Let Me Go (11 page)

“Do you think you'll ever tell him?” Gretchen asks.

She brings this up a lot. She seems to worry that Archie and Henry will go out for beers one day and Archie will spill his guts. She doesn't understand Archie's relationship with Henry at all. There is no way Archie will ever tell his partner anything about this. He has already let himself down. He doesn't want to let Henry down, too. “God, no,” Archie says. “No offense.”

Gretchen looks skeptical. “Many men brag about their conquests.”

“I'm not proud of this,” Archie says. “It's not something I would ever brag about. And believe me, Henry would not be impressed.”

He's seen the way that Henry looks at Gretchen. He knows Henry doesn't like her.

Gretchen sighs deeply, and looks away. The room is painted pale yellow and the light from the brass and crystal chandelier overhead gives everything a buttery glow. When she turns back to him, her eyes seem sad.

“I'm sorry I cause you so much pain,” she says.

“I'm here, aren't I?” Archie says. Just looking at her makes his heart rate increase. The attraction he feels toward her is unlike anything he has ever experienced before. He reaches for her hips and pulls her closer to him on the bed. “I have free will,” he says. “I'm the one who's cheating. You're not doing anything wrong.”

“I think your wife might disagree,” Gretchen says.

“Probably,” Archie says. “But I'm the one she'd hate.”

“For a detective, you're not very smart about women,” Gretchen says.

Her body is warm under his hands and he feels the physical pull he always does when they are this close.

He has memorized her. He knows her intimately. Even after their first sexual encounter he could conjure her in his mind like a photograph. “I can't get you out of my head,” he tells her. “I spent all day at a crime scene, and all I could think about was you.”

She leans closer to him. “Tell me about it,” she says.

Archie hesitates. She'll get the file tomorrow, anyway, and it hardly seems like bedroom talk. “It'll all be in the file,” he says.

“I want to hear about it from you,” Gretchen says, laying her head on his chest, her cheek over his heart. Her blond hair rises and falls as he breathes.

Archie doesn't talk about his work with Debbie. Even when Debbie presses, he refuses to talk to her about the murders. He tells himself that she doesn't really want to know. He doesn't want to scare her.

But Gretchen is a consultant on the case. She's seen all the crime scene files. She's read all the notes. She's viewed all the crime scene photographs and autopsy reports. For the first time, Archie can tell someone about his day. He can unload. It makes him regret not being able to share that with his wife.

“She was young,” he tells Gretchen quietly. “Twenty-two. Graduated from Cornish up in Seattle in the spring. Lidia Hays. The Beauty Killer murdered her at her apartment in North Portland. She lived off of Alberta, in a house that had been subdivided into four units. She didn't lock her door. We think he entered early in the day and waited for her to come home from work. She was a server at a brewpub downtown. She got off at ten and told her coworkers that she was headed straight home. He kept her alive most of the night. She was tied spread-eagled and naked to her bed. She had duct tape over her mouth, or the neighbors would have heard her screaming.”

“The killings aren't usually sexual,” Gretchen says. Her hair is over one shoulder, revealing the curve of her neck.

“It doesn't look like she was sexually assaulted,” Archie says. “But the scene was definitely staged to make a point.” The chandelier throws a large shadow on the ceiling above the bed, like a giant spider. “Maybe she reminded him of someone,” Archie says.

“What did she look like?” Gretchen asks.

Archie hesitates, not sure she wants to hear the answer. “You, actually,” he says. “Blond, blue eyes. A beauty.”

He feels Gretchen shiver.

Archie touches the back of her neck. “Do you want me to close the window?” he asks.

“It's not that,” she says.

His finger finds the small hollow at the base of her skull. “We don't have to talk about this.”

“I want to know,” she says firmly. “I want to try to understand the killer.”

“The killer.” Never “him.” Never “he.” Gretchen is always gender-neutral. “You're avoiding pronouns again,” Archie says.

“You don't know it's a man,” Gretchen chides him. “That's your assumption.”

