Sweetheart (13 page)

Henry’s voice was perfectly modulated. It was a tone Archie had heard him use a thousand times with suspects. “You went months without seeing her,” Henry said. “You were doing better.”

Archie’s head pounded. He pressed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “No,” he said with a sad laugh. “I wasn’t.”

Debbie walked over and knelt beside him. “Archie, we’re doing this for you.”

“I need her,” Archie said, his voice barely above a whisper, the pills still stuck in his throat. “You think you’re helping. But it will just make things worse.”

Debbie put a hand on either side of his face. “I miss you so much.”

He looked her in the eye. Her hands felt strange against his cheeks. Unfamiliar. “Leave me alone,” he said. He looked up at Henry. “Both of you.”

Debbie let her hands fall away and she got up and stood behind Henry, her hand on his arm.

“Archie?” Henry said.

Archie looked up. Behind Henry and Debbie, he could see the television; the car being lifted from the Willamette, the senator’s weeping widow.

“I need your gun tonight,” Henry said. “I’m going to sleep on the couch. You can have it back in the morning.”

“Sure,” Archie said. He reached up and picked his keys off the desk and tossed them to Henry and watched as Henry came around and unlocked the desk drawer where Archie kept his service revolver. Henry picked it up out of the drawer, flipped open the cartridge to make sure it was empty, and then closed the drawer.

Henry placed his big hand on Archie’s shoulder and held it for a minute. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Archie didn’t know if he meant he was sorry about Gretchen or taking the gun or conspiring with Debbie. It didn’t matter. If Archie were going to kill himself, he wouldn’t use his weapon. He’d use the pills. Gretchen would have known that.

A
rchie woke up stiff. It was a combination of the foldout couch in his office and not having taken his first pills of the day. Every day was like waking up with the flu. His first awareness was the stiffness in his legs and arms, the ache in his ribs, his throbbing head, and then Sara, standing next to the bed, dressed for school in a pair of red overalls and a pink T-shirt.

The TV was still on. An aerial shot of flames filled the screen. The local news had taken a break from the senatorial mourning to cover a forest fire somewhere in Central Oregon. Even the news moved on.

“Henry’s making eggs,” Sara said. He could smell the eggs then, the salt and fat wafting in from the kitchen. It made his stomach turn.

“You’ve got to get up,” Sara said.

Archie rubbed his face and looked at his watch. It was 6:30
A.M.

Sara took his hand and began to pull.

He was wearing a pair of pajama pants that Debbie had bought for him a few Christmases ago, and no shirt, and as he sat up the blanket slipped and exposed his scarred chest. He felt the cool air on his torso, saw Sara’s eyes widen, and then he looked down to see his mutilated body. He pulled his hand away from Sara’s and lifted the blanket up to his armpits. He expected her to shrink away, but instead she leaned against him and wrapped her arms halfway around his neck. “I have scars, too,” she whispered. She pulled back her hair to show him the paper-thin scar at her hairline from where she had fallen off a sled when she was three. “See?” she said.

Archie touched the scar on his daughter’s head. It was so slight that it barely registered under his thick fingers; nothing like the chasms that marked his own skin. When he ran his hands over the topography of his own scars, he could imagine he was feeling the surface of another planet.

Archie kissed her on the forehead, the scar under his lips. “Go eat some eggs,” he said. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

Only when Sara left the room and closed the door behind her did he pull back the blanket all the way and sit on the edge of the bed. He reached up and felt the heart-shaped scar, his heart beating underneath it. He liked the way it felt now, and he let his fingers slide over its surface for a long moment, before he reached for his pants, and the pills in the front pocket.

He glanced up at the crawl along the bottom of the TV. Two fires had merged.

Archie showered and shaved. The pills kicked in under the warm rain of the shower and by the time he was done shaving he felt a comfortable Vicodin buzz. The pills created a kind of dull roar in his head that muted the guilt. He thought, sometimes, about giving them up. But only first thing in the morning. Never once he was high.

He dressed for the day in brown pants and a brown button-down shirt, and then walked out into the kitchen. The kids had finished eating. Henry was standing at the stove, wearing Debbie’s white chefs apron and making scrambled eggs. His head was freshly shaved. He was wearing a different set of clothes from the ones he’d had on last night. He’d planned ahead and brought an overnight bag.

Henry looked up at Archie and smiled. “You look like a UPS man,” he said.

Sara ran from Debbie to Archie, slamming her metal lunch box into Archie’s thigh. Ben stayed where he was, next to Debbie.

Sara looked up at Archie. “I have a spelling test today,” she said.

“You’re in first grade,” Archie said.

“Henry was quizzing me,” she said.

“She can spell better than I can,” Henry said.

Debbie walked up and put her hand on Sara’s shoulder and kissed Archie on the cheek. “I’ll see you tonight,” she said. “Henry said he’d watch the kids. We can go out. Do something fun.”

“Sure,” Archie said.

Debbie nodded and then took Sara by the hand. “Let’s go,” Debbie said. “Ben, kiss your father.”

Ben trudged forward and Archie bent down so his son could kiss him goodbye.

“I love you, Daddy,” Sara said.
“L-O-V-B.”

“E,”
said Archie.

And they were gone.

Archie got a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. The kids’ dishes still sat there, crusts of bread and egg goop and grease.

“My gun?” Archie said.

