by Kaylea Cross
She waited until he was gone before she went around the house. The air was absolutely frigid, but at least no wind was blowing. She glanced toward the hemlocks as she opened the garage door. No movement back there now. Could have been a bird earlier.
To her right, floor-to-ceiling shelving held some old art supplies and sketches. Her gaze caught on a charcoal sketch of the spring landscape she’d made when she’d first moved here. And it hit her how much like the drawing her life had become, a shadow image of what she’d once been, all her colors reduced to shades of gray.
She was going to change that. For herself and for Maddie.
She strode to the back wall and carried the paintings out by the armload, all wrapped in the paper bags from the local grocery store. Thank God for stores that stayed open around the clock. She braved a trip once every couple of weeks in the middle of the night, when she could be sure she would be virtually alone. During the times when she couldn’t go as far as the store down the road, she lived on pizza and Chinese delivery.
That too would change, she thought as she tossed the first batch of canvases onto the ground in front of the garage, where the hard wind the previous day had blown a patch clear of snow.
When the phone rang in her pocket, she was tempted to ignore it. But what if it was the police? If they had another question, she’d just as soon answer it over the phone than have them come back here.
But instead of Captain Bing, the caller turned out to be Graham Lanius, the art dealer.
“Just checking in if you might have something for me. I’m going to do a big summer show this year. As one of my favorite local artists, I’d love it if you would participate.”
He called every couple of months, trying to talk her into a show. But her agent, Isabelle, wasn’t crazy about the man. Neither was Ashley, truthfully. He was smarmy, for one. And the few times she’d met him in person, she’d gotten the impression that while he made a living off artists, he looked down on them.
“I truly appreciate the offer. I’m working on a series, actually. But all my scheduling goes through my agent.”
“Ah, yes, the lovely Isabelle.” The words were still complimentary, but the tone had chilled a few degrees. “I’ll be sure to get in touch with her as well. Would you mind if I just stopped by and looked at your new series in the meanwhile? We’re practically neighbors.”
The work wasn’t ready. She didn’t like strangers in her house. Living in the same town didn’t make them neighbors. Yet she understood that since Broslin had three times as many galleries as the average small town, competition was rough. Although, her kind of art wasn’t exactly what appealed to tourists who came to see Franklin Milton’s birthplace and studio, his museum.
Milton had painted barns and fields and covered bridges, the cows, the horse farms, quintessential Pennsylvania countryside. His grandson, Andre, continued in that vein. But Graham didn’t have Andre, and at least Ashley Price was a fairly well-known name in the contemporary art world.
She had broken in, after years of hard work. But what she had achieved could be lost in a heartbeat. Her gaze stayed on the small pile of canvases in front of her. She needed to deal with that now.
“I’m sorry. I’m in the middle of something. I really need to go.”
“Sure. No problem at all. We’ll be in touch,” he promised.
She hung up and carried the rest of her dark creations outside.
She’d never destroyed a painting before. But now, once her pile was complete, she lifted the paint thinner and poured. The liquid splashed onto the top package, immediately bleeding through the wrapping. She set down the bottle and pulled the matches from her pocket as she shivered, feeling as if she was about to commit murder.
But they weren’t right, those images she’d created. Jackson Pollock had said that paintings had a life of their own; his job was to let it come through.
Her paintings had a death of their own. And her job was to destroy the dark images.
She was so focused on her thoughts that the question, “Need help?” coming from behind her, nearly made her jump out of her boots. Her heart broke into a mad rhythm as she whipped around.
The man had appeared out of nowhere, his hands in the pockets of his black coat, his wiry frame standing in contrast to the white background. His cerulean gaze sharp, he focused his full attention on her, and she couldn’t breathe for a second. She had pretty good color memory. She would have recognized that russet hair and those eyes anywhere.
But he did introduce himself.
“Jack Sullivan. I stopped by to thank you for what you did for me.”
He had been covered in mud and blood the last time she’d seen him. Now she had no trouble making out his features, the square jaw and the planes of his face. He looked gaunt, had probably lost weight from his ordeal and while recovering. Yet his aura was definitely not weak.
His unwavering focus and his intense gaze were complemented with a good dose of masculine energy. His sculpted lips made his face interesting. He would have made a great study for a painting. The edgy darkness in him made looking away from him difficult, something that would have come through in a painting if the artist did it right.
Another woman might have found him handsome. She found him, his presence at her house, terrifying. She would have preferred never having to see him again.
“Why don’t we go into the house?” She moved forward out of sheer desperation, against instinct. She didn’t want him in her house or anywhere near it, but she needed to draw him away from her paintings.
“I don’t want to keep you from your work.” His gaze slid to the pile. He stepped closer. “How about I give you a hand with this?”
* * *
She might have been shooting him a cool look, but she was hot. He’d missed that before.
Of course, the first time they’d met, he’d barely been conscious. And while he’d watched her nearly every day since he’d made his escape from the hospital, he’d watched her from afar.
