Stroke of Death

by Dale Mayer

  “We need to contact those two people who saw and heard them,” Richard said.

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “I’ve got messages from both.” He called the first name on his list. “This is Detective Ganderwahl. I’m calling about the incident that you witnessed this evening at the bar.” He listened for a few minutes. “And then you scared him off, I understand.” He listened some more.

  On the outside of the conversation, but hearing just enough to keep him in the loop, Richard stood there impatiently, until Andy ended the call.

  “So, that changes things a little bit,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “Apparently this guy had a job for her, but it was a different kind of job.” And Andy waggled his eyebrows.

  “Ah, shit. So I presume she resented it, struggled, it got ugly, and he knocked her in the head.”

  “When Naomi and her man came outside, they were laughing and giggling, having a good time, lots of kissing and cuddling going on, but, when he mentioned a price, she got furious and hit him, and he hit her back.”

  Richard barely held back a smile. “Yeah, slightly different story and definitely not connected to our killer.”

  “We hope,” Andy said. “We know what assumptions can do to our cases.”

  “Yes, I hear you,” he said. “Good enough. We’ll follow up, but I’m not sure how we’ll find a guy who may have hit her in self-defense.”

  “Which is most likely why she didn’t want to make a statement.”

  “Exactly.”

  Andy stood for a long moment and asked, “You were talking with Cayce?”

  Richard nodded, keeping his face deliberately blank. “Yes, trying to get more information on Gruber and Fenster. I need to run Frankie down, as I’m still looking for contact information for both of them.”

  “No luck looking them up?”

  “No luck finding last names,” he said with a look at Andy. “Something about the nature of the art world.”

  Andy nodded. “Well, I’m heading home,” he said. “It’s been a damn long day.”

  “Yeah, I’m following.” He sent a quick text to Cayce, telling her that Naomi was her usual self and not to worry.

  He headed on toward his home. The problem was, even though his mind should be on the case, all he could think about was Cayce. She’d looked so vulnerable, so different from the woman that he’d seen up until now that it gave him an insight into who she was as a person. The one she never let anybody else see—although he suspected that Elena had had many chances to see it. He really wanted to know what was in the two women’s backgrounds.

  As soon as he hit home, he brought out his laptop and researched the two of them. He went back twenty years. Cayce was thirty-two. Elena was thirty-one. And then decided he needed to go back twenty-five years, maybe even twenty-seven.

  It took him a while, but he finally found a case with Elena’s name. Her last name had been changed when she was ten. She had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Only one mention was in all the articles, even in the case files he’d managed to find, of the one friend who’d saved her, sneaking into her bedroom that night and half dragging her from the house to the hospital and safety. That one friend had been Cayce. Elena was put into the foster care system and hidden away. Which explained why Cayce had lost touch with Elena for so many years. A trial date on the rape of Elena had been set, but the stepfather had disappeared before it got underway and hadn’t been heard of since.

  Richard sat back, stunned. “Cayce was right. Something like that went way past all normal relationships.”

  He could understand now why the two had been so close. Their kinship covered decades. Cayce had mentioned something else in later years, of having come together and Elena saving her that time. He wondered if it was a similar situation. And, though he hunted, he couldn’t find any information. So, even if Cayce had also suffered abuse, it hadn’t gone criminal, and he didn’t have an old case for it. And he found nothing on the internet about it at all.

  He shook his head and thought about the lives of the two women who only had each other, but, once they found each other, it was something more precious than gold. And then he realized just how devastated and alone Cayce must feel now. With Elena gone—that one light in her life, that one person Cayce could always trust—Cayce had no one.

  *

  So much light was in her work. Halo stared through the window at the wall mural. So pretty. Too pretty. Must be bad. Evil.

  He shoved his hands deep into his oversize coat and hunched his shoulders. His mother’s words were ever-present in his head. You can’t paint. You can’t draw. That’s the devil’s work. He chooses his minions by the skill he gives them. No one should create such works without his permission. Remember that.

  How could he forget? His art had been part of his soul. The evil part.

  Good boy. Bad boy. And the litany carried on.

  Chapter 12

  Waking up the next morning, Cayce could feel some of her vigor returning. She didn’t understand how or why, but it was almost as if that breaking of the dam last night had helped. She hated that she had fallen apart with Richard though. She should have been strong enough to deal with it on her own.

  She reached out a finger, trailed it across the familiar face of Elena on one of the big pictures she kept on the wall close to her bed. Elena had been so photogenic. So easy to body-paint, so easy to turn into something special, and it would just be that much harder to find a replacement for her.

