by Chelsea Cain
“He knew what he was doing,” Susan said, though she wasn’t sure she believed it.
Bliss turned and looked at Susan. The muscles in Bliss’s neck were taut. When she put her hand on Susan’s leg, Susan could feel it tremble. “Don’t waste your time on him,” Bliss said quietly. “There’s a reason his marriage didn’t work out.”
Little did she know, thought Susan.
“I’m going to get some water,” Susan said. She stood up and went into the kitchen. Leo’s kitchen was all steel appliances and sharp angles. He was making tea. His gleaming white dress shirt was rolled up at the sleeves and his black pants were crisply pressed. He looked up at her and smiled. “Chamomile,” he said.
Susan lifted herself up to sit on the black granite counter, next to the two matching white ceramic mugs that Leo had ready for the tea. “Do you have any blow?” she asked.
Leo raised his eyebrows. He picked up the electric kettle and poured steaming water into the two cups. “Do you think that’s a good idea right now?”
“I think it’s the perfect idea right now,” Susan said. “I need a boost.”
He picked up a spoon and stirred the tea bag in one cup, then the other. Susan could smell the chamomile, pungent and floral. “All out,” Leo said.
She poked him in the arm with her index finger. “You’re lying.”
“You just got out of the hospital, Susan.”
Susan pushed herself off the counter. “So let’s celebrate,” she said. She headed for his bedroom, and he followed her. She knew where he kept a gram now and again. It wasn’t like she didn’t know he did coke occasionally. She wasn’t stupid. She opened the top drawer of his dresser, and he closed the bedroom door. Inside the drawer was a leather toiletry bag. Susan pulled it out and unzipped it. The coke was in a little plastic bag, the kind you get at bead stores. There was also a black straw, about two inches long.
“Good news,” Susan said. “Looks like you’ve got some left.”
Leo stood just inside the bedroom door with his hands in his pockets.
She tapped some white powder out of the bag onto the smooth dark wood of his dresser.
“You don’t want to do much of that,” Leo said.
Susan ignored him, put her hair behind her ears, plugged one nostril, and snorted.
She recoiled immediately—her nose burned and her eyes watered. She rubbed at her nose and jumped up and down. “Fuck, that’s strong,” she said.
“It’s uncut,” Leo said quietly.
“Get me a tissue,” Susan said, flailing a hand.
He laid a handkerchief in her palm. He was that kind of guy, the guy with the cloth handkerchief.
Susan blew her nose and handed him back the handkerchief.
She actually felt great. Her arms tickled. Her brain felt warm. She felt like she was getting more oxygen, like a veil of haze had been lifted. “That’s really good shit,” she said.
“Archie’s going to fucking kill me,” Leo said.
“Why do you care so much what Archie thinks?” Susan asked.
“Why do you?” Leo countered.
Susan shrugged and turned away. She felt like moving.
“He caught my sister’s killer,” Leo said. “We have a relationship. I’ve known him forever.”
“He doesn’t even like you,” Susan said. Did she say that aloud? She put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry.”
“He likes me,” Leo said. “He just doesn’t like me with you.”
“Why?”
“He could probably foresee this moment,” Leo said.
“I found the gym bag.” She had said it. It had come right out. That’s what a bump of cocaine gave you—courage. She put her hands on her hips for emphasis.
Leo blinked at her, then exhaled like someone had socked him in the belly. He threaded his hands behind his head. “Fuck,” he said. He was sputtering, shaking his head. He looked angry, even angrier than she thought he’d be. “Fucking Christ, Susan. I told you not to snoop.”
His reaction made Susan feel defensive. “You’re a drug dealer,” she said, “just like your father.”
“Did you touch it?” Leo asked. He was pacing, looking at the floor. “Shit, they’re going to print it.” He walked over to her and took her by the arms. “Did you touch the plastic?”
Susan was confused. “Print it? What? No.”
He let go of her and backed away.
“What did you do with it?” Susan asked him.
He turned away from her and started pacing again. “Shit, we cannot be having this conversation. Not now.”
The seriousness of this was settling on her. “What are you?” she asked.
His look was sharp. “What did you think I was?”
“A lawyer.”
He leveled a skeptical gaze at her. “With one client?”
Susan’s nose was running. She didn’t want to ask for the handkerchief again. She sniffled and wiped it with her hand. “That was a lot of coke, Leo.”
His eyes widened slightly. It was quick, but she caught it. “Yeahhh,” he said.
It wasn’t coke. It had looked like coke. “What was it?” Susan asked. She didn’t feel euphoric anymore, just jittery. “Was it heroin?”
Heroin. Hero. It was weird the way the brain worked. Maybe it was the cocaine. Maybe it was free association. All Susan knew was that up until that moment she had forgotten about the note that her mother had left her, about Gabby Meester and the Trib’s Heroes column. And now she remembered. And what’s more, she remembered that when she and Bliss went back into the house, the note was gone. It had been next to her laptop, next to the phone. And then it wasn’t there. Beaton had taken it. Because it was important.
“I need your computer,” Susan said.
