Kill You Twice (11 page)

CHAPTER

B
y the time
Susan rolled up to the task force offices, she had spent an hour and a half on I-5 in heavy traffic, with no
A/C, in the heat of the day. She was so sweaty she glistened, and her left arm was sunburned from having her elbow out the open window. She looked in the backseat for a hat to cover her sweaty,
matted hair, and after some digging found a white Panama with a black band. This was why it paid not to clean out your car.

She still wasn’t ready to go inside.

Archie was in there, and he wouldn’t be happy with her. He would look all disappointed and fatherly. He was only twelve years older than she was, but had a way of making those twelve years
seem like a century. She could already hear his voice, lecturing her.
I’m not angry with you, just disappointed.

“Gathering your courage?” she heard Archie ask.

She jumped.

Archie was standing outside her window. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and corduroy pants. The man did not know how to dress for the weather.

“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“I just got back from an errand,” he said. “You need to get your A/C fixed,” he added, squinting up at the blindingly blue sky. “It’s only going to get
hotter.”

He didn’t seem that mad at her.

A couple of uniformed cops she didn’t recognize walked by and nodded at Archie. He tapped the roof of her car with his palm. “Let’s talk in my office,” he said.
“Now.”

Susan’s heart sank. He just wanted to get her alone before he laid into her.

Fine, then. She deserved it.

She got out of the car. Her skin made a Velcro sound as it peeled off the vinyl seat.

Her T-shirt was sweat-sodden and her scalp itched under the hat, but she followed Archie into the bank, past the uniformed cop at the front desk, past the detectives’ desks. She was
careful to keep her eyes forward, careful to avoid seeing the desk where Heil had sat. She wasn’t sure if it would be worse to see it empty or to see someone else sitting at it. Just a few
years before, she had only seen one dead body—her father’s. And he had died of cancer. Working on the crime stories for the
Herald
, following Archie around, she had seen more.
But Jeff Heil’s death haunted her the most. Maybe because they had been together, and she knew that it could have been her.

It had not been easy. She’d had nightmares for two months after the flood: dark waters, creatures she couldn’t see, Heil’s limp corpse sinking beneath the surface. Bliss had
fed her ginger tea, played Deepak Chopra audiobooks day and night, and convinced Susan to float in a sensory deprivation tank for three hours a week. Now, even with the anxiety gone, Susan still
avoided that stretch of Division Street. She still kept her eyes on the bridge when she crossed the river, careful not to let her eyes wander down to the water below.

Archie didn’t talk about it. She hadn’t heard him mention Heil’s name since the funeral. She wondered if it bothered him, living in that apartment, with all those windows
looking out over the river that had almost killed them.

She was relieved when they got to Archie’s office and he closed the door. Susan could take a lecture, but she never liked the bit leading up to one. She sat right down in one of the chairs
facing his desk and braced herself.

Archie took his time walking around and taking a seat in his desk chair. He leaned back and folded his hands across his chest. He looked at her. “So you saw Gretchen,” he said with a
slow smile. “How did she look?”

There was something about the pleasure he took in the question that made Susan think he knew exactly how she looked.

“She’s looked better,” Susan said.

Archie’s hands lifted and fell as he breathed. He’d taken the bandage off from the night before. She could barely see the scabs. He was watching her. He looked like he wanted to hear
more, but Susan didn’t offer. And Archie didn’t ask.

After a moment he extended one hand across the desk, palm up. The smile was gone. “The tape?” he said.

“There is no tape,” Susan said, rummaging in her purse for the recorder. “It’s a digital file.” She found the recorder and held it up for Archie. “Welcome to
the twenty-first century,” she said. She looked away then, her eyes shifting back to her purse, suddenly sure that she’d given away something more than she’d intended. She tried
to make her question sound casual. It was reasonable enough. “Do you have a flash drive?”

“No,” Archie said.

Susan glanced back at the closed door. “Perhaps one of your minions?”

Archie looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Okay.” He gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself up. He said, “I can get one.” He walked around the desk,
behind Susan, and left the office, presumably to commune with some sort of office supply cabinet.

