Transgressions

'Calvin Cotrona. A few busts, petty stuff. Yeah, he was a user.'

Elisa took her brandy and soda away from the white dog with the large ruff of a head; he scolded her with a sharp bark. 'Can't give him any more,' she explained to Peter. 'He becomes obstreperous, and pees on the Aubusson. Rather like my third husband, who couldn't hold his liquor either. Quiet down, Richelieu, or mommy will become deeply annoyed.' She studied Peter again. 'You seem to know so much about Nan's tragedy and how she died. What is it you hoped to learn from me, Detective?'

Peter rubbed tired eyes. 'I wanted to know if Nan saw or heard from John Ransome once she'd finished posing for him.'

'Not to my knowledge. After she returned to Houston she was quite blue and unsociable for many months. I suspected at the time she was infatuated with the man. But I never asked. Is it important?' Elisa raised her glass but didn't drink; her hand trembled. She looked startled. 'But you can't mean—you can't be thinking —'

'Mrs. McLaren, I've talked to two of Ransome's other models in the past few weeks. Both were disfigured. A knife in one case, sulphuric acid in the other. In a day or two, with luck, I'll be talking to another of the Ransome women, Valerie Angelus. And I hope to God that nothing has happened to her face because that's stretching coincidence way too far. And already it's scaring the hell out of me.'

In his room at a Motel 6 near Houston's major airport, named for one of the U.S. presidents who had bloomed and thrived where a stink of corruption was part of the land, Peter called his Uncle Charlie in Brookline, Massachusetts. Thirty-six hours had passed since he'd e-mailed Echo from Vegas, but she hadn't showed up there. He tried Rosemay in New York; she hadn't heard from Echo either. He sent another e-mail that didn't go through. In exasperation he tried leaving a message on her pager, but it was turned off.

Frustrated, he stretched out on the bed with a cold washcloth over his eyes. Traveling always gave him a queasy stomach and a headache. He chewed a Pepcid and tried to convince himself he had nothing to seriously worry about. The other Ransome women he knew of or had already interviewed had been attacked months after their commitments to the artist, and presumably their love affairs, were over.

Violent psychopaths had consistent profiles. Pete couldn't see the urbane Mr. Ransome as a part-time stalker and slasher, no matter what the full moon could do to potentially unstable psyches. But there was another breed, and not so rare according to his readings of case studies in psychopathology, who, insulated by wealth and position and perverse beyond human ken, would pay handsomely to have others gratify their sick, secret urges.

There was no label he could pin on John Ransome yet. But the notion that Ransome had spent several weeks already carefully and unhurriedly manipulating Echo, first to seduce and finally to destroy her, detonated the fast-food meal that had been sitting undigested in his stomach like a bomb. He went into the bathroom to throw up, afterward sat on the floor exhausting himself in a helpless rage. Feeling Echo on his skin, allure of a supple body, her creases and small breast buds and tempting, half-awake eyes. Thinking of her desire to make love to him at the cottage in Bedford and his stiff-necked refusal of her. A defining instance of false pride that might have sent his life careering off in a direction he'd never intended it to go.

He wanted Echo now, desperately. But while he was savagely getting himself off what he felt was a whore's welcome in silk, what he saw was the rancor in Eileen's dark eyes.

John Ransome didn't show up at the house until a quarter of ten, still wearing his work clothes that retained the pungency of the studio. Oil paints. To Echo the most intoxicating of odors. She caught a whiff of the oils before she saw him reflected in the glass of one of the bookcases in the first-floor library where she had passed the time with a sketchbook and her Prismacolor pencils, copying an early Ransome seascape.

Painting the sea gave her a lot of trouble; it changed with the swiftness of a dream.

'I am so sorry, Mary Catherine.' He had the look of a man wearied but satisfied after a fulfilling day.

'Don't worry, John. But I don't know about dinner.'

'Ciera's used to my lateness. I need twenty minutes. You could select the wine. Chateau Petrus.'

'John?'

'Yes?'

'I was looking at your self-portrait again—'

'Oh, that. An exercise in monomania. But I was sick of staring at myself before I finished. I don't know how Courbet could have done eight self-studies. Needless to say he was better looking than I am. I ought to take that blunder down and shove it in the closet under the stairs.'

'Don't you dare! John, really, it's magnificent.'

'Well, then. If you like it so much, Mary Catherine, it's yours.'

'What? No,' she protested, laughing. 'I only wanted to ask you about the girl—the one who's reflected in the mirror behind your chair? So mysterious. Who is she?'

He came into the library and stood beside her, rubbed a cheekbone where his skin, sensitive to paint-thinner, was inflamed.

'My cousin Brigid. She was the first Ransome girl.'

'No, really?'

'Years before I began to dedicate myself to portraits, I did a nude study of Brigid. After we were both satisfied with the work, we burned it together. In fact, we toasted marshmallows over the fire.'

Echo smiled in patient disbelief.

'If the painting was so good . . .'

'Oh, I think it was. But Brigid wasn't of age when she posed.'

'And you were?'

'Nineteen.' He shrugged and made a palms-up gesture. 'She was very mature for her years. But it would have been a scandal. Very hard on Brigid, although I didn't care what anyone would think.'