“That was ages ago. It evolved into something different.”
“What do you know about the group?”
“My dad had a couple of patients who wouldn’t open up. He wanted to give them a safe and open forum to discuss their situation.”
“And you thought it was a good idea?” Connor asked, thinking about Dillon’s derisive comments about the group.
“At first. But then he broadened it and included practically everyone. I couldn’t imagine it succeeding. I asked him about it a couple times, but he told me to stay out of it. My father loved attention. He loved when people came and told him their deep, dark secrets. He loved to play God, cure all the ills in the world. Maybe his goals were noble at the beginning, but he lost it somewhere down the line.”
“You two didn’t get along, I take it.”
Eric stared out the window, his mouth a tight line. “I used to be close to my dad. But after Mom died he worked nonstop. I didn’t see much of him. Aunt Monica moved in, but she was sick, too. And then two years later, she died.”
Will flipped through his notes. “Monica was your father’s sister, correct?”
“Right. She’d gone through a divorce or something-I never really knew what happened-but shortly after my mom died she needed a place to live with Tristan.”
“Tristan?”
“My cousin.” Eric swept his hand around the room. “He painted most of these.” A cloud crossed his face.
“Where is Tristan?”
“He travels a lot, but he’s been in town the last month or so because of Saturday’s fund-raiser. The studio which has been exhibiting his work benefited from the event.”
“Do you know where we can find him?” asked Will.
Eric got up, sorted through a Rolodex, then copied an address and phone numbers onto a Post-it note. Will took it with a “Thanks.”
“Do you know who’s in Wishlist?” Will asked.
“No. I helped him construct the messaging system, but that’s all. My dad didn’t have the technical skill to put it together, but, like I said, that was it.”
Will changed the subject. “My understanding is that you just inherited a few million dollars.”
Eric sighed. “I guess all cops have to think that way. I don’t care about the money. My mother was independently wealthy and I received most of her estate. That was worth three times what my dad was worth. The only thing he got from her estate was the house.”
“What about anyone who threatened your dad? Was he scared? Angry about something?”
“Dad never got angry, even when mom died. He was unique.”
“What happened to your cousin Tristan after his mother died? Did he continue to live with you?”
“Let’s see, he was eighteen at the time. He moved out almost immediately. Tristan and Dad didn’t see eye-to-eye about a lot of things, and-”
He stopped.
“What?” Will prompted.
Eric frowned. “Tristan is the reason Wishlist was created in the first place. After Aunt Monica died, Tristan started cutting himself. He refused to talk to Dad about it, but agreed to the anonymous counseling. It seemed to work wonders. Tristan stopped self-mutilating, focused on his art, and now, seven years later, he’s a rising star in the art world. I got to hand it to him, he’s done well.”
Connor stared at Tristan’s painting across the room. At first he only saw swirls of pink and red, jagged lines fading toward the edges. Other, darker colors seemed randomly thrown onto the canvas. But from this distance, Connor made out the hint of a female shape. And the jagged lines were shadows. The fading out was drip marks.
The skin crawled on the back of Connor’s hand. Tristan’s paintings were creepy.
Faye kept the knife under the blanket. She rolled it between her fingers. Back and forth, back and forth. It nicked her once and she jumped in pleasurable surprise. She liked being surprised. It was why she liked being cut on her back. She could anticipate it, but not know the moment when it would come. Then the sting was far more exquisite.
She was going to miss her angel. For a moment, she wondered if she’d done the right thing. Maybe somehow they could have run away together.
But she had to take the blame. After all, she had killed.
Faye didn’t want to go to prison. And she damn well didn’t want to talk to any more shrinks. Playing with your mind while pretending to be your friend. They didn’t know shit, only wanted to live vicariously through you because they had no lives of their own.
She remembered one session with Dr. Bowen. He wanted to know all about her sex life. He was probably getting off on her description, so she made it as lewd and lurid as possible. She described how her lover had cut her breast, then he sucked her blood. She then did the same to him. They came together as the pain and the feelings peaked.
She smiled. Bowen never even guessed Faye was talking about his own flesh and blood.
Taking the knife in hand, she cut deeply from the inside of her right elbow to her palm. The instant, burning pain almost stopped her. She almost called for a nurse.
Instead, she bit her tongue and watched the blood spread, seeping through the sheet, through the cotton blanket, spreading…
THIRTY
“Faye’s dead,” Cami said.
His hand shook as he held the phone to his ear. “Wh-what?”
“I was watching the hospital, just to see what they were going to do with Faye, and Julia Chandler went into her room. Right after she came out, a nurse went in and then called for doctors and an alarm went off. I saw them take Faye’s body from the room.”
Didn’t Faye know how much he needed her? That they were a team? He was empowered with her at his side, knowing and understanding his dark needs. Offering him her trust and faith.
Now she was dead.
“Why would Chandler hurt her? She has no reason.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t something Chandler did, but something she said. Threatened her. You know how those prosecutor types all think they have the authority to do anything they damn well please. Maybe she told Faye she’d be locked up for life, or put on Death Row, or that they were going to put her on drugs to force her to talk. I don’t know, but I think she was driven to suicide. Faye is dead and I just know Julia Chandler is responsible.”
