Let Me Go (33 page)

“Give me a minute,” Henry shouted into the phone. He opened his wallet, glanced around for Claire, and then laid a twenty-dollar bill on the edge of the stage.

She's taking her man to the graveyard

But she ain't gonna bring him back

She shot her man

Because he was doin' her wrong

“Henry?” Robbins shouted.

Henry turned and headed for the door. He still didn't see Claire. The bar was shoulder-to-shoulder with half-aroused costumed yahoos, but Henry didn't have time for niceties. He straight-armed through the horde and nearly flattened a blue guy in a diaper who tried to force a Jell-O shot into Henry's hand.

This story has no moral

This story has no end

This story goes to show

That you can't put your trust in men

Henry cleared the bouncer and stepped outside, immediately feeling his blood pressure go down twenty points as the fresh air washed over him. The relative silence was deafening. He lifted the phone back to his ear. “Okay, go ahead,” he said, walking into the parking lot.

“I thought you guys were champing at the bit for the Watson autopsy.”

Henry stopped walking. “What?”

“Archie called,” Robbins said, a note of impatience in his voice. “Said you guys wanted the Watson results. So I, being a dedicated public servant, decided to stay and do the autopsy despite the fact that it means working well past midnight. Then I call your partner, and what's he doing? He's asleep. And you're apparently at a party.”

The back of Henry's neck itched vaguely. “What do you mean, Archie was asleep?” Henry asked.

“I tried him first,” Robbins said. “He didn't pick up.”

“Archie always picks up,” Henry said. He checked his watch. It was just after one
A.M.

“Well, maybe he took a sleeping pill or something,” Robbins said. There was a pause. “I saw the news. The guy probably has a lot on his mind.”

Henry was pacing now, his bad leg starting to throb. “Archie doesn't take sleeping pills.”

“You're going to want to hear what I found,” Robbins said.

Henry stopped moving. He had to get ahold of himself. He cleared his throat. Then he said, “Go ahead.”

“Her killer put something inside her,” Robbins said. “A playing card. It was rolled up and pushed up into her vagina, almost to her cervix.”

“A playing card?”

“A suicide jack,” Robbins said. “I went to a conference in Hawaii last spring. A colleague of mine from Miami told a story about a similar case. He said he was aware of four other cases. Young women. Sexually assaulted. Tortured. All found with cards inside them. I didn't find semen. I did manage to pull some skin from under her fingernails and I sent it to the DNA lab with a rush request. But I'm telling you, Gretchen Lowell didn't do this.”

A serial killer. Henry rubbed his forehead.
Another
serial killer. In any other instance, Henry would have questions for Robbins, follow-up. But not right now. Right now his head was somewhere else entirely. “Okay,” Henry said.

“Okay?” Robbins repeated incredulously. “How about, ‘Excellent work, thanks for staying—'”

Henry hung up. He punched in Archie's number. “Pick up,” he muttered to himself, “pick up, goddamn you.” It rang and rang. Then went to voice mail. Henry's mouth was dry. He hung up and immediately called the dispatcher and asked to be patched through to the patrol car assigned to Archie's security detail. He had to consciously relax his fist around the phone—worried he'd snap it in two. He wanted Archie to be drunk, high, passed out on the couch, in the shower, ignoring the phone, fast asleep, anything. But this felt wrong. This felt very wrong. The dispatcher came back after a minute. Her voice was tense. “We're not getting a response,” she said.

Henry closed his eyes, anger flooding his body, expanding his chest, filling him.
Goddamn her.
The psycho bitch had done it again. “Send backup there,” Henry spat into the phone.
“Now.”

The front door to the club swung open and Claire came jogging out, holding up her phone, face stricken. “There you are,” she said, out of breath. “I can't get ahold of Susan. The patrol detail at her mother's house said they'd been told she was spending the night at Archie's.”

“Told?” Henry sputtered. “Told by fucking whom?”

“Apparently the chief got a text from Susan's phone,” Claire said, walking past him toward the car. “He relayed the message to her protection detail and to her mother. Everyone was so busy, no one thought to question it.”

Henry jammed his phone in his pocket and ran after Claire. A string of expletives were at the tip of his tongue, but he reminded himself of the baby and gritted his teeth instead. Claire climbed into the passenger side of the car, as Henry got behind the wheel.

“That fucking cunt,” Claire said. “If she fucking hurts them, I swear to fuck I'll fucking shoot her my-goddamn-self.”

 

CHAPTER

38

 

Susan sat in
a circle of light, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Beyond the perimeter of the light, there was only darkness. It was like being in a tiny vessel submerged in a deep, black vastness. She studied the dark, trying to make out images, but her brain played tricks on her, presenting connections and then taking them away. She could not see how big the room she was in was; she could not see the door she had come through, or the ceiling above her, or the walls on any side. She had a terrible, consuming feeling that there was something very bad in the darkness behind her. She didn't turn around to look. The darkness was her ally. It would protect her from seeing its secrets. She studied her hands in the lantern light, her palms raw from rubbing them against her pant legs. She was not here. She was somewhere else. She was in an airplane crossing over the polar ice cap at night. She was on a tiny submarine in the Mariana Trench.

But the cold concrete floor radiated through the seat of her pants and the thin soles of her shoes reminding her exactly where she was.

She held her palms over the Coleman, and pretended it was a campfire.

*   *   *

It had taken
Susan twenty minutes to find the lantern. When Gretchen had closed the door behind Susan, she had found herself in complete darkness—thick and dangerous and absolute. She kept her back against the door, eyes aching, straining to see, both hands frantically working the doorknob. That's when Susan heard the first nail. She knew the sound, the head of a hammer driving a heavy nail into wood; then the sudden muted resonance as the nail cleared the wood and continued into concrete. Gretchen was sealing her inside.

