Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) (10 page)

20

The Sorenson Gallery sat in Laurel Canyon, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles. Expensive didn’t always translate to tasteful in Farkas’s opinion, but on this particular night it seemed to.

The gallery had been exquisitely decorated. His photographs and paintings adorned the walls, his sculptures occupied the centers of the rooms, and video loops ran in a special dark room. He had initially wanted a hallucinogenic fog to waft into the room out of the vents, maybe something laced with LSD to give the observers a truer experience of his art, but the owner of the gallery had refused.
Small minds always had a way of blocking the path of great spirits
.

Tonight he had dressed like a true artist. It was considered passé to call oneself an artist and certainly to attempt to dress like one, but he felt stereotypes were there for a reason—they were generally based in some aspect of reality. So he wore an all-white silk top, white silk pants, and a red scarf. The red splashed out away from him, diverting attention from his deformity. He stared through the windows first. He had decided that if it didn’t look every bit as amazing as he had hoped, he wouldn’t be making an appearance. He would just sneak away and not return anyone’s calls.

But to his pleasure, the gallery was all that he had hoped.

He entered without fanfare, and in fact didn’t want to be recognized right away. People’s reactions to art were more interesting than the art. That was always true, from the works of the great masters down to the lowliest graffiti artist in the ghettos.

Farkas noticed a young woman staring at one of his photographs. He stood behind her and just watched her reaction. The photograph was of a teenage boy holding a gun that had just been fired. At his feet lay the body of a young man only a few years older than he was, with a bloody wound in his head.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said.

She glanced at him. “That’s one word for it.”

“It’s in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some of the militias recruit boys as young as eight to do their killing for them. They figure that if the boys can kill from the time they’re young, by the time they’re adults, that’s all they’ll know. They won’t hesitate when called upon to commit genocide and mass rape.”

She looked at him again. “How do you know that?”

“Sorry,” he said, holding out his hand. “Oliver Farkas.”

“Oh, wow.” She took his hand. “Mr. Farkas, I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’m Natalie Gibb, with Arts in the City.”

“Right. I thought I recognized you. I love your magazine. The piece you did on billboards as mind pollution was fascinating.”

She grinned bashfully. “I don’t think the billboard lobby would agree with you. They tried to get me fired.”

“The insecure are hammers, and they always look for the tallest nails to hit.”

“Well, I appreciate it. But what I do is nothing compared to this. You risk your life for your art. I do it for a paycheck.”

He brushed past her, gently rubbing the back of his hand against her thighs. The photograph was black and white. Farkas could’ve probably stopped the shooting had he wanted to, but he’d had no intention of doing that. The image was perfect in its horror: one child killing another and not feeling a bit of remorse. In fact, the boy’s face seemed to betray a hint of pleasure.

“I’ve seen this picture in every country on the planet,” he said, his eyes not leaving the photograph. “The darkness in us that’s waiting. This boy, before the war, was a normal child. Given the right opportunity, he willingly became a monster.”

Farkas turned to her and saw the wide-eyed look of someone who had just seen or heard something terrifying but not enough time had passed for them to be truly terrified. True terror, he had always believed, took time to develop.

So he smiled and said, “But what do I know? I point a camera and press a button.”

She blinked, as though pushing away what she’d just heard, and then grinned. “I think you don’t give yourself enough credit.”

“Olly!” a tall woman in a thin red dress shouted as she crossed the gallery. She threw her arms around Farkas’s neck and kissed air next to his cheek. “I have some people you must meet.”

With that, Farkas was dragged away. He mingled, always smiling, always having anecdotes and witty retorts at the ready. People would say he was nothing if not charming and likeable, or so he thought.

The final piece of the exhibit was going to be revealed at around ten thirty, and as the hour approached, he grew excited. He took his place at the back of the gallery, away from everybody else, as the gallery owner’s wife stood next to a piece covered by a blue tarp.

“And now,” the woman said, “the
pièce de résistance
we’ve waited for all night. I give you Boy with Wolf, by Oliver Farkas: the new piece accepted into the Guggenheim as of twelve days ago.”

