The Death Artist Read online

  A suicide that the young detective McKinnon discovered hanging from an attic beam almost a full two weeks after the knotted sheet had stopped all air and blood to the brain and heart.

  Prying up floor planks of that oh-so-innocent-looking young man’s basement apartment to discover the two bodies in advanced states of decomposition.

  Now Kate was taking the stairs two at time, stumbling over her heels, the stairwell a blur, that damn smell getting stronger, killing other senses: She heard nothing, did not feel the scrape to her hand when she tripped on the top step of the second landing, was blind to the blood surfacing on her palm, across her knuckles. But at the top of the third-story landing Willie came into sharp focus, slumped against the wall, his head forward on his chest.

  Scraping her knees against dirty floorboards, Kate got a hand under his chin, lifted his head, listened—Yes, he’s breathing—fumbled in her bag for a mentholated Chap Stick, got it under his nose.

  He blinked.

  “Jesus—Willie! Are you all right? What happened?”

  There were tears in his startling green eyes.

  Kate followed his line of vision to the open apartment door. She turned back, gazed into his eyes, and in that one terrible moment she knew.

  She pulled herself up and took the necessary steps toward the open door, that smell coming at her.

  The Marilyn Monroe pillow was poking out from under the couch. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Please. Please. Please. Let me be wrong. Kate covered her nose with her arm, leaned against a wall for support, and then she was turning, taking in the dark vertical streaks and splatters of blood on the opposite wall, and lifting her feet from something thick and sticky on the floor, trying to make sense of the twisted leg jutting out from the space between the sink and the refrigerator. And then there was Elena’s face. Elena’s beautiful face—or what was left of it.

  Kate turned away fast, spinning, heart pounding, the smell of death so thick it sucked the oxygen from her lungs. No. No. No. She squeezed her eyes shut. The bad scene hovered behind her. But no. She would not look, would not validate it. Oh, God. This isn’t happening. I’m saving children now, not losing them.

  She was glued against the wall, the ability to put one foot in front of the other impossible.

  She was too late. Again.

  Waves of impotence and despair rippled through her, explosions, like tiny firecrackers, jitterbugged all over her body—fingers, toes, arms, legs, torso. Her organs felt as though they were imploding and exploding all at once. For a moment Kate truly believed she would die. Yes. Let me die. Hail Marys, bits of the Lord’s Prayer, fragments of Sunday-morning service in Latin that she didn’t think she knew were buzzing in her head.

  She swiped the tears from her cheeks, opened her eyes.

  Just that one garish pillow out of place on a bare wood floor. The place was too damn neat, that was for sure. As if nothing had happened here. No blood on the living room floor or walls.

  In the bedroom—How did she get there? She had no memory of moving. The patchwork quilt was folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Above it one of Willie’s early works, a small assemblage where he’d taken a page of Elena’s handwritten music, cut it up, rearranged the notes, glued and sealed them onto fragments of metal and wood, glazed over them so that you could just make them out. It was so damn beautiful, Kate was crying again, feeling as though her heart were being pulverized. She swallowed hard, looked away, noted that the gate on the tiny bedroom window was locked and secure.

  At the doorway to the living room she hesitated, prayed. Maybe that fierce, punishing God, the one she was schooled on, would perform one of his miracles and it would not be Elena.

  But no. Once again, he’d let her down. For even now, with the body so bloated with gases, Elena’s face was recognizable.

  My God. How many stabs does it take to kill one girl?

  Kate fought the sickness rising in her, tried to count them, but couldn’t; Elena’s torn clothes were so blood-soaked that it looked like one huge wound.

  Her eyes followed the vertical streaks of blood on the wall down to the floor where Elena had slid and bled to death.

  Just a body.

  Just a body.

  Just a body.

  A mantra Kate repeated to forget this was Elena, her little girl. Just a body. Just a body. Just a body. Again and again, in her mind, and aloud: “Just a body . . .” as she backed out of the apartment, careful not to touch anything, almost not breathing.

