Free Kill You Twice by Chelsea Cain

on her shoulder.
    She looked over at Jim Prescott. He had met her at reception and was escorting her to the forensic psychiatric services ward currently housing the Beauty Killer. It didn’t seem like a
hospital. There were no intercom announcements. No cheerful art on the wall, or plaques celebrating donors. No coffee cart or gift store. And no signs of patients. If there was psychotic shouting
or group counseling chatter, it was all happening behind closed, soundproofed doors.
    Susan ran her hands over her goose-pimply arms.
    “You okay?” Prescott said.
    “Fine,” Susan said. Her flip-flops flapped on the linoleum.
    As they moved into more secure areas, Prescott swiped the badge on his lanyard over electronic scanners, and heavy doors opened for them.
    He was nothing like she’d imagined him. She’d pictured someone older, patrician, clean-shaven with silvering hair, distinguished wrinkles, and those half-glasses some people wear
around their necks on chains. Prescott was in his early forties, and there was nothing patrician about him. He had a feathery beard and wild curly hair, and he wore a creased tan sports coat
instead of a white lab coat. He wore slip-on shoes, she noticed. No laces. Shoelaces were for shrinks who didn’t have to worry about their patients strangling them to death if they looked at
them wrong.
    Susan was glad she’d worn flip-flops.
    “Will you be in the room?” she asked him.
    He swiped his badge again. “If you want me to be.”
    Susan bristled. “No, I can handle it.”
    She followed him through the door. They were in a patient wing. A man dressed in scrubs was sitting at a Formica counter writing in a chart. He didn’t look up.
    Prescott led her to a door at the end of the hall.
    “This is her room,” Prescott said. “She’s expecting you.”
    “Wait a minute,” Susan said, feeling her palms start to sweat. She had pictured Gretchen tied to a board, on the other side of bars, with an IV of tranquilizers in her arm,
surrounded by five armed guards and a pack of growling German shepherds. “Just like that? I’m just supposed to go in and chat with her? What if she decides to gut me with a barrette or
something?”
    Prescott gave her a sympathetic, patronizing smile. “You’re not in any danger,” he said.
    Susan practically choked. “This is Gretchen Lowell we’re talking about here. She’s killed more than two hundred people.”
    “She says she killed more than two hundred people,” Prescott said. “She’s delusional.”
    “I’ve seen her work,” Susan said. “I’ve seen what she’s done.”
    “She’s disturbed.”
    “You’re wrong, you know,” Susan said. “She doesn’t belong here. I’m against the death penalty. I don’t think the state should be in the business of
killing people. I think it’s wrong. And it’s hypocritical. Mostly, I just think it’s mean. Gretchen Lowell? She is the exception. She deserves to die. If we kill one person, one
criminal in the history of the world, it should be her.” Susan paused, reconsidering. “And Hitler. Her, and Hitler.” Prescott had that shrink look on his face again, passive and
unimpressed, and yet somehow judgmental at the same time. Susan continued. “She removed a detective’s spleen without anesthesia. She stuck a wire through an old woman’s eyeball
and then threaded it behind her nose and out through the other eye socket and then she stuck the wire into an outlet.”
    Prescott raised an eyebrow. “And you’re arguing that she’s sane?”
    Susan decided that she didn’t like him. “She knows the difference between right and wrong,” she said.
    “You’re not qualified to make that assessment,” he said. He glanced at his watch and then jutted his scruffy chin in the direction of a metal switch on the wall next to the
door. “That gets you in,” he said. He was already moving, already hoofing it to his next psychopath. They probably didn’t like to be left waiting.