“You want me to see if some deranged proctor is killing them?”
Archie fished an antacid out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It tasted like citrus-flavored chalk. “I don’t know,” he said. He forced himself to chew the tablet and swallow it. He turned on the flashlight, holding it at an oblique angle against the sand. Several tiny crabs scrambled from the light. “I just want to catch the motherfucker.” Archie liked to use a flashlight to go over a crime scene, even in broad daylight. It shrank his focus, made him look at things one square inch at a time. “Throw more surveillance at the schools. I don’t care if we have to drive every kid home.”
Henry hooked his thumbs behind his turquoise belt buckle, leaned back, and looked up at the dark sky. “Should we head back?” he asked hopefully.
“You have someone waiting for you at home?” Archie asked.
“Hey,” Henry said. “My depressing apartment is nicer than yours.”
“Touché,” Archie said. “Remind me how many times you’ve been married?”
Henry grinned. “Three. Four if you count the one that was annulled, and five if you count the one that was just legal on the reservation.”
“Yeah, I think it’s better to keep you busy,” Archie said. He swung the flashlight beam around, watching the crabs scatter. “Besides, we haven’t searched the crime scene yet.”
“The crime-scene investigators have already done that,” Henry said.
“So we’ll see if they’ve missed anything.”
“It’s dark.”
Archie shined the beam under his chin. He looked like a horror-show ghoul. “That’s why we have a flashlight.”
CHAPTER
21
S usan woke up, shrugged on her old kimono, took the elevator downstairs, and systematically dug through the pile of Herald s on the granite floor of the lobby until she found the one with her name on it. She waited until she was back upstairs in her apartment before she pulled the newspaper out of its plastic bag. She always felt butterflies when she looked for a story she had written. It was a mix of anticipation and fear, pride and embarrassment. Most of the time, she didn’t even like to read her work once it appeared in print. But the hot janitor’s SmackDown had fanned the flame of her familiar self-doubt. The truth was, sometimes she did feel like a fraud. And sometimes she did feel like she exploited her subjects. She had pissed the hell out of a city councilman she had profiled and described as “balding and gnomelike.” (He was.) But this was different.
The task force story was the first byline she had ever had on the front page. She sat down on her bed, and with a heavy, nervous breath, she unfolded the Herald, half-expecting the story to have been killed, but there it was, below the fold, with a jump to the Metro section. The front page. A-1. An aerial photograph of the crime scene on Sauvie Island accompanied the story. With a startled laugh, she recognized herself, a small figure in the photo, and next to her, among the other detectives, Archie Sheridan. Screw the janitor. She was delighted.
She found herself wishing she had someone with whom she could share her little journalistic triumph. Bliss had canceled her subscription to the Herald years ago, after the paper’s owners had controversially clear-cut some old-growth forest. She would have bought a copy of the paper. If she’d known. But Susan hadn’t told her about the series. And wouldn’t. Susan traced the newspaper image of Archie Sheridan with her fingers and found herself wondering if he had seen it yet. The thought made her feel self-conscious and she shook it loose.
She got up and brewed herself a pot of coffee and then sat back down and flipped through the paper to find the Metro section, where the story jumped, and an envelope fell on the rug. At first, she thought it was a pack of coupons or some other silly promotion the paper had agreed to in exchange for advertising dollars. Then she saw that her name was on it. Typed. Not typed on a label. Typed on the envelope itself. “Susan Ward.” Who typed an envelope? She picked it up.
It was a regular white business-size envelope. She turned it over a few times in her hands and then opened it. A piece of white copy paper was folded neatly inside. There was one line typed in the center of the page: “Justin Johnson: 031038299.”
Who the fuck was Justin Johnson?
Seriously. Who was he? And why, if she didn’t know that, would someone slip her a secret note with his name and a bunch of numbers?
Susan was aware of her heart suddenly racing. She wrote the digits down on the edge of the newspaper in the hope that the act of writing them down would help her make sense of them. There were nine of them. It wasn’t a phone number. Could a Social Security number begin with zero? She looked at it for a while longer and then she picked up the phone and called Quentin Parker’s direct line at the Herald.
“Parker,” he barked.