“And if one thing led to another...” she said, trailing off.
“I had never cheated on my wife,” Archie said. “I loved my family.” How many times had he told himself that over the past three years? And yet he still couldn’t look them in the eye. He was sure his son knew. He didn’t know how. No one else suspected. But Ben knew that Archie had betrayed them.
Gretchen’s breath was feather-light on his cheek. “You were overworked, darling,” she said. “You needed an outlet.” She moved her mouth just over his ear, the words sending shivers down his neck, and took his earlobe in her mouth and bit it. The pain was nice, something he could feel. She suckled his earlobe for a moment and he could feel his heartbeat quicken.
“A lot of men have affairs,” she said.
Archie tried to smile. “Mine just turned out to be with the person I was supposed to be hunting,” he said.
Gretchen’s voice was full of sympathy. “Sin is rarely without complication,” she said.
She leaned in and kissed him. Their tongues met and he tasted the Scotch. In that moment she was all there was, the heat of her mouth, her warm hand still pressed against his rib cage. Surely she could feel his heart, his pulse, the erection pressing against her leg.
She lifted her lips from his and pulled away a few inches, so they were eye to eye. “Would you take it back?” she asked. “That first night you came to my house?”
It had been two A.M. He’d come from a crime scene. He could have gone home to his wife but instead he’d gone to Gretchen’s house. He’d planned it. He’d thought about it on the drive there. And when Gretchen opened the door in her nightgown, he’d taken a step inside and then he’d kissed her.
It had been him. He’d started the affair.
He’d brought everything on himself.
And he had loved every minute of it. And later, when she tortured him, he couldn’t help but think that he deserved it. That he had it coming, and at least he would be dead and Debbie would never know the truth.
“Why did you do it?” he asked Gretchen.
She smiled. “Out of love,” she said.
He wasn’t sure Gretchen even knew what he was asking about. The affair? The torture? The fact that she had turned herself in and saved his life? He looked for something in her pale blue eyes. “I would take it all back,” he said. “I wish I’d never met you.” He meant it, too. He meant it more than he had ever meant anything. “I would give anything for it not to have happened.”
She tilted her head, her blond hair folding against her shoulder, and he thought he saw a flash of something authentic, a glimpse of who she really was, something sad and desperate.
Did she know why he was there, what he was planning?
“Do you want to fuck me now?” she asked.
He drew her face to his and kissed her. “Yes,” he said.
CHAPTER
47
Susan sat in her car two blocks away from the task force offices. With the number of news vans already assembled around the old bank for the press conference, she’d been lucky to park that close. The windows were rolled up, but she still glanced around to be sure there weren’t any other reporters lurking around before she opened up her phone and punched in a Herald number.
Derek Rogers picked up.
“It’s me,” she said. “I need you to call every gas station along Highway 22 through Santiam Pass.” “Uh, what?” Derek said.
“There aren’t that many,” Susan said quickly. The press conferance was going to start in fifteen minutes. She flipped down the visor and dug into her purse for some makeup. “I’ve driven that road. It’s all timber towns. Gas every half hour.” She paused to smear on some raspberry-colored lipstick. “But you’d need it. What does a Jag get? Twenty miles per gallon?” She blotted the lipstick with an old receipt she found in her purse. “She’d need gas.”
Derek’s voice was doubtful. “So you want me to call and ask all the gas stations along 22 if they’ve seen Gretchen Lowell?”
“No,” Susan said. “Not Lowell. The car. That’s what they’ll remember. Ask them if they’ve seen a silver Jag.”
“There’s a fire up there,” Derek said. “They’re evacuating people. You think she’s psycho enough to hide in the path of it?”
“Psycho like a fox,” Susan said.
Derek wasn’t convinced. “These calls will take hours,” he said.
Susan pulled her pigtails out, dug her hairbrush out of her purse, and started brushing her hair. “I know,” she said.
“Are you brushing your hair?” Derek asked.
“One more favor?” she asked. Something Archie had said before he’d walked away in the alley had been gnawing at her.
Derek sighed. “What?”
“Can you check the Herald’s database for any couples who might have gone missing about two years ago? They were in their twenties.”
“What does this have to do with Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell?” Derek asked.