Let Me Go (19 page)

People drowned in Oregon all the time. Most of them drowned in rivers. Some drowned in the Pacific. Some drowned in lakes. A lot of the fatalities were due to unpredictable accidents—floods, capsized boats, sneaker waves—but there were also a good twenty people every summer who just went out for a swim and never made it back to shore.

So a report of a drowning in Lake Oswego did not generate the sort of media excitement of a bona fide homicide. There were no helicopters. No news vans. No telephoto lenses aimed from passing boats. Just two LO cops, in their head-to-toe navy-blue uniforms, and someone in street clothes Archie assumed was a crime tech or medical examiner hunched over the corpse.

The two LO cops headed over toward them.

“Major Case,” Henry said, showing them his badge. Archie didn't move to show his badge. In situations like this, he let Henry do the talking.

The two cops were both men. They recognized Archie. He could always tell. There was that jerk of surprise and the awkward half attempt at hiding it. The cops were both in their early thirties, a decade younger than Archie, and still swaggering with the confidence of youth. Their silver shirt pins read E. L
EONARD
and S. V
ITELLO
.

“What's Major Case want with this?” Leonard asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Henry said with an impatient smile. He pocketed his badge and he and Archie bypassed the two cops and started down the grassy slope to the lake.

“Careful of the dock,” Leonard called. “The leaves are slippery.”

He was right. The leaves had coated the dock and begun the process of entropy, forming a primordial sludge. Archie walked with Henry, moving along the wooden slats gingerly, like an old man, aware of the cops standing in the yard watching him. He wondered fleetingly if he had disappointed them. In the flesh, Archie had the feeling that he was not so heroic-seeming as the papers sometimes made him out to be.

The woman kneeling next to the body didn't glance up. She was a decade older than Archie, and had her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair in a ponytail, tucked under a black watch cap. She was wearing jeans and rubber-soled duck-hunting boots and a wool red-checked lumberjack shirt over a thick cable-knit sweater. Dr. L.L.Bean.

The body she was kneeling over looked bloodless by comparison. Archie had seen a lot of carnage in the Beauty Killer days. He had seen bodies that had been gutted and electrocuted and dismembered. He'd seen the remains of people who had been eaten alive by rats. He had smelled burned flesh, and putrid flesh, bleached flesh, broiled flesh, and bodies that had been skinned and baked and boiled. This girl had no smell. The frigid lake had slowed decomposition. Even dead, she looked cold. It appeared as if she'd been submerged, but had been out of the water long enough that she was no longer soaking wet. Her blue dress was damp and stained with lake muck, but the hem had dried enough that it moved in the breeze off the lake, and her wet hair had dried to the point that thin wisps of bright blond were visible. Her arms were at her sides, palms up, her fingers curled just enough that Archie could make out the silver glittery polish on her nails. Her feet were bare. Her toenail polish matched her fingernails. She seemed peaceful, her eyes closed and faintly sunken, a hint of gray where her lips closed in something close to a smile. Yet her death had been far from peaceful. Ugly red gashes cut across her neck and chest, creating open fissures of flesh. The blue slip dress she had on was a wet second skin, revealing every bony notch on her, every cleft and joint. Bodies floated with the head and arms down, backside up, and could get fairly battered, caught in boat propellers, knocked against debris. But this girl hadn't been a floater. She was too fresh. A corpse in water took a week to bloom enough bacteria in the gut to gas up sufficiently to float, longer in frigid water like this. Besides, Archie had seen this girl just last night.

Archie looked over at Henry. “I know her,” he said.

Henry's mouth opened.

“Who the hell are you?” Dr. L.L.Bean asked them both before Henry could speak. The ID clipped to the pocket of her plaid wood shirt said she was the Clackamas County ME and that her name was Belinda Green.

“Major Case out of Portland,” Henry said, his eyes still on Archie.

