The Sculptor

by Gregory Funaro

  “May I see the barn?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Hill led Markham from the porch around to the back of the farmhouse. In addition to the large barn and a pair of smaller buildings at the rear of the property, Markham spied about two dozen Nubian goats in a nearby paddock—many of whom raised their heads and approached the fence as the men passed.

  Outgoing indeed, Markham thought.

  “Settle down, children,” said Hill. “Don’t go begging the government for no handouts now.”

  The large swinging doors were propped open, the inside of the barn empty, but the lingering smell of livestock—of hay and manure and sawdust—suddenly bombarded Markham with memories of a petting zoo to which his father had taken him as a little boy—a ramshackle affair at the local mall where a llama once nibbled at the collar of his shirt and made him cry. The barn itself was typical in its layout—a single corridor flanked by stalls for the animals. The horse stalls, of which there were four, came first; followed by six stalls on each side that Hill said were reserved for the goats. These—unlike the horse stalls, which had high wooden doors and barred windows—were enclosed by chain link gates and were separated from each other by 2 x 6s that Hill said could be removed to make the pens bigger.

  “They usually go three or four to a stall,” said the farmer. “Sometimes more if a doe is weaning. And in the winter we can take down those walls and house more together, separating them by size, age, and sex if we need to. But Gamble always had his own stall down at the end year round. He could get a bit ornery, but he was smart, and would try sometimes to push the latch—why his was the only stall that was padlocked. He got the job done when it came time to getting with his honeys, though. That’s what a special boy he was. Goddamn shame if you ask me.”

  Hill and Markham reached the opposite end of the barn.

  “See there?” asked Hill, pointing to his prized buck’s former stall. “My grandson and I fixed it, but you can still see where the sons of bitches pulled the gate off. Didn’t even bother with the other goats—coulda gotten to them easy. Nope, no padlock or nothing was gonna stop these guys. Guess they had their sights on Gamble from the beginning—just pulled the goddamn thing right outta the frame.”

  Markham squatted down and ran his pinky finger along the wooden beam—along the outline of the gate hinges’ former position.

  “Cops took fingerprints and everything,” said Louis Hill, spitting. “But they found nothing—not even any pry marks. Said it woulda taken three or four men to pull that gate off its hinges. First I thought it mighta been kids—local boys playing a prank or something. Then I got to thinking it mighta been somebody who wanted to breed Gamble. I mean, these guys went to a lot of trouble to get him. I tell ya, that boy was a real be-ute of a—”

  “Mr. Hill, you said Gamble went missing back in November?”

  “Yep. Two weeks before Thanksgiving. I remember cuz my grandson had a game. He’s only a sophomore but he’s a starter. Quarterback. Gamble going missing messed up his head bad for that one. Felt like it was his fault. Good kid, my grandson. Always loved those—”

  “And you never saw anyone suspicious lurking around the property?”

  “I’m telling ya what I told the police. Have no idea who woulda wanted to take Gamble other than what I already told ya.”

  “Mr. Hill, the FBI has reason to believe that Gamble may have been found.”

  “He’s dead, ain’t he?” said Hill, spitting again. “Where’d they find him?”

  “You been following the news at all lately, Mr. Hill? You’ve heard about the murder of Tommy Campbell and that boy down at Watch Hill? You know what happened to them?”

  A look of grim realization suddenly washed over the old man’s face.

  “I saw the picture of that statue on the news—the one they said looked like the thing the killer made outta those bodies. You mean to say that the bottom half of that boy is a real goat? You mean to say that you think it’s Gamble?”

  “There’s a very high probability of that, yes.”

  “So you’re telling me the fella who did that to those boys was here? On my property?”

  “We won’t know for sure until I send a team here to get some DNA samples from Gamble’s offspring. We’re also going to need to question your grandson.”

  “What’s he got to do with any of this?” asked the old man, his voice trembling.

  “He was the last one to see Gamble alive. And the one who subsequently discovered him to be missing. He might be able to tell us something the police overlooked.” Markham had no intention of telling Louis Hill that his grandson could be a suspect in the case. No, he would let Rachel Sullivan and her team handle that; let them spring the search warrant on the old man if he refused to cooperate.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” said Louis Hill.

  Markham left the farmer staring blankly into Gamble’s empty stall. But more than being disturbed at the incredible amount of strength it would have taken The Michelangelo Killer to rip the gate off its hinges—if in fact it was The Michelangelo Killer who had done so—what really bothered Sam Markham as he sped away down the shady country road was the date when the crime occurred.

  November, Markham said to himself over and over again. The killer acquired the bottom half of his satyr after he already had the boy. That means the killer was confident enough in his technique for preserving humans before he murdered Michael Wenick. That means Michael Wenick might not have been his first. That means I was wrong about the timeline.

  That means I was wrong.

