Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  He turned around and saw that she was standing up now, next to a small rattan bar. She was wearing a gray cashmere sweater and fitted gray slacks and was in her stocking feet. She held up a bottle of something.

  This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. “Sure,” he said.

  “Scotch okay?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. He didn’t move, his hands behind him, holding on to the edge of the counter.

  He watched her as she poured the drink, scooping ice from an ice bucket then pouring the alcohol over it, no water. Her glossy blond hair settled on her shoulder blades, swinging slightly as she moved.

  She turned back and held the glass out toward him, arm extended.

  He stood there another moment, and then pushed himself off the counter and walked toward her and took the glass. As he took the glass, their fingers met. The contact made his head swim, his vision darken for a moment, but he was careful not to flinch, not to show it on his face. He raised the drink to her and then drank the Scotch in several swallows. He didn’t know much about Scotch, but it went down easily and tasted expensive. When he was done, he handed her back the glass, now just ice.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I need to take a shower,” he said.

  “It’s down the hall,” she said. “Second door on the left. You’ll find everything you need.”

  “My sanity?” he said.

  She leaned forward as if to kiss him, but instead put her lips next to his ear, her cheek millimeters from his. The smell of her made him dizzy. Her breath was warm but sent a cold shiver down his spine.

  “Long gone, darling,” she whispered.

  He had showered and changed into some clothes from the closet. A pair of tan corduroys and a blue button-down shirt. An undershirt. Underwear. Socks. They all fit perfectly. The pills had hit him in the shower, and the body aches and pain in his liver had subsided to be replaced by a white noise that felt soft and comfortingly familiar. It wasn’t like it used to be. There was no more euphoria. But the pills dulled his sensations enough that he felt almost pleasant.

  It was fully dark outside by the time he returned to the living room.

  Gretchen had moved to the leather couch. The fire had died down a little, but still bathed the room in a warm orange glow. Archie sat down on the chair Gretchen had been in earlier. The laptop was gone.

  “Do you want another drink?” she asked.

  “Why not?” Archie said.

  She got up and moved between the couch and the chair, brushing his arm with her fingertips as she did. He kept his eyes straight ahead, trying not to look at her. He could hear her behind him, putting the ice in the glass, pouring the Scotch. The liquid crackling on the ice. The ice clinking against the side of the glass. She returned and handed him the glass and then sat on the arm of the chair he was in. His body tensed. He couldn’t disguise it; his hand tightened around the glass, his knees went rigid.

  She laughed lightly and leaned against him, stretching an arm along the top of the back of the chair. He could feel the cashmere of her sweater lick the back of his neck. The glass stayed frozen in his hand.

  “It will happen faster, the more you drink,” she said.

  He focused on the glass. It was heavy crystal with a silver lip. He took a sip of the Scotch, this time slowly, letting the alcohol sit on his tongue, savoring the taste.

  “The liver failure,” she continued. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  He felt his body relax a notch, and lifted his glass at her and said, “To my health.”

  She picked up his free hand and turned it over in hers. His nail beds were white, his skin a shade too yellow. “It won’t be long now,” she said softly.

  He needed enough time. Maybe days. “How long?” he asked.

  “A few days, a few weeks,” she said. She reached across him, her breasts against his chest, her pale neck at his chin, and lifted his glass from his other hand and then sat back. She smelled different than he remembered. Like some other flower. Roses. Maybe she had never smelled like lilacs. Maybe he had imagined it. He smiled at that, as she took a sip of the Scotch from his glass.

  “You smell nice,” he said.

  She handed the glass back to him and he took it.

  “It might be faster,” she said. “It depends on how efficiently you poison yourself.”

  He looked at the exquisite glass in his hand. Not the kind of glass you’d find at a rental house. A vacation house then. She had rented it. Or killed the family. His stomach tightened. He couldn’t think about that now.

  The glass. If it all worked, his team would find it later. Both sets of the fingerprints on the glass. Drinking buddies. “Were you really an ER nurse?” he asked.

  Gretchen tilted her head and smiled and then unbuttoned the third button down on his shirt and reached under the fabric, her fingers tracing his undershirt, quickly finding the scar where she had sliced him open to remove his spleen. She raised an eyebrow. “You doubt my medical prowess?”

  Archie could feel his breath quicken, his chest heave. He took another drink. “Practice makes perfect,” he said.

  She kept her hand in his shirt and lifted her right leg over his left, so their thighs were touching.

  He searched for something to say, anything, and remembered the laptop. “What were you working on earlier?” he asked.

  She didn’t seem surprised by the question. He knew she’d been waiting for him to ask. “A present for you.”

  “Your autobiography?” he asked.

  “Something like that. You’ll have to wait and see.” She reached up and moved a piece of his hair, smoothing it back behind his ear. “Do you still think about me?” she whispered.

  Archie could barely speak. “Yes.”

  She put her face right in front of his, her eyes sparkling in the firelight. “Do you think Henry suspects?”

