by Mia Marlowe
He started to put a hand to her cheek, but she took a step back to avoid his touch. A sad smile lifted one corner of his mouth.
“If you’re in danger, it’s already personal.”
Chapter 12
Slashing wildly, Neville Rede hacked at the canvas until it hung in shapeless tatters. It wasn’t that the painting was bad. It was quite good, in fact. Easily the technical equal of say, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and with tons more emotional subtext. Neville could feel Valenti’s terror leaping off the canvas. Done in ochres and browns, Anthony Valenti’s portrait was a cubist nightmare.
Just as Neville intended.
“But it’s not perfect, damn it,” he muttered as he ripped the remains of the painting from the wall and kicked it into the corner. It would never be perfect unless the police reclassified Valenti’s death accidental again.
And that wouldn’t happen as long as that deaf girl kept making her accusations.
Neville was confident he’d covered all his tracks this time. But just to make certain, after he caught the train back from Maine, he managed to bluff his way into Sara Kelley’s apartment posing as a cable guy to plant a few listening devices. It was so hard to get a repairman these days, most supers would let him in rather than make their tenant wait another six weeks for the next available appointment. He’d hoped to listen in as Sara Kelley’s bereaved family picked through her things.
It was a guilty little pleasure he felt he deserved for all the trouble she’d put him through.
Instead, Neville had barely made it out of her place before the ex arrived to take up his all night vigil. Now he knew the trip to Maine had been a waste. Somehow Sara Kelley and her date survived the accident and now her cop ex-husband was taking her to see the Feds.
Imperfection. It tore at his gut like a bleeding ulcer.
He gazed down the long line of portraits gracing the walls of his tiny studio. All of them master works, lovingly done by his own hand. Each one the perfect reproduction of a major artistic style.
Each one a perfect kill. He painted them. Then he killed them, freezing their essence forever in the images he captured on his canvas.
And the fricking dean at the Art Institute of Boston had said he wasn’t original enough. Oh, his talent as a draftsman was undisputed and he could fool most experts with his copies of the old masters, but the admissions committee didn’t believe he had the vision to be a serious artist.
He’d produced twenty-three paintings that proved them wrong.
Make that twenty-two.
He’d have to do the Valenti portrait over again once he set things right. But in the meantime, he needed to lavish his attention on his current work in progress. He’d let himself succumb to the temptation to do things out of order. There was a symmetry to things. If he kept to his tried and true process, he’d find success.
He pulled the sheeting from the canvas and studied the half-finished painting. It was smaller than the Valenti work, only 30 by 21 inches. The mountainous landscape behind the central figure was detailed and nearly complete.
The primary focus of the painting was the pyramid formed by the seated figure’s torso and calmly folded hands. He wasn’t sure yet if he’d adorn one of the fingers with the diamond solitaire he’d noticed on her bedside table or not.
Might be a nice personal touch.
His Mona Lisa should have a few secrets, too.
He turned his attention to his subject’s face. The half-smile was already there, timelessly provocative. He daubed his brush on the palette and tinted the subject’s eyes beneath her hairless brows a deep green.
Sara Kelley. If he worked hard, he ought to be able to finish this canvas in a few days.
And then he could finish Ms. Kelley.
Chapter 13
Matthew wanted to stay with her while the FBI put Sara through several interrogators, looking for discrepancies in her story, but the most they’d allow, as a professional courtesy, was for him to stand behind the two-way mirrors. Then when she remained consistent, they drilled her thoroughly, trying to help her recapture any details she might have forgotten.
When Special Agent Arnold Griffith was finished with Sara, Matthew took him aside.
“How about some protection for her?” he asked.
“We don’t have the resources for it.”
“But she’s the best lead you have on this guy and she’s already been the target of an attack.”
“We don’t have any proof of that. By her own admission, she made no report of that alleged attack to the authorities in Maine.”
“But you find the rest of her testimony credible.”
“It gives us a little more to go on,” the agent admitted. “We’ll talk to the cell phone providers and try to run down that call she—what would you call it? ‘over-saw?’—but if there was a snarl before the Zakim Bridge, everybody and his brother would have been making a call to explain why they were late.” He shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and see a number we can associate with a known bad actor.”
“That’s all?” Matthew demanded.
“Everything about this case is still just supposition. We think we’ve discerned a pattern in a string of deaths. Ms. Kelley has just added a bit more weight to the hypothesis, but it’s like chasing a ghost. We aren’t even 100% sure the deaths are related.”
“Then figure it out, damn it. What the hell do they pay you for?” The words exploded out of Matthew’s mouth. It wasn’t the politically correct thing to do, but he couldn’t stop himself.
The agent regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Lieutenant Kelley, I suspect you lack the proper sense of distance in this instance. We, on the other hand, have to weigh all the angles. You’ve worked with domestic squabbles before. Have you considered that your ex-wife might be making all this up to get your attention?” Agent Griffith raised his brows in question. “If so, it seems to be working.”
That was Brittany’s theory. It irked him to hear someone else mouth it as well.
