Heartsick

“He was leading the task force. His picture was in the paper all the time in those days. She felt the need to present herself to him. She walked right into his office, offered her supposed pseudopsychiatric expertise. Maybe it presented itself as a challenge. And then there’s the fact that she’s cuckoo.” He popped the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth as an exclamation mark.

“Why did they call her ‘the Beauty Killer’?” Susan asked.

“That was mine,” he said proudly. “I asked the ME who examined Sheridan ’s dead hooker to characterize the condition of the corpse. She’d been cut up pretty bad. He whistled and said, ‘It’s a beauty.’ Most interesting autopsy he’d done all year. His last job had been in Newport. All drownings and suicides. He was positively tickled. Just a coincidence that Gretchen Lowell turned out to be a looker.”

It still didn’t click for Susan. This was a woman who had a strong survival instinct. She’d been on a ten-year killing spree. At least. Kidnapping the cop who was chasing her was not in her best interest. “What do you think of the theories that she wanted to be stopped? To be caught? Suicide by cop?”

“It’s bullshit,” Parker said. “Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. She’s not like us. She doesn’t do things for reasons. She liked killing people. She’s said as much in prison. She kidnapped Archie Sheridan, drugged him, tortured him for ten days, and would have murdered him if he hadn’t talked her out of it.”

“Talked her out of it. Just like that.”

“She was the one who called nine one one. If she hadn’t had medical training, he’d be dead. One of the EMTs told me that she’d kept him alive for almost thirty minutes, doing CPR, before they got there.”

“She saved his life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Christ, that’s got to be a mind fuck.”

Parker’s lips were shiny with grease. “I’d expect so.”

CHAPTER 8

Portland Mayor Bob “Buddy” Anderson was a

Ian insisted on driving, which was fine with Susan, as her battered Saab was always loaded with the accoutrements of her life-magazines, empty water bottles, discarded jackets, notebooks and pens-dozens of pens. She found that passengers sometimes failed to understand her complete lack of interest in picking up old french fries off the floor, much less dusting the dashboard. Parker, who was actually covering the press conference, and who did not like Ian, based entirely on the fact that Ian had graduated from journalism school in 1986, took a separate vehicle.

It was still raining. The sky was entirely white and the foothills that surrounded the city looked like jagged, milky shadows. As they made their way over the bridge, Susan placed her hand flat on the passenger side window, watching the rivulets of water carve their jagged paths down the glass. So many people moved to Portland for the quality of life and the progressive politics. They bought bicycles and big old wooden houses and espresso makers, and then, after the first dreary winter, they moved back to L.A. But Susan liked the slick of rain, the way that it distorted the view out of every windshield, every window. The way light blurred around brake lights and glowed on the pavement. The scrape of the wipers.

She had to ask it. “This assignment,” she said, still looking out her window, drumming her fingers on the cold, hard glass. “It has nothing to do with your cock, right, lan?”

Ian looked honestly startled. “Jesus! No. No, Susan. Howard asked for you. I just agreed. I would never…” He let that trail off.

“Good,” Susan said. “Because if I ever thought that it was interfering in our professional relationship, the fucking would stop.” She turned and looked at him with her hard green eyes. “You understand that, right?”

He cleared his throat, and his face and neck reddened. “Yes.”

She let her gaze drift back out over the Willamette. “Don’t you love the rain?”

A