Heartsick

CHAPTER 44

When Susan didn’t pick up her landline or cell phone, Archie’s thoughts grew dark. They were already in Henry’s car, Archie in the passenger seat, Henry behind the wheel, on their way to the Pearl. Claire and Anne were following close behind. He left identical troubled messages on Susan’s voice mails and then let the phone rest in his palm on his lap, willing it to ring. Sunset was at six-thirty. It was nearly 7:30, so the sun had long ago slipped behind the West Hills, but the purple late-winter sky was still half-lit with dusk. It was going to be a cold night.

“Could be anything,” Henry said, gripping the steering wheel. “Could be she’s in the shower. Anything.”

“Right,” said Archie.

“Maybe she’s taking a nap,” Henry added.

“I get it,” said Archie. He noticed then that Henry’s wrist was bleeding. “What happened to you?”

Henry shrugged. “Fucking cat scratched me.”

Archie’s walkie-talkie buzzed and he answered it. The patrol cops were at Susan’s apartment. She wasn’t answering the door. “Find out if her car’s in the parking lot,” he told them. “Knock on her neighbors’ doors. See if anyone saw her come home or go out. And check if there’s a security camera in the parking garage or lobby.” Then he dialed information and got Ian Harper’s telephone number.

A child’s voice picked up at the Harper residence. “Is your dad at home?” Archie asked.

The boy went off to get his father and Archie could hear music and the sounds of adults eating and laughing. In a minute, Ian Harper picked up the phone.

His voice was annoyed. “Yeah?”

Archie wasn’t feeling very generous toward Ian right now and he was in a hurry, so he skipped the niceties. “Ian. Archie Sheridan. Did you drop Susan at her apartment this afternoon?”

Ian hesitated. “Yeah.”

“What time?” Archie asked.

“What’s going on?”

Henry whipped around a slow pickup truck on the Ross Island Bridge. Henry had the Crown Vic’s lights on but not the siren. The downtown skyline was a postcard to the north. Archie pulled the pillbox from his pocket and rotated it between his fingers. “What time did you drop her off?” he asked again.

“I don’t know,” Ian said. His voice wavered. “About five-thirty?”

“Was she planning on going out this evening?” asked Archie. “Or having anyone over?”

“Not that she said.” Then Ian added, authoritatively, “She’s got a story due tomorrow.”

“You know anything about an anonymous source mentioning a Cleveland student to her?”

“Yeah,” Ian said instantly. “It’s another story. Nothing to do with the Strangler.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” he said definitively.

None of this was making Archie feel any better. He started to open the pillbox, caught Henry’s disapproving glance, and shoved the box back in his pocket. “And you saw her go inside the building?”

“Yeah.” Ian paused. Archie could hear his guests laughing again in the background. “Has something happened to Susan?”

“I’m just trying to find her. If you hear from her, you tell her to call me, okay?”

Ian’s voice lowered an octave. “Should I come over?”

“No, Ian.” Archie sighed, thinking about Susan’s confession. “Stay with your family.”

When Henry pulled in behind a patrol car in front of the old brewery building, one of the patrol cops was waiting. “Car’s here,” he said. “There’s a security camera in the lobby. It feeds into a monitor in the concierge’s office.”

“Concierge?” Archie asked.

The patrol cop rolled his eyes. “I think she’s the building spokesmodel.”

Archie, Henry, and Anne followed the officer through the building’s entirely black-and-white modernist lobby to a small room decorated entirely in shades of brown, where a young woman with a platinum ponytail stood behind a bamboo counter. She held an egg-shaped white remote in her hand and was reviewing grainy footage of the parking garage on a glossy white monitor. A stack of photocopies sat on the counter. Archie glanced at the top one. It had a picture of a cat and in big letters said STOP LAB KITTEN ABUSE.

“There,” she said. She leaned forward on her elbows and pressed a manicured forefinger on the screen on top of an image of Susan Ward and Paul Reston. “That’s Susan Ward.”

The five of them watched the jerky image as Susan and Reston made their way from the elevator, across the parking garage, and out of range of the camera. The time code on the video read 6:12 P.M.

“Find them,” Anne said to Archie and Henry. “He’ll kill her if you don’t.”

Archie stood in Susan’s apartment. The spokesmodel had let them in. An expensive-looking gilded mirror hung just inside the front door. A wineglass sat empty on the table in front of it. Beside the glass was a wooden hairbrush, a single bright pink hair tangled in its bristles. Archie examined the glass without touching it. The base was coated with gritty red wine sediment; traces of lipstick were visible on the lip. They had just missed her. She’d drunk a glass of wine and she’d left with him and who the fuck knew where they were now. Archie had put a broadcast out for Reston. Highway Patrol in four states would be looking for his car. But a lot of people had looked for Archie once, too. He fingered the pillbox in his pocket. He was feeling that sort of uneven overcaffeinated vibration that meant it was time to take some Vicodin. Soon the headache, then the slow burn under the skin that would turn to cold sweats, the body aches.

He slid open the box and removed three of the large oval pills by touch and then slipped them into his mouth. He held them in his cheek as he walked into Susan’s kitchen nook, where he filled his cupped hand with water from the faucet and washed the pills down.

He’d even grown to like the bitter taste of the pills. He’d run into addicts who shot saline when they couldn’t get their intravenous drug of choice. The fact that someone would inject a needle into a vein for the hell of it had puzzled Archie then. Now he understood that the familiar pain acted as a brief mental tonic.

