Coyle’s fingerprint at a murder scene and subsequent disappearance - combined with his newly revealed fondness for serial-killer memorabilia - allowed a search warrant. We sent a pale and frightened Lydia Barstow home. Harry and I started back into the house. He stopped, a stricken look on his face.
“I hate to say this, but given the burr under the chief’s britches, you think we should call -”
“Yep,” I said, less irritated than I should have been.
Ten minutes later Danbury was in the driveway in an unmarked van, savvy enough to forgo the logo-screaming newswagon. Given the trees and the curve of the street, few would notice our discreet little group. She’d brought Zipinski. The diminutive cameraman gave Harry and me a wide berth, tripoding his camera at the far end of the drive, framing the house in the background.
“So we file this footage away?” Zipinski asked Danbury.
“For now,” she said. “It’s for a possible story. Just get the house. Anything comes out, we’ll get that too.”
“This has something to do with the crazy you told me about?” Zipinski asked. “The artsy crazy?”
“That’s what the guys will tell us. Right, gents?”
Harry sighed. “Is Carla all right?”
“Secure in the fortress and didn’t want babysitting.”
Zipinski shot footage of Harry and me standing outside. It was illegal for a news crew to accompany us inside, so we went in alone. Danbury wasn’t happy, but knew the law. “I want a full report,” she called out as we entered.
Harry and I split up inside Coyle’s office, Harry taking the desk area. I checked a closet, files in a credenza, a stack of papers in a chair. Everything seemed related to cases and negotiations and I couldn’t look without violating lawyer-client privilege. When my eyes lingered benignly on the pages, I saw nothing allied with art.
“Carson,” Harry said quietly, “I’ve got something.”
He was behind Coyle’s desk. I set aside a file and walked over. Harry lifted a foot-square Plexiglas box from the top drawer, a small white envelope taped to the box.
He held up the box with gloved fingers. Inside was a painting of a skull, dark with browns and umbers. The skull had been overpainted with glazes and highlighting and tiny flecks of red, giving it a trompe-l’oeil sense of depth and dimension. There were more of the squiggly wormlike shapes. The image was so hyper-real it seemed possible to pick up the skull, give a soliloquy on slings and arrows. Harry set it carefully on the desktop and opened the white envelope. He removed a card, four by six inches or so, holding three paragraphs of typewritten text.
“Well ain’t this interesting,” he said, passing me the card.
Marsden Hexcamp, reportedly a study for “The Art of the Final Moment”. Painted July 1970(?). One of seventeen studies for a final canvas measuring 367 (h) x 212 (w) centimeters. The studies are explorations of subject matter within the final work. Fourteen are of high-quality, two have moderate environmental damage (water, probably), one heavy damage, probably due to haphazard last-minute packing.
Several small canvases Hexcamp employed as “test” versions also are extant, two having been scavenged and cut into smaller pieces for the market. Nine of these “works” are also currently available, five of high quality, three rather heavily damaged by exposure to the elements.
Note: The accompanying piece has been cataloged as MH - AFM, stud. 012.
I digested the information. Brief as it was, it provided a treasure trove of insights. “It’s a catalog entry, bro, or similar: Marsden Hexcamp, ‘Art of the Final Moment’, study number twelve.”
Harry, reading over my shoulder, caught it. “Seventeen studies, one major work, ‘The Art of the Final Moment’. What size is it, Cars? Outside of buying scotch by the liter, I never made the jump to metric.”
“About twelve feet high by seven feet wide.”
“Damn,” he said. “Almost a mural.”
“And now we know why the pieces we’re seeing are snippets,” I said. “Someone’s cut a couple of studies up, selling them piecemeal, literally. Maybe they were part of the damaged canvases.”
“Maybe they’re worth more that way, Carson. People aren’t looking for art, specifically.”
“Right. They just want something pretty touched by Marsden’s hot little fingers.”
Harry thought a moment. “The mailing to Coyle might have been a purchase. This is his. Maybe permanently, or maybe he’s bringing the whole collection together for the big show.”
I mulled the possibilities. “Or whoever’s selling the collection sent this to Coyle as good faith, Coyle’s payment, a sample of how they’re displayed. Who knows.”
Harry said, “Could Coyle be the guy who’s verifying this stuff?”
“I’d bet against it; but this about clinches his role as salesman, or facilitator. It’s almost a given he knows who’s doing the verifying. Maybe even hired our authenticator. Who else could write the catalog information?”
The painting was all we took from Coyle’s office, its technique and composition a match with the art found in Marie’s room and Heidi’s trailer. The narrow search warrant didn’t allow removal of Coyle’s “art” from the walls, it lacking direct connection to our cases. I looked at it again and suppressed a shudder; between Forrier’s mask and Hexcamp’s skull, I was getting an unsettling glimpse into the dark underbelly of creation.
Harry bagged the painting. We went outside and walked to the edge of the lawn, where Danbury and Zipinski waited in the dense shade of a magnolia tree. Danbury rushed up. Borg stayed beside his tripod-mounted camera, probably not wanting to get caught between Harry and me.
“What’d you find?” Danbury asked.
Harry held up the boxed artwork. “My God,” she said. “It’s a photograph from the dark side.”
Zipinski took a look, frowned. “I can almost smell rotting meat. How about a shot of it?”
Harry started to say no, caught himself. Zipinski shooting the painting was no different than when the newsies videotaped cops carrying potential evidence from any legal search.
“Yeah, fire away,” he muttered.
“Stand there and hold it,” Zipinski said. “Let me get the light right. He started fiddling with a reflector. There was wind today, but it was hot, and the windblown reflector kept zapping Harry’s eyes as he waited for Zipinski to get set. Harry squinted, growled, shoved the painting at me.
