Deathscape

by Dana Marton

  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.

  He’d seen her police file as well. A four-year-old boy, Dylan Miller, had died while in her care, went under the ice of the reservoir last winter—ruled accidental drowning. He had to wonder now, didn’t he, with all those paintings lying at his feet.

  Were the rest of those people Blackwell’s victims like he’d been, or Ashley’s? Maybe Blackwell was a killer with a split personality. Killed one set of victims one way, the other for a different purpose entirely. His jaw tightened. He didn’t like the word “victim” applied to him.

  From what he knew of Blackwell and what he’d seen of Ashley so far, his money was on Blackwell doing all the killing and Ashley doing only the painting. He didn’t get a killer vibe from her. Yet she was involved, in up to her haunted green eyes.

  “Did Brady Blackwell make you paint these?” Maybe they were something like trophies to the bastard. Ashley, the bodies, and Blackwell had to be somehow all connected.

  “I don’t know Brady Blackwell.” She held herself together but not by much. Her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, were trembling.

/>   “I’m going to bring in the rest. You touch any of these, you move an inch from that couch, and I promise you’ll regret it.”

  He strode out, hurried back in with an armload two minutes later, laid them out and unwrapped them, examined them one by one.

  Then he asked the question he was most afraid of knowing the answer to. “Do you have others?”

  He didn’t know if he could stand looking at Shannon in the grave. It had been fifteen years, but the wound of losing his sister had never healed. He didn’t breathe while he waited for the answer.

  “No. This is it.”

  He exhaled. Of course. She couldn’t have painted Shannon in North Carolina. Ashley Price was twenty-five, according to her file. She would have been only ten, living in Philadelphia with her parents, at the time of Shannon’s disappearance. One of the tightly wound springs inside him marginally relaxed.

  He stared at the images, and a faint memory popped into his head at last. The woman in one, lying in a dark alley, had been a rape/homicide case in West Chester six months back. The case belonged to a different police department, but Jack made it his business to look into cases of women disappearing, then turning up dead. This one he’d quickly ruled out as Blackwell’s, and the West Chester police had gotten their perp within a few days, a rock-solid case. She’d been murdered by her ex-boyfriend.

  No link to Blackwell. Yet there had to be a connection to Ashley Price, since Ashley had painted her. How and when?

  “What do you know about these people?”

  She shifted her gaze away from him. “Nothing.”

  “Stop lying.” Frustration raised his voice, which made her jump in her seat.

  “Just what I read in the paper.”

  He drew up an eyebrow. “You only know them from the news?”

  She nodded without looking at him.

  He picked up the painting he’d been staring at and held it up for her. “I don’t remember the papers detailing the exact position of the body when she was found. You need to come up with a better story.”

  She paled, fighting more tears.

  His cop instincts said she didn’t have what it took to kill. Maybe in self-defense, but not in cold blood and regularly. She seemed messed up, granted, but cold, calculated murder wasn’t in her.

  He’d interrogated enough people to know when to go soft as well as when to push hard. He could do bad-cop-good-cop all on his own just fine.

  “Look.” He gentled his voice. “I’ve got all these paintings now. I know you’re connected. I don’t think you harmed these people. We both know who did. You have to tell me where he is so I can stop him from doing this again.”

  She rubbed her arms, breathing erratically. “I don’t feel well.”

  “You’ll feel better once you get this off your chest. It’s over. It’s the end of the line. You need to come clean.”

  Some strange energy seemed to zap into her then, and she shot to her feet, vibrating with nerves. “I can’t breathe.” She gulped air.

  Whatever her connection was to the people she painted, he knew this: Brady Blackwell had put him in a shallow grave, and Ashley Price had been there when he came to. For what purpose, Jack wasn’t sure yet, but he didn’t think she’d just randomly wandered the fields in the twilight and accidentally tripped over him as she claimed.

  And what about all these other people? They hadn’t been on her land. How had she come to see them dead? See them from close enough and well enough to render the scene with accurate detail?

  “Tell me, Ashley, where, when, and how did you come to paint these?”

  She moved to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. Drank. Then, as if someone had taken out her battery, she collapsed against the counter and slid to the floor, leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, her face buried in her slim-fingered artist hands as she hyperventilated.

  “I see them in my mind.” She choked up the words. “I don’t want to. They are just there, and I have to get them out.”

  What she implied… Screw the good cop. Anger pumped through him. Did he look stupid? If she was going for this kind of bullshit, he seriously needed to work on his I-mean-business face. “So you’re psychic?”

  “No.” The denial came between two gasps.

  “What then?”

  Her hands fell away, and she looked up at him, the desperation on her face gut-wrenching. “I don’t know.” Tears filled her eyes all over again. She blinked them furiously away.

