CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ella slunk into the precinct at seven-fifteen feeling worse than she had any right to after a night where she hadn't even had a drink.
She'd lain awake in the hotel room until gone three, staring at the ceiling and running the figurine chain through her head until the links blurred together and none of it made sense anymore.
At some point, she must have slept because her alarm had woken her, but she didn't feel like she'd slept.
She felt like she'd been buried in sand for six hours and someone had dug her up too early.
Ripley was already at the desk they’d been sharing. Of course she was. She had a coffee, a stack of notes, and the look of someone who had been productive for long enough to feel superior about it.
‘Morning,’ Ripley said without looking up.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Long enough.’ Ripley glanced at her and took in whatever Ella’s face was doing this morning. ‘You look terrible.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it. You look like you slept in a ditch.’
‘I didn’t sleep at all. Or I slept badly, which is the same thing.’ Ella dropped into her chair. ‘What have you got?’
Ripley pushed her notes across the desk. ‘Two things. First, I’ve been on the phone since seven. Every donation centre within twenty miles of Rose Michaels’s apartment.’
‘The music box.’
‘The music box. Lily said Rose donated it after the split with Jared, but she didn’t know where. So I called them all. I found fourteen places.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. Not one of them remembers a music box coming in during the last six months. Most of them said they wouldn’t, because they don’t keep item-level logs.
Stuff comes in, they put a price sticker on it, it goes on the shelf.
If it sells, the money goes in the register.
If it doesn’t sell, it goes in the back or gets binned.
Nobody’s cataloguing individual donations unless they’re high value. ’
Ella had expected as much, but it was still a dead end she’d hoped wouldn’t be.
The music box was the origin point of the figurine chain, or at least the earliest point they could trace.
Rose’s snowman had ended up on Amber Holloway’s body.
The ballet dancer had led them to the Colisée Theatre and Eddie Foxall.
If they could find out who had bought or received the music box after Rose donated it, they’d have a direct connection to the killer.
‘So we’re dry.’
‘For now. I’ve asked all fourteen places to check with their volunteers and staff, see if anyone remembers it. But I wouldn’t hold your breath. These places turn over hundreds of items a day.’
‘What’s the second thing?’
‘I got us a meeting.’ Ripley checked her watch. ‘In about an hour and a half. A woman named Marguerite Lefevre. She runs an antique shop on Royal Street in the Quarter. Specialises in musical antiques. She might recognize the figure we found on Eddie Foxall.’
‘How’d you find her?’
‘I called the Orleans Parish library reference desk last night and asked who in the city knew the most about handcrafted figurines and music boxes. The librarian gave me three names. Lefevre was the only one who picked up the phone at before 8AM. She sounded excited about talking to us. I think she might be a bit odd.’
‘Odd is fine. Odd people notice things normal people don’t.’
‘That’s what I figured. I told her we had three figurines connected to an active investigation and asked if she’d be willing to examine them. She said she’d clear her morning.’
Ella looked at the evidence bags lined up on Ripley’s side of the desk.
Three of them. The ceramic snowman from Amber Holloway’s necklace.
The wooden ballet dancer from Rose Michaels’ palm.
And the newest one – the wooden man holding an oversized key, taken from Eddie Foxall’s hand less than twelve hours ago.
Three figurines. Three victims. And somewhere out there, a fourth target who didn’t know they were next.
‘Hey, Mia, not bad work for someone who wasn’t interested in another murder investigation.’
‘I have my reasons,’ Ripley said.
Ella didn’t know what Ripley’s reasons were and she was a little scared to ask. She certainly wasn’t doing this for the love of the game, nor to impress Vernon. The woman had a secret, that much was certain, and Ella was happy to keep it that way if it got her interviews with music box specialists.
‘Grab a coffee,’ Ripley said, ‘because you’ve got an hour to start acting human again.’
***
Marguerite Lefevre’s shop was on the ground floor of a narrow building on Royal Street, wedged between a praline place and a gallery selling paintings of jazz musicians that all looked like they’d been done by the same person in the same afternoon.
The sign above the door said LEFEVRE ANTIQUITéS in gold lettering that was flaking at the edges, and the window display was a cluttered arrangement of pocket watches, music boxes, porcelain dolls, brass candlesticks and a stuffed crow under a glass dome that watched Ella with one dusty eye as she pushed through the door.
A bell tinkled, and the smell of antiques washed over Ella as she and Ripley headed inside.
Marguerite Lefevre was behind the counter, already waiting for them.
She looked somewhere between sixty and eighty, and Ella hoped she could say the same about herself in thirty years or so.
The woman was petite and had silver hair pinned up in a style that probably had a name Ella didn’t know.
Her fingers were covered in rings and she wore a magnifying loupe on a chain around her neck like a piece of jewellery.
‘You must be the FBI,’ she said, and smiled like this was the best thing that had happened to her all month.
‘Agent Dark. This is Agent Ripley.’
