Sweetheart (9 page)

“That case is still technically unsolved, isn’t it?” Susan asked.

“Gretchen did it,” Henry said. “She just hasn’t admitted it yet.”

A Subaru wagon parked on the street up ahead and a man in running clothes unloaded two large dogs and headed toward the park for a night jog. “Is that why Archie kept going back to see her, all that time? Because he wanted to close that first case?”

Henry was quiet for a moment. “No.”

Susan wondered how much Archie talked to Henry about Gretchen. She’d seen the way he reacted when Gretchen had touched Archie’s arm at the interrogation session Susan had witnessed when she was writing the profile. Henry had been in the room in an instant, pulling Gretchen away from Archie, like she was something infectious. Susan had been terrified of her, and at the same time captivated by Gretchen and Archie’s casual rapport. There was an intimacy to their relationship that was unsettling at best.

The sidewalk was old, buckled around tree roots, and Susan and Henry walked carefully, their eyes on the ground.

“We should never have agreed to the plea bargain,” Henry said, almost to himself. “We should have let Washington State prosecute. She’d be dead by now.”

“Archie closed thirty-one more cases,” Susan said.

Henry stopped. They were at the house, a brown clapboard behemoth that looked like it had been built in the forties. She could see his face a little in the light of the streetlamp. He looked tired, shoulders hunched, his leather jacket shiny from the rain. “You didn’t know him before,” he said.

It was hard to imagine Archie ever being very happy.

“Parker wrote a lot about the Beauty Killer case, didn’t he?” Susan asked.

“Hundreds of stories over the years,” Henry said with a shrug. “Jesus, probably thousands.”

Parker was old-school. He’d have used a typewriter if they’d let him. He probably had notes. Boxes of notes. They would be invaluable to someone who, say, wanted to write a book about the Beauty Killer case someday. Once the Molly Palmer story ran, she’d have some sway at the paper. She might be able to take a sabbatical.

“Do you remember him ever mentioning where he kept his notes?” Susan asked.

Henry looked at her for a moment and then raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I almost forgot,” he said. He pulled a badge out of his pocket and snapped it open. Then he shone his flashlight at Susan’s face.

She cringed, momentarily blinded, and lifted a hand over her face. “Forgot what?” she asked.

“That you care about stories more than people,” Henry said. He snapped the light off. “Let me do the talking,” he said, and he knocked on the door.

They waited in silence, while Susan fumed. She hadn’t meant to be insensitive. She
did
care about Archie. She wasn’t trying to write something trashy. That had been done already. She wanted to write a real book. A smart, compelling, illuminating book. Was that so terrible?

“I didn’t mean to—” she started to say.

Henry held up his hand. “Stop,” he said.

A porch light came on, splashing yellow light into the darkness. The front door opened and an elderly woman appeared. She wore her gray hair loose and was wearing a wool button-down shirt decorated with Indian totems.

“Yes?” she said.

Henry stepped forward and showed her his badge. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Detective Sobol. I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions.” He smiled amiably. “Do you live here?”

“Yes, son,” she said, her pale blue eyes alert and amused. “For fifty-four years now.”

“Have you noticed anything strange lately?” Henry asked. He ran a hand over his bald head. “Activity in the woods?”

The folds in her face deepened. “Is this connected to the senator’s death?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “We’ve found some remains in the woods.”

“What sort of remains?” she asked.

Henry cleared his throat. “Human.”

The old woman turned and craned her head back toward the park. Then she looked over at Susan. Susan tried to smile amiably, too. “Is this your wife?” the woman asked Henry.

Susan laughed out loud.

“No, ma’am,” Henry said. “She’s a reporter.”

Susan held up her notebook and wiggled her other hand in hello.

Henry continued, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Notice anything out of the ordinary? Hear anything? Smell anything?”

Missing any relatives, Susan thought but didn’t say.

The woman considered Henry’s questions. “Bill has been acting strange lately.”

“Is that your husband?” Henry asked.

“My standard poodle,” she said.

Susan saw the corners of Henry’s mouth twitch up for an instant. “Strange, how?” Henry asked.

