Artist (18 page)

“Put somebody on him around the clock,” Cassie said. She headed for the bedroom. “I’m going to see Wesling. Then I’m going back to to France.”

“To France?” Dupond said. “Why the hell would you go back to France?”

“Know thine enemy,” Cassie said.

Watt pulled the stack of paper from his inbox in the mailroom, carrying the load of magazines and papers to his desk, where he dropped them on top and went get coffee. The newspapers, which he now followed ardently, were still full of his latest exploit. The hysteria, urgent before, now grew to a fevered pitch. He
did have had one regret. None of his work appeared in public. His art, in all it’s beauty, was withheld. It was one thing to have news coverage night and day, but if the audience couldn’t see for themselves, couldn’t judge his work with their own eyes, what good was it? He looked through periodicals and scheduling messages, found a note from Dean Burke. Kurt Dupond was asking to see him, along with several other professors. Burke wanted him available sometime this morning.

A splinter of doubt wedged itself into his brain, stuck there. What was going on here? Why was Dupond wanting to speak with him? Think. Denise Burge should have been enough to draw them away, get the looking outward from the University. Yet, here they were, circling around, like wolves. He forgot his correspondence, digging in the back of a desk drawer, found an old bottle of cognac, tossed a dab in his coffee, then another. He drank it down, felt the spreading warmth, took another shot straight out of the bottle. All the old doubts began to creep in.

He kept mints on his desk, popped one in with shaking hands. Relax, relax. He read the note again. It wasn’t just him. They were talking to everyone. He wasn’t the focus. He could pull this off, stay one step ahead. Still, he went back over everything he’d done, everything he’d read. None of the papers mentioned the signature. Had that given him away? No, it was too perfect, too obscure. Enough to mark the work as his own but not tie it to him directly, even if they knew what it meant. He went back to his papers, more confident now, but the splinter was still there. Festering.

Wesling wasn’t happy and made no bones about it. “I can’t see why you have to go back to France and I don’t see why we should be as involved in this thing as we already are,” she told Cassie flat out.

“You wanted me to get experience. This is experience.” Cassie said. She had been arguing for the last ten minutes.

“Yes, I wanted you to get experience. You’ve gotten some. Now it’s probably time to get out.”

  Cassie shook her head. “No. I have to go to France. In the meantime, I want everything you can dig up on Watt’s time over there. I want the names of all his old schools, the professors especially, anyone who would have had contact with him. I want his family background, the histories on his mother and father. I want everything, no matter how small. We need to know him like a book, like nobody else in the world.”

“You really think this is the guy?” Wesling asked.

“Yes,” Cassie said.

“Because of what you can do? Because of the psychic thing? Have you tried viewing him?”

“Partly. That’s another reason I have to do this.” She struggled to explain, struggled to understand herself. “This is something I can do without that. Something that’s just me and hard work. No psychic viewing, no reaching outside myself. I think I can be good at this.”

“Let me ask you this, then,” Wesling said. “Suppose you can’t nail him. Suppose you can’t tie him to the murders, can’t prove anything to a jury. What happens then?”

“Then I’ll kill him myself,” Cassie said. “He has to be stopped.”

“Cassie,” Wesling said, “You have to be careful here. You sound like some kind of vigilante. I can’t have you running around killing anyone you don’t like. Our agreement is that I let you live a reasonably normal life in exchange for your services. That doesn’t include freelance work.”

“I’ve got a chance here,” Cassie said. “A chance to do some good. I’ll travel around the world and kill whoever you want. You make those decisions don’t you? Or somebody does. What gives you the right to play God and send me out to do your dirty work? What’s the difference? If I don’t feel like I can do some good what’s the point? I might as well just quit and let you kill me. I should have just killed myself after Ronnie died. I thought about it often enough.”

Wesling caved. “Okay. I’ll get you as much as I can on W
att and his family. You have maybe 10 days or two weeks and you come back in the fold. One last question. How are things between you and this detective?”

“Good. Really good. But, you need to stay out of that. My personal life is out of bounds.”

“No,” Wesling said. “In our business, nothing is out of bounds. You’ll have to keep your work for me off limits with him. He knows nothing, understand? Nothing. Lie to him, make something up, refuse to tell him, but he can’t know anything about what you do for me. Can you handle that?”

Cassie nodded.

“That’s not going to be easy. You know that don’t you?”

“I can handle it,” Cassie said.

“Well, you’re a better woman than me then.” Wesling said.

“Why is that?”

“I’ve seen his picture. If I had a guy looked like that in my bed I’d tell him anything he wanted to know. Now, get the hell out of here. Your flight leaves at five o’clock.”

Cat and mouse
, Dupond thought. Watt seemed relaxed, even friendly. They had hooked up in the teacher’s lounge, where Watt was engaged in conversation with an older blonde woman. Dupond recognized her from the meeting with Burke but couldn’t remember the name, or if she’d even spoken. Watt excused himself, offered coffee that Dupond refused.

“What can I do for you, Detective?” Watt asked.

“I’m not really sure, Professor. We’ve kind of hit a dead end. We were hoping that some of the professors might be able to point us in the right direction. Sometimes teachers pick up on things, students with problems, or displaying unusual behavior.”

“H
mm. Call me Viktor by the way. There’s no need for formalities. What you need to understand is that this is a university. It’s a big place. We draw from the entire Metropolitan area and New Orleans being what it is, there are some, well, let’s say people that march to a different drummer. It would be hard to pick out anyone that would be capable of the kind of things we see in this situation, though.”

