Heartsick

CHAPTER 7

Tell me about Archie Sheridan,” Susan said. It was mid-afternoon and she had made her way through the folder of research material that Derek had pulled from the Herald database and handed over with an apple fritter wrapped in aluminum foil. Was he trying to be funny? Now she sat perched on the edge of Quentin Parker’s desk, a notebook in her hand.

Parker was the city crime-beat reporter. He was balding and fat and thought little of journalism degrees, much less M.F.A.’s. He was old school. He was belligerent. He was condescending. He was probably an alcoholic. But he was smart and Susan liked him.

Parker leaned back in his task chair, gripping the arms with his beefy hands. He grinned. “What took you so long?”

“They tell you about my Pulitzer Prize-winning series?”

He snorted. “Did they tell you that your vagina got you the story?”

She smiled sweetly. “My vagina is my most tireless advocate.”

Parker guffawed and appraised her fondly. “You sure you’re not my kid?”

“Would your kid have pink hair?”

He shook his head, causing his jowls to sway. “Over my dead fucking body.” He looked around the newsroom at the rows of people staring at computer screens or talking on telephones. “Look at this place,” he said, scowling sadly at the hushed, serious environment-all carpeting and cubicles. “It’s like working in a fucking office.”

“Come on,” he said, straining to push himself upright and out of his seat. “I’ll buy you a crappy sandwich in the cafeteria and we can play reporter.”

The cafeteria was in the basement of the building. The food was standard institutional fare: slop under heat lamps, iceberg lettuce salads, shriveled baked potatoes. A wall of steel and glass vending machines that had probably been in the building for thirty years hosted tangerine-size red apples, triangular sandwiches, slices of pie, and slightly bruised bananas. Parker bought two ham and cheese sandwiches out of a machine and handed one to Susan.

Because the food was lousy, few of the paper’s employees actually used the cafeteria, much less sat down to enjoy the ambience, so Parker and Susan easily found a vacant beige Formica table.

The stench of stale cigarettes clung to Parker like an aura. He always smelled like he had just come from a smoke break, though Susan had never seen him leave his desk. He took a large bite of sandwich and wiped some mayonnaise off his chin with the back of his hand.

“So, go ahead,” he said.

Susan opened her notebook and smiled dazzlingly. “Susan Ward,” she purred. “ Oregon Herald. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions, sir?”

“Not at all. Fine paper, fine paper.”

“Detective Archie Sheridan. He was on the Beauty Killer Task Force from the beginning, right? He and his partner investigated the first body?”

Parker nodded, his chin multiplying as he did. “Yeah. He’d been a homicide cop for a couple of weeks. Partner was Henry Sobol. It was Sheridan ’s first case. Can you fucking imagine that? First case and he draws a serial killer? Lucky fuck. Of course, they didn’t know that then. It was just a dead hooker. Jogger found her in Forest Park. Naked. Tortured. It was some twisted shit. Tame compared to what would come later, but twisted enough that it caught a little attention. For a hooker case. That was back in 1994. May.”

Susan checked her notes. “Then they found the other bodies over that summer, right? In Idaho and Washington?”

“Right. There was that kid in Boise. Ten-year-old boy. Went missing; then they found him dead in a ditch. An old man in Olympia was found murdered in his backyard. Then there was some waitress in Salem. Someone tossed her body out of a moving car on the freeway. Caused a four-car pileup that delayed traffic for hours. The citizens were pissed.”

“And Sheridan caught the signature, right? Marks on the torso?”

“Yeah. That’s what we called them in the paper. ‘Marks on the torso.’” He learned forward, his expansive girth bulging against the table. “You know what an X-Acto knife is? Like a pen with a razor blade at the end?”

Susan nodded.

“They all had been cut up with one of those. Every single one of them. Very specific injuries inflicted while the assholes were still alive.”

“Specific how?”

“She signed her work. Carved a heart on every one of them. There was a lot of other torso damage, so the hearts were sort of hard to spot, the forest for the trees sort of thing. Someone would have seen it eventually. But Sheridan caught it earlier than most. It was his first case, you know, his dead hooker. Not a big priority for the squad, let me assure you. I mean, they couldn’t even find any family to claim the body. She was a runaway from foster care. But he wasn’t going to let it go. And when the brass realized they had a serial killer on their hands who was torturing and murdering taxpayers at random, they formed that task force quicker than you can say ‘evening news.’” He took another bite of sandwich, chewed twice, and started talking again. “You have to understand that she confounded the hell out of the investigators. There are things we understand about serial killers. Gretchen Lowell did not conform. Her vic profile was all over the place. She was consistent with the torso damage; she cut them, stabbed them, carved them, burned them sometimes. But there was a Chinese menu of other psycho shit. Sometimes she made them drink drain cleaner. Sometimes she dissected the bodies. Removed their spleens. Took out their appendixes. Tongues. A few were basically filleted. Plus, she had accomplices. And she was a woman.” He swallowed his mouthful of food and set the sandwich on the table. “You’re not eating,” he said.