That made sense. Julia Chandler had been talking to everyone. She’d made the connection to Jason Ridge. She had been a problem and he should have done something about her earlier, but he never thought it would go this far. He didn’t think Faye would end up dead, or that Chandler would push her to kill herself.
Didn’t they have any propriety in that hospital? Didn’t they have doctors who cared about their patients?
What was he thinking? There was no Hippocratic oath. Doctors did whatever the hell they wanted. They had all the control.
Like Garrett Bowen. He decided to be God for a day and stole the only solid thing in his life.
“Are you there?” Cami’s voice grated on him.
“I’m here.” He squeezed his eyes closed, surprised to find he was crying.
“What are you going to do about Julia Chandler?”
There was a knock on his front door. “Hold on.”
Cautious, he glanced out his bedroom window, then pulled back.
“I’ll take care of it.” He hung up.
In her office, Julia released a long, pent-up sigh. She’d spent the last hour being reprimanded by Andrew Stanton for interfering in an investigation. She justified her actions without emotion, the entire time scared to death that he’d fire her.
In the end, he put a reprimand in her file and took her off leave effective next Monday.
She planned to flip through messages, talk to her legal assistant, and wait for Connor to call when he was done talking to Garrett Bowen’s son. Her cell phone rang.
“Is this Julia Chandler with the San Diego District Attorney’s Office?” the voice said.
“Yes.”
“I’
m Harriet Jameson from the Palo Alto Police Department. I spoke with you yesterday about a student at Stanford, Michelle O’Dell.”
“Right. Did you talk to her?”
“No. The address you gave me is a mail drop, not a residence. I ran the phone number and discovered it’s a cell phone forwarded to another cell phone with a six-one-nine prefix.”
“San Diego,” Julia said.
“I talked to the dean of students first thing this morning. He went through the student records and said that a Michelle O’Dell of San Diego, California, is a registered student in an independent study program.”
“Which means what?”
“She only has to meet with her counselor once a month and turn in her assignments. The last meeting was two weeks ago and she is current with her assignments.”
“Thank you, Harriet. I appreciate your following up for me.” Julia hung up the phone.
Michelle O’Dell wasn’t at Stanford. She was most certainly the mysterious “Cami” Connor had run into at Garrett Bowen’s house. And she was also probably the “Cami” that Faye had responded to, but denied knowing, during her interview, as well as the lascivious blonde Billy Thompson said had tried to recruit him.
Michelle O’Dell had been Shannon’s best friend. Had Shannon told her everything that had happened with Jason Ridge? Maybe Michelle blamed herself in some way for Shannon’s suicide, that she hadn’t helped her friend after Jason had gotten just a slap on the wrist.
But why such an elaborate plan? What did Michelle hope to gain from this string of murders?
She was just leaving to walk to the parking garage down the street when her cell phone rang, again.
“Chandler,” she said, walking down the hall. It was after six and there were a few people in the building, but it was mostly empty.
“Julia, it’s Dillon Kincaid. Faye Kessler committed suicide.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Garrett Bowen’s nephew, Tristan Lord, lived in a converted warehouse on the edge of the renovated cultural district. The three-story loft stood on a short cliff near the ocean, up the hill from the Art Center where his paintings were shown. Will knocked on the metal door.
“What are you thinking?” Connor asked Will.
“Maybe Eric Bowen was leading us down the wrong path. Did you really see something in that picture?”
Connor sheepishly admitted it. “A woman cutting herself.”
“Huh. All I saw were bright splotches.”
Will called dispatch and learned that the loft was owned by Garrett Bowen. All utilities and taxes were paid by him. Tristan Lord had no record, not even a parking ticket. He had a driver’s license and a passport. Will had another detective looking into his travel history. “And while you’re at it, put a hold on his passport. I don’t want him skipping out on us before we get a chance to talk to him.”
They knocked again, but heard no movement inside. They walked around the side. The cliffs went straight down thirty feet to a rocky beach. Connor glanced up at the deck above them; no one was there.
“Why don’t you put a BOLO on him?” Connor suggested.
Will put in the be-on-the-lookout order as they walked back to the car. “Questioning only. I don’t want him totally spooked.”
They drove down the hill to Tristan Lord’s art studio. Tristan wasn’t there either, but they went in and looked around.
“They call this art?” Will said. “I can’t tell what anything is supposed to be.”
“You’re supposed to use your imagination,” Connor said.
“I’d never have taken you for the arty type,” Will said.
“And I always thought you were.”
While Will talked to the studio’s art director, Connor looked at the paintings. One in particular disturbed him, and he didn’t know why.
“Haunting, isn’t it?” The curator approached. “Tristan Lord is immensely talented. His work is displayed at the Washington, D.C., Museum of Art and we’re honored that he opened a studio here. His presence will help build our center.”
“Hmm.” Connor didn’t want the small talk. He wanted to figure out why this particular painting bothered him.
