Kill You Twice

  “She must have an angle,” Flannigan said.

  Archie looked at his hands. Of course there was an angle. Gretchen always had an angle. “She says that she didn’t kill any of the children we’ve accused her of murdering,” Archie said. “She says that she’s never killed a child, and that Ryan Motley is behind all of those murders. That,” he said, “is her angle.”

  Flannigan nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” Archie said.

  “I just wanted to know,” Flannigan said. “So that I could be sure that you knew.” He started stacking the printouts on the table. “I’ll work with Levy on reviewing the case files.”

  Everyone but Archie and Henry started pushing their chairs out and packing up.

  “No media on this,” Archie told them. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  Archie watched them all walk out. Except for Henry. Henry still sat at the table, his hands folded on his belly, his gaze leveled at Archie. His blue eyes were cloudy. The bristles on his shaved head were turning white. He had started to look like an old man.

  Archie picked a dog hair off his pants and waited for Henry to ask.

  “You went and saw her, didn’t you?” Henry said.

  Archie exhaled slowly. “Susan called me after the interview,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, so I lied to you about it. I went and saw Gretchen to tell her to stay away from Susan.”

  Henry’s face reddened. He moved his jaw around and then pushed his chair out and stood up. He stalked back and forth for a few moments and then picked up the chair and slid it hard across the linoleum. It skidded and fell on its side. “Bullshit,” Henry said.

  Archie had seen Henry lose his temper only a few times. It had a way of drawing all the oxygen out of a room. Archie kept his eyes on the table. “I wanted to see her,” he said. “I knew you’d stop me.”

  Henry leaned in close to Archie, his flushed face inches from Archie’s nose. “Better,” Henry said.

  “She’s in bad shape,” Archie said. He’d meant it as an objective report, but he couldn’t suppress a slight smile.

  Henry saw it. He shook his head and pointed a finger in Archie’s face. “I’m not doing this again,” he said. “You and her.” His eyes went to the ceiling in exasperation. “Your thing. I’m not doing it.”

  Archie didn’t know what to say. He had lied. But he had lied about much worse, and Henry knew it. This was about something else.

  “I can’t take care of you right now,” Henry said. “I have other responsibilities.” He lowered his chin to indicate his leg. “I’m not at a hundred percent here.”

  Archie wanted to say the right thing. “Can I help?” he asked.

  Henry chuckled. “You want to help me?” he asked. “Here’s an insight. Every lie you’ve ever told me has something to do with Gretchen Lowell. Someday, when it matters, I want you to lie to her, and tell me the truth. Let’s start there.”

  “Okay,” Archie said.

  Henry put his fists on the table and leaned on his knuckles. “Things are different now,” Henry said. “I have a person. I have Claire.”

  “I know,” Archie said.

  “I would still jump in front of a bus for you,” Henry said.

  “I know,” Archie said.

  “A short bus,” Henry said.

  “Right.”

  Henry glanced behind him at the chair on the floor.

  Archie hesitated. The black plastic chair lay on its side, metal legs in the air. Was this a test? “You want me to get that?” Archie asked.

  “I can get my own fucking chair,” Henry said. He didn’t move. “But if it will make you feel better.”

  Archie got up and walked over and picked up the chair and carried it back to the table. Henry sat down with a groan, and started rubbing his leg. “You still have the Beauty Killer files at home?” Henry asked.

  “Not everything,” Archie said. “Just what I need.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows at him.

  Archie didn’t say anything.

  “She killed those kids, Archie,” Henry said.

  Archie felt his stomach tighten. He couldn’t believe he was going to say it out loud. “What if she didn’t?”

  CHAPTER

  37

  It was almost eight o’clock and Susan was on her fourth cigarette when Archie came out of the task force building. She had been waiting an hour—rehearsing what she was going to say—when he fled out the front door and, without even a glance at her, made a beeline for his car.

