34 #2
Odd title for an art show, he thought. He stared at the brochure’s cover and was sure he had seen the painting depicted there—a still life of a bowl of peaches, four perfect and one rotten, brown and dotted with blow fly larvae, brown juice spilling out of the bowl and staining the white tablecloth on which it sat.
He couldn’t remember who had painted it or where he had seen it before, but he recalled being repulsed by the decaying fruit and the way the juice reminded him of fluids leaking from a corpse.
He used the side of his fist to bang on the white steel door. It had been realistically painted to look like a cross-and-bible Colonial-era door but was in fact a bank-grade vault door, like ones Conor had seen in panic rooms—and like the one to the bedroom in the Bellevigne Island mansion.
“Kate!” he called. “Fernando, open the door!”
Conor knew that Fernando stored valuable paintings and other artworks here, and that definitely explained the extra security measures.
Kate had recently upgraded the system at the gallery, adding alarms to every window—including the small sidelights, too narrow for any would-be thief to slip through, high-definition cameras that recorded continuously instead of just being motion activated, and extra-sensitive glass-break detectors.
If Fernando had those in place here, wouldn’t Conor’s entry have tripped some of them and caused Fernando to come out?
He heard a door open, and when he turned around, Tom was entering from the parking area.
“Her car’s here,” Tom said.
“Yeah, and I rang the bell,” Conor said, gesturing at the steel door, “but Fernando’s not answering.”
“Just walk in,” Tom said, heading toward the door, then stopping in his tracks. “Where’s the doorknob?”
“There isn’t one. It’s a safe room.”
“In a framing gallery?” Tom asked.
Conor didn’t answer, just concentrated on the door.
“How does he open the door?” Tom asked, running a hand around the perimeter of the doorframe.
“He probably has remote access, uses a key fob or a program on his phone,” Conor said. He pointed at a small matte triangle, flush with the steel. “I think that’s the access site.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “But with high tech, there always has to be a fallback. You know, in case the grid is attacked, or the Wi-Fi goes out, and your electronics stop working. Isn’t there a standard lock? You could get in that way.”
Conor felt frustration rising. He walked outside and around the house to the front sidewalk.
Looking up at the house, he noticed that all the first-floor curtains were drawn.
He walked up onto the wide front porch and rang the doorbell.
He could hear the tone through the door, unlike the reinforced one in the studio.
From this perspective, the house looked completely normal—regular doors and windows, nothing to suggest that inside it was a fortress.
He didn’t see any special reinforcement, which led him to believe that only the back section, where Fernando worked on paintings, was fortified.
He rang the bell, then banged hard on the front door.
“Connecticut State Police,” he called. “Open the door.”
Tom pushed through the boxwood hedge that ran along the front of the house, getting close enough to peer through the closed curtains of the first-floor windows.
Conor pulled out his phone and called his office at the Connecticut State Police Western District Major Crime Squad. He gave his location to the dispatcher and asked her to send a unit. He stood back, surveying the house again. His heart was racing.
“Does Harris have a family?” Tom asked. “Wife, kids?”
“No idea,” Conor said. Again, he pounded on the door rapidly, with the side of his fist. “Police! Fernando Harris, open the door!”
“We both know Kate could be in there,” Tom said. “You need a warrant, but exigent . . .”
“Fuck it,” Conor said, interrupting him. “I’m not waiting.”
He eyed the lock on the front door. It looked standard, and from the outside, he couldn’t see if there was a dead bolt. He took a big step back, raised his right foot, smashed it into the wood just beside the doorknob. The wood cracked loudly, and the next kick sent the splintered door flying open.
The forward momentum sent Conor stumbling into Fernando Harris’s foyer, with Tom right behind him.
Everything looked in order, with the kind of decor Conor was used to seeing in houses of well-off people, especially those who lived in this maritime part of the world: antique mahogany furniture, Oriental rugs, paintings of sailing ships in gilded frames, brass candlesticks on the mantel, birch logs tidily held in a polished copper bin.
There was an air of genteel unflappability, as if this was the kind of home where nothing bad ever happened.
The Reid brothers split up. Conor took the first floor while Tom went up the stairs. Conor made his way through each room, including closets, looking for Kate. She wasn’t there, and neither was Fernando. Tom came downstairs and shook his head.
The door to the studio, in the back of the house, was located off a hallway lined with bookcases.
Conor examined the door and saw that it was fortified just like the one at the rear entrance.
It had a lock on it. It made sense to Conor that Fernando might hide a key somewhere close by, so he began removing books and looking behind and under them.
Each section was about three feet wide and seven feet tall, and each held ten shelves, spaced in ways to hold books of varying heights.
He worked his way down the row until he came to a spot where the bookcases were uneven. One section tilted slightly out from the next, leaving an inch gap between them. He pulled on it and realized that that section was a door.
“Tom,” he said, and his brother walked over, and they opened the door.
It led into a space that was completely dark.
It was obviously an interior room and had no windows.
A chill ran through Conor, Kate’s name racing through his mind.
He fumbled his hand along the walls on both sides of the door, feeling for a light switch.
He found one about shoulder level on the left side, and he switched it on.
“Holy shit,” Tom said.
The walls were covered with silk and there was a pale-blue rug on the floor.
A black-and-white photo—the same still from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—hung above the bed.
There were old editions of the book, and there was a crystal decanter that held the same sickly sweet liquid that had nearly knocked Conor out on the island.
“How many of these rooms are there? The island, here . . . where else?” Conor asked.
The bedroom was an exact replica of the bedroom in the mansion on Bellevigne Island.
The bed was made, but the covers were mussed up, as if someone had lain on top of them and failed to straighten them out. Conor touched the indentation to see if it was still warm. It was not. But he could hardly breathe when he pulled back the sheet and saw reddish-brown streaks of blood.
“Conor, that’s not Kate’s blood,” Tom said, reading his mind. “It can’t be—it’s dry. This stain has been there awhile.”
“You’re right,” Conor said, incredibly relieved but still shaken. “It’s old, it’s not Kate’s.”
Conor walked around the perimeter of the bedroom until he came to the closet.
When he opened the door, lamplight from the bedroom streamed inside.
It was a cedar closet; bolted into the wood were handcuffs, just like the ones they’d seen on Psyche.
There was dried blood on the metal and on the floor.
“So Fernando’s part of it. And he lured Kate here.” Conor stared at the irons, then back at the bed. He wanted to explode, to tear Fernando apart.
There was a commotion coming from the front of the house, and Conor knew that the team from his police barracks had arrived. He and Tom stood and went to meet them. Conor thought of how, once again, he had stepped into a crime scene, but he would do anything to find Kate, so he didn’t care.
“Where’s Kate now?” Conor said to Tom. He was trying to hold himself together, his mouth so dry he could barely speak.
“Let’s go find her,” Tom said.
And Conor didn’t even answer. He didn’t have to.