacerations to the torso, a stab wound to the abdomen, his tox levels were dangerously high. We had to do emergency surgery to repair damage to the esophagus and stomach wall. When we got in there, the esophagus was so damaged, we ended up having to rebuild it with a section of bowel. And, of course, she had removed his spleen.”

Susan was scribbling along when he got to that last part. She stopped writing and looked up. “His spleen?”

“Correct. They didn’t release that at the time. She’d done a decent job dividing the blood supply and suturing him up, but there was some minor bleeding we had to go in and clean up.”

The tip of Susan’s pen remained motionless, pressed against the paper of notebook. “Can you do that? Can you just take someone’s spleen out?”

“If you’ve done it before,” Fergus said. “It’s a nonessential organ.”

“What did she”-Susan tapped her pen nervously against the page-“do with it?”

Fergus exhaled slowly. “I believe that it was sent to the police. Along with his wallet.”

Susan widened her eyes in disbelief and scribbled a sentence in her notebook. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes,” he said, sitting forward, his professional interest clearly piqued. “It surprised us, too. It is major surgery. He’d gone into septic shock and his organs were failing. If she hadn’t treated him at the site, he would be dead.”

“I heard that she did CPR on him,” Susan said.

Fergus examined her for a second. “That’s what the EMTs said. She also used digitalis to stop his heart, and then resuscitated him with lidocaine.”

Susan simultaneously cringed and craned forward. “Why?”

“I have no idea. It happened several days before we got to him. That’s about when she dressed the wounds. He was well taken care of.” He paused, catching himself, and ran a hand past his forehead. “You know, from that point on. Clean bandages. Every wound stitched. She’d had him on intravenous fluids, given him blood. But there was nothing she could do at that point about the infection. She didn’t have the proper antibiotics, or the equipment to keep his organs functioning enough for them to work.”

“Where’d she get the blood?”

Fergus shrugged and shook his head. “We have no idea. It was O-negative, a universal donor, and it was fresh, but it wasn’t hers. And the man she killed in front of Sheridan was AB.”

Susan wrote the word blood in her notebook, followed by a question mark. “You said his tox levels were high. What was he on exactly?”

“Quite a little cocktail.” Fergus glanced down at a page in his file. “Morphine, amphetmines, succinylcholine, bufotenin, benzylpiperazine. And that’s just what was still in his system.”

Susan was trying to figure out how to spell succinylcholine phonetically. “What would have been the result of all those drugs?”

“Without knowing the order in which they were given, I have no way of knowing. Varying degrees of insomnia, restlessness, paralysis, hallucinations, and probably quite a nice high.”

Susan tried to imagine what that would be like. Alone, in pain. So high that your mind isn’t functioning. Completely dependent on the person who is killing you. She examined Fergus. He wasn’t exactly chatty. But she liked him for being protective of Archie. Jesus, someone had to be. She tilted her head and flashed her most radiant tell-me-anything smile. “You like him? Archie?”

Fergus pursed his lips. “I’m not sure Archie has friends anymore. But if he did, I think he’d count me among them.”

“What do you think of me doing this? Writing this story? Writing about what happened to him?”

Fergus leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. The mountain sparkled in the sunlight behind him. After a while, you probably stopped noticing it. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

“How’d he react?” she asked.

“I was unable to sway him,” Fergus said.

“But you’re not being entirely open with me, either?”

“He never said I had to tell you everything. He is my patient. And I will choose his well-being over your newspaper story. Regardless of what he thinks he wants. We had a lot of press crawling all over this hospital in the weeks after Archie was found. My staff referred them all to the hospital PR department. Do you know why?”

Wait, Susan thought, I know this one! “Because reporters are vultures who will print anything without a passing thought to its relevance, significance, or veracity?”

“Yes.” Fergus glanced at his five-hundred-dollar watch. “If you want to know more, you can ask your subject. I’ve got to go. I’m a doctor. I’ve got patients. I’ve got to see about treating them. The hospital gets testy if I don’t at least make an effort.”

“Sure,” Susan said quickly. “Just a few more questions. Is Detective Sheridan still on any medication?”

Fergus looked her in the eye. “Nothing that would interfere with his ability to do his job.”

“Great. And just so I understand, you’re saying that Gretchen Lowell tortured Sheridan, killed him, and then resuscitated him and took care of him for a few days before calling nine one one?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Fergus said.

“And Sheridan confirms this?” Susan asked.

Fergus leaned farther back in his chair and interlaced his fingers over his chest. “He doesn’t really talk about what happened to him. He claims not to remember much.”

“You don’t believe him?”

Fergus looked deliberately at her. “It’s bullshit. And I’ve told him that to his face.”

“What’s your favorite movie?” Susan asked.

“Excuse me?”

Susan smiled pleasantly, like it wasn’t a strange question. “Your favorite movie.”

The poor doctor seemed a little bewildered. “I don’t really have time to see movies,” he said finally. “I ski.”

“At least you didn’t make something up,” Susan said with a satisfied nod. People lied all the time about movies. Susan told people that her favorite movie was Annie Hall, and she’d never even seen it. “Thanks for your time, Doctor.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Fergus said with a sigh.