  Cayce thought about Stefan and all that weirdness with him calling her via the sound waves or whatever to speak to her and Richard, wondering just how weird it really was. Something was incredibly odd and unique about Stefan too. But it was more than that. His unique gift or ability, or whatever the hell that was, made that telecommunication happen. And the fact that he knew about the way she dealt with energy and how he knew that the luminescence found in her art was made by blending her energy with that of her subject, the model, and why Cayce couldn’t ever make Naomi be Elena, no matter how much Naomi wanted to become the next Elena, because something was really wrong about Naomi’s energy.

  As far as Cayce was concerned, she dealt with people who were full of love and light, people who wanted to do good and be good—not people who were full of bitchy, cranky miserableness and who wanted to step on others in order to move up because that was just so wrong.

  Cayce could do so many things with the right person, but she was seriously crippled when she had to deal with the wrong person. And, after yesterday, she knew that she was done with Naomi.

  She picked up the phone and called Anita. “I’m just now waking up. I know I’m late, but can you make sure Naomi is no longer on any of my schedules?”

  “Let me check,” Anita said. “Did something happen?”

  “Nothing more than usual,” she said. “I just can’t deal with that woman anymore.”

  “I’m surprised you ever could,” she said. “She’s brutal.”

  “I know, but some things just—”

  “I know. You can’t do it. Okay, she’s booked for one more next week.”

  “Have we paid her, or is it a contract that we have to honor?”

  “No, we haven’t, and, no, it isn’t,” she said. “I can cancel it.”

  “Please do. We won’t be using her again.”

  “Good,” Anita said. “She’s nasty and greedy, isn’t she?”

  “She is at that, and that’s the nice way to say it,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll be in soon.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.”

  Cayce got up and headed in to take a shower. Just standing under the hot water, getting the dried paint all off, the little bit that she had missed getting off last night, wouldn’t be enough. She obviously needed a good scrubbing to get herself clean of the toxins used to remove the paint initially. This time she did a full-on scrub with the intent to soothe and to ease her skin, instead of last night’s hard scrubbing, when she
had been too impatient and too tired to do anything else.

  As soon as her shower stopped dripping, she put a one-minute conditioner on her hair and let it soak in, then gave it a quick rinse before wrapping it up in a towel. She stepped out of the shower and into the bathroom and coated her body in moisturizer. One of the handicaps of being a full-time artist was dealing with elements that stripped her skin of its natural moisturizers. And that was something she had to watch out for.

  When she was done, she walked back to her bedroom, pulled out white capris, some little flat shoes, and an elegant long tunic top. It was simple cotton but made her feel good and look good too.

  Downstairs she put on coffee and rustled up some eggs and toast for her breakfast. The one thing that Richard was right about was how she wasn’t taking care of herself. She had allowed her work schedule to interfere.

  Before Elena’s death, Cayce’s lack of self-care had been a problem; now, after her best friend’s murder, Cayce had mentally compensated, trying to put that soul-deep loss in the right perspective, and she had again just let her own self-care slide.

  While she ate, she made a simple list of things she had to do, and on top of that list was to move some of these potential artist models forward. She really wanted to find somebody she could connect with. Not necessarily as well as Elena—that wasn’t realistic—but someone who was unique and fresh, different, with some sort of connection between Cayce and the new model.

  Cayce would have to use her energy in a different way today. Something that she used to do all the time after being put in the hospital by a boyfriend—make that fiancé—where she had mentally corrected because she had this problem with distancing. She always tried to distance to the point that she didn’t even acknowledge what the relationship originally was. He was her fiancé, the man who she would marry and spend the rest of her life with. Until he got mad because she chose to go to an art show instead of spend time with him. The end result was that she spent time in the hospital.

  Elena had moved Cayce out of the very difficult situation she’d been in and had helped her set up her life again. She had been consoled by the fact that somebody had threatened her fiancé to disappear quietly—or else.

  She would be forever grateful to that person. She didn’t know if that person was still around because of Elena, who had a lot of those kind of people as friends, whereas Cayce just had Elena, making Cayce’s loss all that much more heartbreaking.

  With Cayce’s to-do list well and truly locked in, she nodded, realizing that this failure to take care of herself was causing all kinds of chaos in her world. I’ll do better now, she thought, as she headed to work.

  When she walked into the next project, the big icy one, she stood there, looking at it, when Frankie came up.

  “Hey, how are you doing today?” he asked.

  “I’m doing fine,” she said with a smile. “At least I’m doing better than I was.”

  He looked at her intently. “You do look better,” he said. “Brighter skin, a little happier.”

  “It’ll take time,” she said. “There’s really no other answer for grief.”

  “I understand,” he said. “At least you’re in the position where you can keep moving forward.”

  She motioned at the backdrop behind him. “How’s this going?”

  “You tell me,” he said with that big grin of his.

  She smiled, loving the energy that came with Frankie’s smile. He was always calm, upbeat, energizing to be around. She studied the icy backdrop and smiled. “Those areas there need a bit of work,” she said, pointing. “That series of icicles hanging around the cave needs a bit of work too,” she murmured.