She had large green eyes a man could fall into, with shadows at their depth that pulled at him. Her perfectly symmetrical face, beauty without artifice, was the face of a distressed angel. All that purity somehow accentuated her swollen lips that looked as if they’d been made to sin. Her body was mostly covered up by her coat, except for her legs that were long enough for a pole dancer.
As he looked her over, he felt a responding tug at his groin, which he ignored. He hadn’t come here for cheap thrills. He’d come to make her lead him to Blackwell.
And she probably knew it. She was as nervous as a king crab at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, although she tried to hide it. But she couldn’t stop her feet from shuffling over the frozen ground, her hands grasped tightly together in front of her.
“I have a few questions about that night. I’m a police officer.” Jack watched for her reaction.
His occupation set some at ease, carried a certain amount of respectability and trustworthiness, he supposed; others got decidedly nervous. Ashley Price didn’t relax. Nor did his revelation surprise her. She’d known, and he wondered how. Bing had kept all details from the media. Of course, there was no way to stop gossip from spreading in a small town like Broslin.
“I was hoping I could ask you some questions.” He laid his first card on the table, the only one he was willing to show her.
“I already told the police and the FBI everything I know.”
Or everything she would admit to, he thought. He’d had his own tête-à-tête with the FBI, and given an official victim statement. He’d held back plenty. As nervous as she was acting, he had no doubt Ashley Price had done the same.
“It will only take a few minutes,” he said in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t leaving.
“All right, um… We should go inside.” She moved forward but stopped after only one step.
He was standing between her and the house. She seemed reluctant to come too close to him.
“I’m sorry if I
was difficult when you rescued me. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Her gaze flew up to his. “You kidnapped me.”
So he’d given her a fright. He couldn’t rightly say he regretted it.
“Sorry. Again,” he apologized for form’s sake.
She nodded, pushing thick auburn waves out of her face with the back of a gloved hand. The face of an angel, he thought again. Except, he didn’t believe in angels, and he sure wasn’t predisposed to believe anything Ashley Price was about to tell him.
He’d spent enough years on the force to know a person with secrets when he met one, and she was definitely hiding something. She wanted him gone and wanted it badly.
He glanced at the makings of her strange bonfire, the reason he had revealed himself. He wouldn’t be a good cop if he stood by while a suspect destroyed evidence.
“What are you burning?”
“Some paintings of mine.”
He tried for a light tone. “That bad?”
“Worse.” She faked a ghost of a smile as she tapped her boot-clad feet. “It’s colder out here than I thought.” She made a move toward the house again.
But the more she tried to drag him away, the more his instincts prickled. He did want to see the inside of her house, but he was, for the moment, more interested in what she wanted to burn.
“It’ll get better once you start the fire. Let me straighten this up for you.” He stepped to the pile and shored it up, despite the protesting sound she made and the terrified look on her face.
He could actually bend over now; his ribs had healed some while he’d been going over his files this past week or so, calling around, trying to find out what the FBI had, sitting on fallen logs in the brush, watching her woods, watching her house.
She lived alone. He’d kept track of every man coming and going: Pete the mailman and Eddie the town handyman. He’d made a point to bump into both in town, but he didn’t recognize their voices as Blackwell’s. Still, he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. He hadn’t been in his right mind. So he couldn’t completely rule out either man.
He would have watched her house longer, put off a personal confrontation for another day or two in the hopes of catching someone else visiting her, if she hadn’t come out and begun building her strange pile.
“Here you go.” He worked the package he was holding so his finger would get caught in the folds of the brown wrapping paper and he could rip it, making it look like an accident. “Sorry.”
He held the partially exposed canvas. Green trees. Brown grass. Legs. Red.
She dove for the painting, and he managed to rip more wrapping off as she pulled it away from him. He caught a glimpse of a prone figure before she snatched the painting away to cover it against her body.
Everything inside him went cold, and it had nothing to do with the temperature outside. He picked up another painting by his feet.
There was a time he would have followed the rules and wouldn’t have gone further without a warrant. Not today. By the time he could get back with one—if he could get one, considering he wasn’t on active duty—the paintings would be a pile of ashes. He needed to know.
“Don’t,” she pleaded.
He tore into the wrapper.
A woman in a creek, pasty face, blankly staring eyes, the body bent at odd angles. Dark, insidious colors swirled in the water—except for the ribbon of red that looked violently vibrant. The scene pulled him in, pulled him under until he could feel the cold water on his own face. A shiver drilled down his spine.
The next painting depicted a man in a UPS driver uniform. The paint thinner had blurred this one, but he saw enough to remember the case even if he hadn’t worked on it. The body had been found outside his jurisdiction, but this was rural PA and murder was big news. When something like that happened in any of the small towns nearby, all the cops in the area tended to know about it.
He reached for the next picture, then the next. She stopped protesting, looked as if she’d gone numb, clutching the one picture she had taken away from him. Just the same, he moved into a position from where he could grab her if she thought of running.
He ripped the wrapping from the next painting he picked up. Plenty of smudges on this one, but he had no trouble recognizing the scene—he’d spent enough time there in the last week or so. He blinked as he looked at an image of himself in the grave.