The woman frowned. “He just stands in front of his doghouse. Barks some. Won’t let me near it.”

“Do you let him run loose in the woods?” Henry asked.

“He jumps the fence sometimes,” she said. “Always comes back, though.”

“Where is Bill now?” Henry asked.

She motioned for them to follow, and then led them around down an old brick path that ran along the side of the house. She was wearing sheepskin boots, and Susan noticed Henry move close in behind her, in case the old woman slipped on the uneven wet bricks. The path was lit with solar yard lights that cast a pale blue glow, but did little to provide illumination. However, the woman was steady on her feet and didn’t miss a step.

They came to a gate in the cedar fence that boxed in the backyard and the woman opened it, and the gate swung in with a rusty sigh. There weren’t any lights back there and it was dark. Henry snapped his flashlight back on as the woman disappeared into the blackness.

“Ma’am?” Henry said.

A floodlight turned on, revealing an ivy-clotted backyard, and the woman appeared on her back stoop.

“Bill,” she said to the backyard, “I’ve brought a friend to meet you.”

Susan searched the yard for the poodle. The ivy from the park had crawled over the fence and snaked halfway across the yard. It was like some sort of intractable green tide. You could chop it back, sure, but it would just keep creeping forward, an inch a day, until it covered everything again. Susan heard a dog bark and she realized that the doghouse was half-covered with ivy, too. A large black poodle stood in the doghouse’s open doorway. The dog had been recently groomed and his coat had been trimmed into a series of lumps and balls, a weird living topiary.

Susan saw Henry wince. “Is Bill friendly?” he asked.

“As a lamb,” the woman said.

Henry shook his head, set his shoulders, and walked toward the doghouse.

Bill growled.

Henry stopped. “As a lamb?” he asked.

“Don’t let him intimidate you, son,” the woman said. “You don’t have a cat, do you?”

“I have three cats,” Henry said.

The woman clucked. “Bill doesn’t like cats,” she said ominously.

“Susan?” Henry called. “A little help?”

Susan had never had any pets. She hesitated. “I’m not good with dogs,” she said.

“Get the hell over here,” Henry said.

Susan walked slowly over to the poodle. “Hi, Bill,” she said. “Good Bill.” She reached out to let the dog smell her hand. “Nice Bill.”

“You probably don’t want to touch him,” the old woman called from the porch.

Susan froze and the dog looked at her outstretched hand and bared his teeth. He didn’t growl. He didn’t make a sound.

“He’s probably scared of your hair,” Henry said, as he attempted to squeeze his large frame around the dog far enough that he could aim his flashlight around to see inside the doghouse. He got down on his hands and knees and managed to wedge himself halfway into the doghouse. Then he backed out, sat down next to the dog, and punched a number into his cell phone.

“Archie,” he said into the phone. “It’s me. The blonde.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “Is she missing an arm?”

Susan heard Archie’s voice say, “Yeah.”

Henry glanced back over his shoulder into the doghouse. Then he looked at Susan. The dog growled and eyed them both suspiciously. “I found it,” Henry said.

T
he old woman’s name was Trudy Schuyler. Susan had filled a few pages of her notebook with information about her. Her husband had died five years before. She didn’t have a wood chipper. She didn’t know a kid who fit the description of the kid Archie had seen in the woods. She had been a meter maid, but she had retired twenty years before. She had three grown children. The cops had taken the dog into custody so they could monitor its output, lest the furry topiary had managed to digest a clue or two while gnawing on the dead woman’s radius bone. With this in mind, they had started bagging dog shit from the yard. That was about the time that Susan left.

There wasn’t that much going on at the
Herald
building at 1:00
A.M.
The ambulance chasers who’d been on hand to help put together the issue on Castle and Parker were all tucked neatly in bed. Even the janitors were done for the day. A security guard had let Susan in through the loading dock entrance. She had taken the elevator up to the fifth floor, where Ian was already huddled in his office with a copy editor, a headline editor, a designer, and a photo editor, all of whom had been called in to help pull the story together. They all looked tired and a little annoyed. Susan was trying not to look tired and annoyed. She was trying to look cheery. She had pissed Ian off enough already. And pissing Ian off was not going to get the Molly Palmer story published. Being nice might help. It was so crazy, it just might work.

