Authors: Chelsea Cain
“He’s neat,” Susan said. No one answered. Henry was going through the dresser. Claire was going through the nightstand. Leo was staring out a window that looked like it had been reinforced with chicken wire.
Susan walked over and opened the closet. Nothing was hung up. There were just three plastic hangers—one red, one white, and one blue. And dozens and dozens of photographs of Gretchen Lowell.
“Guys,” Susan said.
Henry stepped behind her.
She recognized the collagist. The perfectly cut edges. It was the same person who’d done the Gretchen wall collage at Fintan English’s house.
“Told you he was OCD,” Leo said, from the window.
“You weren’t kidding,” Henry said.
“Check this out,” Claire said.
Susan and Henry spun around. Claire was standing at the bedside table, reading a beat-up blue spiral-bound notebook.
“Tell me that’s a diary,” Henry said.
Claire widened her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. She flipped a page. “Ranting, mostly. Letters to
Gretchen. And this.” She held up a page with pencil-written paragraphs and a childlike drawing of a woman’s face. “It’s a mockup for a Match.com page. A woman in her mid-thirties.Blond.Psychiatrist.”
“The orderly,” Susan said. “George Hay. His friends said he’d started dating someone.”
“Maybe he never met her,” Claire said slowly.
“Gretchen didn’t kill Courtenay, either,” Susan said. “Jeremy manufactured an identity and used it to manipulate Hay into committing murder.” She felt light-headed. It all seemed so clear. “Jeremy was the one in the mask.”
Henry turned slowly to Leo. “How crazy is your brother?” Henry asked.
Leo stood at the chicken-wire window, not looking back. “Pretty crazy,” he said.
C H A P T E R 46
Susan sat in her car outside the JoyceHotel and drummed her fingers on her sheepskin-covered steering wheel. She needed to find Jeremy and she needed to find him fast, before he did something terrible to Archie.
She glanced over at her purse on the passenger seat. Inside it was the phone Gretchen had been using to text Archie. She reached over and pulled it open, so she could see the phones she’d slipped inside. The one Archie had gotten from Jack Reynolds. And the one he’d gotten, somehow, from Gretchen Lowell. The number that the texts had been sent from was stored in the call log. Which meant that Susan had a way to contact Gretchen.
She dug into the purse, pulled out the phone, and looked at the screen. There were twenty-four missed calls and fifteen new texts.
“
WHERE ARE YOU, DARLING?”
“
WHERE ARE YOU, DARLING?”
“
WHERE ARE YOU, DARLING?”
Gretchen was looking for Archie, too. Which meant that she wasn’t involved in this. These lunatics had killed five people.
She traced her finger over the phone’s buttons. It was a stupid idea.
But Archie had already called her. It was right there, in the log. They were already communicating.
Susan didn’t know exactly what Archie’s relationship with Gretchen was—not the extent of it anyway. Gretchen was a psychopath. She was a killer. And she was just plain mean. But she had saved Archie’s life. Twice.
Maybe she would do it again.
Susan typed in a text.
“
ARCHIE IS IN TROUBLE.”
And she hit send.
Susan looked down at the phone in her hands as the hourglass turned and then blipped out of sight. She had a nagging feeling that she’d just done exactly what Gretchen would have wanted.
Across the street, she saw Leo Reynolds just getting into a silver Volvo. She grabbed her purse, got out of her car, ran to his window, and knocked on it.
He looked up, startled, and rolled the window down.
“You’re not going home, are you?” Susan said.
“He’s my brother,” Leo said. “He’s my responsibility.”
“I want to come with you,” Susan said. Henry and Claire had called in the crime techs to go over Jeremy’s room. Susan was on her own. But she didn’t know where to start.
Leo hesitated.
“Archie’s my friend,” Susan said. “He saved my life. That makes him my responsibility.”
Susan could see him sizing her up, his face blue from the glow of the dash lights. “Okay,” he said. He hit a button on his door and she heard the car unlock. She ran behind the car to the passenger side and got in.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“It’s time to rely on the kindness of lesser elements,” Leo said.
Susan looked at him blankly.
He shrugged. “I’ve got friends in low places.”
I bet you do, thought Susan.
C H A P T E R 47
It’s called the ‘Superman position,’ ” Jeremy explained. “It’s the least painful. And I thought it was fitting. Archie Sheridan. Superhero cop.”
If this was the least painful, Archie was glad he wasn’t being introduced to any of the alternatives. His head was killing him, probably from the enthusiastic Tasering. But his muscles, which were also reeling from the massive dose of electric current, had at least relaxed a little. He couldn’t lift his head far enough to see much in the room, so he hung there and looked at the floor. And he tried to keep Jeremy talking.
“They have names for all of the suspensions,” Jeremy continued. “You can hang flat, facing up, with the hooks in your chest and legs. That’s called the ‘Coma.’ Like from the movie. You know, that scene where they find all the people hanging from the ceiling? Or you can suspend yourself from your shoulder blades so you’re hanging upright—they call that one the ‘Suicide,’ because if you do it right it looks like you’ve hung yourself.”
He untied his robe and let it hang open. He was naked underneath,
his crotch at Archie’s eye level. He’d shaved his pubic area and his scrotum was cuffed in a metal ring, stretched a good ten inches. It made Archie’s solar plexus hurt just to look at it.
Jeremy let the robe drop to the floor and put a hand under his testicles, lifting them for Archie to see.
“It started my first night home,” he explained. “I wanted to feel the pain. So I tied my balls to my bedpost and bent over backward. Later, I saw some pictures on the Internet, and I started experimenting with stretching. Ropes, then with a wooden block, and finally metal rings.” He motioned to the one currently encircling his scrotum. “I wear this one all the time,” he said.
“It’s not your fault,” Archie said. “Surviving. You couldn’t have done anything to save your sister.”
“It’s important to warm up before any session,” Jeremy said. “To relax.” He picked up a tub of Vaseline off the floor and scooped some out with his fingers and began to rub it on his balls and up the shaft of his penis. Archie looked away. “I’m showing you this because I think it will help you understand,” Jeremy explained. “Please watch me.”