Debbie moved a hand down to his abdomen and touched the long scar over his diaphragm where his spleen had been removed. It was his thickest scar, an ugly six-inch slash, the raised white scars from the stitches still visible around it, giving it a particularly Frankensteinian appearance. The scar tissue was tough, and he could barely feel Debbie’s fingertips brush over it. She moved then to the smaller scars that scattered his chest. These were finer, the scalpel pressed firmly into his flesh more to pass the time than to inflict pain. They looked like silver blades of grass, each laid out even with the one before it, like hash marks on a grotesque score card. Debbie traced her fingers over the slightly puckered lump of flesh that marked the stab wound below his left ribs.
“We had a deal,” Archie said. “Life, in exchange for the locations of her victims. She kept her part of the bargain. I was the one who couldn’t handle it. She won’t talk to anyone else, Debbie. Think of the two hundred people she killed. Think about their families.” It was a speech he had given often to himself over the two years he had gone every week to meet with Gretchen Lowell. It was all part of his effort to convince himself that he was just doing his job. He didn’t believe it anymore. He wondered if Debbie did.
“One hundred and ninety-nine,” Debbie said. “You were number two hundred, Archie. And you’re still alive.”
She moved her hand up to the other scar, the scar that began below his left nipple, arced through his chest hair, and traveled down to its original point, in the shape of a heart. Gretchen Lowell carved a heart on all her victims. It was her signature. But her other victims had been corpses, the hearts bloody wounds obscured by decomposition and a litany of torture. As head of the Beauty Killer Task Force, Archie had stood over their bodies, stared at their morgue photographs, been one step behind for ten years. Until he walked into the trap that Gretchen had set for him.
She had infiltrated the task force six weeks before she revealed herself to him the night she drugged him. They had thought she was a psychiatrist, offering her expertise. He wondered now if he would have been so quick to trust her if she hadn’t been so beautiful.
The heart scar was delicate, the new flesh a dainty thread of pale skin. His prettiest scar. For months he couldn’t bring himself to look at it. Now it felt as much a part of his body as the beating heart beneath. Debbie’s fingers grazed it and Archie felt an electrical jolt run through his nervous system.
He reached up and took her hand by the wrist. “Don’t,” he said.
Debbie pressed her face into his shoulder. “She’s killing you,” she said, the words small and muffled in the cloth. “She’s killing us.”
Archie’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I love you,” he said. He meant it. He loved her and their children more than anything. He loved them completely, and it wasn’t enough. “But I can’t just forget about her.”
Debbie looked up at Archie’s reflection. “I won’t let her win.”
It broke his heart. Not because she was worried that he was in danger, but because she thought she had a chance of saving him. Whatever fucked-up game he and Gretchen played, it was between them. Gretchen didn’t care about Debbie because she knew that Debbie wasn’t a threat. “It’s not a contest.” What he didn’t say was, she’s already won.
Debbie looked at him for a minute, not saying anything. And then, slowly, sweetly, she kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s sit up for a while,” she said. “Watch TV or something.”
Archie was grateful for the shift in topic. “Like married people,” he said.
Debbie smiled. “Yeah.”
Pretending to be normal. That was something that Archie was good at. “I’ll be the husband,” he said. He followed her into the living room, just as the pills kicked in and the codeine rushed through his system. Like a kiss, it was soft and warm and full of promise.
CHAPTER
4
Susan sat naked on the floor in front of the oscillating fan, goose bumps rising on her flesh every time the fan’s warm air hit her. She’d taken a cool bath and her turquoise hair was wet, her bob combed flat against her head. She had just changed her hair from pink to turquoise two days before, and her scalp still stung from the bleach. That, and the fact that it was ninety-five degrees on the second story of the cramped Victorian, made sleep elusive. The bath had helped. She’d gotten the cigarette smoke smell out of her hair. Though not, somehow, the smell of Parker’s buttered popcorn.
She stared at the white laptop that sat on the floor next to her. The final draft of the Molly Palmer story was due the next day. The fucker was finally going to get what was coming to him.
The door to the room flew open.
“Mom!” Susan cried.
Susan’s mother, Bliss, looked startled. Her long bleached dreads were wrapped up on top of her head; her cotton caftan floated loosely around her wiry, yoga-toned body. She was carrying a Japanese teapot on a wicker tray. “I’m just bringing you mint tea,” she said.
Susan ran her hands through her wet hair and brought her knees up to her chest to hide her naked body. Whereas her mother was fifty and had the body of a thirty-year-old, Susan was twenty-eight and had the body of a fifteen-year-old. “Knock. Okay? I don’t want tea. It’s like a hundred degrees.”
“I’ll just set it here,” Bliss said, bending over to place the tray on the floor. She looked up at Susan. “Have you been eating popcorn?” she asked.