CHAPTER SIX
Kate was back at the hotel with her laptop, after a fruitful telephone conversation with an assistant at the prestigious Hauptman Gallery, where Ashworth’s last exhibition took place back in June.
The Hauptmann was a venerable East Coast institution; from a glance at the website alone, Kate could imagine its cool interiors, its elegant staff in their cocktail dresses and their pearls, the cloying scent of old money and freshly-cut flowers.
But the gallery was far from being stuck in another century.
What Kate really wanted, of course, was someone who ticked every box.
A strong, fit adult male with a history of violence and/or psychiatric illness.
They were ten a penny out on the street; just go to a bar on the last Friday of the month and your eyes would be stinging from all the testosterone.
But the kind of men who got into bar fights, fought about…
what? Women, she guessed, and ice hockey, and perceived slights or advances.
They didn’t get into fights about religion.
She was willing to bet that, in no drinking den in this century, maybe even the one before, no-one had slugged someone else over their interpretation of the second commandment.
She was hunting a paradox. These people on her laptop were protesting because they saw Ashworth's work as an affront to something they held dearly, their Christian faith.
But a big part of that same faith was, as Christ himself had put it, turning the other cheek.
Christianity's history might, at certain points, have been full of torture and beheadings, burnings at the stake, and the dismemberment of heretics, but that was way back when.
Not now. She was beginning to doubt that the killer would be found amongst the protestors.
But then, as soon as she had that thought, he appeared, like a glowering genie from a lamp.
A broad saddle of a face, high cheekbones, handsome in a tribal sort of way.
Neal Allenby ran a small construction business, just him and three employees, and he had a history of bar-fights, road-rage, and neighbor disputes, with alcohol usually somewhere in the mix.
After the last court appearance, a Judge with a conscience – or perhaps with his own demons to conquer - had given Allenby a stark choice.
Jail time, or completing a church-run 12 Step programme, from which he'd ultimately emerged, sober and faithful.
But Kate could see, just from the way he glared at the camera, that violence had not entirely left his soul. Allenby was an angry man.
She rang the number on his website. A woman answered. Kate introduced herself and asked to speak to Allenby.
‘He’s out on a job at present.’
‘Would you be able to give me his cell number?’
There was a pause. ‘He’s likely to be up on a roof or doing something noisy. If you want to leave your number with me, I’ll be speaking to him tonight and I’ll pass your details on, for sure.’
‘Where is he at present?’
‘He’s working on my brother’s place, in Morton.’
‘Morton in…?’
‘Sorry, honey. Morton, Wyoming. He’s been there these past two weeks.’
Drat.
She was just about to return to her screen when there was a series of knocks at the door: three quick, two slow. Marcus.
‘Come in!’
He’d brought coffee and sandwiches. Kate felt a rush of gratitude towards her ever-thoughtful partner.
Not for the first time, she wondered what could have happened between him and Cheryl.
Why didn’t she want to marry Marcus? Assuming it was that way round.
And, for some reason, she felt sure it was. Marcus was besotted with the girl.
‘What do you know?’
‘I just had another chat with Gillian, the neighbor,’ Marcus said, flopping into a tub chair and unwrapping his sandwich.
‘New Gillian.’
‘You know, apart from that name, she’s completely ordinary. She didn’t know if Ashworth had received any recent threats, he hadn’t mentioned it to her, but he did ask her if she’d seen anyone hanging around.’
‘That implies he had seen someone himself. Any description?’
‘He asked her if she’d seen a big guy. Didn’t specify if he meant big tall, or big fat, or both.’
Kate frowned. ‘And Gillian didn’t ask?’
'Gillian's a bit of a space cadet, to be honest. But Ashford's agent, Kathy Crendell, reported someone hanging around last month.
Two occasions, two days apart. Standing on the opposite side of the road, wearing a front-facing ball cap which she thinks was gray or dirty white.
She said she went out to challenge him on the second occasion, and he – I quote – moved pretty fast for a big guy.
She reported this second visit to the cops, who said… '
‘They couldn’t do anything until or unless he committed a crime,’ Kate finished the line.
‘Yup.’
‘That moving-fast-for-a-big-guy detail… to me that implies he was big-fat, not big-tall.’
‘I kind of thought that,’ Marcus said, ‘but then, why not be precise and say he was fat? Or overweight?’
‘It’s more polite to say “big”.’
