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?”
Henry grunted. “You’re getting to be a better reporter,” he said.