“It took him sixteen hours to die. He lost five quarts of blood. But in the end, he died of suffocation. His tongue swelled up, and
he choked on it.” He looked back at the girl. Uncle Archie. Scaring them straight. “Still having fun?” he asked.
The girl took another small step back. She had goose bumps on her arms, but it might have just been because the basement was chilly.
“We found him four days later,” Archie continued. “Sitting in here in the dark, taped to the chair, his eggplant of a tongue engorged, drool, blood everywhere. Strange to see someone’s tongue coming out of the wrong orifice like that, blue lips, mouth open above it.”
“What about his eyes?” the masked man asked. Archie thought he detected a smile behind the mask, but the man’s features were so flattened by the nylon, he couldn’t be sure.
The details about the eyes had not been made public. “She’d pushed a needle through each of his pupils,” Archie said.
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said softly.
“Such is our reward for those in sin,” the masked man said.
One of the young men behind him smirked.
Archie lowered the timbre of his voice. It was time to get serious. “This ends now,” he said. “Whatever this is. Go home to your parents,” he said to the girl. “Your halfway houses,” he added to Shark Boy. “I don’t give a shit where you go. Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. She is not some sort of antihero. This is real life.” He addressed them all. “This man, his name was Can Giang. He came here from Vietnam with his wife. They ran a convenience store downtown. After he died, his teenaged son dropped out of high school to keep the place afloat. He was a human being.”
The girl pulled at the white fringe of her cutoffs. “He wanted to,” she said.
“Shut up,” the masked man snapped.
“Fintan wanted us to do it,” the girl said. “He begged us. We didn’t know he’d die.”
“Shut up, Pearl,” the masked man said again.
The girl was wavering. Archie had reached her. It had worked. “Where’s Jeremy?” Archie asked her.
“Jeremy’s part of our family,” Shark Boy said.
“Jeremy is the only person besides you who survived Gretchen Lowell,” the masked man said, walking toward Archie. “Jeremy is special.” He tapped Archie on the center of his chest. “Like you.”
“Jeremy was a kid,” Archie said. “He doesn’t remember.”
“Yes he does,” the masked man said. He motioned to Shark Boy. “Show him.”
Shark Boy lifted his shirt and bared his shark teeth in a frightening smile. Archie felt a shiver run down his back. Gretchen didn’t have an MO. She did whatever crazy shit she felt like in the moment. But it usually involved, at some point, carving into the person’s torso. Archie had come to know the marks and abrasions on her victims’ chests like a curator would know a collection of paintings. Every stroke was exact. Each victim was painted differently.
He remembered Isabel Reynolds’s wounds. Sixteen vertical slices stacked up on the left rib cage, a latticework of tiny hash marks on her belly, and below her left clavicle, carved with a scalpel, a thinly rendered heart. Even more unique, Gretchen had carved a pattern of triangles across her right rib cage, something she had done to no other victims.
Shark Boy’s chest bore the same marks.
“Jeremy did it for me,” he said. “How does it look?”
The shiver turned into a cold chill. The morgue photos were sealed. If Jeremy had carved those marks into Shark Boy’s chest, it meant that he did remember. He knew what had happened. He was a witness. With his testimony they might be able to close the case. Archie cleared his throat. “I need to talk to him,” he said.
The man in the mask put his nylon face right in front of
Archie’s. Archie could make out short brown hair beneath the stocking. “Starting to take us seriously?” the masked man asked.
Archie had heard of scarification, of cutting, but this? He pulled Shark Boy’s shirt back down. “You think this would amuse her?” Archie said. “That she’d take it as some sort of deranged compliment?”
“I know why she’s here,” the man in the mask said, jabbing a thumb at Susan. “She wants a story. But why are you here?” He turned to Susan, addressing her for the first time. “You wonder that, too?”
“I’m wondering why you’re the only one wearing a mask,” Susan said.
There was a slight adjustment in the masked man’s stance, like a boxer inhaling before a blow. Archie, still over by the bloodstain, was too far away. He took a step closer to Susan, and tried to refocus the masked man’s attention. “I came for Jeremy,” Archie said.
But things had already been set in motion.