Let Me Go (18 page)

She glances down at him approvingly. “It looks like you're ready to go,” she says.

He kisses her, all the while acutely aware of the bed behind him, of the fact that he isn't the only one with a key to the crime scene and that anyone can walk in at any time, of the smell of decomp that still permeates everything. He knows that he will still stink of it when he gets home, and that the smell will remind him now of this, of Gretchen.

He can feel Gretchen's breathing quicken and her nipples harden under his hands. She lifts one knee and tucks her hips forward and he slides into her, and they both groan. He can feel her clinging to him as he begins to thrust.

“I want to try something,” she says breathlessly in his ear. “I think you're going to like it. Will you let me?”

He nods. He would agree to anything in exchange for this.

She reaches behind his head and a moment later he feels a stinging pain at the base of his skull. He reaches up and tries to pull away, but she has her hand in his hair, and her foot hooked behind him, holding him inside her. “What the fuck?” Archie says, his cock softening. His hand touches blood.

“Stay inside me,” she tells him. “Breathe.”

It hurts.

“Do you feel it?” she asks him. “The endorphins from the pain. They heighten sensual pleasure. It's just a nail. I've got it pressed into your skull. It won't go in any farther.”

A nail?

“Feel it?” Her eyes are shining.

She is rocking against him, and he can feel it. She's right. Everything is amplified. He can feel himself hardening inside her again, and he can't help himself, he has to push deeper, to keep thrusting. He lifts her knee higher.

The pain is still there, but it is diluted by his mounting arousal. He shudders, almost dizzy, pleasure coursing through him.

“Can I stab you again?” she asks, out of breath.

He kisses her hard, pressing her against the wall, and she pushes her tongue deep into his mouth, just as hungrily. He tastes blood. He doesn't know whose. Then he remembers his wife. “Don't leave any marks,” he says.

 

CHAPTER

25

 

Archie woke up
from a hard nap on the sofa, disoriented and sore, his body slimy with cold sweat and a bag of melted ice next to his head. Ginger was snoring gently on the floor below him, one ear twitching. He glanced at his watch. It was almost three. He'd been asleep for hours. His headache had settled into a throbbing pain behind his eyes. Archie moved the melted ice to the coffee table and touched the scabbed lump on his scalp. He'd changed out of Jack Reynolds's clothes and into a pair of sweats and an old T-shirt. Now the T-shirt was damp with sweat. He could smell it on himself. But his head felt clearer. He'd sweated out the painkillers.

He was still on the couch a few minutes later, imagining what Rachel's Halloween costume might be, when someone knocked on the door.

Ginger lifted her head.

“Come in, Henry,” Archie called.

The door opened and Henry walked in. Ginger, seeing it was Henry, laid her head back down and closed her eyes.

Archie put his socked feet on the floor and sat up stiffly. That was the thing with painkillers, when they wore off they only reminded you how much pain you were in without them.

Henry sank down in the chair across from the sofa and put his feet up on Archie's coffee table. There was a dead leaf stuck to the heel of his black cowboy boot. There were dead leaves stuck to everything in Portland in the fall. They had a way of appearing in the most unexpected places. Henry smoothed his mustache and then crossed his arms and looked at Archie like he was waiting for him to say something.

“Thanks for looking after the dog,” Archie said.

“I don't like it,” Henry said, glancing at Ginger.

“Her,”
Archie said. “You don't like
her.
”

“She's Gretchen's dog,” Henry said.

“She's my dog,” Archie said. “Gretchen only had her for a night before she gave her to me. I don't think it was long enough to train her as an assassin.”

“When I was a SEAL,” Henry said, “I'm telling you, we worked on shit like that.” Henry's blue eyes narrowed and he looked Archie up and down. “You sick?”

“No,” Archie said. “I was asleep.”

Henry shifted forward, anchored his elbows on his knees, and folded his hands. “You thinking about her again?”

Archie's stomach knotted. He could feel a faint burn on his cheeks as he turned his head, eyes on the floor. “No.”