CHAPTER
63
Archie stared into the darkness of Gretchen’s room. The hall lights made a door-shaped rectangle of light on the floor. The room was cold.
“Are you awake?” Archie asked.
“Yes,” Gretchen said.
The light switch was in the hall, just outside the door. Archie flipped it on, and the door on the floor disappeared as the room sprang into sick institutional color. Gretchen was lying on her back in bed. He had the feeling that she’d been lying there a long time awake in the dark.
“Gretchen Stevens,” Archie said. “It’s a pleasure.”
She didn’t react visibly to that. But then he wasn’t close enough to see any minute shifts of expression play on her face. “What a busy bee you’ve been,” she said. She turned her head and looked at him. “I wasn’t expecting you. No one came in to tie me up.”
“I’ve had a long day,” Archie said from the doorway. “I didn’t call ahead.”
She beckoned him with a hand. “Come and fill me in. I’m a little out of the loop.”
Archie walked to her. She scooted a little over in the bed and propped herself up on her elbows and he sat down on the edge of the bed. He could feel his closeness to her.
Her hand ran up his back and threaded into the short hairs at the base of his neck. “Tell me about your day,” she said.
His shoulders relaxed under her touch and he let his head drop forward. “Your old friend Colin Beaton put Susan Ward in the hospital and he kidnapped a kid named Margaux Clinton. Seventeen. A foster kid, like you.”
He stole a sideways glance at her.
She gave him a small smile. “He doesn’t like that name now.”
“Sorry, Ryan Motley.”
She looked different. Her skin was clearer, and her eyes seemed sharper. The slowness of her speech was gone. Or was he imagining it?
Her fingers moved deeper into his hairline, caressing his scalp.
“The Beatons took you in,” he said. “And you murdered James Beaton. Was it Colin’s idea? Did you do it together?”
“That’s sweet,” she cooed. “You want to blame it on him. He was the psychopath and I was the innocent flower, caught up in the carnage.” Her lips spre
ad into a wicked smile. “Sorry, darling. Daddy Beaton was all me.”
“You turned Colin into a killer,” Archie said.
“I showed him how to survive—I didn’t know he was insane.”
Archie chuckled dryly. “Now he’s the insane one?”
Gretchen sat up so that she was directly behind him, and she put her head over his shoulder and her lips to his ears. Her warm breath fluttered against his neck. “He’s testing God,” she whispered.
The Church of Living Christ. Scriptural purists. “He believes in faith healing,” Archie said, understanding. Gretchen tortured her victims for her own amusement. Beaton tortured his victims to make dying last longer, to give them as much time as possible for God to step in. “He tries to save them.”
Gretchen’s face lit up with delight. “With prayer. And they die anyway, of course.” She arched an eyebrow. “You’d think he’d catch on.”
“Why did he carve the hearts on some of the children?”
“It’s a private joke.”
“It’s not very funny.”
She shrugged and settled back onto her elbows again.
Archie looked around the sad, dank room. “Is this better than prison?” he asked.
“It’s better than lethal injection.”
“Worried that the angels won’t be there to greet you?”
She blinked, and looked away, and Archie couldn’t tell if she was really feeling something or if she was just faking it. When she looked back at him, her eyes were soft. “Lie next to me,” she said.
Archie glanced at the door. This was going too far. He scratched the back of his head. He could feel the weight of her stare. He took off his shoes, slowly, and lined them up side by side on the floor. Then he stretched out next to her on the bed, so that they were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.
“Does it help, seeing me like this?” she asked.
Archie tried not to think about the heat in his groin. “Not really,” he said.
“You’re seeing someone.” She said it casually.
He knew she was just guessing, reading him somehow, but it still threw him. “Am I?” he said.
“Does she look like me?” She hesitated at the end of the sentence, and the correction was clear: How I used to look?
“Henry thinks so,” Archie said.
“Good. I want you to be happy.”
Archie laughed. “No, you don’t.”
She smiled and ran the tip of her finger along the scar she’d left across his neck. “You should have had me restrained,” she said. “I could kill you. You never know when I might have a razor blade tucked up my sleeve.”
“Why kill me now?” Archie said. “It would seem anticlimactic.”
She moved her finger from his neck down the buttons of his shirt to the front of his pants and then settled her palm over his pelvis. He strained for her.
She grinned. “You still like me.”
He knew it was what she wanted. Power. To know she still wielded it over him.
She moved her hand to her mouth and sucked on her fingers, then danced her fingers back down his shirt and slid her fingers into his pants. The rush of blood in his body made him feel light-headed. The heat of her hand, the stickiness of her saliva.
He put his hand on her wrist.
“No,” he said.
He could smell the sex between them. Both of them breathing heavily, sweating in that cold room.
She pulled her hand out of his pants and curled next to him, her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t plan it,” she said. “Our affair. I just wanted to get inside the investigation.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he asked.
“It should probably make you feel worse. If I’d planned it, you’d be a victim of my wiles.”
“This way I’m a guilty shit,” Archie said.
“We’re all guilty.”
