Archie leaned forward. “Why do you say that, Jen?”
Jen smoothed the matted green fur of the alligator. “She’d been having trouble with the chain coming off. It was a shitty bike. She had to drag it home a couple of times.” A single tear rolled down her brown cheek. She wiped it away with her sleeve and shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s probably a stupid answer.”
Archie reached out and gently put his hand on Jen’s. She looked up. And he saw, in her hard eyes, a fissure, and, behind it, a tiny bit of hope. “I think it’s a really smart guess,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”
“So her bike is broken,” Claire said when they were back in the car. It was dark and the windows were glassy with rain. “She tries to fix it for a while, then gives up and decides to walk it home. Our guy stops, offers her a ride, or to help fix the bike, and he grabs her.”
“But that’s a crime of opportunity,” Henry said from the driver’s seat of the unmarked Crown Vic. Henry hated Crown Vics. And yet somehow he always ended up with one. “She fits his profile. You think he just drives around looking for high school girls who look right enough to snatch? That he just got lucky?”
“He broke the bike,” Archie said quietly from the backseat. He pulled the pillbox out his pocket and absentmindedly rotated it between his thumb and forefinger.
“He broke the bike,” Henry agreed emphatically, nodding. “Which means he had her picked out. Knew she had the bike. Knew which bike was hers. Maybe even knew it was crappy. That she’d drag the thing home like usual. He’s watching them.”
“Still leaves us with some missing time,” Claire said. “Next kid left rehearsal at six-thirty. Didn’t see her. The bike rack is right by the door.”
Archie’s head throbbed. “We’ll do the roadblock again tomorrow. Maybe someone else saw her.” He extracted three pills from the pillbox and put them in his mouth one by one.
“You okay, boss?” Henry asked, glancing back at Archie in the rearview mirror.
“Zantac,” Archie lied. “For my stomach.” He leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. If the killer had stalked Kristy, then he’d probably start looking for another girl soon. “You sure the other high schools are secure?” Archie asked, eyes still closed.
“Fort Knox,” Claire confirmed.
“Set up surveillance at all four tomorrow,” Archie told them. “Run the plates of every car that goes by Jefferson between five and seven.” He opened his eyes, rubbed his face with an open hand, and leaned forward between the two front seats. “I want to go through the autopsy reports again. And let’s go door-to-door again tonight. Maybe someone’s remembered something.”
Henry glanced over at him. “We should all get some sleep. We’ve got people working tonight. Smart people. Awake people. I’ll have them call if anything turns up.”
Archie was too tired to argue. He could do the work back at the apartment. “I’ll go home,” he said. “If you take me by the office so I can pick up the reports.”
“She’s still out there, right?” Claire said. “It’s not all for nothing? There’s a chance. Right?”
There was a long silence and then Henry said, “Right.”
The phone was ringing when Archie got back to the apartment. He had an armload full of police reports and citizen tips he planned to read that night and he stacked them perilously on the hallway table, picked up the cordless, and set his keys on the table next to the charger.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Hey, Debbie,” Archie said to his ex-wife, grateful for the momentary distraction. He walked through the kitchen, got a beer out of the fridge, and opened it.
“How was your first day?”
“Futile,” Archie said. He unclipped his gun from his belt and set it on the coffee table and sat down on the couch in front of it.
“I saw you on TV. You were very intimidating.”
“I wore that tie you bought me.”
“I noticed that.” She paused. “Are you coming to Ben’s thing on Sunday?”
He swallowed hard. “You know I can’t.”
He could hear the sigh in her voice. “Because you’ll be with her.”
They had been through this before. There wasn’t anything left to say. He let the phone slide down his face, his neck, until the base of the receiver rested against his breastbone. He pressed it hard against the bone until it hurt. He could still hear her, muffled and distant, like someone talking underwater.
“You know how sick that is, right?”
The vibration of her voice deep inside his chest made him feel better, like there was something alive in there.
“What do you two talk about?”
She had asked before. He had never told her, would never tell her. He lifted the phone back to his ear. He could hear her breathing. She said, “I just don’t know how you’re going to get better until you cleanse her from your life.”