The Sculptor

“Oh my God, Sam,” Cathy cried. “It’s Steve.”

“What the fuck?” said her ex-husband on the television screen before them—his voice hoarse and gravelly.

“That’s it,” said a man’s voice off camera. “Shake off your slumber, O Mother of God.”

“What the fuck is—”

Cathy and Markham watched like gaping zombies as Rogers struggled then abruptly stopped with a look of confusion across his face. The light on his shiny cheeks had changed ever so slightly, and he seemed to be watching something above him—his eyes widening and narrowing in an eerie silence.

“That’s it,” said the man’s voice again. “Shake off your slumber, O Mother of God.”

Rogers attempted to turn his head toward the voice.

“Who are you? What the fuck you want?”

The light on Rogers’s face changed again, and he stopped straining. In their stunned silence, Cathy and Markham could tell that something had caught the man’s eye. Rogers’s breathing seemed to quicken all at once, when suddenly the camera angle shifted—a bit jumpy now, filmed directly above him.

“He’s using two cameras,” Markham said absently. “One stationary, the other handheld.”

The continuity of the cut was seamless as the camera began to pan slowly down from Rogers’s face to his neck. And just as the first of the bloody stitches scrolled upward from the bottom of the screen, Steve Rogers began to scream.

“What the fuck! What the fuck you do to me!”

“Dear God, no,” Cathy gasped when she saw the breasts—plump and white and stitched like eggs at awkward angles onto her ex-husband’s muscular chest. She cupped her hand to her mouth as Steve Rogers went on screaming on the screen.

“I’m sorry, Cathy!” she heard him yell. “I’m sorry!”

And as the camera continued to pan down over her ex-husband’s stomach, over the thick leather strap which held him down to the steel table, Cathy felt like her head would explode. It was as if she had already seen in her mind what was coming next—knew deep down that she couldn’t bear the sight of it. And in a flash she was up off the sofa and vomiting in the hall as Markham, frozen in horror, watched the bloody stitches where Steve Rogers’s penis should have been rise onto the television screen.

The screaming stopped for a moment. Another edit. Then the last part of the scene played again from the angle of the stationary camera—the screams of her ex-husband echoing once again through the walls of Cathy’s East Side condo; the soul of Steve Rogers taking flight before Sam Markham’s eyes just as Cathy fainted into black.

Chapter 31

Bill Burrell raced down Route 95 at over ninety miles an hour—the colored lights of the Friday night traffic parting before his state trooper escorts like Christmas wrapping paper at a pair of scissors. Rachel Sullivan was about a half-hour ahead of him. She would meet him in Dr. Hildebrant’s room at Rhode Island Hospital after her team’s preliminary sit-down with the Cranston Police.

Son of a bitch, he thought. No way getting around the locals now.

It had all come together so fast—it was his wife who actually told him about the breaking news story down in Rhode Island only seconds before he got the call from Markham. It was all just too bizarre, he thought—yes, just like the media was already fucking calling it: “A bizarre twist in the case of The Michelangelo Killer.” The news- fuckers didn’t know about the DVD or that Steve Rogers was already dead. No, the simple fact that there was another disappearance in Rhode Island—the disappearance of the ex-husband of Dr. Hildebrant, that Brown University professor and resident expert on Michelangelo who had been associated with the case at the beginning —was enough meat for the vultures to chew on.

For now.

Son of a bitch, Burrell said to himself as he whizzed across the Rhode Island– Massachusetts border. Only a matter of time before the whole thing explodes, before they learn of Hildebrant’s connection to everything—not just this nutbag Michelangelo Killer, but to us.

But more than worrying about how the pretty art history professor who so reminded him of his wife would handle everything; more than worrying about how all the media attention she would soon receive was going to impede the FBI’s investigation; as he sped toward Rhode Island Hospital, Special Agent in Charge Bill Burrell could not ignore the sinking feeling that—even with this newest development—the strange case of The Michelangelo Killer would continue on and on as it had all along.

Cold.

Chapter 32

Sam Markham’s brain sizzled like a slab of bacon—his thoughts sputtering and popping inside his skull with the panic of what to do next. Cathy had suffered a mild concussion, but would be okay—he knew that deep down. But as he sat beside her hospital bed, his anxiety fired back and forth between his need to go looking for The Michelangelo Killer, and his concern, his gnawing guilt for the woman he loved.

Sullivan’s team would be the ones to scramble on the information he’d gleaned from the DVD, for Markham knew he had to be there when Cathy woke up. He had heard the smack of her head on the hardwood floor when she fainted—a dull thud out in the hallway that could have been prevented had he been there to catch her, had he not been so transfixed by the horrible DVD death of Steve Rogers. But worse for Cathy than the fall was when Markham revived her—the shock at first, then the hysterics that followed when her mind attempted to wrap itself around what she had just witnessed.

“Mother!” she had screamed in the ambulance. “You were right, Mother! You tried to warn me but I didn’t listen! I’m sorry, Steven!”

The EMTs had to strap Cathy to the gurney and administered a sedative on the ride over to the hospital. And as Markham held her hand, as she started to calm, Cathy whispered to him what he already knew.

“The Pieta, Sam. The breasts. He used Steve for the body of his Pieta.”

From his reading of Slumbering in the Stone, Sam Markham knew all about the Rome Pieta—knew that Michelangelo had ingeniously sculpted the Virgin Mary out of proportion to Jesus in order to get the correct visual relationship between the two figures. He also knew right off the bat that the real Rome Pieta was still on display in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and thus instinctively ordered Sullivan to mobilize the local police forces outside of every church named St. Peter’s in Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts, and northern Connecticut. But deep down Markham knew it wouldn’t be that easy—knew that The Michelangelo Killer wouldn’t tip his hand to Dr. Hildebrant and the FBI just like that.

Perhaps he was even trying to throw them off the trail.

Nonetheless, before climbing into the ambulance with Cathy, Special Agent Sam Markham had the good sense to grab from the Trailblazer his now ragged copy of Slumbering in the Stone. He had pored desperately over the chapters on the Rome Pieta at Cathy’s bedside while she slept—learned that the statue was originally commissioned as a grave marker by the French cardinal Jean de Billheres. Its first home had been the Chapel of St. Petronilla, a Roman mausoleum located in the south transept of St. Peter’s which the cardinal had chosen for his funerary chapel. There it had lived for a short time until the chapel was demolished. The Pieta occupied a number of locations around St. Peter’s when finally, in the eighteenth century, it came to rest in its current location in the first chapel on the right of the Basilica. Markham relayed all this information to Sullivan, but her subsequent Internet search came up empty. She could not