Air hissed out of his lungs. Rage filled the freed space. “How do you know Brady Blackwell?” His voice snapped.
She stood silent, shivering.
He grabbed up as many pictures as he could, tucking them under one arm, grabbing her with his other hand. “We need to talk.”
She wouldn’t move.
“Inside or you can come to the station with me.” An empty threat, since he couldn’t officially interrogate anyone. He was on medical leave, off the case. If Bing found out he came here—
“Please.” She raised her luminous green eyes to his face.
If she thought she could soften him as easily as that, she had another think coming. “Let’s go.”
“I have nothing to do with what happened to you,” she begged.
He very much doubted that.
He marched her into the house. He couldn’t really remember much of it from before, little else but the pain. And when the smell of paint hit him, he could swear he felt that pain again. He shook it off and looked around.
She had a clean home with a sense of warmth, a place that contained a lot of natural wood surfaces and old-fashioned braided rugs. Not exactly a killer’s lair. Then again, appearances could be deceiving.
He scanned the living room wall, covered with drawings and paintings that looked like they’d been done by a child. She had no other artwork on display, nothing that might have been her own save what he held.
As he stepped forward, his ribs ached, reminding him of those days of torture. “Do you have a basement? A root cellar?” He didn’t see any sign of one from the outside but wanted to make sure.
“None of the houses have basements this close to the reservoir. The water table is too high.” She shrugged out of her coat, looking dazed, as if she was moving on autopilot.
Could be an act, he thought as he watched her, making sure she wasn’t planning on making a break for it. His gaze swept her from head to toe, looking for suspicious body language, but then he got distracted by other things.
Okay, he definitely hadn’t remembered the breasts. They were a lot rounder up close and personal than from the distance when he’d been watching her through the loft window. Her body was the type to give men restless dreams. The wave of instant lust threw him for a second, but for only a second. He was a seasoned investigator. He could ignore his twitching dick, dammit.
“Take a seat.” He motioned her to the sofa, not liking that he felt the need to put some distance between them.
To start with, he asked a question he already knew the answer to, an old interrogators’ trick. “You have a daughter?” He nodded toward the drawings, most of them signed Madison.
“Yes.” She wouldn’t look at him.
“Where is she?”
“She’s temporarily staying with my father.”
Not Madison’s father? So nothing changed there. According to a couple of old tabloid articles he’d found on her on the Internet, she had claimed the father of her child was Dave DaRosa, a prominent Philadelphia millionaire. DaRosa, twenty years Ashley’s senior and a reputed ladies’ man, had publicly denied paternity, and Ashley Price had never taken him to court. Could be she hadn’t been sure enough for a DNA test.
He knew DaRosa from the news. Everybody in the state did. The man liked to throw around money and liked to do it publicly. An image of the cocky bastard’s signet-ringed hands on Ashley’s long thighs flashed into his mind and made him angry, which made no sense at all. He was definitely off his game today.
He shrugged off his coat and draped it over the back of an armchair, but he didn’t sit. He kept
one eye on her while he spread out her paintings on the floor. When he reached for the one she was still holding, she clutched it to her body.
“It’s too late for that now.” He tugged on the canvas, and she let it go finally, her full lips pressed into narrow lines.
He lay the picture next to the others and looked over the bizarre collection of disturbing images. He’d always wondered if Blackwell might have had more victims, victims that had either not been found, or found but not connected to him. He didn’t recognize a single person in the paintings from his Blackwell victim files, yet some of the faces did seem vaguely familiar. He racked his brain to place them, but nothing popped into his mind.
“How do you know these people?”
“I don’t.”
“Were you there when they died?”
“No.”
“How long have you known Brady Blackwell?”
“I have no idea who he is.”
Frustration pumped through him as he reviewed the paintings again. Something was off, but he didn’t know what. Then it finally hit him. Blackwell’s victims had all been found in pieces. All the corpses Ashley had painted were whole, without mutilation.
Another killer?
His gaze snapped to her. Did she kill these people so she could paint them?
But Blackwell had definitely been the one to put him in the grave. Maybe they worked together; Jack circled back to his original thoughts.
Blackwell took young women, in twos and threes, chopped them up, kept some of the pieces. Whoever killed the people in the paintings had left them whole. Because she wanted to paint them?
There had been a handful of boyfriend-girlfriend serial-killer teams, but they’d all hunted together, used the same MO. That a team like that would have a different murder profile didn’t seem likely.
For the first time in a long time, he had a lead, dammit. He wanted it to make sense. He wanted a straight arrow pointing in the right direction, but confusion was all he was getting.
“Why do you paint these?”
She blinked rapidly, looking as if she was fighting tears.
He couldn’t care less. He was too much of a hard-assed, cold-hearted bastard to be swayed by crying. Miss Price was about to find that out. Princess Price, the tabloids had called her back in the day. She came from major money, father a veritable tycoon, mother a nut, died over a decade ago in a mental hospital. Ashley, the only child, made herself a name in the visual arts.
