Kill You Twice (2 page)

“I wish we had more volunteers like you,” Bea said. She blew a stray piece of graying hair off her forehead, adjusted her grip on the basket, and headed for the back door.

Jake peeled off the yellow gloves, tucked them in his apron pocket, and ran after her to help. “What’s with the laundry?”

“Washer’s broken. I was going to put this in my car so I don’t forget to take it home tonight.”

Jake didn’t even hesitate. “I’ll take it,” he said.

She frowned and raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Jake took the laundry basket from her hands. It was heavier than it looked. Or maybe she was stronger than she looked. “Let me take it home. I have to do laundry anyway tonight. I can
bring it back in the morning.”

Bea crossed her arms and shook her head with a smile. “You’re a blessing, Jake.”

Jake beamed. “I’m happy to help.”

“You want some help getting it to your car?” she asked.

“I’ve got it, thanks.”

Bea opened the back door for him anyway, and he lugged the basket out to his car. The center had a small parking lot, five spaces, just enough for staff and volunteers. Three of the cars in the
lot were silver Priuses. Jake took the basket to his silver Prius and set it down on the pavement so he could open the trunk. He paused to look up at the sky. The morning sun on his face was warm
and the cool summer breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck. A white butterfly spiraled lazily through the air, dipping in and out of view. Not a cloud in the sky. Jake closed his eyes and
put his face up to the sun. In the Pacific Northwest, days like this were precious.

He smelled something—sandalwood? cloves?—and opened his eyes. The butterfly was gone.

Then he heard a thud, like a baseball bat hitting a melon, and felt a searing pain in his head that knocked him off his feet. It took him a few seconds to realize that the two sensations were
related. As he lay there on the concrete, slipping into darkness, the last thing he saw was the laundry basket beside him, a fine mist of blood settled on the dirty sheets like dew.

CHAPTER

H
uman meat had
a particular smell. It was blood and flesh, metallic and salty, feces and fat. Like the slaughterhouse
stench of butchered animals, but different.

Sourer.

It was a smell that Archie had trouble describing, but always knew immediately.

The dead man’s wrists and ankles were bound with rope and he was dangling from the lower branch of a cedar tree, his hands tied to the branch so he hung like a sick Christmas ornament, his
bare feet a few inches from the ground. He appeared to have been skinned from the neck down. The beefy red muscles of his chest wall gave off a bloody gleam, and the lacelike threads of exposed
yellow fat looked almost pretty against the raw meat of his flesh.

The weekend summer sun was high and bright, and there was a cool breeze that belied the late afternoon heat to come. Rays of sunlight pierced through the cedar boughs. The corpse’s light
hair fluttered gently along with the leaves. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, average height and weight. But it was hard to tell.

At the corpse’s feet, already marked with an evidence flag, was a wilted white lily.

Cedar needles covered the ground beneath the body, and where the cedar needles gave way to earth, the dirt had been raked clean with a branch, obscuring any footprints.

Archie bent his ear to listen to the distant sounds of children playing echoing through the woods.

Henry had arrived at the scene first, and his shaved head was already glistening with tiny beads of sweat. He looked off into the distance. “Playground,” he explained.

Archie knew the park. Ben and Sara played there.

They were on Mount Tabor, which was less of a mountain and more of an impressive hill with high aspirations. It rose up on Portland’s flat east side, a dormant volcanic cinder cone, its
slopes covered with elegant historic homes nestled among ancient conifers. The top of Mount Tabor was a wooded park. There were hiking trails. Tennis courts. Picnic areas. A crenellated stone water
reservoir. A popular playground. Every August hundreds of adult Portlanders built soapbox cars, dressed up in costumes, and raced from the top of the park, down the winding road to the bottom of
the hill.

“I’ll clear the area,” Henry said. He turned and headed off toward one of the patrol units on the road. He still walked with a limp, though Archie could tell that he tried hard
to hide it.

“How is he?” Robbins asked once Henry was out of earshot. Robbins had his medical examiner’s kit open, and had bagged the body’s hands. Now he stood with his fists on
the hips of his white Tyvek suit, studying the corpse like a butcher sizing up a cut of meat.

