Evil at Heart

by Chelsea Cain

  She nods in understanding. “Of course,” she says.

  It’s warm in there, and Archie pulls at the collar of his shirt. He is there for the victims. This is what he’s told himself, what he’s told Henry, Debbie. No one expected him to give in to her crazy demands to meet with him. She’d nearly killed him. But he’s dragged himself there to help with the identification project, for the victims.

  The victims.

  It wasn’t the whole truth.

  It has been two months since her arrest, and he’s gotten tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. She hasn’t told anyone about

  their relationship. He is prepared to deny it. He can explain the time they had spent together in the context of the case. But wondering why she has remained quiet is killing him.

  “What do you want from me?” he asks Gretchen.

  “You’ve read the plea agreement,” she says. “I’m going to confess. I’m going to tell you everything, every person I murdered. You can close all the cases.”

  “Just like that.”

  “You’ll earn it,” she says, and Archie feels the promise of that statement heavy in the room.

  “Why did you do it?” he asks her. He doesn’t mean the murders. He means the affair.

  “For fun,” she says. But he’s not sure which question she’s answering.

  He leans back against the door, feeling weak.

  “Sit down,” she says again. “Please.”

  He does this time, making his way to the table and lowering himself painfully onto the chair.

  “Don’t be sad,” she says. “You caught me. You’re a hero. You got exactly what you wanted.”

  A hero. He’s been manipulated from the start. Amativeness. He wonders if it is even a real thing.

  “Name a case you want to close, a case that’s important to you.”

  Archie rolls his head back and looks at the ceiling. His scalp tingles from the Vicodin. He just wants to go home. To beg for forgiveness. It’s all right, she had said when he was dying in her arms. And he’d believed her. He lifts his head and glances over at the one-way glass. Something good might as well come out of all this.

  “Isabel Reynolds,” he says.

  Something changes in Gretchen’s face—a tiny lift of her eyebrows, a minuscule furrow between them. Her mouth tightens almost imperceptibly.

  “She’s special,” Gretchen says. “She will be a prize. I’ll tell you about her, darling. When you’re ready.”

  Archie sits up a little. Gretchen’s face has reverted to a convivial mask. But for a second, he’s seen through her.

  She had manipulated him, toyed with him, tortured him, but in the process she’d let him see her. He knows her—at least some small part of her. And it might be enough to work to his advantage.

  “Matthew Fowler,” Archie says.

  Gretchen smiles. “You called it a glass rod,” she says. “It was a swizzle stick.” She lifts a hand and rotates a finger in the air. “I worked a swizzle stick up Matthew Fowler’s urethra.” She looks off in the middle distance, a slight smile on her face, as if she is reliving a fond memory. “It took almost half an hour. I had to be very delicate, very precise. Once it was completely inserted I wrapped my hand around the bottom of the shaft and I broke it.” Her hand tightens into a fist. “I just kept squeezing. I could feel the snap inside him under my hand.” She relaxes her hand and her smile widens. “All at once, this blood full of tiny pieces of glass came pouring out of the tip of his cock.”

  Archie reaches into his pocket, gets his new pillbox out, dumps some Vicodin in his hand and swallows them.

  She looks up. “Should I continue?” she asks.

  “I’m here,” he says.

  C H A P T E R 63

  The house on North Fargo was dark. There were two streetlights on the block, one at each corner. The abandoned house sat in the middle of the block, with two empty lots on each side and a new FOR SALE sign in the yard. An enterprising billboard company had erected a standing billboard on the left-most lot, nearest the freeway exit. Plastered on it was a huge photograph of a woman jogging. EXERCISE CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE read the slogan along the bottom.

  “Twelve hundred people die every month jogging,” Susan said.

  Archie held Henry’s gun on his lap. The perimeter of the house was taped off with crime tape tied to wooden stakes. The front door would be sealed with more crime tape. But Archie couldn’t see it. It was too dark.

  “How did you get in before?” he asked.

  “Through a broken basement window,” Susan said.

  Archie raised an eyebrow at her.

  “I didn’t do it,” she said.

  “Show me.”

  They got out of the car. Susan’s Saab was the only car parked on that block. He held the gun at his side, but he disengaged the safety. She was in there. He could feel her.

  Susan directed him up the mossy concrete steps, through the overgrown yard, around the side of the house. As he followed her lead, he managed to keep a step ahead, one arm out in front of her, as if that small attempt at protection would make a difference.

  They got to the window. It had been covered with new plywood. Archie sank to his knees in the soft dirt in front of it.

  The plywood was screwed on tight, no way to pry it off. All the windows had probably been reinforced. The front door was certainly padlocked.

  “Here,” Susan said. She knelt beside him, rummaged through her bag, and came up with a pocket tool. She opened it with a flick of her wrist, folded out the screwdriver, and set about unscrewing the screws that held the plywood in place.

  He watched her in amazement as she quickly twisted out the screws and then lifted the plywood aside.

