Heartsick

CHAPTER 6

Archie counted out the Vicodin. Thirteen. He placed two of the white oval pills on the back of the toilet and nestled the other eleven in the brass pillbox, padding them carefully in cotton so they wouldn’t rattle. Then he put the pillbox in the pocket of his blazer. Thirteen extra-strength Vicodin. It should be enough. He sighed and pulled the pillbox out of his pocket, counted out another five pills from the large amber plastic prescription bottle, added these to the pillbox, and dropped it back in his pocket. Eighteen Vicodin. Ten milligrams of codeine and 750 milligrams acetaminophen in every dose. The maximum acetaminophen dosage human kidneys could handle was four thousand milligrams in twenty-four hours. He’d done the math. That was 5.33 pills per day. Not nearly enough. So he played at controlling his habit. He would allow himself one more every few days. Up to twenty-five; then he would wean himself, break pills in half, get back down to the recommended four or five a day. Then work his way up again. It was a game. King of the Hill. Everyone took turns. Vicodin for the pain. Xanax for the panic attacks. Zantac for his stomach. Ambien to sleep. They all went into the pillbox.

He traced his fingers along his jawline. He had never been good at shaving, but lately he had become almost dangerous. He pulled at a small piece of toilet paper that was stuck to a razor nick. It came off, but the wound immediately started bleeding again. He splashed some cold water on his face, tore another square of toilet paper off the roll, held it to his chin, and looked in the mirror. Archie had never had the ability to appraise his own appearance. His gifts were appraising other people’s appearances: empathy, recall, and an obsessive, dogged determination that required him to pursue every possible outcome until, like a peeled scab, the truth was exposed. It had rarely occurred to him, during his strange career as a homicide detective, to pay attention to how he might appear to others. Now he turned his eye for detail to his own image. He had sad, dark eyes. He’d had sad eyes long before he’d heard of Gretchen Lowell, long before he’d become a cop. His grandfather, a defrocked priest, had fled Northern Ireland, and they were his eyes: homesick, no matter how many people were around him. Archie had always had sad eyes, but it was as if in the last few years his other features had withdrawn, so now the eyes stood out more. He had the strong chin from his mother’s side and a nose that had been broken in a car accident, and cheeks that dimpled when he permitted a lopsided smile. He wasn’t pretty. But he wasn’t unhandsome if you liked sort of average-looking, depressed people.

He smiled at his image and immediately cringed at the result. Who was he kidding? But he tried to make an effort. He tried to flatten the cowlick at the front of his thick head of curly brown hair and smooth his eyebrows. He wore a ridiculously professorial tan corduroy blazer, and a brown-and-silver silk tie purchased by his ex-wife, who he knew had good taste only because he had heard people comment on it. The blazer, which had once fit perfectly, now hung too loose in the shoulders. But his socks were clean. He appeared, to himself at least, to look almost normal. He hadn’t felt rested in two years. He was forty, but looked at least five years older. He was fighting a losing battle with pills. He could not bear to touch his children. And he looked almost normal. Yes. He could carry it off. He was a cop, he reminded himself. I can bullshit beautifully.

He pulled the toilet paper off his face and tossed it in the wastebasket under the sink. Then he gripped either side of the sink and examined his reflection. The nick was barely noticeable, really. He smiled. Lifted his full eyebrows. Hello! Good to see you again! Yep! Feeling fine! All better! He sighed and let his face fall back into its natural slack expression, and then absentmindedly picked up the two pills off the toilet and swallowed them without water. It was 6:30 A.M. More than twelve hours had passed since the last time anyone had seen Kristy Mathers.

The new task force offices turned out to be in a former bank building, which the city had leased months before for overflow office space. The cement-block building was a one-story rectangle with few windows, surrounded on all sides by parking lot. Its drive-through ATM was still in operation.

Archie glanced at his watch: almost seven o’clock.

