by Kaylea Cross
He’d seen her police file as well. A four-year-old boy, Dylan Miller, had died while in her care, went under the ice of the reservoir last winter—ruled accidental drowning. He had to wonder now, didn’t he, with all those paintings lying at his feet.
Were the rest of those people Blackwell’s victims like he’d been, or Ashley’s? Maybe Blackwell was a killer with a split personality. Killed one set of victims one way, the other for a different purpose entirely. His jaw tightened. He didn’t like the word “victim” applied to him.
From what he knew of Blackwell and what he’d seen of Ashley so far, his money was on Blackwell doing all the killing and Ashley doing only the painting. He didn’t get a killer vibe from her. Yet she was involved, in up to her haunted green eyes.
“Did Brady Blackwell make you paint these?” Maybe they were something like trophies to the bastard. Ashley, the bodies, and Blackwell had to be somehow all connected.
“I don’t know Brady Blackwell.” She held herself together but not by much. Her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, were trembling.
“I’m going to bring in the rest. You touch any of these, you move an inch from that couch, and I promise you’ll regret it.”
He strode out, hurried back in with an armload two minutes later, laid them out and unwrapped them, examined them one by one.
Then he asked the question he was most afraid of knowing the answer to. “Do you have others?”
He didn’t know if he could stand looking at Shannon in the grave. It had been fifteen years, but the wound of losing his sister had never healed. He didn’t breathe while he waited for the answer.
“No. This is it.”
He exhaled. Of course. She couldn’t have painted Shannon in North Carolina. Ashley Price was twenty-five, according to her file. She would have been only ten, living in Philadelphia with her parents, at the time of Shannon’s disappearance. One of the tightly wound springs inside him marginally relaxed.
He stared at the images, and a faint memory popped into his head at last. The woman in one, lying in a dark alley, had been a rape/homicide case in West Chester six months back. The case belonged to a different police department, but Jack made it his business to look into cases of women disappearing, then turning up dead. This one he’d quickly ruled out as Blackwell’s, and the West Chester police had gotten their perp within a few days, a rock-solid case. She’d been murdered by her ex-boyfriend.
No link to Blackwell. Yet there had to be a connection to Ashley Price, since Ashley had painted her. How and when?
“What do you know about these people?”
She shifted her gaze away from him. “Nothing.”
“Stop lying.” Frustration raised his voice, which made her jump in her seat.
“Just what I read in the paper.”
He drew up an eyebrow. “You only know them from the news?”
She nodded without looking at him.
He picked up the painting he’d been staring at and held it up for her. “I don’t remember the papers detailing the exact position of the body when she was found. You need to come up with a better story.”
She paled, fighting more tears.
His cop instincts said she didn’t have what it took to kill. Maybe in self-defense, but not in cold blood and regularly. She seemed messed up, granted, but cold, calculated murder wasn’t in her.
He’d interrogated enough people to know when to go soft as well as when to push hard. He could do bad-cop-good-cop all on his own just fine.
“Look.” He gentled his voice. “I’ve got all these paintings now. I know you’re connected. I don’t think you harmed these people. We both know who did. You have to tell me where he is so I can stop him from doing this again.”
She rubbed her arms, breathing erratically. “I don’t feel well.”
“You’ll feel better once you get this off your chest. It’s over. It’s the end of the line. You need to come clean.”
Some strange energy seemed to zap into her then, and she shot to her feet, vibrating with nerves. “I can’t breathe.” She gulped air.
Whatever her connection was to the people she painted, he knew this: Brady Blackwell had put him in a shallow grave, and Ashley Price had been there when he came to. For what purpose, Jack wasn’t sure yet, but he didn’t think she’d just randomly wandered the fields in the twilight and accidentally tripped over him as she claimed.
And what about all these other people? They hadn’t been on her land. How had she come to see them dead? See them from close enough and well enough to render the scene with accurate detail?
“Tell me, Ashley, where, when, and how did you come to paint these?”
She moved to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. Drank. Then, as if someone had taken out her battery, she collapsed against the counter and slid to the floor, leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, her face buried in her slim-fingered artist hands as she hyperventilated.
“I see them in my mind.” She choked up the words. “I don’t want to. They are just there, and I have to get them out.”
What she implied… Screw the good cop. Anger pumped through him. Did he look stupid? If she was going for this kind of bullshit, he seriously needed to work on his I-mean-business face. “So you’re psychic?”
“No.” The denial came between two gasps.
“What then?”
Her hands fell away, and she looked up at him, the desperation on her face gut-wrenching. “I don’t know.” Tears filled her eyes all over again. She blinked them furiously away.
A woman on the brink of falling apart. Good. Suspects usually told the truth when they came unhinged. Time to push harder.
“What is Blackwell to you?” he challenged. “Are you willing to go to prison for him? Is he your boyfriend?” While the idea of DaRosa’s hands on her had angered him, the idea of Blackwell’s hands on her disturbed him on a deeper level. “Is he worth a charge of accessory to murder? Is he that good a fuck?”
