Archie matched his gait to Susan’s, so that they were side by side, a few steps behind the girl. He knew where they were going. He’d been in this basement a dozen times. He’d walked down those stairs, down this hallway, around the corner, into the old boiler room.
Seven years ago, Gretchen had killed a man here. Archie had examined the crime scene. Taken inventory of every lesion on the corpse. Watched the man split open on the ME’s table. Seven years ago, Archie had notified the dead man’s wife and children. He’d gone to the house, rung the doorbell in the middle of the night, and broken the news that their husband and father was dead.
Back then the main floor of the warehouse had been a used-office-furniture outfit. Metal desks, filing cabinets, stacks of steel-case cubicle components, and hundreds of pale blue and plum-colored office chairs arranged in rows three hundred feet long.
No makeshift gallery. The upper floors were empty, the windows boarded up.
“Are there still rats down here?” Archie asked the girl.
Susan stiffened.
The girl shrugged. “You see them once in a while,” she said.
There was a persistent drip coming from a pipe somewhere that echoed off the concrete. But the air down there was cool and pleasant. The ceiling was low, but looked even lower than it was, and Archie found himself reflexively hunching over a little as they walked.
The gun was tucked into his waistband, under his shirt, at the small of his back. He ordinarily wore his gun in a shoulder holster, but that was in a box in a storage unit. He could feel the gun at his back now, like someone’s hand pressing him along, guiding him deeper into the basement. It would be hard to get at in a hurry, but it was there if they needed it and it was in a place that amateurs might not check. It was that or duct tape it behind his neck—he still couldn’t really figure out exactly how people pulled that off on cop shows. Besides, he didn’t have any duct tape.
“You guys are quiet,” the girl said.
“We’re concentrating on being led to our doom,” Susan said.
They got to the boiler-room door. It was easy to spot. There was a big yellow sign on it that said
BOILER ROOM in all-cap black letters. The door was gray steel. The girl knocked on it twice, then once, then twice more.
“Seriously?” Susan said, rolling her eyes at Archie. “A secret knock?”
“They’re here,” the girl called. “Detective Sheridan and some chick friend.”
“Susan Ward,” Susan called.
The door opened.
Susan turned to Archie. “I wonder how many people die in basements every year,” she said.
The boiler room was dark. Archie and his team had set up high-wattage lights when they were down there, illuminating every
cobweb and blood spatter. Without all those high-powered bulbs defining every corner and crack, the room seemed larger, amorphous, every corner curved. The light from the hall seeped in, a warped yellow rectangle on the floor. Dust hung in the air. Water moved in pipes overhead.
The person who’d opened the door had moved back into the shadows, over by the hulking decommissioned boiler. It had taken him five steps. Archie had counted, listening for the soft shuffle of sneakers on cement. The boiler was the size of Archie’s first car. Archie could make out the shapes of three people beside it.
A flashlight beam hit him in the face. He turned his head and squinted, then forced his gaze straight ahead, into the light. Susan was standing next to him, and he put his hand out and touched her wrist with his fingertips, so she’d stay close to him. He could feel the gun digging into the small of his back.
He’d thought that Gretchen had left the bodies in the park and at the mansion to get his attention, but these people had been doing it to get hers. They wanted to impress her. They wanted to get closer to her. They wanted to use him. To get to her.
“I’m here,” he said into the light. “Now what?”
The light angled down, and a man stepped forward. It took a moment for Archie, blinded by the sudden darkness, to blink the dark spots from his vision. The man was in his twenties or thirties, with a soft untrimmed beard and plugs the size of bottle caps in his earlobes. He looked like he should be bagging groceries at a natural-foods store.
He smiled at Archie, revealing a mouthful of teeth that had been filed into sharp points. “We weren’t sure you’d come,” he said.
Susan’s fingers folded around Archie’s hand.
“It’s been a while since I was down here,” Archie said.
The teeth were good. The teeth meant they were going to be able to find out who this guy was. Cops loved body modification.
Tattoos? Half the world had those. You couldn’t throw a Hacky Sack at the U of O without hitting a sorority girl with a butterfly on her ankle. But file your pearly whites into shark fangs and you were special. People remembered you.
Archie smiled.
Shark Boy’s face faltered. “What?” he said.
“You’re not in charge, are you?” Archie asked.
Susan squeezed his hand. He glanced over at her and she nodded toward the boiler, where one of the shapes had stepped forward.
“The rest of the fan club?” Archie said.
“We’re more of a collective,” Shark Boy said.