In the week and a half following the discovery of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick, Sam Markham spoke with Cathy Hildebrant only twice: once on Thursday to ask her if she had any insight into the coroner’s preliminary findings; once the following Wednesday to tell her that the FBI was temporarily reassigning him to the Boston Field Office and to ask her to join him there the next morning.
In their Thursday conversation, Markham told Cathy that the internal organs of both Campbell and Wenick had been removed by the killer-Wenick’s through the lower half of his severed torso, Campbell’s through a previously undetected incision running from the base of his testicles through his rectum-and the resulting cavities were found stuffed with a mixture of tightly packed sawdust and hay. Both the victims’ heads were shaved and their hair replaced with special “wigs” sculpted from an epoxy compound. The killer had also removed the victims’ brains from what was clearly a postmortem-drilled hole at the base of each of their skulls. Wenick, Markham said, most likely died from a broken neck, for even though both the bodies had been contorted and mounted on a zigzagged iron bar that ran up through the wooden tree stump, through Campbell’s buttock and into his torso, only the bones in Wenick’s neck showed signs of trauma that occurred prior to death.
Markham went on to explain that Campbell’s penis appeared to have been removed while he was still alive, but because of the missing organs-and because both the bodies had been drained and the veins and tissues embalmed with some kind of preservative that needed further analysis-the wide receiver’s cause of death was still to be determined. The final results of the autopsy, Markham stressed, would not be in until the following week, and everything-the white lacquered paint, as well as the epoxy sculptured wigs, the fake grapes, and other accoutrements that adorned the bodies-would require further analysis. Markham told Cathy that all pertinent forensic evidence-including the entire base of the statue-had already been flown to the FBI Laboratory at Quantico for testing. That was good, Markham said, for that meant the detail about the inscription to Cathy could be kept out of the public eye a bit longer.
And that meant that Cathy could be kept out of the public eye a bit longer, too. Immediately following that fateful Sunday, Dr. Catherine Hildebrant was met with an onslaught of messages on her University voice mail asking for an interview-so many, in fact, that she had to instruct her students to contact her only via e-mail. And even though it had been the end of the semester and she could finish up most of her work at Janet’s, by Friday of that first week-when other art historians and so-called experts had already been making the interview circuits for days-the media seemed to have forgotten all about the pretty art history professor who had initially been brought in as a consultant on the case, and who subsequently refused all their requests for an interview.
However, even though by Friday of that first week interest in Cathy had waned, interest in her book had not. Amazon and Barnes & Noble quickly sold out of their few remainder copies of Slumbering in the Stone, and both placed a large backorder with Cathy’s publisher-a small, academic press which in turn informed their star author to expect some hefty royalty checks in the months to come. Other books on Michelangelo began to sell out, too; and by that first Friday, The Agony and the Ecstasy had cracked the number 10 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list.
While both professional and amateur sleuths alike waxed philosophical on the deeper meaning, the deeper cultural significance behind the murder/ sculpture of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick-some of whom actually referred to Slumbering in the Stone while postulating their theories of The Michelangelo Killer’s motives-none made the connection to Cathy’s book as a possible inspiration for the killings-a fact that Sam Markham in his second conversation with Cathy did not find surprising. Without the knowledge of the inscription at the base of the statue, he explained, without the knowledge of the quotes and a direct connection between the killer and herself, there would be no reason for the public to make a connection with her book more than any other the killer might have read, including literature not necessarily related to Michelangelo.
Thus, following a number of carefully calculated comments by Special Agent Rachel Sullivan in her press conferences that week-comments that suggested Cathy had been consulted by the FBI simply because of her geographic proximity to the crime scene-by that first Friday the media seemed to have moved on from Dr. Catherine Hildebrant.
Markham, however, had not. Had he known how many times Cathy had wanted to call him just to chat-and had he known how often she had Googled his name on her laptop while at the Polks’-the FBI agent might have better understood the turmoil that fate had awakened in both their hearts. During his first conversation with her that week, Markham had assured Cathy that it was better for her if he should keep his distance until the media attention died down. She needn’t worry, he said, for even though she was staying with the Polks, she was still under constant surveillance by the FBI. And so Markham felt a certain amount of relief that he had an excuse to stay away from Cathy Hildebrant. But even though the demands of the investigation actually warranted his distance from her, coupled with his relief was a mixture of guilt and shame-guilt because his nagging preoccupation with the pretty art history professor often took his mind off his work; shame because he felt dishonest for not admitting even to himself how often his thoughts of her made him smile.
Markham spent the majority of that week and a half traveling between the Boston Field Office and the Resident Agency in Providence. Most of the time he was alone, but sometimes Rachel Sullivan accompanied him, as on the two occasions when they attempted to speak with Laurie Wenick. Both times they had to settle for her father; for Laurie-who had tried to stab herself in the neck with a butcher’s knife upon learning what had become of her son-was presently being held under a strict suicide watch at the Rhode Island Institute of Mental Health. Thus, it had fallen to John Wenick to perform the grim task, the grim technicality of identifying the upper half of his grandson-that is, once little Michael Wenick had been removed from the rocky cliff and separated from the goat’s legs. John Wenick could offer nothing to help Markham and Sullivan with their investigation other than a tearful oath that he would one day see “whoever did this to my grandson dead at my feet.”
And so, while the remaining pieces of The Sculptor’s Bacchus were being processed and analyzed back at the FBI Laboratories at Quantico, and while Rachel Sullivan and her team began following up on the class rosters obtained from the Registrar’s Office at Brown, Special Agent Sam Markham immediately set about pursuing leads gathered from the plethora of physical evidence The Michelangelo Killer had left behind-the most promising of which so far being the hindquarters of the goat.
The first element of the killer’s Bacchus to be examined at the FBI Laboratory, DNA testing quickly determined that the goat which The Michelangelo Killer had selected for the bottom half of his satyr was a medium-sized adult male of the Nubian variety: a short-haired, somewhat muscular goat distinguished by its floppy ears and what breeders called its distinctively “Roman” nose-a characteristic that Markham, given what he knew of The Michelangelo Killer so far, did not treat as a coincidence. Indeed, through his research, Markham also discovered that, as far as goats go, the Nubian was one of the most sociable, vocal, and outgoing of all the different breeds. Outgoing, Markham said to himself over and over. The same word John Wenick had used to describe his grandson. Another coincidence? Perhaps, but Markham could not help but think otherwise.
The special agent began his investigation by surfing the Internet and telephoning the handful of farms in the New England area that either featured the Nubian breed, or had Nubians among their livestock-beginning with and working his way outward from the farms closest to the area where Michael Wenick was abducted. He got lucky on his second try: a farm called Hill Brothers Homestead in Burrillville-a rural, heavily wooded town located in the northwest corner of Rhode Island. Markham followed up with calls to the other farms as well, but only Louis Hill, owner of Hill Brothers Homestead, confirmed that one of his Nubians had indeed gone missing the previous fall.
