The Night Season (14 page)

CHAPTER

26

Archie had enlarged
the photographs of the keys and tacked them to the bulletin board in the task force conference room. The key from Henry and the one from the kid had been taken for testing. That left three. He held up his pinkie finger and pointed to the middle knuckle. “The keys are half the size of my little finger,” he said. “What do they open?”

Heil, Flannigan, and Ngyun sat around the conference table, each on their third or fourth cup of coffee. Archie stood. The fridge in the room was dying, and its failing motor made a low grinding noise. The clock on the wall ticked. The rain fell. Two chairs at the table sat empty. One Henry’s, one Claire’s.

The major case squad was headquartered in a defunct bank that the city had bought years ago to use as office overflow space. Archie and his team had moved into the building after they’d reunited to track a serial killer murdering teenage girls. It had been the case that had brought Archie back from medical leave, and he’d assembled a group of detectives, many of whom he’d worked with at various times during the ten years of the Beauty Killer case. Ten cops. Most came and went, reassigned as needed from other units.

The bank was a square, one-story, flat-roofed structure surrounded by a parking lot. The drive-up ATM still worked. They’d ripped out the bank clerk counter, but inside it still screamed 1980s Wells Fargo, from the mauve task chairs to the gray carpeting.

The conference room had been the bank’s break room. The fridge still had magnets boasting low-interest home equity line rates.

Archie sneezed.

“Gesundheit,” Heil said.

“Diaries?” Flannigan said.

Ngyun rolled his eyes.

“What?” Flannigan said.

Archie wrote the word
diaries
on the dry-erase board next to the bulletin board. “Next?” he said.

“Golf cart keys?” Ngyun said.

Flannigan snorted. “And you think
diaries
was lame?”

“More,” Archie said. He wrote down some of his own. Lockbox keys. Cabinet keys. Padlock keys.

“Could be keys to old trunks, or jewelry boxes,” Ngyun said.

“Good,” Archie said, adding them to the list.

“Maybe they’re not keys to anything,” Heil said. “I mean, maybe they’re reproductions or fakes, you know? Dime-store stuff.”

Archie’s phone vibrated and he glanced down at it. Susan again. She’d called him four times in the last twenty minutes. He hadn’t had a chance to check the messages.

Fakes.

They had been assuming the keys were old, but what if they weren’t? The crime lab would be able to tell, but until they tested them, it was worth keeping an open mind.

Flannigan leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “How’d the kid get one?” he said.

That was the million-dollar question.

“He’s a victim?” Heil said.

Archie looked at the pictures, the small black key lined up carefully next to the other keys found in each of the victims’ possession. “He wasn’t poisoned.”

Heil shrugged. “Maybe Henry interrupted it.”

It made sense. Henry gets attacked and they find a key on him. The kid ends up in the river within two hours of Archie’s last contact with Henry, and he also has a key. There were too many coincidences for there not to be a connection.

“We need to find the kid,” Archie said. He took the photographs off the board and slapped them down on the table in front of Flannigan. “Take these to a locksmith and see what you can find out about them,” he said. “Heil, you keep contacting aquarium supply stores to see if anyone’s been lurking around asking about blue-ringed octopuses.”

“Besides me,” Heil said.

“Besides you,” Archie said.

“And Ngyun, you troll cephalopod chat rooms and see if any homicidal fiends turn up.”

“Cephalopod chat rooms?” Ngyun said.

“It’s the Internet,” Archie said. “They exist.”

Heil pushed forward a four-inch-tall stack of paper. “These are all tips that came in online and by phone overnight alone,” he said. “People who think they’ve seen the kid, or have had a vision about Henry, or just want to talk.”

“The chief assigned us four patrol cops,” Archie said. “That’s an inch for each of them.”

Ngyun raised his hand. “Um, are we going to talk about the octopus?” he said.

