Stroke of Death

by Dale Mayer

  Just then her cell phone rang. She snatched it up, and, sure enough, it was Richard.

  “Did you eat?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. She settled into her office chair, listening to Anita leave.

  “Do that now.” Then he was gone.

  She laughed. While he did hang up on her, and he did give her an order—and she wasn’t good with those—he had at least softened his tone of voice for her.

  Now feeling a little weird and outside of herself, as if something was not normal, she got up and walked around, going into Anita’s office, and then heading back out to the main gallery area. This space wasn’t huge for a gallery, but it was more grandiose than she probably needed.

  Something was still off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  She wasn’t exactly sure how she’d been convinced into signing up for this lease. But she had, and this space had a lot of good things going for it. She just didn’t know why she felt disgruntled right now.

  As she turned around, sensing somebody, she noted the cleaners were here. One cleaning guy looked over at her, smiled, and waved. He had a big rag in his hand, cleaning the walls, doorknobs, etc.

  She smiled at him. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m good,” he said with a happy smile and bobbed his head up and down and kept on cleaning.

  She studied him, not sure why she had a weird feeling about him but subtly took a photo and sent it to Richard.

  When he called, he said, “Is it the same guy as normal?”

  “No,” she said, “but we do have a contract with a cleaning company,” she murmured, as she walked into Anita’s office. “And they send whoever is available.”

  “I’m sending the guard over to keep you company,” he said.

  “Doesn’t he have anything else to do with his life?”

  “No, he’s quite happy making sure you stay safe.” And then he hung up.

  She wished Richard hadn’t hung up quite so fast, as she, once again, found herself craving even the sound of his voice. She sat down at Anita’s desk and looked around to see if she was supposed to be dealing with something else here. So much of what Anita handled was confusing and beyond Cayce, like bookkeeping, and some ledgers were here. She moved those aside.

  As she did so, she caught sight of some papers sticking out from underneath the big desktop calendar pad that Anita always used. Cayce lifted a corner, surprised to see designs. She pulled them out, looking at them and frowning. A lot of them were her designs, but why were they underneath the desktop pad? Unless Anita needed some black-and-white forms of them for some reason. Cayce flipped through them and froze when she got to the last one. She quickly took a photo of it and sent it to Richard.

  He called her back again. “What’s that, and why is it important?”

  She let out her breath slowly. “I’m in Anita’s office,” she said, “and I noticed a bunch of papers under her large monthly planner thing atop her desk. It’s big. Anyway, I pulled these out, and they are my designs. Or at least a form of them. More like a simplistic skeleton version of them, but, when I got to the bottom one, I had to send it to you.”

  “And it has that weird cutout shape to it that looks like an animal skin. What we were talking about earlier, right? Like the first design you sent me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But this design was just a part of one of my early works. I was fixated with borders back then. You can see the border here is similar to the one I saw on Elena’s body from that horrid picture of her defaced torso. I can’t stop seeing that in my mind. Maybe that’s why this black-and-white version hit me so immediately. I think the outer edges of this partial design may match the outer edges of the cuts made on Elena’s body.”

  “Right, and who did you say had access to that particular design?”

  She took another deep breath. “Not Anita. I’m not sure anyone could have but me.”

  *

  Richard couldn’t get to her fast enough. He knew the guard was coming from across the city and was about fifteen minutes away, but it took what seemed like five hours for his own dash there. When he burst into the space and saw no sign of anybody, he raced toward her smaller office, bypassing other doors until he heard a call from Anita’s office. He stopped, backed up, and let his breath out with a hard, heavy exhale.

  She smiled, got out of the chair, and walked toward him.

  He dragged her into his arms and held her close.

  “I just don’t understand,” she muttered. “And maybe it’s nothing. But, of course, that’s why you’re here, right? Having dropped everything because of nothing, right?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

  “But we can’t exactly judge this to be good or bad at the moment.”

  Just then Anita walked in, catching them still in each other’s arms. “And don’t you two look so cute.” Her voice was sassy and upbeat. Then she must have sensed that something was wrong. “What’s the matter?”

  “I found some designs underneath your desk pad,” she said. “I sat down to see if I needed to take care of something else while I was at odds. I noticed them and pulled them out.”

  Anita nodded slowly. He watched her face and could see the disturbance in her expression. “And what about it?” Anita asked. “Why would that put those looks on your faces?”

  “Well, one of them is a design I didn’t think you’d ever seen before.”

  At that, Anita’s face flushed a little paler.

  “Where did you get access to that design?” she asked quietly.

  Anita, as if holding out hope, said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve just seen it in the office,” she said, looking directly at Cayce and then at Richard, topped by a frown. “I don’t know what the issue is, since your designs are everywhere.”

  “Everywhere inside the office, yes,” she said, “but, prior to you working for me, I had a group of designs that were kept in the safe.”

  “A safe?” Anita asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know you had a safe.”

