Kill You Twice (8 page)

Robbins was wearing a new Tyvek suit, which, in the bright sun, was so unsoiled and so sparkling and so white that it was nearly blinding. After a few apologetic gestures to the remaining
firefighters, he made his way over to Archie and Henry, carrying his ME’s case. If the smell bothered him, he didn’t show it, but he did give the ledge behind them a leery look.
“I don’t like heights,” he said.

“I thought you rock-climbed,” Henry said.

“When I rock-climb,” Robbins said, “I don’t look down.”

Another gust of wind blew over the roof, and more ash swirled up into the air and seemed to hang there above them.

“Heights,” Archie repeated softly to himself. He glanced past Henry and Robbins, over the ledge, where the Willamette, the source of such an ugly flood just months before, sparkled
bright and blue and tranquil. He could see Mount Tabor from there, and the green residential neighborhoods of the east side. A freighter making its way up the river looked like a toy. A mile south,
Archie noticed that the Hawthorne Bridge was up, letting a dinner cruise paddle ship called the
Portland Spirit
go under it, while a few dozen cars waited. From up there the city looked vast
and pretty and bright and small. Archie thought about Susan and what she had said about the tree. That was the common denominator. He brushed off a fine mist of ash that had settled on his
shoulders. “Jake Kelly was tied to a tree,” he said. “Not just a tree—the tallest tree.” He looked at Henry and Robbins. “This is all about heights.”

CHAPTER

S
usan’s purse was
in a locker in the lobby. No cell phones. No cigarettes. No lighters. Basically everything in her
purse was contraband. They had taken her studded skinny red belt, her long beads, and her shoulder-grazing earrings. Now she didn’t have any accessories at all. She pushed a hand into her
pants pockets and felt for the locker key they’d given her. It was still there. But she missed the comforting weight of the purse strap on her shoulder.

She looked over at Jim Prescott. He had met her at reception and was escorting her to the forensic psychiatric services ward currently housing the Beauty Killer. It didn’t seem like a
hospital. There were no intercom announcements. No cheerful art on the wall, or plaques celebrating donors. No coffee cart or gift store. And no signs of patients. If there was psychotic shouting
or group counseling chatter, it was all happening behind closed, soundproofed doors.

Susan ran her hands over her goose-pimply arms.

“You okay?” Prescott said.

“Fine,” Susan said. Her flip-flops flapped on the linoleum.

As they moved into more secure areas, Prescott swiped the badge on his lanyard over electronic scanners, and heavy doors opened for them.

He was nothing like she’d imagined him. She’d pictured someone older, patrician, clean-shaven with silvering hair, distinguished wrinkles, and those half-glasses some people wear
around their necks on chains. Prescott was in his early forties, and there was nothing patrician about him. He had a feathery beard and wild curly hair, and he wore a creased tan sports coat
instead of a white lab coat. He wore slip-on shoes, she noticed. No laces. Shoelaces were for shrinks who didn’t have to worry about their patients strangling them to death if they looked at
them wrong.

Susan was glad she’d worn flip-flops.

“Will you be in the room?” she asked him.

He swiped his badge again. “If you want me to be.”

Susan bristled. “No, I can handle it.”

She followed him through the door. They were in a patient wing. A man dressed in scrubs was sitting at a Formica counter writing in a chart. He didn’t look up.

Prescott led her to a door at the end of the hall.

“This is her room,” Prescott said. “She’s expecting you.”

“Wait a minute,” Susan said, feeling her palms start to sweat. She had pictured Gretchen tied to a board, on the other side of bars, with an IV of tranquilizers in her arm,
surrounded by five armed guards and a pack of growling German shepherds. “Just like that? I’m just supposed to go in and chat with her? What if she decides to gut me with a barrette or
something?”

Prescott gave her a sympathetic, patronizing smile. “You’re not in any danger,” he said.

Susan practically choked. “This is Gretchen Lowell we’re talking about here. She’s killed more than two hundred people.”

“She
says
she killed more than two hundred people,” Prescott said. “She’s delusional.”

“I’ve seen her work,” Susan said. “I’ve seen what she’s done.”

“She’s disturbed.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” Susan said. “She doesn’t belong here. I’m against the death penalty. I don’t think the state should be in the business of
killing people. I think it’s wrong. And it’s hypocritical. Mostly, I just think it’s mean. Gretchen Lowell? She is the exception. She deserves to die. If we kill one person, one
criminal in the history of the world, it should be her.” Susan paused, reconsidering. “And Hitler. Her, and Hitler.” Prescott had that shrink look on his face again, passive and
unimpressed, and yet somehow judgmental at the same time. Susan continued. “She removed a detective’s spleen without anesthesia. She stuck a wire through an old woman’s eyeball
and then threaded it behind her nose and out through the other eye socket and then she stuck the wire into an outlet.”

