Free The Death of an Ambitious Woman by Barbara Ross Page A

time with her, but money and his own career, toiling on their side porch, turning down all cases connected to the New Derby PD, taking time from building his practice to fill all the parenting holes her job created. If Ruth didn’t become chief, there wouldn’t be the raise they were counting on. She might not even have a job, depending on how things fell. No new chief would want his almost-predecessor haunting the headquarters building.
    Yet here she was. Baiting Baines. Doing the one thing Mayor Rosenfeld had asked her not to do.
    Ruth’s cell phone trilled in the silent car. It was Lawry. The medical examiner was ready to release Tracey Kendall’s remains.
    “I’ll go tell Kendall myself,” Ruth responded. “Did the M.E. assign a cause of death?”
    “No, still waiting for tox screens.”
    “Good.” For the first time ever, Ruth was grateful for the chronically overburdened, slow-moving state lab.

C HAPTER S IX
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    The Kendall house looked deserted. Ruth could hear the deep pong of the doorbell as it echoed through the rooms. No answer. She turned and looked across the sweep of lawn. There was movement by the smaller house on the left arc of the drive. Ruth set off on foot.
    It was hard to tell what purpose the building had originally served. It was a three-story building with a dormered roof, built in the same era as the main house. Had it been a gardener’s cottage? A guest house? The door was ajar. Ruth pushed it open and walked through. What she saw stopped her dead in her tracks.
    The house had been gutted and refitted so its interior space comprised a single room—extending out to the walls and up to the rafters that had hung in the original attic. The walls and sloping ceilings were painted a glaring white. Skylights supplemented the light streaming in from three stories of windows. The floor was an expanse of polished oak.
    But it wasn’t the architecture that seized Ruth’s attention. Rising from the floor, in some cases almost to the ceiling, were five pieces of sculpture. Ruth wasn’t much for modern art, but her response was immediate, visceral. She felt as if she had been punched in the chest. The twisted hulks were abstract, and yet were unmistakably dinosaurs. Their frozen postures were so real; the immense beasts seemed about to break free and resume lives interrupted long ago. Each piece displayed an intense emotion. Ruth clearly understood their rage, terror, hunger, even the strutting self-satisfaction of the crested duckbill. The vitality of the sculptures was stunning, especially as Stephen Kendall portrayed it, shot through with decay. The dinosaurs’ gleaming outer skins melted away in spots, revealing torn canvas, jumbled wires, and quick glimpses of jutting metal frames. Even as the beasts ruled the earth, rot was in them, on them, the specter of extinction already present.
    Ruth stood rooted to the spot where she had entered.
    There was a noise in the rear of the building and Susan Gleason appeared. Tall, cool, dressed with the same bohemian elegance as yesterday, she made her way across the studio floor.
    “Amazing, aren’t they?” Susan asked, husky-voiced.
    Ruth groped for speech. “He does these?”
    “Yes. This is what he does. At least, this is what he’s doing now.”
    “Here?”
    “Um-humm. The design work takes place over there.” Gleason pointed to the open shed addition at the back from which she’d emerged. “Everything else is done in this room. The sculptures are so large that they have to be disassembled to be moved and reassembled at the site.”
    Ruth noted that the wall of the studio facing away from the main house held a gigantic double barn door. “He sells well?”
    Susan Gleason didn’t answer right away. “He could. He will. He got a lot of favorable response to his work when he was quite young. His earlier work looked nothing like this. But he refused to capitalize on his success. His whole career can be summed up that way. Every time he