“Mr. Hill?” said Markham, emerging from his car.
“One of ’em, yes,” said the old man in the beat-up Boston Red Sox hat. He stood on the porch of his small farmhouse with his hands in the pockets of his baggy overalls. “If you’re looking for my brother, he’s a ways down the road. You’ll have to shout, though, as he’ll have a hard time hearing ya from six feet under.”
“I spoke with you on the phone, Mr. Hill,” said Markham, showing his ID. “Special Agent Sam Markham. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“I know, son. Just giving you a hard time. Louis Hill. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“About time someone got up here about Gamble.”
“Gamble?”
“The buck I told you about on the phone. Reported it to the police back in November, but nobody done shit since. Didn’t think they’d get the FBI on it, though. You boys got a missing animals division or something?”
“Mr. Hill, you said on the phone that Gamble was the only one of your goats to go missing last year?”
“Yep. Hadn’t had a goat go missing in over a decade. And as far as I know, never had one stolen neither. Had big plans for that boy. Shoulda seen him-was a be-ute of a stud.”
“And you said Gamble was stolen at night, in the dark sometime between eight o’clock and five the next morning?”
“Had to have been, yeah. Grandson checked on the goats and locked the barn as he usually does before he goes to bed. All present and accounted for. Went to feed them the next morning, lock on the barn was busted open and the door to Gamble’s stall ripped off the hinges.”
“May I see the barn?”
“Sure thing.”
Hill led Markham from the porch around to the back of the farmhouse. In addition to the large barn and a pair of smaller buildings at the rear of the property, Markham spied about two dozen Nubian goats in a nearby paddock-many of whom raised their heads and approached the fence as the men passed.
Outgoing indeed, Markham thought.
“Settle down, children,” said Hill. “Don’t go begging the government for no handouts now.”
The large swinging doors were propped open, the inside of the barn empty, but the lingering smell of livestock-of hay and manure and sawdust-suddenly bombarded Markham with memories of a petting zoo to which his father had taken him as a little boy-a ramshackle affair at the local mall where a llama once nibbled at the collar of his shirt and made him cry. The barn itself was typical in its layout-a single corridor flanked by stalls for the animals. The horse stalls, of which there were four, came first; followed by six stalls on each side that Hill said were reserved for the goats. These-unlike the horse stalls, which had high wooden doors and barred windows-were enclosed by chain link gates and were separated from each other by 2 x 6s that Hill said could be removed to make the pens bigger.
“They usually go three or four to a stall,” said the farmer. “Sometimes more if a doe is weaning. And in the winter we can take down those walls and house more together, separating them by size, age, and sex if we need to. But Gamble always had his own stall down at the end year round. He could get a bit ornery, but he was smart, and would try sometimes to push the latch-why his was the only stall that was padlocked. He got the job done when it came time to getting with his honeys, though. That’s what a special boy he was. Goddamn shame if you ask me.”
Hill and Markham reached the opposite end of the barn.
“See there?” asked Hill, pointing to his prized buck’s former stall. “My grandson and I fixed it, but you can still see where the sons of bitches pulled the gate off. Didn’t even bother with the other goats-coulda gotten to them easy. Nope, no padlock or nothing was gonna stop these guys. Guess they had their sights on Gamble from the beginning-just pulled the goddamn thing right outta the frame.”
Markham squatted down and ran his pinky finger along the wooden beam-along the outline of the gate hinges’ former position.
“Cops took fingerprints and everything,” said Louis Hill, spitting. “But they found nothing-not even any pry marks. Said it woulda taken three or four men to pull that gate off its hinges. First I thought it mighta been kids-local boys playing a prank or something. Then I got to thinking it mighta been somebody who wanted to breed Gamble. I mean, these guys went to a lot of trouble to get him. I tell ya, that boy was a real be-ute of a-”
“Mr. Hill, you said Gamble went missing back in November?”
“Yep. Two weeks before Thanksgiving. I remember cuz my grandson had a game. He’s only a sophomore but he’s a starter. Quarterback. Gamble going missing messed up his head bad for that one. Felt like it was his fault. Good kid, my grandson. Always loved those-”
“And you never saw anyone suspicious lurking around the property?”
“I’m telling ya what I told the police. Have no idea who woulda wanted to take Gamble other than what I already told ya.”
“Mr. Hill, the FBI has reason to believe that Gamble may have been found.”
“He’s dead, ain’t he?” said Hill, spitting again. “Where’d they find him?”
“You been following the news at all lately, Mr. Hill? You’ve heard about the murder of Tommy Campbell and that boy down at Watch Hill? You know what happened to them?”
A look of grim realization suddenly washed over the old man’s face.
“I saw the picture of that statue on the news-the one they said looked like the thing the killer made outta those bodies. You mean to say that the bottom half of that boy is a real goat? You mean to say that you think it’s Gamble?”
“There’s a very high probability of that, yes.”
“So you’re telling me the fella who did that to those boys was here? On my property?”
“We won’t know for sure until I send a team here to get some DNA samples from Gamble’s offspring. We’re also going to need to question your grandson.”
“What’s he got to do with any of this?” asked the old man, his voice trembling.
“He was the last one to see Gamble alive. And the one who subsequently discovered him to be missing. He might be able to tell us something the police overlooked.” Markham had no intention of telling Louis Hill that his grandson could be a suspect in the case. No, he would let Rachel Sullivan and her team handle that; let them spring the search warrant on the old man if he refused to cooperate.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” said Louis Hill.
Markham left the farmer staring blankly into Gamble’s empty stall. But more than being disturbed at the incredible amount of strength it would have taken The Michelangelo Killer to rip the gate off its hinges-if in fact it was The Michelangelo Killer who had done so-what really bothered Sam Markham as he sped away down the shady country road was the date when the crime occurred.
November, Markham said to himself over and over again. The killer acquired the bottom half of his satyr after he already had the boy. That means the killer was confident enough in his technique for preserving humans before he murdered Michael Wenick. That means Michael Wenick might not have been his first. That means I was wrong about the timeline.
That means I was wrong.
It was after she hung up with Sam Markham on Wednesday, May 6th-the afternoon on which she learned she would be accompanying him to the Boston Field Office the next day-that Cathy also received word that her divorce from Steven Rogers was official. Cathy took the news with no more emotion than if she had been listening to the morning weather report-a forecast that called for cloudy skies but with only a twenty percent chance of precipitation. And be it due to the previous week’s events, or that she had long ago exhausted any love she had left for her ex-husband, Cathy closed the book on her ten-year marriage to Steven Rogers with a sense of numb resignation.
Her ex-husband, on the other hand, seemed to have had a last minute change of heart. On the Friday before their divorce was to be final, Rogers showed up on the Polks’ doorstep virtually in tears, demanding to see his wife. And after a quick back and forth between Janet and the man to whom she would always regret introducing her best friend, Cathy emerged onto the Polks’ front porch.
“Can we talk, Cat?” Steve shouted over Janet’s shoulder. “Please?”
