A Grave Talent (11 page)

"Maybe that's it. She wouldn't be the first psychopath who arranged to be caught. 'Stop me before I do it again,' that sort of thing."

"Do you honestly think so?"

He squinted out the side window, but saw only the reflection of the dashboard lights and his own unhappy face.

"No, I don't. She looked like a badly beaten ex-con who's trying to decide whether or not to stand up on her feet, not like a murderer who's half afraid of being caught and half afraid of not being caught. She didn't look afraid at all, for that matter. Maybe she really is crazy. I dunno, we'll have to find out what Dodson says tomorrow and see the results from the lab and the prints boys. Oh, hell, I shouldn't have had that Scotch on an empty stomach, it's making me all weepy. Next thing you know I'll be telling you about my ex-wife. I'm tired. Do you need me to keep you awake?"

"No, I'm fine," she lied. "Will it disturb you if I listen to the radio?"

"Nothing disturbs me when I'm asleep," he snorted, and soon proved it.

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Kate reached for the car radio and pushed various selector buttons until the muttering of voices filled the car. For a long and tiresome drive a severe irritant is called for, and there is nothing, but nothing more irritating than listening to one of those twenty-four-hour talk shows, particularly at night, when the callers are regulars who glory in their moments of authority, commanding the airwaves and the attention of hundreds, even thousands, of ears. The current caller was working himself into a rant about oil drillers and water wells, with brief excursions into the weight of concrete and the encroachment of fill into the Bay. It wasn't until the moderator cut him off that Kate learned the topic for the evening, which was earthquakes, the prediction of and how to prepare for. Floods might be more appropriate, she thought. The little car suddenly slowed and veered as it hit a deep wash of water from a blocked drain. The noisy burst of spray from below and the sharp change of speed half woke Hawkin, who looked around blankly and went back to sleep.

Kate carefully poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos, barely taking her eyes from the road. She drove with her left hand on the wheel, sipping, listening to the radio with half an ear, enjoying the sensation of being a warm, dry speck pushing through a cold and nasty universe.

After a few miles a pair of headlights came blurring at her, fellow travelers in the storm. She glanced at Hawkin as the lights passed and had etched onto her inner eye the brief, clear image of a younger man, the lines and hardness of the face softened, vulnerable. Innocent.

It was a disturbing view of an already disturbing man. Kate did not want to see the vulnerable side of Al Hawkin, no more than she wanted to be emotionally intimate with any of the people she worked with. She had labored long and hard on the defenses around her life, defenses all the more efficient for being nearly invisible, and did not wish to see them breached now.

It is no easy job, being a police officer. For a woman it is an impossible job, fitting into the masculine world of the station while retaining her identity as a woman. For a woman to be a street cop she must, from the first day in police academy, create a clear picture of what is required of her, and stick to it without wavering: she must be tough but not coarse, friendly but not obsequious, unaggressive but ready without a moment's hesitation to hurl into a violent confrontation. Impossible, but women do it. Kate had done it. She had also pushed and scrambled and sweated the books to work herself into an early promotion off the streets, knowing the resentment and mistrust her single-minded ambition would cause.

Those feelings and the tensions they had created had undoubtedly contributed to the willingness San Jose had shown in giving her to San Francisco, but once there she had made it her business to play down her urge to competitiveness. For once, she would just fit in, as much as her private self would allow. The men and women she worked with found her friendly and easygoing, to a point. Everyone knew that she ran and worked out at the gym, that she liked pasta and baseball and spicy little carnations, that she had an ongoing feud with the plumber. Everyone knew that Casey could be counted on for donations to shower gifts, for trading shifts so you could get to your sister's wedding or your aunt's funeral, for a wicked accuracy with the bat on the departmental team, for being a good cop to have at your side in a tight place. Yet not one of them had been inside her home, knew what she did in her off hours, knew how or with whom she lived. Her intensely private home life she concealed by the very openness of her work life. It was a somewhat schizophrenic way to live, she knew, but she had found that the only way she could continue as a cop was to preserve a place totally apart where she could retreat. No work came home, no colleagues came inside. Most of them didn't even realize that they hadn't been invited.

