He was well below the line of sight of anyone who might later be asked if they’d seen anything related to the murder of the man they’d found dead in the alley. If anyone can describe me, it would be in only the most general of terms.
Not that he had to worry. It was a rare person who met his eyes when he traveled this way. There was something about imperfection that made people look away. Leaving him free to move as freely as he chose.
Thursday, January 18, 8:30
P.M.
Daniel stared at his hands for a long moment before he spoke. “Simon was always a cruel bastard. Once I stopped him from drowning a cat and he was furious. I tried to whale the tar out of him, but he beat me to a bloody pulp. He was ten.”
Katherine frowned. “At ten Simon could overpower you? You’re not a small man, Agent Vartanian.”
“Simon is bigger,” Susannah said, far too quietly.
Daniel looked at down at her, a combination of tightly bound fury and pain in his eyes. But he went on. “Time passed, Simon got worse. My father became a judge. Simon’s activities were embarrassing to his career, so Dad pulled strings to smooth feathers. You’d be surprised what people are willing to overlook for a buck. When he was eighteen, Simon ran away. Then we heard about the car accident.”
“And we buried him,” Susannah said.
“And we buried him,” Daniel repeated with a sigh. “I moved to Atlanta and became a cop, but I was still coming home then. That last time I saw my parents, I’d come home for Christmas.” He paused for a long moment, then his shoulders sagged. “When I walked into the house I found my mother crying. She didn’t cry often. The last time had been at Simon’s funeral. But she’d found some pictures. Drawings Simon had made.”
“Of animals he’d tortured?” Scarborough asked.
“Some. But mostly people. He cut out pictures from really hard-core, violent magazines. He’d made drawings from the pictures. Simon was a gifted artist, but he always had a dark side. He kept posters of dark paintings on the wall of his bedroom.”
“Like?” Vito asked.
Daniel frowned. “I don’t remember.” He looked down at Susannah. “There was the Scream painting.”
“Munch,” she said. “And he liked Hieronymus Bosch. He also had a poster of a Goya depicting a massacre. Another of a suicide. Dorothy somebody.”
Daniel was nodding. “And there was the Warhol print. ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ That pretty much summed Simon up.”
“What summed him up,” Susannah murmured, “was what he kept under his bed.”
Daniel’s eyes widened. “You saw the pictures?”
She shook her head. “Not the pictures. I have no idea where he hid them.”
“What, Miss Vartanian?” Vito asked sharply. “What was under the bed?”
“His copies of serial killer art. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings. And others.”
Simon Vartanian had copied other people’s pictures, revered dark artists. Now he created his own art. And his own victims. There was a tension around the table, and Vito knew the others understood it, too. For a moment he worried someone would blurt it out. But no one did and Vito was relieved. There were still things the Vartanians hadn’t told them. Until they did, the flow of information couldn’t be complete.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, Miss Vartanian?” Thomas Scarborough asked gently.
Again her chin came up, but in her eyes was shame. “Daniel was gone, and I had to sleep sometime. Then Simon was dead and the paintings disappeared. I didn’t know about the pictures from the magazines or his drawings of them. Until tonight.”
“Agent Vartanian, your mother had found these drawings and magazine clippings. So why did you fight with your father?” Vito asked.
Daniel looked at his sister. “Tell him, Daniel,” she said tightly.
“There were other pictures-snapshots. The magazine pictures were staged, but the snapshots looked real. Women, being raped… Simon had done drawings of these, too.”
There were a few beats of silence, then Jen cleared her throat. “I’m surprised Simon didn’t take the pictures with him,” Jen said. “Where did your mother find them?”
“In one of my father’s safes. He had several hidden through the house.”
“So your father knew about Simon’s secret stash?” Jen asked.
“Yes. My mother confronted him, and he admitted he’d found them in Simon’s room after he’d run away. Now I wonder if they weren’t the cause of Simon’s leaving. Maybe my father had finally had enough. I’ll never know. Once I saw the pictures, I said we had to report it. That the people in the snapshots had been victimized by someone. My father was outraged. Why should we dredge it all up now? he said. Simon couldn’t be punished. He was dead. It would only bring the family shame.”
His sister covered his hand with hers, her face grimly accepting of what was to come, but Daniel’s was distant as he remembered.
“I was so angry. It was like years of watching my father clean up after Simon came to a head and something in me snapped. My father and I almost came to blows so I left the house and took a walk. When I came back I’d decided to take the pictures and report it myself, but I was too late. I found the ashes in the fireplace.”
Nick shook his head, disbelieving. “Your father-a judge-destroyed evidence?”
Daniel looked up, his lips bent in bitter scorn. “Yes. I was furious, and I did hit him then. And he hit me back. We did some damage to each other that day. I walked away and promised them I would never come back. And I didn’t until last Sunday.”
“What did you do about the pictures?” Liz asked.
He shrugged. “What could I do? I obsessed over it for days. In the end I didn’t do anything. I had no evidence. I’d only gotten a glimpse of the pictures. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed or if the pictures were staged or real. And at the end of the day, it was my word against his.”
“But your mother saw them, too,” Jen said carefully.
“She wouldn’t have crossed my father,” Susannah said. “It simply wasn’t done.”
“Did you think these pictures were what Claire Reynolds was using to blackmail your father?” Vito asked.
“It crossed my mind at the beginning, but I didn’t know how she’d know about them, and I wondered if there weren’t other things that even I didn’t know about. I needed to know what the blackmail was. My sister’s career could be damaged.”
Susannah’s chin lifted again. “My career will stand on its own merits. So will yours.”
“I know,” he said. “When I got to the mailbox store, I found my mother had opened a box for me. She left these.” He pulled a thick envelope from his laptop case.
Vito knew what he’d find inside. Still he cringed when he saw the pictures and the drawings a younger Simon Vartanian had created. “Your father didn’t destroy them.”
Daniel cocked his jaw. “Apparently not. And I don’t know why he kept them.”
Vito passed the photos to Liz and rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s connect some dots, shall we? First, Claire Reynolds. How did she know your parents?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Neither of us remembers that name from Dutton.”
“She wasn’t from Dutton,” Katherine said. “She was from Atlanta.”
“Our father went to Atlanta from time to time,” Susannah said. “He was a judge.”
Jen frowned. “But that doesn’t explain how Simon got involved. Did he know her?”