Prescott raised an eyebrow. “And you’re arguing that she’s sane?”

Susan decided that she didn’t like him. “She knows the difference between right and wrong,” she said.

“You’re not qualified to make that assessment,” he said. He glanced at his watch and then jutted his scruffy chin in the direction of a metal switch on the wall next to the
door. “That gets you in,” he said. He was already moving, already hoofing it to his next psychopath. They probably didn’t like to be left waiting. “Tell a nurse when
you’re done,” he said over his shoulder. “They can show you out.”

“Wait,” Susan said, not liking that she couldn’t disguise the anxiety in her voice.

He stopped and turned back to her, and she wanted to wipe the know-it-all smile right off his face.

“I lied,” Susan said. She eyed the door, imagining what was on the other side of it. No guards. No German shepherds. Just Gretchen Lowell. Would she be manacled to a dungeon wall, or
maybe curled in the corner trussed up in a straitjacket? Would there be bars between them? Was it a clean bright room, or a dark cell? Susan had seen Gretchen at her most vile, and at her most
beguiling. And both personas scared the hell out of her. “Please don’t make me be alone with her,” Susan said.

CHAPTER

G
retchen’s room was
painted pale yellow, the color of a baby’s nursery, or a Klonopin. It was large, almost
too big, and empty except for a twin mattress on a metal bed frame, a molded plastic chair, and a dresser. The bed was near the only window in the room. The window was covered with bars that had
been painted with thick, glossy white paint. There weren’t curtains. The floor was burnt-orange linoleum, blistered in places from moisture and splattered with vile-looking stains.

Gretchen was in the bed, with her head turned away from the door, so that all Susan could see were coils of dark blond hair and a gray blanket in the vague shape of a body.

“Gretchen?” Prescott said gently. “Your visitor is here.”

Gretchen didn’t move.

Susan could feel the hair on her arms stand up. Despite herself, she reached up to smooth down her own mangy orange hair. No one could compete with Gretchen Lowell in the looks department, but
she still found herself wanting to at least make an effort. Here she was, about to meet with a megalomaniac serial killer, and she was still that geeky girl approaching the cheerleader sitting at
the popular table in the cafeteria. She thought fleetingly of stepping back through the door, back into the hall, back into her Saab, where even the worst heat would be better than this. She could
smell her own sweat. She could smell the oppressive floral bouquet of the Lady Speed Stick she had caked on in the car. She wasn’t sure which smell was more offensive.

Prescott walked into the room, toward the bed and that tangle of blond, beckoning for Susan to follow him. She did. She thought,
This is what lambs being led into the barn on Easter weekend
feel like
.

“Gretchen?” Prescott said.

Gretchen stirred this time, and then rolled on her back and slowly turned her face to them.

Susan drew back, startled.

For a second she thought there had been a mistake. That she had been taken to the wrong room. That Prescott had misunderstood somehow.

This wasn’t Gretchen Lowell.

Gretchen had always been a beauty. She was the kind of woman who could silence a room when she walked through the door. It was not the only reason she had caught the public’s
attention—her horrific crimes would have been enough—but it helped that that lovely face of hers sold magazines. No one could grasp how someone that stunning could be capable of such
merry acts of brutality. They didn’t understand that her inside didn’t match her outside.

Now it was closer.

Gretchen’s perfect symmetrical features were blurred and bloated. Her once-pristine alabaster skin was now sallow and speckled with painful-looking blemishes. Grit clogged the corners of
her eyes. Her lips were chapped, and a crust of dried saliva had collected at the corners of her mouth. Her hair, which had looked blond from across the room, was dull and brittle, almost
colorless. Most notably, that thing, the unnameable quality that lit her from within, even in prison, was gone. She looked flat and blank. Susan would not have recognized her.

She was ugly.

Gretchen licked her peeling lips. “It’s the medication,” she said in a thick voice.

“It’s an investment in your recovery,” Prescott said.

Gretchen rolled her eyes.

Susan didn’t know what to say. It was all she could do to muster a grim nod. Of course Gretchen was medicated. But Susan had not been prepared for the shape that she was in. She wondered
if Gretchen could read the surprise on her face. But of course she could. Gretchen could read everyone.