The door flung open and Susan stalked in. She looked as if she’d taken a shower fully clothed. Her bright berry hair fell in frizzy strips. Eye makeup was smeared across one cheekbone. Her black sweater hung wet and limp.

She stood for a moment, catching her breath. Then she said, “I have a problem.”

They all looked at her, waiting.

She opened her purse and got out a blue rectangular cardboard box of tampons and tossed it on the table. It slid a foot and came to a stop in front of Heil.

“I found this in my purse,” she said.

No one moved.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Susan said. “Not the tampons. Look inside.”

Archie picked up the box and tipped it. Several tampons slid out, along with a small black key. The key bounced on the table and then lay still.

Archie looked at the photographs in front of Flannigan and then back at the key.

It was a match.

“Where did you get that?” Archie asked softly.

CHAPTER

27

Archie turned Susan’s
palms up and held them in his hands, scanning for the telltale mark. He was amazed at how steady he was, how neutral his face felt. It was something all parents learned. Don’t show panic. Don’t show the terror welling up in your gut. That projectile vomiting? It’s just the flu.

He bent her fingers back and lifted one of her palms closer. Her pale hand had a fine sheen of sweat that made it sparkle. She smelled like Easter lilies.

“I’m fine,” she said.

There. A tiny brown speck, on the base of her thumb near her wrist. Archie steadied himself. He touched it with his finger. “What’s this?” he said, looking up.

Susan slid her hands out of his and squeezed them under her armpits. “A freckle,” she said. “I was not attacked. I think I would have noticed.”

Archie turned back to the table. Ngyun, Heil, and Flannigan hadn’t moved. They were all looking at Susan. The fridge was grinding up a storm. “Bag it,” Archie said to Heil. Heil blinked at him, and then snapped to, produced an evidence bag from his pocket, and used a pen to guide the key off the table and into the bag.

Archie turned back to Susan. “Where did you get the key?” he asked.

“It was in my purse, like I told you,” Susan said. “I found it when I was at the assisted living facility. But I don’t know how long it’s been there.”

“Okay,” Archie said. He had to think, make sense of this, sort out the timeline. “When was the last time you cleaned out your purse?”

Susan frowned. “I don’t clean out my purse. I just buy a new one and put what I need in that.”

Archie pulled out one of the two empty chairs for her and motioned for her to sit. “I want you to tell me everywhere you’ve been the past few days,” he said.

She tossed her purse on the table next to the tampons and slumped down in the chair. “Oaks Park,” she said. “The newspaper. The morgue. Waterfront Park. The hospital. Home. The Mississippi Magnolia Assisted Living Facility.” She shot Archie a wry look. “Which, by the way, does not have a magnolia anywhere near it.” She threw up her hands. “And here.”

“Have you been away from your purse?” Archie asked. “Maybe set it down somewhere?”

“No.”

“You didn’t put it aside at the hospital. Leave it on the back of a chair? Set it down at the park while you were tending to Henry?”

“I wear it,” she said. “I don’t put it down.” She gave the purse a little shove. But it was stuffed so full it didn’t move. “It has my cigarettes and phone in it.”

The purse sat between them all on the table, like an odd centerpiece. It had a woven leather body, double handles, and a leather chest strap that clipped on to either side with a gold buckle. There was no zipper or flap and the top gaped open. Archie could see the corner of a wallet, the cap of a water bottle, and a pair of sunglasses that Susan wouldn’t need until July.

“It’s open,” Archie said.

“It’s a Bottega Veneta tote,” Heil said. “It’s supposed to be open. That’s the style. Reese Witherspoon has one just like it.”

“Exactly,” Susan said.

Archie and the other two detectives looked at Heil.

“My wife leaves
InStyle
out in the bathroom,” Heil said.

“How do you wear it?” Archie asked Susan.

She looked at him like he was crazy. “You’ve seen me with this purse a hundred times.”

He didn’t remember ever having seen her with that purse, but that didn’t mean anything. Some detective.

“Put it on,” he said. “Please.”

