Let Me Go

by Chelsea Cain

  Lynn Watson reentered the room. She had cleaned herself up a little, Archie noticed. Her face was still haggard with grief, her eyes swollen with tears. But she had applied a careful layer of plum-colored lipstick. The color brought out the blotchiness in her cheeks.

  She handed Henry and Archie each a lime-green plastic cup of water, no ice. The cups were printed with a State Tennis Finals Championship logo.

  “Thank you,” Archie and Henry both said.

  Archie noticed that the lip of his cup was dusty, like it had been sitting on a shelf for a few years. He lifted it to his mouth and took a sip of tepid tap water. “Mm,” he said.

  “They want to know if she could have run into anyone she knew, anyone dangerous, at the party out on that island,” Peter Watson told his wife.

  “Lisa is very popular,” Lynn Watson said, nodding. “She knows a lot of people.”

  No one said anything for a moment. Archie could hear a dog barking in the backyard.

  “Anyone who lived around the lake?” Archie asked her, thinking of the dock where Lisa’s body had been found. Archie flipped through his notebook for the name of the property owner. “Wally Swinton?”

  The two Watsons looked at each other blankly.

  “Swinton have any kids?” Archie asked Henry.

  “No,” Henry said. “He’s a bachelor.”

  “A bachelor?” Archie said.

  “He’s gay,” Henry said.

  “Just say that, then,” Archie said.

  “I thought I did,” Henry said.

  The Watsons were both looking at them.

  Archie wasn’t sure what more could be gained from them. He was growing more and more certain that Lisa Watson had met someone at that party who had killed her. And that meant that the answers weren’t here. They were on that island.

  “Do you know who she might have gone to the party with?” Archie asked the Watsons. “A female friend?”

  “Lisa didn’t really have girlfriends,” her father said.

  “She has a lot of friends,” Lynn Watson corrected him. She glanced at her husband sharply and then her face softened. “She just isn’t exclusive,” she explained to Archie and Henry. “She doesn’t have best friends. So she doesn’t talk about them much. We haven’t met them. But she is very popular.”

  “She moved home last year,” her father said. Archie saw him steal a look at his wife, and knew that this fact had been a bone of contention between the two.

  “She’s a junior at PSU,” her mother said. “She took a few years off, but now she’s studying physical education.” She caught herself and lifted a hand over her mouth. “She was studying.”

  “She went out a lot,” Peter Watson said. “But usually alone. I can give you the names of some of the people she knew in high school if that might help.”

  “We’d appreciate that,” Archie said.

  “You pressured her too much,” Lynn Watson said to her husband.

  Peter Watson’s face colored.

  Parents blamed themselves. The cause of death didn’t matter. They always blamed themselves, or each other. Archie had seen it before.

  “All your stupid tennis dreams,” Lynn Watson said to her husband. “He gave her a racket when she was two,” she said, looking from Henry and Archie. “By the time she was six he made her practice every day. Camps all summer. She couldn’t take the stress. She’d started partying by senior year. They caught her drinking on campus and kicked her off the team. She couldn’t cope.” She glanced back at her husband again. She was rambling, not even pausing for a breath. “We shouldn’t have let her move home. If she hadn’t moved back home, she wouldn’t have even known about the party.”

  “She was nationally ranked,” Peter Watson said again, his voice catching.

  Lynn Watson stumbled toward Archie, her eyes glassy—lipstick staining her front teeth. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. “You find who did this,” she said.

  Her eyes went back in her head and Archie just had time to get an arm around her before her knees gave out. Water slopped out of his cup and onto the floor. “Breathe,” he told her. “Long, deep breaths.” She nodded, and put her weight into his shoulder, and he held her as the hyperventilation passed, while Peter Watson sat motionless on the yellow chair. “Promise me,” she said to Archie, clutching him. “Promise me you’ll find who did this.”

  She trembled against his body. The barking in the backyard had grown frantic. “I promise you,” Archie said.

  Henry cleared his throat.