  Outside, Willie sat on the front stoop while Kate finished calling the police. That vision he’d had earlier—the slicing arm, a scream—was this what he’d been seeing? He shivered, rubbed at his eyes with the arm of his leather jacket, caught a whiff of something sour. He sniffed.

  “Nothing gets rid of that smell,” Kate said in a voice so flat that it surprised her. When did it happen—this switch into her old self, the cop, whom she’d never wanted to be again? She could see from the look on Willie’s face that she was scaring him. But she’d already made her decision—or it was made for her. No turning back now. Not if she was going to do something about this. And no way this hideous act would go unpunished. No fucking way. “You sure you didn’t touch anything?”

  “I told you. I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t think, Willie. You have to know.”

  “Well, I don’t, okay? I wasn’t in there long. I just don’t know! Shit. Shit. Shit!” He beat his hand against the brick wall. There were tears on his cheeks.

  Okay, Kate would risk being human. She put her arms around Willie’s shoulders, and—boom! That was it: her hands were shaking, her chin quivering; one more minute and she would be fucking Jell-O. She pulled away fast. “Damn!” She sucked air into her lungs, tried to think of what to do next. Anything to keep from shattering. “There must be someone who saw something. Stay put.”

  At the first-floor apartment she turned her diamond ring into her palm, rapped at the door with the back of her fist. No answer. Down the hall, behind the door of the back apartment, there were slow, shuffling footsteps, then a fraction of an elderly woman’s face, eighty, maybe older, appeared in the two inches between the door and the chain lock.

  “Vat? Vat is it?” A scratchy voice heavy with Eastern European traces.

  There were sirens in the distance.

  “There’s been an . . . accident,” said Kate. “I need to talk to you.”

  “You the police?”

  “No, I—I’m a friend.”

  The sirens were right outside now. What to do? Try to get something out of the old woman or go outside and protect Willie? The old woman made the decision for her, slammed the door shut. Whatever it was she would or would not say would now belong to the police.

  4

  The landing outside Elena’s apartment was littered with cops. The tech team had descended on the place like antic, oversize roaches, infesting every corner. Kate peered in through the door. A woman in a dark brown pantsuit pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The next minute she was reaching under Elena’s blood-soaked blouse—the thin stained cotton undulating as if an alien creature were about to burst from Elena’s torso. Kate attempted to give her statement without crying or screaming to a cop young enough to be her son. Down at the end of the hallway, illuminated under a single bulb hanging from a chain, a uniform was talking, leaning into a guy wearing a bow tie. A detective, Kate figured, and high up, from the attitude the guy seemed to radiate. Kate strained to hear what the uniform was saying. “The old lady in One B, in the back, says she saw a black man in here last time she saw the girl alive.” Bow Tie caught Kate’s eye, turned the uniform around, whispered as he wrote something into a little NYPD notepad.

  The young cop taking Kate’s statement asked, “And then?”

  “What?” A bulb popped, flashed inside the apartment. “Oh. Right.” Kate continued with facts: time she arrived on the scene, called the cops. Another flash. This time, Kate was blinded—and thankful for it. She’d been stari
ng at the ME, who had her fingers deep in Elena’s mouth just as the photographer took his shot.

  Kate went numb as a detective passed by, and then a couple of uniforms slid Elena’s corpse into a dark green body bag.

  Willie stared past the crowd, his vision blurred by tears.

  “Why do I do it? No one wants this shit! Who do I paint for?”

  When was that? Two, no, three years ago. Just before it all started happening for him, when he was ready to give up, quit painting, get a nine-to-five. Willie close to tears. Elena, taking his hand, speaking in her soft but authoritative voice. “You paint for yourself. It’s important what you do, Willie, your painting. And someday people will see that. It’s real, Willie. It’s who you are. Hold on to that.” Elena looking at him, total belief, confidence in him, right there in her eyes, on her face. The beauty of that moment. He’d replayed it often, whenever he was frustrated, close to quitting.

  For a moment Willie was still in the middle of that perfect moment with Elena, desperately trying to hold on to it.

  Curiosity seekers had filled the block. A couple of uniforms kept them at bay. Lots of cop cars, double-parked, flashers going. More uniforms and suits with cameras, bags, cases, surged up the stairs past Willie, into the tenement.

