Chelsea Cain - Heartsick

Jen lifted her arm from Maria’s calf, sat up, and shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“But you didn’t see her ride off, right?” asked Claire. “You just saw her leave the auditorium.”

“Right,” Maria said. “They finished blocking all her scenes. Ms. Sanders let her go.”

“And no one left with her?” Archie asked.

Maria shook her head. “Like we said. All the actors got to go once their scenes were blocked. Kristy went first. Most of us had to stay until seven-thirty. But you talked to all them, right?”

“No one saw her,” Archie said.

“So what was she doing all that time?” asked Jen, staring hard at the yellow wall. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Does she smoke?” asked Claire.

“No,” Maria said. “She hates it.”

Jen examined the plastic eyes of the stuffed alligator, scratching at an invisible imperfection on the hard black plastic of its pupil. “Maybe she had trouble with her bike.” She shrugged, not looking up.

Archie leaned forward. “Why do you say that, Jen?”

Jen smoothed the matted green fur of the alligator. “She’d been having trouble with the chain coming off. It was a shitty bike. She had to drag it home a couple of times.” A single tear rolled down her brown cheek. She wiped it away with her sleeve and shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s probably a stupid answer.”

Archie reached out and gently put his hand on Jen’s. She looked up. And he saw, in her hard eyes, a fissure, and, behind it, a tiny bit of hope. “I think it’s a really smart guess,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”

“So her bikeis broken,” Claire said when they were back in the car. It was dark and the windows were glassy with rain. “She tries to fix it for a while, then gives up and decides to walk it home. Our guy stops, offers her a ride, or to help fix the bike, and he grabs her.”

“But that’s a crime of opportunity,” Henry said from the driver’s seat of the unmarked Crown Vic. Henry hated Crown Vics. And yet somehow he always ended up with one. “She fits his profile. You think he just drives around looking for high school girls who look right enough to snatch? That he just got lucky?”

“He broke the bike,” Archie said quietly from the backseat. He pulled the pillbox out his pocket and absentmindedly rotated it between his thumb and forefinger.

“He broke the bike,” Henry agreed emphatically, nodding. “Which means he had her picked out. Knew she had the bike. Knew which bike was hers. Maybe even knew it was crappy. That she’d drag the thing home like usual. He’s watching them.”

“Still leaves us with some missing time,” Claire said. “Next kid left rehearsal at six-thirty. Didn’t see her. The bike rack is right by the door.”

Archie’s head throbbed. “We’ll do the roadblock again tomorrow. Maybe someone else saw her.” He extracted three pills from the pillbox and put them in his mouth one by one.

“You okay, boss?” Henry asked, glancing back at Archie in the rearview mirror.

“Zantac,” Archie lied. “For my stomach.” He leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. If the killer had stalked Kristy, then he’d probably start looking for another girl soon. “You sure the other high schools are secure?” Archie asked, eyes still closed.

“ Fort Knox,” Claire confirmed.

“Set up surveillance at all four tomorrow,” Archie told them. “Run the plates of every car that goes by Jefferson between five and seven.” He opened his eyes, rubbed his face with an open hand, and leaned forward between the two front seats. “I want to go through the autopsy reports again. And let’s go door-to-door again tonight. Maybe someone’s remembered something.”

Henry glanced over at him. “We should all get some sleep. We’ve got people working tonight. Smart people. Awake people. I’ll have them call if anything turns up.”

Archie was too tired to argue. He could do the work back at the apartment. “I’ll go home,” he said. “If you take me by the office so I can pick up the reports.”

“She’s still out there, right?” Claire said. “It’s not all for nothing? There’s a chance. Right?”

There was a long silence and then Henry said, “Right.”

The phone wasringing when Archie got back to the apartment. He had an armload full of police reports and citizen tips he planned to read that night and he stacked them perilously on the hallway table, picked up the cordless, and set his keys on the table next to the charger.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Hey, Debbie,” Archie said to his ex-wife, grateful for the momentary distraction. He walked through the kitchen, got a beer out of the fridge, and opened it.

“How was your first day?”

“Futile,” Archie said. He unclipped his gun from his belt and set it on the coffee table and sat down on the couch in front of it.

“I saw you on TV. You were very intimidating.”

“I wore that tie you bought me.”

“I noticed that.” She paused. “Are you coming to Ben’s thing on Sunday?”

He swallowed hard. “You know I can’t.”

He could hear the sigh in her voice. “Because you’ll be with her.”

They had been through this before. There wasn’t anything left to say. He let the phone slide down his face, his neck, until the base of the receiver rested against his breastbone. He pressed it hard against the bone until it hurt. He could still hear her, muffled and distant, like someone talking underwater.

“You know how sick that is, right?”

The vibration of her voice deep inside his chest made him feel better, like there was something alive in there.

“What do you two talk about?”

She had asked before. He had never told her, would never tell her. He lifted the phone back to his ear. He could hear her breathing. She said, “I just don’t know how you’re going to get better until you cleanse her from your life.”

I’m not going to get better, he thought. “I can’t just yet.”

“I love you, Archie. Ben loves you. Sara loves you.”

He tried to say something. I know. But he wanted to say something more, and he couldn’t, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“Are you going to come out and see us?”

“As soon as I can.” They both knew what he meant. He felt the splinters of another headache starting. “There’s this reporter, though,” he continued. “Susan Ward. She’s doing a series about me for the Herald. She’ll probably call you.”

“What should I tell her?”

“Tell her you won’t talk to her. And then, later, when she tries again, tell her anything she wants to know.”

“You want me to tell her the truth?”

He ran his fingers over the nubby fabric of his cheerless couch and imagined Debbie sitting on their couch, in their house, in his old life. “Yeah.”

“You want that published in the Herald ?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you up to, Archie?”

He took a swig of his beer. “Closure,” he said with a hollow laugh.

G retchen doesn’t lethim sleep that first night, so he is already losing track of time. She injects him with some sort of amphetamine and then leaves for hours. Archie’s heart races and he can do nothing but stare at the white ceiling and feel the pulse throb in his neck and his hands shake. The blood has dried on his chest and now itches. He is in excruciating pain every time he inhales, but it’s the itching that is making him crazy. He tries for a while to keep track of time by counting, but his mind drifts and he loses the thread of numbers. Judging by the stink of the corpse on the floor beside him, he has been here for at least twenty-four hours. But more than that, he can’t say. So Archie stares. And blinks. And breathes. And waits.