  Susan’s face was suddenly flooded with color, her hair a blaze of purple. There was a light on in the basement. Archie pushed Susan to the left of the window, out of view of anyone watching, and held the plywood back in place.

  “She’s here,” Susan whispered in the darkness.

  Archie reached out and sealed her lips with his finger.

  He waited a moment, letting his heartbeat slow. Then he moved the plywood back aside, and peered in the window. He could see broken glass below on the basement floor. The light wasn’t coming from the main room. There was another room. Off the basement stairs. A boiler room.

  Archie tucked the gun in his pants, placed his hands on either side of the window, and lowered himself through.

  The glass crunched under his feet. He looked back at Susan, concerned face framed in the window, and motioned for her to stay there. He drew the gun and moved toward the light.

  The door to the old boiler room was open, and light from it spilled in a warped rectangle on the concrete floor. The room was large, maybe a quarter of the basement’s square footage. The boiler was long gone, replaced by a dust-covered furnace. There were fixtures for a washer and dryer and a hot water heater. A laundry line stretched across one corner, wooden clothespins clipped along it in a neat row.

  Naked, suspended from his own hooks, in the middle of the room, was Jeremy. The hooks pierced his chest, torso, and legs, so that he was lying flat, faceup, table-height from the floor, like a specimen about to be dissected. His wrists were duct-taped behind his back.

  “Coma position,” Jeremy had called it.

  The flesh tented at each hook site, strange triangles of strained skin that looked as if they might give in to gravity at any moment. Jeremy’s head lolled back, his pale neck arched, Adam’s apple protruded. The one eye socket Archie could see was a bloody hole. A black rubber-ball gag sealed Jeremy’s mouth, but in the silence of the basement, Archie could now hear Jeremy’s pitiful moan.

  Gretchen stood on the other side of Jeremy, facing Archie, elbows out, brows knitted, a scalpel in her hand. Freckles of blood splattered her bare arms. She’d been busy. Jeremy’s chest was raw with wounds. His torso was striped with blood trailing down his rib cage and dripping onto the concrete floor.

  Archie tu
cked his gun behind him and took a step to stand in the doorway.

  She lowered the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest and drew it toward her, as Jeremy choked against the gag. The Palmar grip. All those

  years, Archie and his task force had hunted her, always five steps behind. He had stood at so many crime scenes, seen so many bodies, reviewed so many autopsies, trying to put himself in the moment of the victim’s terror. Then he had experienced it firsthand.

  “Hello, darling,” she said to Archie. She didn’t look up. She just knew he was there. “Have you come to watch me work?”

  “I’ve seen you at work,” Archie said. “Remember?” He heard the faint sound of crunching glass, as Susan’s feet hit the basement floor.

  “This is different,” she said. She smiled up at him. “Come on. Come take a closer look.”

  Archie wanted to keep Gretchen’s attention on him, so she wouldn’t notice Susan, so he walked toward her. Jeremy, hearing Archie, lifted his head and struggled, causing his body to swing, but Gretchen put a hand out and steadied the rigging. Blood ran from Jeremy’s eye sockets like tears.

  Archie stood across from Gretchen, Jeremy suspended between them. The room reeked of urine. A dark puddle stained the concrete below Jeremy. He’d wet himself. Gretchen bent over again, getting back to work, pressing the scalpel into Jeremy’s flesh. His torso was shredded. The wounds varied in depth. Some were mere slivers of red; some gaped open exposing fat; some gurgled blood.

  “You were special,” Gretchen said to Archie. “You got special treatment.” She frowned at Jeremy’s brutalized skin. “This is hardly any pleasure at all.” She moved a stray piece of red hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “But work can’t always be fun, can it? That’s what makes it work.”

  He realized then what she was doing. She was excising the scar tissue of the wounds that Jeremy had self-inflicted, the badges he had not earned.

  “You think Jack Reynolds was going to let this go to trial?” she said, still focused on the scalpel. “He would have had Jeremy killed.

  On the street. In jail. He would have found a way. Because Jeremy going on trial for multiple murders, that would lead to some discussion of Jack Reynolds’s business interests.” She lifted the scalpel and dragged it along the heart Jeremy had carved on himself. “Jeremy is dead one way or another. You know that.”

  “Go ahead,” Archie said. “Kill him. I didn’t come here to save him. I came here for you.”

  Jeremy started to sob, the ball gag bobbing, slippery with saliva.

  Gretchen sized up Archie’s groin. “Are you going to try to strangle me again?”

  He could shoot her. But she had a scalpel in her hand and she would finish Jeremy off if she could. And Susan was behind him, somewhere. He didn’t want to risk the bullet ricocheting off one of the concrete walls. Not yet.

  Archie smoothed a hand over Jeremy’s sweat-and blood-matted hair. “He told me that he fantasizes that we’re lovers,” Archie said to Gretchen. “He likes to think about me hurting you.”

  “Well, he is a psychopath,” Gretchen said. She nicked at the heart-shaped scar, peeled a piece of the tissue off with her fingers, and flung it to the floor at her feet.

