Kill You Twice (7 page)

He opened the medicine cabinet and removed four large prescription pill bottles.

The labels on the pills read
Prilosec
and
Prozac
. He opened one of the bottles and tapped out a few white oval pills onto his palm. The sound of the pills tumbling out of the
plastic bottle made his mouth water. Each pill was stamped with the letter
V
.

Vicodin.

When Archie had agreed to check himself into rehab, Henry had gone through his apartment, gathered up every last painkiller he could find, and flushed them all down the toilet.

Henry knew Archie, knew to go through all of Archie’s pants pockets, his jackets. But Henry had never thought to look for Vicodin in Archie’s other pill bottles. Where better to hide
them?

Now Archie eyed the Vicodin in his hand. He still ached for them, for the bitter chalky taste, for the flush of pleasure that came ten minutes later.

He liked to take them out and look at them. Sometimes he lined them up on the back of the toilet tank, counted them. He liked knowing they were there. But he was already letting the pills drop
from his fist back into the Prilosec bottle when he heard his phone.

He screwed the cap back on the bottle, put everything away in the medicine cabinet, and returned to his bedroom, where his phone was ringing insistently on the bedside table.

When he’d broken it, he’d knocked out the battery and split the casing into two pieces. He’d put the battery back in and secured it all together with duct tape.

Apparently, it still worked. There were some advantages to not having a smartphone.

He picked it up and sat down on the bed.

“Hello, Patrick,” he said.

“Did I wake you up?” Patrick asked.

“No,” Archie said, rubbing his eyes. “I was already up.”

“I’m seeing that counselor again,” Patrick said.

“I’m glad,” Archie said.

“Can I come visit you?” Patrick asked, and Archie could hear the pleading in his voice.

“Not right now,” Archie said.

“Are you mad at me?” Patrick asked.

It broke Archie’s heart. “Look,” he said, “even if your parents agreed, I can’t take care of a kid right now.” He couldn’t even take care of his own
kids with his schedule. If he got a homicide call in the middle of the night on a weekend he had the kids, he had to bundle them up and take them back to their mom’s. They’d go to bed
at his house and wake up at hers, which wasn’t ideal for anyone.

“Archie?” Patrick asked.

“What?”

Archie could hear Patrick breathing.

“I think my parents are scared of me,” Patrick said.

“They’re just scared,” Archie said. “Not of you. Just generally. They’re worried about you. And they’re worried about saying or doing the wrong
thing.”

“Really?” Patrick said.

“Yeah,” Archie said.

Archie heard Patrick yawn. “I’m tired,” Patrick said. “I’m going to say good-bye now.”

“Talk to your counselor, Patrick,” Archie said. “Okay? Tell him what you told me. It’s okay. He can help you.”

“Uh-huh,” Patrick said, and then he hung up.

Archie set his phone back on the bedside table.

His knuckles were still raw, the fresh scabs ringed with pink. His hand had been wet when he had poured the Vicodin into it, and the pills had melted a little, leaving a white chalky
residue.

Archie lifted his palm to his mouth and licked it.

The next time
Archie’s phone rang his bedroom was filled with the milky light of early morning. He was still half asleep when he picked up the
phone.

“Look out your window,” Henry said.

Archie sat up and wrapped a sheet around his waist. “Which one?”

“West.”

He walked to his bedroom’s westward-facing window. A warm breeze came in through the open window, along with the sour scent of rot from the flood. The west side was ablaze with morning.
The jagged tree line of the West Hills was bright against the sky. Windows winked at him. The river sparkled. It took a minute for Archie to register the smudge of gray against the sky to the
north, and then trace it back, to the west side of the Burnside Bridge, where several fire trucks and at least five patrol cars were parked, emergency lights blinking. Traffic was backed up across
the bridge.

“Can you see it?” Henry asked.