The spider on the ceiling seems to crawl as the crystals on the chandelier tremble gently in the breeze. “Women don't kill like this,” he says.

She rolls over, so the back of her head is now resting on his chest, and she looks at him. “What did he do?” she asks.

“He poisoned her,” Archie says. “We found a half-empty bottle of drain cleaner and a spoon on the bedside table. And she was cut. All over. With a scalpel, it looks like. Superficial. Just enough to hurt and to make her bleed a little, but not enough to kill her. He must have cut her a thousand times. Working up one leg, then the other. She would have anticipated each incision.” That would be the worst part, knowing it was coming, knowing it would go on and on.

“It must have taken hours,” Gretchen says.

Each cut had been deliberate. “There was a pattern to it,” he says. It was as if her flesh had been decorated, each incision a new detail in a grisly textile. “He carved column after column of curved slices that intersected like segments of a chain.” Archie curls his hands and hooks them together in front of Gretchen to illustrate.

Gretchen frowns. “Like pieces of a heart?”

“Maybe,” Archie says. “The incisions covered every inch of her, except for an area right here”—he places his palm lightly at the base of Gretchen's throat—“about the size of my hand.” That area of the body had been clean, except for one delicate incision in the shape of a heart. He can feel the pulse of Gretchen's carotid artery under his touch. “That's where he carved his signature,” he says.

Gretchen threads her fingers through his hand and lifts it from her throat.

“She had a poster of Multnomah Falls on the wall of her bedroom,” Archie continues. “You can buy them at the gift store.” How many times had he and Debbie taken out-of-town guests to Multnomah Falls, and then the gift store at the base of the waterfall? How many of them had bought that very poster? “And a lot of books,” Archie says. “She snowboarded. That's what her mother told me. She just moved here two months ago. Her mother said she spent all her tip money on a season pass for Mount Hood.”

“You'll catch the Beauty Killer,” Gretchen says. She says it with so much conviction that Archie almost laughs. But her expression is completely serious. “I know you will,” she says.

These days, Archie isn't so sure. He feels farther from the killer than he's ever been, and the murders are only accelerating. Each new killing weighs heavier than the last. “Why didn't she scream?” he asks. It has been bothering him all day. “Her upstairs neighbors were home the whole time, and didn't hear anything. He would have had to take off the tape to feed it to her. Did he hold the blade to her throat and force her to drink the drain cleaner? Or did she do it willingly? Was she just done?”

Gretchen squeezes his hand. “The killer had been terrorizing her for hours by then. It was probably something of a relief.”

Archie isn't sure which is worse—the idea that the drain cleaner had been forced down the victim's throat, or the idea that she'd been driven to take it without threat or force, as a means to end her own suffering. “She should have screamed,” he says.

They are quiet. The curtains on the window move a little. The spider on the ceiling dances. Otherwise, the room is still.

“Is that why you thought of me today?” Gretchen asks. “Because she looked like me?”

The truth is more shameful. “I thought of you because she was naked on a bed,” Archie says.

“It turned you on,” Gretchen says softly.

He looks away. Lidia had been a beautiful woman, even bloodied and cold, and she'd been sexually staged, splayed open and tied to a bed. He's male. He has reactions. Lizard-brain reactions. He can't be blamed for that.

“It's okay,” Gretchen tells him.

Archie swings his feet onto the floor and sits up. “I have to go home.”

Gretchen crawls behind him and puts her arms around his waist. “It's an understandable biological response,” she says. She lifts a hand and runs it through his hair along the back of his scalp. “Look at me,” she says.

She has perfect blue eyes.

“It was nothing. Don't let it get to you.” A smile plays on her lips. “Some people like to be tied up,” she says, eyes twinkling. She moves her face near his cheek and nuzzles at his ear. “If I asked you to tie me up, would you?”

Archie pulls away and looks at her, unsure if he's heard correctly.

She raises an eyebrow at him and smiles.

“I don't want to tie you up,” he says.

“You've done a lot of things recently you never thought you'd do,” she points out. She lowers her chin and gives him a flirty look. “It's fun. I would make it fun. It's fantasy. It's completely normal. A lot of people play games in bed.”