“You don’t know Sara,” Matthew said. “She doesn’t lie that well.”
Or ever. Not that he could remember.
He drove her back to her apartment and left her with the admonition to be careful. Since he was overdue at the station house, it was all he could do.
Matt’s shift ended at seven, but he didn’t go back to the apartment he shared with Brittany yet. Instead he parked half-way down the block from Sara’s building, scoping out the foot traffic.
If the Feds were any kind of cops at all, they’d at least put a tail on Sara in case the guy tried again. Matthew hadn’t spotted anyone who looked out of place, not even a homeless person wandering by with a shopping cart.
Sara’s building was in a pretty decent neighborhood. He remembered lots of the faces that passed from the time he and she lived here together.
Funny, how people tend to form little ‘villages’ within a big city, countless lives intersecting. Even if you don’t know their names, you see the same ones all the time, walking their dogs, carrying in their groceries and you know they’re no threat. They belong here.
He used to belong here, too.
But no one glanced his way as he sat in his unmarked vehicle. He might as well be a lamppost for all the attention he garnered.
No wonder crooks had it so easy.
Everyone scurried around, intent on their own business, living their lives with blinders on, oblivious to their surroundings.
If someone leaned out a second story window with a silencer and put a bullet in his head, Matthew wondered how many days it would take before someone noticed his body bloating in the heat.
But Matt’s job was to notice things.
So how come he forgot to keep noticing Sara?
He dragged a hand over his face.
When he first met Brittany she was waitressing at Mom’s Anytime Eatery. ‘Mom’ was actually a 300 pound black guy who cooked a great greasy omelet smothered in cheese and never let the coffe
epot run dry. It was Matthew’s favorite place to stop for a break.
When Brittany started flirting with Matthew, he’d been flattered. She’d lean into him a little when she refilled his coffee cup, letting her breast press against his shoulder. Once, she dropped a spoon at the next table and bent over to retrieve it in that micro-short skirt she always wore.
God help him, she was wearing the tiniest thong he’d ever seen.
He broke into a sweat when she straightened back up and tossed him a smile over her shoulder. She made him horny and guilty at the same time.
The guilt made Matt ask to be put on night shift to avoid seeing her. He told Sara it was because the pay was better. They were talking about buying a house if they could put together enough for a down payment. Sara started teaching a signing course at the community college twice a week to bring in a little extra, too. They were both heads down, working so hard, it was difficult to make time for each other.
Damned if Brittany didn’t get her hours changed to match his.
He didn’t suspect she’d planned it.
Not then, anyway.
Then it seemed sort of like fate or something equally cosmic. Brittany was cute and funny and sexy as hell and she always had that flirty little smile for him. Sara would be too sound asleep to even notice when he finally slipped into bed with her after his shift.
He started making excuses to stop by ‘Mom’s’ two or three times a night. Since his partner at the time was a Slurpee junkie and the 7-11 was right next door to Mom’s Anytime Eatery, it was no problem.
Then one night when there weren’t any other customers and ‘Mom’ had stepped out for a smoke, Brittany confided to Matthew that she’d misplaced her thong. Since he was a detective, maybe he could help her look for it. She pulled him into the back room and he went like a lamb to the slaughter. She was all over him with hot, wet kisses and hands that knew exactly where to roam.
He humped her standing up, her back pressed against the subway tile walls, her knees hitched over his elbows.
It was the most wildly exciting sex he’d ever had.
It wasn’t so exciting now.
Now, he had to fantasize up a storm to get hard enough to satisfy Brittany. Most of the time, it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Back then, he convinced himself he’d found a new love. Not that he didn’t still care about Sara. He’d always care about her.
But she was so different after the meningitis, so self-contained. It was like she was trying to prove she didn’t need anybody all the time.
Not even him.
Their marriage was like a set of train tracks, stretching endlessly into the distance. Going the same direction, but never quite meeting. Matthew decided they’d both be better off apart.
He hadn’t intended to hurt Sara. It wasn’t as if he planned falling in love with someone else. He hadn’t even really thought about how she’d take it until the words were out of his mouth and she shriveled before his eyes.
He felt like shit.
But Brittany was a good distraction. He moved into her tiny apartment and they started playing house in earnest. At first, they’d been insatiable as a couple of high school kids in the back seat of daddy’s Buick.
Then he got to know her a little better. Brittany was small and mean and shallow. At first, the sex was so incredible, he told himself it didn’t matter. She was like a porn star in his bed, ready to try anything.
But she was a whiny bitch in the kitchen.
And a lousy housekeeper in general.
He couldn’t have an adult conversation with Brittany unless she was the topic.
He lost Sara forever—his sweet, smart, good-hearted Sara—because he followed his cock into the back room of Mom’s Anytime Eatery.
So he was back to feeling like shit.
He looked down the street toward Sara’s building. In the light of a streetlamp, he saw her taking Lulu out for her ‘last piddle’ of the night.
His wedding vows rolled through his head. He’d meant them when he said them. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he’d do anything other than grow old with Sara O’Brien Kelley. They were going to have half a dozen kids. He’d make captain and Sara would be named Teacher of the Year. They’d celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a trip to Ireland.