  Archie glanced over at his partner. “I promise you that we’ll do everything we can,” Archie clarified.

  CHAPTER

  30

  When Archie stepped off the elevator on the sixth floor of his apartment building, he inhaled a lungful of lingering cigarette smoke and he knew that someone was waiting for him. He unsnapped his holster and walked down the hall toward his apartment door, alert for any movement. The building manager had hung glittery white paper skeletons on the walls. They were the size of children, with brass grommets at their joints that allowed their limbs to splay out at unnatural angles. There were four of them between the elevator and Archie’s apartment door, affixed to the walls with thumbtacks. They grinned at him as he walked past, with wide unblinking eyes. Skeletons didn’t have eyes. Soft tissue, bulging with maggots, they were one of the first things to rot on a corpse. But no one seemed to remember that at Halloween.

  Archie’s apartment was at the end of the hall, near a corner that led to a fire exit, and Archie was almost to his door when he saw a shadow move on the floor. Then Leo stepped around the corner, the cigarette still in his hand, half burned down, a thread of smoke wafting from the orange tip.

  Archie exhaled and put his key in the lock. “Did I keep you waiting long?” he asked.

  “About twenty minutes,” Leo said. He had something in his hand and he tossed it to Archie. Archie just managed to snatch it from the air. He turned it over in his hand and looked at it. It was a flash drive.

  “I didn’t want to just leave this in front of your door,” Leo said. He moved to step beside Archie and Archie instinctively turned slightly, so Leo couldn’t get behind him. Leo raised his palms. “No choke hold,” he said. “Scout’s honor.”

  Leo didn’t look any better than he had that morning. He clearly hadn’t spent the afternoon catching up on sleep. His white button-down shirt was fresh from the dry cleaner’s. His hair was molded to perfection. But he still looked like shit. His face was pallid and there was something leaden in his gaze. The rims of his eyes were the color of raw steak.

  “Who’s the lucky lady?” Leo asked, indicating the shoulder of Archie’s blazer.

  Archie glanced down at the plum-colored lipstick smeared on the tan corduroy. “It’s not what you think,” he said, pushing his apartment door open. If Leo tried anything, Archie could always shoot him. He heard a scrambling from inside the apartment, and then Ginger appeared. She pranced eagerly at Archie’s feet and Archie felt the familiar swell of well-being that came with coming home, now that he had a dog to greet him. He reached down to pet Ginger with one hand, while turning the flash drive over in the other. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked Leo.

  Leo had followed him inside. “The surveillance footage from last night,” he said.

  Jack had refused Archie to his face when he’d asked for this just hours ago. Archie wondered what had changed his mind. “Does Jack know you brought it?” Archie asked.

  “Does it matter?” Leo said.

  Archie straightened up and brushed the corgi hair from his pants.

  Leo’s cigarette ash fell onto Archie’s floor. Ginger nosed at it and then lapped it up.

  “You can put that out in the sink,” Archie said.

  Leo looked down at his hand and seemed startled to find the burning cigarette between his fingers. “Sorry,” he said, and he walked over to the kitchen sink and ran the faucet over the cigarette butt and then washed it down the drain. Ar
chie walked to the kitchen counter, got one of Ginger’s treats from a box, and held it out to her. She sat and looked at him with her head cocked. Then he nodded at her and she dropped flat and rolled over. He held the treat out and she took it gently from his hand and trotted off with it into the living room.

  “Nice dog,” Leo said.

  “Do you want a beer?” Archie asked, setting the flash drive on the counter.

  “I can’t stay,” Leo said.

  Archie opened the fridge and got a beer out and opened it.

  “But I’ll take one to go,” Leo said.

  Archie handed Leo the beer and got another one out for himself. They drank silently together, standing in the kitchen. Most of the lights were still off and the apartment seemed dark and empty. Archie heard a train. “Do you know what happened to the girl?” Archie asked.

