“News helicopters,” said Archie, looking up, face pained, as two helicopters cleared the tree line. “Better get a tent up.” Claire nodded and hurried back toward the road. Archie turned to Susan. She was writing in her notebook, flipping pages frequently as she filled them with large cursive observations. Archie could sense her excitement and he remembered the feeling when he and Henry had responded to that first Beauty Killer case. It wasn’t like that anymore.
“Susan,” he said. She was working furiously to finish a thought in her notebook and made a motion with her finger that she would be with him in a second.
“Look at me,” Archie said. She looked up, her green eyes large. He felt, suddenly, very protective of this strange pink-haired girl who pretended to be so much tougher than he thought she was, and, at the same time, ridiculous for the presumption. He held her eye contact for a moment, until she focused on him. “Whatever you think that’s going to be up there,” he said, gesturing to where Kristy Mathers lay naked in the mud, “it’s going to be worse.”
Susan nodded. “I know.”
“Have you ever been around a corpse?” Archie asked.
She nodded some more. “My dad. He died when I was a kid. Of cancer.”
“It’s going to be different than that,” Archie said gently.
“I can handle it.” She lifted her head and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?” she asked. “Clorox?”
Archie and Henry exchanged a look. Then Henry pulled two pairs of latex gloves out of the pocket of his coat and handed a pair to Archie. Archie looked out once more at the calm river glinting in the late-morning sun, took a deep breath through his mouth, and exhaled.
“Don’t breath through your nose,” he said to Susan. “And don’t get in my way.”
Squatting there beside Kristy’s body, Archie felt absolutely lucid. His head cleared. His gut relaxed. His concentration focused. He realized that he’d actually gone a few minutes without thinking about Gretchen Lowell. He had missed this.
She had been strangled and then soaked in bleach, like the others. She lay five feet from the water’s edge, on her back, head to the side, one plump arm tucked behind her torso, skin and hair coated with sand, as if she had been rolled a few feet. The other arm was delicately bent at the elbow, her curled hand resting just below her chin, chewed nails still flecked with glittery polish. That arm made her look almost human. Archie continued, taking in every detail, working his way from her head to her toes. One leg was slightly bent, the other straight, tangled in river weed. He noted the blood at her nose and mouth, and grotesquely swollen tongue, and the same horizontal mark low on the neck, indicating the use of a ligature they thought was a belt. The underside of her neck and shoulder showed the purplish stain of livor mortis, where her blood had settled after she died. A greenish red coloration had started to bloom around her abdomen; her mouth, nose, vagina, and ears were black. The bleach had slowed down the decomposition by killing some of the bacteria that caused distention and rupture of the soft tissues, so he could still see something of Kristy in the corpse. Something recognizable in the cheek and profile. But the bleach had not deterred the bugs. Tiny insects batted at her mouth and eyes and swarmed over her genitals. Crabs scrambled through her hair. Dark jelly was all that remained of one eye socket, the skin on her forehead and cheek torn from where a bird had stood, hooking its claws in the meat for leverage. Archie looked up, to see a gull standing watchfully a few feet beyond the body. It met Archie’s stare and took a few impatient steps before flapping back to a safer vantage.
Henry cleared his throat. “He dumped her on the beach,” he theorized, “not in the water.”
Archie nodded.
“How do you know?” Susan asked.
Archie looked up at Susan. Her face was pale, all lipstick and freckles, but she was holding together better than he had that first time. “She’d still be out there,” he said.
“Corpses sink,” Henry explained. “They surface three days to a week later because of gases released in the body. It’s only been two days since she disappeared.”
Archie looked up and down the beach. The helicopters circled overhead. He thought he caught the flash reflection of a telephoto lens. “He must have dumped her out here last night, while it was still raining. Early enough that the rain and tide would wash away any trace evidence he’d left on the hike.”
“He wanted us to find her,” Henry said.
“Why is she like that?” Susan asked, her voice quavering for the first time.
Archie looked down at the body, her brown hair now a shade of pale orange, her skin burned. All identical to the crime photographs of Lee Robinson and Dana Stamp. “He bleaches them,” he said quietly. “He kills them. He sexually assaults them. And he soaks them in a tub of bleach until he decides to dump them.” He could taste it in his mouth; the eye-watering burn of the bleach blended with the putrefaction of flesh and muscle.
He saw Susan waver, just a small adjustment in her stance, a catch. “You haven’t released that.”
Archie gave her a tired smile. “I just did.”
“So he kills them right away,” Susan said almost to herself. “Once anyone knows they’re missing, they’re already dead.”