She sat down at her desk, pulled up her keyboard, and started typing away. Very quickly she had a long list of Google search hits regarding Cayce’s designs. She pointed at her screen. “I think people take photos of the original painting, yours and everybody else’s, put it in Photoshop, wash out the color, and come up with some basic line drawing underneath it. You know? Dissecting the great art for beginners to learn by?” She pointed at the monitor again. “That’s what these look like anyway,” she said. “I don’t remember which site I got yours off of, but I’m pretty sure that’s where they were. I’m not sure about that one in particular.” She looked at it, then at Cayce and Richard standing by her, and asked, “Why is that one different?”
“Because it’s my early work, only ever been in my safe,” she said. “Was too dark for the kind of work I wanted to be known for, so I tucked it away.” She stopped, confused. “I don’t get it.”
Richard filled in the blanks. “Somebody must have access to your safe.”
Anita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, that’s not something I want to think about.” She looked at Cayce. “Where is the safe?”
“At home,” she said quietly. “At my apartment.”
“The same one you’re living in now?” Anita asked with a gasp.
Richard gave Cayce a hard look. “How long have you lived there?”
“Eight years,” she said. “Before that, I was at another apartment that I shared with Elena.”
“You two lived together?”
She chuckled. “Not exactly. Elena had the apartment, but I stayed in it for quite a while.”
“Any idea who else had access back then?” he asked, grabbing her hand. “This is really important. This is a design that has great relevance to the case that connects you and Elena.”
Cayce stared at him, chewing on her bottom lip. “But it’s old. As in a long time ago.”
He reached out and gently stroked her bottom lip to both distract her and to get her to stop. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he whispered. He leaned over, kissed her gently, and said, “I need you to really think about it.”
“I need a cup of tea,” she said, looking around, clearly flustered. “Anita, see if you can find the site that you downloaded these from, will you?”
Anita, much more subdued now, said, “Will do, boss. I’m sorry I didn’t bring them up earlier.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Who knew it would be something that mattered?”
“Not me,” Anita said. “There’s an unbelievable amount of your paintings all over the internet, in some form or another. See?” Again she pointed at her screen. “Anybody can copy and do whatever they want based on just these alone.”
Richard stared at her, stared at the search engine, his mind running through it. “Are there any of Cayce’s that she body-painted on Elena the night she died?”
“Didn’t we give you good photographs of that?” Cayce asked.
“You did,” he said, “but I want to know what the internet sees.”
“I’ll look it up,” Anita said, her fingers tapping away on the keyboard again.
Within seconds, she had a whole slew of images of a beautiful Elena.
“Damn. My suspect pool just morphed into millions.” Richard studied Elena’s face, seeing the calm serenity in her gaze. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to meet her,” he said quietly, turning toward Cayce. “She looks like a beautiful person inside and out.”
“She was,” Cayce said from the doorway.
Her voice was thick, and he knew she was on the edge of tears.
“I’ll go put on the tea, while I try to get my brain wrapped around what it is you need to know, and you can look at pictures without me. I’m not in any shape to look at those yet.”
He stood behind Anita as she scrolled through all the images.
“Here’s one from the night she was killed.”
“She was wearing some masterpiece, right?”
“It was masterpiece night,” Anita said, and she quickly tapped through it. Then she brought out one image of Elena, wearing the van Gogh painting.
“She’s stunning,” he said in amazement.
“It’s Cayce who’s stunning,” Anita said. “She could turn Elena into anything. But also Elena had that chameleon ability to be anything and everything to everyone.”
Richard heard a jealous note in her voice. “Did you like her?”
Anita paused, then said, “She always highlighted things about myself that I didn’t like, so she was difficult to know in a way.”
Fascinated and unable to help himself, he said, “Can you give me an example?”
“Just the fact that she was so beautiful and could become anything that Cayce wanted her to be,” she said. “If I dwelled on that, I could get quite jealous, but it would only be with her. I’d see a million other models on a day-to-day basis, and I couldn’t care less. But something about Cayce and Elena’s relationship brought out the worst in me. So, did I like her? Yes. Did I love her? No. Could I live quite happily without her? Yes. I’m sorry for Cayce absolutely,” she said sadly. “I knew that something special existed between the two of them that could never be between the two of us.”
“I need that picture.” He had overlaid the autopsy pictures of the shape that had been cut free with both old designs that Cayce had sent him, and he felt they were too damn similar. He had Anita enlarge the bottom corner, where the signature was, and he nodded. “Interesting.”
“Cayce signs everything,” Anita said.
And then it hit him. “Right. She always does, doesn’t she?” He walked away from Anita, his footsteps rapidly heading toward Cayce’s office. He barged right in. “You always sign everything, even body paintings?”
“If it’s a particular art piece, yes,” she said, staring up at him and holding a cup of tea in her hand. “Why?”
He pulled out his phone and went to his photo gallery and brought up the “gift”