  Elena. Murdered. At once so real and totally unacceptable. He should have insisted Elena get the hell out of this lousy neighborhood. And he had. Lots of times. But Elena always did what she wanted. Willie banged his hand against the wall, felt no pain.

  “Hey, you. Tell me this: Exactly what the fuck were you doing here?” This from that guy on the upper landing, with the little NYPD notepad, now staring into Willie’s face. He was maybe thirty-five, with a flattop, in plain clothes—if you could call a maroon paisley bow tie plain clothes.

  But suddenly Kate was there, too, laying her hand on the guy’s shoulder. “I asked him to meet me here. What’s the problem?”

  Bow Tie turned to face her. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Name’s Katherine McKinnon-Rothstein.” She thought fast. “Friend of Chief of Police Tapell’s.”

  She saw the name register in the guy’s eyes, could feel him giving her the once-over—her clothes, Prada bag, even her uptown hair. The whole time he was making a sucking noise, as if he were trying to get his tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth. “Randy Mead,” he said, not offering his hand, “Chief of Homicide, Special Task Force. And you’re here . . . why?” His eyes, which were already small, narrowed to horizontal slits.

  “Because I know the girl,” said Kate.

  “Well, the kid here was the first on the scene. He’s gotta give a statement. It’s procedure.”

  “I know all about procedure.”

  Mead’s bow tie did a little blip over his bony Adam’s apple. “Oh, really?”

  “I was ten years on the force, in Queens,” said Kate. “Astoria. Homicide and missing persons my specialty.”

  “Assstorrrria.” Mead rolled the word around derisively.

  Willie was quiet, watching Kate, a look on his face as if he was either impressed or in shock. Had she ever told him she’d been a cop? She couldn’t remember.

  “Very impressive,” said Mead.

  “Some people thought so.” She crushed out a Marlboro under her heel. Mead, at about five feet ten, was practically cowering under her.

  “Listen, man,” Willie interrupted. “You gotta do something about—”

  Kate cut him off. “I’ll take care of this. Go wait in my car, Willie. Please.”

  She led Mead back to the front of Elena’s building. He sucked his teeth like a pissed-off rattlesnake. “You might remember,” he said, “that he who finds the body is often the perp.”

  “Don’t give me that Cop 101 crap, okay? I told you. It was all arranged. He was meeting me here. And the girl . . .” Kate stumbled a moment. No. Not just some girl. She could feel her emotions lining up at the starting gate, kicking up their heels like anxious Thoroughbreds. She took a deep breath. “And Elena,” she said calmly, “has been dead for some time. I’m sure you can see that.”

  “Friend of our esteemed Chief Tapell’s, huh?” Mead offered up a low-rent smile.

  “Look,” she said softly, “I don’t mean to step on your toes. I know you’ve got a job to do. I’m just trying to help, explain a few—”

  “Well, that’s real sweet of you . . . Mrs. Rothstein, was it? But I think I can handle it from here.”

  Oh, man. Kate had to hold back from lifting Mr. Chief of Homicide right off the ground by his stupid fucking bow tie, watch his face turn blue. For a minute, her hands were twitching by her sides. But she was cool. The truth was, all that anger, right there, ready to explode, scared the hell out of her.

  She managed to occupy her hands with her cell phone, hit the auto dial for Richard’s office, but only got the machine. No luck with his cell phone either. Damn.

  Mead took the opportunity to split, confer with a couple of uniforms, then he turned back, spit out the words: “Hey! You! Missus, uh—ex-cop! And your friend. Hang around. We need statements from both of you.”

  Even with the windows open, the air inside Kate’s car had gone sour. Willie could not hear what Mead and Kate were saying, but it did not look friendly—Mead pointing in his direction, then mumbling something to a couple of uniforms. Willie tried to signal Kate, but she’d already turned back into the building. More suits and uniforms followed her. What they did inside, Willie could only guess at. Dust for fingerprints? Photograph the scene?

  Willie turned Kate’s ignition and switched on the radio, searched for something to distract him.

