Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2)

by Lisa Brunette

  Grace smiled at the maid. “Mariana, this is really our fault. You should let us clean it up for you.”

  “No, no, no,” said Mariana. “I will take care of it.”

  Grace bent and began picking up shards of glass.

  “Señora, no,” insisted Mariana. She politely but firmly patted Grace on the shoulder. “I will take care of it.”

  “All right,” said Grace, rising to her feet. “Say, Mariana, I have a question for you if you don’t mind.” Grace fetched her phone out of her bag, called up the triptych of the girl, and showed it to Mariana. “Do you recognize this girl?”

  Grace thought she caught a flicker of alarmed recognition in Mariana’s eyes, but then the woman’s face went hard again. She shook her head, her lips pursed as if she were willing herself not to speak.

  “You recognize her?” Grace responded. “Tell me. Who is she?”

  “No lo sé,” Mariana said. “I do not know.”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t say? Where have you seen her?”

  “I cannot say…” Mariana said, backing away. “Por favor, leave me to my work.”

  “Please,” Grace said. “We need to know who she is.”

  “You recognize her, but you don’t know her name,” said Cat.

  Mariana clutched her broom to her chest and backed further away.

  “Where did you see her?” Cat asked.

  Mariana took a deep breath. “Lo siento, but I was mistaken. I have never seen that girl.”

  Grace and Cat could got no further with Mariana, so they left.

  >>>

  When they arrived home, Sergeant Alvarez’s squad car was parked out front. Grace looked at Cat, who shrugged and said, “I sent her the databases and the image of Three Views, One Girl. But I wasn’t expecting a visit. Maybe she turned up something…”

  Encouraged by this, Grace sprinted up the steps to Mick’s door, and finding it unlocked, went inside.

  Immediately she sensed that the mood in the room was wrong. Mick looked scared and confused. Speck and Santiago were slipping Mick’s behemoth laptop into a large plastic bag.

  “What’s going on here?” asked Grace, searching Alvarez’s face for answers.

  But the woman’s stern expression gave back no trace of the camaraderie they had recently shared on the case. “Your brother here is under investigation for possession of child-abuse material.”

  The words hit Grace with the force of a cannonball. She reeled backward, clutching at Cat behind her.

  “Wh-what?” Grace struggled to regain her composure, as well as her balance. She felt her granddaughter propping her up from behind, which was good because Grace was having trouble getting her knees to obey her brain’s instructions.

  “What’s going on?” asked Cat. “What evidence do you have? You know that’s not Mick.”

  “I don’t really know you people,” Alvarez countered. “And the evidence came from you, Cat.”

  “The painting,” said Grace, finding her knees, her balance, her self. “The one Cat texted to you.”

  “The girl depicted in Mick’s art, if you want to call it that, has appeared in child-abuse material known to law enforcement.”

  “But his paintings aren’t pornographic,” Cat protested.

  Alvarez looked as if she were weighing in her mind how much to tell Cat. “The girl, what she’s wearing, the chair she’s sitting on—all of it appears in photographs that are, that we know have circulated for years. So it stands to reason that if Mick’s painting those details, he’s got the kiddie porn.”

  There was a moment of quiet in the room, as if everyone were letting that information sink in. And then they all began to talk at once.

  “But I had no idea, I didn’t mean…” said Mick.

  “Don’t say another word,” Cat said to Mick.

  “We need to take you down to the station for questioning,” said Alvarez.

  “Mick’s innocent,” Grace heard herself add to the fray.

  The next few moments were a blur. The deputies combed through Mick’s studio, bagging and tagging anything that might have been used to house or transmit images. They asked for his passwords. They asked if he used any online or cloud storage providers or clouds. They also sifted through every box and drawer for printed photos or anything else that could connect Mick to child-abuse material.

  Grace saw the spasm in Mick’s jaw working. She went over to him and touched his shoulder.

