by Karen Rose
Ciccotelli gestured impatiently. “Drumroll, Agent Vartanian?”
“The name on the box was Claire Reynolds. She was blackmailing my parents and probably killed them. That’s all I know.”
This time Ciccotelli’s eyes did more than flicker. He blinked once, then sat back and looked at his partner, then his boss. Everyone at the table looked stunned.
“This sucks,” Nick Lawrence muttered.
For a moment Ciccotelli said nothing, then looked again at his boss. Sawyer lifted a shoulder. “Your call, Vito,” she said. “I checked them out while you were all at the morgue doing the ID. They’re both legit. I’d bring them in.”
Daniel searched every face. “What? What’s going on here?”
Ciccotelli frowned. “Claire Reynolds is an issue.”
Susannah stiffened. “Why? She was blackmailing our parents and now they’re dead. What’s stopping you from finding her and bringing her in?”
“Finding her isn’t the issue. It’s arresting Claire Reynolds for your parents’ murder that’s problematic,” Ciccotelli said. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for more than a year.”
Stunned, Daniel looked at Susannah, then shook his head. “That’s impossible. She’s been blackmailing our father for the last year. The kid at the mailbox store said she’d paid her account on time just last month. In cash.”
Ciccotelli sighed. “Well, whoever paid her bill wasn’t Claire Reynolds. You don’t know who else could have been blackmailing your father?”
Susannah shook her head. “No. I don’t know.”
“Do you know how or why?” Lawrence asked softly.
Daniel shook his head mutely. But it wasn’t true. He knew. It was bad enough that it haunted him. So he held his counsel. Besides, he knew Ciccotelli wasn’t telling him everything and until he did, and maybe even if he did, Daniel would not reveal what should have been his father’s greatest shame.
And through him, mine.
Ciccotelli took a sketch from his folder and slid it across the table. “Do you recognize this man?”
Daniel stared hard at the picture. The man had a hard face, rigid jaw, prominent cheekbones. His nose was razor sharp, his chin blunt. But his eyes made Daniel shiver. They were cold, and the sketch artist had imparted to them a cruelty that Daniel knew too well from years in law enforcement. Still, there was a familiarity about the man’s eyes that gave him pause. The mailbox had dredged up all the old ghosts. But they were ghosts. This man was real and had murdered his parents and left them to rot in an unmarked grave. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t. I’m sorry. Suze?”
“No,” she echoed. “I was hoping I would, but I don’t.”
“They should listen to the tape,” Nick said. “Maybe they’ll recognize the voice.”
“All right, but just the first part, Jen,” Ciccotelli said.
McFain opened her laptop. “This part isn’t very loud, so you’ll need to listen.”
“Scream all you want.”
Daniel’s blood ran cold. His heart froze and he stared at the sketch again. At the man’s eyes. And he knew. But it was impossible.
Susannah’s hand went lax, but he could hear her panting and knew she knew, too.
“No one can hear you. No one will save you. I’ve killed them all.”
He closed his eyes, clawing at denial. “Not possible,” he murmured. Because he was dead. They’d buried him, for God’s sake.
“They all thought they suffered, but their suffering was nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”
But it was him. Dear God. Bile rose in his throat.
“Stop it,” Susannah snapped. “Stop the tape.”
Jennifer McFain did so instantly and Daniel felt every eye watching them. The room was suddenly too warm, his tie too tight. “We didn’t lie,” Daniel said hoarsely. “It is just the two of us now. But we had a brother. He died. We buried him in the family plot in the church cemetery.”
“His name was Simon,” Susannah whispered, horror making her voice shake.
“He’s been dead for twelve years. But that was his voice. And those are his eyes.” Daniel met Ciccotelli’s dark eyes and choked out the words past the dread that closed his throat. “If that’s truly Simon on that tape, you have a monster on your hands. He’s capable of just about anything.”
“We know,” Ciccotelli said. “We know.”
