The Death Artist (32 page)

Maybe he should send her one?

He sits back, pictures her opening the package, imagines the smell, the look on her face. That would serve her right.

But no, it’s not part of the game, doesn’t really prove anything.

He stares down at the reproduction. He’s just about finished his latest piece, the birthday card, admires his additions–the clock, the totally confusing calendar, the clump of real hair he has glued onto it. He resists the urge to stroke it, knows what will happen if he does.

He paces. He’s ready. More than ready.

He’s got everything he needs. Six knives, a plastic fish-bowl, the piece of old luggage he picked up at the flea market. He hoists the suitcase onto the table. It’s not exactly like the one in the picture, but close enough. He places the knives carefully into it, noting the worn interior, trying to imagine the people who once owned it, the places they had traveled. Was it a family, a tortured, hideous family? His head begins to ache. But then seeing how perfectly the fishbowl and knives fit into the case soothes him.

He flips open
Who’s Who in American Art
to the page he has marked, his eyes flitting over the biography he has chosen one more time. Particularly the birth date.

Could it possibly have worked out any better than this? He doesn’t see how.

She was just watching the smoke snake out the window when she heard the three loud pops in succession. Gunshots. No mistaking it.

A second later she was pushing through the front door, charging up the stairs, her gun drawn.

On the second-floor landing, a woman with a baby in her arms poked her head out, saw Kate, and froze.

Kate screamed, “Back inside!
Now!”

Kate took the next staircase slowly. The old wooden stairs creaked under her crepe soles. Was someone waiting for her? Trip?

But on the top floor it was quiet, Trip’s door slightly ajar. Kate aimed the pistol out in front of her, pivoted through the door.

Damien Trip was on the floor beside that king-size bed and the lights on tripods, sitting up, hands gripping his belly.

Trip stared at her, his baby blues filled with panic. Blood was pumping, spilling between his fingers so fast that it looked fake.

Kate yanked the stained sheet from the bed, tore off a long strip, balled it up and pressed it against Trip’s midsection. It soaked through in less than twenty seconds.

Trip opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out, only more blood, bubbling past his lips. He managed a nod toward an open window, his eyes blinking like a cartoon character.

Kate was on her feet fast; she peered out the window, spotted him–a jerking staccato figure, on the fire escape. A split-second look back at Trip, who had fallen to the floor, arms stretched out, blood spreading beneath his inert body like a satiny ocean of deep red. It was way too late to help him.

The fire escape groaned, even sagged a bit as Kate made the vertiginous descent. It was like a German Expressionist film set, all oblique angles and dingy gray.

Below her, the man leaped from the last bit of hanging ladder.

A minute later, Kate was doing the same. She came down hard on her heels, rocked backward, banged against the brick wall, then pitched forward into one of several steel Dumpsters.

Shit.

She’d have a bruise on her rib cage for sure.

She sprinted around the building, caught a glimpse of a shadow as the door to a BMW slammed shut, the engine revved, tires squealed.

But Kate was right on him, angling her car into the street, her foot bearing down on the accelerator.

Jesus fucking Christ. A car chase. A fucking car chase.
Last time she did this she was what, twenty-eight? But her adrenaline was pumping again, as fast as the gas was pouring into the engine, thoughts ping-ponging in her brain:
Trip. Shot. But who? Why
?

The speedometer read sixty. The strip of project buildings flew by, blurring like scenes glimpsed through a train window. There were horns blaring, pedestrians racing back to the safety of curbs.

Ahead of her, the BMW ran six red lights in a row and Kate did the same. All around them drivers were hitting their brakes, cars were bouncing up on the sidewalks, slamming into each other.

It might have been over a decade since she had maneuvered a car at raceway speeds, but Kate McKinnon had been the drag-racing princess of Astoria, Queens. No one even came close; not Johnny Bertinelli in his souped-up Chevy II, nor Timmy O’Brien in his dad’s eight-cylinder Grand Prix. Kate had left them all in the dust–little boys with their tails between their legs.

Kate managed to call in for backup with one hand on the wheel.

“Damien Trip is dead,” she said, giving his address.

“Brown was just at the scene,” said the desk cop. “He called it in.”

“I’m in pursuit of the assailant. I’ve just passed Eighteenth Street on Park Avenue South, heading north. First three digits of the license plate are DJW. That’s David John West.” She clicked off.

The BMW charged all the way up to Twenty-third Street, hung a screeching left, which Kate echoed. They raced across to the West Side, darting between cars, trucks, cabs, and traffic cops gesturing like wind-up dolls gone berserk. Alongside him a moment ago, Kate tried to catch a nanosecond glimpse, but everything was a blur.

At the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Twenty-third, the BMW was trapped between a bus and a cab, but Kate was boxed in, too. From somewhere behind, sirens were getting louder.

First the BMW, then Kate zigzagged a way out. They were back up to hazardous speed in a minute, the two of them in their own fast-forward movie, out of sync with the normal rpm world. The BMW was a half a block ahead, not far from the piers and the new Chelsea sports complex, an intersection where the West Side Highway met normal city traffic, where four or five thoroughfares converged.

Kate eased off the gas. She had him. No way he could speed through this.

The sirens were behind her now, their lights flashing in her rearview mirror.

But he didn’t slow down; he virtually flew through the intersection.

Jesus. Where’s he going
?

Framed through her windshield, Kate watched the BMW swerve to the left so sharply, its right side lifted off the ground before straightening out, and once again was racing west.