  “I didn’t mean anything by the painting,” Mick said, his voice weak.

  “I know,” Grace said. “You had no idea.”

  Cat was visibly angry, Grace could see. The girl clenched her fists at her sides as the officers ransacked Mick’s studio.

  “Are you arresting him?” Cat demanded.

  “We’re taking him down for questioning,” Alvarez replied. “After that, it depends on what we discover. This is a very serious charge.”

  “You won’t find anything more than what Cat sent you,” said Grace. “And that doesn’t make much sense, does it? That Cat sent it to you?”

  “Maybe she wanted to out her sicko of an uncle,” said Alvarez.

  “That’s not why I sent it!” Cat yelled. “You’re making a huge mistake.”

  Grace searched for something she could say to Alvarez to explain why her brother painted a girl who had appeared in child-abuse pornography, but there was nothing that would make sense. So she remained silent.

  “Mick, due to the nature of the potential charges here, I’m going to have to bring you in in handcuffs.”

  Grace detected a strain of empathy in Alvarez’s tone. She focused on that to control her own panic. She did not want to see her brother dragged off like a criminal.

  “You can’t do this!” Cat yelled.

  “On the contrary,” said Alvarez. “I have to do this. It’s my job.”

  Grace watched powerlessly as Mick was escorted outside, installed in the back seat of the cop car, and taken away. She reached for Cat, but her granddaughter was more angry than upset. Cat pushed her hand away and tried to appeal to Alvarez.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Cat kept saying. “He’s innocent.”

  Grace found herself at a loss for words.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Cat barged into Alvarez’s office the next day with Granny Grace, who was weakly protesting, telling her that a calm head would prevail. Cat didn’t have a shred of calm left at this point, and Granny Grace must have been too upset herself to push the issue.

  “You haven’t found anything, have you,” Cat asserted to Alvarez. “Let my uncle go.”

  Alvarez sat behind her oversized desk, her index fingers steepled at her chin. “We need your uncle to be more forthcoming about where he found the ‘inspiration’ for his work of art.”

  That took the wind out of Cat’s sails a bit. It meant they were switching gears, looking at Mick as some sort of accessory or accomplice. They couldn’t get him on possession, so they’d try using him to bust whoever else they could.

  Alvarez continued. “I mean, come on. It came to him in a dream? I really doubt that. Who is he protecting?”

  “No one,” said Cat. “Believe me. He’s telling the truth.”

  “My brother’s a very active dreamer,” Grace added.

  Alvarez laughed haughtily. “An active dreamer, huh?” She reclined back in her chair. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I am kind of tired of you people.”

  Cat allowed herself to breathe. Maybe it was even a yoga breath, not that she would admit that to her grandmother.

  She spoke in a more measured tone now to Alvarez. “You’ve got nothing to hold him on, and he doesn’t have any information about the child porn. But if you’ll work with us on this, we might be able to help you track down whoever was involved in whatever material is known to law enforcement that depicts that same girl.”

  Alvarez crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So it really came to him in a dream? That’s what
he’s telling us. ‘She came to me in a dream.’ Not a series of dreams, or God forbid something slightly more useful, like a recurring nightmare or a PTSD episode, but no. One lousy dream.”

  “Yes,” Cat and Granny Grace said in unison.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  Cat held her hands out in front of her. “It’s what we’ve got, because it’s the truth.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Alvarez, standing up. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Cat backed away. “We’d like to see Mick now.”

  “Fine,” said Alvarez. “I’ll take you to him. We’re done questioning him, until he’s ready to tell us more.”

  Cat and Grace followed Alvarez down a hallway lit by fluorescents to a small room where Mick sat with his impromptu lawyer, a defense attorney recommended by Mick’s publicist, Beverly, who was unhappy about what this would mean for Mick’s career.

  Cat had assured her there would be no charges against Mick, but Beverly didn’t care. “Once his name is mixed up in the press with anything having to do with child porn, we’re done for,” she said.