The nighttime house-to-house had turned up nothing but tired, scared neighbors. Henry had dropped Archie off at 3:00 A.M. with the address of the new task force offices. “Get a good night’s sleep,” Henry had said. And they had both laughed.

Now Archie stood across the street, hands deep in his pockets, surveying the spectacle. A cab had dropped him off-his compromise to the pills. He was an addict, but he was a responsible one. A smile passed his lips. A. Fucking. Bank. There were already three local news vans parked in the lot around the bank building. ALL THE NEWS WORTH KNOWING, read a slogan on one of the vans. No national news yet, he noticed. But if he was right, it would only be a matter of time. He watched the reporters, clad in absurdly warm and waterproof coats, confer with their bearded cameramen. They lurched forward expectantly every time a car pulled up, then settled back to cigarettes and thermoses of coffee when the occupant became clear. They were waiting for him, he realized. Not the girls. Not the task force. Not, to be fucking sure, a story. They wanted him. The Beauty Killer’s last victim. The bones in his fingers went cold. He ran a hand through his hair and noticed it was wet. He had been standing in the slow rain for ten minutes. You’ll catch your death, he thought to himself. The words were not in his voice, but hers. Lilting. Teasing. You’ll catch your death, darling. He took a deep breath, pushed her, for a moment, from his mind, and started toward his new office.

The mob of reporters swarmed around him as soon as his shoes hit the wet concrete of the parking lot. He ignored the questions and the cameras, walking as fast as he could through the gauntlet, shoulders hunched against the rain. “How does it feel to be back?” “How’s your health?” “Have you been in contact with Gretchen Lowell?” Don’t get distracted, he told himself. He fingered the pillbox in his pocket, gaining solace from its presence. Just keep moving.

He showed his badge to the uniformed officer at the door, and slid in past the reporters kept firmly at bay outside. The bank was full of people-cleaning, tearing down the old transaction counter, moving furniture. The air was dense with the dust of smashed drywall and the hum of power tools. Archie’s eyes burned from the particulate matter as he scanned the room. Henry was standing just inside the door, waiting for him. He had shown Archie the ropes when Archie made detective and he had been looking out for him ever since. A large man with a gleaming shaved head and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, Henry could cut an imposing figure when he chose. But his crinkled grin and kind blue eyes belied his warmer nature. Henry knew both facades, and he used them to his advantage. Today, he was dressed in a black turtleneck, black leather jacket, and black jeans. He wore a hand-tooled black leather belt with a silver and turquoise belt buckle. It was an ensemble Henry revisited with little variation.

Henry was attentively brushing white dust off his black pants when he saw Archie. “Make it past the local newsies?” he asked with amusement.

Archie had been the object of much more voracious press attention, and Henry knew it. “That’s nothing.”

“You would know,” agreed Henry. “You ready for this?”

“As I’ll ever be.” Archie looked around. “This is a bank.”

“I hope you’re not sensitive to asbestos.”

“Does this seem odd to you?” Archie asked.

“I’ve always liked banks,” Henry said. “They remind me of money.”

“They all here?”

“They’re huddled together, waiting for you in the vault.”

“The vault?”

“Kidding,” Henry said. “There’s a break room. With a microwave. And a minifridge.”

“Sure. It being a bank. How’s the mood?”

“Like they’re about to see a ghost,” Henry said.

Archie waved his fingers at his friend. “Boo.”

A sink, fridge, and countertop with cabinets dominated one wall of the break room. Several small square tables had been assembled to form an ad hoc conference table. The seven detectives were sitting or standing around it, many with travel mugs of coffee. Conversation stopped dead when Archie entered.

“Good morning,” Archie said. He looked around at the group. Five of them he’d worked with on the Beauty Killer Task Force. Two were new. “I’m Archie Sheridan,” he said in a strong voice. They all knew who he was. Even the two he hadn’t met. But it gave Archie something to start out with.