  “Which is why this design itself is important,” Cayce said. She walked back into Anita’s office, pulled out the stack of designs, and asked, “Why do you have these? Where did you get them? This one in particular. Where did you get it?”

  Anita looked at it, frowned, and said, “That page doesn’t have a footer on it with the website and page 1 of 3 or whatever at the bottom. So it wasn’t a Printscreen capture. Yet I could have done a Select All and pasted it into a Word document long enough to print off just what I wanted. Still, I’m pretty sure these came off the internet.” She faced her boss and the detective. “I meant to tell you about them, Cayce, but I stuck them there as a reminder for one of those many times I had hoped we would have a break, where we could discuss more than just the major emergencies. But this one, I’m not sure. Maybe it came from the same group as the others?”

  She sat down at her desk, pulled up her keyboard, and started typing away. Very quickly she had a long list of Google search hits regarding Cayce’s designs. She pointed at her screen. “I think people take photos of the original painting, yours and everybody else’s, put it in Photoshop, wash out the color, and come up with some basic line drawing underneath it. You know? Dissecting the great art for beginners to learn by?” She pointed at the monitor again. “That’s what these look like anyway,” she said. “I don’t remember which site I got yours off of, but I’m pretty sure that’s where they were. I’m not sure about that one in particular.” She looked at it, then at Cayce and Richard standing by her, and asked, “Why is that one different?”

  “Because it’s my early work, only ever been in my safe,” she said. “Was too dark for the kind of work I wanted to be known for, so I tucked it away.” She stopped, confused. “I don’t get it.”

  Richard filled in the blanks. “Somebody must have access to your safe.”

  Anita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, that’s not something I want to think about.” She looked at Cayce. “Where is th
e safe?”

  “At home,” she said quietly. “At my apartment.”

  “The same one you’re living in now?” Anita asked with a gasp.

  Richard gave Cayce a hard look. “How long have you lived there?”

  “Eight years,” she said. “Before that, I was at another apartment that I shared with Elena.”

  “You two lived together?”

  She chuckled. “Not exactly. Elena had the apartment, but I stayed in it for quite a while.”

  “Any idea who else had access back then?” he asked, grabbing her hand. “This is really important. This is a design that has great relevance to the case that connects you and Elena.”

  Cayce stared at him, chewing on her bottom lip. “But it’s old. As in a long time ago.”

  He reached out and gently stroked her bottom lip to both distract her and to get her to stop. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he whispered. He leaned over, kissed her gently, and said, “I need you to really think about it.”

  “I need a cup of tea,” she said, looking around, clearly flustered. “Anita, see if you can find the site that you downloaded these from, will you?”

  Anita, much more subdued now, said, “Will do, boss. I’m sorry I didn’t bring them up earlier.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Who knew it would be something that mattered?”

  “Not me,” Anita said. “There’s an unbelievable amount of your paintings all over the internet, in some form or another. See?” Again she pointed at her screen. “Anybody can copy and do whatever they want based on just these alone.”

  Richard stared at her, stared at the search engine, his mind running through it. “Are there any of Cayce’s that she body-painted on Elena the night she died?”

  “Didn’t we give you good photographs of that?” Cayce asked.

  “You did,” he said, “but I want to know what the internet sees.”

  “I’ll look it up,” Anita said, her fingers tapping away on the keyboard again.

  Within seconds, she had a whole slew of images of a beautiful Elena.

  “Damn. My suspect pool just morphed into millions.” Richard studied Elena’s face, seeing the calm serenity in her gaze. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to meet her,” he said quietly, turning toward Cayce. “She looks like a beautiful person inside and out.”

  “She was,” Cayce said from the doorway.

  Her voice was thick, and he knew she was on the edge of tears.

  “I’ll go put on the tea, while I try to get my brain wrapped around what it is you need to know, and you can look at pictures without me. I’m not in any shape to look at those yet.”

  He stood behind Anita as she scrolled through all the images.

  “Here’s one from the night she was killed.”

  “She was wearing some masterpiece, right?”

  “It was masterpiece night,” Anita said, and she quickly tapped through it. Then she brought out one image of Elena, wearing the van Gogh painting.

  “She’s stunning,” he said in amazement.

  “It’s Cayce who’s stunning,” Anita said. “She could turn Elena into anything. But also Elena had that chameleon ability to be anything and everything to everyone.”

  Richard heard a jealous note in her voice. “Did you like her?”

  Anita paused, then said, “She always highlighted things about myself that I didn’t like, so she was difficult to know in a way.”

  Fascinated and unable to help himself, he said, “Can you give me an example?”

  “Just the fact that she was so beautiful and could become anything that Cayce wanted her to be,” she said. “If I dwelled on that, I could get quite jealous, but it would only be with her. I’d see a million other models on a day-to-day basis, and I couldn’t care less. But something about Cayce and Elena’s relationship brought out the worst in me. So, did I like her? Yes. Did I love her? No. Could I live quite happily without her? Yes. I’m sorry for Cayce absolutely,” she said sadly. “I knew that something special existed between the two of them that could never be between the two of us.”

