Death Mask

“Oh, yes? What, exactly?”

At that moment, however, Detective Kunzel’s cell phone rang again. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Right away, sir. Okay.”

He stood up and said, “Captain wants to see me, so I’ll have to catch you later. Molly, if you can finish up those composites quick as you can. And Mrs. Sawyer, if you can work on those theories of yours, wacky or not.”

He left, closing the studio door behind him. As soon as he had gone, Sissy said, “Where do you keep your originals?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your original sketches. Where do you keep them?”

Molly pointed toward a gray steel plan cabinet on the opposite side of the studio. “They’re all in there. Why?”

“Show me the second sketch you made of Red Mask. The one you drew when that young Jimmy Moulton and those three poor cleaners got killed.”

Molly went across to the cabinet and opened the third drawer down. She took out a yellow manila folder marked “Red Mask Composite/Kraussman” and the date that she had drawn it.

“Here,” she said, and handed it over.

Sissy opened it. It contained nothing but a blank sheet of white cartridge paper.

“Oh,” said Molly. “The media guys probably borrowed it to make some more copies and forgot to bring it back. They’re always doing that. Unless they put it in the wrong file.”

She took out the folder in which she had filed her first Red Mask composite, the one she had drawn from Jane Becker’s description. She opened it up, but that contained only a blank sheet of cartridge paper, too.

“Don’t tell me the media guys borrowed that one, too.”

Molly lifted up the sheet of paper and examined it closely. “No, they didn’t. This is the same sheet of paper I drew it on. Look — those are my initials in the bottom right-hand corner, MS, and a little picture of a saw, for Sawyer. And here are my initials on this Kraussman composite, too. Except there’s no composite on either of them, is there? They’re blank.”

Sissy pressed her fingertips to her forehead and momentarily closed her eyes. “It’s the same as the roses,” she said, slowly. “It’s exactly the same as the roses.”

“What?”

She opened her eyes again. “You painted the roses and they faded from the paper, but they grew for real out in the backyard.”

“You’re not saying that when I drew Red Mask — ”

“The same thing happened. I’m sure of it. You drew him, and your drawings came to life.”

“Oh, Sissy, that’s not possible. That simply can’t happen.”

“It happened with the roses, didn’t it? And those other flowers you drew? It even happened with that ladybug. And you drew Red Mask twice, didn’t you? So now we have three Red Masks, the original one who murdered George Woods and two more copies drawn by you. That’s how he was able to kill those people at the Four Days Mall at the same time as he was killing those people in the Giley Building.”

“I can’t believe it. It’s like some kind of a nightmare.”

“It’s not a nightmare, sweetheart. It sounds impossible, but it’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense.”

“So where is he? Or them, if there are three of him?”

“I don’t know where the real Red Mask is. But I’d guess that at least one of your drawings is hiding someplace in the Giley Building.”

“But the police searched the Giley Building, didn’t they, with dogs? And you tried to find him there, too?”

“I know. But if he’s only a drawing, he doesn’t have a soul that I can sense and he doesn’t have a human scent that the dogs could pick up.”

She lifted up Molly’s sketch pad. Molly’s drawing of Red Mask stared back at her, his eyes dead and his expression unreadable. “I couldn’t sense him when I talked to that poor girl Chrissie, either. All I could feel was coldness, emptiness. Nothing at all. And what happened when I asked young Ben to pick out a card? He chose a picture frame with no picture in it.”

Molly said, “What about these two new composites? If the same thing happens — ”

“We’ll have to destroy them. Burn them. We can’t have five Red Masks roaming around the city. It’ll be carnage.”

“But what am I going to say to Mike Kunzel? He wants to put these out on the news in twenty minutes’ time.”

“Tell him you’re not happy with them. Tell him you spilled coffee on them, anything. He can always put out a copy of your first drawing of Red Mask. It’s the same man, after all.”

Molly hesitated. Then she ripped the two composites of Red Mask from her sketchbook and noisily crumpled them up. She held them over the metal wastebasket while Sissy took out her Zippo lighter and set fire to one corner. Molly dropped them in, and they watched them flare up and crumple into wrinkled black ash.

“I hope we’re not making a mistake,” said Molly.

“Better to be safe than very, very sorry,” said Sissy. “Besides, we’ll soon find out when we go looking for them.”

“Excuse me? When we go looking for them?”

“The police will go on hunting for the first Red Mask, won’t they? The real one? But how are the police going to find two living drawings? And even if they can, how are they to arrest two men who don’t really exist?”

“I don’t know, Sissy. But when it comes to that, how on earth are we going to find him, or them? And supposing we do, what then?”

“Like I told you,” said Sissy. “It’s the roses.” She opened her purse and took out her deck of DeVane cards. “The roses are the key to all of this. They have been, right from the start.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In every single card that I turned up since you painted that Mr. Lincoln rose, there are roses. They’re like a code. If we can work out what the cards are telling us, then I think that we’ll find out how to find Red Mask. Or Red Masks, plural.”

“Sissy — I don’t think that we should even think about finding them. Honestly, it would be way too dangerous.”

“If we don’t do it, who will? Who’s going to believe us? Can you imagine Mike Kunzel’s face if we told him that he has to go looking for two living sketches?”

As if on cue, Detective Kunzel came back into the studio with his mouth full of Whatchamacallit. “Those composites ready?” he asked. Then he coughed and waved his hand from side to side. “What the hell have you been doing in here? Building a campfire?”

“Sorry,” said Sissy. “Slight accident.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Hooded Guest

They drove back to Blue Ash in a hailstorm of cicadas that smashed themselves against the windshield like the locusts in Sissy’s dream. Molly had to use the washer spray again and again so that she could see where was going.

“These bugs are beginning to get seriously horny,” she complained.

“Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? Sex is a matter of life or death, even for bugs.”

“Especially for bugs. Even if they don’t get squished all over my windshield and they manage to find themselves some lady cicadas, they’re all going to drop dead anyway, just as soon they’ve done their reproductive duty.”