“Do you still talk to him?”
“Every day over the phone. Ask me how often we see each other.”
“How often?” Susan asked.
“Every couple of weeks. Never more than that. Sometimes, when he is with Ben and Sara and me, I think he wants to carve his eyes out.” She glanced at the stuffed animals, the sink, the counter. “I’m not usually this neat,” she said.
Susan took a long breath. She had to ask. “Why are you telling me all this, Debbie?”
Debbie frowned thoughtfully. “Because Archie asked me to.”
When Susan got back in her car the first thing she did was rewind the minitape in her recorder a few seconds and then hit PLAY to make sure that the interview had recorded. Debbie’s voice came on immediately. “Sometimes, when he is with Ben and Sara and me, I think he wants to carve his eyes out.” Thank God , thought Susan. She sat for several minutes, feeling her heart pound in her chest. A father and his small daughter walked hand in hand down the sidewalk past her car. The little girl stopped and her father picked her up and carried her into the house next door to Debbie’s. Susan opened her window and lit a cigarette. This story was for the greater good, right?
“Right,” she answered aloud. The role of the witness, she reminded herself. Shared humanity. Right.
She used her cell phone to check her messages at work. There was a message from Ian relaying the positive buzz around the building about her task force story, and reporting that he was working on getting the 911 audio and would know something next week. Susan stared at the small digital recorder in her hand. The second story was writing itself. But there was no message from Archie’s doctor’s office. He was probably busy saving lives or overbilling Medicaid or something. She opened her notebook and found the number again and dialed it. “Yeah,” she said into the phone. “I want to talk to Doctor Fergus. This is Susan Ward. I’m calling about a patient of his, Archie Sheridan.” She was, after all, on a roll.
CHAPTER
23
S ee something?” Anne asked.
She watched as Claire Masland stood on the cement walkway of the Eastbank Esplanade overlooking the Willamette, where Dana Stamp had been found. Claire had a Greek fisherman’s cap pulled low over her short hair and she was gazing across the river to the west side of the city, where Waterfront Park formed a band of green around the mélange of new and historic buildings that made up the downtown corridor.
“No,” Claire said. “Just smelling the river. Sewage has a special aroma, doesn’t it?”
Anne had asked Claire to take her to the sites where they had found the bodies. It was something that she had picked up from Archie when they worked the Beauty Killer case. Walk the scene of the crime. They had been to Ross Island and Sauvie Island and now it was late morning and Anne’s boots were wet and her feet were cold and it looked like it might rain. She sighed and pulled her leather coat tighter around her torso. A jogger ran past, not giving the two women a second glance. Below them, two enormous dirty seagulls paddled in circles in the muddy brown water.
“What do these sites have in common?” Anne mused aloud.
Claire sighed. “They’re all on the Willamette, Anne. He’s got a boat. We know that.”
“It’s not convenient. Ross Island. The Esplanade. Sauvie Island. He’s working his way north. But why? Killers dispose of bodies in places they feel safe. Ross Island and Sauvie Island may be off the beaten path at night, but this place isn’t.” She squinted behind her at the freeway overpass that squeezed above the Esplanade and up at the old-fashioned streetlights that illuminated the Esplanade at night. The sound of the traffic was deafening.
“You can’t see the riverbank from here,” Claire said. “If he was on a small boat, he would have been obscured from anyone walking by. So no one on this side could see him dump the body. And he’d be too far away for anyone to make out what he was doing from the other side.”
“But why risk it?” Anne asked. “If you’ve got a boat. Why not dump the body somewhere safe like the other two locations?”
Claire shrugged. “He wanted her to be found sooner than Lee Robinson?”
“Maybe. It just doesn’t make sense. This guy’s an organized killer. Maybe the first site is random, but after that, there’d be some method to it. Disposing of a body out in the open like this? It’s risky. You don’t do it unless you’re familiar enough with the area that you think you can get away with it. There’s some kind of method to it.” One of the seagulls suddenly squawked and flew off toward the Steel Bridge. The other one stared up at Anne with its beady little eyes.
“How long do we have, do you think?” Claire asked.
“Before he takes another girl? A week. Two if we’re lucky.” Anne buttoned her coat, feeling a sudden chill. “Could be sooner.”