Chelsea Cain - Heartsick

She took a drag off the cigarette, putting a lot of elbow in it, like she had seen in old French movies, and she appraised him-arrogant, condescending, professorial. And she saw in Ian every boss, every teacher she’d ever slept with. Yeah. It was probably time to consider therapy. She wondered idly if the paper’s health-insurance policy covered it. This probably wasn’t the time to ask. “Once this whole thing is done,” she said to Ian, “I want to work on the Molly Palmer story. Full-time.”

“It’s career suicide,” Ian protested. Then, in a final attempt at dissuasion, he added, “It’s tabloid journalism.”

“Hey,” Bliss said. “My daughter-”

“Mom,” Susan warned, and Bliss was silent. Susan was composed, indomitable. “Molly was a teenager, Ian. I want to find out what happened. I want to get her side of the story.”

Ian sighed and rocked back on his heels. He opened his mouth as if to argue, then seemed to think better of it and threw his hands in the air. The smoke from Susan’s cigarette was getting in his eyes. She didn’t move it. “You won’t get her to talk,” he said. “She hasn’t talked to anyone. But if you want to try…” He let that trail off.

Bliss didn’t drive, and Susan’s car was back in the Pearl District. “I don’t suppose you have money for a cab?” Susan asked her mother.

Bliss frowned. “I don’t carry money,” she said.

“Your purse,” Parker said to Susan, extracting her small black purse from the pocket of his coat and handing it to her. “They found it in Reston ’s car.”

“I’ll drive you both home when you’re ready.” It was Derek the Square. He hadn’t had time to blow-dry his hair, and it protruded straight out from his skull like grass.

“I’m going to need you to file the story, kid,” Parker said. “Get it up on-line before we get scooped. You go home early, don’t expect to see your byline.”

Derek shrugged, throwing a glance at Susan. “There’ll be other stories.”

“I need a new mentee,” Parker said to Ian. “This one isn’t working out.” But Susan could tell he didn’t mean it.

“What do you drive?” Susan asked Derek. “Let me guess. A Jetta? No. A Taurus?”

Derek dangled a ring of keys from his fingers. “An old Mercedes,” he said. “It runs on biodiesel.”

Susan tried to ignore the slow grin she could see spreading on Bliss’s face.

“First, I’ll need to go to my apartment for my laptop,” Susan told Derek as she took a drag off her cigarette. “Then I want to go home. To Bliss’s.” Derek’s eyebrows shot up. “My mom’s house,” Susan explained quickly, digging through her purse for her cell phone. “She lives in Southeast.” She looked at her phone screen. She had eighteen new messages.

“Bliss?” Derek said.

Bliss held out a hand. “How do you do,” she said.

Susan was going to say something clever, but she got distracted by her voice mail. The first message was from Molly Palmer.

Anne shrugged onher long leather coat. She wasn’t needed. But she always liked witnessing the wrap-up. It gave her a sense of closure. She dug for her car keys as she exited the patrol office. The damp Northwest weather had officially returned. Anne didn’t know how the natives stood it. It just made her feel like the entire world was rotting away around her.

“Good job today.” It was Archie, standing in the drizzle just outside the door.

Anne smiled. “You want a lift?” she asked. “I’m headed back to the Heathman. I can drop you.”

“No. I’ve got a cab coming.”

Anne looked inside, where Claire and Henry were conferring with the crime-scene techies. “Someone here will drive you.”

Archie shrugged. “I’ve got to make a stop.”

“At this time of night?” Anne asked. She had an idea where he was going. She had gone to see Gretchen Lowell herself, in those first few days when Archie lay in a medically induced coma. Anne’s bad profile had stung, and she’d thought she might learn something from the Beauty Killer. But Gretchen had refused to talk. She’d sat mutely for an hour in her cell while Anne peppered her with questions. And then Anne had gotten up to leave, and Gretchen had finally spoken. One sentence: “Is he still alive?”

“You heading back tomorrow, or are you going to stick around for all of the congratulatory press conferences?” Archie asked.

Anne let him change the subject. “I’m on the red-eye.” You couldn’t force it, she knew, until he was ready for help. But it hurt her to see him suffer, and it hurt her more to not be able to do anything for him. “So I’m around during the day,” she said. She was going to skip the press conferences. There were two pairs of size fourteen sneakers at the Nike outlet with her sons’ names on them. But she added, just in case, “If you want to talk.”

Archie fingered something in his coat pocket and looked at his shoes. “I need to talk to someone.”

“But not to me,” Anne guessed.

Archie glanced up and smiled at her. He looked exhausted to Anne, and she wondered if she looked similarly worn.

“Have a nice flight,” he said warmly. “It was good to see you.”

Anne took a small step toward him. “Anything that happened. While you were with Gretchen. Anything you felt or did. You can’t judge it. It was an extreme situation. She constructed an extreme situation. To push you.”

He looked away, into the night. “I gave up everything I loved in that basement,” Archie explained. His voice was low, controlled. “My children. My wife. My work. My life. I was going to die. In her arms. And I was all right with that. Because she would be there.” He looked right at Anne. “Taking care of me.”

“She’s a psychopath.”

A yellow cab pulled into the small parking lot behind the office. “Yeah,” Archie said, taking a step toward it. “But she’s my psychopath.”

A rchie wakes upcompletely disoriented. He is still in the basement. He is still in the bed. But everything is different. The bed has been moved against the wall. The stench of rotten meat is gone. He looks for the corpse. It has vanished; the cement floor is washed clean. His bandages are fresh. The sheets have been changed. He has been bathed. The room smells like ammonia. He searches the fractured images in his mind for some recent memory.

“You’ve been asleep for two days.” Gretchen appears from behind him. She is wearing a fresh change of clothes, black pants and a gray cashmere sweater, and her blond hair is clean and brushed smooth into a shiny ponytail.

Archie blinks at her, his head still muddy. “I don’t understand,” he manages to say, his voice weak.

“You died,” Gretchen explains. “But I brought you back. Ten milligrams of lidocaine. I wasn’t sure it would work.” She shoots him a twinkling grin. “You must have a healthy heart.”

He lets this sink in. “Why?”

“Because we’re not done yet.”

“I’m done,” he says with as much authority as he can muster.

Gretchen gives him an admonishing look. “You don’t get to choose, though, do you? I get to make all the decisions. I get to be the one in charge. All you have to do is go along.” She leans in close, her face inches away from his, her warm hand on his cheek. “It’s the easiest thing in the world,” she says soothingly. “You’ve worked so hard for so long. Always on call. All that responsibility. Everyone always looking to you for answers.” He can feel her breath against his mouth, tickling his lips. He doesn’t look at her. It’s too hard. He looks through her. “They all think you’re dead now, darling. It’s been a long time. I don’t keep anyone alive this long. Henry knows that. I would think you would be pleased. No one needs you anymore.” She smiles and kisses him on the forehead. “Enjoy it.”