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Authors: Chelsea Cain

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BOOK: Kill You Twice
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She kept her hand moving—green glittery nails, bitten to the quick—teasing him. His face didn’t change. She liked that, his self-control. He watched her with his dark eyes,
mouth turned up in a slight smile, his expression registering only the tiniest amount of surprise. But he was alive under her hands, his body responding to her touch. She used one hand to free him
from his trousers, careful not to break rhythm, listening to her own internal metronome.

Leo’s breaths came long and slow now, like he was concentrating on them, but his expression did not change.

It took two hands to execute a hand job. She ringed her thumb and forefinger around the base of the target. A gay friend had taught her that. It heightened engorgement. But mostly it made the
target look bigger, which, Susan had learned, was incredibly important to every guy on the planet. The other hand was trickier. Twist. Roll. Twist.

It was not an easy maneuver. The first couple of times Susan had tried it, her arm cramped up and she’d had to ice it. Nothing breaks the mood like a freezer gel pack.

But she had practiced since then, and could now Twist Roll Twist like a concert pianist, which is to say, elegantly and by body memory. In fact, she had found that it helped to not think about
it, and to just let her hand Twist Roll Twist on its own.

She breathed in Leo’s smell, the spice of his expensive aftershave, the tobacco of his occasional cigarette, the starch of the shirt. She felt light-headed and content. Leo swallowed hard
and flattened a palm on the wall behind her.

She could feel his rhythm. The target was on course. There was no turning back. He was all hers.

Susan leaned her head contentedly onto his chest, her eyes just above his shoulder, looking out toward the bar. Making a guy come gave her an inordinate amount of satisfaction. She was pondering
the psychological significance of that when the “Breaking News” graphics on the TV caught her attention. It had only been three months since she’d been fired from the
Herald
, and she still had a Pavlovian reaction anytime she saw those two words. Her pupils dilated. Her heart rate increased. Her muscles tensed.

Leo put his hand on her breast.

Susan pressed herself into his palm, still keeping one eye on the TV.

Leo’s eyelids were heavy, his lips open. Twist. Roll. Twist. But the TV news headlines kept calling to her. Murder. Torture. Mount Tabor.

There was a helicopter shot of a thicket of trees. Then a ground shot, taken from a distance, of a blurred body hanging from a branch. She saw Lorenzo Robbins next to the body, recognizable with
his dark skin and white Tyvek suit.

Leo came, catching her by surprise. His stomach muscles clenched and a spurt of hot semen shot between them through her hand.

And at that exact moment, Susan saw someone else she recognized on TV. He was also standing next to the body. Something in the woods seemed to catch his eye and he looked up, right at the
camera, right into the restaurant, right at her, standing there with Leo Reynolds’s dick in her hands.

“Archie,” she said.

CHAPTER

5

A
rchie stood in
the parking lot feeling the sweat congeal on the back of his neck. It was mid afternoon now, and the
heat was starting to radiate off the asphalt. The Life Works Center for Young Women was located in an old three-story house in Southeast Portland, in a neighborhood full of rambling old wooden
houses, most of them long since converted to apartments. The front of the house was painted pastel pink, but the sides and back were lemon yellow, as if whoever had been painting the house had
gotten busy, or distracted, or just forgot to come back and finish the job. The house had a big covered front porch, a front yard planted with overgrown vegetables, and a neighboring lot that had
been paved over with black asphalt to create off-street parking.

The blood-splattered basket of laundry was in the parking lot, between two silver Priuses. Priae? Archie didn’t know.

Blood spatter came in three categories: passive, transfer, and projected. Passive bloodstains were caused by gravity. Blood dripping off a butcher knife, blood pooling around a body, blood
dribbling down a chair leg. It was relatively neat and contained.

Transfer blood spatter occurred when wet blood was transferred from a primary surface to a secondary one. Then it got tracked around on the nice clean carpet leaving boot prints, or smeared from
a palm onto a windowsill, or wiped on someone’s jacket. Transfer blood was ugly and messy, but it meant clues—fingerprints, shoe size, a bloodstained item of clothing in the
killer’s closet.