Henry walked over to one of the high cupboards over the stove and reached up and removed Archie’s gun, and then walked over to the table and laid it in front of Archie. “It’s empty,” he said.

Archie picked it up and held it for a moment in his hands and then slipped it into the leather holster on his waist.

“Do you want to talk some more?” Henry asked.

“Is she in transit?” Archie asked.

“Yep,” Henry said.

“Then there’s nothing to talk about,” Archie said. Before Henry could respond, Archie’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, snapped it open, and held it to his ear.

“It’s me,” Archie heard Susan Ward say. “I know who your Jane Doe is.”

T
he Portland city morgue was in the basement of a beige-colored stucco building in the north part of the city. The walls inside were painted beige. The linoleum was beige. The paper sterile gowns that Susan and Archie had to wear were beige. The room where they did the autopsies was in the basement. All morgues were in the basement. If you believed what you saw on TV. There was a line of steel gurneys, a lot of scales and devilish-looking containers, and four large drains in the floor for hosing down blood at the end of the day. About ten feet up, a bank of frosted windows let in a weird white light and someone had jammed a lot of house-plants up on a ledge below them. Spider plants. Rubber tree plants. Ferns.

“This place smells like nail polish remover,” Susan said.

“Are you going to tell me who you think she is?” Archie asked.

Susan had arranged to meet Archie in the morgue parking lot. He was there, waiting for her, by the time she arrived, fifteen minutes late, which for Susan was early. She didn’t see Henry.

“I just want to be sure,” she said.

The body was under a black plastic tarp, the kind of thing you might throw over an outdoor woodpile. A morgue technician had just wheeled it in. Under her sterile beige smock, the technician was wearing corduroys and clogs and a turtleneck and wool socks, even though it was summer. It was probably always cold down there. Archie nodded at the technician and she unzipped the bag and folded down the thick plastic sheeting.

The dead woman didn’t have a face anymore. Archie had warned Susan about that, but she still wasn’t prepared. The woman’s mandible was slack, so her lipless teeth were slightly agape, her darkened tongue like bruised fruit. The clotted blood remaining on her cheekbones and in her eye sockets looked like grape jelly How medical examiners ever managed to eat, Susan didn’t know.

She looked down and realized that her hand was clenching Archie’s wrist. Her heart was racing and she felt a sort of heaviness in her throat. But she forced herself to keep looking. For something. Some clue. Something familiar.

And then she saw it.

“Oh, God,” she said.

She felt Archie’s wrist pull free and then his hand fold around hers, their fingers interlocking.

He said, “Tell me.”

Susan wasn’t crying. Not really. They were just tears. They slid down her cheeks and onto her mother’s free-trade Peruvian black knit sweater. Her neck felt cold where the tears left salty trails. She shivered. This wasn’t her fault, she told herself. Parker. The senator. None of it. It was a story. She was a reporter. There was a public right to know.

“It’s Molly Palmer,” she said.

A
rchie stared down at the corpse on the slab in front of him. “You’re telling me that this is your source on the Castle story?” he said. “That the woman we found dead the night before Castle went off a bridge was the same woman who was about to publicly disgrace him?”

Susan nodded.

Archie looked at the corpse’s Halloween skeleton face, her marbled, bloated skin. “How can you tell?” he asked.

Susan reached up and pulled at a piece of turquoise hair. “I finally got ahold of her roommate last night. She said that Molly had taken off, left a note and just left. But first she dyed her hair. She was working as a stripper. And blondes make more tips. But she was giving it up.” She let go of the piece of hair, but it remained twisted where she’d wound it around her finger. “So she dyed her hair red. It’s called Cinnamon Glow. Her roommate found the box in the bathroom trash.”

Victim identification based on hair color. Archie could imagine that meeting with the DA. Vidal Sassoon as an expert witness. “You won’t be offended if I double-check with dental records?” he said. It was crazy. A hunch. Based on hair dye. But he could follow it up. Archie pulled his cell phone out and called Lorenzo Rob-bins. He got his voice mail and left a message detailing what he knew about Molly Palmer. She’d gone to high school in Portland. Chances were someone had X-rays on file. “When was the last time you spoke with her?” Archie asked Susan gently.

Susan shook her head. “I couldn’t get ahold of her. But she was like that sometimes. I knew she was nervous about the story coming out.” She pulled at the sleeves of her sweater. “She was blond. You said the woman in the park had red hair. Molly was blond.”

“Did Molly use drugs?” They wouldn’t have the tox screens for six weeks, but it was looking like an OD.

“Yeah,” Susan said.

So she had red hair. She was missing. And she was a user. “Heroin?” Archie asked.

“She didn’t do this to herself,” Susan said, her voice wavering. “Parker wasn’t drunk.” She laughed sadly. “Parker was always drunk. But he was never that drunk. Never drunk enough to steer off a fucking bridge.” Her hands were entirely lost in the sleeves of her sweater now, her arms crossed. “Molly didn’t take bad heroin. She was an addict. She would have had a source, someone trustworthy.” Susan looked at Archie, her algae-green eyes large. “Someone killed her, Archie. Castle was humiliated. He must have gotten Molly to come down here to meet with him, and given her poison dope or something, and then he took Parker with him off that bridge.”

Fuck. This was all he needed. “I need to see all of your notes on the Castle story,” Archie said. “I need everything you have.”

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. T
o 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.”