Hawkin, though. She had a feeling that Al Hawkin's eyes missed very little. Not that he would push her--she'd had to deal with a number of people, men and women, who wanted to be buddies, who felt the presence of a hidden Kate and wanted to pick at it, like fingers on a scab. She could deal with these--it had become almost a game a couple of times--but Al Hawkin was different.

Al Hawkin, she knew by now, was totally involved with whatever case he was on. He would eat, sleep, and drink the case, and be eaten by it, until it ended. Any partner of his who wanted to be more than an assistant would have to follow him at least part of the way down that road. It was something Kate had always resisted, but she felt the threat of it now, radiating from this sleeping man at her side.

The ease with which he plunged into an all-revealing, vulnerable state of unconsciousness was perhaps the most troubling thing of all. Kate herself never slept in the presence of strangers, on a plane, with a half-known man she'd taken to her bed. Exhausting hours later she would invariably get off the plane, out of the bed, red-eyed, unable to let go and sleep until she was by herself.

Except for Lee, of course. With Lee, at home, for the last four years, she had let go entirely, utterly. With Lee, and with no one else, she was absolutely vulnerable, freely open to crushing criticism or heart-filling communion. With Lee. Alone.

How could a person sleep with a stranger watching? Another image came from out of the long, busy day, that of Vaun Adams at the door of her house: the beauty of the fairy-tale princess--blackest hair, palest skin, red lips, ethereal eyes--and the flat expression of a person dragged out from the gates of hell.

That expression--all her expressions, with the exception of that one moment of surprise at their ignorance of her identity--was not a normal reaction to a police questioning. The only people Kate had known who did not respond to the police with nervously exaggerated emotions, of politeness, aggression, humor, or whatever, were old lawyers and young punks convinced of their own invulnerability, and even in the latter there was always a slight air of disdain to give them away. In Vaun Adams, though, there had been no nervous exaggeration whatsoever. Watchful caution, yes, and a vague amusement, but, as Hawkin had said, there had been no fear, which in a woman who had spent over nine years in prison was a very strange thing.

She had seemed, now that Kate thought about it, open, honest, even trusting, amazing as that might be. Childlike in her confidence that the world would not hurt her. Less guarded, in fact, than twelve-year-old Amy Dodson had been.

Yet, this was a murderer who had spent a quarter of her life in prison.

Vaun Adams had claimed that her innocence had been taken from her. Certainly her paintings were not innocent. They were powerful, raw, subtle, moving, beautiful, sordid, pain-filled, and joyous, sometimes all at once, but innocence was not a word that came immediately to mind.

What is innocence, though? Kate wondered. There's the legal definition, but isn't innocence the absence of wickedness, of sin--that old word? "One of the world's innocents." An innocent was someone untouched by the wickedness of the world, whose simplicity was a highly polished surface where the dirt of the ugly world could not cling. (Oh, come now, Martinelli, the Scotch fumes are getting to you!) Nonetheless, she had met one or two of them, who would have been called saints in other times.

Is that what Vaun Adams is, truly: an innocent? A mirror who has seen considerable evil, in herself as well as others, and reflects it back, along with the good, becoming ever brighter in the process? How else to explain the lack of fear, or anger, or joy, or any strong emotion in the eyes of the painter, yet the tumultuous presence of all of them in the canvases she painted?

Can an innocent commit murder?

The muttering radio was forgotten as Kate's mind reached back to a hot afternoon in New York the summer before, and the series of paintings that leapt from the white walls of the gallery. She and Lee stood long in front of the one entitled
Strawberry Fields (Forever)
. It was a single figure of a man, a middle-aged Mexican farm worker, standing in the center of a vast field, row after row of strawberries, radiating endlessly, hypnotically, out from the horizon. He was leaning on a hoe, and the viewer's eyes met his with a shock, for in his face and stance lay a total and uncomplaining acceptance of the miles of grueling work that lay around him and the knowledge that he would never finish, he could never really stop, would never get the dirt from under his thick fingernails or the ache from his back.

Many painters would have left it at that, glad enough to disturb the wealthy elite who would see the work and for a few hours feel ennobled by their guilt. Eva Vaughn, however, had gone one step further. As one studied the farm worker, the huge flat field, the hot blue sky, and came back to his face, gradually the feeling grew that this man was deeply, sublimely happy, in a way that someone with a choice could never be. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant" came to mind, and Kate had left the gallery much shaken. Strawberries had never tasted quite the same ever since.

