Heartsick

“Uh, uh, uh,” Claire chided. “Seat belt.”

Susan sat back with a heavy sigh and resnapped the belt in place. The front seats were light blue cloth, but the backseat was dark blue vinyl. Easier to clean up if someone you were transporting started vomiting. “So this guy,” she said to A

“My professional opinion?” A

“He’s going to kill another girl?” Susan asked.

A

Roosevelt was a large brick school with white pillars, a half acre of green lawn, and a steeple. It looked a bit like Monticello. Three patrol cars were out front.

“They should have called this one Jefferson,” Susan joked.

Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m going to go check on things,” she a

Susan, seeing an opportunity for some one-on-one time with A

Claire got out of the car and walked over to one of the patrol cars.

“So you think that he works at one of the schools?” Susan asked A

A

“I think that warm diet Coke is delicious,” Susan lied. She pushed ahead. “So do you like profiling?”

“Yeah.” A

“How did you get into it?”

“I went to med school. I wanted to be a pediatrician. I thought they were so cool. They were always the nicest docs at the hospital. No ego. Weren’t in it for the money.”

“So you wanted to be a pediatrician so you could hang out with other pediatricians?” Susan asked.

A

“Profiling seems like a weird field to end up in if you wanted to get away from death.”

“Not death,” she said. She licked her thumb and ran it over a tiny stain of soda spray on her black slacks. “Pity.” She glanced out the window. A kid flew by on a skateboard. She turned back to Susan. “The victims we deal with are already dead. We do what we do to prevent other deaths. We catch killers. And I don’t feel sorry for them.”

Susan thought of Gretchen Lowell. “What makes a person do this sort of thing?”

“There was this study of prisoners serving time for B and E. They asked them all the same question: ‘Would you rather run into a dog or a person with a gun?’ You know what the majority of them said?” She spun the soda can slowly in her palm. “The person with a gun. The dog won’t hesitate. The dog will rip your throat out. Every time. Eight times out of ten, you can wrestle the gun right out of the person’s hands or just walk away. Know why?”

“Because it’s hard to shoot someone.”

A

“But how does it get broken?”

She made a small toasting motion with the can. “Nature, nurture. A combination. Take your pick.”

Susan hooked her clasped hands over her knee and leaned in even closer. “But someone can break it for you, right? Like Gretchen Lowell did. How did she do that? How did she get people to kill for her?”

“She’s a master manipulator. Psychopaths very often are. She chose particularly vulnerable men.”

“And she tortured them?”

“No,” A

Claire suddenly appeared at the car door. Her cheeks were scarlet. “The fucker took another girl last night.”

CHAPTER 35

Addy Jackson’s family lived in a two-story adobe house on a terraced hill on the corner of a busy street in Southeast Portland. The house was painted pink and had a red tile roof and it looked as out of place surrounded by its Craftsman neighbors as it now did surrounded by police cars. Susan noticed a shiny black helicopter with the Cha

Claire took the cement steps that jackknifed up the hillside to the house two at a time, followed by A

The house was full of cops. Susan saw Archie was in the living room on one knee in front of a stricken couple who sat holding hands on a small sofa. They looked at him as if he were the only person in the world, as if he could save them. Susan remembered seeing her mother look at Susan’s father’s oncologist with that very same expression. But the case was terminal then, too.

She looked away. The room was beautiful, full of mission-style furniture and stained glass and jewel-toned Deco velvet. Someone had meticulously stripped and refinished the wood molding, which curved around built-in shelf nooks and over arched doors. When she looked back at Archie, he said something to the parents, touching the mother lightly on the arm, and stood up and walked over to the entryway.

“She was gone this morning,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Last they saw her was last night around ten. The bedroom window’s broken. Parents didn’t hear anything. Their bedroom is upstairs. Nothing missing but the girl. The crime-scene investigators are in there now.”

He looked better than the day before, Susan noticed, more alert. That was a good sign. Then she remembered what Debbie had said about how he would sleep so well when he got home from seeing Gretchen.

“How’d he know which room was hers?” asked Claire.

A cop wearing a crime-scene-investigation jacket walked by and Archie stepped out of the way to let him pass. “Curtains were open. She was in there doing homework last night with the lights on. Maybe he was watching. Or maybe he knows her.”

“We sure it’s our guy?” A

Archie motioned for them to follow him into the dining room, where he removed a framed photograph from the wall, returned, and handed it to A

“Jesus,” Claire said under her breath.

“Why would he change his MO?” mused A

“I was hoping you could tell me,” said Archie.

“Too much security at the schools,” A