Heartsick (36 page)

Ian made an apologetic face. “I’ve got copy to look at.”

“Later?” Susan asked, carefully shaving the edge of neediness off of her voice.

“Sharon’s having people over for dinner,” Ian explained. “I’ve got to go right home after work. She’s making some kind of meal that involves boiled chard. I said I’d stop and pick up cheese.”

“Boiled chard and cheese? It must be important.”

“Tomorrow?” Ian asked.

“Forget it.”

“No,” Ian said awkwardly. “I mean you’ll have the story for me tomorrow, right? The next installment?”

Susan picked another dog hair off her pants and flicked it on the floor mat. “Oh, right. Sure.”

“By noon, okay? Seriously.”

“No problem,” Susan said. Then she got out of the car and walked inside.

Archie walked back
outside into the backyard. The mayor was nowhere to be seen, presumably off in a quiet corner preparing for the press conference. The Hardy Boys were standing with their hands on their hips in the door of the garage, and Anne was now standing with Claire near the shed. Archie saw Henry emerge from the garage with McCallum’s gray cat in his arms, and he waved him over.

“They fingerprint the bike yet?” Archie asked.

The cat nuzzled its head under Henry’s chin and purred. “Yeah. It’s clean.”

“Totally?” Archie asked.

“Yep,” Henry said. The cat gave Archie a suspicious, doubtful glance. “Wiped down. Not a print on it.”

Archie chewed on his bottom lip and stood with his hands on his hips, facing the house. It didn’t make sense. Why go through the trouble of wiping the bike down and then go ahead and keep it? If you were worried about evidence, why keep what amounted to a smoking gun? “Why would he do that do you think?” Archie mused aloud.

Henry shrugged. “Neat freak?”

“They print the gun?”

“Not yet.” Henry gave the cat an absentminded scratch on the head. “They’ll do that back at the lab, after they’ve picked the brain matter off.”

“Good idea,” Archie said.

The cat began the task of licking Henry’s neck clean. “You seen Animal Control?” he asked hopefully.

“Nope.”

Archie hopped off the back stoop and walked over to where Anne and Claire stood near the shed in the corner of the backyard. A couple of toddlers, unimpressed by the police activity and the helicopters and the news vans, chased each other in circles beyond the fence. Their mother stood in the middle of her yard, hugging her arms and watching the show. Was he crazy to think that McCallum wasn’t the guy? Anne and Claire were in the throes of conversation, but Archie didn’t have time for niceties. He needed Anne’s profiling skills. And he knew that she needed him to still need her.

“Does McCallum fit?” he asked.

Claire and Anne stopped talking, surprised at the interruption. Claire’s eyes widened. Anne drew her jaw back slightly; then she tilted her head and said, “Yes.” She stopped herself. The lines around her eyes deepened and she added, “Except he’s not quite right.”

“Not quite right?” Archie repeated.

She made a helpless gesture. “If you were a fifteen-year-old girl and Dan McCallum offered to give you a ride, would you go with him? He looked like a toad. He wasn’t well liked. And how did he know the girls at the other schools?”

Archie thought of the handsome custodian, Evan Kent.

“Jesus Christ,” Claire said. “You think it isn’t suicide.”

They all looked at one another, waiting.

Archie caught the gray cat streaking through the backyard in the periphery of his vision.

He raised his eyebrows apologetically. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” He saw Mike Flannigan and called him over to join them. He’d pulled the Hardy Boys off Reston when they’d found McCallum’s body. Now Archie was kicking himself for it. “Anyone else not show up at Cleveland today?” he asked Flannigan.

Flannigan was chewing a fresh piece of gum that made him smell like he’d sucked down a tube of spearmint toothpaste. It was something they taught you at the Academy: chewing gum to mask the odor of death. “No,” Flannigan said. “But that janitor you’ve got Josh tailing just hopped a train to Seattle with a backpack and a guitar case. And another thing’s a little weird.” He jabbed his thumb at the house. “We searched the house, and for an unpopular teacher, he sure dug his students.”

“What do you mean?” Archie asked.

Flannigan unwrapped another piece of gum and put it in his mouth. “On the bookcases in the front room, he’s got every yearbook for the past twenty years,” he said. He snorted and gave the gum a chew. “That’s quite a memory walk for a guy who supposedly hated his job.”

Archie raised a questioning eyebrow at Anne. She frowned a little and turned to Flannigan. “Show me,” she said.

Archie ran his hand over his mouth. “After that,” he said, “I want you and Jeff back on Paul Reston.”

Flannigan’s brows shot up. “What about Kent?” he asked.

“It’s not Kent,” Archie said.

“Why?” Flannigan asked.

“Because I say so.”

Flannigan worked the gum with his tongue. “We were on him from six last night to nine-thirty this morning,” he insisted. “I’m telling you, Reston didn’t leave his house last night. He couldn’t have taken the girl.”

Archie sighed. “Humor me.”

“We always do,” Flannigan muttered as he and Anne walked away.

“I heard that,” Archie called after him.

Archie walked over
to where the mayor was in a deep confab with an aide.

“I think you should cancel the press conference,” Archie said, breaking in.

