Evil at Heart (16 page)

           
She scrolled through her call log again and found the number of the man who’d phoned her with the address.

           
Parker had told her that back in the golden age of newspaper reporting, reporters had had to use reverse phone books to look up addresses from phone numbers. These were massive bound books provided by the phone company and kept under lock and key in a conference room cabinet. You had to get an editor to unlock the cabinet for you and then you had to look up what you wanted right then because you couldn’t take the books back to your desk. The phone company sent new directories every year, so there was no guarantee the information was even up-to-date. But it was still a cool trick. Something to show people on the tour. Tell me your phone number and I’ll tell you your address. Before Google, it was like magic.

           
Now anyone with a phone number could plug the digits into a free Internet search engine and have the corresponding address online in an instant. Plug the address into Google Earth and you could see a 360-degree street view of the house.

           
It sort of took the fun out of it.

           
Susan’s search of the number from her phone log had not turned up a house. It had turned up a pay phone in North Portland.

           
There had been 2.1 million pay phones in the U.S. in 1998. Now there were less than 840,000. (Probably even fewer, as it had been a few months since Susan had done her big pay-phone feature.) Cell phones hadn’t been real good for Superman that way. But Oregon had thought ahead, and when pay phones started going the way of Big Mouth Billy Bass and laser discs, Oregon had passed legislation to preserve “public interest pay phones” in areas where not everyone had the latest BlackBerry. Places like North Portland.

           
Susan plugged a nearby address into Google Earth and fooled around until she found an image with the pay phone in the background. No booth—just one of those half-shells with a big black phone-book binder dangling from a silver cord.

           
Then, on a lark, she plugged in the address of the house: 397 North Fargo. She was surprised by what came up.

           
Nothing.

           
No such address.

           
“Where’s my copy?” Ian said.

           
Two o’clock.

           
Susan looked up to see her editor, Ian Harper, leaning a skinny hip on the edge of her desk. He pulled at his ponytail, a habit Susan had once found endearing and now just annoyed her. There were editors who didn’t bother you until deadline, and editors who hovered. Ian was a helicopter.

           
She pried off her boots and pulled her legs up into a cross-legged position on her chair. “How’s the wife?” she asked.

           
Ian’s mouth tensed. He looked around. No one had looked up. No one cared. The intern was busy tweeting his latest Gretchen Lowell joke. Most of the Herald staff listened to iPods while they worked. The vast and carpeted fifth floor was a cube farm of people sitting in silence, staring at glowing monitors.

           
“I want my thirty inches in a half hour,” he said. He reached up and slid a stray piece of brown hair back into his ponytail.

           
“I’m working on it,” Susan said.

           
He started reading over her shoulder. Susan positioned herself between him and the monitor.

           
“Don’t bury the lead,” Ian said, tapping in the air toward the screen. “That’s your hook. Make the most of those two inches.”

           
Susan smiled sweetly. “You would know,” she said.

           
The intern laughed.

           
Ian pushed off her desk and started back to his office. “I want to see typing,” he said, not looking back.

           
Susan swiveled back to her monitor, wondering how she’d ever slept with him. “It’s called ‘keyboarding’ now,” she said.

           
A newspaper column inch was about thirty-five words. Thirty inches was 1,050 words. Susan always had to do the math. She kept a solar calculator on her desk for just that purpose. Five hundred words in, five hundred fifty to go.

           
A stack of envelopes hit her desk. Derek. He grinned at her. He had a cleft in his chin. An actual cleft. Like Kirk Douglas. Susan had never met anyone with an actual cleft before Derek.

           
She caught him one morning in her bathroom cleaning out his cleft with a Q-tip.

           
“You got mail,” he said.

           
She glanced down at the pile of envelopes—some obviously press releases, some coaster-sized white envelopes with little-old-lady handwriting, and one bright pink envelope that looked to be some sort of card. “You checked my box?”

           
“I was checking my box,” he said with a shrug. “Our boxes are right next to each other.” He paused and gazed at her meaningfully, like their box proximity might be some sort of cosmic sign.

           
Susan threw a look at her overflowing in-box. “Just put it in the pile,” she said.

           
Derek frowned. “You need to reply to readers,” he said. “It’s part of marketing.”

           
“I would,” Susan said, “but I’m out of Garfield stationery.”

           
Derek smoothed out a wrinkle in his khakis. “You hate Garfield,” he said.

           
Susan splayed her hands. “But I love lasagna,” she said. “Ironic.” She pushed away from her desk and leaned back in her chair. “I need to work, Derek. I’m on deadline.”

           
His eyes fell to her jeans. “You’ve got blood on your pants,” he said.

           
She looked down at her shins. The blood had hardened into a smooth rust-colored stain. Susan uncrossed her legs and lowered her socked feet to the floor. “Thanks,” she said.

           
“I’ve got some OxiClean in my desk,” Derek said.

           
“That’s good on stains,” the intern said.

           
Susan turned to the intern. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing a sidebar on spleens?” she said.

           
“Sorry,” the intern said.

           
“You get anything out of the PIO?” Susan asked Derek. One of the great things about covering real news was getting to use nifty acronyms for things like “police information officer.”

           
“Nothing you didn’t get from Sobol. They haven’t identified the body yet. I did a little digging and found out that the house is owned by an old lady. She’s been in a home for over fifteen years. Place has been vacant since she left. There’s an oil tank on the property and radon in the basement. She couldn’t sell it.” He scratched the cleft in his chin. “I might go interview her. Human-interest angle. Funny thing is , she said that she’d already gotten two offers for the house since the news broke. I guess people want their very own Beauty Killer crime scene.”

           
“Sure,” Susan said. “Open up a little B and B.”

           
Derek shrugged. “What are you going to do,” he said. He turned and walked away, and sat back down at the desk he’d inherited from Parker a few months ago.

           
He never looked comfortable in it. It was too big for him.

           
C H A P T E R 19

           
They had cleaned up the blood spattered on the floor in the break room. Archie could still smell the bleach. Word on the ward was the counselor had needed stitches; Courtenay hadn’t. She was back in her room, in lockdown. She’d been singing the same song all afternoon. “High Hopes.” You could hear it all the way down the hall.

           
He’s got high hopes . . . high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

           
Archie hoped it was intended to be funny.

           
“My sister’s coming to visit,” Frank said from the couch.

           
“Yeah, Frank,” Archie said.