He’d left the door ajar. The venetian blinds on the office’s interior window were angled three-quarters open. Susan was already rehearsing excuses in case she was caught:
I just
got my period and I was looking for a tissue to stuff in my underpants
. Men didn’t question menstruation stories. Ever. You probably could get into the White House if you said you needed
a tampon ASAP.

Susan scurried around to the other side of the desk and pulled open the desk drawer. It was full of crap. Pens. Papers. Rubber bands. Files. Wite-Out. (Who even used Wite-Out anymore?) There
were loose staples and thumbtacks. That was so like Archie, orderly at first glance, but a mess just under the surface. It had been three months since Susan had accidentally come across the sleek
silver flash drive hidden under a photograph of Gretchen, under some papers in Archie’s desk. Now Susan shoved her fingers underneath the clutter until she touched something hard and smooth,
the size of a pack of gum. She pulled it out.

The flash drive was still there.

Susan checked the door and then palmed the flash drive and put it in her purse. She was back in her seat a moment later when Archie returned, a brand-new flash drive in his hand. It was one of
those cheap black plastic ones, nothing like the one in his desk.

Archie handed her the black flash drive and Susan focused her attention on downloading the audio file, her heart pounding in her chest. She didn’t dare even glance at her purse. She felt
guiltier than she thought she would. It would have been easier if he’d been mad at her.

“She talks about killing this guy named James Beaton in St. Helens when she was sixteen,” Susan said. “I looked him up.” She decided not to mention that she’d done
this Internet research while she was zooming up 1-5. “There was a James Beaton in St. Helens who disappeared eighteen years ago. They never found a body.”

“What are you going to do with the interview?” Archie asked.

Wasn’t it obvious? “Write a story,” Susan said. Publish it. Make money. Be famous. “The
Times
magazine is interested.”

Archie sat down in the chair next to her. He had never done that. He always sat in his chair, the desk between them. Susan nudged her purse under her chair with her foot.

“Prescott set it up?” Archie asked.

Susan looked at him sideways. “Yep.”

Their knees were almost touching.

“Was he in the room?” Archie asked.

“He insisted on staying,” Susan lied.

Archie slumped back in the chair. “It’s privileged,” he said.

“What?”

“She might be able to claim that it’s privileged. She was talking to her shrink. You just happened to be in the room.”

“She was talking to me,” Susan insisted. “He just happened to be in the room. Besides, I’m not entering it into evidence in court.”

“I was talking about me,” Archie said. “I can’t use the confession.”

Susan blinked a few times, sorting this out. “Oh.”

He stood up and walked behind her, back around to his desk chair. “I need you to wait a few days before you do anything with this,” he said as he sat down.

It would take her a few days to write the story anyway. “Okay,” she agreed. She frowned, as if she’d just thought of something. And, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible,
she asked, “Who’s Ryan Motley?”

Archie reached out and adjusted the framed photograph of his family he kept on his desk. Susan knew the picture: Debbie, the two dark-haired smiling kids, Archie nowhere in sight. Archie
shrugged, as if the name meant nothing to him. “A figment of Gretchen’s imagination,” he said.

CHAPTER

B
liss was waiting
in the living room when Susan got home, her bare feet propped up on the industrial wire spool they had
repurposed as a coffee table, a jam jar full of red wine in her hand, and naked as a jaybird. Her elbow-length peroxide-blond dreadlocks were wound on top of her head like a large bird’s
nest. She was pushing sixty, but her thirty years of yoga had made her body lean, and the Sauvie Island nude beach had given her a late summer tan. Bliss secured her jar of wine between her legs so
she could turn the page of the book she was reading, and Susan caught a glimpse of something she was sure she would spend the next ten years trying to burn from her mind: her mother’s
artistically groomed pubic hair.

“What do you have going on there?” Susan asked, waving her finger at her mother’s nether region. Someone at the salon Bliss worked at had started a cottage industry of
“novelty” bikini waxing. Bliss, who until a few years ago had been proud of an untamed seventies-style bush the size of a salad plate, was now an enthusiast of artistic pruning.

