Color Blind (5 page)

Brown cocked his head. “Meaning?”

“Outsider art. It’s the English equivalent of what was originally called
l’art brut,
which the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined in, oh, the late 1940s—it encompasses the untrained, unschooled, and the art of the insane.”

“You tellin’ me that people care about the art made by a bunch of nut jobs?” McNally shook his head, bewildered.

“Yes, they do,” said Kate. “Quite seriously. The French surrealists were influenced by the art of the insane and revered it. Nowadays, lots of people collect it.”

McNally shook his head again. “Beats the hell out of me.”

Kate plucked her reading glasses out of her bag, came in for a closer inspection, first of the still life and then the street scene. “The edges are interesting, “ she said, taking note of the almost perfect one-inch border that ran around the perimeter of both paintings. “He’s making his own sort of frame.” She regarded the loops and curls of graphite, unintelligible, basically a mass of gray scrawl. “Pencil, I think, mainly scribbles, labor-intensive ones, for sure, but scribbles.” She moved closer into the color part of the paintings. “Whoever painted these is really laying into his brush.” She pointed out an area of paint that looked scrubbed onto the canvas. “There are individual bristles that have broken off the brush and have stuck into the paint.”

McNally flicked Oreo crumbs off his shirt and leaned toward the painting, as did Brown.

“So he’s painting them fast and hard?” asked Brown.

“You could say that,” said Kate.

McNally squinted at the paintings. “That why the color is so fucked up? ’Cause he’s painting them fast?”

“Not necessarily. A forceful, expressionist brush stroke might mean he’s working fast and furiously, but a painter can put the color down correctly as quickly as he or she can put it down wrong.”

“So it’s a choice?” Brown poured a cup of coffee, left it black, and offered it to Kate, who took it not because she wanted lousy cop coffee but because Brown had remembered she drank it black.

“Perhaps.” She took a sip. It was even worse than she remembered. “Lots of artists have experimented with color. And there’s something about these that remind me—a little—of the German expressionist painter, Kirchner. I’ll show you some later.”

McNally’s face lit up. “So our unsub’s a Kraut?”

Kate shook her head, suppressed a grin. “No. What I’m saying is these paintings have a raw quality, an immediacy that
reminds
me of the German painters. It’s possible your unsub—or whoever painted these—knows the work of those artists, is trying to emulate them, or—” She shifted her gaze to the street scene. “I don’t know. This one’s mostly black and white and—”

“Except for the sky,” said McNally, proud, as if he were pointing out something that everyone else had missed.

“Right,” said Kate, exchanging the briefest look with Brown before going back to the paintings. “I’m really not sure what to say. The work looks unschooled, but there are artists who go for that look intentionally.”

“Do you think they’re some sort of code?” Brown asked.

“Maybe.” An image flashed across Kate’s brain—her face pasted over Andrea Mantegna’s painting of Saint Sebastian. That was code all right.
The Death Artist.
She leaned back against the lectern, a wave of nausea rising in her throat.

Brown touched her arm. “You okay?”

She was suddenly dying for a smoke after six months without a single puff. “I’m fine. Where was I?” She focused on the paintings. “The ways he’s drawn the streets and the fruit are okay. Nothing special; the objects are recognizable, adequate, though there is some distortion. Again, I can’t say if that’s intentional or not.” She pursed her lips and came in close again. “There appear to be suggestions of charcoal beneath the paint, which must be how he starts his paintings. And it looks like a bit of a letter, maybe a
Y
and an
R
.” She pointed them out. “See here, and here?”

Kate stood back, took off her glasses, folded her arms across her chest, tried to assess the work coolly. “But what makes these paintings special—though I’m not sure that’s the right word for them—is the odd use of color. And I can’t figure out what he’s trying to accomplish with it because it doesn’t really make sense.” She turned to McNally. “If you have pictures of these, I’ll take them home and see if anything comes to me.”

“Got some in my office,” he said, turning abruptly out of the room.

A muffled jingle sounded from somewhere inside Brown’s clothes.

“Pacemaker?” Kate asked, a wry smile on her lips.