“It’s all right, Jan,” Cathy said, and Janet scowled her way back into the house.
“I’ve been following that story all week on TV,” Steve began. “Been worrying about how you’ve been holding up through it all. I begged Janet for your new cell number, but she wouldn’t give it to me.”
“That’s the point of the unlisted number. We agreed that any communication between us would go through our lawyers.”
“You wanted that, not me. I wanted to work things out but you didn’t want to deal with it. You wanted this divorce, Cat. Remember that.”
“What are you doing here, Steven?”
“Well-it’s just that-they talked to me, too, you know. The FBI. The day after it all happened. They asked me if I had any students that might fit the profile of the guy they were looking for. Christ, I couldn’t give them anything-don’t know why the fuck they’d want to talk to me, other than my association with you. Is there something I should know about, Cat? Some other reason why you’re involved with this bullshit?”
“They’re probably just covering their bases,” Cathy lied-it hadn’t occurred to her that the FBI might question her ex-husband.
But he’s still in the dark. They must not have mentioned the notes.
That was good.
“Christ, Cat. It’s been a pretty fucked-up week. I’ve been seeing all that stuff on TV, been hearing about what happened to Soup and that little boy and…well…being sort of involved in a way, and hearing your name all the time mentioned in that context-well, it’s really been messing with my head, Cat. Made me realize how foolish I was to let go of the person that meant the most to me in this world. And, I don’t know, with the finality of it all, our divorce staring me right in the face, I just thought that maybe-”
“She dump you, Steven, your little graduate student?”
“Catherine, please,” said Steve with a hand through his thick curly hair. “This has nothing to do with her. You know I’ll never feel the same way about her, about anybody, as I felt, as I still feel about you.”
“You should have thought about that before you got your dick stuck in her thesis. I have nothing more to say to you. Good-bye, Steven.”
Only after she was back inside, only after she heard the sound of Rogers’s BMW Z4 roadster speeding off into the distance, did Cathy realize how much the events of the previous week had changed her. For the first time in their twelve-year relationship, Cathy had not the slightest impulse to give in to Steve Rogers-not the slightest. That meant that it was truly over; she had grown stronger-so much so that when she hung up with Sam Markham the following Wednesday, Cathy felt secure enough to resign herself to the feelings for him that had already begun to blossom in her heart.
Of course, Cathy knew very well that her interest in Markham began with their first encounter; but Cathy was also smart enough to realize that her feelings toward him had been confused not only by the overwhelming totality of the previous week’s events, but also by her acute self-awareness of her still-vulnerable broken heart. But while Markham had been pursuing leads all over New England, after quietly finishing up the spring semester at Brown, after dealing with her ex-husband and retreating with the Polks to Bonnet Shores for the weekend to help them ready their beach house, despite a somber self-consciousness that her actions were playing out in the shadow of the murders of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick-murders that, still unbeknown to the general public, had been dedicated to her-Cathy also felt a gnawing premonition that a door to a new life had been opened, and that it was Sam Markham who would carry her over the threshold.
In addition to speaking with Markham only twice since telling him about the opening quote to Slumbering in the Stone, Cathy received a telephone call from Special Agent Rachel Sullivan the morning after she arrived at Janet’s. Sullivan advised Cathy to make an official statement to the Associated Press telling them she could offer nothing more than confirmation that the bodies of Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick had indeed been found posed like Michelangelo’s Bacchus. Sullivan also advised that Cathy stay clear of any interviews-not only to maintain the integrity of the investigation, but also in the event the information about the inscription was ever leaked to the press. Cathy heeded Sullivan’s advice, and by Friday of that first week, the messages on her voice mail had dwindled down to one.
And so, with the worst seemingly behind her, on the morning after her divorce from Steve Rogers-a bright May morning that whispered of the coming summer, her first as a single woman since her midtwenties-Cathy sat waiting on the Polks’ front porch amidst a haze of dread and excitement. Yes, now that the semester was over, now that Rogers was out of her life for good, the void that should have been the beginning of her new life was overwhelmed by a constant preoccupation with two people: The Michelangelo Killer and Sam Markham. That both of them should be inextricably tied together was to Cathy Hildebrant both a blessing and curse. Although she could not rid her mind of The Michelangelo Killer’s Bacchus, of the terror of knowing that her book had been the inspiration for that heinous crime, by that same token such thoughts invariably brought with them the presence of Sam-a presence far away but at the same time close to her in the dark, a presence that helped her through those long nights alone in the Polks’ guest room.
“Nice to see you again,” said the FBI agent as Cathy climbed into his Trailblazer. Cathy smiled-the residue of her daydream on the porch making her blush. “You’re holding up okay, I take it?”
“All right, I guess. And yourself?”
“I’ll brief you in a bit.”
Markham drove off.
Cathy thought the FBI agent seemed chipper, more at ease than during their trip from Watch Hill, when the sudden awkwardness between them had taken Cathy completely by surprise. But today, rather than second guess herself, Cathy knew at once that Sam Markham really did think it was nice to see her. And being in his presence again, Cathy was suddenly filled with a buzzing sense of gratitude and guilt at the thought of the circumstances, of the man who had brought them together.
“Sorry I’m late, by the way,” Markham added. “But I had to pick up some documents at the Providence office and got caught up for a sec.”
“Probably a good thing. We should be past all the traffic by now.”
“Yes, I’ve become quite the regular in that mess this past week.”
“So where exactly are you now, Sam? I thought you were working in Boston.”
“I am. The Boston Division oversees FBI operations in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire, but we have smaller satellite offices scattered about in every state. These are called Resident Agencies. We’ve got one in Providence, and they’ve set me up with a computer and my own office there so I can be local-easier for me to get somewhere fast if I need to. However, I still answer to Bill Burrell in the Boston office, and have been traveling back and forth this past week for meetings and to go over evidence.”
“I see.”
“The Boston office is located right in the heart of downtown, and the facilities are much bigger and more high tech than what we have in Providence. The totality of our operations there demands it-everything from public corruption and organized crime divisions to fraud and counterintelligence. Burrell was reassigned there last fall as the special agent in charge, and also to assist in the restructuring of their Violent Crime Division. I was sent up from Quantico to run a seminar on the latest research and forensic techniques being developed at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.”
“So that’s where all the profilers hang out?”
“Actually, there’s no such thing. The FBI does not have a job called a profiler-just a term that has sort of evolved in popular culture.”
“Forgive me. My television education, I’m afraid.”
“No, no,” Markham smiled. “Don’t feel silly-just one of the many public misconceptions about the Bureau. The procedures commonly associated with what has come to be known as ‘profiling’ are performed by supervisory special agents like myself back at the NCAVC in Quantico, so it was really only a coincidence that I was nearby when this Michelangelo Killer made his spectacular entry into the public eye.”