“It’s Mick Jagger’s profile,” Bliss said.

Sometimes Susan wished she had been born to Pentecostals. “Of course it is,” she said.

Susan’s laptop was on the coffee table, under Bliss’s feet. “Excuse me,” Susan said, kneeling before it. Her mother lifted her feet and Susan slid the laptop to a clear
spot between a Tibetan skull cup full of walnuts and a ten-year-old copy of the
Whole Earth Catalog
.

Moving back in with her mother had been temporary, until Susan had lost her job. Now, on a freelancer’s income, she didn’t have a lot of options.

She pulled the flash drive out of her purse, opened up her laptop, and inserted the drive into the USB port.

“What’s that?” Bliss asked.

“Do you have to be naked?” Susan said. “I mean, what if the UPS guy comes by?”

Bliss fanned her hand in front of her chest. “It’s hot.”

In fact the Victorian that Susan had grown up in was relatively bearable in the summer. As long as they remembered to keep the windows all closed and the curtains drawn during the day, and then
to open the windows—at least the ones that hadn’t been painted shut—at night. Sure, the indoor plants all died by August, and the open windows drew in flies and moths and the
occasional panicked bird, but it worked. The house was only intolerably hot for maybe a week a year. This just happened to be that week.

“Get a place with air-conditioning,” Bliss said. “If you’re so concerned.”

Susan barely heard her.

The flash drive had seven files on it, all PDFs.

Seven files, all with the same name:

Ryan Motley1.

Ryan Motley2.

Ryan Motley3.

Etc.

“Shit,” Susan said under her breath.

What had she been hoping for? Family photographs? A secret novel Archie was working on? (She had been hoping for the secret novel.)

Bliss took her feet off the table and sat forward, shoulder to shoulder with Susan. She smelled like patchouli and eucalyptus oil and red wine, combined with a faint hint of marijuana.

“Who’s Ryan Motley?” she asked.

Susan opened her Web browser and typed
Ryan Motley
into the search field. Over eleven thousand results came up.

“I have no idea,” Susan said.

But she was going to find out.

CHAPTER

T
he Multnomah County
morgue had only recently been reopened after being closed for almost three months due to flood
damage. On the surface, it looked the same as it did before, but cleaner, the clutter having not yet had time enough to accumulate. But the floors had been laid with a new, gleaming white linoleum
and the concrete block walls had a fresh coat of white paint. The effect made the basement facilities seem brighter, though Archie wasn’t sure it was in a good way. Archie had also heard that
the city had replaced the conveyor tray cadaver storage system with a walk-in refrigeration unit, the better to store more bodies.

It was dinnertime, and the morgue had a skeleton staff, but Archie found Robbins in the autopsy room, standing over the charcoaled remains of Gabby Meester. Robbins was almost entirely obscured
behind his gear: a surgical gown over scrubs, shoe covers, a hairnet, a face shield in front of a surgical mask, surgical gloves.

“How’d you get in here?” Robbins asked, looking up from the steel autopsy table. Gabby was just a head and torso. With only stumps where her legs and arms should be, she looked
small, like a child.

Archie walked up to the table waving a white plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back. “I have an access card,” he said.

“You get that when they gave you the key to the city?” Robbins asked.

Robbins had opened Gabby up. Her charred skin was peeled back, and her ribs were removed. She was pink inside, like steak that had been burned on a high heat but remained raw in the middle. Her
large intestine bulged where her belly had been.

“It’s one of my perks,” Archie said, putting the card back in his wallet. “They also paid for rehab.”

Robbins chuckled. “I might quit my job and start catching serial killers.” He cut Gabby’s heart free and bagged it, then quickly removed one of her lungs. Archie was always
amazed at how fast this part was. A sharp blade and a few flicks of the wrist. It only took ten minutes to cut open and disembowel a corpse.

“You do your part,” Archie said. He reached into the shoulder bag he was carrying and pulled out a brown paper lunch sack. “Mind if I eat?” he asked.

Robbins raised his eyebrows. “Man, you
have
been doing this too long.”