by Kaylea Cross
His lips narrowed for a second. “The kicker is, I was sitting just up the road, handing out a speeding ticket. I saw Ashley Price drive by.”
“Who else?”
“The snowplow for one. And the mailman. Old Arnie Martin drove by too. Mrs. Smutzky. Couple of cars I didn’t recognize. I was paying attention to the people I was ticketing.” He rubbed his hand over his knee. “We canvassed the area as soon as you were found. Nobody reported seeing any strange cars pulled over in the hours before you were discovered.”
Jack nodded while he gritted his teeth against the new wave of pain that washed over his body. Whatever drugs they’d given him were wearing off. Good. He wanted to be able to think clearly. He wanted to remember.
“Is someone watching the Price woman?”
“Forget her,” Bing snapped. “She had nothing to do with this.”
I’ll be the judge of that.
He had a lead after all these years, a living, breathing, tangible link to Blackwell. He held on to that thought with everything he had. She might have fooled Bing, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to fool him.
“Let it go. That’s an order.”
He looked his captain in the eyes, preparing for a shit storm as he said, “Shannon Sullivan, the third victim, was my sister.”
A long, tension-charged moment passed as Bing stared at him. “So this hobby of yours is not a hobby. It’s personal.” His expression darkened as he put two and two together. “I don’t believe in coincidences, not in one this big.” His voice sharpened. “Have you followed Blackwell here? Is that why you showed up at my department last year, asking me for a job? You knew something?”
Jack said nothing as the man’s hands fisted on his knees.
“You knew there was a damn serial killer in my town, and you said nothing to me?” Anger heated the captain’s voice.
“I wasn’t sure. I was trying to figure it out.” He’d be damned if he apologized for it. “Blackwell killed my sister.”
Bing pushed to his feet, jaw tight, eyes flashing, about as pissed as Jack had ever seen him. “I can’t talk to you about this right now. I’m gonna strangle you if I stay. Hell, I liked you, Jack. You’re a fine detective, one of the best I’ve ever worked with. But you crossed a line here.”
He wasn’t sure he cared at this stage.
The captain stalked to the door but then stopped to look back with a scowl. “You sure it was Blackwell?”
“One hundred percent.”
A muscle ticked in the man’s face. “Brady Blackwell, one of the most wanted serial killers of the decade, confirmed in Broslin. You know what this means? Freaking FBI all over my town.”
Jack’s jaw clamped tight. He needed to get the hell out of here before the FBI mucked up every clue and lead. Before Ashley Price could disappear.
He glanced around. “Where are my badge and my gun?” A sick cold spread in his stomach.
“He kept them,” Bing said quietly.
The highest insult to a cop. That hurt more than all the injuries put together. Jack swore under his breath. When he got his hands on the bastard—
“Don’t you worry about that now,” the captain said. “You’ll get a new set when you get better.”
He watched Bing leave, then sat up experimentally and nearly passed out from the pain, sweat beading on his forehead. He might be able to walk out of here if he asked for some heavy-duty drugs, but with those drugs he couldn’t think straight and, above all, he wanted to keep his mind clear.
He levered himself back onto the pillows and closed his eyes, ran through everything he knew about the man he hunted, from the very beginning, every case, every detail from the considerable file he’d put together over the years. And then he added every bit of new information, every impression he remembered from his three days of bloody torture.
He put everything in neat order first, then shuffled the puzzle pieces over and over again to see what might fit together, if he could see a clear picture emerging. Hours passed, awash in pain and trying to force his brain to work, to see something he hadn’t seen before.
A nurse came around, a kind-faced black woman, and checked his chart. “How are you, Mr. Sullivan?”
“I need to get out of here.” He struggled again to sit up, hoping to succeed this time, pulling on the tubes hooked up to him.
“You need to watch those.” She pushed him down gently.
When he tried to resist, she frowned and did something with his IV. He wanted to protest, but his brain slowed and his tongue wouldn’t turn in his mouth suddenly. And then darkness claimed him.
His dreams weren’t happy. He was back in the cold and the dark, in the grave.
When he woke, the sun sat low in the morning sky outside. Long minutes ticked by as his brain slowly began clearing. Another nurse stuck her head in. This time, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to be put to sleep again. He closed his eyes, trying to work through the fog in his brain, come up with a plan. He was so focused on his thoughts, he didn’t hear the man standing in the doorway until he cleared his throat.
“Detective Sullivan. I was told you were awake. I’m Dr. Beacon.” The doctor, wearing dress pants, a white shirt, and a lab coat, strode into the room. He was meticulously trim and meticulously groomed, right down to his fingernails, in his midthirties, his face stretched into an artificial smile that matched the sense of artificial serenity he carried.
“When can I be discharged?” Jack asked with all the impatience that coursed through him.
The man sat in a chair next to the bed, not a hurried movement there. “That will be decided by your attending physician. I’m the psychiatrist the police department called in to help you deal with your ordeal.”
