The girl laughed.
Archie squinted at the shape that had stepped forward: tall, male, but Archie couldn’t make out more than that. “Jeremy?” he said.
The shape didn’t move.
“I don’t think that’s Jeremy,” Susan said quietly.
Archie didn’t like where this was going. He turned to the girl. “There still a bloodstain?” he asked.
Shark Boy lifted his flashlight beam to the floor near the opposite wall. “Over there,” he said.
Archie pretended not to see it. “Turn on the light,” he said. “The mood is great. Very Nightmare on Elm Street. But if you turn on the light, I can show you what happened.”
Archie kept his focus on Shark Boy, watching as his gaze flicked over to the man by the boiler, looking for permission. The man must have nodded, because Shark Boy said, “Okay.”
Someone turned on the lights. Nothing fancy.Three bulbs. No one had bothered to install compact fluorescents down here. Maybe they were waiting for these to burn out first.
Archie turned back toward the boiler. The man was still standing
there. He wore black pants and a gray T-shirt and a nylon stocking over his head. He was relaxed. His hands were in his pockets. Behind him were two young men in their twenties. No masks.
“There you are,” Archie said.
“Start talking,” the man in the mask said.
Archie turned his attention to the bloodstain. Susan unfolded her hand from his. “Go ahead,” she whispered, and Archie took a step away from her.
It had been seven years, but it was still there, much as he remembered it: a bathmat-sized stain, a human body’s length from the wall. Someone had lovingly swept the dust off it.
Seven years. But it was hard to get blood off concrete. You had to work at it. Sandblast it. Use flame. Grind. Scab.Plane. Scour. Douse with chemicals. No reason to waste the effort in an old boiler room. Who was ever going to see it?
He hesitated for a second. Susan didn’t need to hear what he was going to say. He looked over at her.
“Go ahead,” she whispered again.
“She taped him to a chair,” Archie said. He looked around the room. He wasn’t looking at the people. He was looking for the chair. It was gone. Someone had had the decency, at least, to get rid of that. “An office chair.From a shop upstairs. It was pale blue.” He didn’t know why, but that detail had always struck him, the powder-blue cloth of the chair, dated even then, like something out of a dentist’s waiting room. “She used an entire roll of duct tape.” One hundred and eighty feet. One of the crime techs had measured it. It had taken them forty minutes to peel it off him before he could be sent to the morgue. “Mummified him from his ankles to his neck.” He glanced over at Susan. Her face was a mask of journalistic objectivity. Good girl, Archie thought. And then he mentally kicked himself for being condescending.
He reached up and touched his chest, feeling the thick scars
under the cloth of his shirt. “She had carved up his chest. She always did that. But the incisions on this one were unusually passionate.” He shot Shark Boy a wicked grin. “The duct tape stopped him from bleeding out.” The girl had taken a step closer to Shark Boy and was working the stud in her eyebrow again. “Duct tape’s good for that,” he said. “Among other things.” Shark Boy was smiling, but it was a put-on smile, another kind of mask.
The man in the mask was perfectly still.
Archie needed to make it worse. Much worse.
“Then she sliced open his chin,” Archie continued. “About an inch below his bottom lip, a two-inch-wide opening.” He walked over to the girl. She was the one. If he could get to any of them, it would be her. He lifted his hand and brushed his thumb along her bottom lip. She was stock-still, but she didn’t shrink from him. She held her ground. Archie pressed his thumb into her chin. “And she pulled his tongue through the incision.” He let that image sink in for all of them. “And then she pushed piercing needles through the part of the tongue that was exposed.” He moved his hand up the girl’s face and tapped one of the studs that pierced her eyebrows. “Two-inch hollow piercing needles,” he said. “Three of them. She left two of the needles in, so he couldn’t pull his tongue back through the hole. And then she removed the third needle.”
The girl turned her head. Not much, but enough that she pulled away from Archie’s hand. He looked at it there in midair and then closed his fist and dropped it to his side. She was just a kid.
He turned to Shark Boy and the others.
“There’s a pretty big vein in the tongue that apparently bleeds a lot,” he said. He paused. Susan’s face was still impenetrable, but she’d crossed her arms tightly across her chest. A black sludge dripped from the rusty joint of a sewer pipe overhead.