  He nodded. “I knew you’d catch those two areas,” he said. “Look at the bottom far corner. I don’t think the trees are quite right yet.”

  “I can finish those,” she murmured. “I just want to make sure we’ve got a really good solid foundation before we even attempt to find models.”

  “Not Naomi?” he asked in surprise. “I thought she was booked.”

  “If she was booked, she just became unbooked,” she said briskly.

  “Got it,” he said, nodding. “Can’t say I’m sad to see her go.”

  “You and me both,” she said with a smile. “Just being around her is terrible.”

  “True,” he said. “This a good thing.”

  “Says you,” she said with a smile.

  “And you too,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I had to,” she said. “It was just too impossible.”

  “You’ll never hear me argue that point,” he said. “I’m all for it. I do know a couple potentials, if you’re interested.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Friends?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, friends.”

  Something odd was in his voice. She looked at him, smiled, and said, “Lovers?”

  He flushed. “Yeah. I love her.”

  “Send me her photos, and I’ll see,” she said, “but I make no promises.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “That’s all any of us can do, you know? Is take a look and see.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Now let’s get to work.” And she quickly pulled her long smock over her clothing, kicked off her shoes, rolled up her capris a little bit higher, and walked over the canvas cloths littering the floor. “I’ll work down here first,” she said. “I’ll fix these trees and then work my way up this side.”

  “Good enough.” And they got started.

  When she turned around a few hours later, somehow she wasn’t surprised to see Richard standing in front of her.

  He eyed her critically. “You do look better.”

  She shrugged self-consciously. “Thank you. I didn’t expect such kindness from you last night.”

  “We tend to have that initial negative effect,” he said, “but we’re not mean people.”

  She nodded. “No, it’s just that you’re involved in an ugly job.”

  “That we are,” he said.

  She looked at him and asked, “Do you have any more details about what happened last night?” She gave a slight glance over in Frankie’s direction.

  “It’s not connected,” he said.

  She sighed in relief. “Well, thank God for that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not to worry,” he said. “You can carry on with the next installation. We’ll probably have some undercover cops around, just to make sure we don’t have a third victim.”

  “And yet I don’t think Thorne was at the last installation, was he?” She frowned and looked at Frankie. “Frankie, was Thorne at the last installation the night that he died?”

  Frankie nodded. “But we were done easily by four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  She turned to look at Richard. “So I don’t know that added security at that show would have made any difference.”

  “What you really mean is,” he said, “that somebody could be watching during the day, if they pinpointed Thorne.”

  “That’s not what I meant to say,” she said, “but, now that you brought it up, it is quite possible.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just hang around, walk a few blocks, take a look at what’s going on around you, while you do this,” he said. “A fair bit of attention is out there.”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s a big project, lots of activity, and I think I need to put a sign or two outside to say what is coming.”

  “Okay, I’ll just blend into the background and see what I can see.”

  “You can also get video cameras,” she said. “You might see the same person at the same installations.”

  He smiled at her. “I am a cop, and I’ve been one for a really long time. I do know what I’m doing,” he said. “And honestly, we have asked various people for those feeds. And we have several people at the station culling through all those that we’ve received to date.”

  “Oh,” she said, flushing. “I did
n’t mean to be rude. It just occurred to me that maybe the same person, if he was stalking Thorne, could also be stalking someone else.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Go and do your work. Let me take a look around and do mine.” And, with that, he turned and walked away.

  Frankie walked over and asked, “This is still about Elena?”

  “Elena and Thorne,” she said sadly. “Two young lives that had no business being cut short.”

  “I know,” he said. “There’s been some talk on the set too.”

  “Anybody quit because of it?” she asked him, stepping back slightly. “Does it bother you?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” he said, “but I also have a black belt in karate. Killing me won’t be quite so easy.”

  “No,” she said, “but the minute you think that it’s almost a guarantee, somebody will find a way around your skills.”

  He chuckled. “Come on. Let’s get back to work. It’s the only time you are ever really happy.”

  She thought about it, nodded, and said, “Boy, you are right there.”

  *

  Richard wandered around the area, checking out her work, checking out Frankie—and her relationship with him—seeing a bond, and, although Richard had told her that he saw auras, he saw a little bit more than that.

  A stranger’s voice at his shoulder said, “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  He turned to look at the speaker, only to find nobody there. Frowning, he spun around and then turned to look back in the direction he’d been. “What the hell?” he whispered.

  “It’s Stefan,” the voice said at his shoulder.

  He turned in an ever-so-slow loop again. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here,” he said, “but, while you’re studying the energy of those two over there, you’re not looking at my energy.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Go back to the position where you were standing originally,” Stefan ordered.

  Obediently Richard turned to study Frankie and Cayce, who were standing and discussing a corner of this massive painting. “And?”