Evil at Heart (13 page)

           
“This better come off,” Susan said.

           
She was perched on the back of a police van, the cab’s double doors open on either side of her, blocking the view of the gawkers who already lined the police tape that had just gone up a half hour ago. The rain had stopped, but not before Susan’s hair had gotten frizzy. Police radios cracked, emergency lights flashed. Everyone walked with purpose. The blood on Susan’s jeans had started to dry, stiffening the denim against her knees. She was trying to ignore it.

           
The fingerprint tech was sitting next to her, a police fingerprint card on the bed of the van between them. His hooded eyes didn’t waver from his work, his balding head bowed over her hand beside her. “Hold still,” he told Susan.

           
Henry cleared his throat and tapped his notebook with his pen. He’d come out of the house ten minutes before, mouth set, eyes masked behind sunglasses, and had been grilling her ever since.

           
“How did this guy get your cell-phone number?” Henry asked.

           
“Everyone has it,” Susan said. “It’s on my e-mail signature. I’m a reporter. I need to be reachable.” She craned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of his notes. She should be the one asking him questions. For a reporter, she spent an awful lot of time being interviewed. “So, I hear you found a head,” she said.

           
Henry angled his notebook toward his chest. “I should arrest you for trespassing,” he said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

           
“I played the odds,” Susan said. She looked at her boots. They were caked with mud. She had probably tracked it all through the house. “Who’s the dead guy?” she asked.

           
Henry rubbed the back of his neck like it hurt.

           
Susan could hear more sirens in the distance. The fingerprint tech moved on to the next finger. She glanced, dismayed, at her purple fingertip. “Seriously,” she said, “that ink washes off, right?”

           
“The victim doesn’t have ID,” Henry said, and Susan looked back up. “The ME says male in his early twenties. Only been dead two to six hours.” Henry leaned toward her. It was a tiny motion, a shift in his stance of an inch, imperceptible to anyone watching, but Henry was a mountain, and it was all Susan could do not to cower. “Tell me about the caller,” Henry said.

           
“Tell me about the head,” she said.

           
“We found a head,” Henry said. “PittockMansion. We had to close off part of the backyard, but you can still take a tour of the house.” He scratched one eyebrow. “I think they’re charging extra.”

           
Susan pulled at her damp tank top. “He didn’t sound young,” she said of the caller. “He didn’t sound old. He said he was part of a Gretchen Lowell fan group.” She caught herself. “I mean, not specifically. He said I’d written to him on his Web site, wanting to write about his group.” Henry held his pen to his notebook, apparently still waiting for her to say something worth writing down. She wound a piece of purple hair around a finger and tried to remember any other group she might have contacted—she used the Internet endlessly—but came up only with the Gretchen story. “I’ve been contacting Beauty Killer fan sites.” She left out the part about him not recognizing Jimi Hendrix. She didn’t think Henry would be interested.

           
Henry wrote something down. Susan lifted her chin to read it. “SW PC.” He circled it. “What the hell does that mean?” she asked.

           
“I’m going to need your hard drive,” he said.

           
He had to be kidding. “No,” Susan said. And she felt the need to add, “And I have a Mac, not a PC.”

           
Henry adjusted his sunglasses, pressing them more firmly into place. It wasn’t sunny. But Susan wasn’t sure this was the time to point that out. “We need to trace your Internet history,” he said.

           
Susan shook her head. “And have you find out how much time I spend Googling myself?” she said. “No way.”

           
Henry lowered his head and looked up at her from under the aviators, and she knew then why he wore them. “This is a murder investigation,” he said. “You’re obstructing justice.” He gritted his teeth. “And pissing me off.”

           
“I’m a journalist,” she said, straightening up. “I’m not turning my computer over to the police.” She’d told the cops when they first got there that she wasn’t showing them her incoming call log. She was protecting a source. It was the code. Once you gave up a source, you could forget about anyone ever telling you anything again. Parker taught her that. He’d gone to jail to protect a source. “Good luck getting a warrant,” she added. The fingerprint tech rolled her ring finger across the ink pad. There was dirt under the nail. “Can you tell an ape fingerprint from a human one?” she asked him.

           
The tech didn’t look up. He lifted her finger off the ink and pressed it in the center of a square on the fingerprint card. Susan admired his focus. “Yes,” he said.

           
Henry wrote something down. “Do you think you’d recognize the caller’s voice?” he asked.

           
Susan tried to replay the caller’s voice in her head, but it eluded her. “Maybe,” she said. She gazed down at her bloodstained jeans. Thank God for black denim. It could hide anything.

           
“The guy I found,” she said—she could still see his face, those egg-white eyes—“how’d he die?”

           
“I think we can rule out natural causes,” Henry said.

           
Susan had knelt two feet away from the body, and gotten blood on her pants. The sheet was soaked with it. The guy had bled a lot. Like he’d been cut up. No, she thought, operated on. The hearts on the wall, Gretchen’s signature, the fan site. Suddenly she knew. “His spleen’s gone, isn’t it?” Susan asked. Henry’s reaction was almost undetectable. But he flinched.

           
Someone had ripped out his spleen. Just like Gretchen had done to her victims, like she’d done to Archie. She had sliced Archie open without anesthesia and cut it out of him. Then sent it to Henry in the mail. Susan’s throat tightened and she had to swallow a few times before she could speak. “Should I be in protection?” she asked.

           
Henry took off the sunglasses and looked at her. His shaved head was still shiny with rain. “Leave town,” he said.

           
It was a good idea. Go to Mexico for a few months. Get some writing done. Maybe she could have done it, a few months ago, before she’d met Archie. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m a journalist. I can’t.”

           
Susan’s pulse was racing. The fingerprint tech must have felt it because he looked up at her for the first time since he’d arrived. “Koalas,” he said. “You fingerprint a koala, it’s almost impossible to tell the print from a human one.”

           
“Seriously?” Susan said.

           
He pressed her pinkie onto the cardstock. “Fools us every time,” he said.

           
“Did you know,” Susan said, “that in the past twenty years, nine children have been crushed to death by school cafeteria tables?”

           
The fingerprint tech glanced up worriedly. “No,” he said.

           
Susan relaxed a little, and as she did her brain started to circle the details. Who had called her? “Do you think she has a new accomplice?” Susan asked Henry. He didn’t answer. Then something occurred to her. “Accomplices?” she asked, stressing the plural. The crime scene flashed in her mind. “There were ten flashlights.”

           
“One person could have set up all the flashlights,” Henry said, putting the sunglasses back on. “We want to keep the flashlight thing out of the media, okay?”

           
“Maybe she had nine accomplices,” Susan said. “Like a serial-killer baseball team. Or maybe she’s trying people out. You know, she cuts one of them from the team after every kill. The last guy alive gets to be her murder buddy.”

           
Henry was not amused. “Tell me about these fan sites,” he said.

           
“People paint pictures of her and post them,” Susan said. “They write her poetry. Fan fiction. I did a story about it a few weekends ago.” No reaction. Susan exhaled, exasperated. “You don’t even read the Herald, do you?”

           
“I get all my news from the Daily Auto Trader,” Henry said.

           
The fingerprint tech handed Susan a moist towelette. She scrubbed her fingers with it and the ink wiped right off. Whatever was in that towelette had to be toxic. “I have to work,” Susan said, standing up. The fingerprint tech held out a plastic bag and she dropped the inky towelette in it.

           
Henry crossed his arms. “I can’t convince you to keep some of what you saw to yourself?” he said. “So as to, you know, avoid pande-fucking-monium?”

           
“No chance,” Susan said. “Besides, you found a head. You don’t think the citizens are going to freak out as it is?”