Like the painting in Eric Bowen’s town house, this was predominantly red, pink, and orange, with dark slashes at random intervals. Slashes, but maybe not random. He tilted his head. Saw something. He couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it was his imagination and there was really nothing there.
“Tristan’s uniqueness comes from perspective,” the curator continued as if Connor hadn’t been ignoring him. “From one angle you see one thing, from another you see something completely different.”
Connor glanced around. The art studio was a three-story open warehouse with multiple levels that displayed different works of art under premium lighting conditions. Connor ran across the floor, almost knocked over a statue, and ran up a spiral staircase that led to the third-floor balcony.
The distance brought clarity. The dark slashes made up another female body, naked, this one hanging from a chandelier. An eye had been drawn into her back. In the corner was a football with a faint number 10.
Jason Ridge had been number 10.
Another layer coated the painting. Connor changed perspective by moving several feet to the right and saw the hanging image was now a man. He also had an eye in his back.
An eye for an eye.
Vengeance. Revenge. Garrett Bowen for Shannon Chase.
Who would care about the suicide death of a young cheerleader? They’d already ruled out her father, three thousand miles away in Maine with an alibi. But her mother was nowhere to be found. And what about that Cami he’d encountered at Bowen’s house?
But where did Tristan Lord fit into this? He was a mere relative, the son of Garrett’s sister.
Was it Connor’s imagination that saw something in the paintings, things that wouldn’t be admissible in court?
“Hey, Kincaid!” Will shouted from the bottom floor. “Get your ass down here.” He was animatedly talking into his cell phone.
Connor ran down the stairs two at a time. “What?”
“Faye Kessler. She’s dead. Someone smuggled in a knife.”
Julia pictured the scars all over Faye’s body, scars the girl had put there or allowed to be carved into her skin. Faye had been self-mutilating for years; she had problems long before she got wrapped up with Michelle O’Dell and the others, long before she killed.
Julia pulled up in front of the hospital at a vacant meter and glanced at the hours of operation. It was after six, but the meter ran until seven p.m., so she fumbled for a couple of quarters. She knew how the meter maids worked-wait until five minutes before the meter day ran out and ticket everyone. Julia had gotten a half-dozen tickets that way.
She was about to put two quarters in when she sensed someone rapidly approaching her from behind. Before she could turn around, scream, or run, one hand covered her mouth while the other jabbed something sharp into her neck.
She kicked violently backward, but then her limbs grew suddenly heavy as her head grew light.
THIRTY-ONE
“What the hell happened?” Dillon arrived at the hospital just as Connor and Will ran up the stairs to Faye Kessler’s room. Connor could see his brother was extremely upset.
Officer Diaz looked distraught. “I–I don’t know how she did it.”
“Tell me everyone who went into that room after I left.”
“Only two nurses!”
“Two nurses?”
“One nurse about fifteen minutes after you left. Her ID checked out. She was in there for about seven minutes, then left. She signed the log here.”
“And the other?”
“Her,” Diaz nodded toward the nurse sitting in the nurses’ station, her head in her hands. “She came in thirty minutes ago and found Miss Kessler.”
Rena Klein, RN, was shaken. “I make my rounds every two hours. No patient is left alone for more than two hours. We check their vi
tals, talk to them. We have everyone on 24/7 surveillance.”
“Where are the tapes kept?” Will asked.
“At the central security desk in the basement.”
The three men went down to the basement. The security chief was already there, expecting them.
“I have the tape from Ms. Kessler’s room.”
“Run it,” Dillon said, tight-lipped.
He started the black-and-white tape from the time Dillon and Julia left. There were three angles of tape into the room. One showed the view from the observation area, which showed most of the room plus the patient. The second was above the patient, showing only the bed. The third focused on the door.
The door opened and a young nurse came in.
“What did her ID say?” Will asked.
“Isabel Younger,” said Officer Diaz. “But I found out Younger’s supposed to be off-duty today.”
“Pull her employment files and photograph.”
The security chief nodded to an assistant, who scurried off.
On the videotape, words were exchanged between patient and nurse. The nurse picked up Faye’s wrist and looked at her own wrist, as if taking Faye’s pulse.
“The nurse is not wearing a watch,” Connor said.
“And her fingers aren’t on the pulse point,” Dillon added.
The woman on the video wrote something down on a chart and handed Faye a small cup, then the water from the side table.
“She drugged her,” Will said.
“We’ll run a tox screen for psychotics and other drugs,” Dillon said.
More conversation. Then the “nurse” left. Faye lay there.
Connor watched the second camera. Faye had something in her hand under the blanket. She was moving her hand back and forth. For the first time that Connor had seen, Faye’s face was peaceful. Almost joyous. She rolled to her right side. Pain crossed her face, but she just lay there, eyes half closed. Sleeping? No. Darkness spread under the blanket. Blood. It looked black on the black-and-white video.
“Why didn’t anyone see this?” Dillon demanded.
“We did and called the nurse. But it was too late.”
See No Evil e-2 Page 29