by Chelsea Cain
“Yeah,” Archie said.
Archie was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a double shot of whiskey when there was a knock at his door. He smiled. He had told himself, if Susan came back, even after what he’d told her, that he would let her in, that he could take a chance. But when he opened the door, it was Rachel, not Susan, who stared back at him.
She was wearing her white satin robe, and he got the feeling that she wasn’t wearing anything else.
“You’re all over the TV,” Rachel said. “A big hero. I came here as a citizen, to express my gratitude.”
“Really,” Archie said.
Rachel slipped past him into the apartment. “I thought I’d start with your cock,” she said.
Archie nearly choked on a sip of whiskey. “I usually just get some sort of commendation.”
He closed the door and when he turned back into the apartment, Rachel had dropped the robe and was standing naked in his living room. Every time Archie saw her body, it made him weak in the knees.
“I was planning on just going to bed,” Archie said.
Rachel smiled and wetted her bottom lip with her tongue. “I’ll meet you there,” she said, and she turned and walked into the bedroom.
Archie looked at the empty glass in his hand, and then walked to the kitchen counter again and poured himself some more whiskey. Then he took his holster off his hip and laid it on the counter next to the bottle. And then he took his phone out of his pants pocket. He had a text message from Susan, just as she’d said: Coming over. Need to see you.
He scanned through all the previous texts from her, all of them checking in, letting him know that Pearl was fine; everything was fine.
Archie lifted the whiskey glass to his lips.
Rachel put her arms around his waist from behind. “What’s taking you so long?”
Archie took another swig of whiskey. “Just finishing some stuff up,” he said.
She turned him around so they were facing each other and then she spun slowly around for him.
“Tell me the story of the heart tattoo again,” he said.
She put her finger on his mouth. “Don’t ask so many questions. Do you want to fuck me, or not?”
He let his eyes graze over her. Her blond hair, blue eyes, the cheekbones and chin, the dip of her collarbone and curve of her breasts and hips. “You look like someone I know, have I told you that?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But you didn’t say if that was good or bad.”
Archie considered this. “A little of both.”
Rachel grinned and lifted her hand to her mouth, and pushed three fingers deeply into her mouth and slowly pulled them out. Then she walked them down Archie’s shirt and slid them into his pants.
“You like that?” she whispered.
Archie took another sip of whiskey.
“Very much,” he said.
Archie awoke to Rachel’s gentle prodding. “Your phone’s ringing,” she said.
He pulled it off the bedside table, looked at it, and sat up in bed in the dark. Then he lifted the phone to his ear. “Hello, Patrick,” he said.
“Are you all right?” Patrick asked.
The kid had seen the news. He sounded panicked. Archie swung his bare feet on the floor and stood up and walked to his north bedroom window. “I’m fine,” Archie assured him.
The bedroom was dark. The red IKEA gooseneck lamp was off.
Archie looked out the window, at the stars in the sky and the bridge lights over the dark scar of the Willamette River. The city’s buildings glowed. The interstate stretched north and south. Streetlights twinkled. From this view, standing in the dark room, the city looked brighter.
“I’m ready to tell you my secret,” Patrick said.
“I’m here.”
Patrick exhaled a long, sad breath. “Sometimes I miss him,” he said. Archie heard the words catch in Patrick’s throat. “Sometimes I want him to come back for me.”
“I know,” Archie said. “It’s okay. I promise,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”
Archie wanted to believe that it was true.
CHAPTER
73
When Archie woke up in the morning, Rachel was gone, and he had a headache from the whiskey. He took a shower, drank some coffee, got dressed, and drove to Sauvie Island.