  He drained the last of the Scotch and set the glass on the arm of the chair. “No,” he said. It felt strange to talk about it. He’d kept the secret so long. Sat across from her in the prison, knowing what she knew, and wasn’t saying. It ate away at him. “Henry thinks too highly of me to suspect anything.”

  “He never asked you about all those late nights?” she said, smiling. “How I had your cell phone number?” She raised an eyebrow. “He never asked why you really came to my house that night I took you?”

  Archie shrugged weakly. “I wanted a psych consult about the latest body.”

  “And if one thing led to another...” she said, trailing off.

  “I had never cheated on my wife,” Archie said. “I loved my family.” How many times had he told himself that over the past three years? And yet he still couldn’t look them in the eye. He was sure his son knew. He didn’t know how. No one else suspected. But Ben knew that Archie had betrayed them.

  Gretchen’s breath was feather-light on his cheek. “You were overworked, darling,” she said. “You needed an outlet.” She moved her mouth just over his ear, the words sending shivers down his neck, and took his earlobe in her mouth and bit it. The pain was nice, something he could feel. She suckled his earlobe for a moment and he could feel his heartbeat quicken.

  “A lot of men have affairs,” she said.

  Archie tried to smile. “Mine just turned out to be with the person I was supposed to be hunting,” he said.

  Gretchen’s voice was full of sympathy. “Sin is rarely without complication,” she said.

  She leaned in and kissed him. Their tongues met and he tasted the Scotch. In that moment she was all there was, the heat of her mouth, her warm hand still pressed against his rib cage. Surely she could feel his heart, his pulse, the erection pressing against her leg.

  She lifted her lips from his and pulled away a few inches, so they were eye to eye. “Would you take it back?” she asked. “That first night you came to my house?”

  It had been two A.M. He’d come from a crime scene. He could have gone home to his wife but instead
he’d gone to Gretchen’s house. He’d planned it. He’d thought about it on the drive there. And when Gretchen opened the door in her nightgown, he’d taken a step inside and then he’d kissed her.

  It had been him. He’d started the affair.

  He’d brought everything on himself.

  And he had loved every minute of it. And later, when she tortured him, he couldn’t help but think that he deserved it. That he had it coming, and at least he would be dead and Debbie would never know the truth.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked Gretchen.

  She smiled. “Out of love,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure Gretchen even knew what he was asking about. The affair? The torture? The fact that she had turned herself in and saved his life? He looked for something in her pale blue eyes. “I would take it all back,” he said. “I wish I’d never met you.” He meant it, too. He meant it more than he had ever meant anything. “I would give anything for it not to have happened.”

  She tilted her head, her blond hair folding against her shoulder, and he thought he saw a flash of something authentic, a glimpse of who she really was, something sad and desperate.

  Did she know why he was there, what he was planning?

  “Do you want to fuck me now?” she asked.

  He drew her face to his and kissed her. “Yes,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  47

  Susan sat in her car two blocks away from the task force offices. With the number of news vans already assembled around the old bank for the press conference, she’d been lucky to park that close. The windows were rolled up, but she still glanced around to be sure there weren’t any other reporters lurking around before she opened up her phone and punched in a Herald number.

  Derek Rogers picked up.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I need you to call every gas station along Highway 22 through Santiam Pass.” “Uh, what?” Derek said.

  “There aren’t that many,” Susan said quickly. The press conferance was going to start in fifteen minutes. She flipped down the visor and dug into her purse for some makeup. “I’ve driven that road. It’s all timber towns. Gas every half hour.” She paused to smear on some raspberry-colored lipstick. “But you’d need it. What does a Jag get? Twenty miles per gallon?” She blotted the lipstick with an old receipt she found in her purse. “She’d need gas.”

  Derek’s voice was doubtful. “So you want me to call and ask all the gas stations along 22 if they’ve seen Gretchen Lowell?”

  “No,” Susan said. “Not Lowell. The car. That’s what they’ll remember. Ask them if they’ve seen a silver Jag.”

  “There’s a fire up there,” Derek said. “They’re evacuating people. You think she’s psycho enough to hide in the path of it?”

  “Psycho like a fox,” Susan said.

  Derek wasn’t convinced. “These calls will take hours,” he said.

  Susan pulled her pigtails out, dug her hairbrush out of her purse, and started brushing her hair. “I know,” she said.

  “Are you brushing your hair?” Derek asked.

  “One more favor?” she asked. Something Archie had said before he’d walked away in the alley had been gnawing at her.

  Derek sighed. “What?”

  “Can you check the Herald’s database for any couples who might have gone missing about two years ago? They were in their twenties.”

  “What does this have to do with Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell?” Derek asked.

  “Nothing,” Susan said.

  “Do you realize the competition we have for this story? It’s national.” Derek lowered his voice. “Ian will shit if he finds out you’re working on something else.”

  “I think it might have something to do with Parker,” Susan said.

  There was a short pause. “It will take a few minutes,” Derek said. “I’ll call you back.”

  Susan had opened the driver’s window and was smoking a cigarette to get the taste of hazelnut-flavored coffee out of her mouth when Derek called back.

