CHAPTER TWELVE
Caldwell was almost superhuman, Kate thought, as he grabbed the steaming hot cup of coffee in his paw, registering no pain or discomfort.
He brought it to his lips and swallowed the lot in one gulp, the sort of feat you could only achieve if you were made of asbestos.
There was a further possibility, of course, which was that he was extremely high on some kind of stimulant, but there were no other signs of that; the man's breathing was regular, his eyes focused.
She took a cautious sip of her own brew, praying for inspiration. Checked the clock, although she knew it would be roughly a minute later than when she’d last done so. The interview was going nowhere.
‘Why did you run?’ Marcus asked, for the third time.
‘You took a serious risk,’ Kate added. ‘Jumping onto the next building. Why would you be so desperate to avoid talking to us?’
‘I’ve done it before,’ Caldwell replied. ‘Plenty of times. I knew it was possible.’
‘Why would you have done it before? Are you often being chased, James?’
‘You don’t like being followed, but it’s okay for you to do it to other people?’
Caldwell said nothing. It had been like this for the past 43 minutes.
He'd occasionally answer a tangential question, but when faced with anything deeper, pertaining to the blog, or his stalking of the artists, or his whereabouts at the time of Ashworth and Vasquez's deaths…
Zilch. He just sat there like a boulder, staring at his own huge hands.
‘Brandon Ashworth’s agent confirms you were standing watching her office in Williamsburg on two occasions,’ Marcus said. ‘Were you outside Mr Ashworth’s apartment, too?’
Caldwell yawned.
‘Did you visit the Hauptman Gallery to disrupt the exhibition and intimidate the artist?’
No reply.
‘Do you actually know any of the artists you’ve been stalking?’
Caldwell didn’t answer.
‘When did you start doing it? What happened to make you so angry? Did they reject your sculptures, James?’
Kate and Marcus both thought they noticed something then, a tiny glint of anger in the man’s eyes, like sunlight on a rock.
‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Marcus pressed ahead quickly. ‘You started out so promisingly, but after art school, you just couldn’t hack it. You didn’t make it.’
‘They wouldn’t give me a chance,’ he spat angrily. ‘At my first show, they said my work was one-dimensional and inauthentic. Said I should throw in the towel, go and work for the family firm.’
‘That must have been hurtful,’ Kate said.
‘Nobody else’s background mattered. But because they had me down as this spoilt rich kid, they weren’t going to let me succeed. They turned their backs on me.’
‘Is it possible that your work just wasn’t good enough?’ Marcus said, bluntly.
Caldwell pursed his lips, obviously not keen to go there.
‘People get rejected all the time, James,’ Marcus went on. ‘Authors, artists, actors, singers… it’s a tough world. They either keep on trying, or they go and do something else. They don’t convert it into some kind of religious crusade against the establishment that’s rejected them.’
Caldwell frowned and opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment, Chen came in, carrying a note. She passed it to Kate, and she and Marcus read it. As Chen left, Kate put the note in her pocket.
‘Tell us about Ilford Park,’ Kate said.
‘Spent four weeks there,’ he mumbled. ‘Back in ‘23.’
‘And why was that?’
‘Why are you asking? You obviously know. It was on that note the cop brought in.’
‘We want to hear your take on it.’
‘I conducted a legitimate protest at an exhibit by the Leopold Brothers.’
‘Tell us about that.’
'It was a roomful of copies of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man on a crucifix. Each one made from solid gold and precious stones, worth exactly 550,000 dollars, which is the exact market value of all the organs, substances, and minerals in the human body.'
‘And you damaged several of them?’
‘Two of them. But, yes, I did. And the judge sent me to Ilford Park for psychiatric evaluation. Which, incidentally, concluded that I’m entirely sane. Or no more crazy than the next guy.’
‘And that was all because you saw the art works as blasphemous?’
‘I did not.’
The comment was so unexpected that Kate asked him to repeat himself.
‘I said that the whole display would be deeply offensive to Christians, but that wasn’t the reason behind my attack.’
‘What was the reason?’
‘Agent Valentine, that gallery sits in one of the most deprived boroughs in North America. If you’re born there, you’ve got a lower life expectancy than someone living half a mile down the road.
And along come the Leopold Brothers, filling a room with 24 million dollars’ worth of gold and gems as some sort of ironic ‘comment’ on…
I don’t even know what. Do you? Does anyone?
