Susan stopped writing and glanced skeptically at her Saran-wrapped sandwich. She was feeling a little queasy and it lay there like something that had been dead for a while. She looked at Parker. He raised his eyebrows expectantly. She unwrapped the sandwich and took a tiny bite off one corner. It was ham, but it tasted like fish. He seemed satisfied. She put the sandwich down and went on with her questions. “So tell me about the accomplices. They were all men, right?”
“Poor fucks. They think she found them mostly through newspaper personal ads, or, later, on Internet dating sites. She’d use false information to register on the sites and then troll, looking for her targets. Apparently she had a knack for picking out men she could manipulate. She’d isolate them from their friends. Find their weaknesses. And push them until they cracked.” He smiled wryly and a small glob of mayonnaise squirted out of the corner of his mouth. “She has a lot in common with my wife, actually.”
“I had this boyfriend once who met his ex-wife through a personal ad. She emptied out their bank account and moved to Canada one day while he was at work.”
“Yeah,” Parker said, smiling and dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin. “Doesn’t often work out, does it?”
“What did you think of the task force? Of how it was run? You wrote a lot of those stories.”
Parker waved his hand dismissively. “There was a lot of political crap. A lot of pressure from the families and the media and politicians. I haven’t seen that much back stabbing since my daughters were teenagers. The FBI sent three different profilers. And they went through three task force leaders before they finally gave it to Sheridan. Detectives would burn out on it after a few years. I mean, they were tracking down leads all day, every day, and coming up with nada. They had a database with something like ten thousand individual tips. The profile the FBI gave them was all wrong. One year there’d be forty-eight cops working the case, and then a year would pass between bodies and the public would get all pissy about how they weren’t coming up with anything and how tax dollars were being wasted, and the next year the task force would be down to three guys. Another body would turn up, and it would bloom again. Sheridan was the only cop who was on the task force for all ten years. He was the only one who never asked to be transferred.”
She had stopped writing in the notebook. “You know him?”
“Sure.”
“In a ‘Let me ask you a few questions as you run away from me in the hallway’ kind of way, or in the ‘Let’s talk about this over a few drinks’ kind of way?”
“The former. He had a wife and two babies. Totally smitten with them. The wife was his college sweetheart. I met her once. Nice lady. As far as I ever knew, he had the Beauty Killer and he had his family, and not a lot in between.”
“What did you think of him?” Susan asked.
“Good cop. Smart guy. He could have taken a lot of shit for that. He’s got a master’s degree in criminology or some such crap. Total college boy. But his colleagues liked him. Fair. Driven. And,” Parker added, wiggling his hand in the air, “he was a little bit off.”
“Off how?” asked Susan. Her pen now lay next to her sandwich.
He shrugged. “Let’s just say he was very focused. But then he worked one case for ten years.”
“Where’s he been the past two years, do you know?”
“Here, as far as I know,” Parker said. “On disability. She did a number on him. He was in the hospital for a month. Rehab after that. But I heard he worked with the prosecution on the deal they cut her, so he didn’t exactly fall off the face of the earth.”
“She pled guilty to the five murders in Oregon and six in Washington and Idaho, and kidnapping and attempted murder, and coughed up twenty more bodies, right?”
“In exchange for life, yeah. Lot of people thought she should have gotten the needle.”
“What do you think?” Susan asked.
“I wish there’d been a trial. I love a good emotional courtroom drama, and I would have paid top dollar to see Archie Sheridan testify.”
Susan bit her lip. “Why did she go after him? It doesn’t make sense.”
“He was leading the task force. His picture was in the paper all the time in those days. She felt the need to present herself to him. She walked right into his office, offered her supposed pseudopsychiatric expertise. Maybe it presented itself as a challenge. And then there’s the fact that she’s cuckoo.” He popped the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth as an exclamation mark.
“Why did they call her ‘the Beauty Killer’?” Susan asked.
“That was mine,” he said proudly. “I asked the ME who examined Sheridan’s dead hooker to characterize the condition of the corpse. She’d been cut up pretty bad. He whistled and said, ‘It’s a beauty.’ Most interesting autopsy he’d done all year. His last job had been in Newport. All drownings and suicides. He was positively tickled. Just a coincidence that Gretchen Lowell turned out to be a looker.”