‘Marguerite. Don’t call me Mrs Lefevre or I’ll think my mother-in-law has come back from the dead, and I didn’t like her the first time.’ She was already clearing space on the counter. ‘Your partner said you had figurines for me. I’m ready when you are.’
Straight to business. Ella liked it. Ripley placed the three evidence bags on the counter in a row. Marguerite pulled the loupe up to her eye and leaned in without touching them.
‘May I take them out?’
‘Go ahead,’ Ella said. ‘Just handle them by the bases if you can.’
Marguerite opened the first bag – the ceramic snowman – and placed it on a square of black velvet she’d produced from under the counter. She turned it slowly, then she did the same with the ballet dancer. Then the wooden man with the key.
She spent longer on the last one. Ella watched her fingers hover over the blue line painted along the base, then move to the oversized key the figure held across its chest. Marguerite said nothing for what felt like a long time.
‘Well, this is interesting,’ Marguerite said.
‘How interesting?’ asked Ella.
‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘You have one music box piece and two that aren’t.’
Ella looked at Ripley. Ripley looked at Ella. They both already knew the answer, but Ella wanted to hear Marguerite get there on her own.
‘Which one’s from a music box?’ Ella asked.
Marguerite tapped the velvet beside the snowman without touching it.
‘This fellow. Ceramic, machine-moulded base with a hand-painted finish, approximately forty millimetres tall. The base has a peg hole. You can see it here. This tiny recess on the underside. That’s where it would have sat on the lid or the rotating platform inside the box.
It’s standard gauge for a mid-range decorative music box, and it was probably manufactured in the last fifteen to twenty years.
East Asian import, most likely. You’d find this in a gift shop or a department store. ’
‘And the other two?’
Marguerite picked up the ballet dancer and held it at eye level.
‘This is wood. Hand-carved, not moulded. The paint is acrylic and it’s been applied by hand.
You can see the brush strokes if you look closely, and they’re confident.
Whoever made this knew what they were doing.
But it’s the wrong size for a music box ornament.
It’s too tall and too wide at the base. There’s no peg hole or attachment point.
This was never designed to sit on a music box. It was made to stand alone.’
‘And the third?’
Marguerite set the ballet dancer down and picked up the wooden man with the key.
‘Same story. Hand-carved wood, acrylic paint, skilled craftsmanship. The proportions are completely off for any standard music box format I’ve seen in forty years of handling these things.
This is a standalone piece. Someone made it on purpose, as its own object. ’
‘So the snowman came off a music box,’ Ella said, ‘but the ballet dancer and the man with the key were made from scratch.’
‘That’s my assessment. The snowman is commercial. The other two are artisan. Different origins entirely.’
Ella stared at the three figurines on their square of black velvet. The snowman from Rose’s music box – the one Jared Novak had given her, the one she’d donated after the custody battle. That was the starting point, but the ballet dancer and the wooden man hadn’t been snapped off anything.
‘How skilled are we talking?’ Ripley asked. ‘Could anyone with a whittling knife do this?’
Marguerite shook her head. 'Not to this standard.
The carving is clean, the proportions are balanced, the paint application is close to professional.
This isn't someone's first attempt. Whoever made these has experience working with wood and paint at a fine scale.
It could be a hobbyist with years of practice, or someone with a background in decorative arts, restoration work, or model-making. Either way, this isn't amateur hour.'
‘Antiques?’ Ella said. ‘Could someone in the antiques trade have this kind of skill?’
‘Absolutely. Restoration work on music boxes, automata and carved figures is bread and butter in this business. You learn to replicate period styles and match paint techniques and work to very precise dimensions. Someone who’d done that kind of work professionally would find these pieces trivial to produce. ’
Ella thanked her and Ripley gathered the evidence bags. Marguerite watched them go with the expression of someone who wanted to ask questions but had the good sense not to.
‘So the chain starts with the music box,’ Ripley said, ‘but it doesn’t stay there. He used the snowman because it was available. It came with the box. But the rest he’s making himself.’
‘Which means the music box might be where he got the idea, but it’s not the whole picture. He’s a craftsman. He makes these things to order, one for each victim, and each one points to the next target.’
‘A craftsman with a knowledge of antiques.’
‘Or restoration. Or model-making. Or all of it.’ Ella unlocked the car and stood with her hand on the door, not getting in yet. The heat pressed down on her scalp. She squinted against the light bouncing off a windshield across the street.
She didn’t know what this killer wanted.
That was the thing that had kept her staring at the hotel ceiling until three in the morning.
She could read his method but she couldn’t see his reason.
Amber Holloway, Rose Michaels, Eddie Foxall — a Dollar General worker, an unemployed single mother, a theatre manager.
There was no obvious connection between them beyond the figurines he was threading through their deaths.
She needed to get back to the precinct and pull records on anyone with a criminal history connected to antiques, be it theft, fraud, forgery, restoration scams. It was a long shot, but long shots scored the best goals.
‘Come on,’ she said to Ripley. ‘We’ve got work to do.’