Heartsick (38 page)

Paul got in on his side first, leaning over and unlocking Susan’s door. She climbed in and pulled her seat belt into place, and took a final drag off the cigarette. Then she looked for the ashtray to put it out in. It was the cleanest car she’d ever seen. The dash was so clean, it shone. There wasn’t a Corgi hair or a pen or an old pack of catsup to be found. She reached out and opened the ashtray in the center consol. The ashtray in her car was filled with old gum and ashes. Paul’s ashtray was empty. You could eat out of it. If you wanted to. Susan examined her cigarette; it seemed a shame to sully his sterile ashtray with it. Paul had turned his head and was leaning between the seats to root for something in the back. She didn’t want to just drop the cigarette on the parking garage floor—she was trying to be better about the whole littering thing. Maybe Paul had something in the glove compartment she could wrap the cigarette in and then she could put it in her purse. She opened the glove compartment. Inside was a flashlight and a single folded map. “Jesus, Paul,” she said. “Clean much?” The car even smelled disinfected, like a freshly scrubbed public bathroom.

“What did you do? Dip your car in bleach?” she asked. “Because it smells like—” She pulled the map out and turned it over in her hands. It was a nautical map of the Willamette. “Clorox.”

He grabbed her from behind just as she reached for the door handle. She clawed at the door, but he hit an all-lock button and the electronic locks bolted into place with a mechanical thud. She scrambled to get to the button on her door handle to unlock her door, but he had a forearm around her neck and something over her mouth and nose and she couldn’t get free of him. She fought, all knees and elbows, but it wasn’t enough. He had leverage on her. She thought of all sorts of things: how she wished she’d done that story on self-defense classes; how she should have worn her shit-kicker boots, the ones with the steel toes; how she should have kept her nails long, so she could rip his fucking eyes out; how, somehow, none of this surprised her at all. She managed to get the lit cigarette up, grinding it hard into his neck until he howled and wrenched her wrist until she dropped it. She had wanted to kill him with it, but she would settle for it burning a hole through his spotless floor mat. That would be her legacy: a burn spot on an otherwise-pristine surface.
Fucking perfect
. It was her last thought as the darkness engulfed her.

CHAPTER

42

A
nne sat on
the carpet in Dan McCallum’s dark little living room, surrounded by Cleveland High School yearbooks. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But Archie suspected Reston and she was going to find him something to move on. The books had been arranged chronologically and Anne had started with the most recent volume, flipping through the pages, hoping for something to catch her eye. Page after page of goofy club photographs, sporting events, school plays, class photos, teachers, and plaintive senior messages, and then, halfway through the 1994 yearbook, she found exactly what she was looking for. She pulled the 1995 yearbook off the shelf and searched frantically through it until she found the next picture she needed to confirm what she was thinking. It did.

She scrambled up off the floor, holding both the books cradled to her chest, and fled through the house to find Archie.

He was in the kitchen, watching as they zipped McCallum’s corpse into a black body bag and prepared to wheel him out of the house. Anne pulled him to the back stoop and thrust the first yearbook into his hands, open to the photograph of the Cleveland High School drama club. There at its center was Susan Ward, and next to her Paul Reston. Susan, fourteen years old, before the pink hair. She had not yet come into the beauty that was waiting for her. She was still an awkward-looking, thin, brown-haired girl.

“Jesus Christ,” said Archie, his color draining. “She looks like all the others.”

“Why did you suspect Reston?” Anne asked.

She could see Archie hesitate for a moment. He touched the photograph of the young Susan, as if his fingertips could somehow protect her retroactively. “Susan told me yesterday that she had a sexual relationship with him when he was her teacher. Today, she denied it.”

Anne harbored no doubt that Susan had slept with Reston when she was a teenager. “It’s him,” she said simply.

“He’s got an alibi,” Archie said, leaning against the back of the house. “We can’t pick him up based on an old photograph and a crime with a long-passed statute of limitations.”

Anne laid the next yearbook over the one he held and opened it to Susan’s sophomore-year photograph. She was a different kid from the one in the first picture. She wore a black T-shirt and black lipstick. Her eyes looked helpless and sad and hard all at the same time. And she had bleached her hair. But she hadn’t used Clairol. She hadn’t gone to a salon. She’d used what she could find under the sink. She’d used Clorox.

“It’s all about her,” Anne said. She cataloged the morgue photos in her mind, the girls’ marbled faces, their hemorrhaged corneas, the cruel yellow-orange of their once-brown hair. “He bleaches them because it completes the transformation.”

Archie’s eyes didn’t lift from the page. She could see him processing all of it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said almost to himself. Then he looked up at Anne, his face flushed with urgency. “Where are Claire and Henry?”

“I’m here,” Claire said, coming up the back steps, cell phone still in her hand. “Jeff just called,” she said, face tense. “Reston isn’t at home. He left school at the usual time, but hasn’t come home yet. They don’t have any way to find him until he shows up. Should I have them wait?”

The back door burst open and Anne saw the back of a jacket that read
MEDICAL TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
, and then a college-age man backed out, pulling the metal gurney that carried McCallum’s bagged body. Anne held the screen door open for him as he and another man moved the body out onto the stoop.

“Find him,” Archie said to Claire, handing the yearbooks back to Anne so that he could get to his cell phone. “Arrest him. He’s our guy. Get a warrant to search his house. And get some uniforms over to Susan Ward’s apartment. Now.”

The transport team cleared the stairs and began wheeling the body down the slim cement path that led to the driveway. The wheels made a cruel grating sound on the concrete.

Anne glanced down at the top yearbook. In the margin next to a photograph of a young man was a scrawled message from one of McCallum’s students: “Hey, Mr. M. I’m outta here. Have a great life.”

CHAPTER

43

S
usan awoke with
a start to the smell of gasoline. The odor was so strong that it reached down through the ocean she was under, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her to the surface of her consciousness. She came to with a start, but it was so dark that it took her a few moments to realize that her eyes were open. Her hands and feet were bound. She sat up and hit her head on something hard just above her. The impact sent a shock wave of pain through her skull and she sank back down into a lying position.

“Paul?” she said. Her voice came out in a whimper.

The room lurched. Susan was caught off balance and rolled back against a wall. It wasn’t so much the lurching room that tipped her off as the thud her body made against the fiberglass. A boat. She was on a boat.

It was then that she panicked.

She started to scream. She used her bound hands and feet to bang on the fiberglass. She found strength she didn’t know she had. “I’m down here,” she shrieked. “Help me. Someone.”

“Susan.”

She froze and every hair on her body stood up. He was down there. With her. In the dark.

“Susan.” His disembodied voice was strained and brutal. “You need to be quiet.”

“Let me go, Paul,” she pleaded into the darkness.

She felt him fumble for her and she forced herself not to cringe under his touch as his hand found her leg and moved up her thigh and stopped. He was right next to her. His breath was hot against her face.

“I thought we’d spend some time together,” he said, and his voice caught. “Like you said, I barely know you.”

CHAPTER

44

W
hen 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.”