Heartsick

CHAPTER 26

Anne Boyd ate all of the chocolate in the hotel minibar. She started with the plain M &M’s, then ate the Toblerone, then the peanut M &M’s. When she was done, she flattened the wrappers and placed them next to the photographs of the dead girls that lay on her hotel room bed. Candy helped her think. There would be time to diet when people stopped killing one another.

She had memorized the girls’ faces, pre-and postmortem, but there was something useful in seeing them all side by side. The school photographs. The crime-scene photographs. Family snapshots. She had outlined a victim profile in her report to Archie. The killer had a type: dark-haired white girls on the rocky side of puberty. Each from a different high school. What is your fantasy? she wondered. He killed this girl again and again. Then he raped her in the most controlling way possible. So who was it he was killing? A teenage girlfriend? His mother? A girl who broke his heart without even knowing? Whoever it was, it was someone he had not been able to control. Anne was growing more and more certain that this fact was key to identifying the person they were hunting.

She rolled off the bed, opened the minibar, and found a diet Coke. It was the last one. Her kids were already asking when she was going to come home. What they really wanted was the loot she’d promised she’d bring back from the Nike outlet store. She didn’t know when she’d have time to get there.

The truth was that she didn’t travel much for work anymore. But she had asked to be assigned to this one. She’d considered quitting after the Beauty Killer case. Her profile had been wrong and it had nearly cost Archie Sheridan his life. She had been absolutely confident that the killer was a male and that he was working alone. The signs had been textbook. Because Gretchen Lowell had read the textbooks. Anne had been famously fooled, and she blamed only herself for it. She was a good profiler, one of the best with the FBI, which had the best profilers in the world. But her confidence had been shaken badly by Gretchen Lowell. Confidence was essential to profiling. You had to believe in your skill in order to make mental leaps.

So she had to find the leap. He was acting out a specific fantasy, one that had started many years before. So what had triggered the action? There were all sorts of triggers: financial, relationship or parental issues, trouble at work, a death, a birth, a perceived snub. He initiated contact with the victims. He chose them. The crimes were highly organized. He took pains to destroy evidence, but he still returned the bodies. Why did he return the bodies? This time, she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She couldn’t undo what had happened to Archie Sheridan. But she could help him this time. And he needed help. Of that, she was quite certain.

She’d been on the job long enough to know that the only way you survived was if you could turn off the violence. But you had to have something to distract you, some other passion. If you didn’t, if you were alone, it was harder to flip the switch. She recognized that Archie was cutting himself off from the people who could help him; she just didn’t know what she could do about it.

She got up off the bed, walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out over Broadway. The Friday-night traffic was heavy and streams of pedestrians in fancy clothes were making their way down from an event at the nearby concert hall. If there were any black folks among them, Anne didn’t see them.

She let the curtain fall back into place and sat back down on the bed, where she took one last long look at the photographs of the dead girls and then turned the photographs over one by one. Lee Robinson’s week-old corpse, a yellow and blackened heap in the mud; Dana Stamp facedown in a bank of weeds; Kristy Mathers coated in wet sand, her body improbably twisted. The school portraits and birthday party snapshots. When every image was turned, she got out her wallet and she pulled out another photograph. This one was of a very handsome black man with his arm around two very handsome black teenage boys. She smiled at their grinning faces. Then she picked up her cell phone and called home.

“Mama,” her eldest son, Anthony, answered. “You don’t have to call every day.”

“Yeah, baby,” Anne said. The job was always hardest at night. When she was alone. “I do.”

“You get us our Nikes?”

Anne laughed. “It’s on my to-do list.”

“What number is it?” her son asked.

Anne glanced back down at the photographs on her bed and then up across the room at the window that overlooked the bustle of downtown. The killer was out there. “Two.”

After Susan left , Archie finished his beer and got back to work. First, he spread out the contents of the files on the coffee table. He had hurriedly shuffled them into two neat towers before her arrival. He wasn’t cleaning up; he just didn’t think she needed to see the autopsy photographs of three dead teenagers. He took three more Vicodin and sat down next to the coffee table on the beige carpet. It was staring at photographs like these that helped him spot Gretchen Lowell’s signature. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for this time, but if it was there, he wasn’t seeing it. The kid upstairs was singing. Archie couldn’t make out the words, but he thought he recognized the tune from when his own children were toddlers.

He looked at the digital clock. Did the math. It was just after 9:00 P.M. Gretchen would be in her cell for the night. Lights-out wasn’t until 10:00 P.M. This was the hour when Gretchen read. He knew that she borrowed books from the prison library, because her checkout history was forwarded to him every month. She read psychoanalytic tomes, from Freud to textbooks to pop-psych paperbacks. She read smart contemporary fiction, the kind of books that won awards and most people read only so that they could say so at dinner parties. She read true crime. Why not? Archie thought. It was her profession’s trade publication. And last month, she had checked out The Last Victim. He hadn’t told Henry about that. The fact that Gretchen was reading the sordid true-crime account of Archie’s captivity, with its cheap prose and gruesome photographs of the bodies, of Archie, of all of them, would have been more than Henry could handle. He would have had the book taken away, pulled from the library. He might even have gone through with his threat to stop Archie from seeing her. It wouldn’t take much, a heart-to-heart with Buddy. Archie was barely convincing them all that he was functional. It was his insistence, combined with their guilt about what he’d been through, that kept him in a position to bargain. But he knew his footing was tenuous.

He looked at the girls’ pallid bodies, gaping open on the morgue table, the ligature marks a slash of purple across their necks. That was one upside, Archie decided: He killed them right away. And there were worse ways to die than strangulation.

The kid upstairs jumped up and down and an adult walked over and picked her up. Archie could hear her shrieking and giggling.