CHAPTER ELEVEN
It depressed her. Still being in this vulnerable state, after all this time, still haunted by the man who’d tried to kill her a decade ago.
It was months since Robert Denton had been executed in federal prison, but he still had her in his grip.
At night-time, anyway. He stalked her dreams as if the lethal injection hadn’t killed him, only turned him into some sort of night ghoul, snapping silently at her heels.
It embarrassed her, too. She was thirty-six and still had nightmares.
Went to stay at her Mom's house because she was afraid of the dark.
Stripping the bed every morning because every morning, she woke up sopping wet, drenched with the brackish sweat of pure terror.
How could she ever have a relationship with anyone?
There was no one on the cards, but there'd been moments, opportunities, encounters she wasn't blind to.
That sweet guy at her friend Alicia's Fourth of July party.
The cute and bookish cycling fanatic who lived in the adjacent block.
And each time, she'd done something to sabotage it before it could take flight, because why bother?
Who would spend the night with… that? She was doomed to be alone.
Worse than alone. She was stuck in a long-term relationship with a dead serial killer.
And Denton was just a limb, one part of a bigger beast. If Elijah Cox was telling the truth, nothing had ended with Denton's execution or Cox's own imprisonment. There were more, in the shadows, awaiting the call. The thought was too much to bear. And so, for the most part, she didn’t bear it.
She buried it. Didn't give it the oxygen of her thoughts and fears.
So what was that? Was she sensibly and practically refusing to let it take over her life, so that she could function as a human being and an agent?
Or hiding, avoiding, or ignoring the elephant in the room?
She wondered if she should go back to the shrink. Lay it on the table. I’m not coping. But what would that achieve? More drugs. More time on the couch, raking over ancient history…
She forced a smile – well, not quite a smile, but a general look of capability and composure – onto her face as she neared the office, hearing the voices of Marcus and Chen. They greeted her as she came in.
‘Are you okay, Kate?’ Chen looked concerned.
‘Yes, thanks. I didn’t sleep too good,’ Kate said automatically as she sat down. She felt like she should have a badge with that on. It would save her having to say it.
‘That’s the problem with the city that never sleeps,’ Marcus quipped.
Kate rolled her eyes. ‘Even from you, Marcus, that’s a cheesy line.’
‘Some fall on stony ground,’ he replied.
‘I took care of a few loose ends whilst you two were out yesterday,’ Chen said, eagerly. ‘You want me to update you?’
‘Please.’
‘OK, Vasquez’s agent gave me a list of all the galleries that featured in her tour last year.
It was six over six weeks; seems only two reported any kind of protest or disturbance.
I’ll be checking those out later today. But bear in mind this was last summer, so they’re unlikely to have hung onto any footage. ’
‘Thanks. Anything else?’
'Robyn Cope. He was the artist who failed to make the shortlist for the Plessy Prize and subsequently issued threats against Ashworth and Vasquez.
He's been in a residential rehab in New Mexico since the start of this month, so he's safely off the list. Meanwhile, the other artists who submitted work for the prize, whether shortlisted or not, are all in the clear.
No threats, no reports of being followed, watched, etc. '
‘Lucky Robyn.’
'Next up, forensics confirm that the same type of rocks were scattered at both crime scenes, and the PM concludes a 99 percent chance that the same object was deployed as the murder weapon at both sites. Also that BTC was used to paralyze the victim prior to the fatal blow or blows.'
‘So what exactly are those rocks?’ Kate asked.
‘A cryptocrystalline quartz; what you and I would call flint, found in areas with a high concentration of chalk or limestone. Hard, maybe even impossible to give us a point of origin, because there were no traces of soil or pollen on any of the items recovered from either crime scene. The killer must have carefully scrubbed them. And on their own, chalk and limestone deposits are found literally all over the entirety of North America.’
‘Any word from forensics?’ Kate asked.
Chen shook her head. ‘No, but I did discover that a large quantity of BHC and all sorts of other goodies was boosted from a pharma-supply hub in Jersey a couple of years ago. And it’s easily available on the Dark Web, which limits our chances of tracing the purchaser or suppliers.