Henry didn't press it. It was rare for Henry even to breathe Gretchen's name these days. The more the media brought her up, the more TV specials and exposés, the less they talked about her. They both knew she could make you deranged if you let her. The only defense was denial.

Henry nodded at the bag of melted ice on the table and cleared his throat. “How was your birthday?”

Archie smiled thinly. “I have a headache, so it must have been fun, right?”

Henry lifted his bushy gray eyebrows at Archie. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Archie said, wincing as he touched the goose egg on his head.

“Is it over?” Henry asked.

Archie rubbed his eyes. “Leo's still out there.”

“Can you talk about it?”

Archie hesitated. Technically, Henry wasn't cleared to be briefed on Archie's little extracurricular op for the FBI, but Henry already knew everything up until the party. He knew that Leo was working for the DEA. He knew how Jack Reynolds made his money. Henry had known Leo as long as Archie had. Archie needed to talk it through with someone, and he still wasn't sure how much he could trust Sanchez. “Jack's working on some deal with the Russians,” Archie told Henry. “The party was just a cover for the meeting. Leo's on his own. He thinks Sanchez is dirty. He doesn't trust anybody. I don't know what to think.”

“Do you trust Leo?” Henry asked.

That was the question, wasn't it? But Archie couldn't trust his gut when it came to Leo, because his instincts were clouded by Leo's relationship with Susan.

“I trust you,” Archie said. He reached into the pocket of his sweats, retrieved the brass pillbox, and held it out to Henry. “There's a strand of hair in here,” Archie said. “Can you run the DNA?”

“Who do you think it belongs to?” Henry asked, taking the box.

“You're going to think I've gone crazy.”

“I already think you're crazy.”

Archie exhaled slowly. “I walked in on Leo cleaning up last night.” He glanced up at Henry. Henry was watching him intently. “He was covered in blood,” Archie continued. “He used a choke hold on me. I lost consciousness. He said the Russians were coming back, that he was trying to protect me. He killed someone last night, Henry. He told me this morning. An FSB agent who'd infiltrated the group. He said he had to do it to maintain his cover, that Jack suspects him. I woke up outside on a bank near the boathouse five hours later with a head wound and no memory of how I got there. Leo claims they left me in the bedroom and when he came back ten minutes later I was gone. I don't remember.” Archie glanced at the pillbox in Henry's hand. “But this morning, when I got out of the shower, I found a blond hair,” he said. Archie cleared his throat, clarifying. “I coughed it up.”

Henry rubbed his palm over his face and then paused, as if considering his response. “You should have a tox screen,” he said finally.

If he'd been drugged, a tox screen might show it, but it would also show opiates in his system, and Archie didn't want to have to explain that. “It's been too long,” Archie said. “It's probably out of my system.”

Ginger whined in her sleep and rolled over on her back and Archie stroked her belly with his foot.

“I've been thinking about her,” Archie said. “I had a dream about her last night”—he watched Henry, looking for his reaction—“while I was unconscious. Before I found the hair. It seemed real. Like she was there.”

Henry's face was expressionless. “That doesn't mean she was,” he said. “So you think you found a hair in your mouth. A lot of people have blond hair. It was a party. You could have picked it up anywhere, off of anyone. I don't have to tell you that. Have you considered the possibility that it belongs to Rachel? You know, the other blonde you occasionally sleep with?”

Rachel's private bits were waxed to a prepubescent shine, though Archie was in no mood to get into that level of detail with Henry. Besides, this wasn't about Rachel. Archie bent forward, retrieved the image from Sanchez from the coffee table, and began to unfold it.

Henry glanced at the picture and then waved it away. “I've seen it,” he said.

So Henry was more involved in the pursuit of Gretchen than he'd led Archie to believe.

“Maybe that's her,” Henry said, flicking a hand at the picture. “Maybe she's in the country. It's a lot of maybes. The plan was not to bother you with this shit, remember? You can't get involved every time there's a sighting.”