“Yeah, well, some of us more than others,” he said. He yawned and rubbed his face. “I don’t know why I came here.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “I do. You want to save the girl. You think I might know where they are, and you think that if you’re nice to me I might tell you.”
This was it.
“Do you know where they are?” Archie asked.
Her chin was on his shoulder, their faces close. He could see the threads of blood vessels in the whites of her eyes. “I need you to kill Colin,” she said. “I don’t want him caught. I want him killed.”
“I’m a cop, Gretchen,” he said. “I couldn’t even kill you when I had the chance.”
Her nostrils flared. “You think I’m dangerous? He is twice as dangerous as I ever was. He has done worse things. He will do worse things.”
He cupped her head in his hands and looked her in the eye, searching for some tell, some spark of humanity. “Do you know where he is?”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “Tell me you’ll kill him,” she said.
“If I catch him, the state will do that for us.”
“The state didn’t kill me,” she said.
Archie brushed her cheek with his thumb. “You’re a fucking aberration, sweetheart.”
“Promise me you’ll kill him.”
He squinted at her, still searching for her angle. “We lie to each other all the time. Whatever we say, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’ll believe you,” she said. There was an urgent quality to her voice that he had never heard before. It unnerved him.
“I’ll kill him,” he said.
She closed her eyes. And he dropped his hands.
Her lids lifted. And she fixed her blue eyes on him. “Where do you go, when God fails you?”
And then he knew. Lowell Street. “The church,” Archie said. The husk of the burned-out building was still there. What better place to hide? He swung his legs off the bed and pushed his feet into his shoes.
“Darling?” she said. “I’m not crazy.”
Archie was already headed for the door. He looked back at her as he closed it behind him. She was still on her elbows, still watching him. “I know,” he said. And then he flipped off the light and sent her back into darkness.
Henry was waiting in the hall. “Did it work?” he asked.
CHAPTER
64
Susan sat on the edge of Leo’s bed, his black laptop bobbing on her jiggling knees. Leo was sitting next to her, watching her like she might have a heart attack at any minute. She had Googled every name she could think of in conjunction with the Heroes column. Jake Kelly. Ryan Motley. All the Beatons. In fact, she had never typed faster. But nobody but Gabby Meester came up.
Then she had borrowed Leo’s phone to call Lucy Trotter, the Trib staffer who put together the Heroes column every week. Lucy had said that a friend of Gabby’s had called her a few months ago to ask some questions for a form she was working on, nominating Gabby for some award that paid 10K and had been advertised in the classifieds of the Oregon Herald. So then Susan had looked up the call for nominations in the classifieds of the Herald, and there it was. “Nominations Wanted for the Good News Award. 10K to local person with most charitable heart. Reap what you sow.”
“Motherfucker,” Susan said.
The Herald classified system provided a third-party e-mail to protect the privacy of the person listing the ad. But you had to provide bona fide contact info in order to get that third-party e-mail.
Susan called Derek Rogers. With the cutbacks at the paper, he’d be working late, covering the crime beat she’d once hoped to inherit. He was one of those people who worried about his job, which was probably why he still had one and she didn’t. He probably had on a tie right now. She hoped he’d pick up. She drummed her fingers on her legs while she waited. He picked up after four rings.
“Herald,” he said, wearily.
“It’s me,” Susan said.
“Where are you?” Derek asked, his voice dropping. “Are you okay?”
“I’m calling to give you an ex
clusive interview on everything that happened today.”
There was a long pause.
“What’s in it for you?” he asked.
He’d been suspicious of her intentions ever since she’d stopped sleeping with him.
“I need a favor,” she said. “I have the third-party e-mail for a Herald classified and I need you to e-mail me the guy’s real contact information.”
“Why are you talking so fast?” Derek asked.
“I’m excited,” Susan said.
She saw Leo roll his eyes.
“I’ll have to go down to classifieds,” Derek said. “It’ll take a few minutes. The number you’re calling from is blocked. Give it to me so I can call you back.”
Susan glanced over at Leo. “It’s not my phone. I’ll call you when you e-mail me the contact info.”
There was another pause.
Susan groaned. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said.
“Okay,” Derek said, and he hung up.
Susan slid the computer off her lap and jumped up and headed for the dresser.
“No,” Leo said. “Not a chance.”
“I’m on to something,” Susan said, picking up the small black straw. “I don’t want to get tired.”
“That’s not going to help you find her,” Leo said.
“You’re pretty self-righteous for someone with a gym bag full of heroin,” Susan said.
Leo picked up the little bag of cocaine, pinched it between his fingers, and emptied it on the floor. “Whoops,” he said.
The bedroom door opened and Bliss popped her head in. “What are you two doing?” she asked.
“Mom!” Susan said, dropping the straw. “Knock first.” She moved away from the dresser, from the mirror, from the white powder on the floor. “What if we’d been having sex?”
“Sexuality is nothing to be embarrassed about, honey.”
Susan cringed internally. “Any news on TV?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Bliss said.
“Do you want some tea?” Leo asked.
“I want some wine,” Bliss said.