Gretchen’s bloodshot eyes went to the plastic chair next to her bed. “Let’s get started,” she said.

Susan took a seat in the chair. Prescott leaned against the wall and folded his arms.

“What do you want to tell me?” Susan said.

“Turn it on,” Gretchen said.

It took a second for Susan to figure out what she was talking about, and then she realized what Gretchen meant and fished the tiny digital recorder from her pants pocket. An awkward moment
followed as Susan realized that there was no bedside table to set it on, so she would have to hold it, which meant getting closer to Gretchen. Susan scooted the chair forward a foot, just close
enough that she could pick up Gretchen’s voice on the recorder, and not an inch closer.

Gretchen lifted herself up onto her elbows until she was sitting up in bed, her back resting against the wall. She moved sluggishly, like her head was heavier than normal. The threadbare gray
cotton V-neck pajamas made her look even feebler.

If Gretchen Lowell hadn’t murdered so many people, Susan might have felt sorry for her.

“When I was sixteen,” Gretchen said, “I killed a man named James Beaton.”

Susan leaned forward. Gretchen was staring off into the middle distance. Susan glanced back at Prescott. He was leaning against the wall by the window, watching Gretchen with his beady shrinky
eyes. Susan glanced down to make sure the red light was flashing on her recorder.

“He was married,” Gretchen said, “and I asked him to meet me in a motel room, a place called the Hamlet Inn, in St. Helens.”

St. Helens was an hour west of Portland along a highway popular with bicyclists despite the fact that they were routinely flattened into roadkill by passing semis. It was a small town.
They’d named it St. Helens because there was a volcano in Washington State named St. Helens and, for a few weeks a year, when the cloud cover lifted, you could see it from the town. That had
always seemed kind of sad to Susan—naming a town after something that wasn’t even in it.

“It was the first time I used a scalpel,” Gretchen said. She slurred when she spoke and Susan had to listen hard to make sure she was making everything out correctly. “I had
everything I needed in a canvas shoulder bag. I handcuffed his wrists to the headboard and his feet to the legs of the bed, so that he was spread-eagled.” An angry rash crawled over
Gretchen’s jawbone and up her cheek. “He thought we were going to have sex,” Gretchen said. “Even after I put the duct tape over his mouth, he wasn’t afraid. He liked
it. I was naked. I could have done anything to him. He was so hard he was grinding his hips against the sheet. Some people like it rough.” Her eyelids were heavy. She smiled to herself.
“Sometimes it’s not the people you expect,” she said.

She lifted bloodshot, bleary eyes to Susan’s.

Archie. That was where Gretchen wanted Susan’s mind to go. But, whatever fucked-up relationship Archie and Gretchen may or may not have had, there was no way that Susan was going there.
“Continue,” Susan said.

Gretchen smirked. “Like my acquaintance, James Beaton. He was married, but you and I both know how that goes.” She lifted her chin toward Prescott. “Susan has daddy issues,
Jim,” Gretchen said. “She likes married men. Unavailable men.”

Susan cut her off. “He gets it,” she said.

Prescott hadn’t moved. He kept up his silent vigil at the wall, his arms crossed, expression impassive. Susan couldn’t decide if he was a really good psychiatrist or a spectacularly
bad one.

Gretchen’s gaze traveled back to Susan. “He didn’t have a good heart,” she said. She straightened up and folded her legs next to her on the bed. There was a little color
in her face now. “He was flushed and sweating, piggish. His whole body was oozing. Sweat. Ejaculate. Like poison beading out of him. He stank with want. The smell of unwashed cock.” Her
words came easier now. She wiped the corner of her mouth. “I remember the sweat running into his hairy ears, a sheen of grease on his forehead, trickling down the sides of his bloated belly.
He thought I’d want that? Him? I had my bag under the bed and I pulled it out and got the plastic sheeting. It was folded up, pressed into a square, and I had to give it a good shake to
unfurl the thing. The plastic was thick and loud and it took me a while to lay it out on the carpet. It was only after I started to work it under him, between him and the sheet, that his eyes
changed.” She looked down at the blanket over her thighs and smoothed it with her hand. “Anxiety at that point, not fear. I got the plastic in place and I showed him the scalpel. His
erection was gone.” She leaned forward and put her mouth close to the recorder in Susan’s hands, as Susan braced herself. “Just a limp little thumb of a cock in its place,
bouncing around back and forth as he struggled,” Gretchen said into the mike. She sat back in the bed.