Susan didn't pound on the door, didn't scream out for help.

She knew there wasn't any point.

She had to help herself.

Gretchen had said there'd be a lantern.

The hammer hit another nail.

Susan stepped away from the door, and into the black. It felt like falling. The smell of urine and dirt made her stomach turn. She stumbled forward, groping blindly, until she tripped and fell to her knees, and her hands landed on something padded. She ran her fingers over it, a broad swath of damp woven polyester. In addition to urine and dirt, Susan could now detect a hint of mildew. She felt around the object's edge—it was as wide as the distance between her armpit and fingertips, and three times as long. Susan sat up, momentary distracted from her plight by her successful detective skills. It was a mattress. Just a few inches thick. The sort of thing they used at summer camps, or psych wards. Susan felt a hard knot in her throat as she swallowed. How long did Gretchen expect to keep her here?

The hammer striking another nail brought her mind back to the moment.

She scrambled to her feet and dived again into the darkness, getting to a crumbling concrete wall, feeling for another door, a light switch, anything—finding nothing, and then turning back and zigzagging in a new direction.

Her foot kicked something. It clattered on its side and rolled away on the floor and she fell to her knees and clamored after the sound. Her fingers connected with an object and she pulled it onto her lap. Plastic. The right size. She traced the hourglass shape with her hands, and moved a fingertip along the handle on top. Shaking with excitement, she moved her attention to the lantern's base, fumbling around until her fingers located the nickel-sized button. Then she pressed it.

She squinted as the white LED bulb flickered to life. Her eyes watered. She cradled the lantern protectively in her arms, like it was a child. She knew this lantern. The sense of familiarity gave her comfort. It was a Coleman camp lantern, and it was green. Not just any green. It was the color green of sleeping bags and the Green Bay Packers and the Coleman cooler her dad had had when she was a kid. Bliss had bought a Coleman camp lantern at a yard sale to match it. They had given that lantern to her father for his birthday.

The hammering had stopped.

Susan didn't move.

If she listened hard, she could hear the faint sound of some sort of fan and the distant thrum of water moving through pipes, though that might have just been the blood rushing through her head.

She was underground. She knew that much. She was someplace where no one would ever find her.

There was a mattress. Maybe there was water, too. Maybe Gretchen had left her a hot plate and a selection of Hungry Man soups. Susan lifted the Coleman by the handle to look around, but before she could even stand up, something made her stop. She pulled the lantern closer, to examine it. It could have been anything. It was dirty in there. She was dirty. The lantern was bound to be dirty, too.

The LED bulb illuminated every detail of the handprint on the lantern's clear plastic globe. The specks of dirt, the whorls of fingertips, laugh line, life line, and the blood that stained the palm and several fingers.

Susan gagged and coughed and lowered the lantern to the floor, and snapped her hand away. Then she extended both her hands, palms down, in front of her, and very slowly, held her shaking hand a few inches in front of the clearest print. They were the same size.

She turned her hands over and held them in the light, knowing, already, what she would find. They were caked with blood and dirt.

Her eyes roamed the perimeter of the light. She didn't even know what direction she'd stumbled from; she was completely turned around. What was it she had touched? Had it come from the mattress? The wall?

The lantern cast a ghostly flicker in a circle three feet around her. Beyond it, the dark made her eyes hurt. Was there a body in there with her, someone Gretchen had already murdered?

Susan rubbed her palms hard against her thighs, and then wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged herself. She could feel her heartbeat pounding in her chest so hard it felt like her rib cage might split. She made herself inhale a deep lungful of rank air, then exhaled and concentrated on slowing her heart.

Go to your calm blue ocean, Bliss would always say. Like it was easy. Like everyone loved the tropics. Calm blue oceans made Susan think of drowning. Susan had to find something else. She glanced up over her knees.

*   *   *

Susan held her
palms over the Coleman lantern, and pretended it was a campfire. She was camping with her dad. They were in the Trinities, and they were looking up at the stars. Susan could feel the thrumming in her chest slow as she pictured the scene. She kept breathing. They were sitting outside of their tent, on the soft ground. The Coleman was their only source of light other than the stars. Her dad had a book open and he was reading to her by lantern light. Susan closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against her kneecaps. What book was it?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Susan half laughed, half sobbed. She knew the first lines by heart.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Susan opened her eyes. This wasn't right.

This lantern wasn't like her father's at all. What had she been thinking? His had been similar, yes, but it had been tin, and fueled by propane. This one was plastic, and …

Her pulse was throbbing again.

Susan leaned forward and flipped the lantern upside down. The light shifted to the floor, illuminating a dirty gray expanse of concrete, but she could still make out the battery compartment on the underside of the lamp. She turned the lamp upright, squinting in its direct light, and turned it in her hands, searching for the answer. She found the sticker near the bottom of the lamp's base, a few inches below the Coleman logo.
Four D cell batteries,
it read.
Run time: 175 hours.

Susan did the math. That was seven days. If the batteries were fresh. If the bulbs were new. If the sticker was even accurate.

A terrible notion occurred to her: What if she was down here longer than that?

The darkness seemed to press in around her. Susan felt goose bumps rise on her legs and arms.

It was clear what she had to do.

She would have to ration herself. She would have to save the light.

She was in the Trinities, and she was in her tent, and her father was there right beside her, and it was time for bed. They had down sleeping bags. And books to read in the morning. And Bliss had made them terrible trail mix with flaxseeds and when they woke up they were going to feed it to the birds.

“Good night, Dad,” Susan said softly into the darkness, and she put her finger on the lantern's on/off button and pushed it.