Thursday, January 18, 8:05 P.M.
Vito dragged his palms down his face, his stubble scratching his skin. Daniel Vartanian told them about his brother’s death in a fiery car crash and the subsequent burial. That their brother had been a cruel person who’d taken pleasure in tormenting animals, but who’d also been a gifted student with a broad base of talent. Everything from art, literature, and history to science, math, and computers.
Simon Vartanian was a twenty-first-century Renaissance man of sorts. But knowing all that brought them no closer to putting the monster in custody.
“I think we’ve got more new questions than answers,” Vito muttered.
“But now we have his real name,” Nick said. “And his face.”
“It’s not the way he looked before,” Daniel said.
“But his eyes are the same,” his sister said, still staring at Tino’s sketch, her expression a mixture of pain and horror and grief.
Vito put the sketch back in his folder. “We’ll need to exhume the casket that’s buried in your family’s plot.”
Daniel nodded. “I know. Part of me doesn’t want to know what’s inside. My father took care of everything when Simon ‘died.’ He identified the body, bought the casket, had Simon prepared, and brought him home to be buried.”
“It was a closed-casket funeral,” Susannah Vartanian added. She was dangerously pale but sat straight in her chair, her chin lifted as if she expected the next blow to be personal, and Vito wondered what these two knew that they weren’t telling him.
“That’s normal when the body is badly disfigured,” Katherine said. “This body was in a car accident and burned badly. If you had seen the body, there’s nothing to say you wouldn’t have thought he was your brother, too.”
Daniel’s mouth lifted, just barely. “Thank you. But I’m not worried about the body we’ll find inside, per se.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “You’re worried the casket will be empty, that your father knew your brother wasn’t really dead.”
Daniel just lifted his brows. Beside him, his sister stiffened a little more. This was the blow she’d been expecting, Vito thought.
“Why would your father fake an entire funeral and burial?” Jen said.
Daniel smiled bitterly. “My father was in the habit of fixing Simon’s messes.”
Vito had opened his mouth to probe when Thomas Scarborough cleared his throat.
“You said your family was estranged,” Thomas said. “Why?”
Daniel looked at his sister, for support, for guidance. For permission even, Vito thought.
Susannah’s small nod was almost indiscernible. “Tell them,” she murmured. “For God’s sake, tell them all of it. We’ve lived in Simon’s shadow long enough.”
Thursday, January 18, 8:15 P.M.
Van Zandt thought he was smooth, instructing his hired gun to follow him from the restaurant. Of course that would never do, allowing VZ to know his true address. It would just give the Dutchman one more thing to hold over his head.
Taking pictures of me . . . Van Zandt had one hell of a lot of nerve. Although it was, in its own way, damn ironic, he supposed.
Van Zandt’s security man had parked in an alley, his eyes fixed on the door of the Chinese restaurant across the street through which he’d had entered, waiting for him to return to his vehicle the same way. Instead, he approached from behind and tapped on the driver’s side window. Startled, VZ’s man swung around to look at him, then relaxed. He rolled down the window. “What do you want, buddy?”
The man’s tone was belligerent, but he only smiled. “I�
��m sorry to bother you, sir, but my organization is selling calendars to—”
“No. Not interested.” He started to roll up his window, but the man was a second too late. His knife had found its target, and now Jager’s head of security was bleeding like a stuck pig. The man’s eyes widened, flickered, then went dead, treating him to yet another moment of death.
“That’s okay,” he murmured. “It was last year’s calendar anyway.” Leaving his knife behind, he exited the alley and headed for his vehicle, parked conveniently right outside the Chinese restaurant’s front door. He navigated the street with ease, passing all the poor motorists who’d been forced to find parking blocks away. Just another side benefit to his current mode of . . . personal transportation.
He was well below the line of sight of anyone who might later be asked if they’d seen anything related to the murder of the man they’d found dead in the alley. If anyone can describe me, it would be in only the most general of terms.
