"Um. Well, yes, in fact, I did."
"And you allowed her to move in."
"I didn't think she'd done it. No, that's not strong enough: I knew she couldn't have done it."
"And in December, when Tina Merrill was found? Weren't you just the least bit worried that you knew who had killed her, and after her the others?"
"No. I should have told you, that first day you came, but I couldn't bring myself to cause her grief for nothing. And I knew she had not done it. And I was right."
But not about Tony Dodson, Kate thought, and did not say.
"You mustn't tell the press, or anyone else for that matter, that she is completely innocent. Not yet." She tried to sound stern.
"I don't talk about it at all. I find that's usually best."
He stayed another twenty minutes, and left in the police car.
It was, for the women in the house, a truly terrifying week.
Knowing that she was far from the center of action made the week even harder for Kate. It was given out, when anyone asked, that her injuries were keeping her away from duty but in truth she would have preferred to bleed to death rather than miss this part of the case.
For it was now that the solid groundwork for an eventual prosecution was being laid, the jigsaw answers to all the questions locked into a tight, smooth picture for the District Attorney. Who? Andrew C. Lewis, alias Tony Dodson. What? Murder, of a peculiarly cold-blooded and thus inexplicable sort, murder not as an end, but as a means of building an elaborate and creative revenge. When? Could he be placed, by witnesses or evidence, near the relevant sites at the right times? Where? Now that was a good one. Where was Lewis on the days in question? Where did he go when he went 'to work'? Where were the clothes and lunchbags and backpacks of the three girls? And most important, where was Lewis now? And finally, how? How did he get to the children, how did he spirit them away, how did he avoid attracting attention?
For all that week Kate had to live with the knowledge that the case was being investigated without her, and that knowledge made it hard to stay cheerful and calm and alert. Vaun drifted; Lee went out to clients in the hospitals or the hospices; Kate fretted and phoned for updates a dozen times a day; and Hawkin and Trujillo set out to get some answers.
For the past week Trujillo, ill-shaven, dressed in grimy black pants, hideous shoes with pointed toes, and a leather jacket that he had come to loathe, sat at the bar of the Golden Grill beneath the glowing skin of the woman on the barbecue and drank himself into an irritated ulcer. He got to know the regulars, he got to know that several of the regulars who were friends with the man they knew as "Tony Andrews" had been very scarce recently, and finally he got to know a flabby, pasty-looking kid with acne who appeared for the first time on Tuesday afternoon and who knew "Tony" well enough to have seen where he lived when he was in town.
The flabby kid knew little more than that. He was a hanger-on and had not actually been to "Tony's" apartment but had only seen him come out of the place one morning, climb into his truck, and drive off. Trujillo invited the kid out of the bar, found the apartment house, and contacted Hawkin, and before too long they moved in with a large, heavily armed escort and a search warrant in Hawkin's jacket pocket.
The apartment was empty. The resident manager produced a key and let them into Andy Lewis's third persona.
It was a large apartment, furnished in tasteless luxury, up to and including a vast round bed with satin sheets and a well-stocked, padded leather wet bar in the living room. The prints of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson/Tony Andrews were all over. Two other prints brought up the names of men with records for narcotics dealing. There was a canister of high-grade marijuana in the closet, a tin of hashish on a shelf, about fifty thousand dollars' worth of heroin tightly packaged for the street in colorful balloons, and all the attendant paraphernalia. Later the lab was to find considerable cocaine dust in the carpets and furniture. There was one loaded shotgun in the coat closet near the door, a second one in the bedroom closet, and two loose forty-five-caliber bullets and traces of gun oil in the drawer of the bedside table.
The clothes in the bedroom's oversized walk-in closet were clothes of two different men, though they were all the same size and all had the same dark hairs and black-brown beard hairs in them. To the left everything was arranged on wooden hangers: silk shirts, wool suits that made Trujillo whistle, a neatly filled stack of shallow shelves holding handmade Italian shoes. The clothing verged on the flashy, and Hawkin reflected that some of them must have looked a bit incongruous on a man with long hair and a full beard. On the right hung his Tyler's Road clothes: old work jeans, worn flannel shirts, and denims, all on metal hangers with the paper of dry cleaners on them. An odd assortment of scuffed and grease-impregnated boots and tennis shoes lay in a tumble on the floor underneath.
There was also a painting.
It protruded slightly from behind the shoe shelves, and the frayed canvas at its back edges caught Hawkin's eye. He pushed past Trujillo (who was still dressed as a bar rat and was fingering lapels enviously) and drew the canvas out to carry it into the light. At the window he turned it around, and there was Andy Lewis, just as Red Jameson had described him, half naked, slightly sweaty, a small sardonic smile on his lips, the narrow back of the chair thrusting up like some phallic structure under his chin, the dragon coiled on his upper arm.
Hawkin's tired blue eyes traveled over the glossy surface, searching for the painting's depths, and because he was looking for them, he found them. Most of Vaun's better paintings had something behind the surface image, a hidden meaning that emerged only for the patient eye, and this was one of her very best. Red had not studied this one, Hawkin mused, had been too put off by the obvious surface meaning, or he would not have worried about his niece.
It was a caricature. Skillful, amazingly subtle for a teen-aged artist, but it was a caricature. At first view it was the portrait of a young man with whom the artist was both in love and in lust. Gradually, however, the slight exaggerations asserted themselves, and soon Hawkin knew that she was not painting how she felt looking at Andy Lewis but rather how Andy Lewis imagined women in general felt looking at him. It was dated April.
Trujillo heard him laugh and emerged from the closet to come and look over his shoulder. He made an appreciative noise in his throat.
"Wish some lady would see me that way," he commented.
"Do you?" Hawkin asked. A bustle in the hallway outside indicated the arrival of the prints and photograph crew, and he handed Trujillo the painting. "I want you to study this closely for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think. Be careful of it," he added. "It's worth more than you make in a year."
Ten minutes later he came back and found a confused and troubled Trujillo sitting in a chair staring at the image of the young Lewis. He looked up at Hawkin.
"But, it's… it's cruel, isn't it? She's laughing at him. Making fun of him."
Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?
Suddenly Lee Cooper's words came back to him: Vaun was "more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas…" This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis's methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.