Evil at Heart (34 page)

           
He turned to Shark Boy and the others.

           
“There’s a pretty big vein in the tongue that apparently bleeds a lot,” he said. He paused. Susan’s face was still impenetrable, but she’d crossed her arms tightly across her chest. A black sludge dripped from the rusty joint of a sewer pipe overhead.

           
“It took him sixteen hours to die. He lost five quarts of blood. But in the end, he died of suffocation. His tongue swelled up, and

           
he choked on it.” He looked back at the girl. Uncle Archie. Scaring them straight. “Still having fun?” he asked.

           
The girl took another small step back. She had goose bumps on her arms, but it might have just been because the basement was chilly.

           
“We found him four days later,” Archie continued. “Sitting in here in the dark, taped to the chair, his eggplant of a tongue engorged, drool, blood everywhere. Strange to see someone’s tongue coming out of the wrong orifice like that, blue lips, mouth open above it.”

           
“What about his eyes?” the masked man asked. Archie thought he detected a smile behind the mask, but the man’s features were so flattened by the nylon, he couldn’t be sure.

           
The details about the eyes had not been made public. “She’d pushed a needle through each of his pupils,” Archie said.

           
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said softly.

           
“Such is our reward for those in sin,” the masked man said.

           
One of the young men behind him smirked.

           
Archie lowered the timbre of his voice. It was time to get serious. “This ends now,” he said. “Whatever this is. Go home to your parents,” he said to the girl. “Your halfway houses,” he added to Shark Boy. “I don’t give a shit where you go. Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. She is not some sort of antihero. This is real life.” He addressed them all. “This man, his name was Can Giang. He came here from Vietnam with his wife. They ran a convenience store downtown. After he died, his teenaged son dropped out of high school to keep the place afloat. He was a human being.”

           
The girl pulled at the white fringe of her cutoffs. “He wanted to,” she said.

           
“Shut up,” the masked man snapped.

           
“Fintan wanted us to do it,” the girl said. “He begged us. We didn’t know he’d die.”

           
“Shut up, Pearl,” the masked man said again.

           
The girl was wavering. Archie had reached her. It had worked. “Where’s Jeremy?” Archie asked her.

           
“Jeremy’s part of our family,” Shark Boy said.

           
“Jeremy is the only person besides you who survived Gretchen Lowell,” the masked man said, walking toward Archie. “Jeremy is special.” He tapped Archie on the center of his chest. “Like you.”

           
“Jeremy was a kid,” Archie said. “He doesn’t remember.”

           
“Yes he does,” the masked man said. He motioned to Shark Boy. “Show him.”

           
Shark Boy lifted his shirt and bared his shark teeth in a frightening smile. Archie felt a shiver run down his back. Gretchen didn’t have an MO. She did whatever crazy shit she felt like in the moment. But it usually involved, at some point, carving into the person’s torso. Archie had come to know the marks and abrasions on her victims’ chests like a curator would know a collection of paintings. Every stroke was exact. Each victim was painted differently.

           
He remembered Isabel Reynolds’s wounds. Sixteen vertical slices stacked up on the left rib cage, a latticework of tiny hash marks on her belly, and below her left clavicle, carved with a scalpel, a thinly rendered heart. Even more unique, Gretchen had carved a pattern of triangles across her right rib cage, something she had done to no other victims.

           
Shark Boy’s chest bore the same marks.

           
“Jeremy did it for me,” he said. “How does it look?”

           
The shiver turned into a cold chill. The morgue photos were sealed. If Jeremy had carved those marks into Shark Boy’s chest, it meant that he did remember. He knew what had happened. He was a witness. With his testimony they might be able to close the case. Archie cleared his throat. “I need to talk to him,” he said.

           
The man in the mask put his nylon face right in front of

           
Archie’s. Archie could make out short brown hair beneath the stocking. “Starting to take us seriously?” the masked man asked.

           
Archie had heard of scarification, of cutting, but this? He pulled Shark Boy’s shirt back down. “You think this would amuse her?” Archie said. “That she’d take it as some sort of deranged compliment?”

           
“I know why she’s here,” the man in the mask said, jabbing a thumb at Susan. “She wants a story. But why are you here?” He turned to Susan, addressing her for the first time. “You wonder that, too?”

           
“I’m wondering why you’re the only one wearing a mask,” Susan said.

           
There was a slight adjustment in the masked man’s stance, like a boxer inhaling before a blow. Archie, still over by the bloodstain, was too far away. He took a step closer to Susan, and tried to refocus the masked man’s attention. “I came for Jeremy,” Archie said.

           
But things had already been set in motion.

           
Shark Boy stepped behind Susan and wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Her mouth opened, more out of surprise than fear, and she struggled for something in her purse, but Shark Boy pulled the purse off her arm and threw it across the room.

           
Archie could see it happening, see the man in the mask lift something sharp and silver to Susan’s face—a piercing needle. Shark Boy tightened his grip. Susan struggled but the masked man held the sharp needle against the smooth flushed flesh of her cheek, and she froze.

           
The masked man’s featureless face was pointed at Archie. “I think you came for something else,” he said.

           
Nobody moved. The needle was nearly touching Susan’s face, so close that if Susan flinched, it would pierce the skin. Susan’s eyes widened.

           
“The major vessels of the lingual artery go through the tongue,” the masked man continued. “That’s that big vein you were talking about. Ever had Manchego cheese? That’s what pushing a needle through a tongue feels like. Like slicing a knife through Manchego cheese. Cartilage makes a popping, squashy sound, like poking through the skin of a baked acorn squash.”

           
“Let me guess,” Susan said. “You work in food service?”

           
Shark Boy put a hand on Susan’s forehead and snapped her head back, securing the back of her skull against his shoulder.

           
She didn’t know what was happening yet, but Archie did. He couldn’t stop it. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

           
The masked man slid one end of the needle into Susan’s cheek. It went in effortlessly, like a thumbtack into corkboard. The skin tented on the other side for a moment and then the tip of the needle popped through, just under her eye. It happened in an instant. Susan barely had time to cry out. Then it was over. The two-inch needle was threaded through her cheek.

           
The gun pressed insistently into Archie’s back. He could recover it, but it was under his shirt, and he would have to fumble for it. It would take seconds. So would they hurt her more in the panic of those few seconds, or if Archie did nothing?

           
Susan’s eyes were wild with anger and disbelief. She fought to lift her hands up, but Shark Boy held her tight.

           
“Jesus fuck!” Susan screamed. “You pierced my fucking face!” She looked at Archie, her eyes pleading with him to do something. She knew he had a gun. It was not unthinkable that she would wonder why the hell he wasn’t using it.

           
“Flesh,” the man in the mask said, producing another needle, “is more like a frozen grape.” He moved the needle down just below Susan’s bottom lip. “Is this about where Gretchen cut your noble immigrant?”

           
Susan stopped struggling and squeezed her eyes shut. A tiny rivulet of blood made a trail down her chin and neck, and under the collar of her white shirt.

           
Archie summoned all the calm in his body and focused on Susan. “Susan,” he said. “Look at me.”

           
He half expected her to ignore him. He’d brought her down here, into this. No backup. No badge. And a masked madman had just put a needle through her face. Trust was probably not high on her emotional agenda right now.