Kill You Twice (26 page)

“I can handle that,” Archie said.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked.

The last woman Archie had had sex with was a serial killer. Before that, his wife. He had met Debbie in college. There hadn’t been that many women. “I think so,” he said.

She held his gaze. He could see the outline of her nipples through the cotton of the dress. She moved her hand forward and pressed it against his abdomen and then slid her fingers inside his
shirt against his skin. His breath caught and she smiled and untucked his shirttails and slid her fingers deeper, moving them through his pubic hair, teasing him with her fingertips. Then she
smiled. He was already hard. He had been hard since she’d come to the door. She wrapped her hand around his cock. He tried not to whimper as she pulled him inside.

Archie heard his
phone and fumbled for it in the dark before he remembered where he was and that his phone was in his pants on the floor next to
Rachel’s bed. He slipped out from under the sheet and felt around on the floor. He was naked on his hands and knees when Rachel turned on the bedside light.

“What are you doing?” she asked sleepily.

He saw his pants then, discarded at the foot of the bed. “Phone,” he said. He pulled his phone out of the pocket, glanced at it, and hesitated only for a second before lifting it to
his ear.

“Hello, Patrick,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Patrick asked.

Archie leaned back against the side of the mattress and stretched his bare legs out on the floor. The bedside lamp sent long shadows across the room. “Just sleeping.”

“Do you want to watch TV?” Patrick asked.

Archie scratched the back of his neck. “Right now?”

“Yeah. We both turn on the same channel and watch the same thing. That way we can do it together.”

Archie turned around to Rachel. She was sitting up on her elbows, looking at him. “Do you have a TV?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Okay,” Archie said into the phone. “Give me a minute.”

“There’s a
Simpsons
marathon on Fox.”

“Do your parents let you watch that?”

“All the time,” Patrick said.

Archie was too tired to argue. “Okay,” he said. The kid had seen people murdered. He could handle
The Simpsons
. “Just a second.” He put his phone on mute and stood
up. “This is hard to explain,” he said to Rachel. “But there’s this kid. He’s having a tough time. And he can’t sleep. And I need to watch TV with
him.”

Rachel slid out of bed. For a moment Archie lost himself in her body. He had to take a deep breath as he followed her into the living room. The room was dark except for the moonlight coming in
the paned factory windows that overlooked the city. She picked a remote off her coffee table and aimed it at a flat-screen TV that hung on an interior wall. The screen went blue, bathing her body
in a watery glow. Then she picked up a second remote and looked at him.

“Fox,” Archie said.

The Simpsons
sprang to life on the TV screen.

Archie took his phone off mute. “I’m here,” he said.

He sank down on her sofa, the leather buttery soft against the backs of his legs.

“I’ve seen this episode,” Patrick said.

“Do you want to watch something else?”

“No,” Patrick said. “I like knowing what happens.”

“Okay,” Archie said. “I’m here. I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

Rachel was still standing with the remote in her hand. He watched her set it down. He put his hand over the phone. “You can go back to bed,” he said. She gave him a strange, tender
smile. Then she crawled onto the sofa next to him and laid her head against his chest.

Patrick laughed at something Bart Simpson said.

Archie put his arm around Rachel.

For the first time in a long time, he felt at home in his body. Holding her like that, he couldn’t see his scars.

CHAPTER

A
rchie had the
boxes from his apartment brought to the office—all of them. The Beauty Killer case files formed a
floor-to-ceiling wall, three boxes deep, on one side of the break room. The personal papers from the Beaton house were unpacked and laid out on tables. The dead children they thought Gretchen had
murdered were on one wall. The dead children they thought Colin had murdered were on another wall. The photograph of the Beatons standing in their front yard was attached, with a magnet, to the
dry-erase board.

It was lunchtime, but no one was eating.

“You were right,” Claire said. “Colin Beaton’s traffic ticket puts him in Boise at the same time that Taylor King was murdered. He had a Nebraska driver’s license
with an address in Lincoln. Hannah Fielding was killed in Lincoln, Nebraska. The first time any record of Gretchen Lowell shows up was a bad-check-writing bust in Lincoln, Nebraska, a few months
after Beaton’s license was issued at a Lincoln DMV. Then Beaton falls off the face of the earth. We think this is when he started going by ‘Ryan Motley.’”

“We’re going through all U.S. licenses issued in the name of Ryan Motley that match his general age and description,” Levy said. “But nothing has turned up
yet.”

Archie turned to Robbins. “You’ve reviewed the autopsies?” he asked.

“All of them,” Robbins said. “There’s a progression of violence. The killings overlap. But if we look at the children that were left with lilies and the children who were
left with the heart signature and we lay them out consecutively, the pattern fits. Each murder ups the ante. Also, Gretchen never killed the same way twice. But if we remove her child victims and
look at them as a group, there’s a pattern—no defense wounds, nothing under the fingernails. No signs that the kids were restrained. Our theory at the time was that Gretchen drugged
them. We found traces of a paralytic in two of them. The others were all found too late. It would have worked its way through their systems. You wouldn’t find a paralytic unless you were
specifically looking for it. It wouldn’t show up on a standard tox screen. The six children left with lilies fit this same pattern. No defense wounds, no signs of restraint. I think they were
drugged, too.”

“So whoever killed them, killed the others,” Archie said.

Robbins looked around the table. “It looks like it.”

Archie gazed back and forth from one wall to the other. There was another element all the child murders shared. “They were all left somewhere higher than where they were taken,”
Archie said. “We didn’t notice it then.”

“Maybe Gretchen killed them all,” Henry said.

“She didn’t kill him,” Archie said, pointing to the photo of Calvin Long. “She was with me.”

