He laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. He was definitely not okay. He has an exhausting, stressful, rewarding day at work, and where does he go? The state pen. Because what could be more calming than spending quality time with a woman who repeatedly drove a nail into your chest? “I just wanted to see you.” He rubbed his eyes with his hand. “How fucked up is that?”
“Do you know the origin of the term Stockholm syndrome?” Gretchen asked sweetly. She reached out her manacled hands and laid her palms flat on the tabletop so that the tips of her fingers were inches from where Archie’s right hand lay on the table. “In 1973, a petty criminal named Janne Olsson walked into the Kreditbanken bank in Stockholm with a machine gun. He demanded three million crowns and that a friend of his be freed from prison. The police released the friend and sent him into the bank, and he and Olsson held four bank employees hostage in a vault for six days. The police finally drilled a hole into the vault and pumped in gas, and Olsson and his friend surrendered.” She slid her hands across the table, closer to Archie. Her hands were smooth, the nails cut short. “All the hostages were freed, unharmed. Their lives had been threatened, they had been forced to wear nooses around their necks, and yet to a person they defended Olsson. One of the women said that she had wanted to run off with him. Olsson served eight years in prison. You know where he is now?” Gently, slowly, she brushed Archie’s thumb with her fingertips. “He runs a grocery store in Bangkok.”
Archie looked down at where their hands touched, but he didn’t move a muscle. “They should consider stiffer sentencing in Sweden.”
“Stockholm is lovely. The Bergianska botanical garden has a greenhouse that has plants from every climate zone in the world. I’ll take you there one day.”
“You’re never getting out of prison.”
She raised her eyebrows noncommittally and drew a tiny circle on the crook of his thumb with her finger.
“It’s funny,” Archie said, watching her finger on his thumb. “How Reston waited ten years to start killing. Anne says there must have been a trigger.”
“Oh?”
Archie looked up. “How did you meet him?”
Gretchen smiled. “Meet him?”
“Reston,” Archie said. He threaded his hand in hers. It was the first time he had ever made an effort to touch her, and he thought he saw a flicker of surprise in her eyes. “He was one of your accomplices. Maybe one you were training,” he said, letting himself enjoy the heat of her hand in his. “He was there that day. He was the second man who lifted me into the van. And then you went to prison. And he festered. And it set him off. How did you meet him?”
She looked at him, and in that moment Archie realized that Gretchen had never told him anything, never let him see anything that she didn’t want him to know. She had always been in control. She had always been one move ahead.
“I picked him out, just as I did all the others,” she explained happily. “His on-line profile was perfect. Long divorced.” She smiled. “I like the divorced ones because they’re lonely. He didn’t have any hobbies, passions. High IQ. Middle-class.” She gave a dismissive little roll of her eyes. “He tried to pass a Whitman poem off as one of his own. Classic narcissism.” She leaned forward. “Narcissists are easy to manipulate because they’re so predictable. He was depressed. Obsessed with fantasy.” A smile spread on her lips. “And he liked blondes. We dated. I told him that I was married and that we had to keep our love a secret, and I gave him what he wanted. Power. Submission. I let him think he was in control.” Sound familiar? thought Archie. “Once I’d gotten him to tell me about his little teen lust, it wasn’t hard to help him express his rage.”
Archie threaded his fingers even deeper between hers, so that their hands were tightly entwined. His mouth felt dry. He could barely look at her, but he didn’t want to let go. It was all becoming horribly clear. “You let me think I’d come up with bringing Susan in. But Reston had told you about her. You recognized her byline. You planted the idea. Stopped giving me bodies. Dropped her name. You set us all up.” Archie shook his head and chuckled. “And then you sat back to watch.” It sounded absurd even as he was saying it, paranoid, the delusions of a drug addict. “I just don’t think I can prove it.”
She smiled at him indulgently. “The important thing is that you’ve gone back to work,” she said. “Gotten out of that apartment.”
Henry would believe him. He knew what Gretchen was capable of. But then what? Henry would make sure that Archie never saw Gretchen again.
“You should be grateful to Paul,” Gretchen continued wickedly. “He donated two pints of blood to you.”
Archie turned his head, nauseous. The image of Reston on the AstroTurf green carpet, head bloody meat, flashed in his head. “Do you really like Godard?” Archie asked her.
“No,” she said. “But I know that you do.”