Evil at Heart

by Chelsea Cain

  He continued to jerk and twitch as she slid her fingernail up his arm, across his shoulder, and down his spine to his tailbone, and then he couldn’t feel her anymore.

  The back door opened and closed.

  Archie rolled onto his back and the cat padded over and started licking his face. It took Archie several minutes to force his muscles to relax enough to open his hand, revealing her parting gift to him—two white orbs the color of spoiled milk, threaded with red vessels and slippery with blood.

  He reflexively pulled his hand back and Jeremy’s eyeballs rolled out of his palm and onto the floor.

  The cat cocked its head.

  Archie struggled to his feet, and backed away from them, looking at his hand, smeared with Jeremy’s blood. Then he turned, went to the front window, pulled back the curtain, and searched for the patrol unit Henry had stationed in front of the house. The car was there. The dome light was on and the officer was inside. Alive.

  Archie leaned his head against the glass, caught his breath, then stumbled into the bathroom and held his hand under the sink faucet, the water as hot as he could stand it.

  Had Jeremy killed Isabel?

  Or was this just another one of Gretchen’s lies?

  He had to know. Archie was calm now, his heart rate settled. Twin red bite marks already showed on his side where the Taser’s

  projectiles had made contact. A purple bruise would rise soon, matching the opposite side.

  Archie turned the water off and dried his hands. Then, moving slowly and painfully, he put on clean clothes. By the time he was done, he had stopped shaking.

  He went back out into the living room. One of the eyes was gone. So was the cat. Archie scooped up the keys to Claire’s car off the sideboard, picked the empty gun up off the floor, and made a call on Henry’s landline.

  “It’s me,” Archie said. “I need to see you.”

  Archie could hear the beat of club music in the background. “You know where I am,” Leo Reynolds said.

  Archie hung up and picked the phone up again. This time he dialed Henry. He carried the receiver into Henry’s bedroom and opened the closet.

  “Jeremy’s dead,” Archie said when Henry picked up.

  “Where are you?” Henry asked.

  Archie scanned the closet shelf, looking for the box the gun would have been in. “At your house. Gretchen was here. You’ll find Jeremy’s eyes on your living room floor.” He paused, remembering the cat. “Or under the couch.” He saw a box and dumped the contents out on the floor. Photographs. “Where do you keep the bullets to your gun?” he asked.

  “Stay there,” Henry said. “I’m on my way.”

  Archie moved to Henry’s dresser and starting pulling open drawers. He had to get out of there, before Henry sent in the cop out front. “Goddamn, Henry. Where are the fucking bullets?”

  “Night table,” Henry said quietly. “Top drawer.”

  “Thank you,” Archie said. He hung up the phone and tossed it on the bed, and then went to Henry’s bedside table and opened the drawer. The bullets were in a box next to a pair of reading glasses. Archie loaded the gun and kept a handful of extra bullets. He

  needed something to keep them in, so he went back to the bathroom, to his overnight bag from the hospital, and dug out the brass pillbox he had kept his painkillers in. He’d missed it.

  He opened the pillbox, dropped the bullets in, and went out the back door.

  He was never going to let Gretchen catch him unarmed again.

  C H A P T E R 60

  The bouncer at George’s Dancin’ Bare had his nose in a book. Behind him, pinned on the wall, was a flyer advertising a Gretchen Lowell lookalike stripper contest.

  “I’m looking for Leo,” Archie said.

  “Room three,” the bouncer said, not looking up.

  The club was busier than Archie remembered it, and louder. He tried to stand up straight, to not favor the side where Gretchen’s Taser bruise still burned. Cigarette smoke choked the air. Portland was going to ban smoking in bars in the New Year, and it seemed like everyone was trying to suck down as much nicotine as possible while they still could.

  Archie moved like a hunchback, but no one noticed. There were a dozen men collected around the first stage, where a half-dressed woman was working on disassembling the rest of her nurse’s ensemble. Behind the stage was the club’s trademark sign, a dancing bear, crossed out, above a drawing of a naked woman, reclined, legs extended in front of her. Beside that sign was another sign that read

  GIRLS, UP CLOSE, with an arrow pointing right.

  Archie followed it down a hall where there were four doors, all quilted with brown fake-leather fabric held in place in a harlequin pattern with brass furniture tacks. Archie went to the door marked “3” and knocked. “It’s me,” he said. If Leo was in there, Archie wasn’t sure he could hear him over the club’s main speakers.

  He tried the door.

  It wasn’t locked.

  He opened the door a tiny crack and peered in.

  The room was mirrored. Mirrored walls, mirrored ceiling. If they could have figured out a way to make the floor mirrored, they would have. A cherry-red vinyl sofa went around the perimeter.

  Leo looked up and waved Archie in. He was sitting back on the red sofa, knees apart, arms resting on his thighs. Gray suit pants, white shirt unbuttoned midway down his chest. There was a glass of something dark on the sofa next to him.