“No offense,” Robbins said, “but you were dying, and, might I add, high on the same paralytic that we’re saying was used on these kids. We can’t rely on your sense
of time.”

But Archie could rely on what he knew about Gretchen. And he knew that she wouldn’t leave him for that long. She enjoyed hurting him way too much. Archie’s eyes wandered over the
crime scene photos on the wall. “He drugged them, killed them slowly, and then moved the bodies to a higher place, always a higher place.” He thought of the Church of Living Christ and
the crucifixes throughout Colin Beaton’s childhood home. And then it dawned on him. “He wanted to leave them closer to God,” Archie said.

“Well, that’s fucked up,” Claire said.

“Now he’s moved on to adults,” Archie said. “Any traces of the paralytic in those screens?”

“Jake Kelly was just outside the window when it would have been detectable,” Robbins said. “Gabby Meester was positive.”

“What about Mrs. Beaton?” Archie asked.

“Jackpot,” Robbins said. “I suggested to the Columbia County ME that he might want to run an expanded tox screen. It came up positive.”

“This whole theory is based on the word of a woman who is sitting in the state mental hospital,” Levy said. “There’s no proof that James Beaton is even dead. He could be
in Cancún right now sucking on a margarita with some hot tamale and watching his half-Mexican kids play in the surf.”

Ngyun walked into the break room with a folder under his arm. “He’s not in Cancún,” Ngyun said. “He’s in New Jersey.”

He had their attention.

“They couldn’t identify him at the time,” Ngyun said. “The body was too degraded. Nothing like a train ride across country in a freight car to accelerate decomp. A hobo
found him. They’re not called hobos anymore. But the modern equivalent. Some local cops caught the case, and didn’t try very hard. ME’s office kept the bones in a box.”
Ngyun pulled a photograph out of the folder and stuck it to the board. “This is his skull,” he said. “A few years ago some anthropology student at Princeton did a reconstruction
for a class.” He pulled another photograph from the folder and put it on the board next to the skull. “Look familiar?”

A plaster cast of the skull had been filled out with modeling clay and prosthetic eyes. It looked just like James Beaton.

“Why didn’t anyone match it to the missing person report?” Archie asked.

“It was for a class,” Ngyun said with a shrug. “I guess they thought they couldn’t rely on the work, because no one asked for a copy of his finished project. I had to
track down the student to get a copy. He’s using his Ivy League anthropology degree to work as a barista in New York, by the way.” Ngyun looked at the doorway. “You need
something?” he asked.

Archie turned to see a man standing in the doorway with a laptop under his arm. He was in his twenties, goateed, with a ponytail, wearing a T-shirt and tight plaid shorts. Archie guessed he
wasn’t a cop.

“That’s L.B.,” Claire said. “The composite guy.”

“Good,” Archie said. He leaned behind Ngyun and snapped the Beaton family photo off the dry-erase board and held it out to L.B. “Can you age him?” Archie asked. L.B.
inched into the room and took the photo.

He looked at it, and then he looked up at Archie. “Is this a test?” he asked.

“What?” Archie said.

L.B. opened his laptop and clicked on an icon on his screen. A digital composite of a man’s face materialized. “This is the composite I worked on with that kid yesterday,” he
said. The image on his laptop showed a disembodied head and neck floating at the center of a white screen. Composites were created by assembling photographic splinters of facial features until the
correct combination matched the image in a witness’s mind. The effect was unnervingly real-looking. The head on L.B.’s screen was a man in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and a hollow
face. L.B. held the family snapshot up next to the screen and put his finger next to Colin Beaton’s teenage face. “It’s the same guy. Look at the bone structure.”

The room was silent.

Archie looked at the teenage Colin Beaton in the snapshot, and then at the laptop composite image of the man who Pearl claimed had tried to attack her. He could see the resemblance.

Pearl had been telling the truth about the man she’d seen. If Colin Beaton had tried to grab her, it implicated him in Jake Kelly’s murder, which led then to Gaby Meester’s
murder, and the six child murders on the flash drive, which led to the child murders they had attributed to Gretchen.

Colin Beaton had killed them all.

CHAPTER

S
he can’t stay
here,” Archie said.

Susan stood in her front door. Archie stood on the porch with a Child Protective Services caseworker named Peggy.

Susan shrugged and opened the door for them to come in. “Fine,” she said.

Archie had thought she would take it harder.

He walked inside the house. Peggy followed him. Peggy had smooth brown skin, dark hair ironed so straight it looked wet, and the poise of someone who’d seen her share of chaos. The house
smelled like marijuana. Peggy arched an eyebrow at him. He shrugged.

“They’re outside with the goat,” Susan said. “Come on.” She led them through the kitchen, past the kitchen table, where Archie saw her laptop set up next to a
collection of coffee cups and empty water glasses, and out the back door.

The yard stretched back a good quarter acre and was framed with English ivy and bamboo that walled it off from the neighbors.

Every inch of space was utilized. A huge tree, its branches festooned with Tibetan prayer flags, shaded the back half of the yard. A fire pit was surrounded by old wooden dining room chairs,
bleached gray by the elements. An overgrown garden gleamed red with tomatoes. Sheets fluttered on a laundry line next to a pair of drawstring tie-dyed pants. In the far corner of the yard, a
mattress-sized compost pile constructed out of wire mesh and snow fence baked in the sun under a black tarp. Archie counted three birdbaths.

Beyond the garden, under the tree, near the wall of ivy, was a rickety wooden shed that looked like a large dog house. Between the back porch and the shed stood a brown and white goat. Squatted
on either side of the goat were Bliss and Pearl.

They both looked up.

Archie walked toward them, flanked by Peggy and Susan.

Bliss looked at the goat and then at Archie. “I have a permit,” she said, in a way that made Archie think that she didn’t have a permit.