  “There was a story,” he said. “September 2005. Stuart Davis and his girlfriend, Annabelle Nixon. They lived together. Disappeared. They found their car parked on Twenty-third. No trace of them since. The story had some legs because he was a junior aide in Senator Castle’s office.”

  “Zebra,” Susan whispered.

  “Huh?” Derek said.

  The press conference was minutes away. Susan got out of the car and dropped the cigarette on the street. “E-mail me everything we have,” she said.

  It was all coming back to Senator Castle. Susan searched her mind for any clue from her investigation into the Molly Palmer story, anyone who acted suspiciously. She had interviewed a hundred people over the last few months. And frankly, they had all acted suspiciously. But there had been one kid in particular, a high school kid who knew one of Castle’s sons. Maybe it was time to pay him another visit.

  CHAPTER

  48

  Archie sat on the end of Gretchen’s bed, his feet on the floor. The mattress was firm, the gray satin duvet slick beneath his hands. The master suite’s vaulted ceilings made the room feel huge and off-kilter. The sideways perspective made Archie feel a swoon of vertigo.

  Gretchen undressed. She did it uneventfully, as if this were something they did often together, as if they had always been lovers. Her clothes neatly folded on a chair by the closet, she turned back and faced him, naked.

  Archie felt all the blood in his body rush south. She was bruised. Hematomas from her attack shadowed her ribs and stomach, her left clavicle was raw and swollen. And still she was lovely. Prison, if nothing else, created time for an excellent workout regimen, and Gretchen was toned and slim. But you didn’t get that kind of face and body without the perfect mix of genetics. The DNA that had played a role in making her a monster had also made her a beauty. Without the mix that had granted her that perfect profile, who knows? She might have been another kind of person, a good person.

  The ceiling fan rotated overhead, throwing shadows on the ceiling, her face, the carpet. Shapes shifted on the periphery of Archie’s vision.

  Gretchen padded over to where Archie sat, and took his face in her hands and lifted his chin so he was looking up at her. Their knees touched. He gripped the satin, slippery in his fingers.

  She lowered her chin, and looked up flirtatiously. “Shall I hurt you?” she asked.

  “No,” Archie said.

  She tilted her head and smiled. “Do you want to hurt me?”

  Archie sighed. “No.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He lifted his hands from the bed and put one on each of her hips. The light in the room was low but he could see goose bumps rise on her flesh from his touch. “Redemption,” he said. “Barring that, distraction.”

  “Distraction I might be able to help you with,” Gretchen said. She leaned in and kissed him lightly on the cheek, his face still cupped in her hands. “You know,” she said, “I am capable of human emotion.”

  He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that there was something real between them, some fucked-up twisted connection.

  He pulled her to him and she moved her hands behind his neck and they kissed again. Her naked body in his arms was almost too much for Archie to bear.

  He cleared his throat. “You taste sweet,” he said.

  “It’s not me,” she said. “It’s you. Your system’s not cleaning out toxins like it should.”

  “Undress me,” he said.

  He held up one wrist and she unbuttoned the cuff. Then he held up the other wrist and she unbuttoned that cuff. Then she went to work on the eight buttons that connected the front flaps. She did it by touch, never losing eye contact with him, just sliding her fingers down the vertical band of buttons until she found the next one. When the shirt was open, she slid it off his shoulders and held it for a moment before letting it drop to the carpet.

  Her eyes still leveled at him, she reached toward his groin and freed th
e undershirt from under his waistband. He held up his arms and she lifted it off his torso and then dropped it on top of the dress shirt.

  Her eyes immediately went to his chest. He could see them move over his scars, tracing the damage she had done to him. His flesh was a minefield. Even nurses had to steel themselves the first time they saw him. Not Gretchen. Her face shone with appreciation. She looked at it like it was a Picasso.

  “Which is your favorite?” she asked, referring to the scars.

  Archie thought she was kidding. “I’d be afraid I’d hurt one of their feelings if I said.”

  “I like the heart,” said Gretchen. She touched the heart scar, running her fingers over its curves. “It’s one of the best I’ve ever done. It’s not easy to cut smoothly into chest muscle.” She leaned her face in close to his clavicle. He thought that she was going in for a closer examination of her work, but instead she touched the scar with her tongue.

  The sudden warm wet pressure on the tender tissue made him jump.

  She pulled her head away and looked up at him and he threaded a hand behind her blond head and pushed her face back to his flesh and she put her tongue back on the scar. Her hair was soft and slick in his fist; he could feel the heat of her tongue ripple through his body. He leaned back on the bed and she straddled him, and then slowly, deliciously, traced the scar with her mouth.

  Then she moved her tongue down the vertical scar from the spleenectomy over his tensed lower stomach to his belt, which she began to unbuckle.

  His erection throbbed, wanting release. His head hurt. His body ached. But he wasn’t as conflicted as he thought he would be. He’d felt guilty every time he’d fantasized about her, guiltier than he’d ever felt during their affair. He had paid emotionally for every imaginary fuck. But not this time.

  “I want you on top,” he said. “So I can see you.”

  She had the belt off and was pulling down his pants and underwear in a swift, practiced motion.