The Death Artist (7 page)

“Balls! I got close to half the runaway kids I found, and you know that.”

“
After
you found them,” said Tapell.

“My feelings–my emotions–helped me find them,” said Kate. “And I’ve got a feeling about this, too.”

Tapell took a seat across the room, locked her long fingers together. “Look, Kate, I’d like to help you out, but you’ve got to give me more than a feeling if you want to be advising on this case.” She shook her head, stood. “Do yourself a favor, Kate. Go home to that wonderful husband of yours and tell him that the chief of police has promised to take care of this–and I will.” She took Kate’s hand in hers. Tapell’s eyes were sympathetic, but her hands were perfectly cool. “Go home, Kate.”

The ice in Richard Rothstein’s second glass of Scotch had melted. He looked at his illuminated watch dial: twelve-twenty. He was tired, agitated.

He wondered if the restaurant had given Kate his message, and if she was annoyed. She had probably tried to call him on his cell phone, the one he was currently recharging, the batteries having gone dead hours ago.

He moved to the windows. Somewhere below, on Central Park West, a siren blared. Street lamps illuminated the trees that bordered the edge of the park, dappling light onto Strawberry Fields. Across the park, the ornate mansard roofs of Fifth Avenue hotels painted a haphazard geometry against a black sky.

But even if Kate was annoyed with him, he knew she would forgive him for not showing up. Kate, he thought, would forgive him just about anything.

Richard gulped down the watered-down Scotch, flipped the switch of a modernist zigzag lamp. It cast a yellowish light under one of his recent purchases, a mask from the Ivory Coast, for which he had outbid the Museum for African Art. The piece looked absolutely perfect beside the one-eyed Picasso, a sketchy self-portrait the artist had tossed off in 1901.

Just when he was wondering how an East Village performance could go on past midnight, he heard the front door. He called out–“Kate?”–then peered into the darkened hall to find his wife leaning heavily against the wall. “Darling? What’s the matter?” The words were lost a bit as he hurried toward her.

“Oh, Richard–” For the first time in hours Kate could not find her voice. She let go and collapsed against her husband with deep, choking sobs.

Richard let her cry. In all the years he had been with Kate, he had rarely seen her in tears. Yes, after the miscarriages, and when it had become clear that they would not be having children of their own, then she cried. But even then, not like this. He stroked her hair, slowly moved her into the living room, onto the couch, where he held her to his chest and waited.

Finally she managed to tell him about Elena.

“Oh my God.” Richard reared back as if he’d been hit, and Kate started sobbing all over again. It was another ten minutes before she pulled herself together enough to tell him about her meeting with Tapell.

“Be part of an investigation? Are you insane?”

“I know it sounds crazy, Richard, but . . . I have to do it.”

Richard shot her an incredulous look as he moved toward the handcrafted mahogany bar, mixed gin and vermouth for Kate, refreshed his Scotch. He pinched the bridge of his nose; his frown lines deepened. “Wasn’t there a reason you gave that all up, Kate? I thought you
wanted
out of police work.”

“I did, but–” Kate tried to collect her thoughts, which was not easy with Richard’s blue eyes–so sweet a minute ago–now focused on her with total disbelief. She reached for his hand. “I’m going to need your support on this.”

For a moment he hesitated, then his fingers closed around hers. “Of course. You’ve got it.”

They were quiet a minute in the dimly lit living room, then Kate remembered she’d been trying to reach him for hours. “Where were you?”

“When?”

“Tonight?”

He hesitated a moment. “At the office, and then out with clients. Plus, my cell phone died. God, I’m so sorry, honey. If I knew–”

“I needed you there with me–to throw your weight around. Get the cops off my back.”

“They were rough on you?” Richard’s blue eyes sparked with anger.

“No. Not really.” She closed her eyes. Again, Elena’s face–destroyed, bloated–flashed.

“You okay?”

“Yes.” Kate shook her head, whispered, “No.” She leaned against her husband, let him lead her toward the bedroom.

“Lie down, darling.” Richard’s hands gently pressed her shoulders onto the bed.

