by Chelsea Cain
Her hair was dirty, snarled, clumped together in places by something crusty. Her face was relaxed. Her breathing was soundless and steady. She was so perfectly still—so without the twitches and small shifts of sleep—that Archie thought she might be awake.
She opened her eyes and looked at him.
He was sitting on the windowsill, leaning against the bars, and he had to consciously will himself to stay as still as she was, to not let her read him. Right now he only wanted her to see one expression on his face: satisfaction.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said.
She tried to shift her position, and then raised her head and looked down at the leather straps that bound her wrists to the sides of her bed. She dropped her head back on the pillow and smiled at him. “What are these?” she said. “Afraid I might hurt you?”
Archie got up off the windowsill and walked slowly to her bedside. He kept his hands in his pockets so he could let his fingers brush against the three Vicodin he had stashed there. He leaned close to her, slowly. He had to do everything slowly around Gretchen, because if he didn’t, he’d make a mistake, show her too much.
“No,” he said, in a low whisper. “I just like seeing you tied up.”
Her nostrils flared and she smiled again, her once-white teeth now a pale shade of gray. “There’s my boy,” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot, but they were still very blue. She traveled his body with her eyes. “I thought you’d come sooner, so you could see what you’ve done to me,” she said.
“You’ve used your beauty to manipulate people. It’s one less tool in your toolbox.”
Gretchen gave a cynical chuckle. “Is that what you tell them?”
It hadn’t been hard for Archie to convince the hospital administrators to let him take a special interest in Gretchen’s medication. She had killed so many people. She deserved worse. Prescott was cocky, but he was young and insecure in his position and he followed orders. He accepted that Gretchen’s drug regimen was determined by his bosses. And he had no idea that Archie was involved.
Archie touched the pills in his pocket. “I don’t want you seeing Susan,” he said. “You need to leave her out of this.”
“Out of what, darling?” Gretchen said.
He knew what she wanted to hear. But he hated saying it. “Us.”
She gave him a pretend pout. “You weren’t returning my calls.”
“I’ve been seeing other serial killers,” Archie said. “I knew you’d be jealous.”
Gretchen raised a smug eyebrow. “I’ve been seeing someone else, too.”
“Prescott,” Archie said.
She stole a glance behind him, out the window into the night. There was no clock in her room, and he realized that she was trying to puzzle out the time. “I thought he’d be here when you came,” she said. “I wanted you to meet him.”
So she could manipulate them both, play them off each other. Archie was familiar with the tactic. “I didn’t tell him I was coming,” he said. “I’m sorry. Was that not part of your plan?”
“Who’s jealous now?” Gretchen said.
There was nothing in the room. No family snapshots taped on the walls. No toiletries. No books. None of the pleasantries allowed other patients. Prescott had lobbied for that to change. Archie had read his report. Personal items, Prescott posited, would be therapeutic. Prescott had never scraped one of Gretchen’s victims up off the floor.
“You don’t care about Prescott,” he said. “But you’ve done a nice job with him. Surprising.” He studied her face. “Considering.” Archie rolled the Vicodin in his pocket between his fingers. “He wants to reduce your meds.” He took a step closer to her and saw the tendons in her arms tighten as she strained at the wrist straps. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “The thing is, sweetheart, I like to see you like this, that sharp brain of yours foggy, physically helpless.” He was close enough now that he could smell her skin and hair. He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose, taking in her sweet stink. “I like it too much to give it up,” he said, opening his eyes. “I will never let them take you off the drugs.” She showed no response, no reaction. “I have to say, I don’t mind you being in here as much as I thought I would. You belong in prison. We’d all be a lot safer with you manacled in maximum security. But the administrators of this place don’t know quite what to do with you here. And you know who they ask?” She gazed at him blankly. “Me,” Archie said. “Prescott and the rest of your team of shrinks can make all the recommendations they want. But at the end of the day, they depend on the person who knows you best to decide what privileges you can handle, what books you’re allowed to read, how many hours a day you get to spend unrestrained.”
“You like it, don’t you?” Gretchen said.
Archie grinned. “More than you know.”
“That’s an awfully unkind thing to say,” Gretchen said, “to someone who is suffering from mental illness.”
“I’m crazier than you are,” Archie said flatly.
“Prescott says that I have to be insane, to do the things I’ve done.”
Archie nodded, drawing out the moment. Then he said, “I’ve gotten you a new doctor. Didn’t I mention that? Because I know you like to play, and I think that Prescott wasn’t enough of a challenge for you.”
Gretchen’s smile vanished for a second, a tiny splinter in the façade. “Ryan Motley’s back.”
She was a genius at redirecting.
“Let me guess,” Archie said. “He’s the one who’s after your child?”
“He’s close,” Gretchen said without emotion. “If you get me out of here, I can stop him.”
The drugs were making her delusional.
“Do you think motherhood might help get you out of here sooner?” He couldn’t even conceive of it. “You. A mother. There’s a hysterical image. Good luck with that. You think that will convince them you’re cured? You know what works better?” Archie practically spat it out: “Find God.”
