Sweetheart (2 page)

“Hard to say until we know what killed her,” Robbins answered. He gazed up at Henry. “Do you wax your head or is it naturally that shiny?”

Archie smiled. Henry had called Robbins out at the police softball game that spring. It had been like this ever since.

“I was just asking,” Henry said to Robbins.

“Ask me after the autopsy,” Robbins muttered. He produced another bag and gave it a snap in the air, and then gently lifted her other hand so he could slide it into the bag. The beetles scattered, and Henry took a small step back.

Archie wrote something in his notebook. It had been thirteen years since they had stood over another dead girl in that park. That had set them on the trail of the Beauty Killer. They didn’t know back then it would become a career. Or that Archie would become one of her victims.

A voice from up the hillside hollered, “Hey.”

Henry looked up at the path, where Claire Masland was waving for them to come back up the hill. He put his hands on his hips. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said to Archie.

Claire motioned again. This time she put her whole arm into it.

“I’ll go first,” Archie said. He glanced back at Henry and added, “So when you fall you won’t take us both down.”

“Ha, ha,” said Henry.

What do you have?” Archie asked Claire when they reached the path. Claire was small and angular with a very short haircut. She was wearing a striped T-shirt and jeans. Her gold shield was clipped to her waistband, along with a phone, a gun in a leather holster, and a pair of red plastic sunglasses jauntily hooked through a belt loop. She tilted her head at a young uniformed cop who was covered in dirt.

“This is Officer Bennett,” she said. “The first responder.”

Bennett looked like a kid, tall with a baby face and a slight double chin that pressed fretfully against a skinny neck. He hunched his shoulders miserably. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Show them,” Claire told Bennett. He sighed glumly and turned around. He had taken a header down the ravine and his uniform was stained with muck, and tiny bits of vegetation still clung to his shirt.

Both Henry and Archie leaned forward to get a better look. Clinging to Bennett’s shoulder blade, among the fern seeds, the moss particulate, and the dirt, was, unmistakably, a clue.

Henry looked at Archie. “That would be a human hair,” he said.

“When you, uh, fell,” Archie asked Bennett. “Did you actually make contact with the body?”

Bennett’s spine stiffened. “Jesus no, sir. I swear.”

“Must have picked it up on the way down,” said Henry.

Archie pulled a slim black flashlight out of his pocket and shone it along the length of the red hair. He held it for Henry to look. There was a tiny clump of tissue at the base of the hair. “It’s got a scalp fragment on it,” Archie said.

Bennett whipped his head around, eyes wide. “Get it off me,” he pleaded. “Get it off me, okay?”

“Easy, son,” Henry said.

Claire, who was a good foot shorter than Bennett, reached up and plucked the hair off and dropped it in an evidence bag.

Archie called a crime scene tech over. “Bag all his clothes. Socks, everything.”

“But what will I wear?” Bennett asked as the crime scene tech led him off.

Claire turned to Archie and Henry. The path they were on was about three feet wide, carved worryingly out of the hillside. The back foot of it had been taped off to let the fifty-year-old women by, so they didn’t have to backtrack a mile into the woods and miss afternoon spa appointments. A chocolate Lab bounded through the foliage on the hillside as its owner, in cargo shorts, hiking books, and reflective sunglasses, walked past without even a second glance at the activity at the bottom of the glen. “So?” Claire said.

“Head injury,” said Archie.

“Yep,” said Henry.

“Maybe she fell,” Claire theorized. “Like T. J. Hooker, there. Hit her head on a rock.”

“Or maybe the rock hit her,” Henry said.

“Or,” Archie said, “maybe Sparky scrambled down there and stuck his snout in our corpse, and the hair dropped off his tongue on his way back up the embankment.”

Claire and Henry both looked at Archie.

“Sparky?” Henry said.

“That is so gross,” said Claire.

S
usan Ward felt sick to her stomach. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the bar’s toxic smog of cigarette smoke.

“You want another drink?” Quentin Parker asked. Parker had been the crime-beat reporter for the
Herald
for as long as anyone could remember. Susan didn’t know if he’d started out an alcoholic, or if it had something to do with the job.

“Something with an umbrella this time?” he said.

Parker drank Wild Turkey. No ice. The waitress had poured him one before they’d even sat down.

Susan ignored the crack about the umbrella and slid a cigarette from the pack she had set on the table. “I’ll just smoke,” she said, surveying the bar. Parker had suggested it. It was downtown, and easy to get to from the paper. Susan had never heard of it, but Parker seemed to know everyone in the place. He knew a lot of people in a lot of bars.

The bar was small, so Susan was able to keep an eye on the door, to watch for the man they were supposed to meet. Parker had set it up. Susan usually worked with the features editor, but this story was crime, and that meant Parker. She’d been trying to get this meeting for two months. Parker set it up with one phone call. But the whole story had been like that. She was about to single-handedly decimate the career of an esteemed politician. Most of the staff at the
Herald
had voted for the guy. Susan had voted for him. She’d take that vote back now if she could.

“I could have come by myself,” Susan said.

“He doesn’t know you,” Parker said. “And I like to help.” He was kidding, of course. Generosity was not the word that came to mind when you thought of Quentin Parker. Belligerent? Yes. Sexist? Yes. Great fucking writer? Yes. Drunk? Absolutely.

Almost everyone thought he was an asshole.

But for some reason, from that first day at the paper two years ago, Parker had looked out for Susan. She didn’t know why. Maybe he’d liked her smart-ass mouth. Or her inappropriate clothes. Or whatever color her hair had been at the time. It didn’t matter. She’d take a bullet for him, and she was pretty sure that, barring the distraction of a drink or a hot lead, he’d do the same for her.