The art world disgusts me. But it’s got nothing to do with God.
If God exists, I reckon He’s big and tough enough to put up with a little blasphemy. ’
Marcus and Kate exchanged a glance. This wasn’t what they’d expected.
‘If you’d actually read my blog, you’d know that what disgusts me is the self-applauding joke that the art world has become.
It’s detached from any sort of desire to depict the world, good or bad.
It’s detached from any mission to change lives or change minds or perspectives – most of the people living near an art gallery in this city couldn’t even afford the admission fee.
It’s just a club, a club where everyone sits around chuckling at how clever they are. ’
‘So, just to clarify,’ Kate said. ‘You have no issue with the religious content of works by people like Elena Vasquez and Brandon Ashworth?’
‘I do have an issue with it, but not because of blasphemy. Because trampling on people’s faith, or deliberately offending people’s religious sensibilities, is just one of the ways in which the contemporary art world demonstrates its scorn for the people.
Read my blog, Agent Valentine. If you had, you wouldn’t be wasting your time and mine down here. ’
'You've been unable to provide an alibi for the dates and times of the two murders,' Kate said, tersely.
'You also attempted to evade arrest, and I'm satisfied that your systematic stalking of numerous artists and gallery owners breaks multiple state and federal laws.
You'll remain in custody while we investigate further. '
+ + + + + +
When Kate returned to the office, she found another note from Chen: a yellow Post-It this time, bearing the cryptic legend Dr Ignaz, Soil, followed by a cellphone number. This meant very little to her, so she called her temporary colleague for more information.
‘It seems we owe the forensics team an apology,’ Chen said. She was somewhere in traffic.
‘Not even on my death-bed,’ Kate said, not entirely joking. ‘What’s it all about?’
'They haven't been sitting on it. They've actually sent samples from the clay statues to this guy, Dr Ignaz.
He's a soil scientist. He's meant to be hot stuff; last year, he solved a 20-year-old murder case from, like, two molecules of pollen.
Anyway, he's got some findings. And so have I, actually. I'll be in in twenty.'
Kate thanked her and dialled the number. Dr Ignaz answered almost as if he’d been sitting in his office, willing his phone to ring.
‘I understand you might be able to tell us where the clay comes from,’ Kate said.
‘Well, let us be a hundred percent clear from the outset,’ said Dr Ignaz, irritably. ‘There is no such thing as “clay”.’
‘Um… ok?’ she replied, hesitantly.
'The term 'clay' denotes a size of particle, it does not pertain to a material in its own right,' Ignaz went on.
'Specifically, it refers to any particle with a diameter of less than one-two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth of a millimetre.
' He had a precise, cross and slightly self-satisfied voice, which Kate was already struggling to listen to.
'We might also say,' the scientist went on, 'that clay is a process. It is a process formed by the interaction of rock, rainwater, and an assortment of minerals and acids, as well as biological events including the life-cycle of microbial organisms and plants.’
‘I was just hoping that you could tell us where, in relation to the two effigies, that particular size of particle or process, or whatever you want to call it, might be found.’
She was conscious of sounding a little rude, but she wasn’t sure how else to get her point across.
‘Well I can hardly tell you that without telling you how clay is formed, can I?’ snapped Ignaz.
Er, you could try, Kate thought. But she said, ‘Please do’, as politely as she could.
What followed from the soil expert was a 15-minute lecture on the formation and composition of clay, if indeed, she was allowed to use that highly contentious word in these circumstances.
The unsolicited lecture roamed freely, taking in the formation of siliciclastic rocks, the role of chlorites, illites, and muscovites, the key differences between podzols, pedalfers, and pedocals, and if the angry doodles on Kate's notepad were any sort of indicator, it went on for far too long and went into far too much detail.
When it was finished, she thanked Dr Ignaz, and then sat on her own in the little office for some time, massaging her eyeballs.
Marcus came in, whistling. He stopped when he saw Kate.
‘You okay?’
She looked up. ‘Not exactly. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes talking to a soil expert. Not talking to,’ she corrected herself. ‘Being talked at by.’
‘Did he tell you anything useful?’
‘To be fair, yes, but I had to pick up a PhD in geology along the way.’ She sighed. ‘You know what I like? I like those experts who ask you, “what do you need to know?” Do you know what I mean? What happened to them? I never get an expert like that anymore.’
Marcus grinned. ‘He certainly pushed your buttons.’