Things like honor and trust and love and family meant something to him. To both of them.
And he threw it all away.
His eyes felt like someone was pressing their thumbs against them from behind. His soft palate ached. He didn’t know who he was without Sara. With a muttered curse, he swiped away a tear.
“Oh, God,” he whispered as she turned and went back into her building. “I’m so sorry, Sara.”
Chapter 14
The last day of summer school. Finally.
Sara was just as relieved as her students when the minute hand on the classroom clock jumped for the last time. Of course, they’d only have a little over three weeks before the fall semester began, but it was time they all needed. The kids were getting squirrelly and Sara was more than frazzled herself.
It didn’t help that she kept looking over her shoulder all the time, wondering if some faceless boogey man was waiting. Concentrating on lesson plans and grading papers was impossible when her life outside the classroom was in this weird limbo. It was worse than when she was going through the divorce.
At least then, Matthew had only broken her heart, not scared her silly with his precautions. She caught him outside her building several nights in a row. And when she insisted he stop his vigil, he started texting her at 10:30 each evening to make sure she and Lulu were in and buttoned up for the night.
Bet Brittany just loved that.
But nothing out of the ordinary happened. She got up. She went to school. Her life would have been boring except for the panic Matt kept rousing in her.
She just wanted to put it all behind her. Surely if there was anything to worry about, the FBI would have done something.
Matthew was almost stalking her.
Sara clutched her scarlet trench coat around her, hunching her shoulders so her hearing aids were shielded from the rain by her collar. She made a dash for North Station. She might look like the tortoise with her collar up, but when the sky was dumping, she sprinted like the hare.
Last day of school and it has to be raining.
Sometimes men did stalk their ex-wives and made their lives a living hell. But since Matthew was a cop, who could she turn him in to? Besides, he claimed the best of intentions, the purest of motives. He was only trying to protect her.
From someone who was probably not there.
She hadn’t heard a word from Ryan. Not a text. Not a note. She hadn’t even run into him on the T. As often as she’d accidentally bumped into him before their weekend together, it certainly seemed as if he was purposely avoiding her now.
But she hadn’t tried to contact him either. Even though Matthew was driving her crazy, she still wasn’t sure Ryan might not be right. Was it her feelings for Matt that kept her from reporting his actions and making trouble for him? At some level, wasn’t she enjoying his attention?
Until she could honestly answer those questions, she shouldn’t contact Ryan.
To make matters worse, the Ford shop said the damage to the Taurus’s frame was more extensive than they first thought. It would take at least another week to try to straighten it and even then, they couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t chew through tires like crazy because they weren’t sure the alignment would hold. Perhaps it was time to think about claiming a total loss on her insurance and replacing the vehicle…
As if she had the money for a big car payment each month. The Taurus’s greatest charm was that it was paid for. So she was stuck taking the T. She swallowed back her disgust each time she descended into one of the subway stations. Not only were they grimy with decades of dirt, she actually saw a rat one day, nosing along the edge of a corridor. As she approached, it scurrie
d under a door marked ‘authorized personnel only.’
“An official rat, evidently,” she’d muttered.
She ducked down into the station, giving her collar a shake to flick off the raindrops. She inserted her Charlie card into the machine and entered the subway, still checking the signs to make sure she went to the right track. Both the Green and the Orange lines ran through North Station, and through the Haymarket stop as well, running in tandem for a short while as they crawled beneath the sprawling old city. She still studied the T map every time she traveled. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong train headed in the wrong direction.
North Station was a two-tiered affair. The older Green Line’s north and south bound tracks were stacked on top of each other. On the lower level, the inbound Green Line was right across the broad center platform from the newer inbound Orange Line. What genius designed that redundancy she couldn’t imagine. The track Sara wanted, Orange outbound, ran alongside the Orange inbound with its platform hugging the far wall of the station.
The outbound Orange line platform was packed with people. Bad weather drove pedestrians onto the trains. She’d be standing up all the way to her final stop, but she wouldn’t have to worry about losing her balance and falling over. She’d be crammed in with the other riders like too many crayons jammed into a small box. Even if she fainted, she’d remain upright.
But she didn’t have to be claustrophobic while she waited for the train. At the far end of the platform, there was a narrow space near the opening of the dark tunnel from which the train would emerge. No one was standing there. It was a small space, only a couple of feet of concrete behind the yellow caution line. The other passengers milled in the deeper portion of the platform. She’d have that little space to herself.
She wound through the clumps of T riders. Pierced and tattooed teen-agers head-bobbed to the music from their ear buds. She passed businessmen in suits and gray trench coats. An Asian family was trying without much success to corral a two year old who led them a merry chase around the brushed aluminum pillars. Sara caught a whiff of wet dog. The smell was coming from a homeless woman with plastic bags wrapped around both feet, tied at her swollen ankles. Sara eased by them all and finally reached her destination at the far end of the platform. She breathed a sigh of relief.
