by Chelsea Cain
“She kept asking for you,” one of the EMTs said.
Huffington turned her head, looking for Archie.
“I’m right here,” Archie said. He could tell she was having trouble seeing. He knew what it meant—her blood pressure was tanking. It wasn’t good.
Huffington turned toward the sound of his voice. “I owed her,” she said haltingly.
Her. The pit of Archie’s stomach tightened. “What did you do?”
He felt Henry’s firm grip on his shoulder. “We need to talk,” Henry said. “Now.”
“Melissa,” Archie said, “what did you do?”
Her head lolled and she lost consciousness. “We’ve got to go,” one of the EMTs said, and they lifted her and began rolling her to the ambulance waiting outside.
Henry’s hand was still on Archie’s shoulder.
The church was crawling with crime scene techs. There was blood and body matter everywhere. Everything smelled like death.
“Gretchen,” Archie said softly. He wanted Henry to tell him he was wrong, that Gretchen was still locked up, but he could see the truth in Henry’s face as Henry stepped beside him.
“She got out,” Henry said. “Apparently her new doctor took her off most of the meds. Cleared the bitch’s head. She cut his throat with a razor blade, killed a nurse, and got out with her clothes and ID.”
Archie lifted his hand to his throat and ran his fingers over the scar there. “A razor blade?”
“I had them check the visitor log,” Henry said. “The only people allowed in to see her are hospital staff and cops.”
He could hear the wail of the siren as the ambulance left the church parking lot. “Let me guess,” Archie said. “Huffington.”
“She was there to see her just before we were,” Henry said.
You never know when I might have a razor blade tucked up my sleeve.
She had let him live. Again.
CHAPTER
70
Susan was in another emergency room with a new plastic hospital bracelet. She had been swabbed, scraped, and combed, picked clean and washed off, had her clothes taken into evidence. The hospital was freezing. She hadn’t been that cold since Archie had fished her out of the Willamette River. She was sitting on the bed wrapped in two thick white cotton blankets, wondering when someone was going to come in and tell her what to do next, when Leo walked in.
His clothes were spotless. Except for the blood in the hair on the back of his head, he didn’t appear to be injured. He’d left before the explosion. He had left right after he’d shot Huffington.
“Who are you?” Susan asked.
Leo took a breath and put his hands on Susan’s shoulders. He was looking at her like Archie did sometimes. Like she was innocent. She wasn’t innocent.
“I want to get you home,” Leo said. “Your mother will be here in a minute. She brought clothes.”
Susan pulled away from him, scooting back farther onto the bed. She could feel the tears coming, but she couldn’t stop them. “A kid I was supposed to keep safe is dead,” she said. She tugged at her wet hair. “I just had two men with tweezers and magnifying glasses pick brain matter out of my hair.” Then she tapped her chest with her hand. “A man died because of me.”
She was not innocent.
“That’s not your fault,” Leo said. “Colin Beaton built that bomb.”
Susan’s lips were trembling. Snot was dripping from her nose. She needed someone to give her the hug of a lifetime. She just wasn’t sure that someone was Leo. She leveled her gaze at him. “Who are you?”
He glanced at the door.
“Are you a cop?” Susan asked.
He looked at her. His hands were in his pockets. He was perfectly still for several minutes. She didn’t say anything. She just waited.
“DEA,” Leo said quietly, motionless. “I’m inside my father’s operation. He has cops on his payroll. I can’t be on any of the reports.”
“Archie knew?” Susan asked.
Leo looked at the floor. “He introduced me to my recruiter.”
Susan shook her head. None of this was making sense. “But he doesn’t like you.”
Leo looked up. “He’s trying to protect you,” he said. “From me.”
The door to the room flew open, and Bliss rushed in, kicked off her clogs, and climbed into bed next to Susan. Bliss didn’t have on any makeup. Her platinum dreadlocks looked like a mop of fuzzy ropes. She was wearing a T-shirt with the word atheist printed across the chest. She laid her head on Susan’s shoulder and took her hand. Susan looked at their hands together—so much the same. Square palms, and thin stubby fingers with nails bitten to the quick.
“He killed her,” Susan said, squeezing her eyes shut, still not quite believing it.
Bliss started to say something, but had to stop, and Susan realized her mother was crying. Bliss was an epic bawler, capable of clearing out a movie theater with her caterwauling. She dissolved into tears every year on John Lennon’s birthday. She wept during Joni Mitchell songs and blubbered when she saw lobsters scrambling in their aquarium at the fish counter. This time she didn’t make a sound.
Susan fell apart. Sobbing wracked her body. She couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe. She gasped and mewled while her mother held her tight. Finally, exhausted, Susan was able to catch her breath and lift her head.
Leo was still standing there, waiting to take her home.
Bliss peeled the stray wet hair off Susan’s cheeks with that hand that looked so much like Susan’s own. At that moment, Susan was filled with love for her mother. Bliss was maddening sometimes, but when it came down to it, she was always there when Susan really needed her.
“I heard you blew up a reverend,” Bliss said in an excited, conspiratorial tone.
Susan blinked at her mother, astonished. Then she looked at Leo. He gave her a sympathetic shrug. They both had embarrassing parents.
