He emptied the pillbox on his dresser and lined the pills up by type. Then he took off his shirt, undershirt, pants, until he was sitting on the edge of the bed naked. There was a big square mirror above the dresser and he could see his reflection from the mid-chest up. The scars that had so long been a brutal pale purple had lightened to a translucent white. He was almost starting to think of them as part of his body. He let his hand find the heart, the raised tissue sensitive beneath his fingertips, sending shivers down his thighs.
He settled back on the bed and let his memory of her smell wash over him. Lilacs. Her breath against his face. Her touch. His hand found its way lower. He had resisted this for a long time. Until he and Debbie had separated. And then he was alone. And he could think only of Gretchen. Every time he closed his eyes, there she would be, this ghostly presence, wanting him, so beautiful that it took his breath away. Until one day, finally, he gave in, and in his mind he pulled her to him, onto him. He knew it was wrong. That he was sick. That he needed help. But he was beyond help. So what did it matter? It wasn’t real.
The pills grinned at him from the dresser. There weren’t enough to kill him. But he had enough in the bathroom. He liked to think about that sometimes at night. It was cold comfort.
CHAPTER
34
S usan had ground her teeth all night. She could tell the moment she woke up, because she could barely move her jaw, barely open her mouth, and her teeth felt like she’d spent the night chewing gravel. She held a heating pad against her face until she felt her sore muscles loosen and the pain in her face subside. But the heat left her face looking raw and sunburned.
It was only just getting light outside, and the forecast in the paper was a row of smiling yellow suns on squares of blue sky. Sure enough, a glance beyond the loft’s wall of glass revealed fragments of clear blue behind the Pearl District’s skyline of brick, glass, stone, and steel. Susan was unimpressed. People didn’t appreciate rain until it was gone.
She sat on her bed and watched the pedestrians struggle by with their paper coffee cups down below. She should have been working. The next story was due tomorrow. But the digital recorder that Archie had recovered for her still sat on her bedside table, and she had yet to listen to the recording of her encounter with Gretchen Lowell. The thought of it made her a little sick to her stomach.
Claire rang the doorbell at exactly 8:00 A.M. Next to her was Anne Boyd.
Despite the unseasonably warm forecast, Susan was wearing what she thought of as her TV-cop clothes: black pants, a crisp black button-down shirt, and an honest-to-God tan trench coat. She didn’t care if it was going to be sixty-five degrees; she was wearing that coat. Claire was dressed, per usual, as if she had just come down off the mountain, and Anne was wearing a zebra-print blouse, black pants, and leopard-print boots, and she had about a dozen gold bracelets squeezed on each wrist. “I love your boots,” Susan said.
“I know,” Anne said. “They’re fabulous.”
“Yeah,” said Claire with a sigh. “You two are going to get along fine.” She introduced Anne and Susan and the three women headed downstairs to where Claire’s city-issued Chevy Caprice was parked.
The plan was to check on the security at the city’s ten public high schools. Many parents were keeping their daughters at home; all kids were encouraged not to walk to or from school, or if they did, to have a buddy. The whole city was on edge. The anticipation was so palpable that it felt to Susan as if people were actually willing another girl to be taken so that they could watch it on the news. A good kidnapping and murder made for excellent televised entertainment as long as it didn’t preempt anything more interesting.
They drove to Roosevelt High first. Claire had a paper cup of coffee from the coffee place next door to Susan’s building, and the nutty aroma filled the car, making Susan’s mouth water. She got her notebook out and set it on her lap. She hated riding in the back. It reminded her of being a child. She unlocked her seat belt so she could lean forward between the seats, the better to ask questions.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Claire chided. “Seat belt.”
Susan sat back with a heavy sigh and resnapped the belt in place. The front seats were light blue cloth, but the backseat was dark blue vinyl. Easier to clean up if someone you were transporting started vomiting. “So this guy,” she said to Anne. “You think he’s a nut job, or what?”
“My professional opinion?” Anne said, looking out the window. “I think he may have an issue or two.”
“He’s going to kill another girl?” Susan asked.
Anne leaned around to look at Susan, her expression skeptical. “Why would he stop?”
Roosevelt was a large brick school with white pillars, a half acre of green lawn, and a steeple. It looked a bit like Monticello. Three patrol cars were out front.
“They should have called this one Jefferson,” Susan joked.
Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m going to go check on things,” she announced. “You guys want to wait here?”
Susan, seeing an opportunity for some one-on-one time with Anne, jumped at the opportunity. “Sure,” she said. She unclasped her seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats so that she was inches away from Anne.