Kill You Twice (34 page)

Henry was wiping body goop from his eyes. His clothes were bloody. His eyebrows were singed. He had been knocked on his back by the blast.

Colin was gone. The explosion had been just the opportunity he needed to escape.

Susan looked up at Archie, his forehead covered with a fine mist of red.

She didn’t know what to say. Somehow “sorry” didn’t seem to cover it.

Archie lifted his arm and wiped the blood off his face. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

Susan nodded.

Archie looked back at Henry.

Henry was pulling himself to his feet. “Me?” he said. “I’m fucking perfect.”

Susan tended to Pearl. Her body was spattered with tiny bits of the reverend’s flesh and blood, like someone had combined shrimp and tomato soup and then forgot to put the lid on the
blender. Susan picked some of the larger pieces off while Archie called 911.

CHAPTER

S
usan was wrapped
in a blanket and curled up on a church pew, where she had been instructed to wait until a crime scene
investigator could collect the evidence that stuck to her clothes.

There were, by her estimates, a hundred cops now on the scene. City cops. State cops. County cops. FBI. The Coast Guard would probably be there in a minute.

“Anything?” she heard one of them ask.

“He must have had a car,” someone else said.

Pearl was still lying up there, right out in the open, while strangers took pictures of her. It made Susan sick.

Archie walked up to her. He had cleaned most of the blood off his face, though he still had something vile-looking spattered on his shirt.

“Where’s Leo?” she asked.

Archie sat next to her and leaned in close. She thought, for a moment, that he was being affectionate, offering solace or something. But his eyes were too serious for that. “Leo was never
here,” he whispered. “They’re going to take your statement. You borrowed his car. You came alone. Got it?”

Susan managed a minuscule nod.

The EMTs beckoned
Archie over. Huffington had been loaded onto a gurney and stabilized for transport. She was weak, but she wanted to talk.

“She kept asking for you,” one of the EMTs said.

Huffington turned her head, looking for Archie.

“I’m right here,” Archie said. He could tell she was having trouble seeing. He knew what it meant—her blood pressure was tanking. It wasn’t good.

Huffington turned toward the sound of his voice. “I owed her,” she said haltingly.

Her
. The pit of Archie’s stomach tightened. “What did you do?”

He felt Henry’s firm grip on his shoulder. “We need to talk,” Henry said. “Now.”

“Melissa,” Archie said, “what did you do?”

Her head lolled and she lost consciousness. “We’ve got to go,” one of the EMTs said, and they lifted her and began rolling her to the ambulance waiting outside.

Henry’s hand was still on Archie’s shoulder.

The church was crawling with crime scene techs. There was blood and body matter everywhere. Everything smelled like death.

“Gretchen,” Archie said softly. He wanted Henry to tell him he was wrong, that Gretchen was still locked up, but he could see the truth in Henry’s face as Henry stepped beside
him.

“She got out,” Henry said. “Apparently her new doctor took her off most of the meds. Cleared the bitch’s head. She cut his throat with a razor blade, killed a nurse, and
got out with her clothes and ID.”

Archie lifted his hand to his throat and ran his fingers over the scar there. “A razor blade?”

“I had them check the visitor log,” Henry said. “The only people allowed in to see her are hospital staff and cops.”

He could hear the wail of the siren as the ambulance left the church parking lot. “Let me guess,” Archie said. “Huffington.”

“She was there to see her just before we were,” Henry said.

You never know when I might have a razor blade tucked up my sleeve.

She had let him live. Again.

CHAPTER

S
usan was in
another emergency room with a new plastic hospital bracelet. She had been swabbed, scraped, and combed,
picked clean and washed off, had her clothes taken into evidence. The hospital was freezing. She hadn’t been that cold since Archie had fished her out of the Willamette River. She was sitting
on the bed wrapped in two thick white cotton blankets, wondering when someone was going to come in and tell her what to do next, when Leo walked in.

His clothes were spotless. Except for the blood in the hair on the back of his head, he didn’t appear to be injured. He’d left before the explosion. He had left right after
he’d shot Huffington.

“Who are you?” Susan asked.

Leo took a breath and put his hands on Susan’s shoulders. He was looking at her like Archie did sometimes. Like she was innocent. She wasn’t innocent.

“I want to get you home,” Leo said. “Your mother will be here in a minute. She brought clothes.”

Susan pulled away from him, scooting back farther onto the bed. She could feel the tears coming, but she couldn’t stop them. “A kid I was supposed to keep safe is dead,” she
said. She tugged at her wet hair. “I just had two men with tweezers and magnifying glasses pick brain matter out of my hair.” Then she tapped her chest with her hand. “A man died
because of me.”

She was not innocent.

“That’s not your fault,” Leo said. “Colin Beaton built that bomb.”

Susan’s lips were trembling. Snot was dripping from her nose. She needed someone to give her the hug of a lifetime. She just wasn’t sure that someone was Leo. She leveled her gaze at
him. “Who are you?”

He glanced at the door.

“Are you a cop?” Susan asked.

He looked at her. His hands were in his pockets. He was perfectly still for several minutes. She didn’t say anything. She just waited.

“DEA,” Leo said quietly, motionless. “I’m inside my father’s operation. He has cops on his payroll. I can’t be on any of the reports.”