Her eyes widened with shock, and she recoiled from him as if he’d physically struck her. If her reaction made him feel like a bastard, he wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.
“I don’t know him,” she protested in a voice filled with despair.
“So you just saw me in your mind?”
She nodded.
Judging by the look in her eyes, she hated him as much at this moment as he hated Blackwell. She was welcome to it. “And?”
“I recognized the rock and the creek. I knew where you were.”
* * *
Jack Sullivan thought she was in league with a serial killer. And, stupidly, to convince him she was innocent, she had blurted out her darkest secret. Oh God. She would have done anything to undo that, to erase her words.
Soon everyone would know that something was seriously wrong with her. And then she would never get her daughter back. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, dizzy with the anxiety and anger that gripped her.
She had to make Sullivan believe her, accept that she had nothing to do with the killer he was looking for. He seemed dead set on pinning a slew of murders on her. Or accessory to murder. Nausea bubbled in her stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second.
To think that she’d been scared of Bing. For Bing, the case was a job. For Sullivan, it was personal. He was aggressive and crass and relentless and—
“Have you tried to find any of the others?” He glanced back at the pictures, then at her again, his face hard, his eyes narrowed. He had a look of emptiness about him, as if he’d left his soul in that grave and brought only the darkness with him. He had no right to bring that to her house.
She wanted to curl up into a ball and howl with the unfairness of it all. “I didn’t know where the others were. Only you. And I knew you weren’t dead.”
“How?”
She pointed at the painting with a frustrated gesture. It was so obvious. How could he not see it?
He picked up the painting, looked at it for
a few seconds; then he looked at the rest of the canvases. “I don’t look like the others.” He paused. “Why did you come?”
If only she hadn’t. She’d been scared out of her mind. “I thought…”
He waited her out.
“I thought if I saved you, maybe I wouldn’t see another…vision, ever again.” She had expected relief, some sort of absolution and an end to the nightmare that had kept her bound for over a year now. Instead, she’d gotten Jack Sullivan with all his disapproval and suspicions, and his ability to reach to the deepest, darkest core of her.
He kept his face inscrutable, leaving her no way to tell if he believed anything she told him. She wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to her.
The first time she had painted a lifeless body, she’d thought it some sort of a fluke, another symptom of the depression that had followed the accident on the reservoir. The landscape she’d planned on painting kept changing as she was compelled to change the location of the trees, add a road, take out the barn she’d meant to have as the focal point. She’d painted that first body, an older woman, in a trance, horrified when she’d stepped back at the end.
After the second time it’d happened, a black teenager, she packed up her paints and canvases and decided not to paint for a while until whatever was going on in her mind blew over. Her shrink upped her antidepressant. It didn’t help, made her slightly manic, keeping her up night after night with nothing to do.
The third body she’d seen in her mind, a man in a UPS uniform, she’d been determined not to paint. But her hands moved on their own, dragging out her supplies. She’d been terrified enough after that to throw the rest of her blank canvases and paint tubes into the trash.
When the image of the fourth body invaded her thoughts, she’d been forced to paint on the back of an old kitchen cabinet with leftover household paints. After that, she’d accepted that she couldn’t fight the curse and no longer tossed the odd canvases friends brought by or the paint and brush samples sent by companies she’d frequently ordered from in the past.
When the next terrible urge came, she simply painted the young woman, Megan Keeler, the first who had a name. Ashley had recognized her in the Inquirer a few days later. Missing College Student’s Body Found in Southeastern PA.
She’d thrown up twice before she could finish the article.
With the next victims, she searched the papers obsessively until she found them. She didn’t dare go to the police. What help could she be? They were already all dead. What could she say? I paint dead people?
The man with the cerulean-blue eyes, Detective Jack Sullivan, had been her ninth.
She was not going crazy. There had to be a way out of this. She would find it.
“When did it start?” he demanded.
God, not that. She couldn’t go back to Dylan. But looking at the man’s face, she finally understood that she wasn’t going to get a choice. “An accident happened on the reservoir.”
He nodded.
Did he know about that? Of course he did; everyone around here knew the whole sordid tale.
“We fell through the ice, Maddie and Dylan and I.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, feeling the deadly chill all over again. “I was under for twenty minutes, but they pulled me out and revived me. I was in a coma for a week.”
The cold water had slowed down her metabolism to the point where she didn’t suffer any brain damage from the lack of oxygen, the doctors had explained later, declaring her a medical miracle.
“And after that—” It killed her to have to think back to the accusations, the tremendous guilt, the depression.
The Millers, her neighbors, had lost Dylan. But she had lost her daughter too. Her father had taken Maddie while Ashley had been in the hospital. And considering the state she’d been in even after she’d gotten out, he’d been reluctant to give Maddie back.
