CHAPTER EIGHT
Another thing that never appeared in the recruitment ads, Kate thought.
Working in a budget hotel room, slowly asphyxiating as the oxygen was replaced by coffee and burger fumes, the scent of weariness and unmade beds.
She wished she could open a window, to wake herself up a bit, but that was a luxury beyond their budget.
She was mopping-up, as they called it: following up the various loose threads of the investigation so far.
And making good progress, too. Henk Steensma, who'd sent the most recent blood-and-thunder letter to Ashworth's agent, was a carer for his elderly mother.
The nurse who provided night cover for him three nights a week confirmed he'd been home, asleep, at the time of the artist's murder.
That, combined with the mammoth amount of work Marcus had already done on the letters sent to the dead artist and his agent, left just seven outstanding, two of which were completely illegible. She pushed the folder away, unable to tackle any more religiously-inspired death threats right now.
Besides, she doubted strongly whether the killer would have advertised their intentions prior to taking Ashworth's life.
Letters tended to be serial-killer stuff, a way for them to taunt the authorities and the media as they claimed scalp after scalp.
And whoever it was who had stood over Brandon Ashworth and beaten his brains out, caveman-style, with a rock, they were primarily a visual person.
That much was evident from the crime scene, their targeting of an artist, the skill that went into that unsettling effigy left with the body.
They weren't about words. They were all about actions and pictures, of the bloodiest kind.
She shivered, despite the stuffiness of the room. Marcus suddenly strode in, making her jump. She gave a little involuntary cry, then felt ridiculous.
‘Sorry, did I scare you?’
‘You normally knock.’
‘I did.’
She rubbed her eyes. ‘Did you?’ She realised she’d probably been in a bit of a trance. ‘Sorry. What news?’
‘I’ve been working my way through the protestors. A couple of them got fined for demonstrating outside an abortion clinic. But not recent. Three years back. Oh, and I sent the photo of Big Guy to Ashworth’s agent.’
‘Well done. And?’
Marcus sat down heavily in the armchair. ‘We parted on pretty cool terms when I visited her, so I was surprised when she rang me back.’
Kate leant forward and pulled her cardigan out from under Marcus. ‘What did she say?’
‘She’s stuck on the fact that the guy she saw outside the office wore a cap. Can’t imagine him without it. I suggested she put her thumb over his hairline. Still not sure.’
‘So out of every angle we’ve explored so far, the priest is looking most suspicious.’
‘Let’s organize a warrant,’ Marcus said, getting his phone out. It buzzed in his hand, startling him.
‘It’s Chen.’
As soon as he heard what she had to say, he sat bolt upright in the chair. ‘We’re on it.’
‘What is it?’ Kate asked, as he ended the call.
‘There’s been a second killing, over on Long Island. Rocks, a statue, the same pattern. Neighbor popped round with a serving dish she'd borrowed, found the body.'
‘Time?’
‘PM yet to confirm but techs on-site say recent, between eleven and one today.’
‘When Father T was either celebrating the Mass…’
‘Or talking to us.’
Kate frowned, wishing she could punch a wall or kick a chair. ‘At least we didn’t bother with the warrant.’
With all the tiredness gone, she grabbed her coat, assembled the basic investigatory kit she took everywhere, preoccupied by the sure and certain knowledge that they were dealing with an elusive, sophisticated killer. One who wasn’t going to stop.
+ + + + + +
It was astonishing how rural Long Island looked.
Less than an hour from the hotel room, and Kate was looking at gentle hills, blanketed in afternoon sunshine.
Rows of vines, meticulously tended, stretched out towards the horizon, interrupted only by the occasional clapboard farm building.
Kate found it hard to tear herself away from the window and focus back on the horror in the room.
Painter Elena Vasquez lay on the floor of her studio; if Kate focussed on the bottom half of the body, it was almost possible to believe that the woman had taken an impromptu nap beneath her easel.
