by Chelsea Cain
Rachel walked her cup of coffee over to him and put it in his hand. “You need this more than I do,” she said. Her head moved around the room. “These are all Beauty Killer victims?”
Archie took a sip of the coffee. It was black and strong, and he kept his nose in it for a moment, letting the aroma clear his senses.
When he looked up, Rachel was sitting on the bed next to him. She had picked up a stack of evidence photos and was leafing through them. The robe was short and had slipped up, exposing almost all of her tan thighs. “I waited for you the other night,” she said. “I thought you might come back.”
Archie tried to concentrate on the coffee.
She peered at a photograph on her lap. “What’s this?”
He took the photograph from her. It was a microscopic image of a light brown hair. He put the photo back in its proper folder and put the folder in the box.
“Dog hair,” he said. They had found several dog hairs on Thomas Vernon’s jeans. He didn’t have a dog. It made them think he might have made it to the park before he’d been grabbed. They’d asked the public for help, thinking there might have been a potential witness, a dog owner who’d come in contact with the boy before he’d disappeared. No one came forward. But it could have been anything. Hair like that traveled. It came off the dog, was passed from person to person.
“What kind of dog?” Rachel asked.
“Welsh corgi,” Archie said.
“They’re cute,” Rachel said.
Archie barely heard her. “Shit,” he said.
CHAPTER
39
A lot of people have corgis,” Henry said.
It was a point he had made several times that morning on the drive to St. Helens. Archie wasn’t hearing any of it. He knocked again on the door of the aquamarine-colored house. The peeling paint crumbled under his knuckles and fell as lead-tainted dust to the porch. “It’s not a coincidence,” Archie said.
Henry leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Do you think the Queen of England is involved?”
Archie ignored him, listening instead for some sound of movement from within. The Beatons had a corgi. Judging by the family photograph over the couch, they’d had corgis for years. Gretchen knew if she confessed to murdering James Beaton that Archie would look into it. She knew he’d connect the dots back to Thomas Vernon. She was leading him . . . somewhere. “Mrs. Beaton?” Archie called for the fourth time. “It’s Detective Sheridan again. I just had a few more questions for you.” He imagined her up from the recliner now, shuffling toward the door, her weight on her walker, the dog cutting back and forth in front of her legs. He willed her to move faster.
“You called first, right?” Henry said. A fly landed on his arm and he batted it away.
“She doesn’t always pick up,” Archie said.
“Maybe she’s not home,” Henry said.
Archie remembered the bubble-gum-pink tennis balls jammed on the walker’s feet, their pristine condition. Those tennis balls had never touched a sidewalk. “I got the impression that she doesn’t get out much,” he said.
“Maybe she’s napping,” Henry said. “Maybe she’s watching TV.” Henry shifted his weight—Archie could tell his leg was starting to bother him. “Or maybe,” Henry said, “she’s tired of people digging up a bunch of shit that happened almost twenty years ago.”
Archie knocked harder and then let the screen door snap shut and took a step back. Something was nagging at him. She should have answered the door by now. The gold Lincoln was still in the driveway. The grass in the yard was so dead he could smell it. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
He could hear the air-conditioning unit rasping from around the side of the house. A light breeze whispered through the trees. The wooden porch creaked under the weight of their feet. A dozen flies buzzed in circles in front of the door.
Archie said, “I don’t hear the dog.”
There was no barking. That dog had gone ballistic the moment Archie had stepped onto the porch during his first visit. Another fly tried to land on Henry. This time Henry slapped his arm and then flicked the wings and flattened fly carcass onto the porch.
Archie’s right hand found the butt of his gun. With his left, he opened the screen door again, secured it with his foot, and tried the doorknob. The house was unlocked. He glanced at Henry.
“You’re back to the corgi again?” Henry said. “Really?”
“Watch the flies,” Archie said. He kept his hand on his gun. The flies continued to swarm around the porch. Archie turned the knob and pushed the door open a crack.