“What?” Bliss asked.
Susan sighed and leaned her head back in the crook of her mother’s warm neck. “Nothing,” she said.
CHAPTER
71
Archie had been up all night helping to direct the manhunt for Colin Beaton. The small St. Helens police station had been taken over as the base of operations. The low white building looked like a dentist’s office that had been taken over by eminent domain. The hunt for Gretchen Lowell had diverted resources, but it was still crowded in there. Huffington had died in surgery at the hospital. She had returned to town five years ago, with a new name. She had married and divorced in California, and kept his last name, and then started using her middle name, Samantha, as a first name. As identity changes went, it had been easy. No one had thought to connect her to the skinny teenage Beaton girl who had left so many years before only to succumb to cancer.
Sixty cops crowded in that building, and not one had thought to take her photograph down off the wall below the brass label engraved with the title chief of police.
I owed her, Huffington had said.
Archie got a cup of bad coffee and walked outside and leaned against the four-foot concrete slab that read police above the city seal. There was a residential house right next door. The neighbors stood on their parking strip, gawking.
It was cooler that it had been. The flag above the precinct was flapping in the wind.
Henry’s car pulled to a stop in the middle of the street in front of the station. “Get in,” Henry said. “They found him.”
Archie left his coffee cup sitting on the concrete slab and climbed into the car.
Ninety armed officers searching for Colin Beaton, and it had been a maid who had found him.
Room Six. The Hamlet Inn.
Archie kicked himself for not thinking of it.
Two patrol cars had arrived when Henry pulled into the motel parking lot, and they could hear sirens approaching from all sides behind them.
One of the uniformed cops on the scene was vomiting over the second-floor hall railing.
/> Archie and Henry galloped up the steps, taking them two at a time. The door to the room was swung open. A maid’s cart was parked out front. Neat stacks of toilet paper. Freshly cleaned towels. Archie had a feeling that Colin wouldn’t be needing any of it.
The vomiting patrol cop looked up, his face gray, and said, “Don’t go in there.”
“It’s okay,” Archie told him. “I’ve done this before.”
Archie stepped into the doorway.
Henry stepped beside him.
They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. They just took in the scene. There was a protocol to surveying a crime scene that was drilled into all cops. Start left; scan right. Look up; look down. Don’t miss the details. But sometimes the thing in the middle was so distracting that you couldn’t pull your eyes from it.
The king-sized bed had been stripped of its top sheet and polyester floral bedspread, which lay discarded on the floor. The bottom sheet, still on the bed, was so soaked with blood it could have been red.
Colin Beaton was bound, naked, spread-eagled, to the headboard and footboard with an industrial-looking black twine. His torso gaped open, split from his ribs to his pelvic bone. His abdomen was sunken, its contents extracted and then strewn next to him by the bed, like refuse from a butcher shop. A slither of intestines. A chunk of liver. Handfuls of fat and muscle. Blood and bile soaked into the sheet. The stink was powerful. His feces had been squeezed out of his large intestine and smeared on his face. Flies crawled in and out of him, along his hairline, around his mouth.
She hadn’t just killed him, she’d slaughtered him.
On the wall, above the headboard of the bed, using his blood, she had drawn a heart.
Archie could hear voices behind him, people jogging up the stairs. There’d be dozens of cops here in a minute. He turned back to the gray-faced patrolman. “Secure the scene,” he said.
The cop was young, in a St. Helens uniform. He had vomit on his chin. “On whose authority?” he asked.
“Mine,” Archie said.
“This is a Beauty Killer case,” Henry explained. He handed him a task force business card. “It’s ours now. No one gets in but our people.”
The cop nodded and wiped his chin. He looked glad to have an important job, a way to redeem himself.
As Archie and Henry entered the room, Archie could hear the cop’s voice rising with authority. Beauty Killer. Restricted. Task force. They watched where they stepped. Archie scanned the room. There was something on the dresser. As he got closer he saw that it was a dirty red wallet. Archie plucked a pen out of his pocket and nudged it open. It was empty.
“What is it?” Henry asked.
“Toss me an evidence bag,” Archie said.
Henry did and Archie slid the wallet into the bag and sealed it. Underneath the caked dirt, he could barely make out a faint gold monogram. GS.
When Archie had asked Gretchen about the name Gretchen Stevens, she had said that Stevens was dead. She had buried her on Sauvie Island, she said. According to the DCS file, when Gretchen had turned up in St. Helens, she had been both bloody and dirty. She had come from the island, where she had buried her past. And now she had gone back, and she had dug it up.
“It’s something she buried a long time ago,” Archie said.
Archie carried the wallet over to where Henry stood next to the bed. Colin’s mouth was taped shut. His eyes were pushed open unnaturally wide, the upper lid folded over the lashes. She’d used superglue, Archie realized, to keep Colin’s eyes open, so he wouldn’t miss a minute. Then used a triangular incision to carve out Colin’s nose, in the style of a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.
“He got what he wanted,” Archie said. “He got to see her again.”
Henry grunted. “He doesn’t look very happy about it.”
“True,” Archie said.
Henry paused and then looked around. “Where is it?”
