Free Kill You Twice by Chelsea Cain Page A

“Tell a nurse when
you’re done,” he said over his shoulder. “They can show you out.”
    “Wait,” Susan said, not liking that she couldn’t disguise the anxiety in her voice.
    He stopped and turned back to her, and she wanted to wipe the know-it-all smile right off his face.
    “I lied,” Susan said. She eyed the door, imagining what was on the other side of it. No guards. No German shepherds. Just Gretchen Lowell. Would she be manacled to a dungeon wall, or
maybe curled in the corner trussed up in a straitjacket? Would there be bars between them? Was it a clean bright room, or a dark cell? Susan had seen Gretchen at her most vile, and at her most
beguiling. And both personas scared the hell out of her. “Please don’t make me be alone with her,” Susan said.

CHAPTER
15
    G retchen’s room was painted pale yellow, the color of a baby’s nursery, or a Klonopin. It was large, almost
too big, and empty except for a twin mattress on a metal bed frame, a molded plastic chair, and a dresser. The bed was near the only window in the room. The window was covered with bars that had
been painted with thick, glossy white paint. There weren’t curtains. The floor was burnt-orange linoleum, blistered in places from moisture and splattered with vile-looking stains.
    Gretchen was in the bed, with her head turned away from the door, so that all Susan could see were coils of dark blond hair and a gray blanket in the vague shape of a body.
    “Gretchen?” Prescott said gently. “Your visitor is here.”
    Gretchen didn’t move.
    Susan could feel the hair on her arms stand up. Despite herself, she reached up to smooth down her own mangy orange hair. No one could compete with Gretchen Lowell in the looks department, but
she still found herself wanting to at least make an effort. Here she was, about to meet with a megalomaniac serial killer, and she was still that geeky girl approaching the cheerleader sitting at
the popular table in the cafeteria. She thought fleetingly of stepping back through the door, back into the hall, back into her Saab, where even the worst heat would be better than this. She could
smell her own sweat. She could smell the oppressive floral bouquet of the Lady Speed Stick she had caked on in the car. She wasn’t sure which smell was more offensive.
    Prescott walked into the room, toward the bed and that tangle of blond, beckoning for Susan to follow him. She did. She thought, This is what lambs being led into the barn on Easter weekend
feel like .
    “Gretchen?” Prescott said.
    Gretchen stirred this time, and then rolled on her back and slowly turned her face to them.
    Susan drew back, startled.
    For a second she thought there had been a mistake. That she had been taken to the wrong room. That Prescott had misunderstood somehow.
    This wasn’t Gretchen Lowell.
    Gretchen had always been a beauty. She was the kind of woman who could silence a room when she walked through the door. It was not the only reason she had caught the public’s
attention—her horrific crimes would have been enough—but it helped that that lovely face of hers sold magazines. No one could grasp how someone that stunning could be capable of such
merry acts of brutality. They didn’t understand that her inside didn’t match her outside.
    Now it was closer.
    Gretchen’s perfect symmetrical features were blurred and bloated. Her once-pristine alabaster skin was now sallow and speckled with painful-looking blemishes. Grit clogged the corners of
her eyes. Her lips were chapped, and a crust of dried saliva had collected at the corners of her mouth. Her hair, which had looked blond from across the room, was dull and brittle, almost
colorless. Most notably, that thing, the unnameable quality that lit her from within, even in prison, was gone. She looked flat and blank. Susan would not have recognized her.
    She was ugly.
    Gretchen licked her peeling lips. “It’s the medication,” she said in a thick voice.
    “It’s