“What the hell?” Henry said.
“Wait for it,” Archie said.
Nothing happened.
Then, one by one, the flies flew inside the house.
Henry raised his eyebrows at Archie. “Mrs. Beaton?” Henry called through the crack of the door. “It’s the police. Everything all right in there?”
Refrigerated air from inside the house seeped outside into the heat.
“Mrs. Beaton?” Archie called. “It’s Detective Sheridan.” He looked over at Henry. “I’m here with Detective Sobol. We’re going to come on in and check on you, okay?”
Archie opened the door and stepped inside. Henry followed him. There was no discussion. They would figure out probable cause later.
Now Archie blinked, trying to adjust to the dim indoor light and thirty-degree drop in temperature. It hadn’t been this cold the first time Archie had been in the Beaton house. Goose bumps rose on his forearms. He reached for the wall and turned on a light switch. The change in illumination barely registered.
His eyes ached as he strained to focus.
The chair in the living room was empty. Mrs. Beaton’s walker stood alone on the other side of the end table, out of reach from any sitting place.
Inside the house, the drone of the A/C unit was fainter than outside. Archie listened. And then there it was: the sound of flies. As his vision finally adjusted, he could see them—a cloud of black spots where the flies had regathered in the Beaton living room.
The flies hovered briefly there, and then, as if from some collective decision-making process, they hung a left and disappeared down the hall toward the back of the house.
The pit of Archie’s stomach twisted.
“Mrs. Beaton?” he called again. Archie checked in on Henry. Henry’s face was grim, his gun out. Sweat stains already darkened his charcoal T-shirt where his shoulder holster crossed at his upper back. He wasn’t limping now; too much adrenaline.
Archie squinted through the living room down the hall. The hall had a door on either side of it, and ended at a linen cabinet. One of the doors was ajar and Archie could see, behind it, part of a bathroom vanity and medicine chest.
The flies were in front of the second door.
The bedroom.
“Police,” Archie called out. “Anyone there?”
He saw Henry switch the safety off on his weapon.
The most dangerous places in a building were called “fatal funnels.” Doorways, narrow hallways, windows—any place that limited your ability to move or take cover.
They could call it in and wait for backup. Archie imagined how that call would go. Probable cause? “Flies,” Archie would say. “And it’s too quiet.”
No.
He and Henry crept forward, into the fatal funnel, hugging opposite walls. When they reached the bathroom, Archie gave the door a push and then stepped back. The door creaked, bounced off a doorstop, and then settled open. He heard the flop of a towel slipping off a towel rack onto the floor. They waited a moment. Archie listened to his pulse throb.
Then, weapons raised, he and Henry edged in front of the open door.
The bathroom was small: a toilet, vanity sink, and shower. Metal handrails had been installed next to the toilet and in the shower. Someone had covered up old wallpaper with a coat of cheery yellow paint, but the paper had started to blister where water had leaked through the ceiling. The back of the t
oilet and the vanity counter were crammed with dozens of jewel-colored glass perfume bottles and makeup containers. A dark green towel lay in a heap on the linoleum.
They stepped across the hall and stood near the doorknob of the other door. Archie watched as Henry soft-checked it. The door was unlocked. The flies flitted around Archie’s head.
Archie gave Henry a go-ahead nod, and Henry pounded on the door. Focused like that, his muscles tensed, face flushed with adrenaline, Henry looked like his old self.
“Mrs. Beaton?” Archie called again. “This is the police. We’re coming in.”
If she was in there taking a nap, she was in for a surprise.
Archie readied his weapon as Henry turned the doorknob and gave the door a hard push. The door swung open, banged against the interior wall, and then came to a stop.
The walls were stacked with framed photographs, prints of stately landscapes, paint-by-numbers mountains, and needlepoint portraits of stoic-looking corgis. Clothing littered the carpet. The bedside tables were stacked with greasy water glasses, paperbacks, magazines, and empty tissue boxes. Two twin beds sat side by side. One was crisply made, its surface the most immaculate thing in the room—the other, abuzz with berserk, happy flies, held the bloody, butchered remains of Mrs. James Beaton.
