The guard’s fingertips were blue, and his forearms were webbed with fine red scratches.
The warden’s gaze drifted to where the bulge of the guard’s erection pressed against his pants. He cleared his throat. “You ever seen anything like that?”
“It’s caused by blood pooling in the lower half of the body,” Archie said matter-of-factly. “Tissues expand to their maximum capacity. It’ll go down as soon as he’s horizontal.”
“So it’s not a woody?”
“Get a penis swab,” Archie said. “I want a DNA match to the rape kit.”
Archie wasn’t sure what he’d expected to feel when faced with Gretchen’s attacker. But he felt unsatisfied faced with this dangling corpse. Because he couldn’t throw him against a wall? Arrest him? Because he couldn’t be Gretchen’s white knight?
Archie couldn’t shake the feeling of responsibility for what had happened. Gretchen wasn’t in the women’s prison. She was on the solitary ward, which was on the men’s section of the campus, so her guards were mostly male. Gretchen was slender, but she was dangerous. She had found a hundred different ways to kill people. But the guard was big, two hundred forty at least, and Archie could see how he might have overpowered her.
“He used a choke hold,” the warden said. “Cracked her collarbone. The doc thinks she was unconscious through most of it.”
“Jesus,” Archie said.
“And then he offs himself?” Henry said with a snort. “Convenient.” Archie threw him a look. “What?” Henry said. “You think she’s not capable of setting this up?”
“She’s a victim until proven otherwise.”
Henry lifted his chin toward the body. “Divorced recently?” he asked the warden.
The warden nodded. “His wife left him last year.”
Henry looked at Archie. “Fits her profile.”
Gretchen had used the Internet to troll for lonely men whom she could manipulate. She traveled with them for a while, got them to kill for her, and then executed them. She’d done it at least three times. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she’d somehow convinced this man to die for her, or because of her. “He leave a note?” Archie asked.
The warden lifted his eyebrows toward the bathroom, which was directly off the locker room. Archie and Henry followed him in. The bathroom had two showers, three toilet stalls, a row of urinals, and a counter with two sinks and, above it, a mirror onto which someone had drawn, with a felt-tip marker, a heart.
Archie realized that he had subconsciously lifted his hand to the heart scar on his chest, the skin raised beneath the cotton cloth of his shirt. He forced his hand into his pocket, only to find the pillbox.
“It’s her signature, right?” the warden was saying. “A heart?”
“Right,” Archie said. He pulled the pillbox out, opened it, put three pills in his mouth and swallowed them. His hand was trembling. “You need to rotate all her guards. It was a mistake to allow her contact with men. She’s assigned women, from now on.” He held the pillbox out to the warden. “Tic Tacs,” Archie said. “Want one?”
The warden looked at Archie strangely and shook his head.
Archie glanced up at his own reflection, framed in the inked heart. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I should have paid more attention. I should have been here more.”
“She’s playing you,” Henry said softly.
“I needed a break,” Archie said to his reflection, trying to convince himself. “I can handle it now.” He turned to the warden. “Go through the security logs. Review footage. Interview your staff. I want to know if they had a relationship.”
The warden’s ruddy skin colored with the realization of what Archie was driving at. “You think she was fucking him all along?” he asked.
Archie felt his stomach clench. It felt a little bit like jealousy “You better hope not,” he said.
CHAPTER
16
Archie had the TV on in his home office, without the volume. It was the first TV he and Debbie had bought together, for their first apartment, back in college. A twenty-seven-inch color Panasonic. It had seemed extravagant then. Now it just looked sort of old and clunky. Debbie had bought a flat screen for the living room. But Archie couldn’t bear to part with the old TV. It had sentimental value.
He had turned on the local news in hopes that there would be some coverage of the remains in the park, but the news had been preempted by continuing coverage of the circus surrounding the senator’s death. They were already talking about changing the name of the airport to Castle International.