  Babyface, crooning a sappy R & B ballad about becoming a father.

  It was enough to make Willie think about the father he never knew. What was he like? Could he draw? Willie never asked his mother—she couldn’t draw at all—and it must’ve come from somewhere. Willie could feel the tears on his cheeks—for Elena, or the father he had never known?

  Babyface slid into a high falsetto, but the words no longer made any sense.

  The crackle of a police phone startled him. A cop in the patrol car beside him, calling in details: “Female, Hispanic, stab wounds . . .”

  “Excuse me.” The man flashes the large Latino woman beside him a murderous look. Every time she strains to get a better view of the scene, her enormous straw tote slams into his thigh.

  “Is exciting, no?” she says, staring up at the tenement steps, all the cops and technicians coming and going, then nodding at the police cars and ambulance and Crime Scene RV that are crowding the street, their sirens providing a shrieking slasher-movie sound track to the already cinematic scene.

  “A girl’s death? A young woman’s life snuffed out? You call that exciting?”

  The Latino woman’s dark eyes blink with shame. “Oh,” she says softly. “I did not know it was a girl. A young girl.” Then, suspicious, she asks, “How do you know this? You live in this building?” The woman squints at him, but he is no longer paying attention, because just then, when she asks her stupid question, his entire body stiffens, his eyes, ears, every muscle in his body shift, ever so slightly, but with absolute certainty, toward the brownstone stairs. For just now, Kate is stepping through the door, and quietly, almost imperceptibly, except to him, he gasps a breath.

  Magnificent.

  He stares, transfixed, as Kate fumbles to light a cigarette, sucks all that tar and nicotine into her lungs, where, he believes, he can actually see it cloud her organs, impede her pounding heart, still the adrenaline that is racing through her arteries.

  He takes a couple of steps backward, allows the thrill-seeking crowd to offer up a shield.

  Well, now, what do you make of it?

  He tries to telegraph this question to Kate, concentrating so hard that his head begins to ache.

  Kate puffed on her Marlboro, her eyes on the crowd, but not really looking. If only she would remember that Cop 101 crap—the part about how some psychos enjoy being part of
the scene, like to come oh-so-close, get all hot and bothered watching others clean up their mess.

  And then she did.

  Like the simple flip of a switch, the cloud lifted from Kate’s eyes. She scanned the crowd. But too late.

  He’s already fallen back, swallowed by the throng. He can no longer see her. But that’s okay. He’s got to get moving. That feeling is coming over him again, even stronger this time. And the man is waiting. If he only knew what was in store for him.

  “Damn it.” Kate flipped the ignition key. “You’re going to run my battery down. Jesus, Willie.”

  Willie’s mouth opened as if he was about to say something, but no sound came out. He looked as if he might cry.

  “Oh, fuck. I’m sorry.” Kate felt like a total shit. A part of her wanted to hug him and hold him, and cry for the rest of her goddamn life. But no way she could chance it. Not now, not here, in front of Elena’s building with a dozen cop cars and three dozen cops. And not if she was going to hold it together long enough to get some answers. “You’re going to have to give a statement,” she said, jamming in the car lighter, pulling a Marlboro from her pack.

  “What were you and that asshole in the bow tie talking about, pointing at me?”

  “About your statement, that’s all.” The lighter glowed like a hot coal. Kate inhaled, pulled more smoke into her lungs.

  A couple of uniforms headed toward the car.

  “It’ll be okay,” said Kate, leaning across Willie, popping his door open. “Just tell them the truth.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “I’ve got something to take care of.” A deep breath. “Something I’ve got to—need to do.”

  Willie flashed an incredulous you-are-a-rat-deserting-a-ship look, and Kate felt like one.

  “Hey,” she said softly, her eyes on his. “You’ll be fine. I’ll call Richard, have him meet you at the station.”

  Willie didn’t even look at her as he dragged himself out of the car.

  Kate turned the ignition key, revved the engine, then rolled down her window. “Willie. Wait.” She offered up a couple of tissues. “Wipe the blood off your sneakers.”