It was a beautiful day. The sky was high and bright. It was so clear that Archie could see the Cascade Range from the bridge to the island. Most Portlanders loved Sauvie Island. Situated between the Columbia River, the Multnomah Channel, and the Willamette, it was just ten miles north of Portland; but it was its own ecosystem of trees, fields, wildlife areas, beaches, farms, houses, rivers, and slough. People went there to pick raspberries, swim in the river, hike, hunt, bird-watch, and cycle. They also went there to dump bodies. Children drowned in the currents off the beach. A few years before, a woman had tossed her two small children off the bridge to the island. One died, the other was rescued by someone in one of the houseboats who heard what sounded like an animal crying.
Archie felt that he could never quite see the island the way other people did. But he could still appreciate it. Once you crossed that bridge, it felt like someplace else, and he liked the way the fields looked and the horses and the old farms.
After a nice talk with Pennie at the Sauvie Island Community Association, the creek with the oak trees next to the red barn wasn’t hard to find. Archie took a left off the bridge and followed Gilman Road around back under the bridge and along the south side of the island. He knew this road from taking his kids to the pumpkin patch and the corn maze.
He pulled over at the milepost marker that Pennie had given him and parked the car. The creek was on farm property, behind a house. Archie could see a small grove of trees and a large red barn in the distance. It didn’t look like anyone was home at the farm. The lights were off and there were no cars in the gravel driveway. Archie climbed over the barbed-wire fence and started walking. As he got close, the grass got higher. It was above his waist, green from the wet soil. He waded through it under the trees. It was quiet. No birds. The creek was more of a swamp. The water looked gloomy and stagnant. Small white wildflowers sprang up in the places where the grass didn’t grow. The ground was soft and wet, easy to dig.
He couldn’t see his car from here. A few sheep grazed in a nearby meadow. Nothing else moved.
Archie sat down at the base of a tree and waited.
It was three hours before she showed up.
She still surprised him.
He was staring at a piece of grass he had picked, twisting it in his fingers, and then he looked up and she was standing there. Her legs were bare. The green cotton dress she was wearing was the same color as the grass. He wondered if she’d planned that.
“Have you been waiting long?” Gretchen asked.
“Just a few hours,” Archie said.
Her hair was dark now, and pulled back. Makeup covered whatever blemishes remained on her face. Out of the institutional pajamas, in the green dress, her body curved and flattened in all the right places.
She took off a pair of large dark sunglasses and arched an eyebrow. “I had to make sure it wasn’t a trap.”
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it,” Archie said.
Gretchen pulled on a leash and a corgi sauntered through the grass and flopped down next to Archie.
“I think of you more as a cat person,” Archie said.
“Colin had him,” Gretchen said. She squatted daintily on the other side of the dog and ran her hand down the length of the dog’s back. “He could kill his mother, but he couldn’t kill the fucking corgi.”
“You killed Colin,” Archie pointed out. “And not the corgi.”
Gretchen shrugged. “Colin’s been trying to get me to kill him for years.” The corgi rolled over on its back and gazed up at Gretchen with adoring brown eyes. “The corgi wanted to live,” she said, rubbing its belly.
“What happened between you and Colin
?” Archie asked.
Gretchen was quiet for a moment. The wind moved the leaves in the trees above them. “We were together for a few years,” she said. “And then I left him.” She frowned. “He took it rather hard.”
“I’ll say,” Archie said. She could have killed Colin back then, left him dead, as she had so many of her other apprentices. Or she could have killed him when he’d started the copycat routine. “What took you so long?” he asked.
She leveled her gaze at him. “Some people are harder to kill than others,” she said.
He wound the blade of grass around his finger. “You heard about Melissa?” he asked.
Gretchen stopped petting the dog. “Yes.”
The trees formed a canopy of pale green. Sunlight dappled the still creek. Archie could smell the fecund sweetness of the dirt and grass.
“I tried to save her,” Archie said.
“She would have been arrested,” Gretchen said. “It’s probably for the best. She would not have done well in prison.”
“No,” he said.
She lifted her eyes to his, daring him to say it.