She was wearing a thin, loose, denim smock, her dark curls stretching across her shoulders like seaweed.
And her once-beautiful face had been smashed to a bloody pulp.
Like gulls on a beach, a buzz of quiet industry surrounded the still corpse: a photographer knelt to capture various details and angles, his camera making an electronic whine with each flash.
Clad in their trademark white paper suits, another pair of forensic techs took measurements, marking out areas and items of interest with bright yellow numbered tags.
Picking his way between the rocks scattered all around the body, Marcus approached a couple of unframed canvasses hanging on the wall just behind the body. He motioned to Kate to join him.
‘Why one and not the other?’ he asked.
The canvas on the left had been cut to ribbons, while a large, central hole suggested the killer had punched it, or perhaps struck it with some heavy tool. In stark contrast, the canvas on the right, depicting a similar view to the one out of the window, was untouched.
‘So the killer prefers landscapes?’ Kate suggested, in a feeble attempt to lighten the mood. She moved closer to the damaged canvas. It was impossible to tell what had been painted there.
‘There’s no blood to be seen,’ she said. ‘So if he attacked this canvas with the murder weapon, it must have been before he killed the victim.’
‘Or he used something else,’ Marcus mused. ‘Like one of these smaller rocks. We’ll need to know if it’s the same type of rock that was used in the Ashworth killing.’
‘Schist,’ Kate said, mainly to herself. She liked the word.
‘Are we okay to bag up the… thing?’ asked one of the techs, indicating the clay idol which had been placed, like the first, above and slightly to the left of the victim’s head.
They went over to take a look.
‘Thing’ wasn’t a bad effort, in the circumstances. It was similar to the one that had accompanied Ashworth’s murder: approximately the shape and size of a human head, but with the entirety of the face taken up by a gaping, silently screaming mouth.
‘Like the other one,’ Kate said quietly. ‘What did Chen call it? Agony in 3-D?’
Marcus said nothing. He stared at the effigy for a while, then gave a shudder.
‘I kind of can’t stop looking at it. I mean… it’s ugly, but… I feel like it doesn’t want to let me go.’
‘I feel exactly the same,’ said Kate. ‘I felt it about the first one, too.’
‘Did you? Why didn’t you say?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It felt like a crazy thing to say.’
‘It isn’t,’ Marcus said, continuing to stare. He took a deep breath and snapped his gaze to the waiting tech. ‘We’re good to go, thanks.’
They moved aside to let their co-workers proceed.
‘Why does he make them?’ Marcus asked, almost to himself. ‘What’s he trying to say?’
‘Maybe he wants us to know how horribly they died.’
‘Isn’t that obvious from the state he leaves them in?’
Kate shrugged. ‘If it is something to do with breaking the second commandment, maybe he’s sending them to Hell. And that’s what he’s showing us. The eternal torment they’ll be suffering in Hell.’
‘Still think it’s nothing to do with Cox?’
‘So far, I’ve seen no clues to be deciphered, no codes or ciphers. I’m keeping an open mind. But it strikes me that, if Cox was involved, he’d want me to know it. He’s not the shy and retiring type, after all.’
‘True.’
‘We need to go downstairs now.’
Understanding just what she meant, Marcus nodded grimly.
The next task was going to be gruelling, but it was vital.
They stripped out of their paper suits on the landing and headed in silence downstairs.
Chen was making coffee in the kitchen, having just interviewed the very traumatized neighbor.
On the sofa, a gaunt-looking man sat, staring into space.
His eyes were red, his hands fidgeted, the sleeves of his hooded zip-up ended a good four inches above his slim, bony wrists.
Kate had a suspicion it had belonged to his wife.
‘Mr Shinwell,’ Kate said, quietly.
He looked at her, but he seemed to be a great many miles away. ‘I came home a day early,’ he said, blankly. ‘To surprise her. It’s our wedding anniversary.’