‘Forty-point-three percent of US adults are overweight. You know that? So you’d think we would’ve found a way of saying it without tiptoeing around it.’ Marcus shook his head, as he often did, when the habits of the Great American Public were under discussion.
‘BUT… here’s a thing,’ he went on. ‘Ashworth’s got an alarm on his car.
It goes off all the time. Everyone in the building complains about it, according to Gillian.
He has to go down to his car to reset it.
He’s been in the habit of ignoring it – it shuts off on its own eventually – but he’d received so many complaints that he’d gotten into the habit of going down to sort it out. ’
‘I thought you were going to suggest it was a motive for his murder.’
‘I’m sure it’s happened somewhere,’ Marcus grinned.
‘The point is, it went off at about half-two on Tuesday morning. Gillian put her ear plugs in and went back to sleep. But I’m thinking, maybe the killer set it off.
That would be a reason for Ashworth to open his front door in the dead of the night, which you wouldn’t ordinarily do. ’
‘So potentially the killer was right outside his door and pushed him back into his apartment?’
‘If he’d been watching the victim over a period of weeks, or even longer, he’d know that Ashworth had to leave the apartment to deal with the alarm.
But that might explain why Ashworth wanted CCTV.
He had an idea that someone was watching him.
And that’s also backed up by something else Kathy Crendell told me.
When she mentioned the guy hanging round outside her office to Ashworth, he seemed spooked. ’
‘Spooked?’
‘Her words.’
‘We need to double down on CCTV, near the agent and near Ashworth’s apartment.’
‘Chen’s on it. But bear in mind we’re talking about events last month. It’s likely to have been wiped.’
‘I know. We can only try. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s bothering me. There are, what, six apartments in that building?’
‘One empty, being sold, one used only in the daytime by a cartoonist who commutes in from Connecticut. That leaves two, one on the ground, one on the floor above Ashworth.’
‘And neither of them heard a thing?’
‘Don’t forget the killer could have paralyzed Ashworth with the betahydroxy-stuff as soon as he or she got in.’
‘You’re right. So we’ve got some sense of a physical threat from someone watching the building. What about more overt threats?’
‘The agent loaned me a file full of angry letters. I’m about halfway through. They’re pretty tame as far as death threats go, but we should do a basic background search on the ones that aren’t anonymous. What about you?’
She filled him in on the material from the gallery. He peered at the screen.
‘You’ve got 14 photographs, but only 12 names.’
‘Have I?’
Marcus had noticed something instantly that she’d failed to see in about two hours. That didn’t surprise her.
‘So that means two people didn’t sign the petition,’ Marcus went on. ‘Who have you matched?’
She showed him, tapping the screen with her pen.
‘So it’s just these two.’
They looked at the two images – two very different men.
One was huge, as wide as he was tall, with mousy hair plastered over his forehead and a somewhat vacant look in his eyes.
The other was a small, neat-looking man, with a dark complexion and a tidy beard.
He wore simple robes over a well-fitting charcoal suit and a priest’s collar.
‘Big Guy,’ Marcus said, pointing to the larger of the two men. ‘I’m going to email this to Ashworth’s agent, see if it’s the same guy she saw hanging around.’
‘Good thinking.’
‘Did you do a reverse image search on this guy?’ Marcus asked, pointing to the priest.
‘Yep. Nothing came up. Maybe the beard is new, or it’s a different style to one he had before. That’s the problem with beards.’
‘I say we go back to the gallery. I need to talk to them anyway, because his agent said they also got emails, letters, written threats. Maybe one of the staff saw something, spoke to one of the protestors…’
‘Worth a try.’
They were just heading out of the door when Kate’s phone rang.
‘It’s Winters.’
Kate picked up. True to form, her boss launched straight in without any niceties.
‘What’s the progress?’
‘We’re looking at protestors, people with a specific gripe with the victim and his work. We’re getting repeated mentions of a particular individual scoping out Ashworth’s apartment and the office of his agent, Kathy Crendell.’
‘I asked about progress, not leads, Kate.’
Kate rolled her eyes at Marcus. ‘Yes, ma’am, I understand, but -’
'I'm not chewing you out, but I'm getting serious heat from upstairs. There's a bill going through the Senate right now, targeting religiously motivated violence. If it looks to the world like the FBI can't successfully prosecute crimes like that… I don't need to say more, do I?'
‘No, ma’am.’