“No flakes in the bowl, Professor?” Dupond said. “There has to be at least one student who stands out. A loner, no friends, walks around with a sullen look on his face?”

“I, or any other teacher in this college, could give you the names of a half dozen students who don’t seem overly social, Detective. That doesn’t make them killers. If you want socially inept suspects, try the Computer Science Department.”

“You think the killer is socially inept?”

“I haven’t given it any thought. What do the police think? Surely you have access to some kind of psychologist that can point you in the right direction.”

“Yes, we do.” Dupond re
ached into his pocket, pulling out a notepad, opened it to a blank page. “Here’s what we think. We think the murderer is probably some kind of social outcast, maybe he’s ugly or crippled even. Something that would make people shy away from him. The psychologist thinks he, for some reason, hates women. Maybe his mother mistreated him, or failed to protect him from an abusive father. He may also be homosexual, or as the psychologist put it “struggling with his sexual identity” or he sees himself as effeminate.”

“Why would you think he’s a homosexual?” Watt asked.

“He picked up a man in the French Quarter. That’s speculation of course, but our psychologist seems to think it points to some underlying desire. The Quarter is well known for transvestites. They murderer either wanted to pick up a man or he’s pretty easily fooled. Maybe he’s just stupid,” Dupond shrugged, “and couldn’t tell the difference. Anyway, the guy he picked up gave him a good fight so we think he’s maybe weak, not in too good of a physical shape, you know? After all, he does pick young girls, or somehow subdues weaker individuals.”

“He’s killed how many women, Detective?”

“Four. That we know of,” Dupond said. “Why?”

“If he’s predominantly picking women, I doubt he’s homosexual. The boy in the Quarter, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’ve ever seen some of the drag queens down there. Perhaps he got taken in.”

Dupond shrugged. “Maybe, but I think he leans that way. I think he can’t get it up with the women in a normal way, that he can only rape them after they’re dead. Women scare him. How about students that are failing out?”

“Students fail all the time, Detective Dupond, for one reason or another. Why do you ask that?”

“Our expert sees this as some way of lashing out. That the guy is a failure in life, can’t get ahead, too stupid to do well in school, kind of a loser personality if you know what I mean.”

Watt stood up, picked up a stack of books. “No, I don’t really see what you mean. It seems to me if he’s managed to get away with what, five murders, that he’s not that stupid at all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a class to get to.”

Dupond got up, reached to shake hands. “Sure. I’m sorry if I kept you. You’ll think about it, though, and let me know, right?”

“Let you know what?” Watt asked.

“If you have any pathetic losers hanging around we could look at, Professor. I thought we agreed the murderer probably fell into that category.”

“You put forth that idea, Detective. I’m inclined to believe differently.”

  Dupond watched as Watt hustled off down the hall.

Cassie checked into the Ambassador Hotel under her own name and took the package Wesling had waiting for her at the desk. It was heavy, four inches thick. After tossing her bags in the corner, she spread the contents out on the desk. The first was an overall view of Watt’s family. She started with the father.

Antoine Watt, the father of Viktor Watt, spent his entire career with one company, hiring on after college. His first position was on the shop floor, overseeing the production of gears. Apparently, he showed a flair for sales, or maneuvered his way into the Sales Department where he became something of a star. He met and married the daughter of one of his clients, an Annette Breax. They had the single son, Viktor, born two years after the union. The rest was a litany of positions, taking the family through eight different assignments across Europe in the first fifteen years of the marriage. Finally, a long settlement in England for several years before the mother and father moved to Luxembourg. By that time the boy was in college in Paris. On the back end, the investigator listed three names of Antoine Watt’s supervisors, with a note that two were deceased and an address for the third. She wrote the name and address down, tossed the folder aside, picked up the folder on Viktor Watt himself.

The investigator had done a remarkable job in just a few hours. Watt’s educational background was good. He attended private schools as a child, a private high school in England. His grades
were fair to well above average. The boy seemed to excel in literature, performed less well in Mathematics and Science but well enough to get into the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where he majored in History. His grades sheets were attached, as well as a list of clubs he joined. Beneath that, a long list of teachers. Again, some had died, others moved to different universities. One had a circle around it, with a hand scrawled note indicating a mentorship. The address for that one was in Le Havre, three hours west, on the coast of the English Channel. She would need a car.

“I think I pissed him off,” Dupond said. He was sitting in his car with Adan, waiting for Watt to leave for the day.

“He didn’t like the homosexual idea?”

“Nope. Or the idea of the perp being stupid, or the idea of him being ugly. In fact, I think I got under his skin in more ways than one.”

“So why are we waiting for him?”

“I want to needle him a little more. I want him to see us watching, maybe make him nervous.” Another half hour went by. Dupond was about to call it quits, get back to the office and see if Cassie had left him a message, when Adan nudged him.

“Check out our boy. Looks like he’s in a hurry. Watt was moving fast, toward the faculty parking lot. He stopped at a black BMW, popped the trunk with his key, moved to the driver’s side. “Go,” Dupond said. Adan put the car in gear and rolled past the parking lot, bumped the horn as they passed. Dupond waved through the window.

“Pretty nice machine for a teacher. I didn’t think they made that kind of money,” Adan said.

“They don’t,” Dupond replied. “He’s got to have money coming in from somewhere else. Cassie should find it. Speaking of which, get me back to the office.”

“Let him go?” Adan said, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder.

“Yes. Let him enjoy the last night he’s going to have without someone looking over his shoulder. Tomorrow morning we go on him twenty four hours a day.”