But as she stood there with her eyes closed, listening to the soft music and keeping her mind as blank as possible, a strange thing began to happen. It was almost as if she drifted away, almost as if she fell asleep and began dreaming. The dream was peaceful, with soft music in the background and the sound of her own steady breathing up close, and all she could see was blue sky stretching forever, the expanse broken only intermittently by fluffy white clouds. She seemed to be far away, and getting farther away moment by moment, and yet she could still hear the music, hear herself breathing, smell the familiar scents of her studio.
It was a very peculiar feeling. It seemed to last only a moment or two, yet she had the strong sense of the passage of time, and when she opened her eyes abruptly with an odd, jarring sensation of shock, it was to find herself standing at her worktable with her back to the easel. Her palette lay before her, covered with gobs and blobs of paint she didn’t remember selecting.
When she looked at her hands, it was to see more paint, bright and dark flecks and smears of color on her skin from wrists to fingertips and, even more, heavily spattered on and completely ruining her sweater. As if she’d been working hard, and for a long time. When she touched the paint on her sweater hesitantly, most of it felt nearly dry to the touch. She was using acrylic paints rather than oil, but still…
Her fingers felt stiff, cramped, and there was an ache between her shoulder blades, the sort of ache she got only after hours working at her easel.
There was no clock in the studio. Maggie fumbled to push up the paint-encrusted sleeve of her sweater to see her watch and was deeply disturbed to see it was after midnight.
Hours. She’d been in here for hours.
She gripped the edge of the worktable, conscious now that her breathing was no longer steady, that she was acutely aware of the canvas on the easel behind her. She could feel it there, whatever it was she had painted in a state of virtual unconsciousness, almost as if it leaned toward her, reached out for her…
She was terrified to turn around.
“Paint on canvas,” she whispered. “That’s all it is. Just paint on canvas. Probably not even a recognizable image. How could it be, when my eyes were closed, when I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular?” Maggie drew a deep breath. “There won’t be anything there, except paint on canvas. That’s all.”
But even with those reasonable words said aloud like a mantra, it took all the self-command Maggie could muster to force herself to turn around and look at what she had done.
“Jesus,” she whispered, staring in horror at what was unquestionably the best work she’d ever done.
The painting, all too hideously complete, was done almost entirely in slashes of black and flesh tones and scarlet, yet for all the limited use of color the central image looked so lifelike that it might have breathed.
If it could have breathed.
The woman lay sprawled against a dim, indistinct background, her wispy dark hair fanned out around her head and visible only because of the blood streaking the strands. Her head was slightly tilted and turned so that she seemed to gaze at the watcher in a mute plea for help that had never come.
Between her open, bruised, and puffy eyelids, more darkness peered out because her eyes were gone, the empty sockets seeping blood that trickled down her temples.
Her sensitive mouth was slightly open, the delicate lines of her lips misshapen by swelling and bruising, and another thin line of blood trailed down over her chin and jaw. On the other side of her face, an ugly bruise marred the high cheekbone.
She was naked, her body so petite it almost seemed childlike with its small, high breasts and gently rounded belly. But there was nothing childlike about what had been done to her. The breasts bore more horrible bruising and one nipple was missing, the ragged wound showing the unmistakable marks of teeth. The rounded belly had also been sickeningly mutilated, laid open from the sternum to the pubic bone in a single deep slash agape in wet scarlet.
Her legs were splayed wide, knees slightly raised, and more blood streaked her thighs and had pooled between them in a congealing puddle of crimson and maroon.
Around one delicate ankle was a thin gold chain from which dangled a tiny gold heart.
It was that final poignant detail that shattered Maggie’s frozen horror. She dropped to her knees, fighting to keep from retching, unable to tear her eyes away from the painting, from the dreadful image of a dead woman she had never seen before in her life.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6
It was something of a joke around the department that Luke Drummond was proud of the fancy conference room in his station, proud of the wide, polished table that could seat more than twelve in nicely comfortable chairs and provide them lots of elbow room in which to… do whatever it was he pictured them doing in the room. Nobody had ever been quite clear on what that might be.
The truth was, the room had never been used for anything more than an occasional hand of poker when the late shift got bored. Until now, anyway.
Andy decided it was high time the conference room was actually used for something remotely resembling police work, and since both the usual investigatory methods and Scott and Jennifer’s work were beginning to pile up paper they needed to keep handy and in some kind of order, it seemed logical to use that space. So Andy commandeered the room and within a couple of hours that morning had efficiently shifted the bulk of the files and other paperwork on the investigation from various desks in the bullpen to the conference room.
The room had at least been set up to facilitate such a move, so it was a simple task to have the switchboard reroute relevant calls to the multiline phones in there, and Andy pretty much rerouted himself to the room on a semipermanent basis.
“We also have a bit more privacy in here,” he told Scott and Jennifer when they gathered there shortly before lunchtime. “I won’t declare this room off limits to those not actively involved in the investigation, but I will make it known that anything in here is to be considered confidential.”
Jennifer shifted a cinnamon toothpick to the other side of her mouth and said, “And by doing so we can hope that they won’t think we’re nuts or, if they do, that they won’t talk about how nuts we are.”
Andy shook his head. “I doubt anybody’s going to think we’re completely nuts, not with this.” He nodded toward the bulletin board they had just finished setting up. “We have sketches, photos, or descriptions of four victims in 1934 closely matching four of our victims. That has to be more than coincidence, and it has to mean something.”
“Yeah, but what?” Scott wondered.
“That’s what we have to determine. Which means we’ll use every source we can until we figure it out.”
“Does that mean you’re telling Garrett about this?” Jennifer asked.
“Yeah. Drummond insisted we keep some of the crime-scene and victim details confidential, but he didn’t say a damned thing about our speculation and lines of research. Garrett’s smart, and he has sources we can use. So I’m telling him. Maggie too. I’ll try to get them both in here this afternoon.”
Jennifer tapped the folded newspaper lying on the table before her. “Well, since Garrett got his picture in the paper today and the reporters are hotly speculating that he’s assisting the police because of his sister being a victim, I imagine you’ll be hearing from an unhappy Luke any time now.”
Andy sighed. “Yeah, I know. What the hell was I doing letting a civilian into the Mitchell house when our forensics team was still working there, for Christ’s sake. I know what he’ll say. And if he doesn’t like the way I’m running this investigation, he can run it himself.”