Her eyes sought his. “I love you, Richard.”

“I love you, too.” He took her hand, squeezed it.

Kate let her body sag into the big white bed, pressed her eyes closed. She pictured Mead in his stupid paisley bow tie.
The finder is often the perp.

The man was way off with that one.
But who then? And why
?

Two days.
Two days
! Damn it, she knew what time meant to a murder investigation. Even if Richard had insisted that little or nothing would get done over the week-end, Kate worried that little or nothing would ever get done–no matter what Tapell said. This wasn’t the kind of case that got attention unless someone was pushing, and pushing hard.

At least now, back in Manhattan, she could be active.

After Richard left for the office–Kate having assured him she’d be fine–she’d been organizing her own small office, making neat stacks from the papers that had previously sprawled over most of the authentic Biedermeier wooden desktop. First, her art history research. Hard copies of every lecture she’d ever given, dozens of reproductions with hand-written notes, art journals, periodicals and magazines, literally hundreds of art postcards. Thank God for her filing cabinet. Not that she was going to organize any of that right now, but it was a place to store it.

But now what to do with a decade’s worth of miscellaneous information? A folder on New York’s finest restaurants with the names and personal telephone numbers of each maître d’, a list of caterers for every possible occasion, information on the best florists in New York and every major American city, catalogs from South American hothouses specializing in mail-order orchids, articles and clippings on noted French and domestic vineyards.

All of it seemed totally absurd. She dumped the papers into the antique silver wastepaper basket, just one of the many gifts Richard had given her when she first set up this office. It had been after her second miscarriage, after the hand-stenciled balloons on the walls and puffy white painted clouds on the ceiling had been latexed over and the crib returned for good.

What was it that seemed familiar about Elena’s crime scene? Kate closed her eyes, tried to reconstruct it, but it was no good.

She turned her attention to the two cartons of books that had been stacked in the corner for years, and chose from among them Hervey Cleckley,
The Mask of Sanity,
Sheilagh Hodgins,
Mental Disorder and Crime,
Robert D. Hare,
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us.
She blew dust off the cover of David Abrahamsen’s
Crime and the Human Mind,
thumbed through it, noted her own faded yellow highlighted markings, scribbled margin notes. Certainly there had to be new findings, new studies. It had been ten years since she had even looked at them.

A call to Liz. If anyone would know, Liz would.

Of course, Liz was more interested in Kate’s state of mind than in helping her focus on criminology. But five minutes on how she was doing was about all Kate could take. Another second and she knew she would break down. “Enough,” she finally said. “Let’s just pretend I’m fine, okay?” Then, quietly, she said, “I’ve got to feel like I’m doing something, Liz–whether I’ve got the legal clout or not.”

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“Probably not. But what can I do?”

“Let the police handle it?”

“I didn’t ask to have this back in my life, but shit, it’s crawled back in through the front door.”

“Okay,” said Liz, resigned. “What do you want me to do?”

“I’ve made a list. I figure with your FBI status you can pull the information a lot faster than I can.”

“Like what?”

“Recent studies on sex murders, as well as updates on violent crime that might help me see this more clearly.”

“Kate, are you aware of how much information on violent crime Quantico alone has produced in the last few years? Enough to stock the Library of Congress.”

“That’s why I called
you.
I made a bunch of notes this weekend about what I observed at Elena’s scene.” Kate spent the next five minutes filling Liz in. “Can you run any of this through VICAP, and NCIC, see what the computer spits out?”

“You say there wasn’t any evidence of a break-in. Could be date rape rather than homicide.”

“Even if it was, Liz, Elena is dead. It
is
a homicide.” She took a breath.

“True. I’ll see what I can get my staff to pull together.”

Kate thanked her friend, hung up, reached into her bag for a smoke, came up with an empty pack.
Damn.
She turned her bag upside down: keys, gum, lipstick, comb, an atomizer filled with Bal à Versailles, tissues, and a dozen cigarettes, half of them broken, spilled onto her desktop, along with that color photograph.

