CHAPTER THREE
Kate spied Marcus up ahead outside the precinct building – his Yankees cap at a jaunty angle, his hands thrust deep into his SEALS windcheater.
Kate waved, but he didn’t see her. A kid whizzed past on a skateboard.
Not a kid, Kate realised, the guy was probably her age, en route between a bagel shop and his wildly creative job in a ‘workspace’.
‘How do you feel about the invasion?’ Kate asked.
Marcus responded with a brief, upward, inquiring jerk of the chin. It was amazing how quickly he resorted to his old mannerisms. You could take the boy out of Brooklyn…
‘Hipsters in Bensonhust,’ Kate explained, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the departing skateboarder.
Marcus grinned. ‘We’re a very tolerant and accepting bunch,’ he replied. ‘As long as you support the Yankees.’
‘Is it good to be back in the old neighborhood?’
‘Kinda,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘I don’t know. Everyone moved out, practically. And I never really felt the same about the place since… you know.’
Kate didn’t know, not really, but she knew it was connected to Marcus’s time in the military, a hinterland he rarely discussed. It sounded like there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and perhaps that was all Kate needed to understand.
'I'll introduce you to the PD Homicide liaison. She's a good person.'
They went up the steps of the brownstone together.
The layout was like every cop show Kate had seen on TV: a front desk managed by a veteran cop, a central cage occupied by three, heavily-inked gang-members, battered lockers lining the walls, and detectives at desks, solo or in pairs, typing with agonising slowness.
‘We’re with Detective Sarah Chen,’ Marcus told the front desk guy.
The desk cop looked like the sort of guy who had a wisecrack for every occasion, but today must have been an off-day, because he just gestured behind him with a pen, and then lifted up part of the counter so they could come through.
Marcus introduced Sarah Chen to Kate. Petite, with her hair tied back in a short, practical pony-tail, she cut an attractive figure, dark eyes shining with intelligence and a mouth ever-ready to smile.
Kate suspected they were going to get along.
‘Welcome to the 62nd,’ Chen said, shaking her hand. ‘The crime scene’s just a walk away, and it’s not a pretty sight. I’ve just heard from the team there. They’re pretty much done. I asked them to hang ten so you can see it all in situ.’
‘Thanks.’ Kate dropped her suitcase, Chen donned an NYPD jacket, and they headed out.
‘The vic lives out in Westchester, but he’s got a studio here. Probably for street cred. How can you be an avant-garde artist and not live in Brooklyn? Anyway, judging by the bedding and the large inventory of condoms, he spends quite a few nights in town.’
‘Wife, family?’
‘Was engaged to a fellow scene-shaking sculptor. Kathy Crendell. She jacked it all in to become an agent to a small stable of avant-garde artists, including our Brandon. Somewhere along the line, they consciously de-coupled and just became agent and client. I don’t know whether that was amicable or not, but if they’re in a business relationship, it can’t be too hostile. ’
‘We’ll find out,’ Kate said. ‘How was the body found?’
‘The artist who has the next-door studio let herself in; they share a refrigerator because she does, like, massive industrial pieces, whatever they are, and she wanted milk for her coffee. Called 911 at 0644 this morning. My opinion, killed between midnight and five in the am. PM will give us a clearer picture. Here we go.’
The building was one of those clever kit-blocks that could be assembled in a week or two: each shipping-container-sized unit stacked onto others, affording maximum light and minimal footprint.
When every occupant was in situ, hammering and painting, Kate thought, the place had to sound like an iron foundry. How could anyone be creative here?
On the other hand, that made it a great location for a murder.
But not if you struck at night.
They stepped into Ashworth's unit, hit immediately by the smell of… art. It was turpentine and oil paints, clay and varnish, hot metal, and cut wood. Kate had enjoyed drawing at school; the other stuff – throwing pots, carvings – it was all a bit too messy for her.
A duo of crime scene techs were taking equipment down to their vehicle.
Nods of acknowledgement all round, a formality Kate had to force herself through.
Her attention was drawn to the top right corner of the unit.
Lying there, face up, in a crazy, broken pose, was the body of the sculptor.
There were small, fist-sized stones or rocks scattered all around the body: Kate counted nine.
‘Stoned to death?’ she questioned.
‘That’s it,’ replied Chen.
‘Not with these rocks, though,’ said Kate. ‘Look at the wound on his head.’
They steeled themselves to bend down and examine the body. The front of the man’s face was mostly concave, smashed right in.
‘One bigger rock did that, and not thrown. To make damage like that, it would have been held and wielded, maybe twice or three times, like a weapon or a tool. Like a hammer.’
‘You’re right, Vee,’ Marcus said, coming closer. ‘And there are no injuries consistent with someone throwing these pebbles.’
‘Why scatter them then?’ asked Chen.
‘For the setting,’ Kate said. ‘For the meaning. If you were stoned to death in ancient Israel,
it was a penalty. A punishment. You could get it for uttering one of the unmentionable names of God. Or for breaking any of the Ten Commandments.’
‘What commandment would he have broken?’ Marcus asked.
‘ “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image”,’ she replied. ‘As in, no worshipping of statues or idols. The second commandment.’
She said this before she realised its significance. When she did, she felt it physically: a flash of heat, followed by intense cold. The second commandment.
In her last case, Cox had targeted people he considered to have broken the first commandment, ‘You shall have no other gods before me’.