  “I need that picture.” He had overlaid the autopsy pictures of the shape that had been cut free with both old designs that Cayce had sent him, and he felt they were too damn similar. He had Anita enlarge the bottom corner, where the signature was, and he nodded. “Interesting.”

  “Cayce signs everything,” Anita said.

  And then it hit him. “Right. She always does, doesn’t she?” He walked away from Anita, his footsteps rapidly heading toward Cayce’s office. He barged right in. “You always sign everything, even body paintings?”

  “If it’s a particular art piece, yes,” she said, staring up at him and holding a cup of tea in her hand. “Why?”

  He pulled out his phone and went to his photo gallery and brought up the “gift” that had been delivered to her. “This was inside the second box delivered to you.”

  She looked at him and said, “I don’t want to see it.”

  “I get that,” he said, “but I need you to.” He thumbed through his pictures on his phone.

  She swallowed hard and looked at it. Her face blanched slightly because it was obviously a chunk of human flesh. And then she frowned.

  He watched her as she studied it, her gaze narrowing and becoming more focused. “It’s not my signature,” she said. “It’s been altered.”

  “That’s what I was wondering, when I saw your signature on one of the paintings on the internet.” he said. “Has it been altered by the killer, or has it been altered by whatever process the killer used to preserve it?”

  “It’s possible the killer altered it,” she said. “Can you email that to me? I’ll bring it up in an art program.”

  “Do you use software?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Sometimes I just have to get a different visual of what it is I’m trying to do.”

  He quickly emailed this photo to her. At her desktop, she opened it up and studied it carefully, going in pixel by pixel.

  “It’s been painted over,” she said, pointing it out. “Here is my original signature, side by side with your photo. And you can see that paint has been applied over the top and above here. See these different layers?”

  “So, you don’t think it’s the software process?”

  “The software gives it more of a caricature look,” she said, “but it was painted over first.”

  “So, it’s yours but not yours.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, somebody’s imitating your work?”

  “No,” she said. “This isn’t imitating. This is stealing.” And she quickly shut down the program.

  *

  Naomi sobbed quietly. She’d been in the same damn position for at least twenty-four hours. Her body ached. Her hands had gone numb. Her feet were beyond numb. And she kept trying to figure out if anybody would even report her as missing. She had yet to see her captor. He had come and gone but always on the far side of this room.

  As she’d slowly adapted to seeing in the darkness around her, she’d realized just how much of a cesspool of mental sickness she was in. This was unbelievable. She found paintings, artwork of some kind, and these big round stretching boards. She didn’t even understand what kind of canvases were used here, but it looked like hides or skin.

  She shuddered because she was on a bigger stretching board herself. She’d been given some water, but, even when he’d done that, he had kept his face in the shadows. His body was nondescript, covered in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. He was slender, tall, and she was pretty sure male, but not enough light was here to make that definitive assertion. All in all, she was just terrified about where she was. Any time she pleaded to be released, he would just say her time was coming.

  Only now was she wondering if that meant she was to be released from life into death.

  And she cried all that much harder.

  Chapter 22

  Today was the day. Cayce’s big installation would be open for p
ublic viewing. Cayce was up early—six in the morning—and still no further progress had been made on Elena’s case. Thankfully no more deaths either. She and Richard had shared every nonworking moment together, and it already had become something so comfortable that having a hug from him was like being wrapped up in her favorite blanket. Cozy and cuddly. And she didn’t want to let go of it.

  They had breakfast together most days and dinner sometimes too. He’d been called out for other cases, and she found herself worrying that it could be something connected to her nightmare, but he’d always come back with a smile and a shake of his head before crawling into bed with her. That little indication did a lot to stop her worries. And still their relationship was platonic.

  She smiled as she remembered the long hard ridge that had been pressed up against her this morning when she woke up. She’d seriously wondered about pushing it further here.

  He leaned over, kissed her on the neck, and said, “Dammit. I really want to be here.”

  She rolled over, pulled him toward her, and had kissed him with all the passion that she’d kept bottled up.

  When he lifted his head, his voice was thick and raspy. “You’re packing a heavy punch, sweetheart. But I’m late for work, and I can’t be late today.”

  She chuckled and said, “Well, save that thought.”

  He’d leaned over, kissed her hard, and raced to get a shower.

  She stretched, loving the sexy and invigorating feeling of knowing that a man truly cared for her and was really interested in her. It seemed like it had been a long time coming. For many, many years she had had nothing to do with men at all. But Elena had helped Cayce adapt afterward too. She surely didn’t want what was going on here with Richard to have anything to do with her abusive fiancé, which always reminded Cayce of the abuse her stepfather had dished out to her mom too.