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At Baker’s instruction, I ran out of the house to tell my curbside FBI babysitter what I suspected. At this time of day, it was Janet Davis. She ordered me back into the house and started to push buttons on her phone.
Baker called me back, saying he’d contacted his higher-ups, then added, “Look, Norwood, neither the stain on his shirt nor the hand you saw in the painting are concrete evidence, at least not until we can check them out. But it’s the first break we’ve had. Just don’t go getting your hopes up.”
I sat at the kitchen table, a cup of tepid and untouched coffee before me. Just don’t go getting your hopes up. No problem. My hopes ran in the opposite direction. I hoped I was wrong.
I started to call Nick, to tell him my suspicions about Gabe, but my phone rang. This time, it was Ortega on his way to join his partner. “Baker and I get to go with the FBI when they visit Professor Turner. What do you think, Lise? What’s your gut tell you?”
“I think—I think—I don’t know. The way he looked for just a brief second when I caught him wiping at what I thought was a sauce stain—and the hand in the painting, matching Beverly Raine’s. I’m worried.”
“We’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything,” Ortega told me.
As I ended the call, there was a tap at the door, and it opened. It was Special Agent Davis. “Mind if I join you?”
“Come on in. I’ll get us some coffee.” I dumped my cold coffee in the sink and poured us each a fresh cup. Sitting at the table, I asked, “What’s going to happen now?”
“It won’t be an assault team hitting his house and office.” She sipped her brew. “But we’ll have enough people so that he won’t be able to run. We’re also using some manpower from the San Marco PD, including your friends, Baker and Ortega.”
“Sorry you have to sit here and watch me,” I told her.
She nodded. “Well, the good news is, if it is Professor Turner, you won’t have to deal with us anymore. Life can go back to normal.”
I shook my head. “That wouldn’t be good news. Gabe is a friend.”
Davis nodded. “You did the right thing.”
“Yeah, I know. Still sucks.” All that time I’d spent with Gabe, I hadn’t a clue. If it was true, I wondered how long it had been going on and if there were things I’d missed. If I’d been more alert, maybe some of his victims might still be alive.
“Do you think he’s killed others? Women who haven’t been found?” I muttered.
She glanced at me as she took another sip. “I don’t know. And we don’t know for sure that it was him.”
“He traveled a lot. Maybe he killed women in other—”
In a rare show of compassion, Davis put down her mug and laid her hand on mine. “Lise, don’t trouble yourself with what-ifs and maybes. We’ll know for sure soon.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
The raid was successful in that we learned the horrible truth that Gabe was Michelangelo. It was unsuccessful because Gabe had already fled by the time they hit his house. Later that afternoon, there was a group at my kitchen table that included Baker, Ortega, and Special Agent Teague, who had relieved Davis. She’d gone to join other feds as they went through Gabe’s home and office.
I’d just finished the gut-wrenching chore of calling Nick to tell him that his mentor, the man he looked up to most, was Michelangelo. He refused to believe me at first, but then I’d handed the phone to Baker, who told him it was true and to let him or the FBI know if Gabe tried to contact him. Nick was dumbfounded when I got back on the phone. He was in shock, and I knew that when it wore off, it would hit him hard. Before we ended the call, I told him I would get out to Vienna as quickly as I could.
“Sorry, Lise.” Baker tried to be sympathetic, but he just sounded even more gruff.
“Me too,” Ortega said.
“Me too,” Teague echoed. I started to sip my latest cup of joe but stood and dumped it in the sink instead. I reached down to the cabinet beside my oven and brought out a bottle of Jameson. “Anyone?”
Teague shook his head. “On duty.”
“Paperwork to do,” Ortega said.
Baker nodded at Ortega. “What he said.”
I shrugged, got a small glass, poured a finger, and added a splash of tap water. “Suit yourselves.” Sitting, I held out my glass. “To the one thing I can feel good about. To The Floating Ballerina.”