Gretchen was watching him; with those blue eyes of hers, she always looked like she was seeing something other people couldn’t. “My daughter’s name was Lily,” she said.
Archie’s chest tightened.
She couldn’t have known about the lilies.
“I’m tired,” she said, rolling over. “They give me sedatives at night.”
She was fishing. She was like a sideshow psychic that way, trying things out, seeing what struck a nerve. “I was leaving anyway,” Archie said, heading toward the door.
“How’s Henry recovering?” he heard her ask.
He stopped in his tracks. His hands were in his pockets. He pressed the pills into his thigh.
“Give him my love,” she said drowsily. “It’s hard for men like him to lose their physical strength. I’d keep my eye on him if I were you.”
Archie spun around, took his hands out of his pockets, and walked to the side of her bed. She still had her head turned away from him when he slid his hand along her skull into her hairline and knotted her hair in his fist. He leaned in close to her. He could feel her fighting him, straining against his grip, her hair snapping at the roots, the short pants of her breaths. “Don’t say his name,” Archie said. He inhaled her again, the same smell, but stronger now, more intense. He saw her eyes wander to his front left pants pocket and then widen with understanding. She knew he had the pills. She recognized the shape, or saw him fingering them, or she just read him well enough to recognize when he was weak.
He waited for her to say something, to taunt him.
But she stayed silent, staring up at him as he held her.
Archie released his grip. “Get some rest,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I hear your new doctor is a son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER
25
Susan had printed out all the PDFs and sat surrounded by them in the living room. When she’d first spread them out, the fan had blown the pages into the kitchen, so now she had weighed each page down with an ad ho
c paperweight: a coffee cup, an incense tray, a small statue of Shiva, her salad bowl from dinner, her ice-cream bowl from dessert, the half a bag of Pirate’s Booty she’d gotten out for an after-dessert snack. The pages were on the wire-spool coffee table, the floor, even the sofa. The corners fluttered each time the fan oscillated past.
Bliss had taken a copy of Mother Jones to bed hours ago.
But Susan was riveted. Each PDF was a newspaper story about a different murder. All unsolved. The victims described in the articles had all been tortured to death. And they were all children. The murders all took place over a six-year period. They all took place in different states.
She had read and reread the articles, and could find no obvious connections between them beyond the torture. So she studied them again, and this time tried to think like Archie. It was only once she had absorbed the articles enough times, and was able to get past the tragedy and shock, that she began to see other similarities. The children had all disappeared and then been found dead within twenty-four hours. None had been sexually assaulted. Each had been alone when he or she was grabbed—in a bedroom, walking outside, at a park—but always alone, no witnesses.
There was no one named Ryan Motley in any of the stories. She researched each murder online, reading dozens of additional articles. She Googled Ryan Motley’s name in tandem with every name and place that came up in connection to each investigation. Nothing. The cases were all cold. Memorial trees had been planted at elementary schools. Honorary diplomas had been presented to parents. No one was maintaining the remembrance Web sites anymore.
Gretchen had given the flash drive to Archie and he had stuck it in a drawer full of Wite-Out. He had his reasons. He must have seen something in the PDFs that convinced him that Gretchen’s information wasn’t worth following up on. Susan hadn’t been able to turn up a single mention of Ryan Motley, and she was a far superior Googler than Archie. Plus Archie had access to police files on all these cases, all sorts of information that wasn’t in the news stories. What had he said? Ryan Motley was a figment of Gretchen’s imagination.
So what had Gretchen wanted Susan to see? Find the flash drive, she had said again and again.
If Gretchen had wanted to use Susan to get to Archie, she could have done it without the big confessional. She didn’t need to mention James Beaton or Ryan Motley. But she had.
Susan turned to her laptop on the floor. With the keywords James Beaton and St. Helens, Oregon, she had turned up a few old newspaper stories from the St. Helens Chronicle on her way back from Salem. Reading them on her iPhone screen in her car going seventy miles an hour up I-5 was less than ideal. Now she opened the articles on her fourteen-inch screen. The Chronicle had not been online eighteen years ago, but the St. Helens Historical Society had since scanned pages of old editions of the paper and put it all on the Internet.
She grabbed a handful of Pirate’s Booty and stuffed it in her mouth.
Local resident James Beaton, husband of Dinah “Dusty” Beaton, and father of two, had been reported missing a day previously. Anyone with information was asked to call the St. Helens Police Department. He was last seen in a late-model black Oldsmobile. His church was planning a vigil, blah, blah. There was a small black-and-white photograph next to the copy of a beefy-faced man in a necktie. He looked like he was in his mid-fifties. The tie had odd markings on it, and Susan zoomed in and out on the screen several times before she found a view that allowed her to make out the pattern.
Susan laughed, and almost choked on Pirate’s Booty.
The tie was covered with pictures of small dogs.
