Heartsick (24 page)

She flushed the toilet and used the cover of the noise to open the door of the medicine cabinet. Shaving cream. Razors. Toothpaste and toothbrush. Deodorant. And two shelves of amber plastic pill bottles. She spun them around by their white lids to read the prescription information. Vicodin. Colace. Percocet. Zantac. Ambien. Xanax. Prozac. Large bottles. Small bottles.
Nothing that would interfere with his ability to do his job,
Fergus had said. Right. There were enough pills in that cabinet to medicate an elephant. All made out to Archie Sheridan. Fuck. If he needed all this stuff to function, he was worse off than she thought. And a better actor.

She memorized the names, carefully turned the bottles back to their original orientation, closed the cabinet, and walked back into the living room.

Archie didn’t even look up at her. “If I’d wanted you to not see the pills, I would have hidden them.”

Susan searched for what to say.
What pills?
But, for some reason, she didn’t feel like lying. “You’re on a lot of medication.”

His eyes followed her into the room, but he remained still as a corpse. “I’m unwell.”

Susan had the sudden unnerving sensation that everything she’d found out so far about Archie Sheridan was exactly what he wanted her to know. Every interview. Every lead. To what end? Maybe he was just tired of lying. Maybe he just wanted everyone to know all his secrets, so he didn’t have to work so hard at keeping them hidden. Subterfuge could be exhausting.

She stowed her digital recorder and notebook in her purse and dug out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m fucking my married boss,” she said to Archie.

Archie paused, mouth slightly agape. “I’m not sure I needed to know that.”

Susan lit her cigarette and took a drag. “Yeah, but as long as we’re sharing.”

“Okay.”

CHAPTER

26

A
nne 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.

CHAPTER

27

T
oday, when Gretchen
comes with the pills, Archie manages to get a sentence out when she removes the tape. “I’ll swallow them,” he tells her.

She sets the funnel on the tray and Archie opens his mouth and extends his tongue, like a good patient. She places a pill on his tongue and holds a small glass of water against his parched lips so he can drink. It is the first water he has had since his arrival and it feels good in his mouth and in his throat. She checks around his tongue to ensure that he has swallowed the medicine. They repeat the exercise four times.

When they are done, Archie asks, “How long have I been here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

He hears a buzzing. At first, he thinks it’s in his head, but then he recognizes the sound: flies. The decomposing corpse on the floor. It reminds him of the other man, and for a moment he is a cop again. “The second man who lifted me into the van,” he says. “Where is he? Have you killed him, too?”

Gretchen raises a bewildered eyebrow. “Darling, you sound like a raving lunatic.”

“He was here,” Archie says, his mind foggy. “Before.”

“It’s just us,” she says impatiently.

But he wants to keep her talking, to get as much information as he can. He glances around at the windowless room. The subway tiles. The medical equipment. “Where are we?”

She is done with his questions. “Have you thought about what I asked you?” she says.

Archie has no idea what she’s talking about. “What?”

“What you want to send them.” This is delivered with thinly disguised irritation. “They’re worried about you, darling.” She runs her hand lightly along his arm to where his wrist is bound with a padded leather strap to the gurney. “You’re right-handed, yes?”

Archie has to think on his feet, while he is still lucid, before the pills kick in. “Why, Gretchen? You never sent anything from the other bodies.” Then it strikes him. Her victims. They were always killed within three days of their abductions. “It’s been four days,” he says. “They’re starting to think I’m dead. You want them to know I’m still alive.”

“I’ll let you choose. But we need to do it now.”

The terror is building in his body, but he knows he can’t agree to her terms. As soon as he does, he becomes a partner to it. “No.”

“I’ve removed dozens of spleens,” she mutters. “But only postmortem. Do you think you can remain still?”

He starts to fold in on himself. “Gretchen, don’t do this.”

“It’s moot, of course.” She picks up a syringe from the tray. “This is succinylcholine. It’s a paralyzing agent, used for surgery. You won’t be able to move at all. But you’ll remain conscious. You’ll feel everything.” She glances at him meaningfully. “I think that’s essential, don’t you? If you’re going to lose a part of your body, you should experience it happening. If you wake up and it’s gone, how do you know if you feel any different?”

He can’t stop it. He knows there is no reasoning with her. He can only protect the people he’s left behind. “Who are you going to send it to?” he asks her.