CHAPTER FOUR
‘This guy’s a one-horse pony.’
Kate looked up from her screen. ‘A what?’
‘Sorry. It’s what my grandma used to say. She always got her sayings mixed up. It’s like a one-trick pony mixed up with a one-horse town. I mean, this Ashworth guy. You’re right what you said about him. He’s really only got one trick. Look…’
Kate padded over from the bed to Marcus’s makeshift desk – a narrow table in his hotel room, where he’d got just enough space for a laptop and a notepad.
Showing on the screen was another one of the artist’s paintings.
A Christ-like figure in a loincloth touted for business amongst a small group of male prostitutes on a city street corner.
Marcus tutted as he clicked through some further images.
A nativity scene being raided by ICE agents.
A re-take of the Last Supper, with Christ and his disciples round a roulette table.
A voluptuous Virgin Mary in some kind of coin-operated funfair attraction, a small boy putting a nickel in the slot.
‘He’s not even making a point,’ Kate said.
‘Maybe the nativity one is… I mean, it’s kind of saying, this is how this family would be treated if they showed up now.
But the rest of it? It’s just trying to offend, isn’t it?
Or maybe, at a stretch, it’s saying, these are the people Christ would have cared most about. ’
‘They’re well executed though,’ Marcus said. ‘The light, the tone… it’s like religious paintings from centuries ago. It seems like a… well, kind of a waste, y’know? To have all that skill, and just to waste it making cheap jokes. Not even jokes. One joke, over and over.’
Kate looked at him. There was a lot about her partner that she didn’t know. She’d never have imagined him to be an art enthusiast, for a start.
'The NYT ran a profile on him a couple of years back,' Marcus continued. 'After he won a big prize. Apparently, it was a major scoop because he doesn't like being interviewed.'
'Well that's another way for the talentless to appear otherwise,' Kate said. Refuse to give interviews. Everyone thinks you're like this great enigma, when in fact, you've got nothing to say.'
She realised that she was being somewhat disrespectful about someone who had just lost their life in the nastiest way possible. The job could make you callous, sometimes. But you didn’t have to give into it.
‘I don’t know if he is talentless,’ Marcus said.
‘Stuck on one point, maybe. But he’s got skill.
I looked him up. He grew up in Baltimore.
He was an altar-boy. Surprise, surprise.
He… hold on, let me find it…’ Marcus clicked away from the artwork and onto another page.
‘This is from an interview with the Baltimore Echo. He says he doesn’t seek controversy but he doesn’t shy away from it.
He compares his work to Jesus knocking the tables over in the temple.
Christ is actually one of his heroes, he says.
He’s not a blasphemer, he thinks JC is cool. ’
‘Go figure,’ Kate said. ‘What do we know about that “controversy”? Any of it spill over into something stronger?’
Apparently, he was part of an exhibition a while back that attracted a crowd of protestors.
And his agent called out the PD at one point.
According to Chen, she'd received a regular stream of not-very-friendly letters, and then there was a guy hanging around outside her office.
That was last year. And…' He searched for something else on the screen.
'This is via Gillian Caitiff, the neighbor who found the body.
'At the last co-op meeting, eight weeks ago, Ashworth filed a motion to overturn the ban on CCTV.
Wanted it installed in all the common areas. '
‘Because of threats?’ Kate asked.
‘That seems likely. Gillian should be able to join the dots for us. By the way, she’s called New Gillian.’
‘New Gillian?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘Artists. Anyway, how about you, Vee? Any progress?’
Kate shook her head and glanced back at the bed, where her various notebooks, papers, and glossaries were scattered alongside her own laptop.
Before Marcus had called her over, she'd been on the verge of falling asleep, just teetering at that point where her thoughts started to slow down and make far less sense.
It was so unfair. At night, she knew she'd be not just awake but hyper-awake, brain churning like a food processor.
Fast-forward to late afternoon, and it was a struggle to stay awake.
They'd asked Chen if they could borrow some desk space in the police precinct.
But her captain had responded swiftly, with a very unequivocal no.
It was probably for the best, she reminded herself.
In their last case, some information had ended up in the hands of the press, and despite the indignant protestations of the local police chief, it had seemed pretty obvious where the leak came from.
End result, for various reasons, Kate and Marcus were holed up in a pair of clean, but tired-looking rooms on 57th Street, offering breakfast, laundry, and panoramic views of the nearby cemetery.
She returned to the bed, continuing to study photos of the clay figure that had been left with the body of the victim.
It wasn’t uncommon, in many societies, ancient and still thriving, for people to be buried alongside small effigies.
But they were generally put inside the grave for companionship and protection.
Death was viewed as a journey, from one state to another, and the figures were meant to help the deceased along the way.
It was hard to think of this tortured figure offering any help to anyone.
Whether it was a gigantic mouth, mid-scream, or an eye transfixed at some hideous sight, or something else altogether, it seemed like an echo of the awful, brutal way in which Ashworth had died.
Or a sign of what was coming next, in Hell.
What message was hidden there? And who was it for?
‘I need to tell you something,’ she said, suddenly. She knew she wouldn’t be able to focus until she’d got it said.
‘G’head.’
She told him about Cox. The promise of disciples, carrying out his orders. The significance of the second commandment. Marcus listened gravely, as he always did.
‘One question,’ he said, eventually. ‘Have you told Winters?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
She rubbed her eyes. ‘I guess because… well, partly because I don’t want it to be true.
Don’t forget, he’s got me on the hook about all of this.
In the last case, he sent those messages to me.
He lured me to the church where my Dad was killed.
It’s about me in some way, and I really, really don’t want it to be. It creeps me out.’
‘I can understand that. But.’
‘The other reason is, we don’t know if Ashworth’s murder does have anything to do with breaking the commandments.
There are dozens of other possible reasons.
And even if his killer is someone with a religiously-motivated grudge against his artwork, that still doesn’t mean it’s got anything to do with Elijah Cox.
There are plenty of other Bible freaks out there.
It’s just too early to tell. And I don’t want to go heading down the wrong path when we still know so little.
For all I know, Winters might pull me off the team; you know how she rolls, she prefers doing something, anything, fast, to not doing anything, and she does it before you’ve even put the phone down. And I don’t want that. Do you?’
Marcus gave a grunt.
‘Is that the grunt that means, “No”?’
He smiled, faintly. ‘Of course, I don’t want you off the case. But I don’t want you on it, in danger.’
‘Apart from anything else, this crime scene doesn’t look anything like the ones in the last case. Remember, he left me all those little coded messages? There’s no sign of them here. I don’t, at the moment, feel as if this has anything to do with Cox.’
Marcus took this in for a while and then nodded. 'And if you get the slightest hint that it might be down to Cox?'
'Then I tell you, and I report it to Winters. Of course! Why wouldn't I?'
‘That’s it,’ Marcus said, looking her right in the eye. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’
+ + + + + +
He liked this new place. It took longer to get to, especially at night, when the path was less clear.
But for every loss, there was a gain. No people ever came this way, day or night, so the spot was his, and his alone.
The tree with the roots that grasped the riverbank like an old man’s hands.
The smell of mud: strong and fungal, like semen.
And the music of the stream, the birds: the chickadee and the titmouse.
It was very special. Once in the night he saw an owl flash past like a ghost.
His thoughts had become clearer. The anxiety that sat just below his ribs, like a peach-stone, that started with a low throb when he woke up and rose to jagged crests with each task and obligation and encounter of the day…
All gone. He hadn’t felt this good – this free, this clean, this pure – in ages.
As The Man had assured him he would because he had done the Lord's work. The Lord wasn't angry with him anymore.