  Cat shook the lawyer’s hand. “Dave Sommers,” he said. Grace shook hands with him next and then went over to Mick and embraced him.

  “I can’t believe this,” Mick said.

  Sommers cleared his throat. “They’ve got nothing against him. The child porn his painting references has been in circulation for a while, they believe, maybe even a long while. So it’s not like anyone thinks Mick knows where the girl depicted in them is, or had anything to do with her appearance in them.”

  Cat and Grace both let out sighs.

  Sommers continued. “And they didn’t find any child porn in your uncle’s possession. There’s no crime here.”

  “Then let’s go home,” said Granny Grace.

  “Just a minute,” said Sommers. “They can’t hold him, but I would recommend that Mick give the police more to show his innocence and cooperation, I mean, if you can, Mr. Travers. The details in the painting do exactly match those in known images of child porn, and that’s been hard to explain. I mean, the dream thing is thin.”

  Mick looked at Cat and Granny Grace.

  “Could you excuse the three of us for a moment?” Cat asked Sommers.

  He appeared taken aback. “Sure… I mean, anything you say to me is protected by attorney-client privilege, but I, uh, respect that this is also a…family matter.” He smiled politely and then left the room.

  Mick spoke first. “I’ve never been in a position like this before. I didn’t know what to tell them.”

  “What you told them was fine,” Granny Grace said in a manner that struck Cat as overly cheerful. “Perfect, in fact.”

  As mad as Cat was at Alvarez at that moment, she realized the value in bringing in the resources of the Miami PD again on this case. An idea occurred to her. “I think the three of us need to agree on a story. A non-dreamslipping version of the truth.”

  “Truth is good,” Mick said. “I’m not a very good liar.”

  “Great idea,” said Grace.

  “So tell them where you were when you had the dream.”

  “Okay,” said Mick.

  “Leave out the dreamslipping part. We’ll use this to get Alvarez’s help investigating who was there at the party. We want access to police databases. We need to know what they already know about this girl and where else she’s appeared.”

  “And we need them to put some pressure on that maid of Serena’s,” added Granny Grace.

  “Agreed,” said Cat.

  “But won’t they want to know what I saw at the party? I mean, I don’t want to have to make something up.”

  “Tell them you don’t remember. Tell them you’d been drinking.”

  Cat felt Grace’s hand on hers on the table. “There’s only one problem here, Cat. We’re going to point a guilty finger at Kristoff, since it was his party, and Alvarez will think it’s likely he’s the one who had whatever inspired Mick.”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “And it was probably someone else at that party who happened to dream about the girl while spending the night at Kristoff’s. But it’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

  “If Kristoff’s innocent, that will be borne out soon enough,” said Grace.

  There was a moment of quiet as they fortified themselves to go forward. Then Cat motioned through the window for Sommers to rejoin them. Once in the room, Cat explained to him that they had a hunch about where Mick might have seen something that sparked the dream.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Sommers asked. He cast glances at Cat and Grace.

  Mick stepped up to the plate. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag someone else into this who might be as innocent as I am.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Kristoff Langholm.”

  “The real estate magnate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.” Sommers reached into his briefcase and took out his audio recorder. “Let’s start from the beginning. Tell me what you know.”

  Mick explained about the party and how he’d had the dream while sleeping overnight at Kristoff’s place on Star Island.

  “But you didn’t see anything there? You didn’t wander into his study, find something in his desk drawer, or a book on a shelf? Anything?”

  “Not that I remember,” said Mick.

  “It was a party,” Cat offered. “Everyone was drinking.”

  “How drunk were you?”

  “The booze was free, and the bar was well stocked.”

  “I see. So you might have seen something and not realized it, in your state.”

  “I suppose that’s possible. But I don’t remember anything except the dream.”

  “Right. And quite a dream it was, as you’ve already explained.”

