Evil at Heart (53 page)

           
She smiled and turned away from him. “You’re close, darling. Don’t worry. You’ll get there. But first you want to ask me about Isabel Reynolds. What is it that’s nagging at you? The triangles?” She touched the towel over his thigh, where he had cut himself for Jeremy.

           
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll play. Did you kill Isabel Reynolds?”

           
Gretchen lifted her finger to her chin thoughtfully and seemed to consider the question. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t kill children.”

           
“Fuck you,” he said.

           
“There you go,” Gretchen said. “That’s what you need. Anger. The psych ward took some of your edge, didn’t it? We need to get that back.”

           
“You think I won’t kill you? I daydream about killing you.”

           
She stepped away from the sideboard. “It’s in the drawer,” she said. “Go ahead. I put it there for you.”

           
Archie went to the drawer and pulled it open. There, lying on a stack of cloth Christmas napkins, was Henry’s gun.

           
Archie picked it up and pointed it at Gretchen.

           
She smiled.

           
“Did you kill Isabel Reynolds?” Archie said.

           
Gretchen looked him in the eyes. “I don’t kill children,” she said.

           
She was lying. There were three children on the Beauty Killer victim list besides Isabel Reynolds. All tortured and left with hearts carved on their chests. “I saw the bodies,” Archie said.

           
“I had an apprentice,” Gretchen said with a dismissive motion of her hand. “His name is Ryan Motley. I couldn’t control him. When he left my orbit he embraced his own work.”

           
Archie didn’t believe her. Sometimes he wondered if everything out of her mouth was a lie.

           
“You’re saying he killed Isabel?” Archie said.

           
“No,” Gretchen said. “He didn’t kill Isabel Reynolds.”

           
“Who did?” Archie asked. And even as he said it, his gut twisted, because somehow, deep down, he already knew.

           
“I always assumed it was the brother,” Gretchen said.

           
She’d had access to the confidential case files when she’d infiltrated the case as a psychiatrist. She could have read everything they had on Jeremy, even his psych reports.

           
“He killed her,” she continued, “and carved a heart on her and then screamed Beauty Killer. I don’t mind usually when I get credit for other people’s work. But Jeremy Reynolds was a psycho little shit who killed his sister and got away with it.”

           
Archie fought it. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.” She was fucking with him. She was manipulating him. She was trying to take Jeremy away from him.

           
“Why now?” Archie asked. “You’ve let us think you killed those children. Why deny it now? You expect me to believe there’s some moral line you won’t cross? That you have rules?”

           
“You know I’m telling the truth. Because if I did kill children, you know—in your heart—that I’d have killed yours.”

           
Archie pulled the trigger. The hammer came down harmlessly. The chamber was empty.

           
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Gretchen said.

           
Archie snapped. He lunged for her, knotted his fist in her hair, and pushed her against the wall. She laughed at him, and it fueled his rage. He used his body as leverage against hers, pinning her. Then he placed his free hand on her throat and pushed. She didn’t struggle. She just looked at him. Her face reddened and she gasped involuntarily against his grasp. Saliva pooled at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes widened.

           
He could smell her, the sweet stink of their sweat intermingled.

           
Her dress was torn at the shoulder from when he’d grabbed her. Her hair was mussed.

           
She didn’t look so beautiful anymore.

           
His chest heaved and she arched her back, pressing her breasts into him. He lifted her up off her feet, sliding her up against the wall, until they were face-to-face. Her lips parted and her hands lifted and wrapped around his wrists. He knew those hands.

           
It had not been Jeremy who had saved him from choking, it had been Gretchen. Her hands. She had been there. She had rolled him over. She had been watching over him. Jeremy had left Archie to die.

           
Archie hated her for that, and he pushed harder into her, feeling her body letting go, sinking into his, her life evaporating.

           
And it made him hard.

           
The sensation of desire at that moment was so disorienting that Archie nearly vomited.

           
He let Gretchen drop to the floor and stumbled back away from her, gathering the towel around his waist.

           
She lifted a hand to her neck and coughed, and the red drained from her face. There was merriment in her blue eyes when she looked up at him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said, flicking her amused gaze to his groin. “It happens to everyone.”

           
She smoothed her hair and got up. She took a step, stumbled, then straightened up, walked over, and picked her purse up off the couch. Then she walked over to him and stuck him with something below his rib cage.

           
His body jerked and seized and he fell to the ground. He choked with laughter as his muscles jerked. She’d fuckingTasered him.

           
“I’m going to go now,” she said. She tossed him a black pouch. “Here’s a package. A few special presents, plus a flash drive on the

           
table with everything I know about Ryan Motley on it. You might want to do something about him.” She took a few steps toward the door and then turned back. “You thought you had a little friend, didn’t you, darling?”

           
She knelt down next to him, the smell and heat of her again filling his senses. “Here’s something to remember him by,” she said, and she put something wet and slippery in Archie’s clawed hand.

           
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.