All the pieces fit together. The reason Colin thought that Gretchen would come for Pearl. This time, he had said. I thought she’d come this time. Gretchen hadn’t had her tubes tied until she was nineteen. She says her child is in danger, the shrink had said.
“Not Melissa,” Archie said. “Pearl. I tried to save your daughter.”
Her face didn’t change. There was no sign of grief, or regret.
“People die,” she said. “You and I know that more than most.”
Archie rubbed his eyes. “The thing about your child being in danger, I thought it was one of your games. But this was always about Pearl. The lilies he left at the crime scenes. Lily. The name you gave her. He moved on to killing adults. But he wanted pure adults, who would be worthy enough to be saved. Susan found an ad he was running in the Trib. That’s how he found Gabby Meester. Someone nominated her for her good citizenry. But he killed Jake Kelly because he was close to Pearl.”
“Well done, Detective,” Gretchen said.
The dog rolled back on its belly and laid its head on Archie’s thigh.
“You must feel something,” Archie said. He wanted her to feel something. “I saw what you did to him in that motel room. You cared for him, but you slaughtered him for what he did to her.”
“I gave her up a long time ago,” Gretchen said.
Yet, when Archie had his first run-in with Pearl, Gretchen had kept showing up. Archie had thought she was watching him.
“You’ve been looking out for her, though, in your own fucked-up way,” Archie said. He picked another blade of grass and looked at it. “Which Beaton was her father?”
Gretchen looked at him askance. “Neither,” she said. “I arrived in St. Helens with that little project already under way.” She snorted. “Though the elder Beaton did try to pray it out of me. Sort of a faith abortion.” Her expression steeled. “The world got a little brighter the day I threw him piece by piece on that train.”
“You should have told me,” Archie said. “I could have done more to protect her.”
She looked away, toward the sheep meadow.
Archie balled up the blade of grass and tossed it into the creek. “She Tasered me last year.”
Gretchen turned back, smiling. “I guess she had a little of me in her after all.”
The dog whined and pawed at Archie’s leg and he reached down and scratched its head.
“She likes you,” Gretchen said.
“I like dogs,” Archie said. “They’re relatively uncomplicated.”
“If I had told you, and you’d saved her, then everyone would have known,” she said. “She would have known. Imagine that life.”
Archie studied her face. Empathy. It was the thing that psychopaths weren’t supposed to have. But some of them got very skilled at faking it. He couldn’t trust himself with her. He saw things that weren’t there. And she knew him well enough to give him what he wanted.
“I can’t tell,” he said. “What’s real for you.”
“Maybe that’s why you keep coming back. Maybe I’m the one person you can’t figure out.”
Archie thought of Dusty Beaton, and how many times, during the Beauty Killer media mania of the past few years, she’d probably seen a photograph of Gretchen Lowell. Had she ever connected that serial killer centerfold with the gawky foster child she’d taken in so many years before?
“Did Mrs. Beaton know what you became?” Archie asked Gretchen.
“I spent two months with her,” Gretchen said. “And blossomed considerably after leaving,” she added. “But the truth is, I think the old bitch didn’t want to recognize me. Melissa was the chief of police of that little town. She wasn’t exactly in hiding. I saw her photograph in a newspaper four years ago and I knew exactly who she was. Dusty saw those same newspaper photos; she watched the local news. She didn’t know her own daughter. That woman was always very good at not seeing what was in front of her. In my experience, people who lie to themselves long enough don’t even know when they’re blind.”
It wasn’t until Gretchen said Melissa’s name that Archie finally put the last piece of the puzzle in place. “This was about Melissa,” he said. He had to give Gretchen credit. She had set in motion a complex set of events, and played each of them perfectly. But Archie had not been her target. “You sent me digging into Beaton’s past, knowing what carnage would follow, knowing how Melissa would react. Pearl’s fate was incidental. You needed Melissa to get you out. You used the rest of us to drive her to it.”
“Melissa owed me,” Gretchen said. “She knew it. I helped her see it.”