  “Hey!” she said, running after him in the parking lot. He stopped, and she saw his shoulders slump, and then he turned around. “Susan,” he said, making her name sound like a sigh.

  The speech she’d been rehearsing went out the window. “You played my recording for them,” she said.

  “You gave it to me,” he said.

  God, he was dense sometimes. “I gave it to you,” Susan said. “My friend. Not the Portland Police Department. You passed out my printed copies. I didn’t give those to you. I showed them to you. There’s a difference.”

  “I’ll print you out more,” Archie said. “It’s the principle,” Susan said, exasperated. “I can’t turn over investigative material to the police. She called me as a journalist.”

  Archie didn’t look all that impressed by her outraged reporter act. He got his car keys out of his pocket. “She called you because she couldn’t get to me,” he said. “She knew you’d give me the information, and she knew I’d use it. She knew I would go down there. You performed your role.”

  Susan knew he was right, but she didn’t like hearing it. She took a drag off her cigarette. “I’m writing the story,” she said.

  Archie shook his head. “Not Ryan Motley. You need to leave him out of it. Write about seeing her. Print every word on that tape. But do not mention Motley. You’re dealing with the parents of murdered children here. We cannot make this public until we are certain. At this point he’s a phantom. All we have is her say-so. And it’s very likely polluted by some deranged agenda that you don’t understand.”

  And you do? thought Susan.

  Archie had said himself that Gretchen had given him the flash drive a year ago. He’d had 365 days to follow up on it. But it had been Susan who’d finally plugged the thing into a USB port. If it hadn’t been for her, it would still be sitting in Archie’s desk with his Wite-Out collection. And now she was being sidelined. Sometimes Susan felt like Archie didn’t appreciate her at all. “Why did you wait so long to look at the flash drive?” she asked.

  “We knew we couldn’t trust the information,” Archie said. “Henry and I agreed not to play her games.”

  Except that Archie had been champing at the bit to learn what was on that memory stick, once Susan had seen it. He’d known that Susan had taken the flash drive from his desk. But he hadn’t been angry. He hadn’t yelled at her once. “You wanted me to steal it,” Susan said. “You’d promised Henry you wouldn’t look at it. You were stuck. But if I opened it up, if I saw what was on the flash drive, then you could find out what was on it without breaking your promise. You left me in your office. You know I snoop. I told you over the phone that Gretchen had mentioned Ryan Motley. You knew I’d seen that flash drive, and you knew I’d take it. You set me up. You refused to play Gretchen’s games. But you played me.”

  Archie lowered his gaze, like he was shamed or maybe just looking at his shoes or the pavement or a particularly interesting ant. Then he lifted his head and looked right at her. “We’re not friends, Susan,” he said. “We don’t hang out. I’m a cop. I’m not your friend.”

  Susan stammered. Her face burned. She took a drag of her cigarette while she tried to figure out what to say. She knew what he was doing. He was trying to push her away. He was being mean to her so she’d stalk off and leave him to wallow in whatever trap Gretchen had set for him.

  Fat chance.

  He wasn’t telling her everything. He wasn’t even telli
ng her half of everything.

  “You went and saw her, didn’t you?” she said.

  If she was looking for a reaction, she didn’t get one. Archie didn’t flinch, didn’t move a muscle. When you looked at dead people and talked to psychopaths for a living, you probably got really good at masking your emotions. She watched as he gently took the cigarette from between her fingers, took a slow long drag off it, and then dropped it on the pavement and stepped on it. “You should quit,” he said. “Before those kill you.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Archie studied the picture of the dead boy.

  His windows were open and a warm night air had settled in his apartment, along with a faint smell of flood-rotted foliage. Archie stretched and tried to find a more comfortable position on the floor. He settled on a slightly less uncomfortable one.

  The dead boy was named Thomas, and the relevant details of his death could be stored in a cardboard file box.