  Chapter 17

  It was after she hung up with Sam Markham on Wednesday, May 6th—the afternoon on which she learned she would be accompanying him to the Boston Field Office the next day—that Cathy also received word that her divorce from Steven Rogers was official. Cathy took the news with no more emotion than if she had been listening to the morning weather report—a forecast that called for cloudy skies but with only a twenty percent chance of precipitation. And be it due to the previous week’s events, or that she had long ago exhausted any love she had left for her ex-husband, Cathy closed the book on her ten-year marriage to Steven Rogers with a sense of numb resignation.

  Her ex-husband, on the other hand, seemed to have had a last minute change of heart. On the Friday before their divorce was to be final, Rogers showed up on the Polks’ doorstep virtually in tears, demanding to see his wife. And after a quick back and forth between Janet and the man to whom she would always regret introducing her best friend, Cathy emerged onto the Polks’ front porch.

  “Can we talk, Cat?” Steve shouted over Janet’s shoulder. “Please?”

  “It’s all right, Jan,” Cathy said, and Janet scowled her way back into the house.

  “I’ve been following that story all week on TV,” Steve began. “Been worrying about how you’ve been holding up through it all. I begged Janet for your new cell number, but she wouldn’t give it to me.”

  “That’s the point of the unlisted number. We agreed that any communication between us would go through our lawyers.”

  “You wanted that, not me. I wanted to work things out but you didn’t want to deal with it. You wanted this divorce, Cat. Remember that.”

  “What are you doing here, Steven?”

  “Well—it’s just that—they talked to me, too, you know. The FBI. The day after it all happened. They asked me if I had any students that might fit the profile of the guy they were looking for. Christ, I couldn’t give them anything—don’t know why the fuck they’d want to talk to me, other than my association with you. Is there something I should know about, Cat? Some other reason why you’re involved with this bullshit?”

  “They’re probably just covering their bases,” Cathy lied—it hadn’t occurred to her that the FBI might question her ex-husband.

  But he’s still in the dark. They must not have mentioned the notes.

  That was good.

  “Christ, Cat. It’s been a pretty
fucked-up week. I’ve been seeing all that stuff on TV, been hearing about what happened to Soup and that little boy and…well…being sort of involved in a way, and hearing your name all the time mentioned in that context—well, it’s really been messing with my head, Cat. Made me realize how foolish I was to let go of the person that meant the most to me in this world. And, I don’t know, with the finality of it all, our divorce staring me right in the face, I just thought that maybe—”

  “She dump you, Steven, your little graduate student?”

  “Catherine, please,” said Steve with a hand through his thick curly hair. “This has nothing to do with her. You know I’ll never feel the same way about her, about anybody, as I felt, as I still feel about you.”

  “You should have thought about that before you got your dick stuck in her thesis. I have nothing more to say to you. Good-bye, Steven.”

  Only after she was back inside, only after she heard the sound of Rogers’s BMW Z4 roadster speeding off into the distance, did Cathy realize how much the events of the previous week had changed her. For the first time in their twelve-year relationship, Cathy had not the slightest impulse to give in to Steve Rogers—not the slightest. That meant that it was truly over; she had grown stronger—so much so that when she hung up with Sam Markham the following Wednesday, Cathy felt secure enough to resign herself to the feelings for him that had already begun to blossom in her heart.

  Of course, Cathy knew very well that her interest in Markham began with their first encounter; but Cathy was also smart enough to realize that her feelings toward him had been confused not only by the overwhelming totality of the previous week’s events, but also by her acute self-awareness of her still-vulnerable broken heart. But while Markham had been pursuing leads all over New England, after quietly finishing up the spring semester at Brown, after dealing with her ex-husband and retreating with the Polks to Bonnet Shores for the weekend to help them ready their beach house, despite a somber self-consciousness that her actions were playing out in the shadow of the murders of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick—murders that, still unbeknown to the general public, had been dedicated to her—Cathy also felt a gnawing premonition that a door to a new life had been opened, and that it was Sam Markham who would carry her over the threshold.

  In addition to speaking with Markham only twice since telling him about the opening quote to Slumbering in the Stone, Cathy received a telephone call from Special Agent Rachel Sullivan the morning after she arrived at Janet’s. Sullivan advised Cathy to make an official statement to the Associated Press telling them she could offer nothing more than confirmation that the bodies of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick had indeed been found posed like Michelangelo’s Bacchus. Sullivan also advised that Cathy stay clear of any interviews—not only to maintain the integrity of the investigation, but also in the event the information about the inscription was ever leaked to the press. Cathy heeded Sullivan’s advice, and by Friday of that first week, the messages on her voice mail had dwindled down to one.

  And so, with the worst seemingly behind her, on the morning after her divorce from Steve Rogers—a bright May morning that whispered of the coming summer, her first as a single woman since her midtwenties—Cathy sat waiting on the Polks’ front porch amidst a haze of dread and excitement. Yes, now that the semester was over, now that Rogers was out of her life for good, the void that should have been the beginning of her new life was overwhelmed by a constant preoccupation with two people: The Michelangelo Killer and Sam Markham. That both of them should be inextricably tied together was to Cathy Hildebrant both a blessing and curse. Although she could not rid her mind of The Michelangelo Killer’s Bacchus, of the terror of knowing that her book had been the inspiration for that heinous crime, by that same token such thoughts invariably brought with them the presence of Sam—a presence far away but at the same time close to her in the dark, a presence that helped her through those long nights alone in the Polks’ guest room.