All except for her nose, which, as far as Archie could tell, was the small chunk of flesh on the carpet in the middle of the room next to a blood-matted platinum wig.
CHAPTER
40
Archie turned his head away from the flash of the digital camera. The Columbia County ME had sent out two crime scene investigators, who were busily documenting the surroundings. Archie watched them work.
The flies were multiplying.
St. Helens averaged about one homicide every ten years, which meant that statistically the Beatons had met nearly a quarter century’s worth of the town’s quota. A murder was big news, and everyone wanted in on it. The entire St. Helens PD—all nineteen officers, plus five volunteers—had shown up, and every time one of them came in or out of the house more flies would find their way inside. The house had been full of cops, poking around with latex gloves and putting evidence markers next to each other’s footprints. It hadn’t taken Chief Huffington long to throw everyone who wasn’t essential out of the house. Now most of her force was standing in the yard getting sunburned necks while the local press took their pictures.
Archie stayed in the bedroom. It wasn’t his case, but old habits died hard. Huffington didn’t ask him to leave. She stayed in the bedroom, too. He wasn’t sure if she was keeping an eye on the crime scene techs or if she was keeping an eye on him.
The flash went off again.
Huffington rocked back and forth on her heels. If the smell of decomp was bothering her, she wasn’t showing it. “Funny that you show up asking questions about her husband and she ends up dead the next day,” she said to Archie.
A fly wandered through Archie’s peripheral vision.
“Yeah,” Archie said.
Huffington got a hair band out of her uniform pants pocket and put her hair in a ponytail with a few quick movements of her hands. She adjusted her St. Helens PD cap. Then she went back into her pocket for a penlight, pulled it out, and aimed it on what was left of Dusty Beaton’s hands. “No defensive wounds,” she said to Archie. Her mouth was tight. She moved the point of light to the dead woman’s abdomen, where seashell-pink entrails spilled from a jagged fist-sized wound. “Last big crime we had around here,” she said, “was when Troy Schmiedeknecht drove his dad’s F-150 into the bookstore down on Columbia.”
Archie glanced over at her. Huffington’s expression looked tense, but not particularly distressed. Archie had seen dozens of cops lose their lunch at crime scenes like this. Huffington hadn’t blanched. Her mouth was set, her gaze focused. Archie knew the expression. It was the mask that people in authority put on when they needed to be in control. Archie had a mask just like it.
Huffington continued her penlight tour of the corpse: the bloody cave in the middle of Dusty Beaton’s face where her nose had been gouged out, her shoulders and hips, where her arms and legs had been partially severed, revealing ball joints and bone. The bed was soaked with blood. Projectile blood spatter dotted the walls.
“This kind of intensity,” Huffington said. “It’s personal.”
“Yep,” Archie said.
“Give me a hand,” she said. She put the penlight away and took a tape measure out of her pocket and gave it to Archie. Then she took hold of the end of the flexible metal strip and walked it across the length of the room, sidestepping Dusty Beaton’s nose. She checked the measurement and recorded it in her notebook, and then she and Archie repeated the process across the width of the room.
When she was done she let go of the measuring tape and it retracted back into Archie’s hand with a metallic snap.
Huffington said, “Tell me about this thing with Gretchen Lowell.”
The camera flashed again as the crime techs took another shot. Huffington waited. With her brown hair back, her face looked especially broad. There was something about the roundness of her cheek and her sturdy physique that gave her a certain owlish quality. Archie got the feeling that she picked up a lot by watching and keeping quiet.
“I never said there was a thing with Gretchen Lowell,” Archie said.
“Why else would you come out here, poking around a cold case?” Huffington continued. “Either that or you think Dusty was connected to those two murders in Portland, and I’m not seeing how she managed to kidnap and kill those people, what with her walker and all.”
