He returned to the observation room and held up the photograph that Gretchen had picked. The image was of a Latina girl, maybe twenty, with short black hair and a silly grin. She had her arm around someone who had been cut out of the photograph, and she was flashing a peace sign. “It’s her,” he said simply.
“Who?” asked Susan.
Rico spun around on his stool. “Gloria Juarez. Nineteen. College kid. She disappeared in Utah in 1995. Gretchen gave us her name this morning. She said she’d tell us where to find her body if we brought you down to meet her.”
Susan was startled. “Why me?”
“Because of me,” Archie answered. He blinked slowly and ran a hand through his dark hair and stared at the ceiling for a moment before continuing. “She hasn’t given up a body in almost six months. I thought that a profile in the Herald would shake her up a bit. She gets jealous easily. I thought that if she knew I was getting close to a reporter, close enough to talk about things, she would react by giving me”—he paused, as if considering his words carefully—“a token of her affection.”
Susan looked around the little room. They all were staring at her. Waiting to see what she would do. “A body?”
“Yeah. She hasn’t talked to anyone but me in the last year.” He shrugged helplessly. “It didn’t even occur to me that she’d actually ask to see you.”
She had been manipulated. Susan felt a prickly self-consciousness wash over her. Archie had used her. She took a step back, moving away from him. She had trusted him. And he had taken advantage of her. It was a weirdly familiar sensation. No one said anything. She reached up and pulled at her hair, knotting it around a finger until it burned. Darrow, the lawyer, rubbed the back of his ruddy neck and sneezed. Rico looked at his lunch. Henry leaned against the wall, arms crossed, waiting for some sort of cue from Archie. They all knew. That just made it worse.
Susan looked through the glass at Gretchen. Gretchen was looking at the table. A picture of comportment. Genetically superior. Why did she have to be so perfect-looking? “That’s why you agreed to the profile?” Susan asked Archie, keeping her voice level as best she could. “You thought it would make her tell you where more bodies were?”
Archie took a step forward toward Susan. “The more she thinks I’m sharing with you, the more she’ll want to reinforce her control, and the more bodies she’ll give me.” His gaze flickered through the glass at Gretchen and held. Then back at Susan. “She’s mentioned your stories. She reads your work. That’s why I chose you.” Underneath heavy lids, his eyes were full of apology and determination, and something else. It was something in his expression, something a half a second off. That’s when it hit Susan. Jesus Christ, she thought, he’s high.
“Help me,” he said.
He was high on pills. She could see him see her register it. They were prescription pills. He was in pain. But he didn’t offer any explanations. He laughed. “Fuck,” he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand. He leaned his forehead against the glass and he looked at Gretchen Lowell. No one said a word. Susan thought she could hear someone’s watch ticking. The lawyer blew his nose. Finally, Archie turned his head back toward Susan. “I should never have brought you here. I’m sorry.”
Susan lifted her chin toward the window. “What does she want with me?” she asked.
Archie looked at Susan. He ran a hand over his mouth, through his hair. “She wants to size you up. See what you know.”
“About you.”
He nodded a few times. “Yup.”
“What do you want me to tell her?”
He looked her in the eye. “The truth. She has a marvelous bullshit detector. But if you go in there, she will fuck with you. She’s not a nice person. And she will not like you.”
Susan tried to smile. “I’m charming.”
Archie’s craggy face was dead serious. “She will feel threatened by you and she will be mean to you. You need to understand that.”
Susan put her palm on the glass, so that Gretchen Lowell’s head rested in the crux between her thumb and forefinger. “Can I write about it?”
“I can’t stop you.”
“True.”
“But no pens,” Archie said definitively.
“Why?”
He looked in through the glass at Gretchen. Susan could see his eyes travel over her, her neck, her arms, her hands. It reminded her of the way someone might linger over a lover. “Because I don’t want her using it to stab you in the throat,” he said.
CHAPTER
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