“Still weak,” Archie said.

“Physical therapy?” Robbins asked.

“Yep,” Archie said. Henry was supposed to work with a therapist twice a week. But it was hard to keep appointments as a cop. Homicides had a way of cropping up at inconvenient
times.

The soft bed of cedar needles on the ground under the body was soaked with blood, and as Archie inched closer to the victim he was careful to stay on the outside edge of it. Blood draining from
a victim who is still alive will coagulate. It’s what stops people from bleeding to death every time they nick a finger slicing a bagel. Assuming you don’t open an artery, an open wound
won’t gush; it will pour something red and thick and sticky, like honey. Coagulated blood still hung from the corpse’s feet in viscous strings.

Standing there, Archie was almost eye to eye with the corpse. The killer had suspended his victim at that height intentionally, Archie thought, so that they could stand nose to nose. It put the
killer at around Archie’s height, five-ten.

It had not been an easy death. A makeshift gag had been stuffed in the dead man’s mouth, forcing his jaw so far open that his chin nearly touched his neck and his cheeks bulged. Rigor had
caused his lips to peel back, so that his teeth and gums grinned madly around the gag, making his mouth appear all the larger. His face was frozen with pain, forehead muscles contracted, dark brows
raised, crow’s-feet splintering into his hairline. His eyelids had contracted, revealing a flat, fixed gaze. With the exception of his head and arms, his entire body was glazed in blood.

“Take a close look,” Robbins said.

Archie leaned forward. He could make out brown body hair on the dead man’s shoulders. He let his eyes travel down the body and saw the same fine hair on the man’s thighs, thicker and
curlier around his genitals. Walking in a slow circle around the corpse, cedar needles crunching under his feet, Archie saw, amid the rivulets of blood, freckles, patches of skin, surrounded by
red. The man had not been completely skinned from the neck down. The killer had taken his pound of flesh only from the man’s chest and abdomen. The victim had then been allowed to bleed. A
lot. Slowly.

Archie was aware of Henry stepping back beside him. Archie had to fight his instinct to nursemaid Henry now that he was back on the job. He didn’t ask how he was doing every ten minutes.
He didn’t ask if he was making his physical therapy appointments, or try to help him get out of the car. No special attention. That was how Henry wanted it. Now Archie gave his old friend a
few moments to survey the scene. It didn’t take long for Henry to come to the same conclusion Archie had reached. Henry scratched the stubble on his head and adjusted his sunglasses. The
bloody corpse was reflected in his mirrored lenses. “The amount of blood on the ground,” Henry said. “He was still alive when he was tortured.”

“The wounds look premortem,” Robbins agreed. “He’s been dead four to six hours.”

Archie batted away a fly. Cautious people didn’t kill in public places. Cautious people killed in rented apartments and on lonely roads and in the backs of stolen vans. It took a special
kind of someone to commit murder. It took a special kind of special to commit murder in a public place, and to take time doing it. It didn’t bode well. People who didn’t make logical
choices were hard to predict, which made them hard to catch.

“Park closes at midnight, opens at five
A.M.
,” Henry said. “So if they came in a vehicle it was last night or this morning.”

“You’re assuming they came in together by car,” Robbins said.

“Maybe the victim came of his own free will,” Archie said. “Maybe they met in the park. Maybe they walked.”

“Or cycled,” Robbins said. “On a tandem.”

Henry ignored him. “No one matching his profile has been reported missing today,” Henry said.

“Do they sweep the park at night looking for cars?” Archie asked.

“They’re supposed to,” Henry said.

It was a big park. A little recon to discover which areas of the park weren’t swept on that final patrol, and the killer could have driven his victim in, tortured and killed him, and then
driven out after the gates went up in the morning.

It was one forty-five
P.M.
The body had been found an hour before. Archie could make out the scars in the dirt where the cyclist had lost control and skidded ten feet
before wrapping his mountain bike around the trunk of a cedar. The bike was still there, on its side, one wheel bent. A cracked rearview mirror had snapped from the handlebar and lay on the ground
a few feet away.

