CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kate was alone in the office when Chen returned, unsmiling.
‘Marcus went to buy a map of upstate New York,’ Kate explained. ‘He’s old-school. Likes something he can hold.’
Chen nodded, without speaking.
‘You said you’d found out something yourself?’
‘Did I?’
‘Hey, Sarah. Are you going to do this all day?’
Chen looked up. ‘Do what all day?’ she asked, coldly.
‘Look. There is nothing going on between Marcus and myself. There never has been. I’m sorry if you were embarrassed, but it was just two friends, giving each other a hug.’
Chen shrugged. ‘In my experience,’ she said, taking a seat. ‘When a man and a woman say they’re “friends”, then at least one of them doesn’t want to be. One of them wants something else.’
‘Well Marcus is engaged to his fiancée. And as for me, well it’s like this.
A guy hurt me very badly, years ago. I don’t mean romantically, he was a serial killer.
I have flashbacks to his attack pretty much every day, and every night, I dream about it.
I don’t imagine there’s a boyfriend in the world who could put up with that.
The ones that have tried, have been under the mistaken impression that they could fix me.
Anyway, it’s left me like this. I work, I run, I watch Netflix.
I have no private or social life. I often go and stay at my mom’s because I’m too scared to be alone.
And I can’t imagine any of that ever changing. ’
Chen looked at her, mystified. 'But you seem like the most together person I've ever met.
That was why I kind of over-reacted. You know, you're drop-dead beautiful, you're a genius, you make guys walk into walls…
I want to kick your shins and spit in your coffee!
I mean, I don't, honestly, I don't, but when I saw you with Marcus, I thought, "Great, she's even got him, too!
" I'm sorry. It sounds petty and silly and bitchy, like Junior High.
I just – yeah, my reaction was dumb. Sorry. '
‘But you like him.’
‘Well, yeah, I do. But I think I’ve been deluding myself. It’s easy to do it when you’re… lonely. And I am, if I’m honest. It’s just work, sleep, repeat, you know? Same as you described. And NYC can be a very lonely place.’
‘It’s a shame you’re not with the Bureau. If you were, I’d tell you to transfer to the Maine field office. It’s full of single guys.’
Chen leant across the table, interested. ‘Really? How come?’
Marcus walked in at that moment and they fell silent.
‘Ok, now you’re making me paranoid,’ he said. ‘What were you just talking about?’
‘You,’ said Chen.
Kate laughed. ‘That’s all we ever talk about, Marcus. You.’
He sat down. ‘Right.’
‘But we can’t talk about you all day,’ Chen said. ‘Much as I’d like to. So I’ve been looking for further connections between our two victims.’
She hooked up her laptop to the display screen, which showed a statuesque lady with short brown curls standing at a podium. Her evening dress had the look of a toga; combined with the jewelled necklace at her throat, she could have been a high-ranking Roman matron on a mosaic.
‘This is Ursula Blackstone,’ Chen said. ‘Aged fifty-one.’
‘I’ve heard the name,’ Kate said, frowning. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Head of the Blackstone Foundation, created by her late father, Digger Blackstone.’
She clicked to another photograph. Digger Blackstone was a craggy, rugged-looking gentleman with a bootlace tie and a white Stetson, the very epitome of a wealthy oilman. His daughter had the same flinty gaze, Kate noted.
‘Digger Blackstone died in 2023, leaving behind an estimated twelve billion dollars. They’re a wealthy family: homes in NYC and L.A.
, ski lodge in Aspen, townhouses in London and Paris.
But there’s also a philanthropic side. The Blackstone Foundation, now administered by his daughter, provides grants for artists, endows educational institutions with generous subsidies and hosts exhibitions at its cultural spaces, of which there are a dozen across the States as well as in various European cities.
There’s been talk about a new one in Shanghai. ’
‘Oil and art… I wouldn’t have thought those two were natural bunk-buddies,’ Marcus said.
‘It may have a certain amount to do with this gentleman,’ Chen said, clicking to a third photograph.
A skinny young man in dirty jeans and handcuffs was flanked on either side by a stone-faced State Trooper.
He looked kind of cute, if you could look cute, and in need of a bath, at the same time.
He didn’t have the same hard look as his sister and his father, Kate thought. He looked strangely vulnerable.
‘Ray Blackstone. The prodigal son. Pictured here in Knoxville in 2016, charged with smashing up a motel room. Ray was groomed to be Digger’s successor in the oil business.