Portland didn’t have many visual landmarks. Its blush skyline. Mount Hood. The twin spires of the convention center. And then there was the fifty-foot neon portland, oregon sign erected on
an Old Town rooftop. For much of its existence, the sign had advertised White Stag sportswear. Archie remembered it from his childhood trips to the city, an outline of the state of Oregon with a
white stag leaping over the company’s name. Back in the fifties, someone got the idea to add a red Rudolph nose to the stag every Christmas. The sign was bought and sold, and the product
being advertised changed. But anytime anyone talked about dismantling it, Portlanders rallied. They loved their composting, renewable energy, and recycling, sure, but they also loved that gaudy
neon sign. The city had finally acquired it a few years ago, and had changed the lettering to portland, oregon, leaving the stag and state outline intact, ensuring that Rudolph would visit
Portland’s children for generations to come.

Now the sign was smoldering.

“There’s a body,” Henry said. “And another lily.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Archie said. He lifted his face to the sun for a moment before he turned and headed into the shower.

CHAPTER

S
usan Ward parked
her Saab in a visitor’s parking spot outside the Oregon State Hospital. She had a knot in her
stomach, and the start of a headache. The hour-long drive down to Salem had been brutal. She had thought she could beat the heat by going early in the morning. No such luck. Her air-conditioning
had been broken for years, and even with both the front windows rolled down she had sweated through her T-shirt. The thermos of hot coffee she’d downed on the way probably hadn’t
helped. She flipped down the visor and inspected her reflection in the mirror. The wind had done a number on her hair. She tried to get her fingers through the tangled thatch of tangerine, wincing
as she worked out the snarls. Her lipstick was rubbed off on the mouth of the water bottle she’d been sucking on to keep hydrated, so she wiped the rest off on her hand and reapplied a shade
of orange that almost matched her hair. Then she added mascara. She inspected her reflection again. Better. She saw a tiny coarse hair between her eyebrows, took hold of it between her thumb and
forefinger, plucked it out, and flicked it out the window.

She squinted out of the car up at the main building. It had opened in 1883, and looked like an asylum from a gothic horror movie. They’d filmed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
here, which pretty much said it all. The state had given it a coat of cream-colored paint since then and refurbished some of the structures. During the remodel they stumbled across a storage room
stacked with what looked like copper soup cans. Turned out they were the cremated remains of more than five thousand former patients.

The hospital had done a lot of PR gymnastics in an effort to get out of that one.

Susan was satisfied that there were only a few people around, prowling the paved paths that knitted the hospital campus buildings together, and no one was looking at her, so she peeled off her
T-shirt right there in the car. It felt good, the sting of air on her sweat-dampened skin, and she sat there for a moment, outside the nut-house, topless except for her purple bra, before she
tossed her sweaty shirt in the backseat and pulled on the clean one she’d brought to change into. She smeared a new layer of deodorant under her arms and checked her reflection one more
time.

She was ready now.

She got out of her car and trudged up the curved path to the hospital’s main entrance. A frigid blast of air-conditioning hit her when she pushed open the door, and Susan shivered. The
entry opened up into a lobby. The carpet was an alarming shade of electric blue. The walls were incredibly white. All the moldings and other original architectural accents appeared to have been
long ago ripped out or painted over. Ahead, a large set of thick wooden double doors led into the main hospital. The doors were behind a formidable L-shaped counter. Two women sat behind it. One
was on the phone. The other one looked up at Susan with the bored forced smile endemic to medical receptionists everywhere.

“I’m here to see Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said.

CHAPTER

A
rchie, in the
course of his job, had gotten used to a lot of things. The smell of decomposing bodies didn’t
bother him anymore. He could watch a medical examiner use a bone saw to remove a brain from a corpse, the blade grinding into the bone, the blowback of fine white powder that looked like sawdust
but was actually pulverized skull. That, he could handle. But he had never gotten used to the smell of charred human flesh. It was stomach-turning and sweet, rank and meaty, putrid and metallic. It
was the smell of something wrong, something that should not have happened; something that was disturbing on a primal level.

Once you smelled it, you never forgot it.

