Kill You Twice

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Nothing makes Portland detective Archie Sheridan happier than knowing that Gretchen Lowell—the serial killer whose stunning beauty is belied by the gruesome murders she’s committed—is locked away in a psych ward. Archie can finally heal from the near-fatal physical and emotional wounds she’s inflicted on him and start moving on with his life.To this end, Archie throws himself into the latest case to come across his desk: A cyclist has discovered a corpse in Mount Tabor Park on the eastern side of Portland. The man was gagged, skinned, and found hanging by his wrists from a tree. It’s the work of a killer bold and clever enough to torture his victim for hours on a sunny summer morning in a big public park and yet leave no trace.And then Archie gets a message he can’t ignore—Gretchen claims to have inside knowledge about this grisly murder. Archie finally agrees to visit Gretchen, because he can’t risk losing his only lead in the case. At least, that’s what he tells himself . . . but the ties between Archie and Gretchen have always been stronger, deeper, and more complex than he’s willing to admit, even to himself. What game is she playing this time? And even more frightening, what long-hidden secrets from Gretchen’s past have been dredged up that someone would kill to protect?At once terrifying and magnetic, “Beauty Killer” Gretchen Lowell returns with a vengeance in Kill You Twice, Chelsea Cain’s latest razor-sharp psychological thriller.

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Content

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this
novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
kill you twice. Copyright © 2012 by Verite Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978,
1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
ISBN 978- 0-312- 61978-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01488-7 (e-book)
First Edition: August 2012
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rchie Sheridan slept with the light on. The pills on his

bedside table were Ambien. A year before they would have
been pain pills. Vicodin. Oxycodone. A cheerful skyline of amber
plastic bottles. Even now the table looked empty without the clutter. Just the Ambien, a cell phone, a week-old glass of tap water, and
a red gooseneck lamp from IKEA.
His kept his gun in the drawer. On the nights the kids weren’t
there, he slept with it loaded.
The Ambien prescription was untouched. Archie just liked to
know it was there. Sleeping pills made Archie groggy, and groggy
wasn’t a luxury he could afford. If the phone rang, if someone died,
he needed to go to work.
Besides, it wasn’t getting to sleep that was the problem. It was
staying asleep. He woke up every morning at three a.m., and was
awake for an hour. That was how it had gone since the flood. Now
he just figured it in. Went to bed an hour earlier. Compensated. He
didn’t mind it. As long as he controlled his thoughts, kept his mind
from wandering to bad places, he was fine. Focus on the present.
Avoid the dark.
The gooseneck lamp stayed on, its red metal shade getting hotter by the hour.

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Three-ten a.m. Archie stared at the ceiling. The apartment was
sweltering and his bedroom window was open. He could hear the
distant grind of the construction equipment still working to clean
up the flood damage downtown. They’d been at it in swing shifts
for three months, and the city still looked gutted.
If it wasn’t the noise from the construction, it was the trains he
heard at night: the engines, the whistles, the wheels on the tracks.
They traveled through Portland’s produce district around the clock.
Archie didn’t mind the noise. It reminded him that he wasn’t
the only one awake.
Everyone had a cure for insomnia. Take a warm bath. Exercise.
Drink a glass of warm milk. Eat a snack before bedtime. Drink
herbal tea. Avoid caffeine. Listen to music. Get a massage.
Nothing worked.
His shrink told him to stay in bed.
Don’t even read, she said. It would just make getting back to
sleep harder.
He just had to lie there.
But his pillow was too flat. The used mattress he’d bought groaned
every time he turned over.
The heat made his scars itch. The new skin was tight and
prickly, reminding him of every place her blade had sliced his flesh.
His chest was knitted with scar tissue. Patches of dark hair sprouted
around the thick pale pink gashes and pearly threads, unable to
grow through the tough flesh.
That sort of itching, in the middle of the night, can make a person crazy, and sometimes, while he slept, he scratched his scars
until they bled.
Archie ran a hand along his side, the scars pebbly under his
fingers, and then over his chest, where his fingers found the heartshaped scar she had carved into him with a scalpel. Then he made
a fist with his hand, rolled over, and pinned it under his pillow.