‘What? Oh. Yeah. Sorry.’ She took a deep breath.
‘He’s meant to have solved a massive murder case last year.
I’m not sure how he could have done that without getting murdered himself.
Anyway… he told me that, based on the composition of the clay, in both cases, it’s been taken from the banks of a stream running along the floor of a valley, surrounded by a cool, coniferous forest with a humid continental climate and greater than average rainfall.
Closest example being south-west of this fair state.
Unlikely to have come from further afield due to the size of the particles and the specific minerals.
He’s going to run a further battery of tests to see if he can zoom in closer.
Oh, and the darker color on the second statue is due to oxidation – a slight variation in the mineral content, which suggests he got his clay from a different spot, but part of the same landscape. ’
‘Well that’s all useful, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah I guess it is. We can apply geographical parameters to a search for violent offenders, people recently released after long sentences, people who’ve been interviewed for related offences.’
‘You don’t sound very pleased.’
She looked at him. ‘I’m just dog-tired,’ she said. ‘And I’ve got this weird kind of dread feeling. As if something bad is about to happen, any minute now.’
‘That’s probably because you’re so tired.’
‘Might be.’
Her phone buzzed with an incoming message. It came from a colleague in the Maine office. She clicked on it. It was a YouTube clip, shakily filmed with bad sound. Kate instantly recognised the scene: the boulevard outside Caldwell’s apartment.
‘Oh jeez. I was right.’
They watched as the ugly scene unfolded, in an order they didn’t recognise.
Caldwell shouted that he’d just had surgery right before Marcus and Kate jumped on him.
Whilst he was struggling on the floor, he shouted that he couldn’t breathe, something he just hadn’t said at the time.
The final frame was Marcus shoving his hand up to block the camera lens, as if he was about to go and commit further brutality.
After the clip ended, they stood there for a moment or two, numb with shock. Caldwell’s arrest hadn’t exactly been a smooth and seamless procedure. But it was nothing compared to this confected, doctored debacle. The clip had 8,000 views, a figure going up as they looked at the screen.
Marcus’s phone rang.
He stiffened in response to an angry invective from whoever had called him. ‘No, ma’am. I can see that, ma’am.’
It wasn’t hard to guess who’d called. It was Assistant Director Winters. Kate could hear her voice. Winters never raised it. Or rather, she never had, until now.
‘It didn’t happen like that, ma’am. He resisted arrest but we subdued him with the minimum of force. And he never said he couldn’t breathe. Someone’s gotten creative with the AI.’
‘It wasn’t the easiest arrest; he jumped over a balcony to evade us and he resisted in front of an angry crowd. But I can assure you we didn’t put a foot wrong.’
‘I appreciate that, ma’am, thank you.’
He hung up, a look in his eyes that Kate had never seen before. He looked defeated, out of options.
‘She’s pissed, seriously pissed,’ Marcus said.
‘But she’s backing us. Tech team’s going to look at the clip.
Provided it demonstrates evidence of editing, they’ll issue a strong rebuttal.
’ He took a deep breath and shook his head, genuinely upset.
‘She shouldn’t need to double-check, though. Why doesn’t she trust us?’
‘Look at it from her perspective, Marcus. Winters has got a whole chain of people she’s accountable to, going right up to the Attorney General.
She has to be able to show that she’s done her due diligence.
It doesn’t matter what she thinks or feels, or even knows.
She has to show that proof. Besides which, we’re not exactly covered in glory, are we? ’
‘What did we do wrong?’
‘Uh, hello? Caldwell’s front door?’
‘Oh. That.’ He sighed. ‘Normally, a thing like that. Getting chewed-out by the boss. It wouldn’t matter.
But the investigation’s going nowhere. And I can’t offload to Cheryl about it, because she’s…
she’s got too much of her own stuff going on, and she doesn’t seem to want to let me in beyond a certain point, either, and that hurts, Vee.
It just hurts. Why has everything gone to shit? ’
Her partner looked so down and crumpled in that instant, that it seemed the most natural thing in the world to give him a quick hug. They held onto each other for a couple of seconds, if that.
‘Oh, I-’
They sprang apart as if they’d been doing something wrong. Chen was standing in the doorway, eyes wide with shock.
‘I didn’t mean to, er…’
She didn’t finish her sentence, just darted away down the corridor. Kate called out to her, but she didn’t look back.
Marcus sighed. ‘Today is the gift that keeps on giving.’