Brown tugged the cellular out of his inside breast pocket, hugged it to his ear. “Brown here.” He paused. “Uh-huh. Where? Shit. Who’s there? Right. Make sure the tech boys don’t destroy the scene until I’ve seen it.”

He clicked off as McNally came chugging back into the room with an envelope for Kate. “Digitals,” he said, handing them over.

“What is it?” Kate asked Brown.

“A body. And a painting. In Midtown Manhattan.”

B
rown maneuvered the Impala through the traffic on the West Side Highway, siren blaring. The Hudson River was flying past Kate’s vision, bluish-green brush strokes painted below a steel-gray sky.

But what was it she was feeling? Aside from a nagging desire to smoke a cigarette that would not go away, there was definitely something else. Could it possibly be adrenaline?
Jesus.
Those old cop instincts just kicked in whether she wanted them to or not. But no way she actually wanted to visit a crime scene—a murder scene. Forget it. She rapped her nails against the dashboard.

“You look like you’re about to explode,” said Brown.

“I’m fine.”

“Should I get off at Seventy-ninth to drop you?”

Kate hesitated, tried to fight the words that were already coming out of her mouth. “Why don’t you just go where you’re going and I’ll grab a cab from there.”

“No Mercedes today?” There was the slightest sneer on Brown’s lips.

Kate offered up her own acerbic smile. “I prefer having you as my driver.”

“Funny,” said Brown, then gave her a knowing look. “You want to see it, don’t you?”

“No.” Kate sighed. “I simply don’t want to take you out of your way.”

Brown threw her a sideways grin. “Uh-huh, sure.”

“You said Thirty-ninth Street, right? It’s just a block away from Richard’s office. It’ll give me an excuse to drop in on him.”

Brown gave her another dry “Uh-huh.”

T
he police-car radio was crackling with codes and descriptions as Brown cut across West Fortieth.

“You want me to let you out here?” he asked.

“In the middle of the street?”

“Just checking,” said Brown, still smirking until he saw the ring of cop cars up ahead and the uniforms keeping passersby from the scene.

Kate checked her watch. Almost four-thirty. Richard would definitely be back from Boston by now, probably even in his office. She should call him, tell him she was close by, maybe they’d go for a bite or a drink. That made a lot more sense than following Brown to a murder scene. But she didn’t go for her cellular and when Brown said, “Last chance,” she just nodded and he knew what she meant.

Brown had to park on the sidewalk. A dozen cop cars, an EMT van, and an ambulance were crowding the end of the street near the tall buildings at the corner of the Avenue of the Americas, just a few blocks south of the neon and glass and billboards and noise that made up Times Square. He was out fast, gold shield in hand, pushing through the crowd that had gathered and the ring of uniforms.

A beefy guy with a red complexion and a sparse blond mustache flagged him over.

“The vic’s way down at the other end of the alley,” he said.

“Anyone touch anything?”

The red-faced detective put his hands up as a sign. “Nope. Did what we were told, Chief Brown. Waited for you. Couple of medics and cops are with the body, that’s all. Just waiting.” He looked over at Kate.

“She’s with me,” said Brown. “Consults for NYPD.”

Kate liked the sound of that, tried her best to look official, tucked her fine leather bag under her arm, stood up straight.
Am I out of my mind?
She took a deep breath, knew the answer to that, but something kept compelling her forward, following Brown.

Brown peered down the alley, but couldn’t see anything.

Blond mustache said: “Runs the entire length of the building—right through from Thirty-ninth to Fortieth. The vic, the cops, and the medics are at the end, like I said. According to a guy at the front desk of the Fortieth Street building, the alley used to connect these two buildings—like about thirty years ago.” He signaled a uniform over, plucked the guy’s flashlight off his belt, handed it to Brown. “You’re gonna need this.”

B
rown turned into the alley, Kate just behind him. But she hesitated.

Maybe it was her cop instincts failing her, or her normal human ones kicking in and telling her to forget this folly, or maybe it was something else. She wasn’t sure of anything except the chill that had started in her lower back now working its way up her spine, and the tingling in her arms and legs, and a sharp awareness of her own breathing and her mouth gone dry.

