“Are you attracted to me?” she asks. She pauses, just long enough for him to sputter awkwardly, then sits back and smiles at him. “It’s an academic question. It’s useful to know from a therapeutic point of view.”
Archie searches for something he can say, something true, but not too true. His mouth is suddenly very dry. The clock continues to tick. He settles on “I think you’re very beautiful.”
Her face lights up and she laughs. It’s a pleasant laugh, a shared joke. “I’ve made you uncomfortable,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
“I only ask about your sex life because sex is an excellent stress reliever. And I know you’ve been under significant stress.”
“I don’t like having sex with Debbie after a crime scene,” Archie says. “I can’t get the images out of my mind. It feels wrong.”
“The images stay with you?” Gretchen asks.
Archie lifts a hand to his forehead, as if he might be able to wipe the images away manually. “Yeah.”
He feels the full weight of her attention. “Any one more than the others?” she asks.
“Heather Gerber,” he says. “The first victim we found. In the park. She wasn’t the worst, in terms of the torture. But her face. Her eyes were open. And she looked at me. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Do the images keep you up at night?”
His phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and flips it open. It’s a text from Henry. Another tip. “Fuck,” he says before he can catch himself. He looks up at Gretchen, suddenly self-conscious about his language. “Excuse me,” he says. “It’s Henry. I have to go.”
He stands up, adjusting the gun on his hip. She stands, too, and walks over and puts her hand on his arm, just above his elbow.
“I want to see you again,” she says. “I think I can help.”
She smells like lilacs.
Archie doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to surrender the pressure of her touch. He feels a strange connection to the place, to her. It’s ridiculous. He barely knows her. She’s beautiful and she’s paying attention to him and he’s responding like a seventeen-year-old.
He decides not to set up another appointment right away. He’ll wait a few days. So he doesn’t seem too desperate.
The ticking stops. He looks up at the grandfather clock. It’s silent, the hands frozen at 3:30.
He clears his throat. “Your clock just stopped,” he tells her.
She drops her hand from his arm and looks back at the clock. “That’s funny,” she says.
He takes a step to leave and she turns after him, her form back-lit from the light coming in the window, a vision of loveliness. There was nothing wrong in noticing that, Archie tells himself. It was just an observation.
“If you’re having trouble sleeping,” she says, “I can give you a sample of something that might help.”
He smiles. Maybe he won’t wait a few days to make that next appointment. Maybe he’ll call back later today. Just to hear her voice. “Thanks,” he says. “But I don’t like to take pills.”
CHAPTER
62
Henry ran the siren for a while, but it didn’t help—there was nowhere to pull over. They were stuck in traffic. The highway carved down the mountain, hundred-foot-tall Doug firs a hedge on either side. You could barely see the sky sometimes. The passing lanes were only occasional, and then only for the briefest interludes. Henry would flip on the siren again and gun it past thirteen cars. But they were still inching down the mountain at a glacial pace. The upside was that they were going so slow that Susan wasn’t carsick anymore. Big Charlie had given her some ice from the ice machine for her face, and she was feeling pretty good.
“Take your feet off the dashboard,” Henry said.
“Sorry,” Susan said, tucking her bare feet under her. She hoped Henry couldn’t see the toe prints she’d left on his windshield. “I still don’t know why I can’t look for her.”
“I’ve put a bulletin out for Highway 20, Highway 22, and for eastern Oregon. You heard the guy. It might have been her. It might not have.”
“How can a police car not have air-conditioning?” she asked. She’d bought a bottle of water at the gas station and had slowly been peeling off the label ever since. Now she tore another minuscule shred and rolled it between her fingers.
“It’s broken,” Henry said.
Susan turned to look in the backseat to see if there was a magazine she could fan herself with or something. Her backseat was filled with magazines. But Henry’s was empty. Except for a cardboard box. She recognized the handwriting on the side.
“Those are my Castle notes,” Susan said.
“Yeah,” Henry said. “I kind of borrowed them.”
“I lent them to Archie,” Susan said. She twisted around so she could open the box. “You better not have gotten them out of order.”
“I haven’t touched them,” Henry said.
Susan pulled the top notebook out with one hand, using the other to keep the plastic bag of ice on her face. “Did you write on this?” she asked. The notebook was flipped open and a name was circled. John Bannon.