“Archie knew?” Susan asked.

Leo looked at the floor. “He introduced me to my recruiter.”

Susan shook her head. None of this was making sense. “But he doesn’t like you.”

Leo looked up. “He’s trying to protect you,” he said. “From me.”

The door to the room flew open, and Bliss rushed in, kicked off her clogs, and climbed into bed next to Susan. Bliss didn’t have on any makeup. Her platinum dreadlocks looked like a mop of
fuzzy ropes. She was wearing a T-shirt with the word atheist printed across the chest. She laid her head on Susan’s shoulder and took her hand. Susan looked at their hands together—so
much the same. Square palms, and thin stubby fingers with nails bitten to the quick.

“He killed her,” Susan said, squeezing her eyes shut, still not quite believing it.

Bliss started to say something, but had to stop, and Susan realized her mother was crying. Bliss was an epic bawler, capable of clearing out a movie theater with her caterwauling. She dissolved
into tears every year on John Lennon’s birthday. She wept during Joni Mitchell songs and blubbered when she saw lobsters scrambling in their aquarium at the fish counter. This time she
didn’t make a sound.

Susan fell apart. Sobbing wracked her body. She couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe. She gasped and mewled while her mother held her tight. Finally, exhausted, Susan was able to catch
her breath and lift her head.

Leo was still standing there, waiting to take her home.

Bliss peeled the stray wet hair off Susan’s cheeks with that hand that looked so much like Susan’s own. At that moment, Susan was filled with love for her mother. Bliss was maddening
sometimes, but when it came down to it, she was always there when Susan really needed her.

“I heard you blew up a reverend,” Bliss said in an excited, conspiratorial tone.

Susan blinked at her mother, astonished. Then she looked at Leo. He gave her a sympathetic shrug. They both had embarrassing parents.

“What?” Bliss asked.

Susan sighed and leaned her head back in the crook of her mother’s warm neck. “Nothing,” she said.

CHAPTER

A
rchie had been
up all night helping to direct the manhunt for Colin Beaton. The small St. Helens police station had
been taken over as the base of operations. The low white building looked like a dentist’s office that had been taken over by eminent domain. The hunt for Gretchen Lowell had diverted
resources, but it was still crowded in there. Huffington had died in surgery at the hospital. She had returned to town five years ago, with a new name. She had married and divorced in California,
and kept his last name, and then started using her middle name, Samantha, as a first name. As identity changes went, it had been easy. No one had thought to connect her to the skinny teenage Beaton
girl who had left so many years before only to succumb to cancer.

Sixty cops crowded in that building, and not one had thought to take her photograph down off the wall below the brass label engraved with the title chief of police.

I owed her
, Huffington had said.

Archie got a cup of bad coffee and walked outside and leaned against the four-foot concrete slab that read police above the city seal. There was a residential house right next door. The
neighbors stood on their parking strip, gawking.

It was cooler that it had been. The flag above the precinct was flapping in the wind.

Henry’s car pulled to a stop in the middle of the street in front of the station. “Get in,” Henry said. “They found him.”

Archie left his coffee cup sitting on the concrete slab and climbed into the car.

Ninety armed officers
searching for Colin Beaton, and it had been a maid who had found him.

Room Six. The Hamlet Inn.

Archie kicked himself for not thinking of it.

Two patrol cars had arrived when Henry pulled into the motel parking lot, and they could hear sirens approaching from all sides behind them.

One of the uniformed cops on the scene was vomiting over the second-floor hall railing.

Archie and Henry galloped up the steps, taking them two at a time. The door to the room was swung open. A maid’s cart was parked out front. Neat stacks of toilet paper. Freshly cleaned
towels. Archie had a feeling that Colin wouldn’t be needing any of it.

The vomiting patrol cop looked up, his face gray, and said, “Don’t go in there.”

“It’s okay,” Archie told him. “I’ve done this before.”

Archie stepped into the doorway.

Henry stepped beside him.

They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. They just took in the scene. There was a protocol to surveying a crime scene that was drilled into all cops. Start left; scan right. Look up;
look down. Don’t miss the details. But sometimes the thing in the middle was so distracting that you couldn’t pull your eyes from it.

The king-sized bed had been stripped of its top sheet and polyester floral bedspread, which lay discarded on the floor. The bottom sheet, still on the bed, was so soaked with blood it could have
been red.

Colin Beaton was bound, naked, spread-eagled, to the headboard and footboard with an industrial-looking black twine. His torso gaped open, split from his ribs to his pelvic bone. His abdomen was
sunken, its contents extracted and then strewn next to him by the bed, like refuse from a butcher shop. A slither of intestines. A chunk of liver. Handfuls of fat and muscle. Blood and bile soaked
into the sheet. The stink was powerful. His feces had been squeezed out of his large intestine and smeared on his face. Flies crawled in and out of him, along his hairline, around his mouth.

She hadn’t just killed him, she’d slaughtered him.

On the wall, above the headboard of the bed, using his blood, she had drawn a heart.

Archie could hear voices behind him, people jogging up the stairs. There’d be dozens of cops here in a minute. He turned back to the gray-faced patrolman. “Secure the scene,”
he said.

The cop was young, in a St. Helens uniform. He had vomit on his chin. “On whose authority?” he asked.

“Mine,” Archie said.