“And Pearl?” Had she truly meant something to Gretchen, or had she just been bait?
“I didn’t love her,” Gretchen said. She said it matter-of-factly, without malice or regret. “She was two.” She was looking past him at something far away. “And I couldn’t love her. So I gave her away.” She tilted her head and turned back to him. “I wanted her to have a life.”
He searched for some quality of Pearl in her, and he could see something in the jaw and cheekbones, the regal nose and full mouth. A year ago, when he’d first met Pearl, she had been sixteen, skinny and boyish and angry. At seventeen, Pearl had grown several inches, developed curves, and inhabited her body completely differently. She had, like her mother, “blossomed considerably.”
“You didn’t kill any of the children?” Archie asked. “The ones we accused you of murdering, the children left dead with your signature carved on their torsos, those were all Colin trying to get your attention.”
“Is that a question?”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“We lie to each other all the time, remember?” she said with an amused smile.
“Tell me,” Archie said, “and I’ll believe you.”
She looked him in the eyes. “I didn’t kill any of those children.” Her gaze was unwavering. Her voice was steady. There was no rise in vocal pitch, no fidgeting, no extended pauses or rapid blinking. None of the usual telltale signs.
Wait a minute. “Any of those children?” Archie said. “So have you killed other children?”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Do teenagers count?”
“Let’s say no,” Archie said evenly.
She leaned forward, until her face was centimeters from his, her lips almost touching his lips, and she widened her eyes. Archie loved her eyes. They were so blue they almost glowed. “Then I’m as innocent as a rose,” she said.
He believed her.
It was, he thought, the first time he could remember ever believing anything she had ever said about anything.
Her breath tickled his lips. “How did you know I was sleeping with someone?” he asked. He wondered what he would do if she pressed her mouth against his. He tried not to move.
“Lucky guess,” she said. She lifted her hand and caressed his cheek with the backs of her finge
rs. “Like I said, I want you to be happy.”
She stood up, gave the leash a tug, and the corgi hopped up and looked at her, its tail nubbin wagging furiously. Archie could see Gretchen’s shadow on the grass, the outline of a human, the girl she had been.
“Lovely chatting with you, darling, but I’ve got to run. Face it, you’re always more content when you’re chasing me than when you have me locked up. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun.”
“Gretchen?” Archie said. She turned back. The breeze made the grass vibrate and the green dress hug her thighs. Archie unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt and pushed his hand under the cloth, along the heart-shaped scar until his fingers found the short pieces of tape that held the tiny microphone to his chest. Then he peeled back his shirt so she could see it. “I have a confession,” he said, holding his shirt open so she could see the wire he was wearing.
Her eyes lifted from his and grazed the perimeter. They had been here for hours: FBI, state police, Archie’s task force, SWAT. They had snipers in the trees. Beyond the quarter-mile radius that Archie had insisted on, the area was surrounded. All the nearby farms had been evacuated. The barn, the dark farmhouse—each teemed with law enforcement. At that moment, Gretchen was in the scope of at least ten high-powered rifles. Don’t think I didn’t think about it.
For a moment he felt a tinge of regret. Not because he had set a trap for her—she was a killer, she deserved to be caught—but because he had lied to her. Then she turned back to Archie, and winked.
The explosion knocked him back hard against the tree. Whatever the device was, she must have buried it when she’d dug up her wallet and other belongings. The ground in front of them exploded, sending dirt and rocks and mud spraying in all directions. The shock wave rippled underneath Archie like an earthquake. Birds shot off squawking into the sky. The slough sloshed. Leaves and twigs rained down from the trees. Archie fumbled for his weapon. He couldn’t see her. There was a wall of pain in his head where he’d slammed his skull against the tree trunk behind him. His ears rang. His clothes and face were splattered with mud. He tried to get up and fell back down; then tried again. The air was so full of leaves he couldn’t see. He felt someone next to him, holding him up. It was Henry.