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Four-ten A.M.
Archie’s cell phone rang. He turned over in bed and looked at
the clock on his bedside table. He’d been asleep ten minutes. It
seemed like longer. His eyeballs felt gritty, his tongue coated. His
hair was damp with sweat. He was on his stomach, naked, half his
face smashed against the pillow. As he reached out and fumbled for
his phone he knocked over the bottle of Ambien, which toppled
and rolled off the bedside table and clattered to a stop somewhere
under the bed.
Archie brought the phone’s glowing LCD screen to his face and
immediately recognized the number.
He knew he should let it go to voice mail.
But he didn’t.
“Hi, Patrick,” Archie said into the phone.
“I can’t sleep,” Patrick said. His voice was a strained whisper.
Probably trying not to wake up his parents. “What if he comes back
to get me?” Patrick said.
“He’s dead,” Archie said.
Patrick was silent. Not convinced.
The official report had been death by drowning. A half-truth.
Archie had held Patrick’s captor’s head underwater, and when he
was dead, he had pushed his body into the current of the flooded
river.
The corpse still hadn’t surfaced.
“Believe me,” Archie said. Because I killed him.
“Will you come and visit me?” Patrick asked.
“I can’t right now,” Archie said.
“Can I come and visit you?”
Archie rolled over on his back and rubbed his forehead with his
hand. “I think your parents want to keep you close right now.”
“I heard them talking about me. They want to give me medicine.”
“They’re trying to help you feel better.”
“I have a secret,” Patrick said.
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“Do you want to tell me what it is?” Archie asked.
“Not yet.”
Archie didn’t want to force it. Not after what Patrick had been
through. “Okay,” he said.
“Will you count with me?” Patrick asked. It was something Archie had done with his own son. Counting breaths to get to sleep.
Patrick and Ben were both nine. But Patrick’s experience had left
him changed. He was mature without being sophisticated.
“Sure,” Archie said. He waited. He could hear Patrick getting
settled and imagined him curled on his side on the couch in his family’s living room, the phone held to his ear. Archie had never seen that
couch, that house, but he’d seen photographs in the police file. He
could picture it.
“One,” Archie said. He paused and listened as Patrick drew a
breath and exhaled it. “Two.” Archie sat up in bed. Patrick yawned.
“Three.” He put his feet on the floor. “Four.” Stood up. “Five.” The
windows in his bedroom were original, made up of dozens of factorystyle rectangular panes. If Archie ran his fingers over the glass, he
could feel tiny waves and ripples on the surface.
“Six,” he said.
He made his way to the window. “Seven.” The light was on inside, and it was still dark enough outside that Archie could see his
own mirror image in the glass. As he got closer, his reflection faded
and the city appeared. Out his window the Willamette cut a curved
path north, slicing the city in half. A sliver of light along the silhouette of the West Hills marked the first hint of dawn. The river was
almost lilac-colored.
“Eight,” he said.
It was the truck’s backup alarm that caught his attention. The
window was open, hinged along the top so that it swung out horizontally. Archie’s eyes flicked down to the street below.
“Nine.”
The streetlights were still on. The produce district had wide
streets, built big enough for multiple trucks full of apples and straw4

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berries. But the trucks didn’t run much anymore. The warehouses
were now mostly home to used office supply stores, fringe art galleries, Asian antique stores, coffeehouses, and microbreweries. It was
close in and cheap, as long as you didn’t mind the trains that barreled through the neighborhood every few hours.
“Ten.”
The truck down below had backed up to the loading dock of Archie’s building and stopped. A black sedan pulled up beside it. Two
men got out of the cab of the truck and walked around to slide the
back door up. A woman got out of the black car. Archie knew she was
a woman the same way he knew that the men in the truck were men.
It was how they stood, how they moved, the dark shapes of their
bodies in the yellow glow of the streetlights. The woman said something to the men, and then took a few steps back and watched as the
men started unloading large cardboard boxes from the truck.
A U-Haul.
Someone was moving into the building. At four in the morning.
Archie had stopped counting.
“Patrick?” he said.
The other end of the line was silent.
“Good night,” Archie whispered.
He ended the call. It was 4:17 a.m. The bed beckoned. He could
still get a few hours’ sleep before he had to head in to the office. As he
stepped away from the window, he thought he saw the woman look
up at him.