Turned it down to be a painter and sculptor.
But he might have been more keen on the lifestyle than the work.
Drink, drugs, fighting… trouble with a capital T. Here’s another mugshot…’
She clicked onto a new file: a cutting from an Alabama news-site. It featured Ray in an arrest photo, slack-jawed, eyes blank. He had the hairstyle of someone who’d slept in a hedgerow, several nights running. The caption read: DUI, Possession, Stolen Goods: 18 Months Jail For Oil Heir.
‘Digger disinherited him, Ray was in and out of jail, and eventually disappeared at the start of the pandemic. Ursula Blackstone told a journalist last year that none of their searches for her brother had revealed any leads, and it’s her opinion that he’s dead.
‘She has also indicated privately that guilt over Ray’s demise prompted the old man’s belated generosity towards struggling artists. Whatever caused it, the Foundation spends millions each year, in supporting the arts and promoting public engagement. Meanwhile…’
She clicked onto a new frame. It was a poster for an exhibition, right here in New York.
There was a quote from an art critic at the bottom.
Blackstone’s abstract figures have a luminous intensity.
They vault like dancers from the bright, sanitised gallery space into our mythic and primal past, pulling us along with them.
‘This was from 2017,’ Chen said. ‘When he seemed to have got his act together for a while.’
Kate and Marcus barely heard her, although if they had, they might have agreed with the reviewer. There was something truly magnetic about the three forms on the poster; magnetic and full of motion.
Knowing exactly what they were all thinking, Chen brought up the images of the two clay statues alongside them.
‘They’re very different, but…’ Kate gave up trying to express it.
‘You kind of can’t take your eyes off of them,’ Chen said. ‘The ones on the poster, and the ones from the crime scenes. They pull you in, but for different reasons.’
‘It’s like, the Blackstone figures, there’s something joyful about them,’ Kate tried again. ‘Whereas the others… you don’t want to look, but they make you.’
They all fell silent again, gazing from one set to the other.
‘Okay, I’m going to ask this question,’ Kate said, decisively. ‘Do we think these two groups of sculptures are similar in some ways?’
‘Could be,’ Marcus said.
‘Same,’ said Chen. ‘I mean, same as Marcus.’
‘Do we think it’s possible,’ Kate went on quietly. ‘That Ray Blackstone isn’t dead? That he’s alive, and still making statues?’
‘But why kill artists?’ Marcus asked. ‘He’s an artist himself.’
‘Both Ashworth and Vasquez were successful at it,’ Kate said.
‘Ray Blackstone hasn’t been. He may have squandered his gifts, but it takes a degree of humility and insight to realise that, and maybe Ray just doesn’t possess that.
Maybe he sees them as people who have usurped what he feels ought to be his. ’
‘There’s another possibility, of course,’ said Chen. ‘Which is that Ray just makes the statues. And someone else does the killing. Ray might not even be involved.’
‘You said you started out looking for another link between the victims,’ Marcus reminded Chen.
Chen nodded and brought up another poster.
‘An exhibition whose title was The Sacred and The Profane,' she read aloud.
'The interface of religion and art, as seen through the creations of multiple artists, ranging from sculptors to tapestry-makers, painters to weavers, and film-makers.
Many of them exhibiting works expressly created for the exhibition.
Set to run in NYC through September and October last year, and then to visit Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and Athens. '
‘Set to?’ queried Kate.
‘Cancelled three weeks prior to opening. “Private, family-related reasons”, according to the one, very brief statement that the Foundation released. Among the affected artists were Elena Vasquez and Brandon Ashworth.’
Marcus scratched his head. ‘I don’t see the connection. The brother slaughters artists. The sister commissions them, but then cancels them.’
‘Maybe there was a reason for cancelling them. Maybe the family-related reason was the brother’s irrational hatred for artists, which she has somehow found out about…
’ Kate shrugged. ‘I’m not seeing it either.
Not yet. But we need to follow this up, right?
Look into the Foundation, find out what Ursula Blackstone knows, see if we can establish what actually happened to her brother.
’ She clapped her hands. ‘Let’s get going, people. ’
They set to, a fresh breeze of energy infusing their efforts.
They had no idea where this new seam of questions would lead them, but so much of their work was like that, following steps in the darkness.
The only thing they knew for certain was that a brutal killer was still roaming free.
And they desperately needed to catch him before he snuffed out another life.