“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me. Was this dedicated just to her, or is there something about her that somebody wanted?”
“It depends if they were trying to kill her for revenge,” she said, “or if it was because of the masterpiece.”
“Why do you keep calling it a masterpiece?”
“Not because I’m an egotist,” she snapped, “but because it was a copy of a masterpiece that she was in.”
He stopped, stared, and said, “Really?”
She nodded. “A van Gogh.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “That adds a whole new layer of shit to the case.”
She nodded slowly.
“We have to get to the bottom of this and fast. Do you have any other masterpieces coming up?”
She stared at him in horror; then she nodded slowly. “Tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m doing one tomorrow night.”
He waved at the wall behind her. “This one?”
She shook her head immediately. “No. I’m doing one at the big art museum,” she said. “It’s different. We’re bringing in the canvases that will be the backdrop, and then the models in the front. So, I’m doing them in pieces.”
“Not that I even begin to understand that,” he said, “but I’ll have some added security on the place.”
“You can do that,” she said, “but will you look after my model too? I don’t want her to turn out to be a second masterpiece for some creep collector who’s found something new to collect.”
*
Richard had interviewed as many people as he could and had spoken to many others from his share of the list of attendees at Elena’s last installation, yet he had a whole lot of nothing. Names, dates, figures, and absolutely none of them were artists themselves, and that concerned him. A lot of them were collectors, but it took an especially unstable mind to want to collect a masterpiece painted onto a woman’s body. But he also knew that it gave him insight into the mind of the collector.
He picked up the phone and called a friend of his. “What was the name of that doctor you went to?”
Sarah, on the other end, laughed. “Well, I’m not exactly sure what doctor you’re talking about,” she said, “because I just had a pap smear done by Dr. Watkins.”
“No, no, no,” he said hurriedly, and then realized she was laughing at him. He groaned. “You’re right. I deserved that,” he said. “That doctor dealing with children’s issues.”
“You’re talking about a child psychologist?” she said curiously. “You do remember that I don’t have any kids, right?”
“I’m not explaining myself really well,” he said, frowning as he stared down at the list. “And maybe that’s who I should be talking to—a psychologist. Maybe then I might come to understand this. But it’s really weird stuff.”
“It depends what you mean by weird stuff,” she said. “I know you’re a cop, and sometimes you have to deal with really strange cases.”
“This is quickly becoming the weirdest of all,” he said.
“Well, I’m a nurse, but I don’t think I have anything to offer you.”
“Actually, you do,” he said, thrumming his fingers on his desk for a moment. “How hard is it to skin somebody?”
An instant of silence passed on the other end; then she gasped softly. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Partially,” he said. “Only the skin off the torso was taken.”
“But not dismembered?”
“No, just that portion of her body was skinned.”
“Well, it isn’t technically all that difficult,” she said. “But to keep it, to preserve it somehow, would be very difficult.”
“And, if they were to use something to preserve it, presumably it would damage anything on the surface of it.”
“If you’re thinking fingerprints, I would assume so, yes.” She spoke slowly, as if trying to feel her way through his meaning. “What did you think this psychologist could do for you?”
“I don’t know,” he said in frustration. “I’ve done all the legwork I know to do at this point, and I need some insight into who and why somebody would want to do this.”
“Sure, but I think I know who you’re talking about. She doesn’t deal with normal issues.”
“This isn’t a normal issue,” he said drily. “And it’s not me who has the problem. It’s one of my cases.”
“Well, you must have a specialist who you can talk to on staff.”
“And I have an appointment with him this afternoon, yes,” he said. “Anyway, forget about it. I’ll rethink my ideas.” And he quickly hung up on her because one of the things that he had wanted to speak to that specialist about went beyond the norm and into what he called the woo-woo factor. He just couldn’t remember what her name was.
His phone buzzed. He looked to see a text from Sarah.
Her name is Dr. Maddy. And she does that woo-woo stuff.
He smiled, wrote the name in his notebook, then headed to his appointment with the shrink.
As soon as he explained the case to the department shrink, Dr. Willoughby sat back with a long, slow sigh and said, “Wow.”
“I know. A little bit complicated, a little bit off to the left, a whole lot weird, and very, very sad.”
“But, at the heart of it all,” he said, “it’s simple. Somebody wanted something, and he took it. So you’ve got a collector who knows there’s no other way to get this, except to do what he’s done. What you don’t know is whether he wanted to collect this because he wanted to own it, wanted to stop somebody else from owning it, wanted to potentially duplicate it—”
“You’re thinking art forgery?” Richard asked, frowning. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“I’m not sure it’s even viable in this instance. It’s just one of the factors that has to be dealt with in the art world.”
“But to kill somebody for it?”
“It means that the person, the victim, is no longer human. They’ve become a piece of art,” the shrink explained. “So, whether they wanted the person to die or not isn’t even an issue here. They’d been
