Authors: Chelsea Cain
The trooper came back around, wiping his chin with a paper towel he must have picked up off the floor.
Archie walked back over to the wall of hearts. No rapid pulse, his breathing normal. It must have been the antianxiety meds. Gretchen was out there. She was killing again. And he wasn’t afraid.
Archie laughed.
Two months earlier, in a hospital bed, his throat cut, nearly dead, he and Gretchen had made a deal. He’d tried to sacrifice himself to catch her. But once again, she’d managed to pull him back from the brink of pastoral darkness. She wanted him alive. So he agreed not to blow his brains out, and she agreed not to murder anyone.
Now the deal was off.
Archie felt Henry’s hand on his shoulder.
No one moved. The only sound was the steady hum of one of the toilets running.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” Henry said.
The ME held the plastic tub of eyes up to the flickering light. The eyeballs bobbed and spun.
“So what do we do now?” the trooper asked finally.
“Seal the scene,” Archie said. “Call in the task force.” Archie looked around the bathroom. “See if you can turn up any more parts.”
The trooper’s face glowed. “It’s her,” he said. “Gretchen-fucking-Lowell.” He slowly shook his head and tried to hide his lopsided grin.
Archie had seen it before. The naked exhilaration young cops brought to the Beauty Killer crime scenes. Like they were in on something special.Like they might be the ones to catch her.
“I didn’t mean”—the trooper hesitated, his cheeks coloring—“I thought it was exciting.” He glanced down at his boots, then back up at Archie. “Did she do that to your neck?”
“Yeah,” Archie said, not moving. “She did that to my neck.”
The trooper’s eyes darted away again, somewhere over Archie’s shoulder. “Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” Archie said. “I was unconscious.”
The trooper’s hand went up past the knot of his blue tie, to the collar of his dress shirt, and Archie noticed a high school ring. “You’re lucky,” the trooper said. And then, after a brief pause, the trooper clarified, “To be alive.”
Lucky. The trooper didn’t want to catch Gretchen. He just wanted to meet her. “You can ask me if you want,” Archie said.
“Archie, come on,” said Henry.
“No,” Archie said. He beckoned with his hand. “Go ahead. Ask me.”
Someone flushed a toilet in the men’s room on the other side of the wall and the tinny sound of rushing water filled the room. Archie could see Claire in the periphery of his vision give Henry a look. Henry didn’t move.
The trooper’s cheeks were scarlet now. He looked down again, then up. His eyes shone. A high-school football player, Archie decided. A quarterback. You didn’t have to have a college degree to join the state cops.
“What’s she like?” the trooper asked.
Archie stepped forward and took the trooper’s free hand in his and lifted it to his own neck. “Feel that,” Archie said gently, guiding the trooper’s fingertips over the thick scar on his neck. The trooper didn’t pull away, didn’t cringe, instead he leaned forward, his eyes following the line of Archie’s scar, still raw and fibrous, still sensitive to the touch. Archie could see the pulse in the trooper’s neck quicken. Archie moved the trooper’s hand over an inch. “The jugular is here,” he said, pressing the trooper’s fingers into his neck so he could feel the arterial cord pulsing beneath the flesh. “Gretchen knows where to cut,” Archie said. “I didn’t get lucky. If she’d wanted me dead, I’d be dead.” Archie let go of the trooper’s hand and the trooper slowly withdrew it. “What’s she like?” Archie repeated softly. He put his hand on the trooper’s shoulder and leaned forward, so his face was inches from his. Gretchen was a beautiful, sensual, charismatic, manipulative bitch, the object of Archie’s sexual obsession, his torturer, and the person who knew him best in the world. “She’s a serial killer,” Archie said. He smiled and gave the trooper’s shoulder an avuncular pat. “If you ever lay eyes on her, shoot her.”
Archie turned to Henry. “I’m ready to go back to the loony bin,” he said.
C H A P T E R 5
Susan Ward made her way quickly down the hospital corridor. It was 9 A.M. and she was already in a bad mood. There was something going on out in the Gorge and Ian had sent Derek Rogers to cover it instead of her. She’d already called Derek eleven times. This was number twelve.
“What do they mean ‘body parts’?” she asked him. She was having trouble holding her phone to her ear, keeping her paper cup of coffee from spilling, and digging through her purse for an Altoid to mask the taste of the cigarette she’d smoked in the hospital parking garage.
“They’re not saying,” Derek said. He had been out there most of the night and it sounded like the novelty was wearing off. “But they’ve got half the Beauty Killer Task Force out here and FBI and volunteers searching the woods.”
It would be big news if there hadn’t already been so much Gretchen Lowell pandemonium. The Herald had run a front-page story about her every day since she’d escaped. She’d been spotted in Italy, Florida, Thailand, and Churchill, Manitoba. All the freaks who’d ever claimed to have been abducted by aliens were now claiming that they’d seen the Beauty Killer. Crimes all over the world were being attributed to her. If you believed the twenty-four-hour news channels, she’d murdered a family in Thailand and then made it to England to kill a fishmonger by sundown.
“Keep me posted,” Susan said. “I’m at the hospital.”
“When are you going to give up?” Derek said.
Susan wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder and managed to locate the Altoids tin under a purseful of balled receipts, pens, gum wrappers, and used tissue. “Maybe this week he’ll see me,” she said.
“If Ian finds out you’re working on a book, he’ll pop his ponytail,” Derek said.
Susan pressed the button for the elevator up to the psych ward. Ian had given Derek the crime beat after Susan’s mentor, Quentin Parker, had been killed. Susan told herself she didn’t care. She had some projects up her sleeve that might get her out of the newspaper business once and for all. The sooner the better, the way things were going. She just needed to get Archie to talk to her.
“Hello?” Derek said.
“Did you know,” Susan said, “that since 1958 over four hundred people have died of an allergic reaction to sperm?”
There was a pause. “Uh, no,” Derek said.
The elevator dinged and the silver doors slid open. “I’ve got to go,” Susan said. She popped an Altoid in her mouth and dropped the tin back in her purse. “I’m here.”
C H A P T E R 6
They wouldn’t let Susan in. They never did. Her name wasn’t on Archie’s list of approved visitors. But Susan buzzed and sent the nurse back to ask if Archie would see her, and when the nurse came back, like always, and said no, not today, but he says hi, Susan took a chair in the psych-ward waiting room. If she came often enough, and sat long enough, eventually, she hoped, Archie would relent.
And if he didn’t, well, it was a nice quiet place to get some work done.
There were two chairs, both pee-colored molded plastic, and Susan always sat in the left one. “Waiting room” was generous. It was more like a waiting closet. No windows. Just five feet square, filled by two chairs and a card table stacked with mental-health brochures. Susan was halfway through her coffee and had taken a break from her laptop to read a leaflet about adult hyperactive attention deficit disorder when the elevator doors opened and out stepped Henry Sobol.
He lifted his eyebrows when he saw her. “Purple, huh?” he said.
“It’s called ‘Plum Passion,’ ” Susan said, touching her violet hair. It had been turquoise. Before that, pink. Susan threw a glance at the psych-ward door. If Henry was here to talk to Archie, maybe the thing at the Gorge did have something to do with Gretchen. “Are you here because of the rest stop?” she asked.
“Just visiting a friend,” Henry said.