  A woman on the brink of falling apart. Good. Suspects usually told the truth when they came unhinged. Time to push harder.

  “What is Blackwell to you?” he challenged. “Are you willing to go to prison for him? Is he your boyfriend?” While the idea of DaRosa’s hands on her had angered him, the idea of Blackwell’s hands on her disturbed him on a deeper level. “Is he worth a charge of accessory to murder? Is he that good a fuck?”

  Her eyes widened with shock, and she recoiled from him as if he’d physically struck her. If her reaction made him feel like a bastard, he wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.

  “I don’t know him,” she protested in a voice filled with despair.

  “So you just saw me in your mind?”

  She nodded.

  Judging by the look in her eyes, she hated him as much at this moment as he hated Blackwell. She was welcome to it. “And?”

  “I recognized the rock and the creek. I knew where you were.”

  * * *

  Jack Sullivan thought she was in league with a serial killer. And, stupidly, to convince him she was innocent, she had blurted out her darkest secret. Oh God. She would have done anything to undo that, to erase her words.

  Soon everyone would know that something was seriously wrong with her. And then she would never get her daughter back. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, dizzy with the anxiety and anger that gripped her.

  She had to make Sullivan believe her, accept that she had nothing to do with the killer he was looking for. He seemed dead set on pinning a slew of murders on her. Or accessory to murder. Nausea bubbled in her stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second.

  To think that she’d been scared of Bing. For Bing, the case was a job. For Sullivan, it was personal. He was aggressive and crass and relentless and—

  “Have you tried to find any of the others?” He glanced back at the pictures, then at her again, his face hard, his eyes narrowed. He had a look of emptiness about him, as if he’d left his soul in that grave and brought only the darkness with him. He had no right to bring that to her house.

  She wanted to curl up into a ball and howl with the unfairness of it all. “I didn’t know where the others were. Only you. And I knew you weren’t dead.”

  “How?”

  She pointed at the painting with a frustrated gesture. It was so obvious. How could he not see it?

  He picked up the painting, looked at it for a few seconds; then he looked at the rest of the canvases. “I don’t look like the others.” He paused. “Why did you come?”

  If only she hadn’t. She’d been scared out of her mind. “I thought…”

  He waited her out.

  “I thought if I saved you, maybe I wouldn’t see another…vision, ever again.” She had expected relief, some sort of absolution and an end to the nightmare that had kept her bound for over a year now. Instead, she’d gotten Jack Sullivan with all his disapproval and suspicions, and his ability to reach to the deepest, darkest core of her.

  He kept his face inscrutable, leaving her no way to tell if he believed anything she told him. She wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to her.

  The first time she had painted a lifeless body, she’d thought it some sort of a fluke, another symptom of the depression that had followed the accident on the reservoir. The landscape she’d planned on painting kept changing as she was compelled to change the location of the trees, add a road, take out the barn she’d meant to have as the focal point. She’d painted that first
body, an older woman, in a trance, horrified when she’d stepped back at the end.

  After the second time it’d happened, a black teenager, she packed up her paints and canvases and decided not to paint for a while until whatever was going on in her mind blew over. Her shrink upped her antidepressant. It didn’t help, made her slightly manic, keeping her up night after night with nothing to do.

  The third body she’d seen in her mind, a man in a UPS uniform, she’d been determined not to paint. But her hands moved on their own, dragging out her supplies. She’d been terrified enough after that to throw the rest of her blank canvases and paint tubes into the trash.

  When the image of the fourth body invaded her thoughts, she’d been forced to paint on the back of an old kitchen cabinet with leftover household paints. After that, she’d accepted that she couldn’t fight the curse and no longer tossed the odd canvases friends brought by or the paint and brush samples sent by companies she’d frequently ordered from in the past.

  When the next terrible urge came, she simply painted the young woman, Megan Keeler, the first who had a name. Ashley had recognized her in the Inquirer a few days later. Missing College Student’s Body Found in Southeastern PA.

  She’d thrown up twice before she could finish the article.

  With the next victims, she searched the papers obsessively until she found them. She didn’t dare go to the police. What help could she be? They were already all dead. What could she say? I paint dead people?

  The man with the cerulean-blue eyes, Detective Jack Sullivan, had been her ninth.

  She was not going crazy. There had to be a way out of this. She would find it.

  “When did it start?” he demanded.

  God, not that. She couldn’t go back to Dylan. But looking at the man’s face, she finally understood that she wasn’t going to get a choice. “An accident happened on the reservoir.”

  He nodded.

  Did he know about that? Of course he did; everyone around here knew the whole sordid tale.