  Archie squatted down, so that his face was level with Jeremy’s. It felt good to sit. “Actually, you’re very intuitive, Jeremy,” Archie said. Jeremy twisted his head to face Archie, a black ball for a mouth, bloody craters for eyes. “We had an affair,” Archie told him. “Before I knew who she was.” It was a relief to tell someone, to actually say it. “Two weeks. That’s how long it took. She appeared, with her fake psychiatric degree, and offered to help us with the case.” Archie slowly shook his head, his lips curled in a dark smile. “Fifteen years of faithful marriage and I lasted two weeks before I fell panting into Gretchen Lowell’s arms.”

  “I’m the best fuck you’ve ever had, darling,” Gretchen said sweetly.

  “Indisputably,” said Archie. He wondered where Susan was, and if she could hear him.

  Jeremy gnawed at the gag and pushed at Archie with his head, pleading for help. Had Isabel pleaded for help like that? Had she begged her brother for mercy?

  “Anyway,” Archie continued, “a month into our affair, she poisons me, takes me into a basement like this one and tortures me.” He pictured Susan, behind him, in the shadows, listening. “I deserved it. I’d betrayed my family. And even after I was out of the hospital and she was in jail, she was all I could think about.” Archie leaned forward, his mouth inches from Jeremy’s ear. “It was just me, in bed, thinking about how much I wanted to fuck Gretchen again.” He glanced up at Gretchen. “I kept asking myself why she’d done it. Why then? What was her plan for me?”

  Gretchen stood motionless, the scalpel still in her hand.

  He laughed. He sounded crazy. Maybe he was crazy.

  Archie put his mouth back to Jeremy’s ear. “Here’s the thing,” Archie said in a stage whisper. “I don’t think she had one.” He looked up at Gretchen. “I think she infiltrated the investigation for her own amusement. I think the affair just happened. For a long time I thought she tortured me because I was the head of her task force, to show the world that she was all-powerful. But I don’t think that’s it. I think she tortured me because we were having an affair and she thought that I was going to break it off.”

  Gretchen’s mouth changed. It was something no one else in the world would notice. But that was his gift. No one knew her like he did.

  Archie stood. “Am I right, sweetheart?”

  Gretchen sank the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest, sliced, and peeled up the rest of his heart scar. “I don’t do anything without a plan,” she said, and she dropped the bloody yarn of flesh on the floor.

  “You want to know what’s funny?” Archie said. There was no amusement in his tone. “I wasn’t going to leave you.” He paused and looked at her, really looked at her, trying to see her as he’d seen her before he knew what she was. “I was going to leave Debbie.”

  Jeremy emitted another low moan. The gun in Archie’s waistband pressed against his back. He couldn’t hear Susan. He hoped that she’d climbed back out of the basement.

  “Why did you come here?” Gretchen asked.

  “To kill you,” Archie said.

  “How badly do you want it?”

  “Pretty badly,” Archie said.

  Gretchen sank the scalpel into the fold of Jeremy’s groin. Jeremy howled against the gag, and Gretchen seized Archie’s right hand and pushed his fingers inside the warm wound, positioning Archie’s thumb and forefinger together around Jeremy’s throbbing femoral artery.

  “The femoral artery is the second biggest artery in the body,” she said. “You take your finger out of the dike and he’ll bleed out in about a minute.”

  Bright red blood spurted between Archie’s fingers with each one of Jeremy’s heartbeats. All cops were required to take some emergency medicine. Heimlich. CPR. How to treat someone in shock. But the one you paid special attention to was how to treat a wound in the field, because if you were ever shot, it could save your life. Archie couldn’t leave him. If he pulled his hand away, Jeremy would die. Archie pressed his left hand on top of his right to get enough pressure to slow the blood flow.

  Gretchen backed away.

  “You can save him,” she said. “He’ll live. You can put him on trial.” She came around Jeremy’s body to Archie’s side and set the scalpel down on the floor at Archie’s feet.

  “Or you can come for me.”

  The pulse of blood against Archie’s fingers increased as Jeremy’s heart rate quickened. Archie’s hand was halfway inside Jeremy’s body. He could feel the heat and life of him.

  He thought of Isabel Reynolds, of three homeless people Jeremy had killed, of Fintan English who’d died in this very house. He looked up at Gretchen. At the scalpel on the floor between them. And he released Jeremy’s artery and lifted his hands.

  Jeremy made a noise. “No.”

  Archi
e took two steps toward Gretchen and scooped up the scalpel in his bloody hand. Gretchen stiffened and took a step back, against the wall. He was on top of her in a moment, their bodies a few inches apart, his palm flat on the wall next to her head.

  He could hear Jeremy struggling against the nylon ropes, making strangled cries.

  The scalpel was light in his hand, pretty, the same model she had used to carve him up.

  “Whatever made you think that I don’t support the death penalty?” Archie said.

  He stabbed her below the left rib cage.

  The scalpel went in all the way to the handle, and Archie held it there, his fist against her heaving abdomen. He looked down between them and saw blood. He tried to ignore Jeremy’s whimpers.