The mayor visibly blanched. “Yeah? How about no?”

“This is going to sound crazy,” Archie said calmly. “So I’m going to have to ask you to trust that I’m feeling exceedingly rational right now. But I’m having doubts as to whether McCallum’s our guy.”

“Tell me you’re kidding,” the mayor said, punctuating the statement by dramatically removing his sunglasses.

“I think there’s a rather significant chance that it’s a setup.”

The mayoral aide was glancing around helplessly. His suit was cheap and looked shiny in the sun.

The mayor leaned forward toward Archie and spoke in an urgent whisper. “I can’t cancel the press conference. The story’s out. A teacher’s dead. A dead girl’s bike is in his garage. They’re live with it right now. It’s on TV.” He gave
TV
an agonized emphasis.

“Then hedge our bets,” Archie said.

The veins in the mayor’s neck thickened and raised. “‘Hedge our bets’?”

Archie reached out and patted the hood of the silver Ford Escort that sat, parked just in front of the garage. “The car’s not big enough,” he said to the mayor. “How’d he get the bike and the girl in a compact, hmm?”

The mayor began to rub some imaginary object between his fingers. “What am I supposed to say?”

“You’re a politician, Buddy. You’ve always been a politician. Find a way to tell them that we don’t know what the fuck is going on in a way that makes it look like we know what the fuck is going on.” Archie gave the mayor an I-know-you-can-do-this arm squeeze and backed away.

CHAPTER

41

S
usan sat on
the couch with her laptop and a glass of red wine and started writing about Gretchen Lowell. As far as she was concerned, the After School Strangler story had ended with Dan McCallum’s suicide. She was sure they’d find Addy Jackson’s body somewhere. He’d killed her and dumped her like he had the others, and she was in the mud, waiting to be discovered by some unlucky jogger or Boy Scout troop. The image of Addy’s half-buried corpse flashed in her mind, and she felt her eyes burn with tears. Crap. She was not going to let this get to her, not now. She wiped the image clean, but it was replaced by Kristy Mathers’s damaged naked body twisted on the dark Sauvie Island sand. And then by Addy’s parents, and how they had looked at Archie with such despair and expectation, wanting him to save their daughter, to save them. And then by her own father.

Her cell phone jumped and vibrated on the coffee table. The caller ID screen read
UNKNOWN NUMBER
. She picked it up and lifted it to her ear. “Yeah?”

“My name’s Molly Palmer.”

“Holy shit,” Susan said.

There was a pause. “Look. I’m just calling to tell you that I don’t want to talk to you. I have nothing to say.”

“It’s not your fault,” Susan said quickly. “He was an adult. There’s no excuse.”

There was a bitter laugh. “Yeah.” There was another pause. “He taught me to play tennis. You can put that in the article you’re writing. It’s the only nice thing I have to say about him.”

Susan tried to control the desperation in her voice. Molly was the story. If she could get her to talk, the paper would have to run it; if not, she’d have nothing, and the senator would get off free and clear. “Get it off your chest, Molly,” Susan pleaded. “If you don’t, it will just eat at you. It will just poison everything.” She twisted a piece of hair around a finger until it hurt. “I know.”

“Listen,” Molly said, her voice catching. “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t call Ethan anymore. This whole thing is starting to freak him out. I don’t keep in touch with a lot of people from back then. And I don’t want to lose him, too.”

“Please,” Susan said.

“It’s ancient history,” Molly said. And she hung up.

Susan held the phone to her ear for a moment, listening to the dead line.

Ancient history. And without Molly, it would stay that way. Susan squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. Ian could have gotten Molly to go on the record. Parker, too. Susan had had Molly in her hands, and she’d lost her. She put her phone down, took a deep breath, wiped her nose and eyes with the back of her hand, and poured some more wine in her glass. There was nothing more reassuring than a full glass of wine.

She considered calling Ethan again. He had clearly given Molly her messages. But then she thought of the pain in Molly’s voice and how she just wanted to be left alone, to leave the past behind.

Was that so wrong?

Fuck it. She picked up the phone and punched in Ethan’s number. Voice mail. Imagine that. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. Susan Ward. Again. Listen. I just got off the phone with Molly and I want you to tell her that I understand. I had an affair”—she caught herself “—or whatever, with my teacher when I was fifteen. And I’ve spent a lot of time justifying it. But you know what, Ethan? It’s not justifiable. It’s just not. So just tell Molly that. She’ll understand. And I won’t call you again.” Who was she kidding? “At least not for a few days.”

She set the phone back down on the table and lifted her computer to her lap. She was on deadline and this story was about Gretchen Lowell. Gretchen, who was very much alive. Gretchen, who made Susan’s teeth hurt. Susan was convinced that if she could get Gretchen down on paper, she could somehow understand Archie and McCallum and the rest of it. She could feel the story, shadowy and amorphous, in the room with her. It just needed to be gathered and shaped. She took a large sip of wine. It was from the Great Writer’s collection, which she had found hidden in the back of his closet under a stack of remaindered hardbacks of his latest novel. Susan told herself he wouldn’t mind. These were special circumstances. The wine was fragrant and leggy and she held it on her tongue, savoring its heat before she swallowed it.