Heartsick (7 page)

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.”

CHAPTER

8

P
ortland Mayor Bob
“Buddy” Anderson was announcing the new task force at an afternoon press conference at the new offices. This was where Susan was supposed to finally meet her subject. Susan loathed press conferences. They were artificial and on-message and almost never revealed anything that was true in the way that made for good writing. The information relayed was accurate, yes. But never true.

Ian insisted on driving, which was fine with Susan, as her battered Saab was always loaded with the accoutrements of her life—magazines, empty water bottles, discarded jackets, notebooks and pens—dozens of pens. She found that passengers sometimes failed to understand her complete lack of interest in picking up old french fries off the floor, much less dusting the dashboard. Parker, who was actually covering the press conference, and who did not like Ian, based entirely on the fact that Ian had graduated from journalism school in 1986, took a separate vehicle.

It was still raining. The sky was entirely white and the foothills that surrounded the city looked like jagged, milky shadows. As they made their way over the bridge, Susan placed her hand flat on the passenger side window, watching the rivulets of water carve their jagged paths down the glass. So many people moved to Portland for the quality of life and the progressive politics. They bought bicycles and big old wooden houses and espresso makers, and then, after the first dreary winter, they moved back to L.A. But Susan liked the slick of rain, the way that it distorted the view out of every windshield, every window. The way light blurred around brake lights and glowed on the pavement. The scrape of the wipers.

She had to ask it. “This assignment,” she said, still looking out her window, drumming her fingers on the cold, hard glass. “It has nothing to do with your cock, right, lan?”

Ian looked honestly startled. “Jesus! No. No, Susan. Howard asked for you. I just agreed. I would never…” He let that trail off.

“Good,” Susan said. “Because if I ever thought that it was interfering in our professional relationship, the fucking would stop.” She turned and looked at him with her hard green eyes. “You understand that, right?”

He cleared his throat, and his face and neck reddened. “Yes.”

She let her gaze drift back out over the Willamette. “Don’t you love the rain?”

Anne Boyd and
Claire Masland sat across from each other in the rectangular break room of the former bank. Claire was the tiniest white woman Anne had ever met. It wasn’t so much that she was short; she was probably five three. It’s just that Claire was so slight and angular that she seemed smaller than she was. But Anne liked Claire. She looked like an adolescent boy, but she was one of the most tenacious cops Anne had ever worked with. Like one of those cute lap dogs that sinks its teeth into someone’s forearm, locks its jaw, and can’t be pried off without tranquilizers. They’d become friends during the Beauty Killer case. The other cops thought it was because they were women. And it was, in a way. They knew something about each other. Despite the black-white thing, the heavy-thin thing, despite it all, they recognized the thing that, as women, made them different enough to lead them into a violent world still dominated by men. They understood what it was to be attracted, in some way, to death.

“You want to go over it again?” Claire asked.

Claire had recounted her particular knowledge of the case with Anne twice already and now sat fidgeting, her gaze resting on the microwave where her lunch was currently heating. She had been at Jefferson, interviewing kids who knew Kristy, and Anne knew that she wanted to get back to the field. Missing persons cases were hard enough. Missing kids made everyone work twice as hard and feel twice as guilty.

“I think I’ve got everything I need from you for now,” Anne said. She stacked the copies of the notes that Claire had brought her next to the ones from Henry and Martin. The notes that cops took at a crime scene were often more copious than the version that made it into their reports, and Anne had learned long ago that the smallest detail could mean the difference between a solid profile and a half-assed guess. “How do you think Archie looked this morning?” Anne asked, keeping her voice casual.

Claire shrugged, her eyes still on the microwave timer. Thin people, Anne noticed, never seemed to stop eating. “Fine,” Claire said. She lifted a hand to her mouth and tore at a bloody cuticle.

“Fine?”

Claire’s gray eyes steeled and her hand fluttered to her lap. “Yes, Anne. Fine. They ask you to keep an eye on him?”

“I’m just concerned about a friend,” Anne said. She examined Claire, the dark circles under her eyes, the bitten cuticles. The stress was already taking its toll.

“Work’s the best thing for him,” Claire said. The microwave dinged and Claire hurried to push her chair back and stand up. “Besides, Henry says he’s okay.”

“Henry loves Archie,” Anne said.

“Exactly. So he’d protect him, right? Besides, they wouldn’t ask him back if he weren’t okay.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“You come in on the red-eye?” Claire asked.

Anne leaned forward. “How does he seem to you?”

Claire thought for a moment, wrinkling her smooth forehead. “His voice sounds different.”

“It’s from the drain cleaner she made him drink. It must have damaged his vocal cords.”

Claire closed her eyes and turned her head. “Jesus Christ.”

Anne hesitated. But she felt that she had to say it. “This new killer. It’s going to get worse, Claire. He’s accelerating. You don’t have a lot of time.”

Claire turned and moved to the microwave. “I spent last night with Kristy’s family,” she said. “Her father. Her grandmother. Her aunts.” She opened the microwave and extracted a withered burrito on a paper plate. “And the whole time, I wasn’t thinking about her. I was focused on the next girl. The girl safe in her bed, who is going to disappear. Who is going to be raped. Who is going to be murdered.” She poked at her burrito sadly with a white plastic fork. A plastic tine snapped off and stuck in the tortilla skin. Claire shook her head, disgusted. “The microwave in here is a piece of shit,” she said.