Kill You Twice (18 page)

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 telling 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

A
rchie 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
vanished 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.

Rachel walked her cup of coffee over to him and put it in his hand. “You need this more than I do,” she said. Her head moved around the room. “These are all Beauty Killer
victims?”

Archie took a sip of the coffee. It was black and strong, and he kept his nose in it for a moment, letting the aroma clear his senses.

When he looked up, Rachel was sitting on the bed next to him. She had picked up a stack of evidence photos and was leafing through them. The robe was short and had slipped up, exposing almost
all of her tan thighs. “I waited for you the other night,” she said. “I thought you might come back.”

Archie tried to concentrate on the coffee.

She peered at a photograph on her lap. “What’s this?”

He took the photograph from her. It was a microscopic image of a light brown hair. He put the photo back in its proper folder and put the folder in the box.

“Dog hair,” he said. They had found several dog hairs on Thomas Vernon’s jeans. He didn’t have a dog. It made them think he might have made it to the park before
he’d been grabbed. They’d asked the public for help, thinking there might have been a potential witness, a dog owner who’d come in contact with the boy before he’d
disappeared. No one came forward. But it could have been anything. Hair like that traveled. It came off the dog, was passed from person to person.

“What kind of dog?” Rachel asked.

“Welsh corgi,” Archie said.

“They’re cute,” Rachel said.

Archie barely heard her. “Shit,” he said.

CHAPTER

A
lot of people
have corgis,” Henry said.

It was a point he had made several times that morning on the drive to St. Helens. Archie wasn’t hearing any of it. He knocked again on the door of the aquamarine-colored house. The peeling
paint crumbled under his knuckles and fell as lead-tainted dust to the porch. “It’s not a coincidence,” Archie said.

Henry leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Do you think the Queen of England is involved?”

Archie ignored him, listening instead for some sound of movement from within. The Beatons had a corgi. Judging by the family photograph over the couch, they’d had corgis for years.
Gretchen knew if she confessed to murdering James Beaton that Archie would look into it. She knew he’d connect the dots back to Thomas Vernon. She was leading him . . . somewhere. “Mrs.
Beaton?” Archie called for the fourth time. “It’s Detective Sheridan again. I just had a few more questions for you.” He imagined her up from the recliner now, shuffling
toward the door, her weight on her walker, the dog cutting back and forth in front of her legs. He willed her to move faster.

“You called first, right?” Henry said. A fly landed on his arm and he batted it away.

“She doesn’t always pick up,” Archie said.

“Maybe she’s not home,” Henry said.

Archie remembered the bubble-gum-pink tennis balls jammed on the walker’s feet, their pristine condition. Those tennis balls had never touched a sidewalk. “I got the impression that
she doesn’t get out much,” he said.

“Maybe she’s napping,” Henry said. “Maybe she’s watching TV.” Henry shifted his weight—Archie could tell his leg was starting to bother him. “Or
maybe,” Henry said, “she’s tired of people digging up a bunch of shit that happened almost twenty years ago.”