Susan looked around the bar again. Parker had chosen it well. There was little chance anyone would see them all together. There was a vague maritime theme: a steering wheel from an old boat on the wall, an anchor nailed above the bar. The bartender looked about a hundred and ten, and the waitress not much younger. The only food in the place was popcorn. The bar stank of it. But it was dark and cool, which was more than could be said about outside. Susan pulled at her black tank top. It said
I SMELL BULLSHIT
in cursive across the chest, and the letters tended to stick to her skin when she sweated.

The door to the bar opened and a blinding rectangle of light streamed into the darkness, transforming the bar’s smoke-choked atmosphere into pretty swirls of carcinogenic mist. Susan’s stomach clenched. A middle-aged man walked in wearing a suit and fiddling with a BlackBerry. He was heavy, though not nearly as heavy as Parker, and he wore rectangular glasses that seemed too fashionable for him. She turned to Parker.

“Hide your valuables,” Parker whispered, taking a handful of popcorn from the bowl in front of them.

“You’re sure it’s him?” Susan asked, pulling at her tank top.

Parker guffawed, a quick laugh that sounded like a wheeze. He lifted the fistful of popcorn into his mouth and chewed. “Thirty years on the crime beat,” he said, mouth full. “You get to know a lot of lawyers.”

“Here,” Parker said, gesturing the lawyer over with a popcorn-greasy hand.

The lawyer sat. He looked ten years older up close. “Parker,” he said with a nod. Then he looked at Susan. His glasses said
PRADA
in big letters on each side. “This her?” he asked.

“Our Brenda Starr,” Parker said, still chewing. He grinned, his yellow teeth small and shiny in the bar’s low light. “Kid does my heart good, the way she went after your boy.”

“My ‘boy,’” the lawyer said, “is a sitting U.S. senator.”

Parker picked up another handful of popcorn. “Not for long,” he said through the grin.

Susan took a drag off her cigarette and felt for the small digital recorder she had hidden on her lap to make sure it was on. It whirred under her fingertips and she felt immediately calmer. Beyond the lawyer, a young man wearing a red baseball cap came into the bar and sat down alone.

The lawyer wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead. “So the
Herald’s
running the story?”

“Senator Castle want to comment?” Parker asked. He brought his fist up and dropped a few kernels of popcorn into his open mouth.

“He denies it,” the lawyer said.

Susan laughed.

The lawyer pushed his Prada glasses up on his nose. “You’re lucky to get any comment at all,” he said, his face coloring.

Susan pledged right then and there that she was going to take down John Castle and the motherfuckers who’d protected him over the years. People idolized Castle for what he’d done for the state. But after Thursday, they would see him for what he was, a rapist, a manipulator, a blackmailer, and a fraud. She ground the rest of her cigarette out in the black plastic ashtray on the table. “He denies it?” she said. “He fucked his kids’ babysitter and he went to enormous lengths to cover it up, including paying her off.” She pulled another cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a plastic lighter. Susan smoked only when she was nervous. But the lawyer didn’t know that. “I’ve spent two months on this story,” she said. “I’ve got Molly Palmer on record. I’ve got interviews with Molly’s friends at the time that match Molly’s version of events. I’ve got bank records showing money passing from your law firm to her account.”

“Ms. Palmer was an intern,” the lawyer said, spreading his hands innocently.

“For one summer,” Susan said. She took a drag off the cigarette, leaned her head back, and exhaled. She took her time, because she knew she had him. “Your firm continued paying her for five years.”

The corner of the lawyer’s mouth twitched. “There may have been a clerical error,” he said.

Susan wanted to wipe the smirk off his face with her elbow. Why had he even bothered to show? A denial could have been delivered over the phone. “This is such bullshit,” she said.

The lawyer stood up and looked Susan up and down. When you looked like she did, you got used to that, but coming from this guy, it made her a little furious. “How old are you?” he asked Susan. “Twenty-five?” He flipped a hand at her head. “You think the people of this state are going to let some girl with blue hair and some sort of political agenda take down a beloved five-term senator?” He put his face right in front of hers, so close she could smell his aftershave. “Even if you publish the story, it will go away. And you won’t publish it. Because if the
Herald
goes near it, I will sue you.” He jabbed a finger at Parker. “And you.” He pushed his glasses up his nose one last time and stepped back from the table. “The senator denies all allegations,” he said. “Other than that, he has no comment.” He turned around and started for the door.

“I’m twenty-eight,” Susan called after him. “And my hair is Atomic Turquoise.”

Parker lifted his glass of whiskey to his mouth. “I thought that went well,” he said.

“Right,” Susan said. “They’re quaking in their boots.”

“Trust me,” Parker said. He picked up a toothpick from a dish on the table and dug at a piece of popcorn kernel stuck between his teeth, his jowls swinging.

Susan had never loved him more.

He looked at her and winked. “They’re scared shitless,” he said.

Susan thought his face flushed with pride.

But it might have just been the whiskey.

A
rchie stood at his front door, his keys in his hands. In the year and a half he and Debbie had been separated she’d never asked for the house key, and he’d never offered it. It had stayed on his key ring the whole time, a constant reminder of what he’d lost. He had been a mess when she had asked him to leave. He had only been out of the hospital a couple of months, and he was still in the blackest dregs of his recovery. He didn’t blame her. He had forced her into it. It was easier to be alone.

He pulled the brass pillbox out of his pocket, opened it, and extracted three white oval pills. He held them for a moment before he put them in his mouth, enjoying the familiar bitter taste before swallowing them. Then he pushed the key into the lock and pushed open the big door. The house was a low-slung, mid-century ranch that had been restored by the previous owners. Debbie had been pregnant with Sara when they bought it. It was far above his pay rate, but Debbie had just been hired as a designer at Nike, so they had splurged.