“What, his nose?” Archie said. They hadn’t seen it on the carpet.
“Yeah.” Henry bent down to look under the bed.
Archie studied Colin’s face, his cheek, where the flesh bulged out on one side, like a squirrel with a nut. “I think it’s in his mouth,” Archie said.
“Archie.”
Archie recognized that tone. It was never good. He looked up and Henry nodded at Colin Beaton’s chest.
It was pale, and scattered with brown hair. And over his left nipple was a heart-shaped scar, just like Archie’s. Archie was intimately familiar with the life span of scars. He knew what they looked like when they were raw and sore and fresh; he knew what they looked like months later, when they were dark pink and tender; and he knew what they looked like after years had passed and they healed to a thick thread of pearly pink tissue. Colin Beaton had had this scar for years. If Gretchen had carved it on him, she had done it long before she had ever taken a scalpel to Archie.
“You want protection?” Henry asked quietly.
Archie sighed and glanced up at the heart she’d drawn in blood on the wall. He could see her fingerprints in it, the path of her delicate hands as she lovingly painted in blood. “If she wanted to kill me,” he said. “I’d be dead.”
CHAPTER
72
When Archie got out of the elevator, he could see Susan sitting on the floor in front of his apartment door. She stood up when she saw him, and gave him a little wave.
“Henry said you’d be home soon,” she said. “I texted you.” She held up an iPhone. “I got a new phone. Same number. And I got an extension on my story. The editor wants five thousand more words.”
He could tell that she’d been crying. Her eyes were red. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her orange hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She was wearing a short black dress and silver Doc Martens. Even at the end of the summer, her legs were still pale.
He got to his door and leaned against it. “Colin is dead,” he said. “You and your mom can go back to the house.”
She nodded. “I heard.”
She looked at him, like she wanted him to say something.
“Yes?” he said.
“Leo told me,” she said. “Some.”
At least she knew now. He wanted to tell her how much he’d struggled with it, how often he’d considered jeopardizing the DEA’s entire operation. He wanted her to understand that it hadn’t been a casual decision, not telling her. But, of course, he couldn’t say any of that. “I can’t talk about that with you. I’m sorry.”
He fumbled for his keys. “I need to sleep,” he said.
Susan leaned the side of her head against his door and looked at him. “How did Colin find Pearl at our house, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Archie said. “We may never know. He might have been following her there to begin with.”
“They’re saying that Gretchen killed Colin,” Susan said. She narrowed her green eyes, studying him. “Why did she do that, Archie?”
Archie rubbed his face, his keys still in his hand. “I think she had her reasons.”
“Is she going to kill you?” Susan asked. Her eyes were glassy, filled with tears. He could see her struggling not to blink.
Archie was filled with tenderness for her. That was why she had come. She was worried about him. He lifted his hand and touched her cheek. “No.”
Her eyes widened and then she blinked and tears ran down her freckled cheeks.
Archie moved his hand from her cheek into her wet orange hair and pulled her to him, and she lifted her mouth to his. He could feel her tears against his face, the warmth of her mouth, her tongue. Her damp hair was thick under his fingers. He moved his arm around the small of her back, and she reached her arms around the back of his neck. He kissed her gently. It took self-control. His body was hungry for her, and finally being there, tasting her cigarettes and coffee, the smell of her sweet shampoo and peppermint soap, he had to consciously hold himself back. He didn’t want to be rough with her. He didn’t want it to be like it had been with Gretchen
.
But Susan seemed to have other ideas. She lifted herself up onto her toes, pushing her tongue deeper into his mouth, circling his tongue and tickling his throat. Her fingertips scratched the back of his scalp, and neck, and then along the edges of his ears. He moved his hands down her body to her hips and backed her up against the wall, and then lifted her and pressed his body against hers, so that she was supported between him and the wall. He could feel her under him, the slightness of her, her hip bones and pelvis, her dress bunched up under his hands, barely covering her. His brain felt like it was buzzing, his hands heavy and clumsy.
His whole body was trembling. He kissed her deeper, willing himself to compose himself. Her hands glided under his earlobes along his jaw, her fingers against his cheeks.
He wasn’t shaking; Susan was.
He let himself forget sometimes how vulnerable she was.
He pulled his mouth from hers, and stepped back, and lowered her to the floor.
She looked at him, confused, cheeks flushed, her lips still parted.
He wiped his mouth. What had he done?
“I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t meant to do that. He was exhausted. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t strong.
“Why?” she asked.
He pressed his forehead into the door and tried to figure out a way to say it, how to explain it to her. He took a deep breath and then turned to look at her, face-to-face. “Because I care about you,” he said. “And this is not a good idea.”
But she was happy. She was glowing. She laid a hand on the front of his shirt. “I know how fucked up you are. I don’t care.”
“Thanks,” Archie said.
She blushed. “You know what I mean.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” Archie said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
“I’m an adult, Archie,” Susan said.
“I’m not over her yet,” Archie said.
He waited.
Susan’s face fell. But she nodded. She seemed to understand. “Your wife,” she said.
Archie gave her a look.
Susan’s eyes widened. Then she looked away. “Oh,” she said.