Archie had read Susan’s article the moment he got up. It wasn’t a bad article. It evoked a certain outsider’s perspective of the investigation. The photo was good. But despite what he had told her over the phone, it was not what he had needed. Justin Johnson? That was interesting. He’d been busted, as a thirteen-year-old, for selling pot to an undercover cop. A pound of pot. And had gotten off on probation, which was interesting in and of itself. So they had checked him out. But his alibi was rock-solid, so the note concerned Archie less than the person who had left it. Someone was trying to manipulate Susan’s story or the investigation. Someone with access to the kid’s juvie record. Archie made a call and asked a patrol to make a few extra passes past Susan’s place for the next couple of nights. It was probably overreacting, but it made him feel better. Now he sat at his desk in the task force offices, surrounded by photographs of murdered girls, barely aware of the bustle around him. His team was exhausted and growing demoralized. There were no new leads. Kent had been fired for lying about his record on his application and, according to the cops tailing him, had spent the last twenty-four hours playing his guitar. The Jefferson checkpoint had turned up nothing else. They had been unable to find any out-of-state rapes that fit their MO, and so far none of the Sauvie Island condoms had matched the DNA of anyone on CODUS. The phone on his desk rang. He glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Debbie.
“Hello,” he said.
“Your biographer just left. Thought you’d want to know.”
“Did you tell her how fucked up I am?”
“I did.”
“Good.”
“I’ll talk to you tonight.”
“Yes.”
Archie hung up the phone. He had taken six Vicodin and he had an unsteady buoyant sensation in his arms and at the back of his head. It was the first wave of codeine that was the best. It made all of the hard edges soften. When he was a patrol cop, he’d dealt with a lot of junkies. They were always breaking into cars to steal coins or whatever crap had been left on the backseat—books, old clothes, bottles that could be turned in for a deposit refund. They’d break a window and risk arrest for thirty-five cents. One of the first things cops learned was that junkies had their own system of reason. They would risk enormous consequences for even a slim chance of a fix. This made them unpredictable. Archie had never understood the mind-set. But he thought he was getting closer.
The Hardy Boys appeared at his office door, forcing Archie to clear his mind and put on his cop face. Both were all jittery excitement. Heil took a few tentative steps toward Archie. Archie had pegged him for the talker. He was right. “We checked the list of school staffers you gave us yesterday and one sort of stood out,” Heil announced.
“Kent?” Archie asked automatically. There was something about the custodian that made him wary.
“McCallum, the physics teacher at Cleveland. Turns out his boat isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”
“Where is it?”
“It burned down yesterday in that marina fire near Sauvie Island.”
Archie raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah,” said Heil. “We thought that might be a clue.”
Emanuel Hospital was one of two trauma centers for the region and it was where Archie Sheridan had been medevaced after they got him out of Gretchen Lowell’s basement. It was the hospital favored by the city’s EMTs and it was rumored that many wore T-shirts printed with the words TAKE ME TO EMANUEL , just in case they threw a blood clot. The main structure had been built in 1915, but several additions had left the original stone building almost entirely obscured by glass and steel. It was also the hospital where Susan’s father had died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma the week before she got her braces off. She parked in the visitors’ garage and made her way to the medical office building where Archie’s doctor had agreed to meet her. When she took the elevator up to the fourth floor, she was careful to press the elevator button with her elbow rather than her finger. Sick people germs. You couldn’t be too careful.
Dr. Fergus made her wait for thirty-five minutes. It wasn’t a bad waiting room. There was a view of the West Hills, Mount Hood, the meandering Willamette. But it smelled like every waiting room Susan remembered from her father’s appointments. Like carnations and iodine. It was the soap they used to cover up the smell of people dying.