Her body is warm under his hands and he feels the physical pull he always does when they are this close.

He has memorized her. He knows her intimately. Even after their first sexual encounter he could conjure her in his mind like a photograph. “I can’t get you out of my head,” he tells her. “I spent all day at a crime scene, and all I could think about was you.”

She leans closer to him. “Tell me about it,” she says.

Archie hesitates. She’ll get the file tomorrow, anyway, and it hardly seems like bedroom talk. “It’ll all be in the file,” he says.

“I want to hear about it from you,” Gretchen says, laying her head on his chest, her cheek over his heart. Her blond hair rises and falls as he breathes.

Archie doesn’t talk about his work with Debbie. Even when Debbie presses, he refuses to talk to her about the murders. He tells himself that she doesn’t really want to know. He doesn’t want to scare her.

But Gretchen is a consultant on the case. She’s seen all the crime scene files. She’s read all the notes. She’s viewed all the crime scene photographs and autopsy reports. For the first time, Archie can tell someone about his day. He can unload. It makes him regret not being able to share that with his wife.

“She was young,” he tells Gretchen quietly. “Twenty-two. Graduated from Cornish up in Seattle in the spring. Lidia Hays. The Beauty Killer murdered her at her apartment in North Portland. She lived off of Alberta, in a house that had been subdivided into four units. She didn’t lock her door. We think he entered early in the day and waited for her to come home from work. She was a server at a brewpub downtown. She got off at ten and told her coworkers that she was headed straight home. He kept her alive most of the night. She was tied spread-eagled and naked to her bed. She had duct tape over her mouth, or the neighbors would have heard her screaming.”

“The killings aren’t usually sexual,” Gretchen says. Her hair is over one shoulder, revealing the curve of her neck.

“It doesn’t look like she was sexually assaulted,” Archie says. “But the scene was definitely staged to make a point.” The chandelier throws a large shadow on the ceiling above the bed, like a giant spider. “Maybe she reminded him of someone,” Archie says.

“What did she look like?” Gretchen asks.

Archie hesitates, not sure she wants to hear the answer. “You, actually,” he says. “Blond, blue eyes. A beauty.”

He feels Gretchen shiver.

Archie touches the back of her neck. “Do you want me to close the window?” he asks.

“It’s not that,” she says.

His finger finds the small hollow at the base of her skull. “We don’t have to talk about this.”