Jack’s hands fisted at his sides as he cursed Bing. The captain meant well, but no way in hell was some shrink going to poke around in his head. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
The doctor tilted his head, regarding him with a smarmy calm. “Here’s the thing. While your discharge is up to your attending physician, we’ll both have to sign off on your returning to active duty.” He crossed his legs, gloating in his power as he took out a small notebook from the pocket of his lab coat.
“Why don’t you tell me everything you remember?”
At least he didn’t ask about his personal connection to Blackwell, which gave Jack hope that Bing had kept that part to himself. Not that the captain owed him any favors. In his place, Jack would have been just as ticked.
He gritted his teeth and sat up, the pain in his ribs a little better than earlier. Or maybe he was just used to it. He slipped from the bed, bracing himself on the side when the room spun with him. When his vision cleared, he ripped the tubes out of his arms.
Dr. Beacon was on his feet by then. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Checking myself out against medical advice.”
The man stepped in to block the way, clamping a restraining hand on his arm. “I realize it can be difficult to talk about a traumatic experience—”
Jack put whatever strength he had into making sure his voice was strong and clear, glancing down at the hand holding him back, then back up into the shrink’s pale eyes.
“Not as difficult as wiping your broken nose with a broken arm. Step aside,” he said and didn’t give a damn that his words would be quoted in his psychiatric evaluation.
Chapter Three
That Jack Sullivan still lived filled him with fury. He’d been careless. He wouldn’t be careless with the detective again.
His art was more important than a handful of lives. Art at the level where he practiced it had to be protected.
He was living his dream at last, living to his full potential, and nobody was going to take that away from him. He’d always wanted to be an artist.
His father hadn’t approved, had refused to pay for art school. And the art school hadn’t given him a scholarship, unable to understand his art. He’d accepted then that they couldn’t have taught hi
m anything anyway.
In hindsight, the rejection had been lucky. Anyone could be trained to a fair level of competence in anything, but creative genius was born. Structured instruction would have imposed restrictions on his vision.
The old fan chugged on in its valiant effort to distribute the heat from the antique woodstove in the corner. He didn’t really feel the cold. Creating always filled him with fire.
He manipulated the small engraving drill to draw his complicated design onto bone, working in his basement studio, pleased as his composition took shape. He didn’t have to worry about the neighbors hearing the drill, or the hammer when he was assembling larger pieces. They hadn’t heard Sullivan’s screams. The basement was soundproofed.
He’d learned how to do that and all kinds of construction tricks from his father, who’d built houses for a living, the same path he’d chosen for his son.
His father had said art was for liberal loafers who lived on the government tit and did nothing but do drugs and fornicate with each other. Art was for the gays. Art was for the kind of women who would neglect their families for their own entertainment.
A real man built things with his two hands, big, sturdy things, manly things like houses. The family tree was full of carpenters.
Yet even now, in the corner of the basement studio, stood his great-grandfather’s walking stick with the whalebone handle he’d carved himself. Art.
Carving was the first art, practiced by the first men who first used tools and wanted to decorate them. The carving of bones was elemental, the highest form of art. It needed the highest-value medium.
He’d tried stone. He didn’t like it. Stone was dead. Bone was alive.
These days he no longer used cat and dog bones like he had for the art school projects that had been rejected. If they could see him now…
They still wouldn’t understand him, he thought with irony as he worked, creating yet another piece for his latest installment, a statue of shards, every inch intricately carved, his skill bringing the pieces back to life. The beautiful bones of a beautiful woman, being made into something sublime. Women were special.
He hated his father, but he’d always loved his mother. Women were his connection to the elemental, to Mother Nature, to Mother Earth. Someday, a more enlightened world would understand the profound symbolism of his art. Someday.
He would never sell his work in his lifetime, he knew that, had accepted it years ago. This wasn’t for some rich collector anyway, to lock away. He created for all humankind.
So he got a job that paid the bills, played the dumb everyday man people were comfortable with. Small-town folks, especially, didn’t have the first idea what to do with true genius.
Someday his pieces would be exhibited in the finest museums. Someday he would be called the premier artist of the twenty-first century. Someday the rest of humanity would grow up to his vision.
All he had to do was keep creating and remove things that were a threat to his legacy, Jack Sullivan being at the top of his list.
But Sullivan would be wary now.
Which meant the next trap had to be even better thought-out with a better bait, something the detective couldn’t resist.
* * *
Ashley added another small dab of white to the Prussian blue. No strange visions, no headaches—a good day. She mixed the paint carefully.
She had finished four works in the two weeks since she’d promised Isabelle the new series. Her loft was a good place to hide from all the police and FBI agents who’d been coming and going on her property.
She’d escaped into painting from sheer desperation, then kept up with the schedule even after they left.
She needed at least three dozen works for a decent show, and four dozen would be better. If she had a show, if it was well received, got good reviews, was written up in the papers—maybe that would convince her father that she was back to normal. Maybe then he would let Madison come back to her.