‘Where were you?’ Marcus asked.
'I'm a partner in a small architectural practice,' he replied. 'We were bidding for the contract to design a row of zero-impact family homes in Philly. That's where I was.'
‘Did you design this house?’ Kate asked. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It was a farm,’ Shinwell said, faintly. He looked at her, wearily; despite the redness surrounding them, his eyes were a very striking blue. ‘What do you want to ask me?’
‘Have there been any unwelcome visitors to the property recently?’ Kate asked. ‘People scoping the place out, parked up nearby?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do you have CCTV? A doorbell camera?’
‘We were discussing it,’ Shinwell said. ‘Neither of us really liked the idea, but after our neighbors were robbed, we thought maybe it was time.’ He made a small, joyless laugh. ‘Too late now.’
‘Did your wife’s work… did it deal with religious themes?’
‘Some. She painted a lot of Long Island landscapes, rural, you know… the kind of stuff that sells to people with big walls and big wallets. But her personal obsession is… was… with the Madonna-figure. She’d painted upwards of three hundred of them. Here –’
He tossed them a catalogue that was lying on the coffee table. ‘That was a touring exhibition that took place last year. Sixteen States.’
Kate flipped through the glossy pages: each one a variant on the Madonna and Child theme, rendered in heavy oils, with an eerie light that seemed to come from the figures themselves.
There was a military Madonna with a cropped head and a camouflage flight-suit, a Madonna nursing a cat, a Madonna covered in tattoos and piercings.
‘What about the work on the wall?’ Marcus asked.
Shinwell glanced over at the smashed canvas, without reacting to it. ‘That was the one that caused the trouble. ‘Our Mother of Love’. It’s in that catalogue if you want to see it.’
Kate quickly flipped to the index in the catalogue and then to the image. As the title suggested, this Madonna was a crimson-lipped seductress in high heels and stockings, gazing defiantly out of the canvas. The 'infant' on her lap was a small man in a business suit, gazing up at her adoringly.
‘Someone threw an egg at it,’ Shinwell said. ‘In Detroit. And there were a couple of protests outside other galleries. Atlanta, I think. And Austin.’
‘Was that the only work that attracted criticism?’ Kate asked.
‘It kind of bled into…’ Shinwell stopped himself, presumably wanting to choose a better word. ‘Kind of affected all the others. You know, the tattooed Madonna probably wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow, but because of the ‘Mother of Love’ one, people decided that they were all bad.’
‘How did your wife react to the criticism?’
‘It upset her,’ he said, running his hand through his short, neatly cut hair.
‘She didn’t do it to cause offence, in fact, she often said she was going to stop painting them.
But of course, her agent loved that it caused a ruckus, so she was always under this pressure from all sides.
From herself, too. She felt kind of driven to keep on painting them.
But she didn’t want the aggravation that came with them. ’
‘Did she receive any direct threats?’
‘Not to her. But some of the galleries got warnings. They never sounded very serious to me. It was either “you’re going to burn in Hell” or “we’ve planted a bomb in the ladies’ restroom”.
But I think the galleries kinda liked it.
It suited them to be edgy and controversial. Kind of free advertising for them.’
‘Could you give us a list of the galleries where she’s exhibited?’
Shinwell shook his head, slowly. ‘I can’t think straight enough for that, I’m sorry.
I can give you her agent’s details. Like I say, it’s probably only ten percent of her paintings that might have crossed the line.
But she tended to get lumped in with that set.
“The Controversial Artists”. Like that guy who died just –’
The words died in Shinwell’s throat. He’d seemingly just joined the dots, just realised why his wife had been killed. He gazed at the agents in horror, as a single tear travelled slowly down his face.
‘She never hurt anybody,’ he said, with a faint edge of shock, as if he was grieving anew. ‘My Ellie was the kindest, sweetest…’ He stopped. All out of words.
‘We’re sorry for your loss,’ Kate said, uselessly.