Evil at Heart (43 page)

           
Susan’s mind was going a mile a minute.

           
Leo Reynolds didn’t know she existed. Not that way. She had purple hair and the body of a ten-year-old boy. He slept with strippers and was, apparently, some sort of drug lawyer. His sister had been murdered. His brother was part of some fucked-up Gretchen Lowell Love Club killing spree. And his father was a drug kingpin.

           
Leo had led the police to Jeremy’s room. He’d been there. He knew about the collage, about the notebook. Now everyone would know. Jeremy’s face, his story, his family, would be all over the news. It would not be good for business.

           
Something wasn’t right.

           
They walked past Paul-Bunyan-the-doorman and out into the early morning light. The entire sky glowed tangerine, bathing the Paul Bunyan statue across the street in a fiery light that made him look even more like an axe murderer.

           
It was almost six. Archie had been missing for over five hours.

           
As they walked to the car, Leo handed her a perfectly folded white handkerchief. “Your nose is running,” he said.

           
Susan sniffled and wiped her nose with the handkerchief, then handed it back to him. He raised an eyebrow at the snotty handkerchief, but folded it and put it back in his pocket.

           
When they got to the car, he opened the door for her, and she got in. “Does your father know you’re helping the police?” Susan asked him.

           
He closed her door, walked around the back of the car, and got in the driver’s seat. He looked at her. “Yep,” he said.

           
“Do you do anything without your father’s approval?” Susan said.

           
Leo started the car. “He would not approve of you.”

           
C H A P T E R 49

           
The coke had worn off and Susan had to will herself to look passably alert. Ian had started holding the editorial meetings in his office instead of the conference room, so he could sit behind his desk and make everyone else gaze in awe at his authority. There were only two extra chairs in Ian’s office and there were six reporters who had to come to the meeting, which meant that four of them had to stand or sit on the floor.

           
Susan usually came early to get one of the chairs. But she’d come straight here after Leo had dropped her at her car, and there was only space left on the floor.

           
“So,” Ian was saying. “Apparently what we have on our hands here is a serial-killer cult. These are all people of interest in all of the recent murders we’ve been attributing to the Beauty Killer. Two have been identified.” Ian had a dry-erase board he’d hauled in from the conference room and propped behind his desk so he could write down story ideas and then cross them out or circle them, and he’d taped pictures of Jeremy and Pearl on it. “Jeremy Reynolds. From Lake Oswego. His father’s a bigwig in real estate and venture

           
capital. Margaux Clinton. Sixteen.Runaway from Eugene.” He held his pen frozen in midair. “Who are they? What led them astray? We’ve also got three victims.” He didn’t have their pictures on his board. “Let’s wrap them into a story about the victimization of the homeless—bum fights, violence against transients, et cetera.

           
“And, obviously, I think the time has come to examine our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell.”

           
Susan looked around the room. It was neat by newspaper-office standards. A New York Yankees pennant on the wall.An Absence of Malice poster. A framed copy of the Oregon Herald from the day Ian was born (1963—God, he was old). And two waist-high stacks of newspapers. On a bulletin board on the wall, next to a five-year-old press release announcing his Pulitzer win, Ian had tacked up a quote that he’d scrawled on a piece of copy paper. “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why”—Bernard Baruch. Next to that was a cartoon from The New Yorker of a guy who was supposed to be Archie Sheridan sitting at a bar. The bartender was handing him a drink and saying, “Gretchen Lowell wants to buy you a beer.”

           
“I know the answer,” Susan said.

           
Ian, who had been going on about the role of the antihero in society, stopped talking and looked down at her, annoyed.

           
“I know the answer,” Susan said again.

           
“Excuse me?” Ian said.

           
“We’re the ones who did it,” Susan said. “It was us.” The walls at the Herald were paper thin, and everyone could hear everything anyone said over a whisper. She didn’t care. “We glamorized Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said. “We made her into a celebrity.”

           
Ian remained perfectly motionless, pen still aloft. He was always perfectly motionless when he was pissed. Susan didn’t care. She had a hole in her cheek and Archie was missing and she was at a stupid story meeting and they were all going to be laid off anyway. “There are people out there who think she’s a hero,” she said. She

           
looked around at all of them. Sitting on the floor, leaning awkwardly against the wall. Derek sat in one of the chairs. Derek almost never got a chair. Susan could only imagine how early he’d gotten there to get one. And why? No one wanted to be there. This was a joke.

           
Susan uncrossed her legs and stood up. “They maintain fan sites,” she said. “They update her Wikipedia page. They write fan fiction about her. The audio of the nine-one-one call she made when she turned herself in? Someone remixed it and made a music video. You can watch it on YouTube. There are T-shirts with her face on them that say ‘I “heart” the Beauty Killer.’ ” She got her foot in one boot, and then pulled on the other one. “Not just T-shirts. Baby onesies. Esquire magazine put her in their ‘Women We Love’ issue last year. I put her name into eBay and I found someone selling a set of scalpels they claimed Gretchen had used to slice someone up. The bidding was up to nine hundred dollars.”

           
She stood there, nose running, bandage on her cheek. She was so fired. She was beyond fired. She would be blacklisted. But she couldn’t stop herself. It all just came blubbering out. “We put all that out there,” she said, flailing a hand. “Story after story after story.The same stale crap.Anything to have an excuse to run her picture, because everyone knows that her picture increases the newsstand pickup by twenty-five percent. So when there wasn’t news, we found other reasons to write about her. ‘How to Make a Gretchen Lowell Halloween Costume.’ ” She forced a laugh and wiped her nose with her wrist. “I wrote that one.”

           
Ian capped his pen and set it on his desk. He did it with a little too much emphasis, and it rolled across the desk and off the front of it and dropped to the carpet. No one made a move to pick it up for him. No one moved at all.

           
“We are in the business of selling ads,” Ian said. “We can charge more for our ads if we sell more papers. Gretchen Lowell sells papers.

           
The Baltimore Sun.The ChicagoTrib. The L.A. Times. Their newsrooms have been gutted. You want to take a buyout? Or do you want to write a story lots of people will read so the ad department can go to Starbucks and talk them into running quarter-page ads in our dying little medium? Because you can either sell Frappuccino ads, or you can sell Frappuccinos. So do you want to be a newspaper reporter, or do you want to be a barista?”

           
“I want to be a journalist,” Susan said. It sounded absurd even as she said it. Someone leaning against the wall smirked.

           
“Then write me a story about why you were treated for a puncture wound in the Produce District at two

           
A.M. this morning. Then write me seventy-five inches on our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell. You can put in everything you just said.”

           
“Seventy-five inches?” Susan said.

           
“Do you think you can fill it?” Ian asked.

           
“Absolutely,” Susan said.

           
“Then go, get out of here,” Ian said.

           
She looked at Ian. Maybe he wasn’t a total asshole, after all.

           
One of the other reporters raised his hand. “Can I go?” he said.

           
“Don’t even think about it,” Ian said.

           
Susan backed out of the room and closed the door behind her before Ian could change his mind.

           
C H A P T E R 50

           
Anne Boyd was the best criminal profiler that Henry knew. She’d been the third one the FBI had sent to work on the Beauty Killer Task Force, and had spent months at a time in Portland, away from her husband and two boys. Henry called her from a table outside Taco Del Mar on
Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
. The taco stand was in an old gas station. Everything in Portland was in an old something. The task force offices were in an old bank. You could get a burger and see a movie inside an old elementary school. Even the old Henry Weinhard’s brewery downtown had been turned into green certified condos. Everything was repurposed. Portlanders loved to recycle.