Projected blood spatter was much more interesting. It was created by force, by impact, something greater than gravity, like, say, a fist, hammer, baseball bat, or car windshield. It spurted,
gushed, sprayed, and misted—it made art.

It told a story.

The bloodstains on the white sheets in the laundry basket were projected spatter. Tiny drops of various sizes created a constellation of red on the white sheets, like paint flicked from a
paintbrush. The drops were elongated, with rounded tips and tails, revealing the direction of the blow. The crime scene investigators would measure the length and width of the bloodstains, plug
the results into trigonometry equations, and use a computer program to reveal the point of origin and the exact impact angle. Archie didn’t remember the trig he took in high school being
nearly that interesting.

The bamboo that formed a hedge between the house and an adjoining property swayed gently in the breeze, and the hollow stalks knocked together softly like a wind chime. The garden had been
freshly composted and the air carried a faint smell of sun-baked manure. Overhead, the clear sky was streaked with jet contrails.

“We haven’t touched it,” Bea Adams said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

Archie had been quiet for too long. He did that sometimes. He knew it made people nervous, but he couldn’t help it.

“Of course,” Archie said.

Bea Adams was the director of the Life Works Center. Gray hair sprang from her head in electric spirals, and she wore a pocketed linen smock over a turtleneck even though it had to be
ninety-five degrees. Her glasses had red plastic frames with orange stars on them. A red kabbalah string encircled one wrist. “Is it him?” she asked. “I heard the story on public
radio. The body in the park. I thought Jake had gone home. Then I came out here and found this.” She fluttered a hand at the basket and then lifted it to her mouth. “God, he’s not
dead, is he?”

The blood spatter was significant, a hard blow, but not a fatal one. The body on Mount Tabor had skull damage. “When did you last see Mr. Kelly?” Archie asked.

“A little after eight,” she said. “He volunteers in the kitchen for the breakfast shift. He stayed late cleaning up. I told him he didn’t have to.”

Archie gave Henry a look, thinking of the rubber kitchen gloves they’d found at the crime scene.

The time frame fit. Archie checked his watch. It was almost three
P.M.
“You didn’t notice his car was still here before then?” Archie asked.

She looked around at the three silver Priuses in the parking lot.

“Right,” Archie said. Every other car in Portland was a Prius or a Subaru.

Archie heard his name and looked up to see Henry motioning for him to come over. “Excuse me,” Archie said to Bea, and he walked over to where Henry was lurking in the shade of the
bamboo. Henry held up his cell phone and said, “Kelly’s not picking up his phone.” He added, “And I sent a unit over to his house, and he’s not answering the
door.” A patrol cop came over and handed Henry a DMV photo printout. They could do that now—enter data in a dashboard computer and out spits a photo. Archie and Henry both looked at the
image off of Jake Kelly’s driver’s license. The laser quality wasn’t great, but he could have been the man in the park.

Archie scanned the eaves of the house for cameras. The center was a nonprofit group home for teenage girls. Some were court-referred for repeated minor offenses—shoplifting, fighting,
property damage—others had been expelled from every high school in town, some had been kicked out of one too many foster homes. They were all, in one way or another, difficult. The center
offered the girls a chance to get their GED and the possibility of a life that might not include prison.

“Any surveillance?” Archie called to Bea.

“No,” she said.

Archie didn’t ask why. No money? A gesture of trust? It didn’t really matter. It was the same result: no photographic evidence. Robbins was comparing the corpse’s teeth to
Jake Kelly’s dental records right now. But based on the evidence so far, Archie was fairly confident they’d have a match.

“You do background checks?” Archie asked Bea.

“Sure,” she said. “We get state funding. It’s required.” Kelly would have been fingerprinted for the check, but the state destroyed fingerprint cards after the
applications were approved. Still, the forms would provide a wealth of other information. Next of kin, past jobs.

Archie’s phone rang. It was Lorenzo Robbins. “Go ahead,” Archie said into the phone.

“The dental records match,” Robbins said. “It’s Jake Kelly.”

Archie slid a glance at Bea. She was pale, her gaze fixed on him. She fully understood what the content of the call had been. “I’ll call you back,” Archie said to Robbins. He
hung up and put the phone back in his pants pocket. There was nothing good to say at this point, nothing that made things better. He had learned that a long time ago.