“Ah, what the hell.” Baker grabbed the bottle and put it next to my glass. “The Floating Ballerina.”
We clinked. I sipped from my glass. He sipped from the bottle.
He gave an appreciative “Ahhh” then said, “Eve said to tell you they’ve recovered everything Stephens stole from his wife.”
“That include the gifts he gave girlfriends?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Where was he stashing it all?” I asked.
“Right before he staged the robbery, he installed a safe in his office,” Ortega said.
“A safe at work, huh?” Almost in plain sight, except his office wasn’t visible from the observation post Elliot the Slim and I had set up. I shook my head and took a larger sip. “You know how hard this is to believe? I would never have believed in a million years that Gabe would be Michelangelo. Are you sure he’s on the run?”
“That’s the assumption we’re working under. His dresser drawers were all open, and the clothes were pulled out and thrown on the bed like he packed in a hurry. Same with the closet, and a lot of empty hangers. We couldn’t find his passport, and most people don’t carry those around unless they’re getting set to travel. A neighbor out walking his dog last night said he saw Turner drive off an hour or so after you left.”
“But how did he know I’d figure it out? I mean, he knew I would. That’s why he went on the run, right?”
Teague said, “You saw his painting where he was recreating what he’d done to Beverly Raine.”
“I only saw a little bit of it, and it didn’t hit me until later what it was.”
“He knows you, knows you’re smart. He knew you’d figure it out, so he bolted.”
Baker sniffed. “We’ve found all sorts of connections to violent, deviant behavior at his house.”
“Turner’s a member of a couple of sadomasochistic groups, has a collection of porn in the same vein, and we’ve discovered snuff films on DVD, flash drives, and his home computer,” Ortega said.
It made me feel sick.
“We think they’re authentic,” Teague said.
“Authentic?”
Teague’s gaze fell to his coffee mug. “People sexually tortured to death. For real.”
“Ah shit...” I drained my glass.
“His files backed up what you said about him traveling a lot,” Teague said.
“He prefers Southeast Asia,” Ortega said.
Teague said, “Lise, we’re early into discovery, but what we’ve found shows he had connections in Indonesia and other locales where certain things can take place for the right amount of money.”
Ortega took up the conversation. “Things that would attract a man whose tastes had grown from causing pain in the name of sex, to sexual torture, and eventually to sexual murder.”
“He’s in some of those films we found,” Baker said. “He’s torturing and killing young Asian women.”
I closed my eyes. “Oh, dear God.”
Baker glanced at Teague. “I’m not some big-shot fed profiler, but I’ll bet any of you a hundred bucks that they’ll end up saying that Turner escalated, and the occasional kill trips no longer satisfied him. He killed Kristin on a whim, and after that, he couldn’t stop.”
“It’s the art aspect that puzzles me,” Teague said. “Why go to the trouble?”
Thinking out loud, I said, “Maybe in his mind, it elevated him from being a crazed killer to the status of an artist.”
“Maybe,” Baker said. “He’s the only one who could tell us. Anyway, it’s mandatory for anyone employed at San Marco University to be fingerprinted for a background check. That’s why he wiped the crime scenes, but as he has no DNA on record, he didn’t worry about that. We’re getting a rush on matching the DNA at his house with that at the crime scenes.”
Ortega added, “Bite marks on the vics match X-rays from his dentist.”
Baker put a hand over mine. “Can you think of any place Professor Turner could be hiding?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue.”
“If he left right after that dinner party, that gives him hours to put distance between himself and San Marco,” Ortega said.
“We’ve got his photo and bulletins out everywhere,” Teague said. “If he tries to get out of the country, we’ll nab him.”
“Considering his sleazy connections in Southeast Asia, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some false paperwork,” Baker said. “Not sure he’d be stopped on his photo alone.”
“His face is already all over the internet,” Teague said. “This evening and tonight, it’ll be on television news, both local and national. Tomorrow morning, his face hits printed media. I think it’s only a matter of time.”