She put her palms on the table, pushed out her chair, and stood up with an exaggerated sigh. Then she grabbed the purse and slung it over her shoulder, so the body of the purse rested behind her left hip. “There,” she said. “Happy?”

“Turn around,” Archie said.

Susan turned, and then looked over her shoulder, at the purse, at the detectives at the table, at Archie.

Archie took a step toward her, so that there was barely a foot between them, and moved his hand over the open top of the purse. Susan’s eyes followed his hand.

“He just came up behind her,” Ngyun said.

“That motherfucker,” Susan said.

The killer had been close enough to touch her, and her reaction was to be pissed. Archie liked that about Susan.

Archie heard a knock and looked over at the door, which Susan had left ajar, to see a female patrol cop peering in at them. He didn’t know her—she was one of the officers that the chief had sent to help. But she was holding a sheet of paper in each hand, and fluttering them like drying Polaroids.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I think I found something,” she said, coming into the room. “I was going through missing persons reports, like you asked. It’s out-of-state, so it didn’t turn up right away.” She moved to the table and slapped down the grainy surveillance photo of the boy leaving the hospital. Then she put down another picture—unmistakably a school photo—from a missing persons report.

Archie looked from one image to the next. The shape of the head, the symmetry of the features, the hair color—it looked like the same kid.

“His name is Patrick Lifton,” the patrol cop continued. “Nine years old. He left his house in Aberdeen, Washington, to walk to a friend’s house three blocks away and never made it.” She pointed to the date across the top of the page, the date when the boy had left his house that last time and the missing persons report was filed.

It was a year and a half ago.

The kid had been missing a year and a half, and Archie had had him in his arms.

And let him go.

“Get out,” he said to Susan.

“What?” she said.

Archie recovered himself. “Please,” he said. “We need to have a meeting. You can wait for me in my office.”

She crossed her arms. “Why do I have to wait?”

“Your purse,” Archie said, searching for a reason. “We need to print it. I’ll call a tech.”

Her eyes fell on the bag and he thought she was going to protest.

“Can I get my phone and cigarettes?” she said.

“Go ahead,” he said.

She picked up one of the tampons off the table. “And I’m going to need this,” she said.

CHAPTER

28

Archie’s office was
a square room with one window, a desk, three chairs, and a bookcase. It was bare-bones. Susan thought it looked like one of those porn sets from the eighties in which the intern gets bent over a desk by an executive wearing nothing but a blue-and-red-striped tie. She’d never told Archie that. Obviously.

His desk chair didn’t even have arms.

She spun around slowly on it.

He’d blame himself. For losing the kid.

There was a computer on Archie’s desk. The monitor was flat and black, but the CPU was older than the ones at the
Herald
. It was probably password-protected. But it didn’t matter. Susan plucked her phone off the desk and Googled “missing ‘Patrick Lifton’ Washington.”

A page of results popped up.

Smartphones. You had to love them.

She clicked on the first result. It was a Web site run by the family. The home page had a snapshot of Patrick Lifton, age eight, grinning and holding a soccer ball under his arm. He was missing one of his top front teeth.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
cried the bold letters above his head.

The information was all there. Patrick Lifton had been born and spent his first eight years in Aberdeen. Susan knew the place—a small town at the gateway of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula that had been gritty even before the mills had closed down and the local salmon runs had dried up.

His father worked at one of the remaining paper mills, and his mother was described as “self-employed.” Their son left home on a Saturday afternoon to walk three blocks to his friend’s house. It was the third time he’d been allowed to walk there alone. The mother of the friend called a half hour after Patrick left. He’d never arrived.

The rest was too familiar. Patrick’s parents searched for him. The police were called. Soon a massive search was under way. An Amber Alert was issued. No one saw anything. It was a rental neighborhood. There were a lot of apartment buildings. People didn’t really know each other.

There were no witnesses. And no suspects.

Susan hoped the police report had more information. If the man who’d poisoned Henry and killed three other people had taken the kid, then the kid had probably been through hell.