“Well, shit,” Bea Adams said.

CHAPTER

6

A
re you mad
at me?” Susan asked Leo. She took a sip of red wine, and let the pinot glass rest against her bottom
lip. “No,” he said. “Guys love it when you say someone else’s name as they’re ejaculating.”

Susan set her glass down on the wood bar. A half-moon of dark purple lipstick marked where her mouth had been. “It wasn’t like that,” she protested. “I saw him on
TV.”

Leo lifted his palm at her. “Just stop talking.”

Their lunch had come and gone and Leo had barely said a word. Mostly he talked on the phone. He said he was working, but Leo was a lawyer with only one client—his father—and as far
as Susan could tell his services mainly involved checking in on several strip clubs his father’s company had acquired. She took another swig of wine. It was the most expensive pinot they had
by the glass on the menu—fifteen dollars, which seemed crazy, but Leo was paying, and he could afford it. Leo’s family was rich. And they’d made their fortune selling a product
more addictive than lap dances. Seeing as being a drug dealer was one of the few professions from which being a lawyer was a step up, Leo had that going for him. Susan took another swig of wine. It
didn’t taste any different from the stuff she bought for nine dollars a bottle. She’d wanted a cocktail. But it had seemed too early for vodka. If they stayed at that bar much longer,
it wouldn’t be.

There was a mirror behind the bar and Susan caught her reflection in it. Her hair was highlighter orange and it gleamed in the mirror like something radioactive. In the last two years
she’d cycled through turquoise, violet, and pink. But the orange was different. It looked like an accident, like she had gone into a salon asking to look like Lucille Ball and had come out
looking like one of those traffic safety cones. People didn’t understand she was
going
for traffic safety cone, that that was the point. She had almost died. She had lost her job at
the newspaper. She was barely able to eke out a living as a freelancer. If it hadn’t been for her book about all the kooky ways people died, she would have starved. But she was alive. Archie
Sheridan had saved her life just three months ago, when he’d pulled her half dead from the floodwaters. It had been two years since they first met, when she’d been assigned to profile
him for the
Herald
—the cop who had caught serial killer Gretchen Lowell—and her life had not been the same since. She had told Archie Sheridan things that she’d never told
anybody. And he had trusted her with the secret that had nearly destroyed his life. Yet somehow, every time they were together, one of them nearly ended up killed. She wanted her hair to say,
Danger Ahead
. Instead strangers on the street pursed their lips sympathetically and assured her that the color would fade. Susan thought about redyeing it. But that meant bleaching her hair
out again, and her hair was already getting sort of fuzzy from all the dye jobs. She wanted to wait at least a month before she put it through another color change.

“What are you thinking about?” Leo asked.

“The Middle East,” Susan said.

She let her eyes fall on the TV above the bar. The local news had cycled back to the murder in the park, and there was the helicopter shot again, the crime scene from above. The trees were
mostly evergreen, with deciduous trees sprinkled between them. As the shot zoomed in, Susan could make out a sliver of crime scene tape, a clutch of people, and something else. . . .

“The trees,” Susan said.

“What?” Leo said.

“I have to make a call,” Susan said.

“Let me guess,” Leo said. “Archie.”

Susan dialed Archie’s number. It went to voice mail. It went to voice mail a lot when she called Archie. “It’s me,” she said. “I saw you on the news.” She
could have told him what she’d seen. But she decided not to. If he wanted to know, he could call her back. “I noticed something about the crime scene,” she said. “Might be
important. You know how to reach me.”

CHAPTER

7

A
rchie’s phone buzzed
against his thigh. He usually carried it in his jacket pocket, but it was too hot these days
for a jacket. The vibrating phone tickled his leg. He ignored it and followed Bea Adams into the living room, where she’d gathered the nine teenage girls who currently lived at the center.
Like most places in Portland, the house didn’t have air-conditioning. A variety of ancient fans blew warm air noisily from points around the room. The sun coming through the window
illuminated a billion specs of dust that swirled slowly in midair.

BOOK: Kill You Twice
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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