“Yes. He really has thrown us for a loop, hasn’t he? The whole country. Can’t turn on the television or even check my e-mail without seeing a picture of Bacchus in the headlines-can’t even look at it now without thinking of Tommy Campbell and that poor little boy. So does that mean The Michelangelo Killer has gotten what he wants, Sam? Does that mean in a way he’s won?”
“As far as turning people on to the works of Michelangelo? I would say yes. Yes he has.”
Cathy was silent, lost in thought as Sam Markham pulled onto the Interstate.
“I know what a strain this has been on you,” Markham said, glancing toward the Providence skyline. “And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you agreeing to join me today for this teleconference.”
“I just hope I can be of some help,” Cathy sighed. “Like I told you on the phone, I’ve been wracking my brain this past week trying to come up with more insight into Slumbering in the Stone, but I feel like I’ve come to a dead end.”
“The insight you’ve given me so far has been invaluable in helping me get a bead on this guy, Cathy. Also, the way you’ve handled yourself with the press has been more than admirable. It’s why I’m taking you to Boston today. It’s why I’ve asked Bill Burrell to bring you in as an official consultant on this case.”
“What?” Cathy said-her heart dropping into her stomach. “You mean you want me to work for the FBI?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Cathy. And not for free, either. The Bureau is ready to negotiate a consultant’s salary with you.”
“But Sam, I-”
“A lot has happened in the eleven days since we first drove together to Watch Hill, Cathy-specifically with regard to the developing profile of our killer. I told you on the phone about the goat-about how The Michelangelo Killer obtained the bottom half of his Bacchus’s satyr.”
“Yes.”
“Well, since our conversation about Slumbering in the Stone, and since concluding that The Michelangelo Killer most likely used your book as a springboard for his murders, Rachel Sullivan and her squad have been following up on those class rosters. Now, even though you can’t recall any of your former students who fit the physical and psychological profile we’ve identified for the killer thus far, from the outset Sullivan and her team have been working from the premise that the killer may have been associated with you indirectly-that is, perhaps via one of your students. She thus focused her attention first on all the male students that were listed on your rosters for the three years leading up to the publication of your book and, shortly afterward, your receipt of the anonymous notes-the latter of which, and you’ll forgive me, you told us happened shortly after your mother passed away, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you told Sullivan that you did not start requiring your book for your classes until the year after it was published-the following fall, right? Almost a year after you received the quotes and the sonnet?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“That means that, even though the killer had to have read your book in a context outside of the classroom, back then he still had to be a local-a student or otherwise-and familiar enough with the campus to be able to drop off the anonymous notes undetected. Just to be safe, Sullivan took into account your class rosters for the following two years as well-which, in theory, would give us the most practical cross section of male students from which to begin drawing a link to potential suspects. As your classes during this time frame were comprised only of majors and graduate students, and as you were teaching only two classes per semester, the actual pool of potential suspects who might have had direct contact with you is quite small. The fact that the vast majority of these students, both undergraduate and graduate, have been female, only whittles this number down even further.”
“Sam, please don’t tell me that this psychopath actually sat in front of me in one of my classes.”
“No, no,” said Markham with a raise of his hand. “But most likely someone who knew him did.”
“What do you mean?”
“Does the name Gabriel Banford mean anything to you, Cathy?”
“Gabriel Banford? Yes, of course, Gabe Banford. I remember Gabe. He was an undergraduate with us for a time-gosh, going back about seven or eight years now. I don’t really remember him other than his jet black hair and his clothes-a little bit more extreme than the usual Goths that sometimes litter the List Art Center. One of those lost soul types-bright from what I heard, but no direction. I had him briefly in class when he was a freshman but he ended up dropping out and transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design the following fall. His parents were not happy about it-that I do remember. Janet told me about it later-said they were trying to blame the department or something. I guess he had a lot of psychological issues, and later a drug problem from what I heard. I got all this secondhand, of course, from Janet. I hate to say this, but the only reason I remember him is because of what she told me happened to him afterward-after he dropped out of RISD and got involved with the wrong crowd.”
“So you know about how he died?”
“You’re going to have to forgive me, Sam, but all of this happened around the same time as my mother-was in a bit of a fog when Janet told me about it. But, if I remember correctly, it was a suicide, right? Drug overdose?”
“That was the official ruling, yes. But before we talk about that, let me back up a sec. You see, given the small number of male students in the initial suspect pool-a pool that Sullivan treated from the beginning as potentially comprised of direct and indirect suspects in terms of their relationship to you-it didn’t take her squad long to track down the whereabouts of your former students, most of whom are now living out of state. Serial killers, especially the types who hang on to their victims for an extended period of time, tend to almost always hunt their prey in a relatively small area in close proximity to their home. If we take into account the distances between the areas where Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick were abducted, the chance of the killer’s home lying beyond each area in either direction goes down exponentially the farther you travel out of state into Massachusetts and Connecticut. Understand?”
“Yes. Because the murders of Campbell and Wenick occurred in Westerly and Cranston -cities on almost opposite sides of Rhode Island.”
“As did the murder of the goat.”
“Of course. You said the goat was stolen from a farm in Burrillville, which is even farther away from Watch Hill-sort of up in the northwest corner of the state.”
“Right. So we have three murders from which we can begin to plot a possible location where The Michelangelo Killer might live. If we include the anonymous notes that you received five and a half years ago, that actually gives us a fourth location to which we can tie the killer. If we plot The Michelangelo Killer’s home in the middle of these four points, this would most likely place his home south of Providence-closer to Providence and Brown University if we work from the premise that serial killers of this resident type, the type of which The Michelangelo Killer undoubtedly is, most often first become active in areas closest to their homes-i.e., the notes.”
“You mean it’s like they get braver as time goes on? Sort of like an animal that ventures out for food farther and farther from his cave?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, yes. The need for food, if I may use your analogy, begins to overshadow the risk of getting it. Serial killers have a comfort zone from which they like to work just like anybody else. It’s why, as so often is the case, the farther away they get from their comfort zone the easier it is for us to catch them-why so often it’s their later murders that lead us to them. They start to slip up, get sloppy because oftentimes their need for victims clouds their fear of the risk involved, and thus it’s that very risk that ends up being their undoing.”
“But what does all this have to do with Gabe Banford?”
“Even though you claimed that none of your former students fit our psychological and, more important, physical profile of The Michelangelo Killer, following up on your class rosters, Gabe Banford immediately caught Sullivan’s attention because, of all your male students for the time frame we’re looking at, Banford was the only one who was deceased. This automatically ruled him out as a potential suspect. However, a closer examination of his case file opened up the possibility of him being a victim-perhaps The Michelangelo Killer’s first.”
“But how do you conclude that? His death was nothing like Campbell’s and Wenick’s.”
“The case file on Banford paints quite a sad picture of the boy-bright, from a moderately wealthy family in New York City, but psychologically disturbed, in counseling since he was eleven and distant from his parents. The classic example of what we at The Bureau like to call a PEP-child.”
“PEP?”