Not that he had to worry. It was a rare person who met his eyes when he traveled this way. There was something about imperfection that made people look away. Leaving him free to move as freely as he chose.
Thursday, January 18, 8:30 P.M.
Daniel stared at his hands for a long moment before he spoke. “Simon was always a cruel bastard. Once I stopped him from drowning a cat and he was furious. I tried to whale the tar out of him, but he beat me to a bloody pulp. He was ten.”
Katherine frowned. “At ten Simon could overpower you? You’re not a small man, Agent Vartanian.”
“Simon is bigger,” Susannah said, far too quietly.
Daniel looked at down at her, a combination of tightly bound fury and pain in his eyes. But he went on. “Time passed, Simon got worse. My father became a judge. Simon’s activities were embarrassing to his career, so Dad pulled strings to smooth feathers. You’d be surprised what people are willing to overlook for a buck. When he was eighteen, Simon ran away. Then we heard about the car accident.”
“And we buried him,” Susannah said.
“And we buried him,” Daniel repeated with a sigh. “I moved to Atlanta and became a cop, but I was still coming home then. That last time I saw my parents, I’d come home for Christmas.” He paused for a long moment, then his shoulders sagged. “When I walked into the house I found my mother crying. She didn’t cry often. The last time had been at Simon’s funeral. But she’d found some pictures. Drawings Simon had made.”
“Of animals he’d tortured?” Scarborough asked.
“Some. But mostly people. He cut out pictures from really hard-core, violent magazines. He’d made drawings from the pictures. Simon was a gifted artist, but he always had a dark side. He kept posters of dark paintings on the wall of his bedroom.”
“Like?” Vito asked.
Daniel frowned. “I don’t remember.” He looked down at Susannah. “There was the Scream painting.”
“Munch,” she said. “And he liked Hieronymus Bosch. He also had a poster of a Goya depicting a massacre. Another of a suicide. Dorothy somebody.”
Daniel was nodding. “And there was the Warhol print. ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ That pretty much summed Simon up.”
“What summed him up,” Susannah murmured, “was what he kept under his bed.”
Daniel’s eyes widened. “You saw the pictures?”
She shook her head. “Not the pictures. I have no idea where he hid them.”
“What, Miss Vartanian?” Vito asked sharply. “What was under the bed?”
“His copies of serial killer art. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings. And others.”
Simon Vartanian had copied other people’s pictures, revered dark artists. Now he created his own art. And his own victims. There was a tension around the table, and Vito knew the others understood it, too. For a moment he worried someone would blurt it out. But no one did and Vito was relieved. There were still things the Vartanians hadn’t told them. Until they did, the flow of information couldn’t be complete.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, Miss Vartanian?” Thomas Scarborough asked gently.
Again her chin came up, but in her eyes was shame. “Daniel was gone, and I had to sleep sometime. Then Simon was dead and the paintings disappeared. I didn’t know about the pictures from the magazines or his drawings of them. Until tonight.”
“Agent Vartanian, your mother had found these drawings and magazine clippings. So why did you fight with your father?” Vito asked.
Daniel looked at his sister. “Tell him, Daniel,” she said tightly.
“There were other pictures—snapshots. The magazine pictures were staged, but the snapshots looked real. Women, being raped . . . Simon had done drawings of these, too.”
There were a few beats of silence, then Jen cleared her throat. “I’m surprised Simon didn’t take the pictures with him,” Jen said. “Where did your mother find them?”
“In one of my father’s safes. He had several hidden through the house.”
“So your father knew about Simon’s secret stash?” Jen asked.
“Yes. My mother confronted him, and he admitted he’d found them in Simon’s room after he’d run away. Now I wonder if they weren’t the cause of Simon’s leaving. Maybe my father had finally had enough. I’ll never know. Once I saw the pictures, I said we had to report it. That the people in the snapshots had been victimized by someone. My father was outraged. Why should we dredge it all up now? he said. Simon couldn’t be punished. He was dead. It would only bring the family shame.”