The screech and squeal of brakes and tires matched the shrill police sirens, with all vehicles coming to a dead stop.

All except the tourist bus, which, after depositing its visitors for a lazy riverside stroll, pulled out of the Chelsea Piers parking lot, somehow blind to the silver bullet hurtling toward it at breakneck speed.

Too late.

The BMW folded like an accordion, the entire front half disappearing as though the bus had opened its hungry jaws and chomped it off.

The noise was like a full-scale orchestra made up entirely of cymbals and drums with a strange chorus of altos, groaning.

Fire engines had clogged Twenty-third Street from Tenth Avenue to the Hudson River. Over a dozen cop cars looped around the scene, their beacons flashing; uniforms, out of their vehicles, formed a ring–rigid toy soldiers keeping thrill seekers and gawkers at bay. Two ambulances stood by, sirens deafening. A couple of local TV news vans had managed to slip in, angle-parked on the sidewalk. Firemen hosed down the smashed bus, steam rising off it like Old Faithful. Another group of firemen were working a chainsaw on the BMW while Kate huddled with Floyd Brown.

“Trip’s dead,” he said, shaking his head. “But you obviously know that.”

Kate nodded, but wasn’t really listening. She had turned to see the firemen tear the crumpled door off the BMW, and the paramedics attempt to pry Darton Washington’s huge body from the mass of steaming, mangled metal. They signaled her over.

Kate wrapped her hand around Washington’s. The younger medic caught her eye, led her vision toward Washington’s lower half, where the ragged edge of what might have been the dashboard had cut across the man’s legs, severing them just below the knees.

Washington’s pupils were dilated in shock. “I’m cold,” he whispered.

“We can fix that,” said Kate, laying her jacket over his chest. A medic shot morphine into Washington’s arm, probably enough to kill him before the loss of blood did. Either way, it was only a matter of minutes.

The TV reporters were storming the uniforms, waving microphones like prehistoric men with bones.

Brown trotted back, made sure they were kept away.

“Someone said it’s the death artist,” said a young guy with an ABC press pass stuck to his corduroy blazer. “Is he dead?”

“No comment, fellas,” said Brown, turning to look at Kate, who was cradling Washington’s dying head in her arms. It made him think of Michelangelo’s
Piet&AGrave;,
the Blessed Virgin with Christ in her lap. He remembered seeing the statue at the New York World’s Fair when he was a kid, and crying.

Kate tried to sip coffee from a styrofoam cup, but her hands were trembling too badly. Trip dead. Washington dead. Kate didn’t know what to think. Both men had connections to each of the victims–Elena, Pruitt, Stein. Had all of the answers to her questions died with them?

“Lord works in mysterious ways,” said Brown, watching them load the remains of Darton Washington into the back of an ambulance.

“Killing Trip was an act of passion,” said Kate. “Washington loved her. He loved Elena.”

“You loved her, too. But you didn’t go and shoot Trip.”

“No,” said Kate. “But I wanted to.”

Almost any other time Kate would have given him a cocky yes, but not while she was thinking about Darton Washington; the image of the man dying in that mangled BMW would always be with her–just one more hideous image she could add to her gallery of grotesqueries.

“You didn’t, by any chance, get a deathbed confession from Trip, did you, McKinnon?”

“By the time I found him, Trip wasn’t talking at all,” said Kate. “I hate to say it, but I think we should search Washington’s place. See if there’s anything definitive that might tie him to the murders.”

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” said Mead.

“Not if we want something conclusive,” said Kate. “Both Trip and Washington had connections to the victims. The fact is, Washington could have killed Trip to silence him.”

“All right,” said Mead. “I’ll send a team over to Washington’s place.”

“What about the press? They were all over the scene yesterday,” said Brown. “What’s the official word going to be?”

“I don’t know.” Mead pinched the bridge of his nose. “I gotta talk to Tapell first. And you, McKinnon, you gotta meet with Mobile, Accident Investigation,
and
Crime Scene. Your little joy ride managed to hit every other division in the NYPD. And I need the papers from each of them on my desk ASAP–plus your personal account of the chain of events leading to Trip’s and Washington’s demise.”

Six hours of interviews and paperwork. Kate was exhausted. Still, she made the trek over to Willie’s studio, wanted him to hear it from her lips. How his collector and friend had died.

But she was too late–the news reports had beaten her to it. How was it they always got the goddamn story so fast?

Kate’s eyes followed Willie as he darted about his studio, stepping over boxes of spilled nails, shreds of sandpaper, tubes of squeezed-out oil paint. “Darton told me you were on his case, hounding him.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“But now he’s dead. So, like what would you call it?”

“An
accident.”
Kate wove a lock of her hair between her fingers, nervously. “Look, Willie. Darton killed Damien Trip. Shot him in cold blood, and–”

“And what? I’m supposed to feel bad?” Willie looked away, pictured Darton Washington in his studio, the cool elegance of the man, a man not unlike himself, out of the ghetto, who had made something of his life, pattering away about music and art and how big Willie was going to be, that he was a “genius.” He turned back to Kate, his green eyes like cool lasers. “Trip killed Elena.
Killed
her. I thought that’s what you cared about. Why you were doing this.”

“I–” Kate stammered a moment. “I’m as sorry about Darton as you are.”

“I don’t think so,” said Willie. He turned away, head tucked in, shoulders hunched. “You should leave now.” The words were whispered so softly Kate could only just hear them; so strong they bore right through her skin, into her heart.

But now what? It suddenly dawns on him that he could simply give it all up, go back to his normal life.