  “Nice to see you again,” said the FBI agent as Cathy climbed into his Trailblazer. Cathy smiled—the residue of her daydream on the porch making her blush. “You’re holding up okay, I take it?”

  “All right, I guess. And yourself?”

  “I’ll brief you in a bit.”

  Markham drove off.

  Cathy thought the FBI agent seemed chipper, more at ease than during their trip from Watch Hill, when the sudden awkwardness between them had taken Cathy completely by surprise. But today, rather than second guess herself, Cathy knew at once that Sam Markham really did think it was nice to see her. And being in his presence again, Cathy was suddenly filled with a buzzing sense of gratitude and guilt at the thought of the circumstances, of the man who had brought them together.

  “Sorry I’m late, by the way,” Markham added. “But I had to pick up some documents at the Providence office and got caught up for a sec.”

  “Probably a good thing. We should be past all the traffic by now.”

  “Yes, I’ve become quite the regular in that mess this past week.”

  “So where exactly are you now, Sam? I thought you were working in Boston.”

  “I am. The Boston Division oversees FBI operations in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire, but we have smaller satellite offices scattered about in every state. These are called Resident Agencies. We’ve got one in Providence, and they’ve set me up with a computer and my own office there so I can be local—easier for me to get somewhere fast if I need to. However, I still answer to Bill Burrell in the Boston office, and have been traveling back and forth this past week for meetings and to go over evidence.”

  “I see.”

  “The Boston office is located right in the heart of downtown, and the facilities are much bigger and more high tech than what we have in Providence. The totality of our operations there demands it—everything from public corruption and organized crime divisions to fraud and counterintelligence. Burrell was reassigned there last fall as the special agent in charge, and also to assist in the restructuring of their Violent Crime Division. I was sent up from Quantico to run a seminar on the latest research and forensic techniques being developed at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.”

  “So that’s where all the profilers hang out?”

  “Actually, there’s no such thing. The FBI does not have a job called a profiler—just a term that has sort of evolved in popular culture.”

  “Forgive me. My television education, I’m afraid.”

  “No, no,” Markham smiled. “Don’t feel silly—just one of the many public misconceptions about the Bureau. The procedures commonly associated with what has come to be known as ‘profiling’ are performed by supervisory special agents like myself back at the NCAVC in Quantico, so it was really only a coincidence that I was nearby when this Michelangelo Killer made his spectacular entry into the public eye.”

  “Yes. He really has thrown us for a loop, hasn’t he? The whole country. Can’t turn on the television or even check my e-mail without seeing a picture of Bacchus in the headlines—can’t even look at it now without thinking of Tommy Campbell and that poor little boy. So does that mean The Michelangelo Killer has gotten what he wants, Sam? Does that mean in a way he’s won?”

  “As far as turning people on to the works of Michelangelo? I would say yes. Yes he has.”

  Cathy was silent, lost in thought as Sam Markham pulled onto the Interstate.

  “I know what a strain this has been on you,” Markham said, glancing toward the Providence skyline. “And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you agreeing to join me today for this teleconference.”

  “I just hope I can be of some help,” Cathy sighed. “Like I told you on the phone, I’ve been wracking my brain this past week trying to come up with more insight into Slumbering in the Stone, but I feel like I’ve come to a dead end.”

  “The insight you’ve given me so far has been invaluable in helping me get a bead on this guy, Cathy. Also, the way you�
��ve handled yourself with the press has been more than admirable. It’s why I’m taking you to Boston today. It’s why I’ve asked Bill Burrell to bring you in as an official consultant on this case.”

  “What?” Cathy said—her heart dropping into her stomach. “You mean you want me to work for the FBI?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Cathy. And not for free, either. The Bureau is ready to negotiate a consultant’s salary with you.”

  “But Sam, I—”

  “A lot has happened in the eleven days since we first drove together to Watch Hill, Cathy—specifically with regard to the developing profile of our killer. I told you on the phone about the goat—about how The Michelangelo Killer obtained the bottom half of his Bacchus’s satyr.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, since our conversation about Slumbering in the Stone, and since concluding that The Michelangelo Killer most likely used your book as a springboard for his murders, Rachel Sullivan and her squad have been following up on those class rosters. Now, even though you can’t recall any of your former students who fit the physical and psychological profile we’ve identified for the killer thus far, from the outset Sullivan and her team have been working from the premise that the killer may have been associated with you indirectly—that is, perhaps via one of your students. She thus focused her attention first on all the male students that were listed on your rosters for the three years leading up to the publication of your book and, shortly afterward, your receipt of the anonymous notes—the latter of which, and you’ll forgive me, you told us happened shortly after your mother passed away, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told Sullivan that you did not start requiring your book for your classes until the year after it was published—the following fall, right? Almost a year after you received the quotes and the sonnet?”