“Pill for every problem-a kid of the Adderall-Ritalin generation. Throw in some Paxil and Zoloft, and you get a good idea of the stew bubbling in Banford’s head. To make a long story short, yes, before dropping out of RISD Banford became involved with a group of disenfranchised intelligentsia types who were not only regulars at a gay club in downtown Providence called Series X, but who also dabbled in recreational drugs-marijuana and coke mostly, but sometimes they’d snort heroin and pop hallucinogens, too. The police report in Banford’s case file includes a number of statements from his friends claiming that, prior to his death, Banford’s heroin snorting was slowly evolving into a habit of the Trainspotting variety. And in addition to a monthly stipend from his parents and a string of part-time jobs from which he was fired, Banford’s friends told police that they suspected he had begun to support his budding needle habit by other means as well-if you take my meaning.”
“Gabe Banford?” Cathy said in disbelief.
“Yes. Banford’s friends stated to the police that Gabe would often hook up with older men at Series X with the understanding that he would be paid for his services. There was also an ambiguously worded posting on the Men Seeking Men board on Craigslist that the police were able to trace back to Banford when they looked into his computer.”
“But why do you think he was connected to The Michelangelo Killer?”
“Although there were high traces of heroin discovered in his system on the night he died, the autopsy report stated that the cause of Gabriel Banford’s death was not from an overdose of heroin, but of epinephrine-more commonly known as adrenaline.”
“Adrenaline? I don’t understand.”
“Hear me out. Banford lived with two roommates on the East Side of Providence-both of whom were either complicit in, or at the very least, turned a blind eye to Banford’s burgeoning drug use. Banford would most often shoot up in his bedroom where-and I quote from the police report-his roommates said, ‘He’d just sit and chill to music and art DVDs.’ And so it was in Banford’s bedroom that one of his roommates found him the next day when he wouldn’t answer his cell phone. Police found a number of syringes and narcotics besides heroin-cocaine, some low grade acid, a little pot-but no prints on anything other than Banford’s and his roommates’, both of whom had alibis at the time of the boy’s death. And so, the police chalked up Banford’s overdose of epinephrine either to suicide or as simply a bit of drug experimentation gone bad. The autopsy report stated that the epinephrine itself was of an extremely high concentration per cubic centimeter, but could not be traced to any legitimate source. Probably was manufactured in a homemade lab-which is possible if you have the know-how.”
“But what does this have to do with the murder of Tommy Campbell?”
“The autopsy results for both Campbell and Wenick were finalized yesterday. And although his internal organs were removed, with the help of the state medical examiner the FBI labs were able to isolate in some of the tissue samples what appeared to be traces of highly concentrated compounds of both epinephrine and a diazepam-ketamine mix, the latter of which could have been used as a tranquilizer. Thus, the official ruling now stands that Tommy Campbell’s death was a result of a myocardial infarction caused by an overdose of highly concentrated epinephrine.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yes. Strange, isn’t it?”
“But, Sam, couldn’t this be just a coincidence? I mean, if I follow you correctly, don’t you need more evidence to tie The Michelangelo Killer to Banford than just the epinephrine and the fact that he was gay? And why didn’t the police investigate the possibility that Banford’s death could have been a homicide to begin with?”
“They had nothing to go on other than what they found in the boy’s bedroom. No fingerprints, no sign of a struggle, nothing suspicious in his e-mails or on his computer-nothing to indicate that anything was out of the ordinary with regard to what they knew of Banford’s life at that point. Banford’s friends told police that he had often talked about killing himself, and all signs in his bedroom seemed to point to just that, or perhaps an accidental overdose-the way he was sitting up in bed under the blankets, the DVD player still on, the open book on his nightstand. But as far as someone else being involved, well, Banford’s roommates testified that when they arrived home later that evening-the evening on which, unbeknown to them, Banford was already dead in his bedroom-the door to the apartment was locked as usual and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”
“So then perhaps it was a suicide-or an accidental overdose.”
“Perhaps,” said Sam Markham. “But there were two interesting details listed in the evidence inventory of the crime scene that, up until now, most likely would have gone unnoticed-or at the very least, deemed irrelevant. The first being the DVD that was found in Banford’s room at the time of his death, a DVD that he was most certainly watching when he OD’d-a DVD his roommates told police was stolen from the bookstore where Banford had worked briefly, and from which he had been fired the week earlier. It was a DVD that, along with the other stolen items from the bookstore, the police didn’t think unusual for him to have in his room-the room of a former art history and RISD student who, according to his friends, still thought of himself as part of the drug-enlightened intelligentsia.”
“What was the DVD?”
“A documentary entitled, Michelangelo: A Self-Portrait.”
“Dear God,” said Cathy-then suddenly it struck her. “Sam, you said there was another detail. Please don’t tell me you were talking about the open book on Banford’s nightstand.”
“Yes, Cathy. Just published that spring. The first edition of Slumbering in the Stone.”
Cathy’s head began to spin, but through her confusion there emerged an obvious flaw in the FBI agent’s reasoning.
“Wait a minute. What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. If, in fact, you’re telling me that Banford somehow met The Michelangelo Killer either at Series X or on Craigslist, how on earth could this psychopath have connected Banford to me-to his having been in my class? I mean, the kid wasn’t even in the department for a whole semester, and had been out of Brown for over two years at the time of his death.”
“I am aware of that, yes.”
“And why would The Michelangelo Killer have stolen my book from the bookstore where Banford worked? Why would he have left it in Banford’s room?”
“I never said the killer stole the book.”
“So you’re saying that Banford stole the book, too?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Sam, please, I’m confused. Are you saying then that Gabe Banford might have stolen the book and the DVD for The Michelangelo Killer?”
“No, Cathy,” said Markham -his eyes off the road and on her for the first time during their drive. “What I’m saying is this: I think there is a strong possibility that The Michelangelo Killer connected Banford to you only after he met him. He might have spotted him at Series X or contacted him on the computer or perhaps even first saw him in the bookstore. Might have singled him out for any number of reasons-maybe because The Michelangelo Killer was sexually attracted to him, maybe because Banford represented to him everything about today’s cultural excesses that The Michelangelo Killer so despises. We might never know, as the club has been closed for three years now and Banford’s computer long ago destroyed. But if I’m right about this, I think The Michelangelo Killer was going to murder Gabriel Banford anyway. I think, for whatever reason, he had chosen this boy to fulfill some sick desire-perhaps even a sexual one at the beginning-but it was you and your book that gave him a greater understanding of the true nature of that desire-a desire rooted in his homosexuality. Maybe through your book he found a parallel between his relationship with Banford and that of Michelangelo and Cavalieri. And so it was you, Cathy, who thus focused him on his greater purpose.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This past week, in addition to scoping out the countryside surrounding the farm in Burrillville, I checked out the Campbells ’ property down at Watch Hill, as well as the woods surrounding Blackamore Pond in Cranston. At first I thought there might be some connection to Campbell and Wenick having been abducted near a body of water, but then I realized that all three areas, including the farm in Burrillville, can be viewed unobstructed from at least one vantage point located a relatively long distance away: the Campbells’ porch from across the water on the banks of Foster Cove, the spot in the woods where Wenick was abducted from the opposite shore of Blackamore Pond, and the paddock in which the goats are kept from atop a nearby hill. This means that The Michelangelo Killer could have watched his victims undetected for any length of time. That means he could have studied them and planned his movements accordingly.
