Henry stood in the rain on the hillside with Detective Martin Ngyun, staring down at the leathery head in the mud. The ferns and brush around the head were charred and the entire area was dusted with foam from a fire extinguisher. Henry could see a soot-blackened cigarette that had been stamped deeply into the dirt.
Henry peered up the hillside. The whole task force had responded. A busload of Beauty Killer tourists were standing at the top of the hill behind the crime-scene tape taking pictures. No keeping this one under wraps. They were probably tweeting as he stood there. “Who put out the fire?” Henry asked Ngyun.
Ngyun had been on the task force for seven years. The only time off he’d ever taken was when the Blazers had made the finals. That hadn’t turned out well at all.
“Some docent from the house,” Ngyun said, adjusting the bill of his Blazers cap against the rain. “Seventy-two years old. Jumped the fence and climbed down the hillside with a fire extinguisher.”
Henry extended a hand, palm up. “It’s raining,” he said.
“Hadn’t started yet,” Ngyun said.
The head had been severed from its body close to the jawbone. The rain was melting the fire-extinguisher foam and Henry could see that the skull showed through in places, and the hair had thinned and was matted with dirt. It was facedown, resting against the root of a weed. Henry looked up the hillside again. “My guess is someone tossed it over the fence,” he said, his eyes following the angle of the slope. “And it rolled down here.”
“Lucky it didn’t roll any farther,” Ngyun said. “Never would have found it.” He frowned at the tangle of blackberries below. “Probably dozens of heads down there.”
“I’ll talk to the mayor about curfew,” Henry said. This was the new mayor. He’d taken the job two months ago, after the old mayor had blown his brains out in front of Archie.
“Yeah,” Ngyun said. “Because no one gets murdered during the daytime.”
“It will appease the citizenry,” Henry said. He squatted, trying to get a better look at the head’s features, but the angle of the face in the mud made it hard. “Where’s the ME?”
“On his way,” Ngyun said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s eleven. They said eleven-fifteen.”
Henry hesitated. He knew he’d catch hell from Robbins for moving the remains. But fuck it. He pushed the thing with the toe of his shoe, until it rolled faceup.
The holes where its nose, eyes, and mouth used to be were crawling with wiggling yellow maggots. No telling if the thing had its eyes gouged out, or just lost them to worms.
Claire called his name, and Henry looked up to see her standing with her hands on her hips looking down at them. Next to her, in a white Tyvek suit, was Lorenzo Robbins, of the Medical Examiner’s department.
“Did you just kick my head?” Robbins said in disbelief.
Henry’s phone rang. He’d never been so happy to get a phone call in his life. He smiled up at Robbins, held a finger out in a “just a minute” gesture, and picked it up.
It was a sergeant from the North Portland precinct. “We have something your task force might be interested in,” the sergeant said. “A Herald reporter found a body that looks like it might be Beauty Killer–related.”
A Herald reporter. Take precautions, he’d told her. Be safe. Don’t do anything stupid. “Let me guess,” Henry said. “Susan Ward.”
C H A P T E R 13
Archie sat on the floor, leaning up against the mauve wall in a bathroom on the first floor of the hospital.
He held the phone in his lap, rereading the text. “DARLING, FEEL BETTER?”
Archie put his head in his hands. Two years had passed and his ribs still ached from where she’d broken them. They probably always would. He moved his hands to his neck, and felt the length of the scar there, his freshest scar, two months old and still tender to the touch. Then he reached under the waist of his shirt and moved one of his hands over his older scars: the one that ran up his midsection, the smaller scars on his flank, and finally the heart-shaped reminder on his chest.
His mind turned to the butchery at the rest stop.
She would not stop killing.
Archie picked the phone up and pressed the top of it against his forehead, digging into the skin until his skull felt like it might split, and his head cleared. Fuck it.
He sat up and punched in a text. “Where are you?”
He hit send and waited.
The toilet was beige with a mismatched white seat. There was a handicap grab bar next to it, and a hook to hang a purse on, and a feminine-hygiene-product waste receptacle. Archie looked up at the ceiling. White corkboard panels. A smoke detector.A sprinkler valve. Two white air vents were layered with years’ worth of dust and grime. No one ever bothered to clean up there.
He glanced back at the phone. Nothing.