This time, Kate regarded it more carefully. Elena in cap and gown, Kate beside her; high school graduation, five–no, six–years ago. A familiar photo. In fact, Kate thought she had one just like it.

In her library, she flipped through a dozen leather-bound albums until she found it.
Identical.

She tried to remember that moment outside George Washington High School. A sunny day. Elena’s camera. Richard took the photo. Elena sent her a dupe. Right. So this one in her hand would be the original. Elena’s?

Kate bent the gooseneck on the high-intensity lamp closer to the snapshot. A thin film, something flesh-colored, had been meticulously painted over Elena’s eyes so they appeared, on closer inspection, to be closed, blinded, dead–like some creepy Surrealist painting by Dalí.

Kate dropped the photo as if she’d received an electrical shock. But a moment later she got her magnifying glass. Yes, it was paint on those eyelids. Careful work, too. Something for a lab to go over, though by now any fingerprints would have been smudged, ruined. And what lab? Whom could she possibly bring it to? And what would she say:
Oh, this picture made its way into my bag, mysteriously, you see, and look, there’s this odd paint on the girl’s eyes, and oh yes, this girl is now dead.

Emotion rippled through like a spider crawling along her arm. Or was it simply fear, knowing that someone had taken this photo from Elena and planted it on her?

Kate knew that some psychopaths had a need to participate–the ones who stood in the crowd as the police found the body, watched the TV news to see what was said about their crimes, had scrapbooks filled with newspaper clip-pings. Was he one of those?

Kate would have to show this to Tapell.

The phone was ringing in her hand.

“Oh, Blair.” Kate couldn’t hide the fact that she was in no mood to talk with her benefit co-chair.

“Kate, darling. I tossed and turned all weekend. Didn’t sleep a wink. I’ve exhausted my supply of Valium. I look a wreck. Oh, it’s so awful. Awful, awful, awful.” She took a breath. “But how are
you
doing?”

Kate wanted to say:
It’s not about you, Blair! Can you possibly understand that
? But she said, flatly, “I guess you could say I’m coping.”

“Kudos, darling. That’s the Kate I know.” Blair waited a beat. “Now. You know I hate to bother you at a time like this, but we need to tie up a few things. Let There Be a Future’s benefit is practically upon us and there are still lots of little details to discuss.”

Kate heard it all–seating arrangements, flowers, party bags–but none of it registered, let alone mattered. Sure, the benefit had to go on, and other kids needed their help, but
party bags
! Jesus. Blair was lucky Kate didn’t take her head off. Sure, it was Blair who had first welcomed her into New York society, rough edges and all, who had given her a few select pointers along the way, and had signed on when Kate chose Let There Be a Future, giving it a lot more cachet than it would have had without her. But flower arrangements? At a time like this?

No way.

No matter how many times Kate had seen Arlen James, the founder of Let There Be a Future, he never failed to impress her. Even leaning on a cane the man was larger than life.

Six feet three, a full head of bone-white hair, clear blue eyes. His fine wool suit was English, his shoes Italian, but the back story–son of a poor tenant farmer who likes to build model planes grows up to create an airplane construction company and makes millions–was pure American corn. Yet Arlen James was no ordinary capitalist. The man had a conscience, and put it to work. Let There Be a Future was his payback, his dream-child: educational money for any poor kid who wanted it.

Ten years earlier, on a rainy Saturday night, only three months after becoming Mrs. Richard Rothstein, Kate had been introduced to Arlen James at a cocktail party. Monday morning she was in his office. On Friday, she was in the South Bronx, walking into that seventh-grade classroom, kneeling beside desks, asking each kid what they wanted to be when they grew up. The answers? Well, a few Michael Jordans, but for most of the kids Kate’s question seemed merely to puzzle. Growing up was enough of a challenge. Of course, Willie had an answer. “An artist,” he said, sketching so hard his pencil broke in two. And Elena did too. Kate waited, watched as the dark-eyed twelve-year-old rolled the idea around in her mind. “I’m not sure,” she finally said, looking Kate directly in the eye. “But I like to sing and act things out, you know?”