She reached over and pulled the tarp off, and murmurs went up from the crowd. Before them was the skeleton of what would be a boy, next to the skeleton of a she-wolf. The boy was suckling from the wolf in a pose reminiscent of the famous sculpture of Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf’s tit. A bit of organ in the shape of udders hung down from the empty wolf ribs.

But the center of the piece sat in the boy’s chest: a heart. A bloody, crimson heart that shone with wetness as it began to beat in a slow rhythm in tune with a similar heart inside the wolf.

“The hearts are beating from an electric shock administered every two seconds,” the wife said, staring at the organs. “And I believe, Olly, you used calf hearts for the piece and horse bones for the skeletons, is that right?”

Farkas smiled, sipping at the wine he held in a plastic cup. “That’s right.”

“Simply amazing,” she said. “A beautiful piece worthy of the Guggenheim.”

A few people came up to Farkas and congratulated him, but most gathered around the piece. Many bent down for a better view of the hearts, completely unaware how large a calf’s heart really was in comparison to the heart of a boy. A calf’s heart wouldn’t even fit in there, and yet no one even posed the question.

Farkas looked down and noticed he had an erection. He turned away quickly and left the gallery, strolling to the back alley. The moon hung in the sky like a silver orb, and he watched it and wished some clouds covered it. The moon always looked more beautiful partially covered.

“That’s pretty impressive,” Natalie said as she stepped outside. He could smell the alcohol on her breath.

Farkas looked at her and then back at the moon. “I worked for months on that piece, and even had I worked a century, it wouldn’t compare to a single glance at the moon. Art is a cheap imitation of nature. We’re motel paintings compared to nature. That’s my true regret: that I can never live up to its pureness… though I try.”

“Well, maybe we can talk about it a bit more back at your place?”

They stepped inside the home, and Natalie immediately wowed and chuckled. She ran through the house like a child at a playground. Open space was the theme, and it seemed almost like the only thing taking up any space was the metal banister and stairs leading up to the second floor and the bedroom. The home was designed as a loft. Farkas would’ve lived in a loft if he could’ve, but he preferred his privacy.

He watched as she ran up the stairs and examined the bedroom and the pole that went all the way back down to the first floor. She grabbed the pole and slid down, squealing the entire time.

“This place is amazing.” She ran up and grabbed his hands. “I really like the bedroom.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a bedroom. It’s more of a shrine.”

“Oh, well, you’re definitely going to have to show me what you worship.”

Before heading upstairs, Farkas made certain she had a few more drinks. It had to be enough to abolish not only self-control but perhaps even lead to black spots in the memory of this night the next morning.

She pressed her lips to his, and wearily, he obliged. Kissing was such a disgusting action. Saliva and bacteria exchanged in a wet embrace. Nothing about it seemed pleasurable. After a few seconds, she pulled away with a shy grin on her face and led him up the stairs to the bedroom.

She sat him on the bed as she rose and undressed. Her skirt slipped off as though she had only just applied lotion, and her shirt, which had hugged her tightly the entire night, came off as well in one smooth motion.

Natalie turned around and bent over, revealing her thong underwear. She ran her hands up her calves and then her thighs before turning to him with a smile on her face. She got between his knees and undid his pants. Her lips engulfed him and her head moved slowly… and then she stopped.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” he said.

“You’re not getting hard.”

He rose and crossed the room to the dresser. Inside was a black satchel that he removed and set on the top, unrolling it and revealing a plethora of scalpels, knives, needles, pliers, lighters, and shards of glass. “No, that type of thing doesn’t arouse me.”

“Well, what does?”

He ran his hand over the glimmering blades. “Let me show you.”

21

The flight to Phoenix had been scheduled for one in the morning but had been delayed for a reason the airline wouldn’t say. Gio told Sarah he once had to wait for a plane for three days, so a few minutes didn’t feel like anything. As they sat in the terminal, she rested her head against his shoulder and he let her.

“What does this feel like to you?” he said. “Us?”

“Comfortable. Familiar.”

“That’s all? Familiar?”

“That’s about the most important thing to me.”

“I think it’s maybe the opposite for men. New is everything. Even supermodels get cheated on.”

