Chapter 7
Calloway
My gaze drifts across the room and finds her. It's like my eyes are calibrated just for her. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, but it's more than that. It's the lightning-quick mind behind her eyes, the wit that could cut you in half. She's a complete, perfect composition.
And then there's me. The walking, talking mess.
The tension in her shoulders, the haunted look on her face, that's on me. I pushed too hard, brought my brand of chaos into her world, and she flinched.
Walk away. It's the only decent thing to do. But I can't. I have to try to fix it. I need to see her smile again, even if it's the last time.
“Frost!”
The voice is a rusty nail scraping across a chalkboard.
I turn. Vincent “Vinny” Torrino, a man whose suit is losing a valiant battle against his gut, shoves his way toward me. Christ. What is this bottom-feeder doing here? Vinny runs numbers for one of the North End families and possesses all the subtlety of a car bomb.
“We need to talk,” he says, his sausage-like fingers clamping onto my arm. They reek of marinara and desperation.
I extract my arm from his grip, my gaze sweeping the gallery. Aanya is still talking to a potential buyer. The last thing I need is a scene. “Not here, Vinny.”
“You think you’re so smart, don’t ya?” Vinny’s Boston accent is thick enough to spread on toast. “With your fancy camera and your artsy-fartsy bullshit.”
“Vinny, what do you want?” I keep my voice level, though every instinct screams at me to relocate his nose to the back of his skull. “This is not the time.”
“I know what you've been doin’.” He leans closer, and I catch a whiff of marinara sauce. “That photographer who used to work the North End? The one who liked takin’ pictures of kids? Real sicko.”
My blood runs cold, but my face stays perfectly still, a photograph of apathy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure ya don’t.” Vinny grins. “Funny thing, though, the guy turns up dead. Real artistic death, too.”
“Sounds like karma to me,” I say.
“Yeah? Well, here’s the thing about karma.” He stabs a finger at my chest. “Sometimes it pays a finder’s fee.”
“You know what, Vinny?” I step closer. “Good luck with that.”
“You don’t know who you’re fuckin’ with—”
“Calloway!” Aanya’s voice cuts across the gallery.
She’s waving me over, standing beside a distinguished older woman I recognize as Eleanor Winfield, a collector with a formidable reputation. Perfect.
“We’re done here,” I tell him, turning my back on him.
“Hey! Don’t you walk away from me, you piece of—”
I hurry across the gallery floor, nodding at the few remaining guests. Most have filtered out already, leaving behind empty champagne flutes and the lingering scent of expensive perfume.
A sharp, metallic crack echoes from the ceiling.
Every head snaps upward.
The massive chandelier, a spider of steel and tungsten, shudders violently. Bolts and washers rain down, pinging against the floor. Directly below it, Vinny looks up, his expression shifting from confusion to dawning, abject terror.
He opens his mouth, maybe to scream, maybe to curse my name one last time.
The rig plummets. The sound is spectacular. A wet, percussive thump, like a watermelon dropped from a skyscraper, followed by the symphonic crash of shattering bulbs and twisting metal. Sparks cascade like dying stars, hissing as they hit the floor.
Well, that’s going to void the gallery’s insurance policy.
Aanya screams, a raw, piercing sound that seems to tear the air.
When the dust settles, Vinny has been transformed from a wannabe gangster into what can only be described as abstract expressionism. His suit is now a Jackson Pollock masterpiece painted across the pristine gallery floor.
Karma, he said?
Aanya’s scream dissolves into a hysterical, keening wail.
Eleanor Winfield staggers back, her face the color of ash. “My God… Is he…?”
My eyes follow a glistening trail to where Vinny’s head has rolled to a stop against the base of a white marble pedestal. It rests there like a piece of a shattered mannequin, its expression one of mild surprise.
The head is intact compared to the rest of him.
“Very much so,” I confirm, fighting the urge to take photos.
I glance across the room at Jiya. She’s still standing in the same spot, but now her eyes are wide. Her hand flies to her mouth in a perfect display of horror.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say she looked guilty.
I step closer.
The white walls now bear arterial spray in perfect arcs, a crimson pattern that speaks of pressure and trajectory and the precise moment when human anatomy fails.
It’s beautiful, in its way. Unintentional art of the highest order.
“Oh God, oh God,” someone keeps repeating. The words blur together into a panicked mantra.
Aanya’s screaming collapses into sobs as her knees buckle. I catch her before she hits the floor, my arm slipping around her waist. She turns her face into my shoulder, her tears and makeup soaking into my white shirt.
I stroke her back. My eyes never leave the head.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, though we both know it isn’t. “Don’t look.”
I hear someone on the phone with 911.
I hold her close, stroking her hair. Her genuine horror is the perfect camouflage for my lack of it.
I glance up, catching Jiya’s gaze across the room again. She hasn’t moved, hasn’t screamed, hasn’t run. She’s watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.
I bury my face in Aanya’s hair, inhaling her scent of jasmine and fear. She needs me. I need her. Not emotionally, as I feel nothing beyond mild annoyance at the cleanup this will require—but as cover. As camouflage.
I press my lips to the top of her head, a perfect performance of shared trauma, while sirens wail in the distance.
