Heartsick

CHAPTER 34

Susan had ground her teeth all night. She could tell the moment she woke up, because she could barely move her jaw, barely open her mouth, and her teeth felt like she’d spent the night chewing gravel. She held a heating pad against her face until she felt her sore muscles loosen and the pain in her face subside. But the heat left her face looking raw and sunburned.

It was only just getting light outside, and the forecast in the paper was a row of smiling yellow suns on squares of blue sky. Sure enough, a glance beyond the loft’s wall of glass revealed fragments of clear blue behind the Pearl District’s skyline of brick, glass, stone, and steel. Susan was unimpressed. People didn’t appreciate rain until it was gone.

She sat on her bed and watched the pedestrians struggle by with their paper coffee cups down below. She should have been working. The next story was due tomorrow. But the digital recorder that Archie had recovered for her still sat on her bedside table, and she had yet to listen to the recording of her encounter with Gretchen Lowell. The thought of it made her a little sick to her stomach.

Claire rang the doorbell at exactly 8:00 A.M. Next to her was Anne Boyd.

Despite the unseasonably warm forecast, Susan was wearing what she thought of as her TV-cop clothes: black pants, a crisp black button-down shirt, and an honest-to-God tan trench coat. She didn’t care if it was going to be sixty-five degrees; she was wearing that coat. Claire was dressed, per usual, as if she had just come down off the mountain, and Anne was wearing a zebra-print blouse, black pants, and leopard-print boots, and she had about a dozen gold bracelets squeezed on each wrist. “I love your boots,” Susan said.

“I know,” Anne said. “They’re fabulous.”

“Yeah,” said Claire with a sigh. “You two are going to get along fine.” She introduced Anne and Susan and the three women headed downstairs to where Claire’s city-issued Chevy Caprice was parked.

The plan was to check on the security at the city’s ten public high schools. Many parents were keeping their daughters at home; all kids were encouraged not to walk to or from school, or if they did, to have a buddy. The whole city was on edge. The anticipation was so palpable that it felt to Susan as if people were actually willing another girl to be taken so that they could watch it on the news. A good kidnapping and murder made for excellent televised entertainment as long as it didn’t preempt anything more interesting.

They drove to Roosevelt High first. Claire had a paper cup of coffee from the coffee place next door to Susan’s building, and the nutty aroma filled the car, making Susan’s mouth water. She got her notebook out and set it on her lap. She hated riding in the back. It reminded her of being a child. She unlocked her seat belt so she could lean forward between the seats, the better to ask questions.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Claire chided. “Seat belt.”

Susan sat back with a heavy sigh and resnapped the belt in place. The front seats were light blue cloth, but the backseat was dark blue vinyl. Easier to clean up if someone you were transporting started vomiting. “So this guy,” she said to Anne. “You think he’s a nut job, or what?”

“My professional opinion?” Anne said, looking out the window. “I think he may have an issue or two.”

“He’s going to kill another girl?” Susan asked.

Anne leaned around to look at Susan, her expression skeptical. “Why would he stop?”

Roosevelt was a large brick school with white pillars, a half acre of green lawn, and a steeple. It looked a bit like Monticello. Three patrol cars were out front.

“They should have called this one Jefferson,” Susan joked.

Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m going to go check on things,” she announced. “You guys want to wait here?”

Susan, seeing an opportunity for some one-on-one time with Anne, jumped at the opportunity. “Sure,” she said. She unclasped her seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats so that she was inches away from Anne.

Claire got out of the car and walked over to one of the patrol cars.

“So you think that he works at one of the schools?” Susan asked Anne.

Anne extracted a diet Coke from her large purse and opened it. A tiny spray of sticky brown liquid shot out in a two-inch diameter. “I don’t know.” She gave Susan a look. “And don’t start with me about the diet Coke. I know. I just have one a day. To kick-start my morning.”

“I think that warm diet Coke is delicious,” Susan lied. She pushed ahead. “So do you like profiling?”

“Yeah.” Anne smiled and took a sip of the Coke. “I’m good at it most of the time. And every workday is different.”

“How did you get into it?”

“I went to med school. I wanted to be a pediatrician. I thought they were so cool. They were always the nicest docs at the hospital. No ego. Weren’t in it for the money.”

“So you wanted to be a pediatrician so you could hang out with other pediatricians?” Susan asked.

Anne laughed and her bracelets jingled. “Basically.” She leaned her head back on the headrest and looked thoughtfully at Susan. “The first day of my pediatrics rotation, I diagnosed a kid with lymphoma. Stage four. She was seven years old. Completely adorable. One of those kids with old souls, you know? I was devastated, and by devastated, I mean crying-in-the-bathroom devastated.” Anne was quiet for a minute, lost in thought. Susan could hear her soda fizzing. Then she shrugged. “So I decided to go into psychiatry. My husband’s people are in Virginia. He got a job there and I needed one and Quantico was looking to train some women in the dark arts. Turned out I wasn’t bad at it.”

“Profiling seems like a weird field to end up in if you wanted to get away from death.”

“Not death,” she said. She licked her thumb and ran it over a tiny stain of soda spray on her black slacks. “Pity.” She glanced out the window. A kid flew by on a skateboard. She turned back to Susan. “The victims we deal with are already dead. We do what we do to prevent other deaths. We catch killers. And I don’t feel sorry for them.”

Susan thought of Gretchen Lowell. “What makes a person do this sort of thing?”

“There was this study of prisoners serving time for B and E. They asked them all the same question: ‘Would you rather run into a dog or a person with a gun?’ You know what the majority of them said?” She spun the soda can slowly in her palm. “The person with a gun. The dog won’t hesitate. The dog will rip your throat out. Every time. Eight times out of ten, you can wrestle the gun right out of the person’s hands or just walk away. Know why?”

“Because it’s hard to shoot someone.”

Anne’s black eyes were electric. “Exactly. And that’s broken in our guy. I don’t think he works for the school district. I hope he does. Because if he does, we’ll catch him. If he doesn’t, I don’t know.”

“But how does it get broken?”

She made a small toasting motion with the can. “Nature, nurture. A combination. Take your pick.”

Susan hooked her clasped hands over her knee and leaned in even closer. “But someone can break it for you, right? Like Gretchen Lowell did. How did she do that? How did she get people to kill for her?”

“She’s a master manipulator. Psychopaths very often are. She chose particularly vulnerable men.”

“And she tortured them?”

“No,” Anne said. “Much more foolproof. She used sex.”

Claire suddenly appeared at the car door. Her cheeks were scarlet. “The fucker took another girl last night.”