Free The Death Artist by Jonathan Santlofer Page A

pair of crude wings onto Kate’s back. After a moment’s consideration, he adds a halo. He pins it to the wall with a steel pushpin, stops a moment to admire his work.
    A guardian angel. Indeed.
    He sets his books onto the table, thinks about the girl.
    He’d been watching her. The way she moved. Her extraordinary voice. That’s when it came to him. Not exactly a plan. More of an improvisation. But he was getting so good at it. The way he had to improvise with the man, too. Good? No. Great.
    But has Kate understood his message?
    He wonders, pictures her on those brownstone steps looking so bruised, destroying her lungs with all that tar and nicotine.
    It’s time he stopped improvising, began planning, taking himself seriously, as others surely would.
    He empties the shopping bags onto the steel table, begins to organize his tools.
    The place is damp. He shivers, stares into the cavernous space past beams and pitted walls, the light from the river beautiful, peaceful.
    A rat scampers across the dank floorboards. A flick of the wrist. The X-Acto knife in flight, and– Gotcha !–the squealing rodent is pinned to the floor.
    His reflexes have always been good.
    He watches the rat’s tiny claws twitching, tail sweeping up a mini dust storm. Always fascinating, the loss of life.
    But enough. There’s work to be done.
    He wants to create another message, something bold, something to convince her that they are in this . . . together.
    He props his latest souvenir, the small altarpiece, against a couple of books, loads the film.
    With each pop of the flashbulb he’s blinded, an image winking in the back of his mind–a knife through a woman’s flesh, a man’s dying gasp, a young girl’s scream. They fade to the Polaroids laid out in front of him, a new set of images developing before his impatient eyes. The last picture’s details are just filling in, but he’s already cutting them into tiny fragments, rearranging them haphazardly, gluing them down so that the original image is unrecognizable.
    He plucks the finished work up with gloved fingers. Should he actually send it? The idea so seductive, it gives him a thrill to tease like this.
    Of course he’s sending it. No way he’s going to stop now.
    He slides the collage into an envelope, sits back, stares at the newspaper photo with wings and halo until the grainy gray dots that make up Kate’s face blur.
     
    LUCILLE SWIRLED A PAPER towel over framed Mapplethorpe photographs that lined the taupe-colored hallway–flowers so seductive the maid avoided looking at them. “A very good evening,” she said in her singsong island accent. “I made some lemon chicken for you and Mr. Rothstein. And some cold orzo salad. I wasn’t sure if you were eating in tonight.”
    Kate thanked her housekeeper warmly, then noticed the large FedEx package from Liz, slipped it under her arm, and headed directly into her home office.
    By the time Lucille poked her head in to say she was leaving, the sky outside Kate’s office window had gone blue-black. Kate had already read two of the monographs Liz had sent over: Nicholas Groth’s Men Who Rape and Robert R. Hazelwood’s The Behavioral-Oriented Interview of Rape Victims: The Key to Profiling. She’d filled half a yellow legal pad with notes.
     
    HOURS LATER, THE IMAGES continued to echo. Dinner was solemn as Kate attempted small talk with Richard.
    She picked at her lemon chicken. “Is it all right if I bounce a few ideas off you?”
    Richard refilled their glasses with a California cabernet. “Sure.”
    “I’m trying to piece together what happened that night. First, the intruder, the street person/junkie theory is no good. Elena had to have been killed by someone she knew.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “One: There were no signs of a break-in. Two: The front-door lock was not picked or broken. Three: The window was still locked. And four: She was making him coffee.”
    Richard peered at her over the rim of his wineglass. “How