“I'm going now before you pull out a latex mask,” Archie says.

“You'll think about it, though, won't you?” she asks. She lies back on the bed and wraps her hands around the bedposts. It is eerily similar to how the latest victim had been secured to her bed, but Gretchen couldn't know that. She arches her back and moans, and Archie feels a twinge of heat in his groin.

“Good-bye,” he says, looking for his socks.

She lets go of the bedposts and wriggles toward him on the bed. “Stay longer,” she purrs.

“I can't,” Archie says. “I have to get home. They're waiting for me.” He sighs and pulls on his pants, already feeling the knot of guilt and shame that tightens in his chest every time he leaves her house. “It's my birthday.”

 

CHAPTER

15

 

Archie awoke to
the sound of birds. He opened his eyes, squinted in the light, and saw water. It lapped gently below him, shimmering with dawn. His whole body hurt. He lay there for a few minutes without moving, trying to piece together where he was and what had happened to him. Then he slowly took in his surroundings. He was splayed on his side on a muddy bank, surrounded by ferns. He could see across the lake, to the docks and houses hedged in by conifers. He was still on the island. He wrestled his wrist forward with a groan and looked at his watch. It was almost five-thirty in the morning. He felt cold to the bone and his hands felt numb and clumsy. He tried to sit up and felt a stabbing pain in his head. He took a few slow breaths and then gently eased himself to a sitting position. His shirt was grimy and stained with dirt. His jacket and tie were gone. His mask was gone. He had mud under his fingernails. His hands smelled strangely of lavender. He felt an irritation in his throat like he'd swallowed something and it had gotten caught halfway down. Archie coughed, trying to dislodge it, but couldn't bring it up. He swallowed hard a few times, trying to get it down the other way, but it remained firmly in place, a small itch behind his Adam's apple. He emptied his pockets. His phone still said no service. He still had the compass from Henry and Claire. He still had the magazine of bullets that he'd ejected from the gun. He still had the brass pillbox. He opened it. There were only two pills. He stared at them, perplexed. There had been ten when he'd started the evening, and he didn't remember taking any. He touched his throat, wondering if that's what he was feeling—a pill. He pinched the remaining two between his dirty fingers, tossed them on his tongue, and chewed them. The bitter taste pulled at the corners of his mouth as the pills broke apart between his teeth. He swallowed the last of the chalky residue and looked at the water. Then he tried to stand.

The sudden change in elevation drove a blade of pain through his head again. He reached up and touched his skull and his fingers found dried blood. He searched his memory for any clues to what had happened and came up with nothing. He remembered Star. He remembered finding Leo in the bedroom. And then … nothing.

He stumbled to the edge of the water and looked at his reflection. His face was smeared with mud. Blood clotted his hair. He coughed again, trying to clear his throat.

What had happened to him?

Archie saw splinters of images. Star coming down the stairs. A gargoyle on top of a lamppost. Leo washing blood off his hands. Then he had a flash of body memory—Leo's arm around his neck, the pressure of Leo's palm pressed against the back of his skull. Leo had choked him.

Archie worked backward. Trying to puzzle it out. He saw Leo's face, talking to him; the urgency in his eyes. He was trying to tell him something important.

Susan
.

Susan was on the island.

Archie turned and started clawing his way up the mud embankment.

 

CHAPTER

16

 

Susan yawned and
turned the page of the
Town & Country
magazine that she was reading for the fourth time. She didn't feel so elegant anymore. Her makeup had dried to a cakey mask that felt like it cracked when she smiled. The fabric of the gold dress stuck to the stubble on her legs, and her armpits were sore where the bodice had chafed her raw. She snuck a glance at Jack Reynolds. He was sitting behind his desk with his tie unknotted and a cup of coffee next to him, reading that day's
New York Times
and looking like the cover of
Cigar Aficionado
magazine. A housekeeper had brought the paper a half hour ago, along with a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
and a cup of coffee. No
Herald,
Susan couldn't help but notice. He probably read it online.