  Thomas had lived on Forest Street in Bellingham, Washington, a college town on Bellingham Bay, north of Seattle. It was a small, idyllic city, framed by conifer-thick hills with bald patches from decades of clear-cutting.

  Archie remembered the case. He remembered all of the cases.

  Thomas had set out for Forest & Cedar Park one day after school. It was a two-block walk along a street where people didn’t lock their doors. That year alone the task force had attributed nineteen bodies to the Beauty Killer. But her killing ground had been south of there, and east: Seattle, Olympia, Spokane, Yakima. North of Seattle, that close to the Canadian border, the public had felt safer.

  Archie unclipped the photograph from the file and gazed at it, trying to see what he had not seen the first thousand times he’d looked at it, some detail, some clue that said this wasn’t the work of Gretchen.

  Any physical evidence was locked up downtown. Gigabytes of data—digital photographs, reports, scanned documents—lay, password-protected, on a mainframe somewhere. But over the years, Archie had created a shadow filing system of his own—copies of originals. Gretchen had confessed to a few dozen of the hundreds of murders they suspected her of committing. Now, with her locked up, most of her presumed victims would lay in a cold-case purgatory, the cases open but half solved, forever attributed to the Beauty Killer.

  In Archie’s hand, in the photograph, Thomas lay dead, nestled among ferns and the velvet moss of a wooded area on the college campus, about four miles from his home. He had been posed, left on his back, arms at his sides, legs together, like a lost doll.

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when he’d left the house the afternoon before: blue jeans, a green T-shirt, sneakers.

  From a distance, he could have been alive.

  But the intimacy of the color photograph told another story: the telephone cord, double-knotted so tightly it cut through the flesh; the blood seeping through the chest of the green shirt; the pale lips, closed, sunken eyes; skin the color of boiled meat.

  A student had found the body. The Bellingham PD had put in a call to the task force, and Archie had been in the air within an hour. It was a two-hour flight on a private plane provided by the father of another of Gretchen’s victims. The local cops had been waiting for Archie as he’d departed the flight at the Bellingham airport. They had preserved the crime scene. Thirty minutes later, Archie was standing over the boy’s body, his suitcase, a carry-on from a set of Debbie’s, in the trunk of a squad car.

  There had been no lily.

  Only ants and decomp and, underneath the T-shirt, carved onto the center of the boy’s undeveloped chest, a wound in the shape of a heart.

  People in Bellingham locked their doors after that.

  The media entered full-blown Beauty Killer hysteria. The task force had their funding doubled. The FBI sent another round of profilers. A murdered child was shocking. But no one put it past her. All of Gretchen’s murders were different. She didn’t have a profile or an MO. It was the key to her ability to terrorize. When serial killers only went after lanky teenage redheads, then everyone who wasn’t a lanky teenage redhead didn’t have to worry. But Gretchen went out of her way to kill from all segments of society, all ages, all races—she was an equal-opportunity serial killer.

  She was also creative. She enjoyed her work. She looked for fresh ways to cause pain: needles, electrical cords, scalpels, poison, gardening tools, drain cleaner. Each victim’s wounds were a new wicked topography. But she had also garroted her victims, suffocated them, strangled them, exsanguinated them, shot them, stabbed them, and poisoned them.

  But while the MOs and victim profiles varied, Gretchen always left the same signature: a heart.

  Always, a heart.

  It was how she signed her work. And like any megalomaniacal artist, she always, always signed her work.

  Archie extracted a copy of a second photograph from the boy’s file and studied it. This one showed Thomas Vernon laid out on the brushed-steel surface of an autopsy table, the camera focused on his slight chest, the raw heart-shaped wound there. The picture would have been taken moments before the ME had cut into the boy’s chest, starting at the top of each shoulder, meeting at the sternum, and extending through the rib cage, down through the abdominal wall. The top triangular flap of flesh would have then been pulled back over Thomas’s face, and the ME would have used shears to tear through the chest cavity, and a bone saw to cut the boy’s ribs.

