Jeremy gnawed at the gag and pushed at Archie with his head, pleading for help. Had Isabel pleaded for help like that? Had she begged her brother for mercy?
“Anyway,” Archie continued, “a month into our affair, she poisons me, takes me into a basement like this one and tortures me.” He pictured Susan, behind him, in the shadows, listening. “I deserved it. I’d betrayed my family. And even after I was out of the hospital and she was in jail, she was all I could think about.” Archie leaned forward, his mouth inches from Jeremy’s ear. “It was just me, in bed, thinking about how much I wanted to fuck Gretchen again.” He glanced up at Gretchen. “I kept asking myself why she’d done it. Why then? What was her plan for me?”
Gretchen stood motionless, the scalpel still in her hand.
He laughed. He sounded crazy. Maybe he was crazy.
Archie put his mouth back to Jeremy’s ear. “Here’s the thing,” Archie said in a stage whisper. “I don’t think she had one.” He looked up at Gretchen. “I think she infiltrated the investigation for her own amusement. I think the affair just happened. For a long time I thought she tortured me because I was the head of her task force, to show the world that she was all-powerful. But I don’t think that’s it. I think she tortured me because we were having an affair and she thought that I was going to break it off.”
Gretchen’s mouth changed. It was something no one else in the world would notice. But that was his gift. No one knew her like he did.
Archie stood. “Am I right, sweetheart?”
Gretchen sank the scalpel into Jeremy’s chest, sliced, and peeled up the rest of his heart scar. “I don’t do anything without a plan,” she said, and she dropped the bloody yarn of flesh on the floor.
“You want to know what’s funny?” Archie said. There was no amusement in his tone. “I wasn’t going to leave you.” He paused and looked at her, really looked at her, trying to see her as he’d seen her before he knew what she was. “I was going to leave Debbie.”
Jeremy emitted another low moan. The gun in Archie’s waistband pressed against his back. He couldn’t hear Susan. He hoped that she’d climbed back out of the basement.
“Why did you come here?” Gretchen asked.
“To kill you,” Archie said.
“How badly do you want it?”
“Pretty badly,” Archie said.
Gretchen sank the scalpel into the fold of Jeremy’s groin. Jeremy howled against the gag, and Gretchen seized Archie’s right hand and pushed his fingers inside the warm wound, positioning Archie’s thumb and forefinger together around Jeremy’s throbbing femoral artery.
“The femoral artery is the second biggest artery in the body,” she said. “You take your finger out of the dike and he’ll bleed out in about a minute.”
Bright red blood spurted between Archie’s fingers with each one of Jeremy’s heartbeats. All cops were required to take some emergency medicine. Heimlich.CPR.How to treat someone in shock. But the one you paid special attention to was how to treat a wound in the field, because if you were ever shot, it could save your life. Archie couldn’t leave him. If he pulled his hand away, Jeremy would die. Archie pressed his left hand on top of his right to get enough pressure to slow the blood flow.
Gretchen backed away.
“You can save him,” she said. “He’ll live. You can put him on trial.” She came around Jeremy’s body to Archie’s side and set the scalpel down on the floor at Archie’s feet.
“Or you can come for me.”
The pulse of blood against Archie’s fingers increased as Jeremy’s heart rate quickened. Archie’s hand was halfway inside Jeremy’s body. He could feel the heat and life of him.
He thought of Isabel Reynolds, of three homeless people Jeremy had killed, of Fintan English who’d died in this very house. He looked up at Gretchen. At the scalpel on the floor between them. And he released Jeremy’s artery and lifted his hands.
Jeremy made a noise. “No.”
Archie took two steps toward Gretchen and scooped up the scalpel in his bloody hand. Gretchen stiffened and took a step back, against the wall. He was on top of her in a moment, their bodies a few inches apart, his palm flat on the wall next to her head.
He could hear Jeremy struggling against the nylon ropes, making strangled cries.
The scalpel was light in his hand, pretty, the same model she had used to carve him up.
“Whatever made you think that I don’t support the death penalty?” Archie said.
He stabbed her below the left rib cage.
The scalpel went in all the way to the handle, and Archie held it there, his fist against her heaving abdomen. He looked down between them and saw blood. He tried to ignore Jeremy’s whimpers.
“Look at me,” he told her.
She looked up at him with her perfect blue eyes. He had wanted to see surprise. He had wanted to do one thing, take one action, that she had not predicted and orchestrated.
Her lips parted. She tried to speak.
Jeremy made one last strangled sound and then was silent.