Susan stopped writing and glanced skeptically at her Saran-wrapped sandwich. She was feeling a little queasy and it lay there like something that had been dead for a while. She looked at Parker. He raised his eyebrows expectantly. She unwrapped the sandwich and took a tiny bite off one corner. It was ham, but it tasted like fish. He seemed satisfied. She put the sandwich down and went on with her questions. “So tell me about the accomplices. They were all men, right?”

“Poor fucks. They think she found them mostly through newspaper personal ads, or, later, on Internet dating sites. She’d use false information to register on the sites and then troll, looking for her targets. Apparently she had a knack for picking out men she could manipulate. She’d isolate them from their friends. Find their weaknesses. And push them until they cracked.” He smiled wryly and a small glob of mayonnaise squirted out of the corner of his mouth. “She has a lot in common with my wife, actually.”

“I had this boyfriend once who met his ex-wife through a personal ad. She emptied out their bank account and moved to Canada one day while he was at work.”

“Yeah,” Parker said, smiling and dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin. “Doesn’t often work out, does it?”

“What did you think of the task force? Of how it was run? You wrote a lot of those stories.”

Parker waved his hand dismissively. “There was a lot of political crap. A lot of pressure from the families and the media and politicians. I haven’t seen that much back stabbing since my daughters were teenagers. The FBI sent three different profilers. And they went through three task force leaders before they finally gave it to Sheridan. Detectives would burn out on it after a few years. I mean, they were tracking down leads all day, every day, and coming up with nada. They had a database with something like ten thousand individual tips. The profile the FBI gave them was all wrong. One year there’d be forty-eight cops working the case, and then a year would pass between bodies and the public would get all pissy about how they weren’t coming up with anything and how tax dollars were being wasted, and the next year the task force would be down to three guys. Another body would turn up, and it would bloom again. Sheridan was the only cop who was on the task force for all ten years. He was the only one who never asked to be transferred.”

She had stopped writing in the notebook. “You know him?”

“Sure.”

“In a ‘Let me ask you a few questions as you run away from me in the hallway’ kind of way, or in the ‘Let’s talk about this over a few drinks’ kind of way?”

“The former. He had a wife and two babies. Totally smitten with them. The wife was his college sweetheart. I met her once. Nice lady. As far as I ever knew, he had the Beauty Killer and he had his family, and not a lot in between.”

“What did you think of him?” Susan asked.

“Good cop. Smart guy. He could have taken a lot of shit for that. He’s got a master’s degree in criminology or some such crap. Total college boy. But his colleagues liked him. Fair. Driven. And,” Parker added, wiggling his hand in the air, “he was a little bit off.”

“Off how?” asked Susan. Her pen now lay next to her sandwich.

He shrugged. “Let’s just say he was very focused. But then he worked one case for ten years.”

“Where’s he been the past two years, do you know?”

“Here, as far as I know,” Parker said. “On disability. She did a number on him. He was in the hospital for a month. Rehab after that. But I heard he worked with the prosecution on the deal they cut her, so he didn’t exactly fall off the face of the earth.”

“She pled guilty to the five murders in Oregon and six in Washington and Idaho, and kidnapping and attempted murder, and coughed up twenty more bodies, right?”

“In exchange for life, yeah. Lot of people thought she should have gotten the needle.”

“What do you think?” Susan asked.

“I wish there’d been a trial. I love a good emotional courtroom drama, and I would have paid top dollar to see Archie Sheridan testify.”

Susan bit her lip. “Why did she go after him? It doesn’t make sense.”

“He was leading the task force. His picture was in the paper all the time in those days. She felt the need to present herself to him. She walked right into his office, offered her supposed pseudopsychiatric expertise. Maybe it presented itself as a challenge. And then there’s the fact that she’s cuckoo.” He popped the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth as an exclamation mark.

“Why did they call her ‘the Beauty Killer’?” Susan asked.

“That was mine,” he said proudly. “I asked the ME who examined Sheridan ’s dead hooker to characterize the condition of the corpse. She’d been cut up pretty bad. He whistled and said, ‘It’s a beauty.’ Most interesting autopsy he’d done all year. His last job had been in Newport. All drownings and suicides. He was positively tickled. Just a coincidence that Gretchen Lowell turned out to be a looker.”

It still didn’t click for Susan. This was a woman who had a strong survival instinct. She’d been on a ten-year killing spree. At least. Kidnapping the cop who was chasing her was not in her best interest. “What do you think of the theories that she wanted to be stopped? To be caught? Suicide by cop?”

“It’s bullshit,” Parker said. “Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. She’s not like us. She doesn’t do things for reasons. She liked killing people. She’s said as much in prison. She kidnapped Archie Sheridan, drugged him, tortured him for ten days, and would have murdered him if he hadn’t talked her out of it.”

“Talked her out of it. Just like that.”

“She was the one who called nine one one. If she hadn’t had medical training, he’d be dead. One of the EMTs told me that she’d kept him alive for almost thirty minutes, doing CPR, before they got there.”

“She saved his life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Christ, that’s got to be a mind fuck.”

Parker’s lips were shiny with grease. “I’d expect so.”