“Now, once we learned about Banford, I checked out the location of his old apartment on the East Side. And what do you think I found? Yes, the same thing-an unobstructed vantage point from a few blocks away that gave a clear view of what used to be Banford’s corner bedroom on the top floor of his three-story walkup. This means The Michelangelo Killer could have known when Banford was in his room or perhaps, more important, when he wasn’t in his room.”
“You mean the killer broke in while he was away? You mean he was waiting for him when Gabe Banford came home?”
“I have no idea, Cathy, but the coincidence of the epinephrine and the Michelangelo material is just too startling to ignore. And when you think about it, it actually makes more sense that The Michelangelo Killer would have found out about you and your book after he had already decided to kill Banford-I mean, given what we know about him so far, there is no question that he is very selective when it comes to choosing his victims in conjunction not only with your book, but also with what he sees as his greater purpose. And the way the Banford murder played out-the fact that he left the body there, the fact that it wasn’t posed in any particular way-indicates that his purpose at that time may have not been fully realized.
“So you see, when it comes right down to it, we’re most likely looking at one of two possible scenarios in terms of Banford being the link between you and The Michelangelo Killer. The first, that Banford knew his killer and that they had some kind of relationship and Banford told him about the book, or perhaps about how you used to be one of his professors. The other scenario is that The Michelangelo Killer might have been in Banford’s room sometime before he killed him, and ended up having some kind of an epiphany. That by seeing the DVD and your book only by chance, by coincidence, by being in the world of his victim, he suddenly understood why the hands of fate had brought him and his victim together. He got lucky in a sense just like we did when we stumbled onto Banford while exploring your class rosters for a suspect. That Banford should have been on one of your rosters and in possession of Slumbering in the Stone might have been a detail of which the killer was entirely unaware.
“Then there’s the night he died. With Banford high on heroin and whatever else, The Michelangelo Killer could have easily climbed up the fire escape and subdued the boy without a fight. Who knows, in his drugged-out state, Banford might have even opened the damn window for him-might have actually welcomed him into his room thinking he was the Tooth Fairy or something. But my point is, just as I’m convinced that it was Banford who somehow turned The Michelangelo Killer on to you, I am also convinced that The Michelangelo Killer was not only in the boy’s room on the night he died, but also that it was he who injected Banford with the adrenaline while forcing him to watch the DVD on Michelangelo’s life.”
“But why would he make Banford watch the DVD?”
“To free him from his slumber, of course. The same reason The Michelangelo Killer uses epinephrine to murder his victims.”
Cathy stared at Markham blankly.
“When do we as human beings produce the most adrenaline?” he asked.
“When we’re excited-no, when we’re afraid, of course.”
“And what do most people fear more than anything else?”
“I guess that would be death.”
“Perhaps. But one could argue the opposite-that our fear of life is more terrifying than any other we as human beings ever experience, and thus produces the most adrenaline. It is a fear, however, that we have forgotten; a terror that is fleeting, yes, but perhaps so powerful, that the only way our minds can deal with it is to forget. And that is the fear of leaving the womb, a child’s fear at the moment he is born.”
“‘What I wish to learn from your beautiful face,’” Cathy said absently, “ cannot be understood in the minds of men.’”
Markham finished the quote.
“‘He who wishes to learn can only die.’”
“So that means that-when he kills them-he wants them to have the same revelation, the same understanding that he has. And through their fear they are reborn. The Sculptor’s hand has awakened them, freed them from their slumber in the womb-in the stone.”
“Yes. Tommy Campbell was alive when his penis was removed and alive when his flesh was stitched back together. That means The Michelangelo Killer wanted him to see what he had become and thus wanted him to understand the true nature of his rebirth.”
“He had already killed then, Sam,” Cathy said suddenly. “When he sent me the sonnet-The Michelangelo Killer had already murdered Gabe Banford months earlier.”
“Yes, Cathy. So maybe the quotes and the sonnets were more than just an attempt to make contact with you. Maybe The Michelangelo Killer was not only telling you he understood, but also was trying to say ‘thank you’ in a way for showing him why he wanted to murder Banford, for showing him his true purpose-a purpose that he simply stumbled upon in what he must have seen as a stroke of divine providence.”
Cathy felt a shiver run across her back, but what Sam Markham said next terrified her more than her thoughts of the faceless Michelangelo Killer.
“I was wrong about this guy, Cathy. I was wrong about the timeline, about when the goat was killed in relation to the murder of Michael Wenick, and thus about the killer’s progression from animals to humans. It’s something that I should have seen from the beginning, simply because it would have made more practical sense for the killer-and forgive me for putting it this way-to get the top half of his satyr first, and then fit the bottom half, the goat legs, onto it. What I’m saying is, The Michelangelo Killer was already confident enough in his technique of ‘sculpting’ the bodies of his victims before he abducted Wenick and Campbell -bodies that he intended to put on public display. That I didn’t see the obvious practicality of acquiring Wenick first was an amateur mistake on my part, clouded by the fact that this Michelangelo Killer’s modus operandi is unlike any we’ve ever seen. It’s why I need you on this case with me, Cathy, why I need your insight into the mind of Michelangelo to help me get into the mind of this killer.”
“I’ll do what I can to help you, Sam,” said Cathy-the words falling from her lips before she had time to think.
“Thank you,” said Markham. There was a long silence-the low hum of the Trailblazer’s tires the only sound.
“You mentioned something a moment ago,” Cathy said finally. “You said the killer was already confident in his technique of sculpting. Are you saying, Sam, that you think The Michelangelo Killer might have even more victims? That he might have killed others in the five-and-a-half-year gap between Gabriel Banford and Michael Wenick-others that he used simply to experiment and develop his technique? Like an artist?”
“I hope I’m wrong, Cathy, but I can’t get the pictures from your book out of my mind-the pictures of Michelangelo’s early sculptures; the reliefs and the smaller statues that he made before he broke onto the scene with his first life-size sculpture, his Bacchus. And even though serial killers usually have what’s called a ‘cooling off’ period, even though this Michelangelo Killer is a very calculated and patient man, five and a half years seems like a long time for him to merely jump from a murder like Banford’s to the type we see with Campbell and Wenick. Yes, it’s important that his victims looked like the figures in Michelangelo’s Bacchus, but if we take into account what happened to Banford-and, as I suspect, what also happened to Campbell-of equal, perhaps even more importance is the awakening of the figures themselves, not just the public’s interpretation of their deeper message. My only hope is that-since this guy is so patient, since he is so obsessed with detail that he was willing to risk murdering a public figure like Tommy Campbell for his Bacchus-he might not have wanted to risk being caught while experimenting on other victims.”