The airline announced that the flight would be boarding in ten minutes, and they rose and stood in line. Even at this hour, at least a hundred people waited to board. She stood in line with Gio and she could tell he was searching for something to say, so she made it easy on him.

“Yes, I miss you.”

He looked at her and grinned. “I wasn’t going to ask you that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“Maybe… I miss you, too. A lot. I don’t know what happened. I think it was my issues. I have this inability to commit right now. I feel like if I let you in, it would only be a recipe for you to get hurt.”

“I can take care of myself.”

He rubbed the side of his cheek with his finger. “I thought you might be the one. A house, kids, retirement, the whole thing… and then I just let it go to shit.” He shook his head. “I wish we knew why we did the things we did. It seems like no one knows.”

“No one does. You just have to believe that tomorrow will be better than today and you’ll get by.”

“You believe that? That tomorrow is always better than today?”

She handed the airline worker her boarding pass, and the man’s finger brushed her own. In a flash, nausea raced through her. Her guts tightened and her heart beat furiously, so loud in her ears that she couldn’t hear anything else. She collapsed onto the floor.

A plane was up in cloud-covered skies. A thunderstorm. It had moved in so quickly the pilots had been caught off guard. And in a brilliant, violent flash, the plane was struck. It went down in a smoking heap, turning to nothing more than fiery twisted metal on an open desert floor. Bodies lay everywhere, some of them melted into the seat from the heat given off at the collision with the ground, some torn in half, some ripped apart so violently limbs were tossed hundreds of feet.

“Sarah!” Gio said, grabbing her. He lifted her in his arms, holding her head off the ground.

“We can’t go,” she mumbled, the pain numbing her face. She thought her eyes were closed but then realized they’d been open the entire time: she was blind.

“Lie down,” he said calmly, “lie down, I’ll call an ambulance.”

She heard voices around her, Gio barking orders at them, and then her sight began to return. Gray hazy outlines at first and then actual images. Gio leaned over her, staring into her eyes, his hands on either side of her head.

“We can’t get on that plane. They can’t take off. Tell them they can’t take off, it’s going to crash.”

“You sure?”

She nodded.

Gio hesitated and then jumped up. He ran over to a gathering of airline employees and began telling them they couldn’t leave. Wisely, he withheld why. Just said it was a matter of national security.

Sarah was helped to her feet and then sat in one of the chairs bolted to the wall. Her nose hadn’t bled, but the blindness was new. That had never happened, and it frightened her to her core. Images of blind witches locked away in mountains popped into her head.

An airport paramedic ran over, but she explained that she didn’t need medical attention and insisted that they call off the ambulance.

Gio came over after a few minutes and sat next to her. He exhaled and rested his elbows against his thighs, leaning forward as he looked her in the face. “You okay?”

She nodded, not meeting his gaze. “I went blind for a few seconds. That’s never happened before.”

“Maybe some medical attention wouldn’t be the worst thing?”

“I’ve been to doctors. One neurologist said he thought I was schizophrenic, and another one thought I had a tumor, though of course no MRI or CAT scans showed anything. They need rational explanations for this, and there aren’t any.”

He nodded. “They’ve contacted their lawyers, who’ll contact the local field office here, who’ll contact DC, who’ll ask me what the hell I’m doing. Eventually, that plane is gonna take off.”

“I know.” She shook her head. “The worst part is that I don’t even know if it was this plane I saw, or even in this time. It could’ve been something from ten years ago or ten years from now.”

“Something had to make you think it was this plane.”

“Just a strong feeling.” She looked at him. “Thanks for believing me.”

“Our gut’s sometimes the only thing we have to go on.” He leaned back in his seat. “So, another night in LA. What should we do?”

She hesitated. “California Bill.”

“What about him?”

“He’s not being truthful. Something about him makes the hairs on my neck stand up straight. He’s hiding something from you.”

“We went through everything at his house and he works from home, so we did a thorough scan of his work computer, too. Nothing. Either he has a great tech guy, better than the FBI’s, or he really doesn’t cross the line into illegal porn.”

“Something about him is off.”

He shrugged. “I think it could be fun to wake him up at three in the morning. Let’s go.”