He cleared his throat. “We found three bodies in Forest Park,” he said.
She turned over and looked at him. He was still startled by her beauty every time. He’d spent so long looking at her picture, imagining her in his mind, and still, he was never prepared for the fact of her.
“I think someone killed Senator Castle and they’re trying to cover it up,” he said.
She smiled sleepily. “Did I mention that liver failure often causes mental confusion?”
“He had an inappropriate relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl ten years ago. Susan Ward was about to make it public. The girl was killed a week ago. Her body dumped in the park.” Archie wondered whether or not to add the last part. “Not far from where you left Heather Gerber.”
The senator’s secret didn’t faze her. Neither did Heather’s name. “Who stands to benefit from a cover-up?” she asked.
“Castle’s publicist?” Archie said dryly.
Gretchen sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. She moved slowly. She was bruised and battered, but this was the first time she seemed actually sore. “His publicist would love it,” Gretchen said. “They bill by the hour, you know.”
“You didn’t benefit from anyone you killed,” Archie said.
Gretchen stood and walked to the dresser where Archie could see a bottle of prescription pills. “I find murder emotionally fulfilling,” she said. She came back to bed and stretched out on her side next to him. “It’s about power,” she said. She opened the bottle and tapped five pills onto his chest. “Power feels good. It’s the same reason people do drugs. You can pontificate all you want about social responsibility, but in the end people do drugs because they like it. It makes them feel good.”
Gretchen arranged the pills on his chest into a neat little line that rose and fell with his breaths. “What about sex?” Archie asked.
“Sex has everything to do with power,” she said. She picked up one of the pills between her teeth and held it out to him and he took it, kissing her for a moment, the Vicodin between their lips.
“Swallow it,” she whispered.
He took the pill into his own mouth and swallowed. He wanted water, but he didn’t want her to leave him.
“Did your father really abuse you?” Archie asked. She had told him that, in the basement, and Archie had wanted to believe that it was true. They didn’t know anything about her, really. Her fingerprints weren’t in the system. There were plenty of “Gretchen Lowells,” but none that fit. She’d made up the name at some point. Her face was plastered on every newspaper in America and no one had ever come forward with information about her past. She had told them she was thirty-four. But for all Archie knew, she could have been lying about that, too.
Gretchen smiled. “No,” she said. “But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” She moved her fingertips from the pills on his chest, down his stomach to his groin, and cradled his balls in her hand. “To blame it on a man.” She nuzzled against his neck. “Why do women kill?” she whispered. “It must be because of a boyfriend or a father or a husband. She can’t possibly have gotten that way on her own.”
“So you’re a feminist homicidal psychopath,” Archie said.
“The Betty Friedan of serial killers,” she said. She moved her hand from his balls, hugging his cock with her thumb and forefinger, and with her free hand fed him another pill.
“Swallow it,” she said.
He forced it down, the saliva in his mouth barely enough to get the pill down into his throat.
“If he wants to stop the story,” she said, lifting her hand to her mouth and wetting the palm with her tongue, “he’ll go after Susan Ward next.”
Archie felt his breathing change, the heat rising from his groin up to his neck. “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” he asked, the pill still in his throat.
She slid her lubricated hand slowly up and down his cock. “Women aren’t capable of murder, darling,” she said. “You know that.”
The time was almost right to put his plan into action. Gretchen didn’t know it, but she wasn’t going to leave that cabin a free woman. And if it all went the way he wanted it to, he wasn’t going to leave that cabin at all. Not alive, anyway.
Henry would take care of Susan.
Gretchen fed him the remaining three pills one by one. Then moved her mouth down his body toward his groin, fluttering against his flesh, down his chest and across his belly, running the tip of her tongue up the shaft of his cock, around the rim of the head, until she finally took it into her mouth and began to slowly, teasingly slide his erection in and out of her throat. His breath was coming fast now, his heart racing. His face was hot, the sweat on his upper lip sweet and cold. He reached down to his groin and his hand found her head, the blond hair slick under his fingers.