“Then Gabriel Banford might have been an experiment, too.”
“Either that, yes, or as I suspect, part of a larger plan yet unformed. We might never know if Banford was The Michelangelo Killer’s first murder, but from what Rachel Sullivan’s investigation into the criminal databases has told us thus far, it most likely was the first in which he used epinephrine-no records going back over the last ten years list a suspicious death due to an overdose of epinephrine.”
“But if The Michelangelo Killer did indeed develop his technique like an artist,” Cathy said, “if he has experimented with the use of adrenaline and the preservation of other bodies over the last few years in secret, there could be no way of telling how many people he killed before Campbell and Wenick, before the creation of his Bacchus.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Cathy. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
The FBI Field Office. Boston. Ten minutes past ten.
Bill Burrell sat at the conference table scowling into his coffee. He needed a smoke-needed it bad-but did not want to step outside and risk missing the linkup with Quantico. Markham and the art history professor were running a little late-an accident on the inbound artery, Sullivan had told him. A little luck, Burrell thought, as the Boston office was having an embarrassing bit of interference with their video feed that day-something about sunspots, his tech guy had said, or a faulty coaxial cable. Either way, Burrell was not in the mood to be understanding. No, the briefing from Rachel Sullivan that morning-the news about Gabriel Banford, about the adrenaline link-did not sit well with him. And the SAC knew instinctively that the upcoming teleconference with Quantico would be no better, for whereas Sam Markham was still holding out hope that the FBI had only three victims on their hands, Bulldog Burrell had a bad feeling that this son of a bitch Michelangelo Killer had more than just the blood of Banford, Wenick, and Campbell on his.
“Sorry, Bill,” said Markham, entering. “Had to stop by in-processing to get the paperwork started for Dr. Hildebrant. Cathy, you remember Special Agent in Charge Bill Burrell?”
There were others seated around the large conference table, but only Burrell and Rachel Sullivan rose to greet her.
“Yes, of course,” Cathy said. “A pleasure to see you again. And you, too, Special Agent Sullivan.”
“Call me Rachel.”
“And you can call me Bill,” said Burrell. “Please, be seated.”
An FBI agent to whom Cathy was introduced-and whose name she immediately forgot-vacated his seat for her at the far end of the table, and Cathy and Markham took their places across from Burrell and Sullivan-a large video screen on the wall before them. Cathy suddenly noticed another man on all fours-his rear poking out of a closet that seamlessly blended in with the rest of the walnut paneled walls.
“You’ll have to forgive us,” began Burrell, “but we’re having a bit of technical difficulties this morning. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or something?”
“No thank you. Sam-I mean, Special Agent Markham already offered.”
“Then he already briefed you on what to expect today?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Good,” said Burrell. “First off then, on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation I would like to officially welcome you on board. I want to also thank you personally for all your help thus far, and for agreeing to work with us as we move forward on this case. You’ve been an invaluable asset to us in developing the profile for this killer, Cathy. I assume that, on your ride up from Providence, Sam here brought you up to date on where things stand at this point? Told you about the development regarding your former student Gabriel Banford, and the possibility of his being linked to this psychopath the press is calling The Michelangelo Killer?”
“Yes.”
“Rachel here is overseeing that end of things. She will be working on the Banford case file with the hopes of finding a more concrete link between him and the killer-mutual acquaintances, Internet records from the postings on Craigslist, that kind of thing. Her team will also be looking into all the unsolved missing person cases in Rhode Island and its immediate vicinity dating from the Banford murder to the present-cases involving other young men who this Michelangelo Killer might have abducted and experimented with before he got to Wenick and Campbell.”
“You see, Cathy,” said Markham, “serial killers tend to consciously select their victims from one particular demographic-victims who meet certain criteria that, for whatever reason, gratify the serial killer’s deeper psychological motivations to murder-motivations of which the killer might be either unconscious or sometimes fully aware.”
“That’s right,” said Burrell. “And given the profile that you and Markham have developed for this Michelangelo Killer so far, the murder of young males most likely is this guy’s MO. Therefore, Sullivan and her team will be specifically looking into the disappearance of young male prostitutes and drifters who were known to reside in Rhode Island and the surrounding area over the last six years. Not only does this fit the profile of Gabriel Banford, who we know had begun stealing and prostituting himself to help support his drug habit, but also these types of victims tend to be safer targets for serial killers in that, because so many of them move around from one place to another, their disappearances usually go unreported-and thus, in this case, would draw little attention to The Michelangelo Killer while he developed his craft.”
“Yes,” said Sullivan. “As Agent Markham probably informed you, we’re going to begin working from the premise that, after the Banford murder, The Michelangelo Killer would have wanted to develop his technique for preserving and painting his figures before the public unveiling of his Bacchus nearly six years later. However, we have another team working from the angle that the killer might have already been familiar with embalming, and thus they’ll be investigating funeral parlors, morticians, taxidermists, and others who not only would have that kind of working knowledge, but who would also have access to the types of chemicals needed to preserve a corpse. It’s those preliminary findings from the FBI labs at Quantico on which we’ll be briefed today. Once we have an idea of exactly how the killer went about preserving Campbell and Wenick, we’ll have much more to go on.”
“All set, Chief,” said the man whose behind had been sticking out of the wall. Cathy recognized him from Watch Hill-the “tech guy” who had set her up with the laptop that day.
Burrell nodded and the large video screen on the wall flickered to life-two men seated at a table, one in a suit, one in a white lab coat.
“We got a visual on you now, gentlemen,” said Burrell. “How about you?”
“Yes, Bill,” said the man in the suit. “We can see you fine.”
“Good. You know everybody else here, Alan, but I want to introduce you to Dr. Catherine Hildebrant. She’s agreed to come on board as a consultant in the case and will be assisting Sam down in Providence. Cathy, this is Alan Gates, chief of Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 at Quantico. Next to him is Dr. Gilbert Morris. He heads up the Chemistry Unit in Scientific Analysis back at the FBI Laboratory.”
The two men nodded their hellos.
“What have we got, gentlemen?”
“I talked to Special Agent Markham earlier this morning, Bill,” said Unit Chief Alan Gates, the man in the suit. “He’s updated me on the latest developments, so I’ll defer to him for the rest of this conference. Sam is officially in charge now from our end, and has expressed his utmost confidence in your team there-specifically Agent Sullivan and her outstanding work as coordinator between your office and the NCAVC.”
“Good,” said Burrell. “Dr. Morris?”
“Thank you, Bill. I’ve been instructed to tell you that the scientists in the Trace Evidence Unit will be submitting their report on the wooden base and the tree stump to your offices later today.”
“Fine.”
“With regard to Scientific Analysis, one of my assistants is preparing a breakdown of the specifics from each subunit as we speak, but I’ll give you a general overview of what we’ve found thus far.” The man in the white lab coat shuffled a pile of papers. “First off, we’ve found nothing more in the chemical makeup of the epoxy compound that was used to sculpt the lion skin, the bowl, and the figures’ hair that would identify it as anything other than the TAP brand Magic-Sculpt commonly sold on the Internet or in the arts and crafts stores in your area.”