The new additions were Mike Flannigan and Jeff Heil, both of medium height and build, one dark-haired, the other light-haired. Archie immediately mentally dubbed them “the Hardy Boys.” The other five were Claire Masland, Martin Ngyun, Greg Fremont, Anne Boyd, and Josh Levy. He had worked with some of these detectives for years, night and day, and, with the exception of Henry, he had not seen any of them since being released from the hospital. He had not wanted to see any of them. They looked at him now with a mixture of affection and anxiety. Archie felt bad for them. He always felt bad for people who knew what he had been through. It made them feel awkward. He knew it was up to him to make them comfortable, so they could work effectively for him, no distractions, no pity. The best tactic, he knew, was to act as if nothing had happened, no time had passed at all. Back to work, just like that. No emotional speeches. Show them that he was up to speed, in control.

“Claire,” he said, spinning around to face the petite detective. “What’s the security situation at the other schools?”

The rest of the team had been brought in that morning. But Claire and Henry had worked the case from the beginning.

Claire sat up a little bit, surprised, but pleased to be put on the spot, as he knew she would be. “After-school activities have been canceled until further notice. We’ve got four uniforms stationed at each school, and six units patrolling around each between five and seven, when he seems to take them. They’re hosting safety assemblies today. Sending letters home to the parents suggesting they don’t let their girls walk or bike to or from school.”

“Good,” he said. “Search and rescue?”

Martin Ngyun leaned forward. He wore a Portland Trail Blazers cap. Archie wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him without it. “Just got an update on that. Nothing turned up last night. We’ve got almost fifty people and ten dogs doing a daylight block-by-block in a square-mile radius around her house. Another hundred volunteers. Nothing yet.”

“I want a roadblock near Jefferson today between five and seven. Stop everyone who drives by. Ask if they’ve seen anything. If they’re driving by there today, there’s a chance they drove that route yesterday. Lee Robinson had a cell phone, right? I want to see her phone records and all the girls’ E-mail records on my desk.” He turned to Anne Boyd. She had been the third profiler that the FBI had sent to work on the Beauty Killer case, and the only one who was not an insufferable prick. He had always liked her, but he had not responded to her occasional letters over the last two years. “When do we get a profile?”

Anne finished off a can of diet Coke, and set it on the table with a tinny clatter. She’d had an Afro the last time Archie had seen her. Now her black hair was woven into a thousand tiny braids. They swung as she tilted her head. “Twenty-four hours. At the most.”

“A sketch?”

“Male, thirty to fifty. And then there’s the obvious.”

“Yeah?”

“He makes an effort to return the victims.” She shrugged her plump shoulders. “He feels bad.”

“So we’re looking for a male between the ages of thirty and fifty who feels bad,” Archie summarized. Sound familiar? “If he feels bad,” he theorized aloud to Anne, “he’s vulnerable, right?”

“He knows what he did is wrong. You might be able to intimidate him, yeah.”

Archie bent forward over the table, leaning on his arms, and faced the group. They looked at him expectantly. He could tell that many of them had been up all night, working the case. Every minute that ticked by would eat away at their morale. They would sleep less, eat less, and worry more. His team. His responsibility. Archie was not a good manager. He knew this. He put the people who worked for him above the people he worked for. This made him a good leader. As long as he got results, the higher-ups were willing to overlook the manager bit. He had worked on the Beauty Killer Task Force for ten years, led it for four, before they’d caught Gretchen Lowell. He had felt the edge of the brass’s ax on his neck during his entire tenure. He had proved himself and almost been killed in the process. And because of it, he had the tenuous trust of the people in that room. This made him loathe all the more the announcement he had to make. “Before we continue, I should let you know that a writer from the Herald, Susan Ward, is going to be following me around.”

Body language stiffened.

“I know,” Archie said, with a sigh. “It’s irregular. But I have to do it and you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that I have a good reason. You are all welcome to cooperate to your level of comfort.” Looking around the room, he wondered what they were thinking. Celebrity whore? Promotion hound? An exclusive exchanged for the burial of some damaging information? Not even close, thought Archie. “Any questions, concerns?” he asked.

Six hands went up.