Kill You Twice by Chelsea Cain

Author:Chelsea Cain
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Psychology, Horror, Suspense, Adult, Thriller
ISBN: 9780312619787
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2011-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

40

Archie turned his head away from the flash of the digital camera. The Columbia County ME had sent out two crime scene investigators, who were busily documenting the surroundings. Archie watched them work.

The flies were multiplying.

St. Helens averaged about one homicide every ten years, which meant that statistically the Beatons had met nearly a quarter century’s worth of the town’s quota. A murder was big news, and everyone wanted in on it. The entire St. Helens PD—all nineteen officers, plus five volunteers—had shown up, and every time one of them came in or out of the house more flies would find their way inside. The house had been full of cops, poking around with latex gloves and putting evidence markers next to each other’s footprints. It hadn’t taken Chief Huffington long to throw everyone who wasn’t essential out of the house. Now most of her force was standing in the yard getting sunburned necks while the local press took their pictures.

Archie stayed in the bedroom. It wasn’t his case, but old habits died hard. Huffington didn’t ask him to leave. She stayed in the bedroom, too. He wasn’t sure if she was keeping an eye on the crime scene techs or if she was keeping an eye on him.

The flash went off again.

Huffington rocked back and forth on her heels. If the smell of decomp was bothering her, she wasn’t showing it. “Funny that you show up asking questions about her husband and she ends up dead the next day,” she said to Archie.

A fly wandered through Archie’s peripheral vision.

“Yeah,” Archie said.

Huffington got a hair band out of her uniform pants pocket and put her hair in a ponytail with a few quick movements of her hands. She adjusted her St. Helens PD cap. Then she went back into her pocket for a penlight, pulled it out, and aimed it on what was left of Dusty Beaton’s hands. “No defensive wounds,” she said to Archie. Her mouth was tight. She moved the point of light to the dead woman’s abdomen, where seashell-pink entrails spilled from a jagged fist-sized wound. “Last big crime we had around here,” she said, “was when Troy Schmiedeknecht drove his dad’s F-150 into the bookstore down on Columbia.”

Archie glanced over at her. Huffington’s expression looked tense, but not particularly distressed. Archie had seen dozens of cops lose their lunch at crime scenes like this. Huffington hadn’t blanched. Her mouth was set, her gaze focused. Archie knew the expression. It was the mask that people in authority put on when they needed to be in control. Archie had a mask just like it.

Huffington continued her penlight tour of the corpse: the bloody cave in the middle of Dusty Beaton’s face where her nose had been gouged out, her shoulders and hips, where her arms and legs had been partially severed, revealing ball joints and bone. The bed was soaked with blood. Projectile blood spatter dotted the walls.

“This kind of intensity,” Huffington said. “It’s personal.”

“Yep,” Archie said.

“Give me a hand,” she said.

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