Archie didn’t even look up at her. “If I’d wanted you to not see the pills, I would have hidden them.”
Susan searched for what to say. What pills? But, for some reason, she didn’t feel like lying. “You’re on a lot of medication.”
His eyes followed her into the room, but he remained still as a corpse. “I’m unwell.”
Susan had the sudden unnerving sensation that everything she’d found out so far about Archie Sheridan was exactly what he wanted her to know. Every interview. Every lead. To what end? Maybe he was just tired of lying. Maybe he just wanted everyone to know all his secrets, so he didn’t have to work so hard at keeping them hidden. Subterfuge could be exhausting.
She stowed her digital recorder and notebook in her purse and dug out a pack of cigarettes. “I’m fucking my married boss,” she said to Archie.
Archie paused, mouth slightly agape. “I’m not sure I needed to know that.”
Susan lit her cigarette and took a drag. “Yeah, but as long as we’re sharing.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER
26
A nne Boyd ate all of the chocolate in the hotel minibar. She started with the plain M&M’s, then ate the Toblerone, then the peanut M&M’s. When she was done, she flattened the wrappers and placed them next to the photographs of the dead girls that lay on her hotel room bed. Candy helped her think. There would be time to diet when people stopped killing one another.
She had memorized the girls’ faces, pre-and postmortem, but there was something useful in seeing them all side by side. The school photographs. The crime-scene photographs. Family snapshots. She had outlined a victim profile in her report to Archie. The killer had a type: dark-haired white girls on the rocky side of puberty. Each from a different high school. What is your fantasy? she wondered. He killed this girl again and again. Then he raped her in the most controlling way possible. So who was it he was killing? A teenage girlfriend? His mother? A girl who broke his heart without even knowing? Whoever it was, it was someone he had not been able to control. Anne was growing more and more certain that this fact was key to identifying the person they were hunting.
She rolled off the bed, opened the minibar, and found a diet Coke. It was the last one. Her kids were already asking when she was going to come home. What they really wanted was the loot she’d promised she’d bring back from the Nike outlet store. She didn’t know when she’d have time to get there.
The truth was that she didn’t travel much for work anymore. But she had asked to be assigned to this one. She’d considered quitting after the Beauty Killer case. Her profile had been wrong and it had nearly cost Archie Sheridan his life. She had been absolutely confident that the killer was a male and that he was working alone. The signs had been textbook. Because Gretchen Lowell had read the textbooks. Anne had been famously fooled, and she blamed only herself for it. She was a good profiler, one of the best with the FBI, which had the best profilers in the world. But her confidence had been shaken badly by Gretchen Lowell. Confidence was essential to profiling. You had to believe in your skill in order to make mental leaps.
So she had to find the leap. He was acting out a specific fantasy, one that had started many years before. So what had triggered the action? There were all sorts of triggers: financial, relationship or parental issues, trouble at work, a death, a birth, a perceived snub. He initiated contact with the victims. He chose them. The crimes were highly organized. He took pains to destroy evidence, but he still returned the bodies. Why did he return the bodies? This time, she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She couldn’t undo what had happened to Archie Sheridan. But she could help him this time. And he needed help. Of that, she was quite certain.
She’d been on the job long enough to know that the only way you survived was if you could turn off the violence. But you had to have something to distract you, some other passion. If you didn’t, if you were alone, it was harder to flip the switch. She recognized that Archie was cutting himself off from the people who could help him; she just didn’t know what she could do about it.