“My guess is, it's human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We've got enough for DNA, if it's human.”
“That's great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”
“You're hot,” the ME said. “You're onto something.”
“Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.
“Maybe, but not on Gabriella.”
Ron Stack was in 610. Lucas knocked on the door, and a moment later a balding, bad-tempered, dark- complected man peered out at them over a chain. He was wearing a nasal spreader on his nose, the kind football players use to help them breathe freely. He was holding a cup of coffee and had a soul patch under his thin lower lip. “What?”
Lucas held up his ID. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs,” Lucas said.
Stack's chin receded into his throat. “Disappearance? She disappeared?”
“You're the last person we know for sure who saw her. Can we come in?”
Stack turned and looked back into his loft, then at Lucas again. “I don't know. Maybe I should call my lawyer.”
“Well, whatever you want to do, Mr. Stack, but we aren't going anywhere until you talk to us. I can have a search warrant down here in twenty minutes if you want to push us. But it'd be a lot easier to sit on the couch and talk, than having you on the floor in handcuffs, while we tear the place apart.”
“What the fuck? Is that a threat?” His voice climbed an octave.
From behind Stack, a woman's voice said, “Who's that, Ron?”
Stack said, “The police.”
“What do they want?” the woman asked.
“Shut up. I'm trying to think.” Stack scratched his chin, then asked, “Am I a suspect?”
“Absolutely,” Lucas said.
Shrake, the nice guy: “Look, all we're doing is trying to find Gabriella. We don't know where she's gone. She's involved in another case, and now…”
“Okay,” Stack said. “I'm gonna push the door shut a little so I can take the chain off.”
He did, and let them in.
The loft was an open cube with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The other three walls were concrete block, covered with six-foot-wide oil paintings of body parts. The place smelled of turpentine, broccoli, and tobacco.
A kitchen area, indicated by a stove, refrigerator, and sink gathered over a plastic-tile floor, was to their left; and farther to the left, a sitting area was designated by an oriental carpet. A tall blond woman, who looked like Gabriella Coombs, but was not, sat smoking on a scarlet couch.
At the other end of the cube, a door stood open, and through the open door, Lucas could see a towel rack: the bathroom. Overhead, a platform was hung with steel bars from the fifteen-foot ceiling, with a spiral staircase going up. Bedroom.
At the center of the cube was an easel, on a fifteen-foot square of loose blue carpet; against the right wall, three battered desks with new Macintosh computer equipment.
Shrake wandered in, following Lucas, sniffed a couple of times, then tilted his head back and took in the paintings. “Whoa. What is this?”
“My project,” Stack said, looking around at all the paintings. There were thirty of them, hung all the way to the ceiling, all along one wall and most of the end wall. One showed the palm of a hand, another the back of the hand. One showed a thigh, another a hip, one the lower part of a woman's face. “I unwrapped a woman.” He paused, then ventured, “Deconstructed her.”
“It's like a jigsaw puzzle,” Shrake asked.
Stack nodded. “But conceptually, it's much more than that. These are views that you could never see on an actual woman. I took high-resolution photographs of her entire body, so you could see every pore and every hair, and reproduced them here in a much bigger format, so you can see every hair and pore. You couldn't do that, just looking at somebody. I call it Outside of a Woman. It was written up last month in American Icarus.”
“Wow, it's like being there,” Shrake enthused. He pointed: “Like this one: you're right there inside her asshole.”
Wrong foot, Lucas thought. To Stack: “We can't find Gabriella. Her mother tells us that you were out together last night, and Gabriella broke it off with you…” “Who's Gabriella?” the woman asked.
“How ya doing?” Shrake asked. He winked at her, and pointed up at the paintings.
“Is this you?”
“No,” the woman said, with frost.
“Gabriella's a potential model,” Stack said to her. Then to Lucas: “Look, she didn't break anything off, because there was nothing to break off. We went down to Baker's Square and had a sandwich, and we couldn't make a deal on my new project, and I said, 'Okay' and she said, 'Okay' and that was it. She took off.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into his jeans pocket.
“You go there together?” Shrake asked.
“No. We met there.”
“Where were you last night?” Lucas asked.
“Here,” Stack said. He turned to the woman: “With her.”
“He was,” the woman said. To Stack: “This Gabriella's just a model?”
“Just a model,” Stack agreed.
“What kind of a car do you drive?” Lucas asked.
“An E-Class Mercedes-Benz station wagon.”
“What color?” Lucas asked.
“Black,” Stack said.
“You must do pretty well for yourself,” Shrake said. “A Benz.”
“It's a 'ninety-four,” Stack said. “I bought it used, with eighty-nine thousand miles on it.”
“Where's the van-the one you use for moving paintings?” Lucas asked.
Stack was mystified: “What van? I have a friend with a blue pickup, when I'm moving big sheets of plywood, but I never used a van.”
“Did you know Marilyn Coombs?” Lucas asked.
“No. Gabriella told me about her dying and about you guys investigating,” Stack said.
“In fact, I think she sorta had the hots for you.”
“For Lucas?” Shrake asked skeptically.
“If you're the guy who took her around her grandmother's house,” Stack said to Lucas.
“Yeah.”
“What'd you mean by 'had'?” Shrake asked. “You said she 'had' the hots for Lucas.
Do you think she's dead? Or just stopped having the hots?”
“Hell, you're the guys who think she's dead,” Stack said. “That's the way you're talking.”
“Did she say where she was going last night?” Lucas asked.
“Well, yeah,” Stack said. “She said she had to go because you-or somebody-asked her to go through her grandma's papers. Looking for clues, or something. Is that, uh… Where'd she disappear from, anyway?”
Lucas looked at Shrake, felt an emotional squeeze of fear and the cold finger of depression. “Bad,” he said. “Bad. Goddamnit to hell, this is bad.”
They pushed the painter for another ten minutes, then Lucas left Shrake with Stack and the woman, to get details of where they were overnight, to get an ID on the woman, to probe for holes in their stories.
On the way out to the car, Smith called: “We got a van. A two thousand one Chevy Express, looks to be a pale tan, but one of the geniuses here tells me that could be the light. It might be white. It went past the halfway house three times on Friday night, the night the storm came in. Can't see the occupants, but we think the tag is Wisconsin and we think we know two letters, but we can't make out the other letter or the numbers. We're going to send it off to the feds, see if they can do some photo magic with it. In the meantime, we're sorting vans out by the letters we know.”
