The Sculptor

the bait—would hopefully lure the policemen out of their cars and thus buy him enough time to sneak up behind them and put a bullet in their heads. The Sculptor hid himself behind a nearby tree and removed a black ski mask from his back pocket, pulling it tightly over his bald head, his sweaty face.

Then he waited.

And soon, just as he expected, the two Exeter police cars—locals, thankfully— pulled up in front of the temple. The Sculptor could see from the flashes of light off the van, off the white marble of the temple and surrounding headstones, that each car held only one officer.

That was fortunate.

“You guys can’t be here,” he heard one of them shout upon emerging from his car. And as the two officers approached the van—their guns not even drawn—The Sculptor was upon them before they even had a chance to turn around.

As was the case when he went shopping for his material with the tranquilizer guns, The Sculptor did not pause when he shot them. However, instead of aiming for their necks, he pointed the red dot from his laser sight just underneath their police hats—one silenced bullet in each of their heads, then two more once they hit the ground just to be safe.

The Sculptor hopped back into his van and drove quickly away from the scene. He did not mourn the fact that he had just wasted good material or whether or not the police dash-cams had recorded the whole event. His face was covered, of course, and he could always repaint the van. He would have it safely hidden away again in the carriage house before the police had time to review the video. And so The Sculptor opted to take his chances on the highway rather than risk being cornered by the police on the back country roads. He had just kicked the van up to sixty-five when he saw the state police cars and the black FBI vehicles speeding past him down Route 95—in the opposite direction, toward the Echo Point Cemetery exit.

The Sculptor smiled. He had no way of knowing, however, that Sam Markham and Bill Burrell saw him, too— had no idea that they both cursed aloud when they spotted the Channel 9 Eye-Team van whizzing past, both of them furious at the local cop who had rolled this time.

“Fucking vultures,” the SAC grunted.

Oh yes, if The Sculptor had heard that little comment, he most certainly would have giggled.

Indeed, many of the local and state authorities would see The Sculptor’s Eye-Team van that night, but just as The Sculptor had hoped when he first painted the logo on its sides, their only wish had been to avoid it.

EXHIBIT THREE Toward David

Chapter 36

Two weeks later

Sam Markham sat at his desk in downtown Providence. He felt sick as he watched the police video for at least the hundredth time—pausing, rewinding, and playing in stop motion every move The Michelangelo Killer made. As with the video of Steve Rogers, the team in Boston had immediately set about enhancing the footage, and Markham could see everything that had happened in front of the Temple of Divine Spirit—not only the calm, methodical way in which The Michelangelo Killer slaughtered the two policemen, but also the Channel 9 Eye-Team logo streaking out of camera range.

Markham remembered seeing the van on the highway that night—oh how he remembered! Felt the urge to vomit every time he thought about how close he had been to the killer—just a few yards across the grassy median. But more than watching over and over again the brutal murders of the two Exeter policemen—murders for which the supervisory special agent felt partly responsible—what really made Markham sick was that, as was the case with the video of Steve Rogers, he could get no clues from it—could not determine anything other than the make of the van and the killer’s size and height.

Yes, even though The Michelangelo Killer was dressed entirely in black—a black ski mask, black gloves, and a tight fitting long-sleeve black shirt—Markham could clearly make out the killer’s physique against the white of the phony Eye-Team van: about six-five and very muscular—a bodybuilder, just as the celebrated profiler had suspected all along.

Of course, in the two weeks following the shocking exhibition of The Michelangelo Killer’s Pieta down at Echo Point Cemetery, the ballistics tests on the killer’s .45 caliber bullets and the leads on the van—a Chevy 2500 Express model that most likely was the same one reported stolen three years earlier—had so far turned up nothing. In addition, a still from the police video had been released on the Wednesday following the discovery of the Michelangelo Killer’s Pieta, but the public had given the FBI nothing but red herrings.

The public.

Markham sighed and closed his computer’s video player. And just as he expected, when he clicked on the Internet Explorer icon, the first picture on his AOL homepage was of Michelangelo’s Pieta. The media firestorm that followed the discovery of the grisly scene in Exeter made the fallout from The Michelangelo Killer’s Bacchus seem like a snowball fight. Indeed, as soon as the real Channel 9 Eye-Team van showed up outside of Echo Point Cemetery, it seemed to Markham as if a war had broken out—the news choppers hovering above and the media frenzy outside the cemetery gates reminding him of a scene right out of Apocalypse Now. There was no keeping anything from the press this time— not even the most telling details of The Michelangelo Killer’s Pieta, which the killer had actually signed.

Yes, unbelievably, The Michelangelo Killer had chiseled another message into his work—this time not to Catherine Hildebrant, but to the public in general. Markham remembered from his reading of Slumbering in the Stone that the Rome Pieta was the only work Michelangelo ever signed—the legend of which claimed that, upon overhearing a visitor to the Chapel of St. Petronilla attribute the statue to another artist, Michelangelo returned later that night and chiseled in Latin a message on the sash across the Virgin’s chest: “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this.” Hildebrant went on to state in her book that the legend was fictional, and that the signature had been there from the beginning. “A bold stab at fame,” she had called it. “Michelangelo’s most blatant attempt ever for public recognition.” And although Sam Markham had since learned from Cathy that there was still much scholarly debate as to the reason why Michelangelo signed his Pieta, both of them agreed that there could be no doubt as to the reason why “The Sculptor” had signed his.

“The Sculptor from Rhode Island made it.”

“Just like the legend,” Cathy had said to Markham when she first laid eyes on the inscription. “He’s telling the press what to call him. He’s correcting them.”

And the press obeyed.

They called him “The Sculptor” now in the papers and on TV, on the Internet and on the blogs and the sick homepages that had sprouted up in dedication to him since the discovery of Tommy Campbell. Indeed, the media seemed to talk of nothing else; and Markham felt a palpable anxiety every time he turned on his computer and his television. Worst of all was the public’s infatuation with Catherine Hildebrant—the woman Sam Markham now knew he loved; the woman that the public loved for her now indisputable connection to The Sculptor. Yes, once the media got wind that the pretty art history professor’s ex-husband had been used for the body of The Sculptor’s Virgin Mary, the FBI knew they could no longer keep her sheltered from the press, knew they