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J

ake Kelly only drank fair trade coffee. It guaranteed a living

wage for coffee farmers, who otherwise might be slaving away
for a price less than the cost of production, forcing them into a cycle
of debt and poverty. Jake needed a cup. He needed the caffeine. But
the center only had Yuban. He could smell the nutty aroma of French
roast wafting from the brewing air pot. Was he tempted? Yes. But then
he thought of the indigenous people of Guatemala, working for pennies in the coffee fields. Every choice a person made, what to buy or
not to buy, what to eat and drink, had the power to change lives. You
were either part of the solution or part of the problem.
He focused on the task at hand.
The trick to cleaning a griddle was kosher salt. Jake let the griddle cool and then scraped it with a plastic spatula. Charred pancake
batter collected in satisfying little clumps. He’d brought his own yellow rubber gloves. The center didn’t have any, and it didn’t seem
right to ask them to spend money on that sort of thing. He’d brought
the kosher salt, too. It was Morton’s, in a blue box with the girl in the
yellow dress carrying an umbrella on the label. He sprinkled some
salt on the griddle. The coarse white granules bounced and scattered
on the cast iron like hail raining down on a sidewalk. You didn’t
want to use soap or detergent. Jake scrubbed the griddle with a pum-

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ice brick, grinding the salt against the surface until his fingers ached.
Then he used a damp cloth to wipe up all the salt and muck it had
loosened. It took five passes with the cloth until the surface of the
griddle gleamed.
He wasn’t done. He unscrewed the plastic cap of an economysized bottle of vegetable oil and drizzled a thread of it on the cast
iron. Then he got yet another cloth rag and used it to work a thin coat
of oil over the entire surface of the griddle. More oil. More rag work.
Small circular motions. Start at the center. Work your way out.
He was bent over, eyes even with the surface of the griddle, inspecting his work, when Bea, the center’s director, walked into the
kitchen carrying a plastic laundry basket piled high with dirty linens.
She was a sturdy woman, old enough to be Jake’s mother, with the
wild hair and anxious eyes of someone who has just stepped out of
a very fast convertible.
“You’re still here,” she said.
Jake glanced at the oven clock and realized that his shift had
been over for an hour.
“I’m seasoning the griddle,” he explained.
She smiled. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind.”
“The last volunteer just used paper towels and 409,” she said.
“I’m sure they did what they thought was best.” He hadn’t known
how to take care of a griddle, either. But he’d seen it on his orientation tour of the kitchen, and afterward he’d looked it up. He’d taken
notes, copying down bullet points from various Web sites. People
could get pretty passionate about the proper care of griddles. After
reading some of what he found on the Web, Jake began to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just make the girls’ pancakes in a
skillet. He thought about suggesting that, but he didn’t want to
make waves.
“I wish we had more volunteers like you,” Bea said. She blew a
stray piece of graying hair off her forehead, adjusted her grip on the
basket, and headed for the back door.
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Jake peeled off the yellow gloves, tucked them in his apron
pocket, and ran after her to help. “What’s with the laundry?”
“Washer’s broken. I was going to put this in my car so I don’t
forget to take it home tonight.”
Jake didn’t even hesitate. “I’ll take it,” he said.
She frowned and raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Jake took the laundry basket from her hands. It was heavier than
it looked. Or maybe she was stronger than she looked. “Let me take
it home. I have to do laundry anyway tonight. I can bring it back in
the morning.”
Bea crossed her arms and shook her head with a smile. “You’re
a blessing, Jake.”
Jake beamed. “I’m happy to help.”
“You want some help getting it to your car?” she asked.
“I’ve got it, thanks.”
Bea opened the back door for him anyway, and he lugged the
basket out to his car. The center had a small parking lot, five spaces,
just enough for staff and volunteers. Three of the cars in the lot
were silver Priuses. Jake took the basket to his silver Prius and set it
down on the pavement so he could open the trunk. He paused to
look up at the sky. The morning sun on his face was warm and the
cool summer breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck. A
white butterfly spiraled lazily through the air, dipping in and out of
view. Not a cloud in the sky. Jake closed his eyes and put his face up
to the sun. In the Pacific Northwest, days like this were precious.
He smelled something—sandalwood? cloves?—and opened his
eyes. The butterfly was gone.
Then he heard a thud, like a baseball bat hitting a melon, and
felt a searing pain in his head that knocked him off his feet. It took
him a few seconds to realize that the two sensations were related. As
he lay there on the concrete, slipping into darkness, the last thing
he saw was the laundry basket beside him, a fine mist of blood settled on the dirty sheets like dew.

8

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