His sister covered his hand with hers, her face grimly accepting of what was to come, but Daniel’s was distant as he remembered.
“I was so angry. It was like years of watching my father clean up after Simon came to a head and something in me snapped. My father and I almost came to blows so I left the house and took a walk. When I came back I’d decided to take the pictures and report it myself, but I was too late. I found the ashes in the fireplace.”
Nick shook his head, disbelieving. “Your father—a judge—destroyed evidence?”
Daniel looked up, his lips bent in bitter scorn. “Yes. I was furious, and I did hit him then. And he hit me back. We did some damage to each other that day. I walked away and promised them I would never come back. And I didn’t until last Sunday.”
“What did you do about the pictures?” Liz asked.
He shrugged. “What could I do? I obsessed over it for days. In the end I didn’t do anything. I had no evidence. I’d only gotten a glimpse of the pictures. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed or if the pictures were staged or real. And at the end of the day, it was my word against his.”
“But your mother saw them, too,” Jen said carefully.
“She wouldn’t have crossed my father,” Susannah said. “It simply wasn’t done.”
“Did you think these pictures were what Claire Reynolds was using to blackmail your father?” Vito asked.
“It crossed my mind at the beginning, but I didn’t know how she’d know about them, and I wondered if there weren’t other things that even I didn’t know about. I needed to know what the blackmail was. My sister’s career could be damaged.”
Susannah’s chin lifted again. “My career will stand on its own merits. So will yours.”
“I know,” he said. “When I got to the mailbox store, I found my mother had opened a box for me. She left these.” He pulled a thick envelope from his laptop case.
Vito knew what he’d find inside. Still he cringed when he saw the pictures and the drawings a younger Simon Vartanian had created. “Your father didn’t destroy them.”
Daniel cocked his jaw. “Apparently not. And I don’t know why he kept them.”
Vito passed the photos to Liz and rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s connect some dots, shall we? First, Claire Reynolds. How did she know your parents?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Neither of us remembers that name from Dutton.”
“She wasn’t
from Dutton,” Katherine said. “She was from Atlanta.”
“Our father went to Atlanta from time to time,” Susannah said. “He was a judge.”
Jen frowned. “But that doesn’t explain how Simon got involved. Did he know her?”
“The only time Simon ever went to Atlanta was when he had to be fitted,” Daniel said. “He was an amputee, and his orthopedist was in Atlanta.”
“Yes,” Jen hissed. “Claire was an amputee.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that before?” Liz asked.
Daniel’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t even suspect he was even alive until an hour ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Liz murmured. “This has been a shock for you.”
Daniel’s eyes flashed again, angrily. “You think so?” he said sarcastically.
Susannah squeezed his hand. “Daniel, please. So Claire knew Simon from the orthopedist. But how would she know about my father? And these pictures?”
“Plus there is the issue of Claire’s continuing the blackmail a year after she was dead,” Vito pointed out.
Nick grimaced. “Small problem, that. Maybe Simon picked up where she left off when he killed her. Maybe he wanted the money from your folks.”
“But the guy at the mailbox store said a woman had paid the bill,” Daniel said. “And we can’t check the store’s security tapes. They only keep them for thirty days.”
“Accomplice?” Jen asked.
Thomas shook his head. “Doesn’t fit the profile. I’d be shocked if Simon would trust anyone enough to be an accomplice. A pawn, maybe. But not an accomplice.”
“So we need to find out who this other woman is,” Liz said.
A piece of the puzzle clicked in Vito’s mind. “Claire had a girlfriend. Dr. Pfeiffer and Barbara at the library said Claire was gay.”
Liz’s brows furrowed. “And of course the library ladies didn’t have a name.”
Vito felt a small surge of energy. It was second-wind time. “No, but there was a newspaper photo—Claire kissing another woman. If we could find that picture . . .”