Color Blind (13 page)

“Jesus,” said Brown. “Are we looking at a copycat?”

Mitch Freeman peered at the paintings over his reading glasses. “Suppose the killer wanted to throw us off, so he painted one painting better than the others, more
assuredly,
as you say?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kate. “Every painter has his or her own touch. It’s like handwriting. Go into a painting class sometime. You’ll see twenty students all working from the same still life or model, and every painting, though it’s the same subject matter, will look different. The composition will be different, the brush strokes, and certainly the color. No two people see color in the same way. Color is subjective—it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

“How so?” asked Grange.

“Your shirt, Agent Grange, looks blue because it’s absorbing all other colors of light and reflecting
only
the blue back to us. Color is the result of light waves. When you say, ‘My shirt is blue,’ what you’re actually saying is that because of the molecular structure of your shirt’s surface, it’s absorbing all light rays except the blue ones.” Six months ago Kate hardly knew any of this, but her PBS show on color had entailed hours spent with scientists and color theorists, who had given her a crash course in color education. “Your shirt has no color itself. Light is generating the color.”

“Do you mean I’m looking at the pink clouds in that painting,” said Perlmutter, “but they’re not really pink?”

“They’re pink because we
perceive
them as pink. But it’s all happening in your
brain
. You see, color occurs when light strikes the nerve cells at the back of your eye called rods and cones. The cones are responsible for color. Rods for black and white. The rods and cones respond to the light, which send a message to the optic nerve in our brains, which in turn tells us what color we’re looking at.”

“So, the guy who did the Bronx paintings, he’s screwing around with color,” said Perlmutter. “But why?”

“That I can’t tell you,” said Kate, though something tugged at the back of her mind. “Could be he’s experimenting. As I said, he isn’t the first painter to play with color for any number of reasons. Emotional resonance? Symbolism?”

“You think the color is symbolic?” asked Brown. “A red sky and pink clouds might mean something?”

“Like Gauguin?” asked Perlmutter, with a good-student smile.

“Could be,” said Kate. “Though I’m not sure what. Gauguin used pure, simple color because he was depicting a pure and simple culture—the people he found in Tahiti and Martinique. But in these paintings I don’t know what that symbolism would be.” She moved back to the Midtown painting, the still life with the blue-striped bowl, and looked closely again. “I really think this has been painted with foam-tipped brushes, or small pieces of sponge. And notice the white stripes in the bowl are not painted at all, but simply the white canvas.” Kate tapped her chin.

“What is it?” asked Brown.

“There’s something familiar in the way this is painted, but…I don’t know.” She sighed, and turned back to the Bronx paintings. “There’s something else. See here?” She passed the magnifier to Grange. “It’s a
Y,
I think. And there—” She directed his hand. “It could be part of an
R,
maybe.”

Grange flinched a bit, moved his hand quickly away from hers. “Meaning?”

She took back the magnifying glass and ran it over the Bronx paintings one more time. “Words? Under the paint. We have to get them x-rayed.” She moved the glass over the gray edges. “This scribbled border is intriguing. I’m not sure, but this could be words too, written over and over so that they become unintelligible.” She squinted. “We have to get enlargements of these areas.” She went back to the blue-striped bowl. “I don’t see any hint of words here at all, but we should x-ray all three paintings.”

“Agreed,” said Grange. “I’ll ship them to Quantico ASAP.”

Kate laid her hand on Grange’s arm. “I’d like to have them around, and—well, I hate to say it, but what if we get another? It would be good to have these here for comparison.”

Grange stared at Kate’s hand, but did not move. “You can x-ray them here, can’t you, Brown?”

“Lab’s right downstairs. And x-raying is no big deal. We do it all the time. Hernandez, who runs our lab, can get right on it. She already ran prints and fibers on the paintings.”

“Anything?” Grange asked.

“No prints, no hairs or fibers other than the vics’ in each case. Our nasty unsub—or
unsubs
—wore gloves.”

“Okay,” said Grange. “We keep the paintings here for a while. But I want all your lab tests and the X-rays copied and sent to Quantico for double-checking.”