Underneath the darkened canopy of conifers, Archie counted the mounted spotlights of at least three television news crews. The cameras winked, light reflecting off the lenses. The police tape
perimeter had been generous, but with a zoom lens and some creative angling, those cameras could get a shot of the body.

“We need to get him down,” Archie said.

“Just waiting for the word, boss,” Robbins said. He dug into his open ME kit, snapped out two pairs of latex gloves, and held them out to Archie and Henry.

Archie stretched the gloves over his hands. Even after a year, the left one still looked wrong without a wedding ring.

A few flies buzzed around the corpse’s head. One landed on his open eye, fluttered its wings for a moment, and then flew off.

Robbins unrolled a white body bag on the ground and then unzipped it. Body-bag zippers did not sound like other zippers. The big plastic slider grinding against all those plastic teeth, down the
side and across the bottom in a J-shape, carried a special menace. Robbins flicked open a medical-looking blade and handed it to Archie. “You cut,” he said. “I’ll
catch.”

“What about me?” Henry asked.

“You stand there and if I shout that my back has given out, help me. Otherwise, try not to contaminate my crime scene.”

There was a white plastic step stool already set up near the body, and Archie climbed up on it with the knife in his hand. The rope around the corpse’s wrists didn’t look remarkable,
and neither did the knotting, but Archie still hesitated.

“Photographed it from every angle,” Robbins said.

Robbins was the best ME Archie had ever worked with. There was no more discussion. Archie gripped the branch with one hand and started to saw at the rope with the other. Robbins stepped behind
the body and placed his gloved palms on the dead man’s back. When the rope gave, the dead man dropped an inch to the ground. He did not slouch back or crumple in a heap. He dropped straight
down, like a lawn dart, his arms frozen straight up above his head, stiff with rigor, his toes pointed. Robbins eased him back into the waiting body bag, like a piece of furniture.

Zip.

Robbins stood up. His latex gloves and the arms of his Tyvek suit were smeared with blood. “Hands look okay,” he said. “I should be able to lift a good set of
prints.”

Archie unwound the rope from the branch and stepped back to the ground.

“We’ve searched the immediate area. No sign of his clothes.”

“Check the trash cans throughout the park,” Archie said. “And see if anything’s floating in the reservoir.”

Henry held out an evidence bag and Archie dropped the rope in it.

“Not exactly a cornucopia of clues,” Henry said.

“There’s one more,” Archie said. He squatted alongside the body bag, and pulled open the zipper to expose the dead man’s head. Then he reached into the corpse’s
gaping mouth, dislodged the gag, and pulled it out. It was a fist of white and yellow rubber, caked with dried saliva. Archie had to use both hands to carefully tug the ball open, turning it inside
out and separating the two parts, the rubber peeling apart with a final sticky snap to reveal a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.

Archie held the gloves out to Robbins. “Print them,” Archie said.

CHAPTER

S
usan Ward gave
a great hand job.

It hadn’t come easy. She had read books. She had practiced. It had been, at times, a slog. But she had overcome her general lack of manual coordination and mastered the technique.

She pressed her palm flat against the fly of Leo’s slacks and held it, feeling the heat of his body under her fingers. He was wearing a skinny black Italian leather belt and she unbuckled
it and unhooked the tab of his pants and slid her hand underneath his boxers.

She loved this part, the promise of it—the control.

He started to say something. “Shhh,” Susan said.

The hallway to the bathrooms was dark. But Susan had positioned herself so that she could see back into the restaurant bar where they’d been sitting. She could see the massive dark wood
countertop, the TVs above it, the lunch crowd perched on tall chairs, downing their tapas and wine. She’d see anyone coming. Then again, with her bright orange hair—a shade of Manic
Panic called Electric Lava—they’d be sure to see her. That was part of the thrill, the tension that came with the possibility of public humiliation. It made Susan’s face hot and
the arms of her skin prickly.

Leo’s breathing quickened.

God, he was pretty. He was the prettiest boyfriend Susan had ever had. She gazed up at his face, his pale smooth complexion and his dark hair, those eyelashes. She licked her lips and kissed him
lightly on the chin, feeling a warm flutter move through her lips, down her neck and chest, to her center.