“That a good idea?” Henry asked.

Archie looked up. Henry was standing on the other side of the kitchen bar, as inscrutable as ever. “It’s maintenance,” Archie said, turning away from Henry. “They won’t make me high.”

He could feel his body loosen up, already anticipating the codeine in his system. It was psychosomatic. The pills didn’t work that fast. But he didn’t care. He had to focus. To think. How had Reston managed to get to Addy? And why kill McCallum? It had to be connected to the boat. Reston and McCallum taught at the same school, knew each other, and McCallum had said that everyone knew he had a boat. Maybe Reston had been using the boat and set fire to it to destroy evidence or divert suspicion. If he knew that McCallum had been questioned, then a suicide could provide a final frame-up. It was sloppy. And desperate. And that worried Archie.

He turned and walked the ten steps that separated the kitchen area from the living room area, where Anne stood looking out the large window. He hoped that she was thinking about Reston and not considering a real estate investment in the Pearl. He could feel Henry a step behind him, his constant shadow. Archie stood next to Anne and looked out the window, too. Across the street sat another brand-new condo building, each loft a brightly lit dollhouse room in the darkness.

“How desperate is he?” he asked Anne.

She moved a stray braid out of her eyes. “He’s obsessed with a former student,” she said. “An affair that ended ten years ago. I would say that he’s very desperate. If you’re asking me if there’s a possibility he’ll kill himself, I’d say there’s a strong one.”

A woman in one of the lofts across the street turned on a TV. “So you don’t think he’s killed her already?” Archie asked.

“No.” She paused. “But I could be wrong.”

“So where would he take her?” asked Henry.

Anne considered this. “He’ll take her somewhere where he feels safe. Where did he take the others?” she asked rhetorically.

“The boat,” answered Archie.

“McCallum’s boat,” Henry echoed. “But it’s gone.”

Archie considered this. Below them, on the street, someone in an SUV was attempting to parallel park. “Unless he’s got another boat.”

“No,” Claire said, joining them. “We checked the state marine board for all faculty and staff at the schools who fit the profile back in November. And again in February. And March. McCallum had only one boat registered. And he was the only one with a captain’s license.”

“He said he bought this boat a few years ago,” Archie said. “Maybe he kept the old one but let the registration lapse.”

“Can you do that?” asked Claire.

“Call the people,” Archie told her.

Claire pulled her phone off the waist of her pants. “Yep.” She stepped away to make the call.

“You okay?” Henry asked Archie.

Archie realized that he was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at the wood floor. Susan Ward was being held by some crazy jackass who was going to kill her, if he hadn’t already, and Archie wasn’t sure that he could save her. “I just need a minute,” he said.

Archie stood in Susan Ward’s bathroom. He could feel Henry’s worry wrap around him like a shroud. Keep it together, Archie thought. Then he said it out loud: “Keep it together.” He splashed some water over his face from the faucet and dried off with a hand towel that hung next to the sink.

He checked his watch. It was almost nine. An hour of reading and then lights-out.

He stopped himself. Don’t think about her. Not now. He had to focus on Susan. His nose itched. It was a nervous-system response to the Vicodin that his body had mostly quashed, but still occasionally surfaced. He gave it a vigorous rubbing. Great. Now on top of everything, they were all going to think that he was a cokehead. And there was Gretchen again, clear as day in his mind, lying in repose on her prison cot, propped on one elbow, The Last Victim in her hands. His wedding photograph was in that book.

“Boss?” Henry knocked gently at the bathroom door.

Archie blinked a few times at his bleary reflection and opened the door. Henry and Claire stood outside the bathroom.

“What do we have?” Archie asked.

Claire checked her notebook. “He registered the boat that burned down five years ago. Before that, he had another boat registered, a 1950 Chris-Craft Catalina. That registration lapsed eight months after he registered the new boat. But if he’d sold it locally, it would have been registered by someone else. And it hasn’t been.”

“So maybe he sold it to someone across the river,” Archie said.

“Maybe,” Claire agreed. “But according to the nice lady at the OSMB, until they clarified the rules in 2002, you didn’t have to keep current registration on a boat that wasn’t ‘in the water,’ which is to say, if you had a boat moored at a marina but weren’t actually taking it out, you could save having to pay the state fifteen bucks a year.”

Archie nodded. “The cheap bastard kept the boat.”

Henry crossed and uncrossed his arms. “That’s the one Reston would have used, because it’s the one that McCallum would have been less likely to notice was amiss.”

“‘Amiss’?” Claire said.

“I can’t use a fancy word?” Henry said.

Claire continued: “If we’re right, the boat would be at the same marina, right? I mean, most likely?”

“Let’s go,” Archie said.

Anne had walked up beside Henry. “Be careful. Because if you send in the cavalry and spook him, he’s likely to hurt her and himself.”

“If we’re right and he’s even there and she’s even still alive,” Archie said.

Anne nodded a few times. Behind her, out the window, in the loft across the street, the woman shut off her television set. Nothing on. “I need a diet Coke,” Anne said.

Then there was a sound from behind them, a sort of gasp, and every cop in the room turned to look at the front door. A middle-aged woman stood there. She wore a ridiculous handmade hat and a leopard-skin coat and tall lace-up platform boots. Her hair was a tangle of long blond dreadlocks. Her dark red mouth was open in a sort of surprised grimace.

“Who are you people?” she asked. “And where is my daughter?”