Archie said it again, his stomach tightening, emphasizing every word: “I know her.” He saw her in his mind's eye, her hand on the bathroom door, face flushed from alcohol. Twenty-two, she'd said, though he hadn't believed her. She looked older now. “She was at the party,” he said. “She was with a friend. They'd both been drinking. I only saw her for a few minutes. Her friend was in the bathroom, sick. This girl was standing outside. We spoke briefly. But I don't know her name.”

Green twisted around and Archie could see what she was looking at. Jack's island was clearly visible offshore. The house was hidden behind the conifers that ringed the island. But he could make out part of the road, and the dock. Green arched an eyebrow at Archie. “You were at the party on the island?” She gave Archie a once-over and snorted. “I'm impressed.”

Henry's eyes were still on Archie. His face was impenetrable. “What time did you see her?” Henry asked.

Archie thought about it, piecing together the sequence of events. “A little after midnight,” he said. “About fifteen minutes before I ran into Leo.” The rest was implied. A few minutes after running into Leo, Archie was unconscious. Archie's head ached. He had no idea what went on after that.

Green lifted her chin back toward the faux–Cape Cod. “The man of the house let his dog out the back door this afternoon,” she said. “Heard Lassie barking its head off. Came down to investigate and found our girl here dead on his dock. Called the cops. He doesn't know how long she was out here. But it looks to me like she's been out of the water for at least a few hours.”

“She didn't drown,” Archie said.

“Doesn't look like it,” Green agreed.

“How much would she have bled out from the wounds?” Henry asked.

Archie knew what he was thinking. The wounds looked deep. They might cause the sort of arterial spray that Leo was washing off in the bathroom. But Archie had seen the girl alive moments before Star came downstairs with the bag, blood already in her hair. Whoever Leo had killed, it hadn't been this girl. The timing didn't fit.

“If they were premortem, she would have bled a lot,” Green said. “Maybe enough to kill her. Of course, I can't say for sure one way or another at this point, but if I had to guess, she was cut up before she went into the water. She's not a floater. She's too fresh. But she spent some time in the lake. Probably after she died. I'll know more at autopsy.”

Henry ran his hand over the back of his head. “What's to say she didn't have a few too many, decide to go for a swim, or fall in, get cut up in the fall, and then pull herself out here? Where she collapsed and died. Dry-drowning. That's a thing, right? We don't even know that this is a homicide.”

Green peeled the wet fabric of the dead girl's dress up over the girl's hips. She wasn't wearing underwear and her genitals were waxed. Exposed like that, she looked so bare and vulnerable that Archie had to resist the urge to take his jacket off and cover her. Green indicated the girl's waist. Archie and Henry peered forward to look. Above her bony hips, carved into her cold pale flesh, a purple line encircled her midsection like a belt. A ligature mark. Like she had been bound. “My guess is she was weighed down with something tied around her midsection,” Green said. “Thrown in the lake. Then maybe came loose, or someone had a change of heart.” She pulled the blue fabric back down over the girl's legs.

“Was she sexually assaulted?” Henry asked.

Green looked at him hard. “What do you think?”

Archie glanced over at Henry. Major Case had a lot of discretion. The task force could claim almost any case they wanted. That had been the deal. Archie had given up his health and his sanity in pursuit of the Beauty Killer, and in exchange his team got the pick of the litter moving forward. “I want this one,” Archie said.

Henry looked neither especially surprised nor especially enthusiastic. “You think that's a good idea?” he asked.

Green's eyes widened at something behind them, and Archie turned to see Raul Sanchez heading down the dock. He had changed out of the safari jacket into an FBI windbreaker and FBI cap, the white lettering bright against blue.

“Oh, goodie, more cops,” Green said grudgingly.

Sanchez had his badge out, which seemed redundant considering what he was wearing. “Raul Sanchez,” he announced to Green, as he stepped between Archie and Henry. “FBI.”

“I can see that,” she said. She didn't sound impressed.

“So?” Sanchez asked Archie. “What do we have here?”

Henry gave Archie a look.

“One of the party guests from last night turned up dead,” Archie said. “Major Case is taking over the investigation. We're going to need any surveillance footage you have of guests arriving or leaving last night.”