  A blond well-toned stripper with a star tattoo danced around a pole in the middle of the room.

  The stripper looked up as Archie entered. She had one long leg wrapped around the pole and the other in a stiletto pump on the floor, and she was bending back, breasts high in the air, so that her hair piled on the floor in a shiny blond heap. “Hi,” she said.

  “That’s Star,” Leo said.

  “Hi, Star,” Archie said.

  There was music in here, too. Archie didn’t know what it was. Something electronic and moody.

  Archie took a seat next to Leo on the sofa. It was a relief to sit down.

  “We haven’t done this in a while,” Leo said.

  Leo had been twenty-one when Archie had met him after his sister’s murder, already older than his years, and already his father’s son. He had all of Jack’s best attributes: his looks, his physical confidence,

  his smarts. He was being groomed to take over the family business, but he wanted out.

  So Archie had introduced him to Raul Sanchez, his contact at the FBI. Archie hadn’t anticipated that the Feds would convince him to do exactly what his father wanted him to. In the end, it had worked out better for Jack than it had for Leo. Unbeknownst to him, it was the reason he was allowed to continue doing business. Leo had access to drug operations all over the world. And as long as the FBI and DEA knew the ins and outs of Jack Reynolds’s operation, they were fine with it.

  People were going to get their heroin somewhere.

  It was one of the reasons that Archie had kept in such close touch with the Reynolds family. Leo had access to all sorts of criminal contacts that Archie had accessed more than once during his tenure as leader of the Beauty Killer Task Force.

  Star hooked a knee around the pole and spun. It was a small room and Archie could smell her, the sweat on her body, the gel in her hair.

  Leo lifted his drink to his lips and took a sip. “Sorry about my brother,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils large.

  “How long have you been here?” Archie asked.

  “A few hours,” he said.

  More like all afternoon. “You’re wasted,” Archie said.

  “Yes.”

  The stripper sashayed back and forth in front of them, fluttering her fingers over the tops of her breasts.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Leo said.

  “She’s very fit,” Archie said.

  Leo laughed. “You don’t like her?”

  “She looks like Gretchen,” Archie said.

  Leo clappe
d his hand on Archie’s knee. “Sometimes a blonde is just a blonde.”

  Archie tried to get a read on Leo. “Did you know?” he said.

  “Give us a minute, Star,” Leo said. The stripper stopped sashaying, picked up a silk robe that lay in a puddle on the floor, put it on, and left without a word.

  Leo frowned. “The triangles bothered me,” he said. He took another swallow of his drink, holding it in his mouth for a moment. “Jeremy was always jealous of Isabel. He thought Jack loved her more. When Jack named the Isabel after her, Jeremy lost it—tried to wreck the boat, tore the sail, cut the lines.” Leo warmed his drink in his hands. “I always wondered if that’s what the triangles carved into Isabel were—boats.”

  Maybe Jeremy had convinced himself that Gretchen had actually killed his sister. Or maybe he had just been lying all along.

  “When did you know for sure?” Archie asked.

  “He had this fascination with eyes as a kid. Used to pop them out of Isabel’s dolls and carry them around in his pocket.” Leo looked in his glass. “The eyes. That’s when I knew for sure.”

  “Gretchen came to see me tonight,” Archie said.

  Leo looked up from his glass.

  “Jeremy’s dead. She killed him. She brought me his eyes.”

  Leo was quiet for a long time. Then he drained his glass in one swallow and set it on the sofa. “Just the eyes?” he asked.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Archie. “He’s still alive.”

  C H A P T E R 61

  Susan’s mother was teaching a yoga class at the Arlington Club, and Susan was trying to figure out how to get Project Runway to stream on her laptop, when she looked up to see Archie Sheridan standing at the front door. She was wearing black sweatpants and a threadbare U of O T-shirt that she slept in, and Uggs. It was not the outfit she imagined wearing when she pictured Archie Sheridan showing up at her front door at night.

  She closed her laptop and padded to the door.

  Her bandage was off, but the two puncture wounds on her face had bruised and swollen, and a black eye was coming in. As she opened the door, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass and winced.

  The porch light was on, and gnats batted against the fixture. August was the only month of the year in Portland that Susan felt comfortable outside at night without a jacket.

  “What’s going on?” Susan asked. She’d been burning incense. Patchouli. And a cloud of it drifted out around her on the porch. She hoped Archie wouldn’t notice it.

  “I need the phone,” Archie said.

  She knew which phone he meant. But she was surprised by his confidence in the fact that she had it, that it wasn’t still sitting in her glove box unnoticed.