The roof of the old White Stag building was wet, not from rain, but from water from the fire hoses. Some of the firefighters were still gathering up equipment, their heavy jackets peeled off,
their helmets set in a neat line near the stairwell access door. The morning sun was already warm, but there was a promising breeze coming off the river. The West Hills were lush and green to the
west, the mountains were crystal clear to the east, and from the roof of the White Stag building the city could not have looked prettier.

The body, or rather the charred husk of what remained of the body, lay in a dirty puddle in the shadow of the portland, oregon sign. The sign, more massive up close than it seemed from
below—the letters were as tall as Archie—was soaked with water from the fire hoses. But it appeared to have escaped the brunt of the fire damage.

The body had been the source of the fire. The sign had been collateral damage.

The corpse was still smoking. Thin wisps of gray rose from the cooked torso and then quickly dissipated into the clear heat of morning.

It was impossible for Archie to tell if they were looking at a male or a female. The hands and feet had crumbled to ash, leaving the corpse with jagged charcoal stumps at the elbows and knees.
The hair and facial features had melted away, leaving only an open maw of perfect bone-white teeth where the mouth had been. Any clothes were now ash. The body was curled on its side, shoulders
pinched forward, arms and legs horribly twisted. The flesh looked like tar, with something raw and red underneath, like undercooked steak, spotted with shiny tapioca patches of melted fat. The lily
lay a few feet away, soaked with water and then crushed, most likely flattened by the heel of a firefighter.

With the body in that position, fetal, mouth agape, anyone would think that the victim had died in agony. Archie had to remind himself that fire causes the muscles to contract like that and the
body to go fetal. It did not mean that the person had been in excruciating pain. Necessarily.

The breeze from the river had already started to erode the remains, lifting tiny particles of ash into the air. Everyone up there had probably breathed in a piece, some speck of a burned-up
hand, some bit of thumb. If a local news helicopter got too close, half the body would go up in a gritty dust storm and they’d all be brushing ash out of their teeth for days.

“Where’s Robbins?” Archie asked Henry.

“On his way,” Henry said, his aviator sunglasses reflecting the cerulean sky. “Calls started coming in about six. Early commuters saw the fire and thought the sign had gone up.
Firefighters responded. Fire burned fast and hot. They didn’t even know there was a body until they put it out. Must have used an accelerant.”

Archie stepped back and looked up at the portland, oregon sign.

“Could be suicide,” Henry said. “Self-immolation.”

“How about spontaneous combustion?” Archie said. “Could be that.”

“Lightning strike.”

“Fell asleep with a lit cigarette?”

“Could be murder.”

“I guess we shouldn’t rule it out,” Archie said.

Henry reached into his pants pockets, pulled out a pack of gum, and offered it to Archie. He took a piece. A lot of cops chewed gum at murder scenes. It helped to ameliorate the smell. It was
not a habit that Archie had ever embraced. Something about it had always struck him as disrespectful. Cops who wouldn’t dream of chewing gum in church would stuff a wad of bubble gum between
their teeth at the first whiff of decomp.

Facing the smell of roasted human flesh, Archie could see the wisdom in it. He put the gum into his mouth. It was spearmint, and unsettlingly warm from being in Henry’s pocket.

Henry also had a piece of gum, and the two men stood together taking in the crime scene as the human remains continued to smolder at their feet.

Only the center of the sign was blackened, a few of the letters partially melted, some of the support scaffolding tarry where it had been singed. Archie guessed that the victim had been tied to
the sign. The fire must have burned through the rope or cord, and the body then dropped to the roof. He redirected his attention to the remains.

Henry, who must have been thinking the same thing, pointed out a snake of ash that could have been the remnants of a burned ligature. “Right there,” he said.

Ozone concerns aside, the portland, oregon sign was a city treasure. Vendors sold postcards with that sign on them, and silk-screened mugs. This wasn’t some grove of trees in an
out-of-the-way corner of Mount Tabor Park. This was public. Which made it risky.

“Why the change in venue?” Henry said. “Nature not his scene?”

Archie heard a ruckus and he and Henry turned to see Robbins, who had just come out the stairway door and had apparently accidentally kicked over several firefighter helmets, which he was now
trying to gather up.