The sirens get louder, slicing through the chaos in the gallery. I hold Aanya as her body shakes against mine, but my gaze drifts back to Jiya.
She hasn’t screamed or fainted. She hasn’t rushed to help like the men trying to lift the lighting rig off Vinny’s remains—a pointless effort if I’ve ever seen one.
No, Jiya stands perfectly still, like a statue amid a hurricane. Her face is pale, her eyes wide. But there’s something...off. Something in her eyes doesn’t match her expression.
“Calloway,” Aanya whimpers against my chest. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I tear my eyes away from Jiya.
In the distance, a siren’s mournful wail grows closer, stitching the night together.
“Let’s get you away from this,” I say to Aanya, steering her toward the small office behind the main gallery space, away from the center of the chaos. I sit her down in my desk chair, handing her a glass of water from the carafe I keep there.
“Stay here,” I command, closing the door just enough to muffle the rising panic outside.
An officer spots me in the office doorway, his expression hardening. I straighten my jacket, smooth my hair, and step out of the office, the perfect portrait of a shocked and grieving host.
“I need everyone to stay in the building,” he says. “We’ll need statements from all witnesses.”
Perfect. Just perfect.
This is exactly what I don’t need. Police attention, questions, investigations that might dig too deep.
I scan the gallery behind the officer's shoulder, searching for a flash of pink hair among the stunned faces.
“Sir, we need your statement,” the officer says again, his pen hovering over a small notepad.
“Of course,” I answer automatically, still craning my neck to see around him.
No sign of Jiya anywhere.
“Mr. Frost?” His voice is casual, but his eyes are sharp. “Interesting coincidence. You had an incident at a bar just a week ago, didn’t you? Beat someone up?” He glances at the severed head, still resting against the marble pedestal. “Now there’s a head rolling around on your gallery floor.”
My mouth goes dry. “I’m sorry. What are you implying, exactly?”
“Implying?” The officer raises an eyebrow. “Just an observation, Mr. Frost. Seems like trouble follows you these days.”
“Two unrelated incidents hardly establish a pattern. The bar involved stopping an armed robbery. Tonight was a tragic accident with faulty equipment.”
“Pretty convenient accident.”
“Convenient?” The indignation in my voice isn’t entirely feigned. “A man is dead in my gallery. How is that convenient?”
“Vincent Torrino. Low-level associate of the Benedetto family.” Mulvaney flips through his notes. “Witnesses say you two were having a heated conversation right before the accident.”
I let a moment of calculated silence hang in the air, as if processing this new information.
“The Benedetto family? He approached me. I had no idea who he was.” I meet the detective’s gaze. “If what you say is true, I’m sure a man in that line of work has a long list of enemies. People who might want him dead.”
I let that thought settle before continuing, my tone shifting to one of firm, undeniable fact.
“But that’s irrelevant, isn’t it? Because this wasn’t that. Everyone here saw what happened. It was a tragic accident. A bolt must have come loose. No one was near him when it fell.”
“So what were you two talking about?”
I shrug. “He wanted me to photograph some event. I declined.”
“Must’ve been some rejection to get him that worked up.”
“You know those temperaments,” I say with a half-smile that fades when I see the officer isn’t amused.
“Mr. Frost, do you know the statistical probability of being present at two violent incidents in the same week?”
“I’m not great at math,” I say, “but I imagine it’s low.”
“Very low.” He taps his pen against his notepad. “Almost as low as the odds of a properly installed lighting rig spontaneously failing.”
My heart rate increases. “Are you charging me with something?”
“No.” The officer steps back. “But we’ll be looking into the gallery’s maintenance records, of course.”
“Of course,” I reply. “We’ll cooperate fully.”
The next few hours are a masterclass in performance art, with me in the starring role of the shocked host. I comfort a hysterical Aanya. I give a calm, coherent statement to a suspicious Detective Mulvaney. I watch as the paramedics zip Vinny’s reassembled parts into a bag and wheel him away.
Finally, as dawn bleeds through the tall gallery windows, they leave. The last police cruiser pulls away, leaving the gallery in an unnatural silence, broken only by the hum of the HVAC system.
The space is a disaster zone, cordoned off with yellow tape. A dark, ugly stain mars the polished concrete floor where Vinny’s body landed, a stark reminder of how close I came.
I stand alone in the center of my wrecked gallery, the smell of ozone and blood still hanging in the air. The adrenaline has long since faded, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
I pull out my phone and dial Xander’s number. He picks up on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep.
“What?”
“There’s a dead body in my gallery.”
I hear him groan through the phone. “Not now, Calloway. It’s too early. Clean up your own mess.”
The assumption is both insulting and, under normal circumstances, entirely fair.
“You don’t understand. I didn’t kill him.”
That gets his attention. A pause. “Huh?”
“It’s a guest. At the exhibit.”
“And you didn’t kill him? Are you sure he’s dead, then?” Xander asks, the familiar sarcasm a strange comfort in the sterile, ruined room.
I look at the chalk outline, then at the dark stain that has soaked into the floor. “Well,” I say, my own sardonic wit creeping back, “his head was on the other side of the room from his body. Think I should’ve checked for a pulse?”
“Fuck.”
The first rays of the sun hit the shattered glass on the floor, scattering light like broken diamonds.
“I think someone is trying to kill me.”