Chelsea Cain: Heartsick

The scar onhis chest was pale and raised, the fibrous tissue no wider than a piece of yarn. It began a few inches below his left nipple, carved a naked path through his dark chest hair, arced, and then arced again back down to its original point. It was shaped like a heart.

Archie was always aware of it, the raised skin against the cloth of his shirt. He had a lot of scars, but this one was the only one that still seemed to hurt. A phantom pain, Archie knew. A broken rib that had never quite healed right, aching underneath. A scar wouldn’t hurt. Not after all this time.

The phone rang. Archie turned slowly to look at it, knowing what it meant. Another victim.

He only got calls from two people: his ex-wife and his ex-partner. He’d already talked to Debbie that day. So that left Henry. He glanced at the caller ID on his cell phone and confirmed his suspicions. It was a department prefix.

He picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said. He was sitting in his living room in the dark. He hadn’t planned it that way. He had just sat down a few hours before and the sun had set and he hadn’t bothered to turn on the light. Plus, the dingy apartment, with its sparse furnishings and stained carpet, looked slightly less sad cloaked in blackness.

Henry’s gruff voice filled the phone line. “He took another girl,” he said. And there you had it.

The digital clock that sat on the empty bookcase blinked insistently in the dim room. It was an hour and thirty-five minutes off, but Archie had never bothered to reset it. He just did the math to calculate the time. “So they want to reconvene the task force,” Archie said. He had already told Henry that he would go back if they agreed to his terms. He touched the files that Henry had given him weeks before. They were on his lap, the crime-scene photographs of the dead girls tucked neatly inside.

“It’s been two years. I told them that you had recovered. That you were ready to come back to work full-time.”

Archie smiled in the dark. “So you lied.”

“Power of positive thinking. You caught Gretchen Lowell, and she scared the crap out of everybody. This new guy? He’s killed three girls already. And he’s taken another one.”

“Gretchen caught me.” A rectangular brass pillbox sat on the coffee table next to a glass of water. Archie didn’t bother with coasters. The scratched-up oak coffee table had come with the apartment. Everything in Archie’s apartment was scarred.

“And you survived.” There was a pause. “Remember?”

With a delicate flick of his thumb, Archie opened the pillbox and took out three white oval pills and tucked them in his mouth. “My old job?” He took a drink of water, relaxing as he felt the pills travel down his throat. Even the glass had been there when he moved in.

“Task force supervisor.”

There was one more requirement. The most important one. “And the reporter?”

“I don’t like this,” Henry said.

Archie waited. There was too much in motion. Henry wouldn’t back down now. Besides, Archie knew that Henry would do almost anything for him.

“She’s perfect,” Henry said, relenting. “I saw her picture. You’ll like her. She’s got pink hair.”

Archie looked down at the files on his lap. He could do this. All he had to do was to keep it together long enough for his plan to work. He opened the top file. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could make out the vague image of a ghostly body in the mud. The killer’s first victim. Archie’s mind filled in the color: the strawberry ligature marks on her neck, the blushed, blistered skin. “How old is the girl?”

“Fifteen. Disappeared on her way home from school. Along with her bike.” Henry paused. Archie could hear his frustration in his silence. “We’ve got nothing.”

“Amber alert?” Archie asked.

“Issued a half hour ago,” Henry said.

“Canvass the neighborhood. Dogs, everything. Send uniforms door-to-door. See if anyone saw anything along the route she would have taken.”

“Technically, you’re not on the job until morning.”

“Do it anyway,” Archie said.

Henry hesitated. “You’re up for this, right?”

“How long has she been missing?” Archie asked.

“Since six-fifteen.”

She’s dead , Archie thought. “Pick me up in a half hour,” he said.

“An hour,” Henry said after a pause. “Drink some coffee. I’ll send a car.”

Archie sat there in the dark for a few minutes after he hung up. It was quiet. No TV blaring from the upstairs apartment, no footsteps overhead; just the pulse of traffic going by in the rain, a steady blast of forced air, and the rattled hum of the dying refrigerator motor. He looked at the clock and did the math. It was just after 9:00 P.M. The girl had been gone for almost three hours. He was warm and woozy from the pills. You could do a lot of damage to someone in three hours. He reached up and slowly unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and inserted his right hand under the fabric, placing it over his ribs, running his fingers over the thick scars that webbed his skin, until he found the heart that Gretchen Lowell had carved on him.

He had spent ten years working on the Beauty Killer Task Force, tracking the Northwest’s most prolific serial killer. A quarter of his life spent standing over corpses at crime scenes, paging through autopsy reports, sifting through clues; all that work, and Gretchen had tricked him into walking right into a trap. Now Gretchen was in prison. And Archie was free.

Funny. Sometimes it still felt like the other way around.

Susan didn’t wantto be there. Her childhood home was cluttered, and its tiny Victorian rooms reeked of cigarettes and sandalwood. She sat on the gold thrift-store couch in the parlor, occasionally looking at her watch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, twisting her hair around her fingers.

“Are you done yet?” she finally asked her mother.

Susan’s mother, Bliss, looked up from the project she had spread out on the large wooden wire spool that served as a coffee table. “Soon,” Bliss said.

On the same night every year, Bliss burned a likeness of Susan’s father in effigy. Susan knew it was crazy. But with Bliss, it was easier to just go along. Bliss made the foot-tall father figure out of bundled straw, wound round with brown packing string. It had been an evolving process. The first year, she had used dead bear grass from the yard, and it had been too wet and hadn’t burned. Kerosene had been required to get the thing ablaze and sparks had set the compost pile on fire and the neighbors had called 911. Now Bliss bought straw ready-packaged at a pet-supply store. It came in a plastic bag with a picture of a rabbit on it.

Susan had said she wouldn’t come this year, but there she sat, watching her mother wrap the packing string tighter and tighter around the little straw man’s femurs.

Bliss cut the string, tied it in a knot around the straw man’s ankle, and took a drag off her cigarette. That was Bliss for you: She drank green algae every day and smoked menthols. She embraced contradictions. She wore no make-up except for bloodred lipstick, which she wore every day without fail. She refused to wear fur except for her vintage leopard-skin coat. She was a vegan, but she ate milk chocolate. She had always made Susan feel, in comparison, less beautiful, less glamorous, less crazy.

Susan would admit that she and Bliss did have two things in common: a shared belief in the artistic potential of hair, and poor taste in men. Bliss cut hair for a living and wore her bleached hippie dreads down to her waist. Susan colored her own hair, dyeing her chin-length bob colors like Green Envy or Ultra Violet or, most recently, Cotton Candy Pink.