And it had been at the hands of a man who had been close enough to her to drop a key in her purse. She ran through it again and again in her mind. Had she been alone, in a crowd? All the others had happened near the river. That’s where it must have happened. She and Archie and Claire had moved through so many people, looking for Henry. All those faceless raincoats. She shivered. Had he planned on poisoning her and then changed his mind? Or had she turned away at the last minute?

“I’m sorry if I was short,” Archie said from the doorway.

Susan held up her phone. “I’ve been catching up on a Scrabble game,” she said.

“Sure you have,” he said. He stalked in and took a seat in one of the chairs across from her. Then he folded his hands in his lap and looked at her with a level gaze. She knew a lecture coming when she saw it. “This thing about the kid, we need to keep that quiet,” he said. “We don’t want the parents to know until we’re sure.”

Susan had already thought this all through. “You could check for his fingerprints on the key he left under the bed. I’m sure they got his prints after he disappeared, right?”

He didn’t move. “I know how to do my job, Susan.”

“Right,” she said. He’d thought of that, too.

They were both quiet for what seemed like too long.

“Do you want your chair?” she asked finally.

“It’s a blue-ringed octopus,” he said.

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him. “What?”

“The toxicology report came back early this morning,” he said. “It’s a small cephalopod. Very deadly. Its bite causes respiratory paralysis. There’s no antivenom. They think if Henry makes it twenty-four hours, he’ll be okay. You can look it up on your phone.”

All Susan could say was, “You lied to me at the hospital?”

He sighed and looked away. “We didn’t want it public.”

She remembered the spots on the palms, his concern with inspecting hers. “The marks on the hands,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“So someone is … is…” She faltered, searching for the words.

“Using an octopus to kill people,” Archie said.

“A blue-ringed octopus,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

She examined his face for some glimmer of humor. “Is this a joke?”

“No.”

“Why are you telling me?”

He spread his fingers. “You can have the story.”

“You said you didn’t want it public.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Now I do.”

It was the kid. Archie’s bosses didn’t want the octopus story out there. People were going to freak out. The city was flooding. They had enough to deal with. But Archie had decided that it was worth upping their chances of catching the guy, and saving the kid.

“I’m not a journalist,” Susan said. “I was fired.”

“You’re a freelance journalist.”

Henry. Archie had said there was no antivenom.

“Twenty-four hours?” Susan looked around the office for a clock. “What time is it?” she asked.

He didn’t even have to glance at his watch. “It’s almost noon. Six hours to go, give or take.”

Susan spun around again slowly in the chair. “This guy takes a kid and keeps him for a year and a half. Then uses a poisonous octopus to kill three people, put a fourth in the hospital, and he leaves keys on all of them.”

“The keys are his signature. The octopus is his weapon. I don’t know how the kid figures in.”

“Why did he give me a key? Was I almost a victim?”

“I have no idea.”

“It’s kind of like a Peter Benchley novel.”

“Okay,” Archie said.

“How much time do I have? For an exclusive?”

“Two hours and I send out a press release.”

Her phone rang. She knew that ringtone. “Number of the Beast.” Iron Maiden.

“It’s Ian,” she said.

“You can take it.”

She let it go to voice mail. “I’ll call him back,” she said. A serial killer with an octopus? She could get that story run anywhere. But she knew that once she did, any hope that Ian would hire her back was over. She’d have to make a living as a freelancer, or move to a city with more media outlets.

There was a second option.

She could use the exclusive to get back in with the
Herald
. Ian would have to take her back. She’d make him sign something. Everything could go back to the way it was.

“Can I smoke a cigarette and have five minutes to think about it?” she said.

“Sure,” Archie said.

Susan stood up. She looked at Archie. He waited.

“Are you giving this to me because you’re worried I was almost murdered and want to keep me around so you can keep an eye on me?” she said.

He held his thumb and forefinger out an inch apart. “A little,” he said.