Authors: Chelsea Cain
Naked, suspended from his own hooks, in the middle of the room, was Jeremy. The hooks pierced his chest, torso, and legs, so that he was lying flat, faceup, table-height from the floor, like a specimen about to be dissected. His wrists were duct-taped behind his back.
“Coma position,” Jeremy had called it.
The flesh tented at each hook site, strange triangles of strained skin that looked as if they might give in to gravity at any moment. Jeremy’s head lolled back, his pale neck arched, Adam’s apple protruded. The one eye socket Archie could see was a bloody hole. A black rubber-ball gag sealed Jeremy’s mouth, but in the silence of the basement, Archie could now hear Jeremy’s pitiful moan.
Gretchen stood on the other side of Jeremy, facing Archie, elbows out, brows knitted, a scalpel in her hand. Freckles of blood splattered her bare arms. She’d been busy. Jeremy’s chest was raw with wounds. His torso was striped with blood trailing down his rib cage and dripping onto the concrete floor.
Archie tucked his gun behind him and took a step to stand in the doorway.
She lowered the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest and drew it toward her, as Jeremy choked against the gag. The Palmar grip. All those
years, Archie and his task force had hunted her, always five steps behind. He had stood at so many crime scenes, seen so many bodies, reviewed so many autopsies, trying to put himself in the moment of the victim’s terror. Then he had experienced it firsthand.
“Hello, darling,” she said to Archie. She didn’t look up. She just knew he was there. “Have you come to watch me work?”
“I’ve seen you at work,” Archie said. “Remember?” He heard the faint sound of crunching glass, as Susan’s feet hit the basement floor.
“This is different,” she said. She smiled up at him. “Come on. Come take a closer look.”
Archie wanted to keep Gretchen’s attention on him, so she wouldn’t notice Susan, so he walked toward her. Jeremy, hearing Archie, lifted his head and struggled, causing his body to swing, but Gretchen put a hand out and steadied the rigging. Blood ran from Jeremy’s eye sockets like tears.
Archie stood across from Gretchen, Jeremy suspended between them. The room reeked of urine. A dark puddle stained the concrete below Jeremy. He’d wet himself. Gretchen bent over again, getting back to work, pressing the scalpel into Jeremy’s flesh. His torso was shredded. The wounds varied in depth. Some were mere slivers of red; some gaped open exposing fat; some gurgled blood.
“You were special,” Gretchen said to Archie. “You got special treatment.” She frowned at Jeremy’s brutalized skin. “This is hardly any pleasure at all.” She moved a stray piece of red hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “But work can’t always be fun, can it? That’s what makes it work.”
He realized then what she was doing. She was excising the scar tissue of the wounds that Jeremy had self-inflicted, the badges he had not earned.
“You think Jack Reynolds was going to let this go to trial?” she said, still focused on the scalpel. “He would have had Jeremy killed.
On the street.In jail. He would have found a way. Because Jeremy going on trial for multiple murders, that would lead to some discussion of Jack Reynolds’s business interests.” She lifted the scalpel and dragged it along the heart Jeremy had carved on himself. “Jeremy is dead one way or another. You know that.”
“Go ahead,” Archie said. “Kill him. I didn’t come here to save him. I came here for you.”
Jeremy started to sob, the ball gag bobbing, slippery with saliva.
Gretchen sized up Archie’s groin. “Are you going to try to strangle me again?”
He could shoot her. But she had a scalpel in her hand and she would finish Jeremy off if she could. And Susan was behind him, somewhere. He didn’t want to risk the bullet ricocheting off one of the concrete walls. Not yet.
Archie smoothed a hand over Jeremy’s sweat-and blood-matted hair. “He told me that he fantasizes that we’re lovers,” Archie said to Gretchen. “He likes to think about me hurting you.”
“Well, he is a psychopath,” Gretchen said. She nicked at the heart-shaped scar, peeled a piece of the tissue off with her fingers, and flung it to the floor at her feet.
