She got up off the bed, walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out over Broadway. The Friday-night traffic was heavy and streams of pedestrians in fancy clothes were making their way down from an event at the nearby concert hall. If there were any black folks among them, Anne didn’t see them.
She let the curtain fall back into place and sat back down on the bed, where she took one last long look at the photographs of the dead girls and then turned the photographs over one by one. Lee Robinson’s week-old corpse, a yellow and blackened heap in the mud; Dana Stamp facedown in a bank of weeds; Kristy Mathers coated in wet sand, her body improbably twisted. The school portraits and birthday party snapshots. When every image was turned, she got out her wallet and she pulled out another photograph. This one was of a very handsome black man with his arm around two very handsome black teenage boys. She smiled at their grinning faces. Then she picked up her cell phone and called home.
“Mama,” her eldest son, Anthony, answered. “You don’t have to call every day.”
“Yeah, baby,” Anne said. The job was always hardest at night. When she was alone. “I do.”
“You get us our Nikes?”
Anne laughed. “It’s on my to-do list.”
“What number is it?” her son asked.
Anne glanced back down at the photographs on her bed and then up across the room at the window that overlooked the bustle of downtown. The killer was out there. “Two.”
After Susan left , Archie finished his beer and got back to work. First, he spread out the contents of the files on the coffee table. He had hurriedly shuffled them into two neat towers before her arrival. He wasn’t cleaning up; he just didn’t think she needed to see the autopsy photographs of three dead teenagers. He took three more Vicodin and sat down next to the coffee table on the beige carpet. It was staring at photographs like these that helped him spot Gretchen Lowell’s signature. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for this time, but if it was there, he wasn’t seeing it. The kid upstairs was singing. Archie couldn’t make out the words, but he thought he recognized the tune from when his own children were toddlers.
He looked at the digital clock. Did the math. It was just after 9:00 P.M. Gretchen would be in her cell for the night. Lights-out wasn’t until 10:00 P.M. This was the hour when Gretchen read. He knew that she borrowed books from the prison library, because her checkout history was forwarded to him every month. She read psychoanalytic tomes, from Freud to textbooks to pop-psych paperbacks. She read smart contemporary fiction, the kind of books that won awards and most people read only so that they could say so at dinner parties. She read true crime. Why not? Archie thought. It was her profession’s trade publication. And last month, she had checked out The Last Victim. He hadn’t told Henry about that. The fact that Gretchen was reading the sordid true-crime account of Archie’s captivity, with its cheap prose and gruesome photographs of the bodies, of Archie, of all of them, would have been more than Henry could handle. He would have had the book taken away, pulled from the library. He might even have gone through with his threat to stop Archie from seeing her. It wouldn’t take much, a heart-to-heart with Buddy. Archie was barely convincing them all that he was functional. It was his insistence, combined with their guilt about what he’d been through, that kept him in a position to bargain. But he knew his footing was tenuous.
He looked at the girls’ pallid bodies, gaping open on the morgue table, the ligature marks a slash of purple across their necks. That was one upside, Archie decided: He killed them right away. And there were worse ways to die than strangulation.
The kid upstairs jumped up and down and an adult walked over and picked her up. Archie could hear her shrieking and giggling.
CHAPTER
27
T oday, when Gretchen comes with the pills, Archie manages to get a sentence out when she removes the tape. “I’ll swallow them,” he tells her.
She sets the funnel on the tray and Archie opens his mouth and extends his tongue, like a good patient. She places a pill on his tongue and holds a small glass of water against his parched lips so he can drink. It is the first water he has had since his arrival and it feels good in his mouth and in his throat. She checks around his tongue to ensure that he has swallowed the medicine. They repeat the exercise four times.
When they are done, Archie asks, “How long have I been here?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
He hears a buzzing. At first, he thinks it’s in his head, but then he recognizes the sound: flies. The decomposing corpse on the floor. It reminds him of the other man, and for a moment he is a cop again. “The second man who lifted me into the van,” he says. “Where is he? Have you killed him, too?”
Gretchen raises a bewildered eyebrow. “Darling, you sound like a raving lunatic.”
“He was here,” Archie says, his mind foggy. “Before.”
“It’s just us,” she says impatiently.