Susan flinched and shook her head. “I can’t do that. I can’t just turn over my notes to the police.” She looked at the dead woman, head still shaking, fists in her sleeves. “Parker never would have done that.”
Archie looked at his watch. It was almost nine A.M. To get to Lawford, they would probably transport Gretchen up I-5, then cut over on 84 East. That meant that they’d come through Portland. He could feel Gretchen. Nearer. “Did you drive?” he asked Susan.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Can you give me a lift?” Archie asked. “I want to show you something.”
Susan didn’t move.
“Trust me, Susan.”
Susan was quiet for a minute. Archie could hear water moving in a pipe overhead, like someone upstairs had flushed a toilet or hosed down a fresh corpse for autopsy. Then Susan unfolded her arms and pushed the sleeves up to her elbows. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Archie punched a number into his phone. When Henry answered he said, “I’ll be late coming in this morning. I’m going to show Susan the boxes from Parker.”
They were at Archie’s house. Susan had been there once before, to interview Debbie Sheridan for Susan’s profile on Archie and the Beauty Killer Task Force. Susan watched as Archie stood on the stoop. He held his keys in his palm for a moment, looking at them like they were something sad and precious before slipping them into the lock and pushing in the front door.
The house still smelled slightly of breakfast. Salt and grease. Eggs. Susan imagined the whole Sheridan family gathered around the kitchen table, clogging their arteries together and staring at one another adoringly. Once, when Susan was ten, Bliss had decided to start making breakfast. She spent the weekend baking homemade granola and fed it to Susan every morning that week. It had been a month before Susan had had a normal bowel movement.
“It’s this way,” Archie said, walking down a carpeted hallway.
“What is?” Susan asked.
“My office,” Archie said.
She followed him into a large room. There was a desk, bookshelves jammed with books, an old TV, framed pictures and commendations on the walls, bulletin boards layered with papers, and a sofa bed still made up from the night before. She tried not to visibly react to the sofa bed. So, Archie Sheridan wasn’t sleeping with his wife. Or ex-wife. Or whatever. It wasn’t any of her business. Really.
He didn’t offer any sort of explanation. He didn’t even seem to notice. He walked over to the closet and carefully folded the accordion doors open. And he pulled a chain that turned on a light.
Inside, tacked on the back wall of the closet, were dozens of photographs. Some were snapshots. Some were morgue photos. They were all Beauty Killer victims.
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
He didn’t say anything. He just bent down and lugged out a big cardboard file box. And then another. And another. The boxes were made out of heavy-duty white cardboard and had cardboard lids and oval cutouts on the sides so you could carry them. On the end of each box someone had written, in red Sharpie, “Beauty Killer.” Susan knew the cramped scrawl. It was Quentin Parker’s.
“These are his notes,” Archie said matter-of-factly, setting the third box on top of the second with a thud.
“How did you get them?” Susan asked.
Archie sat down behind his desk, picked up a pen, and began to rotate it between his fingers. “He lent them to me.”
“Why?”
“He interviewed a lot of people. I asked if I could see the transcripts.” He threw the pen up in the air and caught it. “To help with the identification project.”
Susan glanced at the boxes and then back at Archie. “He gave you his notes?”
“He lent them to me,” Archie said. “And now I’m lending them to you.”
Susan walked up to the stack of boxes and ran her hand across the top one’s lid. Parker’s notes. Almost thirteen years of research about the Beauty Killer case. Susan felt a smile spread across her face and then caught herself. God, she was such an asshole. Parker was dead, and she was picking over his corpse. She was no better than Ian or the rest of them. But she didn’t take her hand off the box. “Parker once spent a month in jail because he refused to identify a drug dealer he’d profiled.”
“I know,” Archie said. His voice was so quiet she could barely hear him. “This was different. Gretchen had been arrested.” He laid the pen at the base of a small frame propped up on the desk. Susan couldn’t see the picture, but imagined his family, gathered around a Christmas tree, or lined up in front of a rustic fence. “I wanted her to admit she’d killed Heather Gerber,” Archie continued. “The girl in the park, thirteen years ago. She refused. No one gave a shit about Heather.” He adjusted the frame, repositioning the angle slightly. “Except for Parker.”