Archie squatted down, so that his face was level with Jeremy’s. It felt good to sit. “Actually, you’re very intuitive, Jeremy,” Archie said. Jeremy twisted his head to face Archie, a black ball for a mouth, bloody craters for eyes. “We had an affair,” Archie told him. “Before I knew who she was.” It was a relief to tell someone, to actually say it. “Two weeks. That’s how long it took. She appeared, with her fake psychiatric degree, and offered to help us with the case.” Archie slowly shook his head, his lips curled in a dark smile. “Fifteen years of faithful marriage and I lasted two weeks before I fell panting into Gretchen Lowell’s arms.”
“I’m the best fuck you’ve ever had, darling,” Gretchen said sweetly.
“Indisputably,” said Archie. He wondered where Susan was, and if she could hear him.
Jeremy gnawed at the gag and pushed at Archie with his head, pleading for help. Had Isabel pleaded for help like that? Had she begged her brother for mercy?
“Anyway,” Archie continued, “a month into our affair, she poisons me, takes me into a basement like this one and tortures me.” He pictured Susan, behind him, in the shadows, listening. “I deserved it. I’d betrayed my family. And even after I was out of the hospital and she was in jail, she was all I could think about.” Archie leaned forward, his mouth inches from Jeremy’s ear. “It was just me, in bed, thinking about how much I wanted to fuck Gretchen again.” He glanced up at Gretchen. “I kept asking myself why she’d done it. Why then? What was her plan for me?”
Gretchen stood motionless, the scalpel still in her hand.
He laughed. He sounded crazy. Maybe he was crazy.
Archie put his mouth back to Jeremy’s ear. “Here’s the thing,” Archie said in a stage whisper. “I don’t think she had one.” He looked up at Gretchen. “I think she infiltrated the investigation for her own amusement. I think the affair just happened. For a long time I thought she tortured me because I was the head of her task force, to show the world that she was all-powerful. But I don’t think that’s it. I think she tortured me because we were having an affair and she thought that I was going to break it off.”
Gretchen’s mouth changed. It was something no one else in the world would notice. But that was his gift. No one knew her like he did.
Archie stood. “Am I right, sweetheart?”
Gretchen sank the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest, sliced, and peeled up the rest of his heart scar. “I don’t do anything without a plan,” she said, and she dropped the bloody yarn of flesh on the floor.
“You want to know what’s funny?” Archie said. There was no amusement in his tone. “I wasn’t going to leave you.” He paused and looked at her, really looked at her, trying to see her as he’d seen her before he knew what she was. “I was going to leave Debbie.”
Jeremy emitted another low moan. The gun in Archie’s waistband pressed against his back. He couldn’t hear Susan. He hoped that she’d climbed back out of the basement.
“Why did you come here?” Gretchen asked.
“To kill you,” Archie said.
“How badly do you want it?”
“Pretty badly,” Archie said.
Gretchen sank the scalpel into the fold of Jeremy’s groin. Jeremy howled against the gag, and Gretchen seized Archie’s right hand and pushed his fingers inside the warm wound, positioning Archie’s thumb and forefinger together around Jeremy’s throbbing femoral artery.
“The femoral artery is the second biggest artery in the body,” she said. “You take your finger out of the dike and he’ll bleed out in about a minute.”
Bright red blood spurted between Archie’s fingers with each one of Jeremy’s heartbeats. All cops were required to take some emergency medicine. Heimlich.CPR.How to treat someone in shock. But the one you paid special attention to was how to treat a wound in the field, because if you were ever shot, it could save your life. Archie couldn’t leave him. If he pulled his hand away, Jeremy would die. Archie pressed his left hand on top of his right to get enough pressure to slow the blood flow.
Gretchen backed away.
“You can save him,” she said. “He’ll live. You can put him on trial.” She came around Jeremy’s body to Archie’s side and set the scalpel down on the floor at Archie’s feet.