“Come on,” he said, straining to push himself upright and out of his seat. “I’ll buy you a crappy sandwich in the cafeteria and we can play reporter.”
The cafeteria was in the basement of the building. The food was standard institutional fare: slop under heat lamps, iceberg lettuce salads, shriveled baked potatoes. A wall of steel and glass vending machines that had probably been in the building for thirty years hosted tangerine-size red apples, triangular sandwiches, slices of pie, and slightly bruised bananas. Parker bought two ham and cheese sandwiches out of a machine and handed one to Susan.
Because the food was lousy, few of the paper’s employees actually used the cafeteria, much less sat down to enjoy the ambience, so Parker and Susan easily found a vacant beige Formica table.
The stench of stale cigarettes clung to Parker like an aura. He always smelled like he had just come from a smoke break, though Susan had never seen him leave his desk. He took a large bite of sandwich and wiped some mayonnaise off his chin with the back of his hand.
“So, go ahead,” he said.
Susan opened her notebook and smiled dazzlingly. “Susan Ward,” she purred. “Oregon Herald. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions, sir?”
“Not at all. Fine paper, fine paper.”
“Detective Archie Sheridan. He was on the Beauty Killer Task Force from the beginning, right? He and his partner investigated the first body?”
Parker nodded, his chin multiplying as he did. “Yeah. He’d been a homicide cop for a couple of weeks. Partner was Henry Sobol. It was Sheridan’s first case. Can you fucking imagine that? First case and he draws a serial killer? Lucky fuck. Of course, they didn’t know that then. It was just a dead hooker. Jogger found her in Forest Park. Naked. Tortured. It was some twisted shit. Tame compared to what would come later, but twisted enough that it caught a little attention. For a hooker case. That was back in 1994. May.”
Susan checked her notes. “Then they found the other bodies over that summer, right? In Idaho and Washington?”
“Right. There was that kid in Boise. Ten-year-old boy. Went missing; then they found him dead in a ditch. An old man in Olympia was found murdered in his backyard. Then there was some waitress in Salem. Someone tossed her body out of a moving car on the freeway. Caused a four-car pileup that delayed traffic for hours. The citizens were pissed.”
“And Sheridan caught the signature, right? Marks on the torso?”
“Yeah. That’s what we called them in the paper. ‘Marks on the torso.’” He learned forward, his expansive girth bulging against the table. “You know what an X-Acto knife is? Like a pen with a razor blade at the end?”
Susan nodded.
“They all had been cut up with one of those. Every single one of them. Very specific injuries inflicted while the assholes were still alive.”
“Specific how?”
“She signed her work. Carved a heart on every one of them. There was a lot of other torso damage, so the hearts were sort of hard to spot, the forest for the trees sort of thing. Someone would have seen it eventually. But Sheridan caught it earlier than most. It was his first case, you know, his dead hooker. Not a big priority for the squad, let me assure you. I mean, they couldn’t even find any family to claim the body. She was a runaway from foster care. But he wasn’t going to let it go. And when the brass realized they had a serial killer on their hands who was torturing and murdering taxpayers at random, they formed that task force quicker than you can say ‘evening news.’” He took another bite of sandwich, chewed twice, and started talking again. “You have to understand that she confounded the hell out of the investigators. There are things we understand about serial killers. Gretchen Lowell did not conform. Her vic profile was all over the place. She was consistent with the torso damage; she cut them, stabbed them, carved them, burned them sometimes. But there was a Chinese menu of other psycho shit. Sometimes she made them drink drain cleaner. Sometimes she dissected the bodies. Removed their spleens. Took out their appendixes. Tongues. A few were basically filleted. Plus, she had accomplices. And she was a woman.” He swallowed his mouthful of food and set the sandwich on the table. “You’re not eating,” he said.