I’m happy to keep up the pressure on forensics for you,’ she added.
She actually looked like she was looking forward to it.
With Chen set to do battle with the intransigent forensics team, Kate turned her attention to emails.
She’d expected Dr Morrison to be true to her word, and have forwarded the correspondence she’d had with Elena Vasquez.
Sure enough, an email from the art historian was sitting unread in her In-Box, but when she opened it, it wasn’t what she’d anticipated.
She dialled Morrison’s cell, expecting to leave a message. Instead, Morrison answered, sounding out of breath, somewhere noisy, with an announcer saying something over a tannoy.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ Kate said. ‘Are you on your way somewhere?’
‘Hartford,’ replied Morrison. ‘Hold on.’
She must have stepped into a waiting room or a café, as the hubbub disappeared instantly.
‘I think you forwarded the wrong thing to me,’ Kate said. ‘It’s thanking you for a comment you made to a blog – something called Caldwell Criticus?’
'Oh God. Him. Sorry. My fault. I was trying to clear my desk late last night.
More haste, less speed. Here… I've just forwarded you the right thing now.
Let me know if it doesn't appear. And please don't think I echo the sentiments on that site.
I was simply correcting one of his many inaccuracies. '
Kate thanked her and waited for the email to appear.
The server could be slow, especially in the mornings, when everyone in the building was sending, receiving, and replying.
She wondered what Morrison meant about 'the sentiments on that site' and so, more out of boredom than curiosity, she opened the email and clicked on the link.
The first thing she saw was a post written just yesterday.
There were two large photographs of Vasquez and Ashworth.
The title of the post was a well-known Bible quote; she’d seen it many times.
Growing up in Chicago, she remembered a rangy old man who used to walk up and down Michigan Avenue with it written in stark capitals on a sandwich board.
It came from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH
Her heartbeat quickened as she read the accompanying post.
For a long time now, the art world has become a bloated, arrogant parody of itself.
And the recent deaths of the ‘artists’ Ashworth and Vasquez only serve to prove the levels of justified anger which are felt towards these servants of darkness.
They trample on the quiet dignity and faith of the ordinary, hard-working American man and woman.
They laugh in the face of the things that many Americans still hold dear and consider sacrosanct.
Each champagne cork, each glowing review of a friend by a friend, each generous grant and subsidy becomes a whip-hand, a tool with which to beat down the ‘little people’, who apparently don’t get the gigantic joke being made at their expense.
But they do. And they are not laughing. They are angry. And they want justice.
She started to look through the rest of the blog.
Whoever was behind it seemed to bear a grudge against the art world in general.
Although she disliked the cliché, it was true that love and hate were very close to one another.
And this blogger’s hate for the art world had caused him to devote hours of his time and resources to his obsession.
There were pages and pages of photographs, most taken in secret with a long-range lens, featuring various artists going about their daily business: walking the dog, taking their kids to school, picking up groceries…
Then there were the gallery pictures: the champagne receptions, the unveilings, the canapes.
Even at a distance, the blogger seemed to have a knack for capturing their subjects at the worst possible moment.
As they air-kissed one another, as they laughed too hard at a joke, as they applauded and celebrated and shrugged off compliments with modesty, false or otherwise, he’d somehow made each and every one of them look ghastly and grotesque, disingenuous, puffed-up with pride and an exaggerated sense of their own significance.
Kate suddenly remembered with a smile the earthy description her father applied to such people – legions of whom he’d encountered in a different realm as a top surgeon and stem cell researcher. High on their own farts.
But this wasn’t funny. The blogger had published their addresses.
Not just their addresses, but staggering quantities of private and personal information: the medications they were taking, the cost of their last car and holiday, the names of their pets, the end-of-year school marks of their children.
This was both stalking and shaming, a rupture of privacy on a grand scale, justified by…
what? Some burning hatred for the art world.
Did they really deserve that? They weren’t arms dealers.
They didn’t rob old folks of their savings or harm children.
This treatment of them was out of proportion.