The late filing was called a “hot chase,” meaning that as soon as Susan was done with the story, they would stop the presses, slip in a new plate, and then continue the press run. She’d have a story in the Dead Senator issue after all. Just not the story she wanted.

Susan started to walk over to Ian’s office, but Ian saw her through his office’s glass wall. He held up a hand for her to stop, then pointed to his watch, and then to her desk.

She obediently walked over to her desk, threw her purse at her feet, set her notebook next to her keyboard, and called Molly Palmer. Nothing. If Ian was going to run the story, Susan knew it had to be solid, triple-checked, every
i
dotted. She left a voice mail. “Seriously, Molly,” Susan said. “You need to call me back.” She wrapped the phone cord around her finger, circling the knuckle so tight that the finger started to turn red. “It’s going to be okay. He’s dead. Let’s go public with this.” She thought of the ensuing press mayhem Molly was sure to endure. “You care about stories more than people,” Henry had said.

Susan bit her lip. “If you want to drop out for a while, fine,” she said into the phone. “But I need you to talk to some people first, okay?” Susan disentangled her finger and hung up. The lights weren’t all on and the floor was quiet and you had to look hard to see across the room. Besides the huddle in Ian’s office, the only other human being on the floor was a guy from sports, who sat wearing headphones and keyboarding something even he didn’t seem interested in.

She began to type furiously. The Jane Doe. The two new bodies. The possibility of a Forest Park serial killer. It was the kind of story that Parker would have loved. Thinking of him made her pause, fingers poised over the keyboard, and she glanced up from her computer monitor to the lights on the West Hills outside the
Herald’s
large windows.

She glanced back at Parker’s desk. There were two new bouquets of flowers. It was starting to look like a grave. Susan got up and went into the break room and dug around in the kitchenette cabinets until she found a glass vase, a coffee can, and three tall water glasses. She filled them with water and took a few trips to carry them back to Parker’s desk. She did her best to arrange the wilted flowers in the vessels, but the stems were soft and the flowers drooped forlornly over the sides.

The flowers made her think of Archie Sheridan, whose yard was buried in floral arrangements during the ten days he was missing, and how Debbie Sheridan had once told her that she couldn’t stand the smell of flowers anymore. They made her think of death.

Susan sat down in Parker’s task chair, rolling in small circles, trying to get into his head, to figure out how he’d write the Forest Park murders story, when her knee bumped against Parker’s desk’s filing drawer. Each desk had one. They were always kept locked. Susan kept her key under a mug full of pens on her desk. She had learned that from Parker.

She reached out and lifted up the Hooters’ mug of number two pencils that sat on Parker’s desk, revealing a tiny silver key. Then she put the key in the file drawer lock and turned it. It opened. Inside, toward the front of the drawer, were thickly packed files marked with names that Susan recognized as being connected to stories that Parker covered. She walked her fingers along the files until she came to a large, black three-ring binder that had been jammed in the back of the drawer. There was a label on the spine, and in Parker’s slanted handwriting, the words “Beauty Killer.”

Jackpot.

She pulled the binder out of the drawer, locked it, replaced the key, and carried the heavy binder over to her desk, just as Ian popped his head out of his office and hollered, “I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”

“Almost done,” Susan said. She slipped the binder onto the floor next to her purse, resting one foot on it protectively. Her face was flushed with excitement, but it was dark and Susan didn’t think that Ian could tell.

A
rchie still wasn’t sure if he’d agreed to let Sarah Rosenberg treat him because he needed the help, or because he wanted an excuse to sit in the room where Gretchen Lowell had drugged him and taken him captive.

This was his Monday morning ritual. No more Sundays at the state pen with the Beauty Killer, but every Monday he spent an hour sitting across from Gretchen’s big wooden desk. In one of her overstuffed striped chairs. He watched her grandfather clock, the time still stuck at 3:30. He looked between the heavy green velvet curtains, out to the cherry trees thick with green leaves outside her window.