“It’s called a ‘high-risk lifestyle,’ ” Henry said. He had turned to wait for her at the top of the stairs.
“What?” Susan said, jogging up the last few steps. She bent over for a minute to catch her breath. Her sneakers were covered with mud. She’d ruined more shoes in this job. …
“Prostitutes,” Henry said. “Addicts. Homeless. They live ‘high-risk lifestyles.’ So we look hard for a couple of days after one of them gets stabbed in the neck with a fork, and then we move on to the more important cases involving honor students.” He started walking away again, up the street. “You know how many black teenage gang members and hookers end up dead without more than a line of copy in your newspaper?”
“What about Heather Gerber?” Susan asked, struggling to get her notebook out as she caught up with him. Heather had been Gretchen’s first victim. A runaway. A street kid. A prostitute. They had found her dead in the park, too. The Herald had certainly run stories about her.
Henry stuffed his hands into his pockets and picked up the pace. The sidewalk was wet and his shoes slapped against the standing water as he walked. “Your paper couldn’t have cared less about Heather Gerber until Archie made the connection to the other bodies and everyone realized there was a serial killer loose. She was just another Jane Doe. Then Parker ran a story about her. The kid’s foster parents saw it. Turns out she’d been missing a year, and they’d never reported it. Just kept cashing the checks. You know who paid to have her buried?”
“No.” The sidewalk was uphill. The street was parallel to the edge of the park and the houses on it abutted the forest. You couldn’t build houses this close to the park anymore, but these were old and grandfathered in. Their porch lights revealed large wooden porches with porch swings and pots of geraniums. The air smelled like blackberries.
“Archie did.” Then he added, by way of an explanation, “She was his first homicide.”
“That case is still technically unsolved, isn’t it?” Susan asked.
“Gretchen did it,” Henry said. “She just hasn’t admitted it yet.”
A Subaru wagon parked on the street up ahead and a man in running clothes unloaded two large dogs and headed toward the park for a night jog. “Is that why Archie kept going back to see her, all that time? Because he wanted to close that first case?”
Henry was quiet for a moment. “No.”
Susan wondered how much Archie talked to Henry about Gretchen. She’d seen the way he reacted when Gretchen had touched Archie’s arm at the interrogation session Susan had witnessed when she was writing the profile. Henry had been in the room in an instant, pulling Gretchen away from Archie, like she was something infectious. Susan had been terrified of her, and at the same time captivated by Gretchen and Archie’s casual rapport. There was an intimacy to their relationship that was unsettling at best.
The sidewalk was old, buckled around tree roots, and Susan and Henry walked carefully, their eyes on the ground.
“We should never have agreed to the plea bargain,” Henry said, almost to himself. “We should have let Washington State prosecute. She’d be dead by now.”
“Archie closed thirty-one more cases,” Susan said.
Henry stopped. They were at the house, a brown clapboard behemoth that looked like it had been built in the forties. She could see his face a little in the light of the streetlamp. He looked tired, shoulders hunched, his leather jacket shiny from the rain. “You didn’t know him before,” he said.
It was hard to imagine Archie ever being very happy.
“Parker wrote a lot about the Beauty Killer case, didn’t he?” Susan asked.
“Hundreds of stories over the years,” Henry said with a shrug. “Jesus, probably thousands.”
Parker was old-school. He’d have used a typewriter if they’d let him. He probably had notes. Boxes of notes. They would be invaluable to someone who, say, wanted to write a book about the Beauty Killer case someday. Once the Molly Palmer story ran, she’d have some sway at the paper. She might be able to take a sabbatical.
“Do you remember him ever mentioning where he kept his notes?” Susan asked.
Henry looked at her for a moment and then raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I almost forgot,” he said. He pulled a badge out of his pocket and snapped it open. Then he shone his flashlight at Susan’s face.
She cringed, momentarily blinded, and lifted a hand over her face. “Forgot what?” she asked.
“That you care about stories more than people,” Henry said. He snapped the light off. “Let me do the talking,” he said, and he knocked on the door.
They waited in silence, while Susan fumed. She hadn’t meant to be insensitive. She did care about Archie. She wasn’t trying to write something trashy. That had been done already. She wanted to write a real book. A smart, compelling, illuminating book. Was that so terrible?
“I didn’t mean to—” she started to say.