If she ever vanished, she hoped they’d run a picture of her in more serious clothes.
She made a copy of the article and saved it, and then she Googled the Hamlet Inn Motel in St. Helens. The Web site was only one page, with a telephone number to call for reservations. The photographs on the site showed a highway-side two-story motel whose best feature appeared to be its large parking lot.
Susan copied down the address for later.
The mysterious Ryan Motley aside, she still had a newspaper story to write, and a little local color wouldn’t hurt.
CHAPTER
26
The fifth floor of Archie’s building was much like the sixth, except for the hallway, which had been painted, inexplicably, plum. The paint had a glossy sheen that reflected the overhead fluorescent lights so that the entire hallway seemed to flicker from three sides.
Archie knocked on his neighbor’s apartment door.
When Rachel opened it, he held up the plastic sandwich bag he’d found taped to his door when he got home.
“Spark plugs?” he said.
She smiled. “Now you have some,” she said. “In case I need to borrow one.”
He put the bag in his pocket and tapped it with his finger. “I’ll keep them somewhere safe,” he said, “until you need one.”
She leaned against the doorjamb. It was after eleven. Too late for a social call. She didn’t seem to mind.
“Do you want a glass of water?” she asked.
“I have water upstairs,” he said.
“I just got a new Brita filter,” she said.
Archie scratched the back of his neck. “Okay.”
She opened the door and he followed her inside. She was wearing pale pink satin pajama shorts and a white tank top. No bra. Her apartment was the same layout as his, but her exposed brick wall was painted white. Her furniture all matched, like it had been purchased all at once. The sofa was butter-colored leather. The coffee table was black lacquer and glass. The two club chairs matched the sofa with a small glass end table in between that matched the coffee table. A spherical light fixture the size of a classroom globe hung over the living room. Here and there, she’d incorporated Asian touches. Framed scrolls of calligraphy, embroidered silk paints. She had a Korean wedding chest against one wall, and a six-foot print of a Chinese robe hanging on the brick wall just inside the door. Red lacquer stools lined her kitchen bar. Floor lamps, with red rice paper shades, gave everything in the room a rich crimson glow.
When Archie was in grad school, he’d had a couch from Goodwill and a bookcase built out of cinder blocks.
Rachel was at the sink on the other side of the kitchen bar.
“Have a seat,” she said. He heard ice clinking against glass.
Her purse was on the floor next to one of the leather club chairs. He went to the chair and sat down. He could see her, on the other side of the bar, putting together something on a plate.
He gently lowered his hand into her purse and felt for her wallet.
When he had it, he leaned over the arm of the chair, snapped it open, and examined her driver’s license. Her name was listed as Rachel Walker. The picture matched. It was a California license. Archie pulled it out of its plastic pouch and tilted it to see if the hologram was real.
If it was a fake, it was a good one.
He heard what sounded like a lacquer tray sliding off a granite counter and he slid the ID back in her wallet and dropped the wallet in her open bag.
She set the tray down on the glass table between the club chairs and took the other seat. The satin shorts sat low on her hips, and he could see the band of skin around her middle that her shirt didn’t quite cover. There was a white satin robe on the back of her chair. She didn’t put it on.
“Asian studies?” Archie said.
Rachel tucked her legs up under her on the chair. “Excuse me?”
“Your area of study,” Archie said.
“Nope,” she said. “But good guess.”
“Dance?”
She tilted her head.
“You walk with your toes turned out, like someone who’s taken a lot of ballet,” Archie said.
“Wrong again,” she said.
Archie leaned forward and picked up a glass of water and drained half the glass. She had put crackers out, and some cheese.
Who moved in at four in the morning?
He
set the glass down and wiped his mouth. “You should be more careful,” he said. “Inviting strange men into your apartment at night.”
Rachel crossed her arms, her gaze appraising him. Her breasts shifted under the ribbed fabric of her shirt as she moved. “Is that what you are,” she said, “a strange man?” Her hair was loose and tousled, like she’d been asleep when he’d knocked, but then why all the mood lighting?
“I’m not afraid of you,” she added with a sly smile. “You’re a cop.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not dangerous,” Archie said.
She blinked at him. Her legs and arms looked dark and smooth in the red glow of the lamps.
His skin itched.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“You just saw my name,” she said. “It’s on my driver’s license.”
She had seen him. Archie shifted in the chair, rattled. She had caught him going through her things. That wasn’t what bothered him. What bothered him was that she should have been angrier. “It could be fake,” Archie said.
“Why would I have fake ID, Archie?”
“You move in during the middle of the night. In the apartment directly below mine. You appear to be living above the means of an average grad student. You look . . .” He struggled for the words. “Like someone I know. The tattoo.” It sounded ludicrous as he said it out loud, paranoid. “We keep bumping into each other.”
“We live in the same building,” she said.
She confused him. The way she looked at him. The way she moved. He picked up the glass of water again, drained the last of it, and set it down. Maybe he was used to Gretchen, maybe he looked for games where there weren’t any.