She wanted her daughter more than she wanted anything. But she was scared to the bone that there was something seriously wrong with her, that she was going crazy, that she would never get better, would never get Maddie back, would end up dying in a mental hospital like her mother, strapped to the bed.
None of which she could share with anyone, not ever.
All she could give Jack Sullivan was the most basic truth, which he had already seen and had refused to believe. “And now I paint the dead.”
Chapter Four
Jack smashed his fist into the boxing bag, the sharp slap the only sound that broke the silence in the small workout room in the back of the police station. The gym was utilitarian, nothing but the basics. He didn’t need much. He just needed a place to build his body back.
He lost himself in the rhythm of his punches. He liked it when he was alone in here. He was still on leave—not by his own choice—but he could at least use the gym, part of his physical therapy. Maybe he was doing it a little harder than he was supposed to, but he didn’t have time for a slow recovery.
So he came in, once a day, for the gym, and because he could usually sneak a few minutes at his computer, check on things, ask around about what progress the FBI was making.
None whatsoever.
Pretty much the same as he. His home visit a week ago with Ashley Price had netted more questions than answers.
He’d spent the intervening days with identifying everybody on the paintings he’d taken from her. Other than himself, he couldn’t find a single link to Blackwell.
Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left. He exhaled sharply on each blow. He was focused on the bag, but not as deeply as he would have liked to be.
What did he know about her for sure?
She painted the dead.
People who died violently, to be more specific. Ashley Price, an untimely death, and geographical proximity were all the victims in her paintings had in common. Somebody coming in fresh and looking at those facts would have theorized that she was one of the rare female serial killers.
Except, he’d met her, and she wasn’t a killer. She was a mess. And she hadn’t been the one who’d put him into the grave.
But she was the one who’d dug him up.
He’d be damned if he knew what that meant.
He was almost puzzled enough to seriously consider her psychic tale. Almost.
Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left.
Maybe the FBI could make more sense of her. The four agents who’d arrived had taken over the single conference room at the police station and one of the offices. Bing wouldn’t let Jack near them. But even if he had, Jack wouldn’t have handed over the paintings. Ashley was his lead. He wanted to be the one who found Blackwell, dammit.
He danced around the bag, working it over as it swung on the chain. Left, right, back, forth. Everything hurt. He thought he’d learned long ago to shut out pain, both emotional and physical. Not quite.
Time to burn that pain out of his muscles. With every hit, he imagined Blackwell, let himself feel just enough to create a controlled flame burning in the dark. The sick bastard had left him alive even as he’d buried him, left him to die slowly so he would have time to think about how badly he’d failed.
The faces of Blackwell’s other known victims played through his mind like a film on an endless loop, each one of the eighteen crying out for revenge. North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Long Island, Connecticut. He’d made it his career to follow Blackwell up and down the East Coast, transferring from department to department over the years.
After a triple murder in Baltimore, he’d picked up on something in a forensics report the FBI had missed—spores at a crime scene, from some gourmet mushroom produced in only a half-dozen places in the country. He’d put six brown pins in the map on his wall at his rental, one for each location.
The line of eighteen red pins that marked the victims all concentrated in the middle section of the East Coast. The six brown ones were distributed randoml
y over the US, only one on the East Coast, Broslin, PA, in the middle of all the red. A state surrounded by victim states but where no victim had been taken.
Why? Because it would have hit too close to home for Blackwell?
So Jack took the first police job that came up in Broslin and had been damn proud of himself for getting another step closer. Except now it seemed Blackwell had caught on. The bastard had trapped him and nearly killed him.
Nearly.
His turn. But he couldn’t let his revenge blind him. Every move had to be carefully calculated. They were in the endgame.
Jab. Cross. Elbow. Uppercut. Jack let the force of his legs explode through his hips, torso, and shoulders, sent the energy through his arms and into the bag.
Only when he was completely spent, covered in sweat, did he let himself drop to the mat. But even then, he couldn’t rest. He reached for his phone and shuffled through the photos he’d taken of Ashley’s bizarre paintings. He paused the screen at the painting of himself in the grave, eyes open but unseeing.
Blackwell’s other known victims hadn’t been buried alive. They’d been buried in pieces. The FBI had never done a full recovery. The bastard was keeping trophies.
But he hadn’t cut Jack. Why? Why bury him alive?
He pushed back his rising anger. You go into a fight hot, you’ve already lost—one of the fundamental rules of combat he’d learned early on. He withdrew to the darkroom in his mind, as always when emotions threatened to get in his way. He liked the black, hollow space that let in no light. Except this time he wasn’t alone. He’d somehow carried Ashley Price in there with him.
The woman carried a load of guilt, grief, and despair, along with some pretty dark secrets. They had that in common.
Hot as all get-out, but a basket case. Then again, anyone who would hook up with Blackwell had to be seriously messed up. He sure as hell didn’t believe the psychic-vision bullshit. She was with Blackwell—either coerced or by choice. Probably the latter.