“No problem,” said Brown.

Grange stood, forcing Kate’s hand to slide off his arm, which was his intent. Her touch had made it almost impossible for him to concentrate. He paced back and forth in front of the three paintings. “If we’re looking at a copycat, two unsubs, two
unknown subjects,
perhaps we’d better divide the investigation.” He glanced at Kate, wanted to say:
Okay, you’ve done your part, you can go home now.
But he’d gotten the word from Tapell. And the word was:
Mc-Kinnon stays
. And she would, but only as long as the case was being shared by the Bureau and the NYPD.

Brown didn’t much like Grange coming into his territory and taking over, but he knew he had to play the game. “Might be easier, and less costly, if we continue to handle the cases together—until we prove they’re different. If that’s okay with you.”

Grange looked past the edge of Brown’s face and said, “Got a point there, Brown,” then proceeded to outline how he thought they should proceed with the cases. Kate noticed how Brown pretended to listen, nodding, his brow knit in studied concentration, but she knew Brown would run his elite homicide squad exactly as he wanted while he let Grange think he was playing ball.

A
fter the men had gone, Kate sat by herself for a moment. She felt odd, almost good.

But how could she possibly feel good?

Because she had done it, had functioned, could look at that painting—a clear reminder of her husband’s death—and analyze it without collapsing into a heap.

Now she looked again at all three paintings. No way they were the work of the same artist. She was certain of it.

She glanced at the banal Midtown painting—fruit in a blue-striped bowl—that would be forever linked to her husband’s death.

Kate did not see herself as a vengeful person, but had to admit that right now it was the reason she got up in the morning, her reason for living—to find the man who had murdered her husband, and make him pay.

One more time she ran the magnifying glass over the surface of the Midtown still life. What was it about those areas of white canvas and the stained, rather than brushed-on paint, that seemed so familiar?

Y
ou want me to summarize while you look them over?”

Hernandez leaned against Floyd Brown’s desk, her ample figure straining against the snug lab coat. She was maybe thirty-five, dark brown hair pulled back without much thought, since it was most often hidden under one of those papery plastic bonnets she wore to keep it from contaminating evidence in the crime lab she’d been running for the past four years.

Brown scanned the postmortem files and nodded.

“Okay.” She cracked the gum she was chewing. “The first two vics, out of the Bronx, pretty much identical. Stab wounds are fast and deep. Heart and lungs pierced. They wouldn’t have lived long. At least three different knives used. If you look at the last page, you’ll see I’m suggesting a short hunting knife, a thin stiletto, and definitely another, heavier serrated number for cutting through ribs. Very efficient work. Your unsub came prepared.”

“Overkill, for sure.”

“No question. He opened them up as if he was searching for something.” She cracked her gum and Brown gave her a look, which she ignored. “But there are no signs of torture. No bite marks. No obvious trophies taken. Nipples, labia, all there.” She paused, cracked her gum a few times, unconsciously. “I’d say he played around with them once they were opened up, but the organs are all intact. He didn’t take anything home for supper.”

Brown blew air out of his mouth. “What about Rothstein?”

“If you look at the suggested weapons on page three…” She waited a moment, chewing loudly while Brown found it. “One weapon only—switchblade, I’m guessing. The vic was slit twice—horizontally and vertically, up from the pubis to just under the sternum, where the bone stopped the blade, then yanked out—” She mimed the moves with jerking arm and hand movements. “…then sliced across the midsection like a big plus sign. Fairly clean wounds, deep enough to cut through skin and muscle. But the heart and lungs were never penetrated.” She hesitated a moment. “Way it looks to me is his lower intestines fell out as he was dragged through the alley.”

“Jesus Christ.” Brown stared at the photos clipped to the file, Richard Rothstein’s naked body broken into abstract details of bruised, wounded flesh.

“From the body temps I got from the ME, who took them at the scene, plus the fact that rigor was just setting in”—Hernandez was chewing her gum with a ferocious intensity—“I’d have to say that the vic was alive, possibly for a while, in that alley.”

“Listen to me, Hernandez.” Brown took hold of her wrist. “Under no circumstances is McKinnon to see or hear about this. You got that?”