Brown glanced over his shoulder. “You sure about this, McKinnon?”

Sure? No, of course not.
But she had to follow, had to see the scene.

Why?

She had no idea. Just a feeling urging her on.

Brown was waiting.

“Yes,” she said.

She would do this, then return to her normal life, call Richard, make him take her for that drink, and everything would be as it was. Naturally she would not be telling Richard what she’d done. He’d absolutely kill her. She flashed on the other night, the two of them in bed, Richard inside her. But instead of warming her it only heightened her anxiety.

The alley was dark, no more than four feet wide, cold. A place the sun never reached. Brown was a few feet ahead of her but already breaking up, becoming a shadow.

Something scampered beside her foot, right up against her fine leather loafers, probably a rat. She maintained her cool, distracted by something less tangible, a buzzing sensation, something she had not felt in over a year; the way she’d felt when the Death Artist was in her brain and she was closing in on him. But that made no sense. The Death Artist was dead.

Brown switched on the flashlight. The brick walls lit up, scarred and decorated with graffiti, the pavement littered with so many beer cans and bottles it looked like a recycling plant gone awry. The air was heavy with garbage, alcohol, and urine.

“Nice smell,” Brown said. “Just like Park Avenue, huh?”

Kate ignored the crack. She was thinking about the last time she and Brown were cops together, and how they’d both come close to dying. She could feel her heart beating fast; Brown whistling a tune as though nothing were wrong, as though they would not eventually come to the end of this dark, dank passageway and find a body.

A
dead
body. So why was it she felt afraid?

She made an involuntary move, her hand inside her jacket, and realized she was reaching for a gun she did not have. She sighed. She was being ridiculous. Ridiculous for coming, and ridiculous for being afraid.

Brown’s flashlight was doing the jitterbug as he walked, picking out a patch of wall here, a piece of floor there.

What was that?
Something gelatinous at Kate’s feet, maybe some rotting food or a dead animal. She didn’t know, didn’t want to know, but the soles of her shoes had picked up some of it, and were making sticky, smacking sounds with each step she took.

They were halfway down the alleyway, there was light at the other end filtering in like a thick fog. She couldn’t really make anything out, or hear much—that buzzing was in her ears, her brain.

“Thought you’d gotten it out of your system, didn’t you, McKinnon?”

“What?” Kate could barely understand his words.

“Once a cop, always a cop.”

That she heard. And knew he was right, though she hated admitting it.
Damn.
Why hadn’t she just called Richard and gone to see him? What the hell was she doing in this dark alleyway in the middle of Manhattan following Brown to a crime scene that had nothing to do with her, when she had vowed never to do anything like this again?

Too late to turn back now. The figures at the end of the tunnel were turning solid, three, no, four of them standing over what looked like a toppled scarecrow.

Kate decided not to look, that when she got to the end of this dark tunnel she would simply step past the group. She didn’t need to see it anymore. She must have been testing herself, that’s all, needed to see if she could handle the fear after all she’d been through.

Brown’s flashlight was picking out the details: three men, one woman, all standing over the scarecrow.

Okay, she’d seen it. More than she needed to. Now she would walk past it, excuse herself to Floyd Brown, go into the light of day and call Richard. Suddenly she could not wait to be out of there.

The woman called out—“Chief Brown”—and the flashlight illuminated her. Kate immediately recognized her—the ME who had examined Elena’s body. The image shot through Kate’s brain like lightning: the ME huddled over Elena’s broken body, gloved hands probing.

Oh, Jesus.

Kate stopped short, leaned against the alley wall, ignored the stench of garbage and alcohol and urine now amplified by death, and took a deep breath. For a moment she thought she might be sick, but no, she was okay. As long as she got out of here she’d be fine.

Brown had met up with the group. They were talking to him, their voices commingling: “…white male, totally mutilated.” Kate could only see half of what they were checking out, the painting that was on the ground beside the dead man, then one of them handing something to Brown, saying—“His wallet”—and Brown opening it, his flashlight still in his hands, rocking, telegraphing indiscriminate indecent split-second pictures of the scene as he bent over to get a look at the body.