It was the same card.
“Someone dropped this off at the hospital for me yesterday,” he said. He pointed at the return address on his card. Three-nine-seven North Fargo.
“That’s where I found the body,” Susan said.
Then he pointed at the address on her card. It was in the same handwriting.
“We need to go to this address,” Archie said.
Susan shook her head. She had copy to write. She didn’t have time to be murdered by Gretchen Lowell. “You’re out of your mind,” she said. “You should call Henry.”
Archie reached back to the floor and came up with that morning’s edition of the Herald. Susan really needed to keep her car cleaner. He pointed to the sketch on the front page. “It’s where this guy lives,” he said.
“How do you know that?” Susan asked.
“Trust me,” Archie said.
“What about Henry?” Susan asked.
“We’ll call him after we check it out,” he said. “If we tell him now, he won’t let either of us go.”
Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. She knew that. Then again, the more time she spent with him, the more time she’d have to talk him into cooperating with the book.
“Okay,” she said.
“On the way, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the body in the house,” Archie said.
Susan pulled out of traffic onto a side street so they could turn around and head west. “I dyed my hair purple,” she said.
She thought she saw Archie smile. “I noticed,” he said.
C H A P T E R 28
Agathering crowd pressed against the police perimeter at the Rose Garden. There were plenty of microphones and notebooks—Henry had counted twelve news vans on his way up the hill—but mostly it was just rubberneckers.
Portland seemed divided into two groups of people these days—people who wanted to get as far away from Gretchen’s crime scenes as possible, and people who wanted to rub up against her corpses.
Henry parked his car and got out and ducked under the tape. “Whatley,” he yelled to a red-haired patrol cop. “Get these people out of here.”
Whatley looked around helplessly at the crowd.
“Move the tape,” Henry said. “Use pepper spray if you have to.”
Claire met him at the entrance to the park and led him to the crime scene. She was wearing a T-shirt with an image of the state of Alaska on it. Henry’s third wife had bought it for him. They’d gotten dressed quickly when the call came in about the murder at the psych ward. The T-shirt almost came down to Claire’s knees. She’d scrunched it up on one side, so she could clip her gun to her waist, along with a pair of red Ray-Bans.
“How’s he doing?” she asked.
“He’s going to stay with me for a while,” Henry said.
“So I shouldn’t leave my panty hose hanging in the shower?” Claire asked.
“You don’t wear panty hose,” Henry said.
“I know,” she said. “But it sounded funny.”
They cleared a hedge and Henry could see a group of cops gathered around a couple sitting on a bench.
Henry popped a piece of licorice gum and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “What do we have?” he asked Claire.
They rounded the bench. The other cops stepped back. “Meet Mr. and Mrs. Doe,” Claire said.
Henry took in the gruesome scene. The bodies had obviously been buried. They were practically mummified in grave wax, a sign they had been buried somewhere moist, probably sealed in something that protected them from bacteria. The features on the faces were beyond recognition, grins revealing brown teeth. That was good. That made dental records a possibility.
“Obviously not the clothes they died in,” Claire continued. “I checked the labels and pockets. Nothing. But I did find this.” She held up an evidence bag with a tiny thread of plastic in it. “It’s one of those plastic thingies that hold tags.”
“Plastic thingies?” Henry said.
“I don’t think that’s the technical name,” Claire said. “But they use them a lot at thrift stores to attach price tags. So I’m sending a few units around to some of the major stores to see if any of these lovely items seem familiar.”
“She bought them outfits and dressed them up so it would take longer for them to get noticed?” Henry said. It didn’t make sense. The smell was sure to tip someone off pretty quickly.
Claire looked down at the bodies. She wasn’t chewing gum. Henry had always admired that about her. She had a stomach of steel. “You think they’ll match the victim list?” she said.
Gretchen had confessed to a lot of murders, but she’d committed even more. And the task force maintained a list of people who’d gone missing during her ten-year killing spree. None of it made sense. Why would Gretchen be digging up her old victims? Unless they weren’t victims.