“Yes,” he said definitively.
None of this was making Archie feel any better. He started to open the pillbox, caught Henry’s disapproving glance, and shoved the box back in his pocket. “And you saw her go inside the building?”
“Yeah.” Ian paused. Archie could hear his guests laughing again in the background. “Has something happened to Susan?”
“I’m just trying to find her. If you hear from her, you tell her to call me, okay?”
Ian’s voice lowered an octave. “Should I come over?”
“No, Ian.” Archie sighed, thinking about Susan’s confession. “Stay with your family.”
When Henry pulled in behind a patrol car in front of the old brewery building, one of the patrol cops was waiting. “Car’s here,” he said. “There’s a security camera in the lobby. It feeds into a monitor in the concierge’s office.”
“Concierge?” Archie asked.
The patrol cop rolled his eyes. “I think she’s the building spokesmodel.”
Archie, Henry, and Anne followed the officer through the building’s entirely black-and-white modernist lobby to a small room decorated entirely in shades of brown, where a young woman with a platinum ponytail stood behind a bamboo counter. She held an egg-shaped white remote in her hand and was reviewing grainy footage of the parking garage on a glossy white monitor. A stack of photocopies sat on the counter. Archie glanced at the top one. It had a picture of a cat and in big letters said STOP LAB KITTEN ABUSE.
“There,” she said. She leaned forward on her elbows and pressed a manicured forefinger on the screen on top of an image of Susan Ward and Paul Reston. “That’s Susan Ward.”
The five of them watched the jerky image as Susan and Reston made their way from the elevator, across the parking garage, and out of range of the camera. The time code on the video read 6:12 P.M.
“Find them,” Anne said to Archie and Henry. “He’ll kill her if you don’t.”
Archie stood in Susan’s apartment. The spokesmodel had let them in. An expensive-looking gilded mirror hung just inside the front door. A wineglass sat empty on the table in front of it. Beside the glass was a wooden hairbrush, a single bright pink hair tangled in its bristles. Archie examined the glass without touching it. The base was coated with gritty red wine sediment; traces of lipstick were visible on the lip. They had just missed her. She’d drunk a glass of wine and she’d left with him and who the fuck knew where they were now. Archie had put a broadcast out for Reston. Highway Patrol in four states would be looking for his car. But a lot of people had looked for Archie once, too. He fingered the pillbox in his pocket. He was feeling that sort of uneven overcaffeinated vibration that meant it was time to take some Vicodin. Soon the headache, then the slow burn under the skin that would turn to cold sweats, the body aches.
He slid open the box and removed three of the large oval pills by touch and then slipped them into his mouth. He held them in his cheek as he walked into Susan’s kitchen nook, where he filled his cupped hand with water from the faucet and washed the pills down.
He’d even grown to like the bitter taste of the pills. He’d run into addicts who shot saline when they couldn’t get their intravenous drug of choice. The fact that someone would inject a needle into a vein for the hell of it had puzzled Archie then. Now he understood that the familiar pain acted as a brief mental tonic.
“That a good idea?” Henry asked.
Archie looked up. Henry was standing on the other side of the kitchen bar, as inscrutable as ever. “It’s maintenance,” Archie said, turning away from Henry. “They won’t make me high.”
He could feel his body loosen up, already anticipating the codeine in his system. It was psychosomatic. The pills didn’t work that fast. But he didn’t care. He had to focus. To think. How had Reston managed to get to Addy? And why kill McCallum? It had to be connected to the boat. Reston and McCallum taught at the same school, knew each other, and McCallum had said that everyone knew he had a boat. Maybe Reston had been using the boat and set fire to it to destroy evidence or divert suspicion. If he knew that McCallum had been questioned, then a suicide could provide a final frame-up. It was sloppy. And desperate. And that worried Archie.
He turned and walked the ten steps that separated the kitchen area from the living room area, where Anne stood looking out the large window. He hoped that she was thinking about Reston and not considering a real estate investment in the Pearl. He could feel Henry a step behind him, his constant shadow. Archie stood next to Anne and looked out the window, too. Across the street sat another brand-new condo building, each loft a brightly lit dollhouse room in the darkness.