Authors: Chelsea Cain
Claire wandered away. Henry was already thinking about getting home. Co-ed Confidential was on Cinemax at eleven and Claire had said she’d watch it with him. He cleared his throat. “Some kids probably bought an organ at a butcher shop,” he said. “Thought they’d scare the crap out of someone.”
“Maybe,” the ME said. “Can’t tell until I get it back to the lab. But the size looks right to be human.”
The state cop gripped his hat a little tighter. “We figured we should call you guys,” he said.
Gretchen had removed some of her victims’ spleens. Both pre-and postmortem. But she left bodies in her wake, not organs. “It’s not Gretchen Lowell,” Henry said. It wasn’t right. No body. No signature. “It’s not her style.”
“Henry,” Claire said. “Look at this.”
Henry turned toward Claire. She was facing the opposite wall, past the stalls. There was seepage where the toilet had flooded onto the concrete floor and Henry had to navigate around it, his attention shifting between his new black cowboy boots and the reflection of his large frame in the puddle. When he got to Claire, he looked up.
The graffiti was recent. Other penciled and scratched musings had been marked over by the thick, neat red lines. The same shape, rendered over and over again. The hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up, his shoulders tightened. “Fuck,” he said.
“We need to tell Archie,” Claire said softly.
“Archie Sheridan?” the state cop asked. He stepped forward, his black boots slapping through the puddle.
Archie had run the task force that had hunted Gretchen. It had made him the most famous cop in the state. For better or worse.
“I heard he was getting inpatient treatment,” the ME said from the sink.
Inpatient treatment, Henry thought. That was a nice euphemism for it. “Officially he’s a citizen until he gets his psych clearance,” Henry said.
“You have to call him,” Claire said again.
Henry looked back up at the wall. Hundreds of tiny hearts, executed perfectly with what looked to be a red Sharpie. They covered everything, obliterated everything. The heart was Gretchen’s signature. She carved it on all of her victims. She’d carved it on Archie.
And now she was back.
C H A P T E R 3
It was long past visiting hours at the ProvidenceMedicalCenter psych ward. Henry rode the back elevator up to a small waiting room with a locked door, a telephone, two chairs, and a table with a sign-in sheet and a stack of Al-Anon brochures. Henry didn’t sign the sign-in sheet. No one ever did.
He picked up the phone. It automatically connected to the nurse’s station inside and in a moment a female voice picked up.
“Can I help you?” the voice said. She didn’t sound like she meant it.
“I need to see Archie Sheridan,” Henry said. He didn’t recognize her voice. He didn’t know the night-shift nurses. “My name’s Henry Sobol. It’s police business.”
There was an extended pause. “Hold on,” the voice said.
After a few minutes the door buzzed and then popped open, revealing a tired-looking woman in scrubs and a Peruvian cardigan. “I’m only letting you in because he said he’d see you,” she said with a tight-lipped smile.
“I know the way,” Henry said. “I’m here three times a week.”
“I’ll walk you anyway,” the nurse said.
There were no TVs in the rooms, but Henry could hear Animal Planet blasting from the break room. Animal Planet was always on in the break room. Henry didn’t know why.
The place had been shocking at first. Fluorescent lights, tile linoleum floors, patients in green scrubs. Everywhere you looked were reminders of suicide—the patients wore socks so they couldn’t hang themselves with their shoelaces, the garbage bags were paper so patients couldn’t pull the plastic ones over their heads, the utensils were plastic so patients couldn’t stab themselves in their jugulars, the mirrors in the rooms were metal sheets so patients couldn’t use the shards to fillet their wrists; there were no outlets in the rooms that could be used for electrocution, no electrical cords that could be used for nooses.
Archie had now had two run-ins with Gretchen Lowell, each of which had left him near death. He was addicted to painkillers. She’d done a number on his psyche. Henry, more than anyone, knew he needed rehab, knew he needed a mountain of analysis. But what he hadn’t expected was that once Archie got in, he wouldn’t want to get out.
The night nurse followed Henry into Archie’s room.
Archie’s roommate was asleep, snoring loudly, that particular kind of wet, choking apnea that was a product of being overweight and heavily sedated. It was the kind of thing that would drive you crazy, if you weren’t already crazy to begin with.
The caged sconce over Archie’s bed was on and he was sitting up, on top of the white sheets, the wafer-thin pillow folded behind his curly brown hair, a thick biography open on his lap. He had graduated from scrubs the month before, and now got to wear his own clothes, a sweatshirt and corduroys, slippers instead of socks. He’d lost weight and from a distance he looked like the man Henry had met fifteen years before, good-looking, healthy. Whole.
Up close, the furrows on Archie’s forehead and worry lines around his eyes told a different story.
Archie’s dark eyes fixed on Henry, and Henry felt a strange unease. Archie’s affect had changed. Henry didn’t know if it was the meds they had him on, or the fact that he’d been high on painkillers for two years and now he wasn’t. It was like he had gotten older, stiller. Sometimes Henry couldn’t believe he was only forty.
“What’s happened?” Archie asked.
Henry shot a look up at the camera mounted in the top corner of the room. It still made him feel strange, being monitored like a prisoner. He pulled up the guest chair on Archie’s side of the room—light plastic, so you couldn’t hurt someone if you threw it—and sat.
“Can I have a minute?” Henry asked the nurse.
“Don’t wake Frank,” she said, and stepped out of the room. Henry looked at Frank. A sheen of saliva collected at the corner of Frank’s mouth.
Henry swung his head back to Archie.
“There’s a crime scene,” Henry said. He reached into the front pocket of his black jeans and pulled out a pack of gum. “They found a spleen at a rest stop east on eighty-four. There are hearts drawn on the wall. I need you to come take a look.”
Archie didn’t react at all; he just sat looking at Henry, not moving, not blinking, not saying anything. Frank made a gurgling sound like a dying chicken. A tiny light blinked red on the surveillance camera. Henry slid a piece of gum from the pack and unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. It was licorice flavored, warm and soft from being in his pocket. He held out the pack to Archie.
Archie said, “It’s not her.”
Henry folded the gum back in his hand and repocketed it. He would never understand Gretchen’s pull on Archie. He knew about Stockholm syndrome. He’d read half a dozen books on it since Archie’s captivity. He understood his friend’s obsession. They’d hunted her for a decade, living and breathing her, working her crime scenes. Only to discover that she was right under their noses posing as a psychiatrist consulting on the case. It had been hard on all of them—hardest on Archie. “What if it is?” Henry said.
“She said she would stop killing,” Archie said. The corner of his mouth twisted. “She promised me.”
“Maybe she had her fingers crossed,” Henry said.
Archie’s eyes fell back to his book, and then he slowly closed it and set it on the table next to his bed. He lifted his chin. “You still there?” he said in a loud voice.
There was a split-second pause and then the night nurse appeared in the doorway.
“They never go far,” Archie told Henry with a faint smile. His eyes flicked to the nurse. “I’ll need to get a day pass,” he said. And then, almost as an afterthought, “And shoes.”
“He’s needed at a crime scene,” Henry said.