“Wouldn’t be my job to tell her. That’s up to you.” Hernandez wriggled her hand out of his grip. “Tapell’s got copies. But it’s up to
you
who gets any others.” She punctuated the statement with a loud gum pop.

“Right,” he said softly. The idea that McKinnon’s husband lay dying, slowly, in that goddamn alleyway made Brown feel sick. He’d gotten to know Richard a bit during the Death Artist case, and afterward, when Kate had invited Brown and his wife, Vonette, out to dinner and to their home a few times, and he had liked the brash and charming Brooklyn-born lawyer.

“If you look at page two, you’ll see that both Bronx vics had tape across their mouths, hands, and feet. We managed to pull a few hairs and fibers from the inside of the tape. Most of the fibers were from each vic’s apartment. Same is true of the hairs—came from the victims. But we also got a couple fibers and hairs that don’t match either vic. So most likely they belong to your unsub. We put the fibers through spectrometry and gas chromatography so they can be matched to clothing and anything you might find in a crib. Evidence ran the hair samples through their system, but so far, no match. But there too we can test for a match once you bring someone in. I attached the evidence results and reports at the back.”

“Nice work,” said Brown. Now all they had to do was find a suspect. No matter how good the forensics, if there was no suspect to match to the findings, it didn’t mean squat. “Any tape used on Rothstein?”

“No. He was knocked out, probably hit with a gun barrel, from the size and shape of the bruise on the back of his head, which would have rendered him unconscious. For a while. Then he was cut. I didn’t find any defensive wounds on his hands, so he was probably out when he was sliced.”

“Small blessing,” said Brown. He thought a minute. “But why cut him if you’ve got a gun?”

“Your guess,” said Hernandez.

“Any prints?”

“No way to dust in that alleyway. Place was a sty. Crime Scene did his office, but nothing other than the vic’s and his staff’s prints came up. Your unsub wore gloves.”

Brown closed the file on Richard Rothstein. He’d heard enough for the moment. “What about the Bronx? Any prints there?”

“Lots of half-prints and smudges, both scenes. And the ninhydrin produced a couple of gloved prints on that Gauguin picture that McKinnon brought in, which must be your unsub, as I doubt the vic wore gloves around the house.”

“A gloved print doesn’t do us much good,” said Brown.

“No, but there could be some sweat on the print, like if he touched his face, maybe. Not a hundred percent sure, but it’s being tested for DNA. Could be something there—if we’re lucky.”

“How long for the DNA?” Brown asked.

“A few days.”

“Anything else?”

“There were scuffs and tears on the front and tops of Rothstein’s shoes, which means he was dragged facedown—which would also account for the intestinal leakage in the alleyway.”

“Can someone actually live with half their guts spilled out?” Brown had to ask.

“Until the blood loss is too great. Though the trauma would most likely have put him in shock and comatized him.”

“Thank God,” said Brown. This much he might pass on to McKinnon if he could ever figure out a way to say it.

“Yeah,” said Hernandez, thinking that sometimes, particularly when she was out of her lab, away from the microscopes and spectrographs and petri dishes, and dealing with the living, she really hated her job. “I gotta get back,” she said.

“Right. Thanks.”

Brown linked his fingers behind his head and sat back in his chair. This much was clear: No question they were looking at two different MOs.

The Bronx victims were stabbed and gutted; Rothstein, knocked out first with a gun, then stabbed. Someone was obviously capitalizing on the Bronx murders, playing copycat, the painting added to seal the deal. McKinnon had been right about the paintings being different. Though whoever had murdered Richard Rothstein did not know what the Bronx paintings looked like, simply that an oil painting—a still life and a cityscape, thanks to the ever-hungry press—had been found at the crime scenes.

Brown made a few notes, summarizing the two cases and their differences while leaving out the part about Rothstein’s being alive in that alleyway. He would pass his summary on to the detectives, then speak with the chief of operations and with Tapell and ask to have more detectives assigned. It was the last thing anyone wanted to hear with the mayor cutting funds daily and the entire NYPD overworked, exhausted, and pissed off.