  Cat interrupted. “The police need to investigate everyone who was at that party.”

  “Sure,” said Sommers. “Look, you do what you want. You can go talk to them about this party, and they might follow up on it, but there’s not much evidence here to link either your uncle or Langholm to any child-abuse material. At the very least, however, it’s a cooperative gesture. As long as fingering Langholm doesn’t come back to bite any of you.”

  As Sommers wrapped up their session, Alvarez appeared in the doorway.

  “You’re free to go, Mick. We haven’t found a thing. I mean, nothing beyond what the average citizen has bookmarked, if you know what I mean.”

  Cat did not want to know what Alvarez meant by that, but she noted that Mick’s face reddened a bit.

  “My client has more information for you,” said Sommers.

  Alvarez came into the room and shut the door, and Mick told her everything—or at least, everything they’d agreed to tell her.

  Alvarez still didn’t buy that Mick hadn’t seen something concrete at Kristoff’s, and the fact that he’d withheld the information about the party initially made her more suspicious that he was covering for someone.

  But this worked to their advantage in a way, thought Cat. It made both Serena Jones and Kristoff Langholm strong suspects, as they were both patrons of Mick’s, and Alvarez would think Mick would be reluctant to finger either of them.

  “Let’s work together on this,” Cat said to Alvarez. “We’ll bring you our research on the suspects so far, and we can map out a strategy.”

  Alvarez’s demeanor was still wary, but she had softened toward them.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Sommers was dismissed, and the four of them got down to work.

  >>>

  On their way back home that evening, Cat checked her text messages while Granny Grace drove. There was one from Jacob: There’s a story breaking on Twitter that your uncle got hauled in for questioning for possession of child porn!!! Are you okay?! What’s going on? Is it true?

  Cat flipped to her phone’s browser and searched for the reference, and there it was. A Miami c
rime blogger had written up a short piece based on Mick’s questioning, which had been recorded in the police blotter. And it looked as if the blogger had tried to increase his traffic by sharing it widely with anyone connected to the art world. There were already tweets shaming Mick as a “pervert.” Cat noted with disgust that most of those tweeters spelled the word “prevert.” A group of tweeters had already set up the hashtag #boycottmicktravers.

  “Oh, my God,” uttered Cat aloud. And then she wished she hadn’t, with both Granny Grace and Mick in the car, and her grandmother driving.

  “What, Cat?” Granny Grace asked.

  “Ah, it’s nothing. I’ll tell you when we get home.”

  “Might as well tell us now, girlie,” said Mick from the back seat. “Otherwise, we’ll sit here imagining the worst. And after this, it can’t get much worse.”

  “Yes, it can,” said Cat. She reluctantly handed him her phone.

  “Fuck me.” Mick flipped through the phone till he’d seen enough, and then he tossed it to the floor of the car. Cat left it there, not particularly wanting to see it, either.

  “Well, would one of you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’ve become the almighty Internet’s latest whipping boy,” Mick said.

  Cat explained to a bewildered Granny Grace, who was uncharacteristically clutching the steering wheel.

  “I’m just famous enough to be damaged by this,” Mick said.

  They were silent the rest of the way home, and when they arrived, they retreated to their own private spaces for some solitude. Cat stuffed her earphones in her head, closed the partition around her bed, and lay down to try to forget the past couple days. She wondered where her God voice was now. Tuning in, she heard only silence, beyond the ringing in her ears.

  She was almost asleep when she realized she’d forgotten to reply to Jacob. Not OK, she tapped out on her phone. Not true.

  He replied immediately. Can I see you?

  Not in the mood.

  Not that. I mean, I want to help.

  Risky.

  Doesn’t have to be. Let me help.

  Cat sat staring at her phone, trying not to think about how much she wanted Jacob’s arms around her right then. But she was too tired to drive back down to South Beach. It was almost as if Jacob heard her thoughts, as what came next was this: I’ll drive up there.