Afterward she and Lee had gone to a nearly empty coffeehouse, and for an hour they had talked about Eva Vaughn and women in the world of art.

"Why do you think there are so few great women artists?" Kate had mused.

"Didn't you even look at that Germaine Greer book I gave you?" Lee chided. "Yes, I know, anything that doesn't have the word 'forensic' in the title gets pushed to the back. You do remember what the title of this one was, don't you?
The Obstacle Race
, right. That should tell you what her thesis is. Men start off on a flat track, half the time with the proper shoes, starting blocks, and coaches. Women have to climb and struggle the whole way, mostly against the circular argument that women artists are minor artists, and therefore if a painting is by a woman it is a minor painting. Training of techniques, not just of art but of the craftsmanship that makes a painting last, the apprentice system, patronage--" Lee was launched on a monologue that left Kate far behind, catching the occasional familiar name--Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon--and a flood of others. "There've been any number of extremely competent, even brilliant women artists. Look at Artemesia Gentileschi--an infinitely superior painter than her more famous father. Or Mary Cassatt: some of her stuff is every bit as good as some of the male artists who were--and still are--better known than she was. Maybe if she'd had less of an emphasis on mothers and babies... I don't know. I'm afraid that women have to be ten times as good as men to overcome their early training. Little girls are raised to be cautious and sensible. Even tomboys like you are too busy fighting their upbringing to leave it behind, and it's the complete, passionate absorption in one single thing, like painting, that allows genius to produce. If you have to worry about folding clothes and constipated babies--if you have to worry about having babies at all--you can't concentrate on one important thing. Geniuses of any kind are always impossibly bloody, single-minded bastards, and women have never had that option, not as a class, not until very recently."

"What about Eva Vaughn? Or wouldn't you count her as first rate?"

"Oh, God, yes, especially considering that she's only in her thirties and getting better all the time. I don't know about her, why she doesn't fit the mold, except that maybe her genius is just so exceptionally great that it rules her. Nobody knows much about her. Even that article in
Time
said that she wouldn't meet with the person who wrote it, although they talked on the phone a couple of times. Remember the rumor that Eva Vaughn was actually a man? That one's still around, by the way. I heard a couple talking about it in the gallery."

"You don't think it's possible, though?"

"There'd be no point in it. The work is so good it makes no difference if it was done by a man or a woman. No, I'm sure she's a woman, a woman who's somehow managed to break away from caution." Lee tapped the photograph of
Strawberry Fields
that lay on the table, and looked wistful. "I'd love to meet her, to know how she's done it, how she was raised to be that free."

And now Kate knew how it had happened. Eva Vaughn would have been a fine painter any time, any place, but nearly a decade in a tough women's prison, convicted of a crime intolerable even to the other inmates, had flayed her of her caution, had cut her loose from any of the expected possibilities. A normal woman would have gone mad, or retreated into the anonymity of ordinariness, or died. Instead, Vaun Adams, Eva Vaughn, had become empty of herself, had become a pair of all-seeing eyes and a pair of hands that held a brush, and she had channeled the pain and the beauty of life into her canvases. She was a murderer who had strangled a small girl, a child who would now be a woman of twenty-four had she lived. Nothing Vaun could be or do would make up for that, and deep down Kate could never finally forgive her. Painful as it was, she knew that her own work, her own humanity, demanded that she pit herself against the woman who had painted those magnificent visions of the human spirit. It was a bitter thought, as filthy and oppressive as the night outside.

On the outskirts of the city Hawkin woke and reached for the thermos.

"Not letting up any, is it?"

Kate pulled her thoughts back into polite normality with roughly the effort of pulling a boot from deep mud.

"No," she said. "No, if anything it's worse. The wind certainly is, even on this side of the hills."

"Ah, well, it'll blow over soon." He seemed almost cheery, disgustingly so considering the night and the thoughts that had been in possession of Kate's mind.

"Do you always wake up so cheerful after a nap?"

"Always, if it's a nap. Sleep is a fine thing. You should try it sometime." Kate hadn't had a nap since she was five years old.

"Not while I'm driving, thanks."

"You're probably right. What's that line about Brother Sleep?"