“You do this, Cars. I just made you official poster boy of the PSIT.”
The reflector flashed in my eyes until Zipinski got it clamped down. I let him run footage, a red light flickering on the camera. After a few seconds he said, “OK.” I returned the painting to Harry and he walked it to the car.
Danbury’s phone rang. She began talking to someone about a motorcycle crash on I-95 and how she’d had two crashes already this week and someone else can by God do this one. She walked toward the street, still arguing into the phone. How about one of the freakin’ anchors does it, if they still remember how…
It sounded like she was winning.
“Damn, it’s gotta be ninety-five degrees,” Zipinski said. He yanked out his shirttail and wiped his sweating face. His stomach was as furred as an orang-utan’s. He set his ballcap atop the camera, blotted his balding head. It gleamed in the sunlight. He looked at me, started to speak, looked away.
“What is it?” I said.
“I screwed up the other day. We do some investigative work. Ambush interviews. Y’know…pop out of a car in front of some stickyfingered bureaucrat. She asks, ‘Just how much money did you take from the Orphaned Children’s Fund?’ or whatnot. I make sure his face gets on tape - that first guilty expression, just before the denials kick in. I was still in that mode when I fucked with you in the parking lot. I apologize.”
He offered his hand. I made it a brief handshake. I didn’t much care for Borgurt Zipinski, but no longer wanted to make him walk bowlegged around his own camera. He started to break down the video equipment, paused, a confused look on his face.
“Let me ask you a question, Detective Ryder. That painting was pretty and freaky at the same time. You really think this crazy guy - Hexcamp? - painted it? And a whole bunch of stuff like it?”
I nodded yes and glanced at Danbury in the distance. She shook her head, dropped the phone in her purse. She looked weary, almost deflated. It hit me that cranking together the news might not be as easy as I thought, asking questions, jamming a microphone in people’s faces, running down tips, most probably going nowhere. I guess you had to do a lot of planning, meet a lot of people you didn’t want to meet, see a hell of a lot of vehicle crashes, shootings, drownings. Kind of like me.
I watched her walk my way, then stop. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. When her eyes opened, the game face was back. She moved our way, fumbling in her purse. She looked up, grinned, shot a thumbs-up, her face alight with mischief. I waved back, admiring the strength it took to keep kicking when you were drained almost dry.
“Detective Ryder?” Zipinski repeated, and I realized I’d zoned out on DeeDee Danbury. “How could a crazy guy make something like that?”
I’d been wondering that myself. “Maybe the genius was fighting the sociopath, Zipinski. Some days the genius won out.”
Zipinski shook his head, put his cap back on his sun-reddening pate, and continued packing equipment. Danbury walked up.
“You’re not going to keep anything from me, are you? We’re the Three Musketeers, remember? Pogie, Nautie and DeeDee.”
Danbury climbed in the van, wind puffing at her skirt. She let it fly, unconcerned. Her legs were long and smooth and her panties were a flash of scarlet. The door closed and she winked. “Hey, stop by later you get a chance. Maybe I’ll have some results on that research. It’s your turn to buy the wine. Hint: Don’t buy anything with cartoons on the label.”
They drove away, Danbury waving with her fingers, Zipinski at the wheel. I joined Harry in the car, trying hard to recall the rich and magical colors in the painting from Coyle’s desk, but all I could see were flashes of scarlet.
We headed back to the department with fresh wind in our sails. We’d pulled covers from a guy who appeared to be a major player in the Hexcamp drama. I’m not sure how much progress it marked, but at least I didn’t feel I was practicing astronomy by jamming my head into the dirt and asking when the stars came out.
“Think we should fill Willow in on Coyle’s private gallery?” Harry said.
Keeping Willow in the loop sounded like the right thing to do. We made it a conference call, sitting in the small meeting room off the detectives’ room and talking at a device in the middle of the table. It looked like a spaceship from a fifties movie.
“We found another stash of memorabilia,” Harry yelled at the spaceship.
“No need to scream,” Willow said. “I hear you fine. Where?”
“Our missing lawyer boy, Rubin Coyle. He’s a collector, got a house full of nightmares. I thought he was a nobody at first. Now he’s looking like the belle of the ball. Naturally, he’s got the usual credentials - fine upstanding citizen, blah, blah, a credit to his community, blah, blah…the standard shitwarble. He’s also an expert in negotiations. And guess what? It looks like something big’s coming to market, and needs someone to negotiate the sale or whatever.”
“The collection,” Willow said. “It has to be.”
“We’re pretty sure Coyle knows who has it,” I said. “But it tells us nothing about why we have two dead women and a third who’s been threatened.”
“All this sicko lawyer boy does is negotiate?” Willow asked.
“He’s the hard-dealing hotshot of Hamerle, Melbine and Raus.”
Willow’s end seemed to go dead. I looked at the spacecraft; the connection light was lit. “Mr Willow?” I said.
“The law firm. You never told me that before.”
“About Coyle, the lost lawyer?” Harry said. “Sure we did. Left a print at the Cozy Cabins five days before Marie Gilbeaux was found, one of a hundred thousand other prints.”
“You never mentioned Coyle worked for Warren Hamerle.”
“What’s Hamerle to you?” I asked.
Willow laughed, dry and humorless. “It’s who he was, Detective Ryder. The last time I saw Warren Hamerle he was a scared, skinny little court-appointed attorney…”
I dropped my head forward until it bumped the table. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He was representing Marsden Hexcamp. Am I right here?”