A rchie counted out the Vicodin. Thirteen. He placed two of the white oval pills on the back of the toilet and nestled the other eleven in the brass pillbox, padding them carefully in cotton so they wouldn’t rattle. Then he put the pillbox in the pocket of his blazer. Thirteen extra-strength Vicodin. It should be enough. He sighed and pulled the pillbox out of his pocket, counted out another five pills from the large amber plastic prescription bottle, added these to the pillbox, and dropped it back in his pocket. Eighteen Vicodin. Ten milligrams of codeine and 750 milligrams acetaminophen in every dose. The maximum acetaminophen dosage human kidneys could handle was four thousand milligrams in twenty-four hours. He’d done the math. That was 5.33 pills per day. Not nearly enough. So he played at controlling his habit. He would allow himself one more every few days. Up to twenty-five; then he would wean himself, break pills in half, get back down to the recommended four or five a day. Then work his way up again. It was a game. King of the Hill. Everyone took turns. Vicodin for the pain. Xanax for the panic attacks. Zantac for his stomach. Ambien to sleep. They all went into the pillbox.
He traced his fingers along his jawline. He had never been good at shaving, but lately he had become almost dangerous. He pulled at a small piece of toilet paper that was stuck to a razor nick. It came off, but the wound immediately started bleeding again. He splashed some cold water on his face, tore another square of toilet paper off the roll, held it to his chin, and looked in the mirror. Archie had never had the ability to appraise his own appearance. His gifts were appraising other people’s appearances: empathy, recall, and an obsessive, dogged determination that required him to pursue every possible outcome until, like a peeled scab, the truth was exposed. It had rarely occurred to him, during his strange career as a homicide detective, to pay attention to how he might appear to others. Now he turned his eye for detail to his own image. He had sad, dark eyes. He’d had sad eyes long before he’d heard of Gretchen Lowell, long before he’d become a cop. His grandfather, a defrocked priest, had fled Northern Ireland, and they were his eyes: homesick, no matter how many people were around him. Archie had always had sad eyes, but it was as if in the last few years his other features had withdrawn, so now the eyes stood out more. He had the strong chin from his mother’s side and a nose that had been broken in a car accident, and cheeks that dimpled when he permitted a lopsided smile. He wasn’t pretty. But he wasn’t unhandsome if you liked sort of average-looking, depressed people.
He smiled at his image and immediately cringed at the result. Who was he kidding? But he tried to make an effort. He tried to flatten the cowlick at the front of his thick head of curly brown hair and smooth his eyebrows. He wore a ridiculously professorial tan corduroy blazer, and a brown-and-silver silk tie purchased by his ex-wife, who he knew had good taste only because he had heard people comment on it. The blazer, which had once fit perfectly, now hung too loose in the shoulders. But his socks were clean. He appeared, to himself at least, to look almost normal. He hadn’t felt rested in two years. He was forty, but looked at least five years older. He was fighting a losing battle with pills. He could not bear to touch his children. And he looked almost normal. Yes. He could carry it off. He was a cop, he reminded himself. I can bullshit beautifully.
He pulled the toilet paper off his face and tossed it in the wastebasket under the sink. Then he gripped either side of the sink and examined his reflection. The nick was barely noticeable, really. He smiled. Lifted his full eyebrows. Hello! Good to see you again! Yep! Feeling fine! All better! He sighed and let his face fall back into its natural slack expression, and then absentmindedly picked up the two pills off the toilet and swallowed them without water. It was 6:30 A.M. More than twelve hours had passed since the last time anyone had seen Kristy Mathers.
The new task force offices turned out to be in a former bank building, which the city had leased months before for overflow office space. The cement-block building was a one-story rectangle with few windows, surrounded on all sides by parking lot. Its drive-through ATM was still in operation.
Archie glanced at his watch: almost seven o’clock.
The nighttime house-to-house had turned up nothing but tired, scared neighbors. Henry had dropped Archie off at 3:00 A.M. with the address of the new task force offices. “Get a good night’s sleep,” Henry had said. And they had both laughed.