It was her inclination to think the best of folks that had her believing Anderson’s death was a loss. She remembered he’d pulled me out of the Mission and had given me money. She thought I’d been rescued. My mother, having taken to Christianity like a drunk to vodka, had tried to save me a couple times before, especially after my father went away. Martha thought this was another instance of maternal concern.
Truth was Anderson had been fed up. He just wanted me to stop embarrassing my mother. He wanted me gone from the city. By giving me money he hoped I’d crawl into some motel room and die anonymously, pretty much the way he did.
What goes around, comes around.
“Who else was on the committee?”
“No one, per se. They’d lined up a number of people to make donations. Let me get you a list.”
Martha left her chair, then waved a hand at a petite woman with white blonde hair and a pale complexion. She had freckles, but they were barely visible beneath a spattering of paint. “Leah, come here. I want you to meet Patrick Molloy. He used to live here, too.”
Leah smiled at me, all the way up into her blue eyes. I started liking her right then, because a lot of beautiful women would have been mortified to be introduced wearing overalls thick with paint. She wiped her hand on a rag, then offered it to me, bespeckled and smeared. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Molloy.”
“Trick.” She had a firm handshake, warm and dry. My flesh tingled as we touched. It was more than attraction. She truly was talented, but I was liking what I was seeing normally so much that I didn’t look at her through magic. That would have been an invasion of privacy-the last bastion of privacy in the mission.
I nodded toward the mural. “Nice work.”
She smiled and reluctantly released my hand as Martha headed toward her office. “You recognize it as da Vinci, yes?”
“Not his style.”
“True. I interpreted it through vanitas.”
“Uh huh.”
Leah laughed delightfully. “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters in Flanders and the Netherlands popularized the style. It’s still-life with decay. It’s supposed to remind us that everything is fleeting and that we’ll die some day. But you knew that.”
It was my turn to laugh. “That’s maybe the one bit of art knowledge that stuck. I was in my nihilistic teen phase when I was forcefed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“Art is something that everyone should experience because it helps them grow. You got it like you were a veal-calf being fattened up. No wonder you didn’t like it.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you don’t go to galleries or museums, do you?” She glanced down. “I used to, all the time. I’d sit and sketch. I’d see the work through the artist’s eyes and then I’d endure watching boorish people troop through, or school kids rushed through with only enough time to look at the back of the kid in front of them. They were walking through beauty and saw none of it. Yet the teachers and the parents all thought the kids were getting culture.”
“They were, it was just the McRembrant version of it.”
She snorted out a little laugh, but didn’t look up. “I kind of lost it. Nervous breakdown. That’s how I ended up here. Martha’s very good at putting puzzles back together.”
I nodded, reached up and parted my hair. “You can’t even see the joints anymore.”
Leah laughed openly, warmly, and looked up again. “She said you could be cold, but I don’t get that. And she said you could be trusted.”
“She’s right on both counts.”
“I’m right? I guess my work here is done.” Martha handed me a print-out of the recent donors to the mission. “The initials after each name indicates the contact.”
“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure what the list would get me, but if the Fellowship was the connection, it was a vector in. “I guess I have to go to work.”
Martha smiled. “You go, but you’re going to come back later. We’ll be having a big crowd tonight, and I need an extra hand on the soup line.”
Leah nodded. “You soup them, I’ll bread them.”
I studied her face, then smiled pretty much against my will. “I think I’d like that.”
Back in the street, my phone rang.
Cate. “4721 Black Oak Road. You want to be here now.”
“Who?”
“E. Theodore Carlson.”
I glanced at the printout. “We have a winner.”
“I’d hate to see what happened to the loser. Hurry, Trick. It’s not pretty, and it isn’t going to get any better with time.”
Cate wasn’t kidding. The corpse was ripe. He’d been dead a couple of days. Carlson had a reputation as a food critic and gourmand who got himself a cooking show and sold a lot of cookbooks and spices. While he liked exotic stuff, his critics claimed he simplified things for the common man. He took folks living hand to mouth and made them think they were mastering haut cuisine.
All while using hot dogs, ground chuck and catsup, and the secret ingredient.
Food lay all around in the kitchen, on presentation platters, but it had curdled or dried, crumbled or gotten covered in flies. He even had packaged cupcakes arranged on a set of stacked trays looking festive. They were the only things that hadn’t gone bad yet, but that didn’t soften the most gruesome aspect of the scene-aside from the corpse, that is.
On the granite countertop of the island, in a roasting pan surrounded by potatoes and carrots and chopped onions, lay a leg.
A human leg.
Carlson’s leg.
He’d managed to hack it off at the knee, rub some salt on it, add pepper, before he collapsed and bled out on the floor. The butcher’s knife lay half-beneath him, covered in bloody prints. Angle of the cuts and the way the bone was sheered meant he’d taken the leg off with only a couple whacks.
I looked around. “What did Prout say? Carlson slipped?”
Cate shook her head. “He was gone before I got here. Manny said he covered his mouth with a handkerchief, then got that look on his face like he’d gotten an idea.”
Manny, who was taking pictures of the scene, grunted. “I said he looked like he’d just dumped a load in his tighty-whities.”
“Same thing when his brain has movement.” My eyes tightened. “Time of death?”
“Two days, three.”
I glanced at my PDA and the listing of case files. “Killer’s on a tight cycle, and it’s getting faster. Two days between Carlson and Anderson. Someone is going to die in the next twelve hours.”
“No, they won’t.”
I spun. Prout had returned, with handkerchief in place. “We just arrested the murderer.”
“What? Who?”
He lowered the handkerchief so I could see his sneer. “Martha Raines.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Only if you are, Molloy.” His beady eyes never wavered. “You followed the money. So did I. The Fellowship’s made millions on these deaths. You didn’t want to see it because you always were a lousy detective.”
“Arresting Raines solves nothing.”
“You trying to confess to being an accomplice? How much did she pay you?”
I glanced at Prout through magic. He almost looked as bad as the corpse, all mushroom gray and speckled with black. He had no talent-nor talent, for that matter-so one spell, just a tiny one, and his white suit would be sopping up blood as he thrashed on the floor.
Cate grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t.”
Prout gave her a hard stare. “I think you better escort your friend from my crime scene.”
“He’s going. He’s got a friend in jail who could use a visit.” She poked a finger into Prout’s chest, leaving a single bloody fingerprint on his tie. It looked like a bullet hole and I wished to God it was. “But this isn’t your crime scene. It isn’t even a crime until I say it is, Inspector. Right now, my running verdict is that he slipped. Death by misadventure, and unless you want to be doing all the paperwork and having all the hearings to change that, you’ll be letting me finish this one fast.”