Sanchez squinted. Archie could see him considering his options. If they had footage of the girl coming onto the island, and no footage of her leaving, that was probable cause. They could get a warrant to search the entire island.

Sanchez groped for a phone that was clipped to the waistband of his pants. “I'm going to have to make some calls,” he said. He turned and took a step on the dock, almost lost his footing, recovered, and then continued gingerly toward the yard.

Green stood up. “I better go tell the others what we're dealing with. Get some crime scene techs out here.”

“We've got this,” Henry told her. “We'll have her transferred to our morgue.”

Green gave Archie and Henry a long look. “You have kids?” she asked.

“I do,” Archie said, knowing where she was going. “A boy and a girl.”

Green pulled off a blue latex glove with a snap. “Good,” she said. Archie got the subtext:
Don't fuck this up.

“How old is she?” Archie asked the ME.

Green looked down at the dead girl, pulling off her other glove. “Early twenties,” she said.

The girl hadn't lied to Archie after all.

“She's all yours, gentlemen,” Green said, hoisting up her ME's kit. Then, with a nod, she headed up the dock back toward the house, passing Sanchez, who was still on the phone.

A breeze blew over the lake, rippling the water. Leaves blew off the trees and settled on the lake's bleak surface, floating for a few moments, and then silently slipping beneath the surface.

Archie stared at the island. If he squinted, he could just make out the boathouse near where he had spent much of the night unconscious. Maybe his blonde hadn't been Gretchen after all.

“Where did you say you found that blond hair?” Henry asked.

“Let's just say I had clear chain of custody,” Archie said.

 

CHAPTER

27

 

Jack Reynolds answered
the door dressed like he was going yachting—white pants, a white V-neck sweater with navy piping at the neck, and white canvas deck shoes, no socks.

Archie threw a glance at Henry, who was dressed entirely in black, and hoped this would go better than he was anticipating.

The island was tranquil and muted. The stacks of rented chairs and piles of torches were gone. The bars had been disassembled and loaded into trucks and carted off. The propane heaters that Archie had seen collected together in the yard that morning were now just faint impressions in the grass. It hadn't taken them long to get rid of any evidence that the bacchanalia had occurred. Even the dead leaves had been bagged and hauled away. This was how it went if you had a hundred people working for you. The last time Archie could remember having a party, it had taken Debbie and him three days to do the dishes.

Jack didn't invite them in.

“Nice outfit, skipper,” Henry said.

“Did you come to return my Ralph Lauren?” Jack asked Archie.

Just three hundred yards away, back on the mainland, Archie's Major Case team was working the crime scene at the Cape Cod. The dock had been cordoned off with crime tape. Crime scene techs were combing the yard. He had divers looking in the lake around the dock. The road was lined with law enforcement vehicles. There was no way that Jack didn't know that. This was a man who employed men with earpieces. He had surveillance cameras in trees.

Archie nodded at Henry and Henry dialed up a crime scene photograph on his phone. They'd downloaded it before they'd crossed the bridge, anticipating the reception issue, so all he had to do was tap the screen. The picture filled the screen—an image of the dead girl's face and shoulders. Henry handed Archie the phone and Archie showed it to Jack. “I need to know who this girl is,” Archie said.

Jack barely glanced at the photo. “I don't know her,” Jack said.

“She was at your party last night,” Archie insisted. “I saw her, right inside there.” Archie indicated the foyer behind Jack.

“As established by your presence,” Jack said pointedly, “I was less than familiar with the guest list.”

“She's dead,” Henry said.

Jack smiled thinly. “I got that.”

“We think she was murdered,” Archie said. “Possibly here on your property.” Jack was a lot of things, but he was also the father of two murdered children, and that counted for something. Archie could use it. It was his way in.

“I don't know who she is,” Jack said, his tone softening. “I'd tell you if I did. Maybe she came with someone.”

“Who would know?” Archie asked.

“We used a private security company last night,” Jack said. “Echo Corp.”

“They're military contractors,” Henry said.

“Heavy security for a garden party,” Archie said to Jack.

“I like my guests to feel secure,” Jack said with a sharklike smile.