Susan heard Archie’s voice say, “Yeah.”
Henry glanced back over his shoulder into the doghouse. Then he looked at Susan. The dog growled and eyed them both suspiciously. “I found it,” Henry said.
CHAPTER
12
The old woman’s name was Trudy Schuyler. Susan had filled a few pages of her notebook with information about her. Her husband had died five years before. She didn’t have a wood chipper. She didn’t know a kid who fit the description of the kid Archie had seen in the woods. She had been a meter maid, but she had retired twenty years before. She had three grown children. The cops had taken the dog into custody so they could monitor its output, lest the furry topiary had managed to digest a clue or two while gnawing on the dead woman’s radius bone. With this in mind, they had started bagging dog shit from the yard. That was about the time that Susan left.
There wasn’t that much going on at the Herald building at 1:00 A.M. The ambulance chasers who’d been on hand to help put together the issue on Castle and Parker were all tucked neatly in bed. Even the janitors were done for the day. A security guard had let Susan in through the loading dock entrance. She had taken the elevator up to the fifth floor, where Ian was already huddled in his office with a copy editor, a headline editor, a designer, and a photo editor, all of whom had been called in to help pull the story together. They all looked tired and a little annoyed. Susan was trying not to look tired and annoyed. She was trying to look cheery. She had pissed Ian off enough already. And pissing Ian off was not going to get the Molly Palmer story published. Being nice might help. It was so crazy, it just might work.
The late filing was called a “hot chase,” meaning that as soon as Susan was done with the story, they would stop the presses, slip in a new plate, and then continue the press run. She’d have a story in the Dead Senator issue after all. Just not the story she wanted.
Susan started to walk over to Ian’s office, but Ian saw her through his office’s glass wall. He held up a hand for her to stop, then pointed to his watch, and then to her desk.
She obediently walked over to her desk, threw her purse at her feet, set her notebook next to her keyboard, and called Molly Palmer. Nothing. If Ian was going to run the story, Susan knew it had to be solid, triple-checked, every i dotted. She left a voice mail. “Seriously, Molly,” Susan said. “You need to call me back.” She wrapped the phone cord around her finger, circling the knuckle so tight that the finger started to turn red. “It’s going to be okay. He’s dead. Let’s go public with this.” She thought of the ensuing press mayhem Molly was sure to endure. “You care about stories more than people,” Henry had said.
Susan bit her lip. “If you want to drop out for a while, fine,” she said into the phone. “But I need you to talk to some people first, okay?” Susan disentangled her finger and hung up. The lights weren’t all on and the floor was quiet and you had to look hard to see across the room. Besides the huddle in Ian’s office, the only other human being on the floor was a guy from sports, who sat wearing headphones and keyboarding something even he didn’t seem interested in.
She began to type furiously. The Jane Doe. The two new bodies. The possibility of a Forest Park serial killer. It was the kind of story that Parker would have loved. Thinking of him made her pause, fingers poised over the keyboard, and she glanced up from her computer monitor to the lights on the West Hills outside the Herald’s large windows.
She glanced back at Parker’s desk. There were two new bouquets of flowers. It was starting to look like a grave. Susan got up and went into the break room and dug around in the kitchenette cabinets until she found a glass vase, a coffee can, and three tall water glasses. She filled them with water and took a few trips to carry them back to Parker’s desk. She did her best to arrange the wilted flowers in the vessels, but the stems were soft and the flowers drooped forlornly over the sides.
The flowers made her think of Archie Sheridan, whose yard was buried in floral arrangements during the ten days he was missing, and how Debbie Sheridan had once told her that she couldn’t stand the smell of flowers anymore. They made her think of death.