by Chelsea Cain
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
13
Archie, 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.
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
14
Susan’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
15
Gretchen’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.