She missed her daughter. They hadn’t come last weekend after all. Her father had some emergency board meeting, trouble at the company. She hated not seeing Madison, but in a way, the missed visit came at the right time. She’d still had the police on her land.
This way, the latest mess she was in had at least remained her secret. It didn’t become another weapon that could be used against her. And now that the police were gone, everything should be fine this weekend when Madison came. Things were back to seminormal again.
She let the brush glide across the canvas, let her arm relax into a sweeping curve reminiscent of the curve of a shoulder, then another one, smaller, the two twined together the moment before being torn apart. Each color she mixed turned out more profound than the one before as she painted her emotions onto the canvas, poured her heartbreak out with every stroke of the squirrel-hair brush.
“Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life.” She murmured George Tooker’s words to the shapes taking form.
For three hours, in the perfect morning light, she had soared. She existed in the elusive zone of creativity where no anxiety existed, just bliss. She felt the pain she painted, felt every ounce of despair, but differently from the darkness that assailed her at other times.
At times, painting could be terror, but on days like this… pure healing therapy.
Not long ago, she’d been able to come and go from this place at will. Lately, she was lucky to find her way in, once in a great while, hacking ahead with sweat and desperation as an explorer in the deep jungle, trying to find a lost city.
The sun trekked across the sky, going around the loft windows, changing the light. She stepped back to inspect what she had so far. A few more days and the painting would be finished. She contemplated whether she could squeeze in another half an hour, even twenty minutes, glancing toward the window again. A movement in the hemlocks caught her eye.
Her muscles clenched as she felt her special place slip away. The wind, she told herself. But none of the other trees were moving. Maybe it had been a deer. It wouldn’t be the first time deer strayed this close to the house. But her growing anxiety refused to ease. Her muscles tightened further as she cleaned her brushes and put them away, cleaned up the loft, glancing toward the window every couple of seconds.
She was probably getting cabin fever. She rolled her neck and headed downstairs. She hadn’t left the house in the two weeks since finding Jack Sullivan. She hadn’t liked all those investigators crawling all over her land.
They hadn’t searched the house and the garage, at least. They probably wouldn’t at this stage. Still, it would be better to get rid of those paintings out there. Not only as a symbolic act, the representation of hope that this part of her life was now over—she’d saved a man—but also because she didn’t want Maddie to accidentally find them once her daughter moved back home.
Since the ground was frozen, she couldn’t bury the canvases. Ice covered the reservoir, so she couldn’t dump them into the water, even if she could make herself go near the place. Taking them somewhere far away and leaving them in a Dumpster seemed too risky.
That left burning, the only solution she could think of. But she hadn’t dared burn them while the police and the FBI were still coming by.
She glanced toward the hemlocks again. All seemed serene in the yard. She had to fight her fears, not give in to the overwhelming anxiety that sometimes kept her housebound for weeks. She wanted her daughter back, which meant she needed to reclaim her life, starting now.
She could do it if she did it little by little, just as it had been taken from her. She could start with reclaiming her small backyard. She would go out there and do what she needed to do. She refused to worry every time a breeze moved a bush.
The temperature hovered on the freezing point, but no wind blew. She grabbed paint thinner for accelerant and padded down the stairs, swiping a box of matches from the kitchen counter where she’d been burning a scented candle earlier.
Boots, scarf, coat, hat, gloves.
>
Cold air hit her in the face as she stepped outside, making her draw a quick breath. Snow covered the landscape, an endless stretch of white. Up ahead, the town plow was hustling down the road. Eddie waved and turned into her driveway. The big plow pretty much cleared everything on the way in, stopping a foot or so from her car. That patch she’d have to do herself.
After she got a new shovel. The handle of the old one broke recently, which meant a trip to the hardware store. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Hey, maybe they wouldn’t get any more snow this winter.
“Thank you, Eddie, I really appreciate it,” she called up to him. “Good to see the big plow fixed.”
“Gave me plenty of trouble. Need a crane to take this damn thing apart. But, hey, at least there weren’t any screws left over when I put it back together.”
He drove the big plow in the winter and did whatever else needed to be done around the town hall the rest of the year. The fifty-something town handyman was the perfect guy for the job, a loner like her. When the town called, he went. He could fix a roof or fill a pothole and did it all with a smile.
“Everything okay?” Eddie called down from his high perch. “I see the police are gone.”
“Thank God.”
“They found anything?”
“I don’t think so. Not that they share with me.” But they looked just as gloomy leaving as they had coming.
“Mind if I come by in a couple of days to grab some wood?”
He had a woodstove in his workshop, and Ashley let him walk through her property and drag out whatever fallen timber he could find, chop it up and haul it away—the least she could do for him for keeping her driveway clean all winter.
“Anytime you want.”
He gave a wave of thanks and backed the plow out of the driveway, getting back to work.