“Coma position,” Jeremy had called it.
The flesh tented at each hook site, strange triangles of strained skin that looked as if they might give in to gravity at any moment. Jeremy’s head lolled back, his pale neck arched, Adam’s apple protruded. The one eye socket Archie could see was a bloody hole. A black rubber-ball gag sealed Jeremy’s mouth, but in the silence of the basement, Archie could now hear Jeremy’s pitiful moan.
Gretchen stood on the other side of Jeremy, facing Archie, elbows out, brows knitted, a scalpel in her hand. Freckles of blood splattered her bare arms. She’d been busy. Jeremy’s chest was raw with wounds. His torso was striped with blood trailing down his rib cage and dripping onto the concrete floor.
Archie tucked his gun behind him and took a step to stand in the doorway.
She lowered the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest and drew it toward her, as Jeremy choked against the gag. The Palmar grip. All those
years, Archie and his task force had hunted her, always five steps behind. He had stood at so many crime scenes, seen so many bodies, reviewed so many autopsies, trying to put himself in the moment of the victim’s terror. Then he had experienced it firsthand.
“Hello, darling,” she said to Archie. She didn’t look up. She just knew he was there. “Have you come to watch me work?”
“I’ve seen you at work,” Archie said. “Remember?” He heard the faint sound of crunching glass, as Susan’s feet hit the basement floor.
“This is different,” she said. She smiled up at him. “Come on. Come take a closer look.”
Archie wanted to keep Gretchen’s attention on him, so she wouldn’t notice Susan, so he walked toward her. Jeremy, hearing Archie, lifted his head and struggled, causing his body to swing, but Gretchen put a hand out and steadied the rigging. Blood ran from Jeremy’s eye sockets like tears.
Archie stood across from Gretchen, Jeremy suspended between them. The room reeked of urine. A dark puddle stained the concrete below Jeremy. He’d wet himself. Gretchen bent over again, getting back to work, pressing the scalpel into Jeremy’s flesh. His torso was shredded. The wounds varied in depth. Some were mere slivers of red; some gaped open exposing fat; some gurgled blood.
“You were special,” Gretchen said to Archie. “You got special treatment.” She frowned at Jeremy’s brutalized skin. “This is hardly any pleasure at all.” She moved a stray piece of red hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “But work can’t always be fun, can it? That’s what makes it work.”
He realized then what she was doing. She was excising the scar tissue of the wounds that Jeremy had self-inflicted, the badges he had not earned.
“You think Jack Reynolds was going to let this go to trial?” she said, still focused on the scalpel. “He would have had Jeremy killed.
On the street.In jail. He would have found a way. Because Jeremy going on trial for multiple murders, that would lead to some discussion of Jack Reynolds’s business interests.” She lifted the scalpel and dragged it along the heart Jeremy had carved on himself. “Jeremy is dead one way or another. You know that.”
“Go ahead,” Archie said. “Kill him. I didn’t come here to save him. I came here for you.”
Jeremy started to sob, the ball gag bobbing, slippery with saliva.
Gretchen sized up Archie’s groin. “Are you going to try to strangle me again?”
He could shoot her. But she had a scalpel in her hand and she would finish Jeremy off if she could. And Susan was behind him, somewhere. He didn’t want to risk the bullet ricocheting off one of the concrete walls. Not yet.
Archie smoothed a hand over Jeremy’s sweat-and blood-matted hair. “He told me that he fantasizes that we’re lovers,” Archie said to Gretchen. “He likes to think about me hurting you.”
“Well, he is a psychopath,” Gretchen said. She nicked at the heart-shaped scar, peeled a piece of the tissue off with her fingers, and flung it to the floor at her feet.
Archie squatted down, so that his face was level with Jeremy’s. It felt good to sit. “Actually, you’re very intuitive, Jeremy,” Archie said. Jeremy twisted his head to face Archie, a black ball for a mouth, bloody craters for eyes. “We had an affair,” Archie told him. “Before I knew who she was.” It was a relief to tell someone, to actually say it. “Two weeks. That’s how long it took. She appeared, with her fake psychiatric degree, and offered to help us with the case.” Archie slowly shook his head, his lips curled in a dark smile. “Fifteen years of faithful marriage and I lasted two weeks before I fell panting into Gretchen Lowell’s arms.”
“I’m the best fuck you’ve ever had, darling,” Gretchen said sweetly.
“Indisputably,” said Archie. He wondered where Susan was, and if she could hear him.