She extended her hand and Archie tossed her the tape measure. She caught it easily.
“Recently, Gretchen Lowell gave a very detailed account of James Beaton’s murder,” Archie said. “She said she tied him to a bed, disemboweled him, lopped off his nose, and then severed his arms and legs before disposing of the body.”
Huffington’s expression didn’t change. “Gretchen Lowell is locked up,” she said.
“Yes, she is.”
One of the crime scene techs squatted down and nudged Dusty Beaton’s nose into a plastic evidence bag. He shook the bag and a fly flew out before he sealed it.
“So if she killed James Beaton, who did this?” Huffington asked.
Archie catalogued the possibilities in his head. Maybe Gretchen had had help when she’d killed James Beaton. She’d used men before, men she’d called her “apprentices.” She was an expert at manipulating a certain kind of man into doing what she wanted. Or she had killed Beaton alone, and had later told someone how she’d done it, and that person had killed Beaton’s widow. Or she had arranged the killing from the State Hospital, instructing it to be done in the same manner in which she’d killed James Beaton, or at least had said she had. She could have been lying about killing him, and had somehow arranged this murder to back up her story. But then there was the dog hair. The path to the truth was somehow wrapped up in that family, that house. If Archie was going to figure any of this out, he was going to have to unravel what had happened eighteen years ago.
“Where are her daughters now?” he asked Huffington.
“She only had one daughter,” Huffington said.
But that wasn’t right. The photograph above the couch showed the Beatons with two dogs and two teenage girls. “The file said she had two kids,” Archie said.
“Two kids,” Huffington said. “One girl, one boy.”
There hadn’t been any photographs of a boy.
Archie hurried out of the bedroom.
“What?” Huffington said, following him.
Archie jostled past three St. Helens cops in the hallway and raced for the living room. Henry was on his cell phone on the couch, his bad leg up on the coffee table. Archie headed straight for him. Henry glanced up and saw him, and said, “Huh?”
The photographs were still there, in their cheap frames, arranged at seemingly random heights and intervals. But as Archie got close,
he realized that something was different.
He took one of the photographs off the wall and examined it. It was not the same picture he’d seen yesterday of the Beatons with two teenage girls.
From the distance, it had looked the same. It was hung in the same spot. It was from the same era, roughly twenty years ago. It was the same composition. Mr. and Mrs. Beaton stood in front of the house. They were wearing the same clothes. She had on the same yellow dress. He was wearing a suit. The dogs sat at their feet. Two teenagers stood side by side between the adults. But in this photograph, one of the teenagers was a boy. He was wearing belted tan slacks and a short-sleeved white button-down shirt, tucked in. A flop of brown hair hung in his eyes. He was as skinny as the girl, the same height; they had the same sharp elbows and sloped shoulders. They were all looking at the camera. Dusty Beaton was the only one who was smiling.
Archie blinked, confused. He said, “This isn’t the picture that was here yesterday.”
No one answered. Archie looked up. Everyone in the room was eyeing him with a sort of benign mistrust. Archie recognized the expression from when he’d first come back from medical leave. It said, We think you might be a little bit crazy.
Huffington was at his shoulder. She took the photograph and looked at it. Archie pointed at the picture. “This isn’t the picture that was here yesterday,” he said again. He looked at Henry for support.
Henry scratched his neck. “Are you sure?” he said from the couch.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Archie said, trying to sound sure, trying to sound not a little bit crazy. “There was another picture,” he said to Huffington. “It was similar, from the same series. But the Beatons were standing with two teenage girls. The boy wasn’t in it.”
Huffington frowned. “So you’re saying there was another picture that looked exactly like this picture but with a girl instead of a boy.”
“Yes.”
“You saw this other photograph for how long?” Huffington asked.
Archie knew where she was headed. “I glanced at it,” he said. “I gave it a long, hard glance.”