  Leo put his beer down on the counter. “No,” he said. He looked Archie in the eye. “I swear,” he said. “It had nothing to do with me. I’ll try to find out what I can from the inside, but so far no one seems to know anything.”

  Archie wanted to believe him. “I saw Sanchez today,” Archie said.

  Leo’s back straightened and he put two fingers to his lips. His eyes moved slowly around the room.

  Archie followed his gaze. This was ridiculous. Leo couldn’t really think that his apartment was bugged, could he? But Leo appeared dead serious. This was looking less like caution and more like paranoia.

  Leo cleared his throat. “How’s Susan?” he asked.

  Archie took a pull of beer. “Annoyed. Tired.”

  Leo nodded. “I’m going to give us some space,” he said. “While I’m out there. For her own protection.”

  That may have been the smartest thing Leo had said since he had arrived at Archie’s apartment.

  Leo’s eyes went to the dull green light of the microwave’s digital clock. “I should get back,” he said. But he lingered there in the kitchen, the beer in his hand, like there was something more he wanted to say.

  “Thanks for this,” Archie said, touching the flash drive on the counter.

  Leo drew back the last swallow of his beer and sat the empty bottle down next to the flash drive. “Before you turn it over,” he said, “you might want to take a look at the boathouse camera footage.” He wiped his mouth and turned away before Archie could read his face.

  Archie picked up the flash drive and looked at it. What the hell?

  Leo was opening the door, already on his way out of the apartment.

  “Wait,” Archie said, coming after him.

  Leo jumped back, but it wasn’t because of Archie. The door opened and Susan stepped through. She was clearly as surprised as Leo was. She had probably been just about to knock when Leo opened the door. Her wet black and white hair was plastered to her head and she was wearing black jeans and an orange T-shirt with the words WORST HALLOWEEN COSTUME EVER emblazoned across the chest. Her Converse sneakers were neon-yellow today. No socks. The shirt was wrinkled. She had dressed in a hurry.

  “Hi,” Leo said.

  Susan frowned, hugging to her chest the laptop she was carrying. Her eyes scanned the apartment, until they landed on Archie. “I just needed to see Archie,” she said.

  Leo glanced over his shoulder at Archie. “Me, too,” he said. Then he looked at Susan, waiting.

  It was Archie’s apartment, but for some reason he felt like he was intruding. Ginger came out from under the coffee table to investigate. Even she seemed to sense the tension. She looked up at Archie fretfully.

  “What?” Susan asked Leo.

  “I’m on my way out,” Leo said. “You’re standing in the doorway.”

  Susan’s eyebrows raised in understanding and her face reddened. She stepped inside the apartment, out of the doorway, to let Leo pass. “Sorry,” she said.

  Leo moved past Susan. Susan glanced over at Archie. The hall light was bright behind her, and her face was in shadow, but Archie could see the hesitation in her body language. She put her arm out and touched Leo, stopping him. “Will you call me later?” she asked him.

  Archie watched as Leo pulled away. “I’ll try,” he said.

  Leo closed the door behind him, leaving Archie and Susan alone in the dark apartment. Archie walked over to the standing lamp in the living room and turned it on. He wanted to give Susan a moment to recover from the interaction with Leo before he asked her what the hell she was doing at his apartment.

  But she didn’t need it.

  When he turned back she was right behind him with her laptop cradled in her arms. Her eyes burned with intensity. “I need to show you something,” she said.

  Ginger was standing at her feet, waiting to get petted. But Susan didn’t bend over.

  “Is it the Internet?” Archie asked. “Because I’ve seen that.”

  She ignored him and opened the laptop.

  He glanced down at the screen. The only open item on the desktop was a Word document with a single line of type on it.

  “Read it,” Susan urged him.

  He did.

  Hello, pigeon. Did Archie like his birthday present?

  Archie’s skin got hot. He looked up at Susan, perplexed.