  Archie unbuttoned his shirt and felt for the heart-shaped scar on his own chest. He traced it with his fingertips, trying to feel if it looked the same as the wound on the boy.

  He got up off the floor and went into the bathroom and he held the photo of the dead boy’s chest next to his own reflection in the mirror.

  “There, darling,” Gretchen had said after carving her signature into Archie, “I’ve given you my heart.”

  Archie’s hair was matted with sweat, his brow shiny. The scarring on his torso made his chest hair look scraggly and uneven. In the bright light of the bathroom he could see every nick and hash mark she’d left on him.

  The hearts looked similar. The mark on Thomas had been cut with a scalpel, right-handed, the left side of the heart first, top to bottom, then the right.

  It was all in the ME’s report. It fit.

  The heart on Archie had been cut the same way.

  Archie scratched the back of his neck and looked at the photograph some more. Homicide investigation photos were shameless in their starkness. In death, there were no private moments. Bodies were picked over for trace evidence, undressed, cut open, the organs weighed and bagged. Photographs were taken at the crime scene, at the autopsy. The body became fragmented—a photograph of a chest wound, the weight of a liver, carpet fibers collected off clothing.

  It was easier to see the pieces than to see the whole.

  Archie looked up at his reflection. He thought for a minute.

  Then he padded quickly back into his bedroom and sat back down on the floor and started sorting through Thomas Vernon’s file. When he found the city map of Bellingham, he unfolded it and found the X he’d used to mark the spot where Thomas Vernon’s body had been found. Then he looked for and found the other marks he had made on the map: the boy’s house, the route to the park he had been heading to. Archie ran his finger from the park to the wooded area where the body had been dumped. Straight up. Thomas had disappeared on Forest Street. His body had been found the next morning on the grounds of Western Washington University, several hundred feet in elevation up the hill from Forest

  Street.

  He had been killed, and then carried higher.

  Archie moved deftly through the boxes, sorting out the other folders of murdered children. He looked for maps, scanned notes.

  His bedroom fan made the pages dance on the floor.

  Every child had been left at an elevation higher than the place where he or she had disappeared. It was subtle sometimes. A child found on the second floor of an abandoned house; another v
anished from a mall, then left on the fourth floor of the mall parking garage. The police had not noticed it. They had not been looking for common threads between the child victims. They had been focused on the victims as a whole, and Gretchen’s victims had mainly been adults.

  Archie started to bend down to pick up a photograph, then stopped. His skin prickled.

  There was someone else in the room. Whether it was a sound that had given the person away, or a shadow in Archie’s peripheral vision, Archie didn’t know. He just went from being alone, to knowing that he was not.

  Archie’s hand went to his gun. It was a reflex, like lifting a hand to catch a sneeze. He had unsnapped the holster by the time he realized it was her. She was standing in his bedroom doorway, a cup of coffee in her hand, watching him. This time she was wearing the robe.

  Rachel took a step back. “Easy,” she said.

  Archie took his hand off his gun. He tried to do it casually, and not like he had almost shot her. He took a long, careful breath, and ran his hand over his face. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “It’s five in the morning,” she said. “I came up here to tell you to quiet the hell down. I keep hearing you up here walking around, dragging stuff across the floor. I knocked. You didn’t hear me. Your front door was open.”

  Archie looked out the north window of his bedroom. The sky was a soft pink. There were boxes all over his bedroom, files fanned out on every surface. He’d spent half the night hunched over paperwork, the other half asleep on the floor.

  Rachel’s eyes grazed the files. “I see you bring your work home with you,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people who have guns,” Archie said, still rattled.

  “Your little project here has kept me awake half the night,” Rachel said. Her eyes looked him up and down. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “On and off,” Archie said. He recognized that this wasn’t normal. His room was a tornado of files, on the floor, on the bed. He sat down on the bed and started shuffling papers.