A priest with a relaxed attitude to his sacred vows, a celebrity academic who called faith a delusion; they’d died horrible deaths, and Kate had nearly joined them.
She still dreamt about Cox’s attack on her: the greasy smell of diesel, the heavy darkness of the derelict church he’d chosen for the denouement, the killer’s pitiless, unblinking gaze.
And later, the words he’d said to her from his prison cell. The threat.
‘Did you hear me?’
Marcus’s words interrupted her thoughts with a jolt.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I said – do we think that’s the motive? Breaking the second commandment?’
‘I… it’s just a possibility. We don’t know enough, do we? For all we know, Ashworth was murdered by his old rock-climbing buddy.’
Marcus acknowledged the point with one of his standard grunts. Then another thought seemed to strike him. He bent down to floor level, nudging first one of the rocks with a pen, then another, and another.
‘There’s no blood on these stones. Not a splash.’
‘Suggests he scattered them last, after the killing,’ Chen said. ‘They’re all schist. Typical of the Manhattan Prong.’
‘Prong?’ Marcus echoed. Kate shot him a look. He could be very childish.
‘That’s the bedrock most of the city is built on,’ Chen said. ‘I majored in Geology.’
‘There you go, every day’s a school day,’ said Marcus, standing up. Chen laughed, rather too loudly.
‘The post-mortem may be able to tell us if the weapon was from the same source of rock,’ Kate observed.
‘Would we call this a graven image?’ Chen asked, moving to a painting on the wall. The glass had been smashed, but the image was still visible. A hooker with wings and a short skirt stood talking to three meth-heads, seated on packing cases in a circle.
‘It’s the angel appearing to the shepherds,’ Kate said. ‘To announce Christ’s birth. I’m not sure what the artist’s trying to say, but I can imagine quite a few Christians would object. It’s an angle, for sure.’
'What do we make of this?' Marcus said, standing by the victim's central workbench.
A cigarette sat unfinished in a little brass ashtray.
Like the Gatorade accompanying it, sad signs of a life abruptly ceased.
But sharing the space on the bench was a macabre assembly of wooden limbs and digits, most of them gouged with a chisel, smashed, or snapped.
‘Like Pinocchio’s autopsy,’ Marcus murmured.
It appeared to be another angel, carved with some skill out of a hard wood like hickory or walnut.
It might have been in bits to begin with, but the killer had obviously smashed it up further.
They’d also made a vain attempt to set light to it, judging by the scorch marks on some of the limbs and the strong smell of white spirit.
‘The partial burning might be because he ran out of time,’ Marcus said.
‘Or he was surprised by someone,’ added Kate. ‘Is there CCTV in the building?’
‘The building’s run by a co-op. They vote on everything, and apparently, they voted not to have CCTV.
Privacy concerns.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The damage suggests a systematic trashing of the guy’s work,’ she went on.
‘But I don’t see any evidence of a struggle between killer and victim.
There’s no damage to the door, no broken plates, no sign that the vic tried to defend himself with anything. ’
‘What about the hands, knuckles? Any evidence of fighting?’ Kate asked.
‘Take a look. I can’t see any,’ said Chen. ‘But he could have come off worst: taken multiple blows to the face whilst failing to land any of his own.’
‘Or could have been incapacitated before the killer smashed his face in,’ Marcus added.
The techs returned with a fold-down gurney for the body; they were, as usual, itching to get everything cleared up and over to the lab.
‘No way. Please give these agents all the time they need,’ Chen said, authoritatively. ‘They want to see everything in situ.’
As the techs slouched off, moodily, Kate shot Chen a grateful look. There were always these little struggles to take into account. Everyone thought their job was the most important of all. It helped to have an ally on the ground.
‘The other thing you need to see is this,’ Chen said, indicating a small object about the size of a pint bottle, lying in the shadows, just above and to the left of the head of the victim.
It was a clay sculpture. A sculpture of what, precisely, it was hard to say.
‘Is it a face? A head? It’s the shape and size of a head.’
‘It’s a mouth,’ Marcus said. ‘A head that’s all mouth.’
‘A scream,’ Chen said. ‘It’s kind of… what a scream would look like, if a scream was in 3-D.’
It was a good description. Kate pulled her eyes away from it, to look at her colleagues.
‘Did the victim make this?’ she asked. ‘Or the killer?’
‘My money’s on the killer,’ Marcus said. ‘Look at Ashworth’s stuff. It’s all… what’s the opposite of abstract?’
‘Figurative,’ said Chen.
'And the head, or the mouth, or whatever you want to call it,' Marcus went on. 'It's still wet. But I guess it could be unfinished. What do you say, Kate? Kate?'
Kate didn’t reply, her eyes had once again found themselves drawn back to the sculpture.
She couldn’t stop looking at it, ugly as it was. It was agony, made solid. Torment, in clay.
And she couldn’t stop thinking about the words Cox had been mouthing to her as he was hauled out of the interview room at the prison.
He’d said those same words to her before, shortly after his arrest.
After Denton, after me, there are many more disciples. And there will be many more deaths. The world will be washed in blood, Kate.
Was he telling the truth? And if he was, was this murder the proof? Could this be the work of some Cox follower or disciple, targeting those he believed to have broken the second commandment?
And if so, why tell her?
That was what she’d failed to understand throughout the last case. What did it have to do with her?