  Her eyebrows jumped impatiently. “It just showed up on my screen this afternoon,” she said. “Don’t you get it?” She held the screen next to her face, her wet black hair combed back over her ears so that the pink of her skull was visible behind the white skunk stripe. Her nail-bitten fingers gripped the computer so hard they were white. “She hacked into my computer, Archie,” she said. “I don’t know how, but she did. I had started writing about last night. I wrote two pages. Then I fell asleep. And when I woke up, I took a bath, and when I came back to my room the story I’d written was gone, and this was there instead.” Her cheeks were pink, every freckle on fire.

  “I don’t understand,” Archie said, stepping back.

  Ginger gave up on Susan and trotted over to Archie.

  “It’s her,” Susan whispered.

  Archie’s eyes went back to the screen. He could feel his body going cold.

  “Gretchen hacked into your computer and wrote that?” Archie said.

  “Yes!” Susan said.

  Archie lifted his hands and rubbed his face, as if he could scrub what he was seeing from his vision.

  Hello, pigeon. Did Archie like his birthday present?

  It didn’t make sense. She was trying to distract them with some meaningless riddle. He hadn’t gotten a birthday present from Gretchen. He had spent the better part of his birthday alone, unconscious in the mud.

  Hadn’t he?

  Archie got the flash drive that Leo had given him out of his pocket and looked at it. “Give me a second,” he mumbled to Susan, and he made himself walk over to where his own laptop hummed on the kitchen bar. Ginger thought he was going for another treat and scurried past him into the kitchen. He was out of his body now, willing himself to put one foot in front of the other, to slide the flash drive into the USB port. He waited for something to happen, an icon to appear on the screen, a window to open, but nothing did. His outer-space screen saver looked vast and empty, billions of stars floating in a black void.

  Ginger came around the corner, looking disappointed, and flopped down at his feet.

  Susan stepped beside him. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Archie indicated the flash drive, his eyes still on the screen. “This is footage from the security cameras on the island last night,” he said. “A young woman was found dead this afternoon on a dock at a nearby property.” There was still no flash drive icon on the desktop—the laptop wasn’t recognizing it. Archie tapped the return key a few times, squinting at the starry landscape. “I saw her at the party last night,” he continued. “Before I blacked out.” He stopped there, deciding to leave Leo out of that particular part of the story. “I woke up this morning on the embankment outside the boathouse,” he said. He touched the wound on his head. “With this.” Maybe the flash drive
didn’t work. Maybe it was corrupted. “There’s a boathouse camera,” Archie said, remembering what Leo had said. “I want to see that footage.” He scanned the keys helplessly, trying to figure out what more to do to get it to work.

  Susan closed her computer and set it on the kitchen bar next to his. “Here,” she said, moving his hand away from the keyboard. “Let me.” He stepped away from the computer gratefully, and allowed her to take his place.

  He watched as she studied his laptop. Then she reached out and wiggled the flash drive in the USB port and the flash drive icon instantly appeared. Apparently, he hadn’t inserted the flash drive correctly. Susan glanced over at him with a slight smile, but didn’t comment.

  “Click on it,” Archie said.

  Susan clicked on the icon and a window opened with dozens of thumbnails, each with a different label. SE Garden. Pool. Dock. Archie scanned them until he found the one called Boathouse.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at it.

  Susan moved the cursor over it and clicked.

  Another box opened on the screen and the video started loading.

  “Can you make it go faster?” Archie asked.

  “Maybe if you had updated your video player in the last three years,” Susan said.

  The status bar ticked forward at a glacial pace.

  “Is that how you hurt your head?” Susan asked.

  Archie stayed focused on the screen. “I don’t know how I hurt my head,” he said.

  “So what’s the last thing you remember?” Susan asked.

  A face flashed in Archie’s mind. “Leo,” Archie said numbly.

  Susan turned to him, eyebrow arched. “What did he do?”

  The status bar was at 60 percent.

  “Can we agree to let that go for now?” Archie asked.

  Susan pressed a key with her thumb and the status bar stopped moving. She had paused it.

  “What are you doing?” Archie demanded.

  Susan crossed her arms and faced him. “Tell me what happened.”