  The only way he’d know that she’d found it was if he knew that she’d used it to try to contact Gretchen. And the only way he’d know she’d tried to contact Gretchen was if he’d been in touch with Gretchen since.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She left him on the porch, went into the dining room, retrieved the red purse she’d hung on the back of a chair, and returned to the front door. Then she dug out the phone and held it out to him.

  He took it, and for a moment their fingers touched. Archie scrolled through the messages. He blinked in disbelief. “You texted her?” he said.

  Susan shrugged and looked away. “You were in trouble.” She tried to make up for it. “I plugged it in,” she said. “I have the same charger.”

  Archie finished going through the messages. “There’s nothing here,” he said. He dialed a number and walked away a few steps on the porch, the phone to his ear. Then his shoulders fell and he turned back around to face her. “The number she was calling from is disconnected. There’s no way to find her.”

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  Archie steadied himself on the doorjamb. “Gretchen has Jeremy.”

  Susan had seen his injuries—he had to be in pain. He was probably delirious. “Do you want to come in and sit down?” Susan asked.

  “No time,” Archie said, shaking his head. “Gretchen didn’t kill Isabel Reynolds,” he added. “Jeremy did.”

  Susan’s hand rose reflexively to her cheek. She flashed on

  Isabel—tortured for two days before she died. It couldn’t be true. What kind of thirteen-year-old kid was capable of that?

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  Archie pressed his forehead against the doorjamb. “She’s going to kill him, if he’s not dead already,” he said. He lifted his head and banged it against the wood. “He played me. He told me that he remembered everything, that Gretchen killed Isabel in the woods. But Isabel was gagged. Wherever Jeremy took her, it wasn’t the woods.” He knocked his forehead against the wood again, as if trying to jog a thought loose. “If they were in the woods, he wouldn’t have had to gag her. But he would have had to take her somewhere private, somewhere he could hide the car. Somewhere people might hear if she wasn’t gagged.”

  And suddenly Susan knew.

  “Derek said that house on Fargo’s been empty for fifteen years,” she said. “The Rose Garden. Pittock Mansion. The old produce warehouse. They were all Beauty Killer crime scenes.”

  Archie lifted his head off the doorjamb and looked at her.

  Susan continued. “There’s a foundation for a garage. Maybe twelve years ago the garage was still there.”

  “He parked the car in the old garage and tortured his sister to death over two days,” Archie said slowly. “Three-nine-seven.” He closed his eyes. “March 1997. He practically spelled it out for us.”

  “You think Gretchen is there, right now?” Susan asked. “With Jeremy?” She waved a hand. “So call the SWAT team. Call everyone. Drop a bomb on the whole fucking block.”

  Archie just looked at her.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re going by yourself, aren’t you?”

  He turned and started down the steps, one hand held to his side, one hand on the railing.

  Susan was filled with terror—terror of Gretchen, terror that she would never see Archie again.

  She grabbed her purse from inside the door and sprinted after him. “I’m going with you,” she said. “I’ve been inside. I know the house.” She took him by the elbow, letting him lean on her. “I’m not going to let you face her alone.”

  C H A P T E R 62

  Gretchen is already there, clad in blue inmate denim and manacled at the table, when Archie walks into the concrete-block interrogation room at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  A month in a medically induced coma, a month of physical therapy, and he still can’t walk across a room upright.

  Gretchen smiles when she sees him and the oxygen rushes out of the room as if she’d swallowed it.

  Archie can’t look at her. He glances away—at the one-way glass Henry waits behind—but sees only the two of them reflected back at him.

  The thick metal door closes behind Archie and locks. It’s an electronic lock, controlled by a set of buzzers near the door and a master board in the adjacent observation room. Two guards stand armed in the hallway outside. But inside, in that room, it’s just the two of them. Those were her terms.

  “I’ve missed you, darling,” she says.

  The smell of the room reminds Archie of the basement she kept him in, concrete and cleaning solvents. “What do you miss exactly?” he asks, his voice still hoarse from the poison she’d fed him. “The smell of my blood?”

  She folds her hands on the table. “I’ve hurt your feelings,” she says.

  Archie looks at her, flustered. He has no idea how to respond. “You fed me drain cleaner and cut out my spleen,” he says.

  Her look of concern seems unsettlingly genuine. “How are the scars healing?” she asks.

  She was still beautiful. Even in these surroundings, in the shapeless prison garb, no makeup, his body still responds to her. He hates himself for it.

  “You’re high,” she says.

  “I’m on painkillers,”
he says. She had fed him pills in the basement, rewarding him with them when he’d choke down the drain cleaner, dropping them down his throat when he could no longer sit up to swallow them.

  He doesn’t take them for the pain anymore.

  She lifts her cuffed hands and gestures to the chair across the table from her. “Do you want to sit down?”

  His broken ribs are still healing, making sitting difficult. The cotton of his shirt chafes his raw scars. The heart-shaped scar on his chest still bleeds sometimes. “I think I’ll stand,” he says.