“I feel her, Henry.” Archie had to look away as he said it, but he still needed to say it aloud, and Henry was the only person he could tell. “I think she's here. I think she was on the island last night.”

Archie had stopped petting Ginger with his foot and she flopped back over and sat staring at him, waiting for an invitation up on the couch.

“Now you're sounding like a nut job,” Henry said. He held the brass pillbox up between two fingers. “You just happened to have this pillbox with you when you found the hair? You were just carrying it around in your pocket in case you needed an evidence container?” The blood vessels on Henry's cheekbones and around his nose brightened. “How many did you take?”

“Two,” Archie said. “Maybe more.”

“
Maybe
more?”

“I don't remember,” Archie said truthfully. “Some were missing, but I don't remember taking them. I haven't had anything since this morning. It's out of my system.”

Henry stood up quickly. Archie thought it was out of frustration, until he saw Henry digging for the phone in his pocket and realized that he must have gotten a call. Henry answered it and then listened, his eyes on Archie.

“No, I'm standing next to him right now,” Henry said into the phone. “I'll tell him.”

Archie's mind was still on Gretchen, and his stomach tightened, anticipating news of another sighting. “What's going on?”

“A dead body just washed up not far from Jack Reynolds's place.”

There it was. The surge of adrenaline that always came with a report of a murder. Archie sat up. His mind felt clear and sharp. He sat forward. “Leo's Russian?”

“You said the Russian was a man, right?” Henry said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it's definitely not him.”

“A woman,” Archie said.

“So says the LOPD,” Henry said.

Archie looked down at his damp T-shirt and sweatpants. He couldn't go to a crime scene looking like this. “Give me a few minutes,” he said.

“Maybe you should sit this one out,” Henry suggested. “Go in for that tox screen. Get your head checked.”

His head, Archie wondered, or his mind?

“It's a concussion,” Archie said. “I've been through worse.”

No one could argue with that.

“Where's the rest of the Vicodin?” Henry asked.

Archie only hesitated for a second. “Medicine cabinet,” Archie said. “In the Prilosec container.”

Henry turned and headed for the bathroom. “I'm flushing them,” he grumbled. “Happy fucking birthday.”

“Okay.” Archie stood and headed for the bedroom to change, Ginger at his heels. As he walked he put his hands in the pockets of his sweats, his fingers grazing the bottle of Oxycodone. Henry hadn't asked about those.

 

CHAPTER

26

 

The air had
that stillness of fall to it—Archie could almost hear individual leaves falling and settling on the grass. He and Henry had parked behind the four Lake Oswego police patrol cars that were neatly parallel-parked along the road in front of a Cape Cod–style home a half mile past Jack Reynolds's place. There was no activity in the front yard. The house's shingles were stained gray, and its trim was painted white, though the New England theme seemed to end at the yard, which was planted with Japanese maples, neatly trimmed evergreen shrubbery, and variegated grasses. A four-foot-tall stone pagoda rose from a bed of chartreuse hostas. A small man-made pond with a bamboo fountain was lined with round stones and filled with fat orange koi. Ugly metal fencing had been erected around the pond in a desperate effort, no doubt, to keep the raccoons at bay.

Archie could see a man staring through the front window. The glass reflected the sky and the grass, and the man was a ghost behind it, but Archie was able to make out a few details. He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, with glasses, tall and thin, with sloped shoulders and long face, and he was standing next to a large dark dog. Both were looking through the glass at Archie and Henry with the same wary expression. But they didn't open the front door, and Archie and Henry didn't knock. Instead, he and Henry followed a path of paving stones around the side of the house toward the lake.

The house's backyard sloped down to a residential dock that extended into the lake like an accusatory finger. The day had warmed into the high fifties and Archie could feel the heat of the sun on his face, but the lake looked dark and cold. The backyard and the dock were peppered with fall leaves. Not the pretty red and yellow ones—these were brown and dead and shredded by the wind. There was no crime scene tape, no flash of crime scene photography. Only several people standing around on the dock who at first glance might be preparing for a rowboat outing, but in this instance were probably more interested in the corpse at their feet.