“Good,” said Burrell. “I’ve already got people working on that angle.”
“The Toxicology Unit, in conjunction with the state medical examiner in Rhode Island, has confirmed that the high concentrations of synthetic epinephrine found in Tommy Campbell’s tissue did indeed lead to his death. Five years ago, we might have missed this, Bill, as the chemicals the killer used in the preservation process altered the base cell structure significantly. However, we still might not be able to get a pure enough sample of the epinephrine to allow us to trace the drug to a specific source. The same goes for the high-powered diazepam and ketamine. We’ll keep you updated as that investigation progresses.”
“Right.”
“Here in our labs at Quantico, we’ve been able to determine that the killer preserved his victims building on a technique called Plastination-a process where water and lipid tissues are replaced by curable polymers.”
“Plastination?” asked Burrell.
“Yes. A process of anatomical preservation being used more and more around the world, but first developed in the late seventies by a German scientist named Dr. Gunther von Hagens. There have been a number of his Body Worlds exhibitions in the last decade or so, but a similar show from a Chinese company recently drew a lot of worldwide attention and criticism. I’ve included those details in my report, but the general character of both the German and Chinese exhibitions is the same-a group of skinless, sometimes partially dissected cadavers posed in lifelike positions and put on display for public viewing. Individual plasticized body parts are also sold to medical and veterinary schools all over the world, but are nonetheless quite expensive.”
“So what do you think, Alan? Our man might have once been a med student? Might have even worked for one of those companies?”
“Maybe,” said Unit Chief Gates. “But unfortunately, Bill, the information about the Plastination process is readily available on the Internet. Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry and the desire-as well as the time and means to fulfill that desire-could, with a little trial and error, figure out the process himself.”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Morris. “It appears the killer preserved his victims by first removing their internal organs and then embalming them with a formaldehyde solution. Then the body was placed in a bath of acetone, which-under freezing conditions-would draw out the water and replace itself in the cells. Next would come the bath of the liquid polymer, in this case silicone rubber. By creating a vacuum, the acetone will boil and vaporize at a very low temperature, drawing the liquid polymer into the cells behind it. While the bodies were still supple, the killer then stuffed the cavities, stretched the bodies into the desired position on the metal frame-probably using wires to help him pose his figures-and left them to dry. Keep in mind, Bill, that the plastic must be cured, and most likely the killer hardened it using heat or ultraviolet light.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Burrell.
“Yes,” said Gates. “Our boy has quite an operation going. He has a large space-a studio, if you will-in which to work. Must also have quite a lot of money socked away. I suppose some of the equipment such as the ultraviolet lamps and the vacuum sealed tub needed for the acetone and polymer baths could be jury-rigged, but the amount of time for experimentation, as well as the time it would take to preserve each body, even under ideal conditions, is staggering-estimated anywhere from eight to twelve hundred man hours.”
“So we’re looking at a guy who has a lot of time on his hands? A guy who is perhaps independently wealthy?”
“Probably,” said Gates. “If you take into account the timeline between Campbell ’s disappearance and the appearance of the bodies down at Watch Hill, you’re looking at a total of just over three months. Even with all that time off, needless to say, our boy hasn’t been getting much sleep lately.”
The room was silent.
“Sales or thefts of large quantities of acetone,” said Gates, “as well as the silicone rubber needed for the Plastination process will be a good place for our teams here to begin. We’ll take care of tracking things down on that end.”
Burrell nodded.
“Next,” Dr. Morris began again, “the Paints and Polymers subunit found a match in our database for the chemical compound of the paint used on the figures of Campbell and Wenick-a mixture of Starfire brand acrylic enamel auto paints, including a primer and a clear coat. Like the epoxy, this brand of automotive paint can be found at many dealers throughout the country and on the Internet. The paint was clearly applied to the bodies in many layers, and by using some type of sprayer. However, mixed into the paint was a white powder that the General Chemistry subunit identified as ground marble.”
“Marble?” asked Burrell. “You mean like the kind of marble used in statues?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean, Bill. Nonfoliated, calcite-based metamorphic rock with the molecular makeup, color, and density identical to what our databases identified as unique to and originating from a specific quarry in Italy.”
“ Carrara,” said Cathy absently, impulsively.
“That’s right, Dr. Hildebrant,” said Gilbert Morris. “The ground marble found in the paint was undoubtedly quarried from Carrara, Italy.”
“How did you know it was Carrara, Cathy?” asked Burrell.
“Well,” she began, “ Carrara is a small town in Italy about sixty miles north of Florence. The marble quarried there has been a favorite of sculptors dating back to Ancient Rome, and many of the city’s greatest monuments were carved from it-as were countless sculptures during the Renaissance. Even more so than his own quarries in Pietrasanta, Michelangelo prized Carrara marble above all other types of stone because of its beauty and consistency. Indeed, it was from blocks of Carrara marble that Michelangelo carved his most famous masterpieces.”
“And they’re still quarrying marble there today?” asked Rachel Sullivan.
“Yes. As far as I know, Carrara marble is still regarded as the finest, and statues carved from it are exported all over the world. However, the marble itself is very expensive.”
“So,” said Burrell, “it appears this Michelangelo Killer went through a great deal of effort and expense not only to get Tommy Campbell for his Bacchus, but also in acquiring the marble powder from Carrara. This might be our best lead so far. Sullivan, you’ll assign someone to start looking into the import records for all the Carrara marble coming into Rhode Island? See if you can track down sales records for vendors who deal specifically with Carrara marble statues?”
“Will do.”
“You should probably look into any reports of statue or marble thefts in the area over the last six years, too. Maybe our man got his marble that way-stole a statue or something and ground it up himself.”
“Right.”
As Dr. Morris went on to give the report from the Metallurgy subunit on the sculpture’s frame, Cathy glanced uneasily over to Sam Markham. Among his paperwork from the Providence office, Markham had also brought with him his copy of Slumbering in the Stone. Cathy could not see to which page he had turned, but she knew exactly what he was looking for. And as if reading her mind, Markham looked up from his book to meet its author’s gaze.
“I think Dr. Hildebrant would like to say something,” he said. “Go ahead, Cathy. It’s about Michelangelo’s Bacchus, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Cathy said-the room at once was silent. “Although Michelangelo carved his most famous sculptures from blocks of Carrara marble, for his Bacchus he used a flawed block of Roman marble. That is, marble that was not quarried from Carrara.”
“So?” asked Burrell. Cathy looked to Markham, who-nodding understandingly-smiled back at her with his eyes.
“Go ahead, Cathy.”
“Well,” she said, “given what we know about The Michelangelo Killer thus far-about his obsession with detail, about his desire to embody his Bacchus in the historical milieu of the original-it seems strange to me that he would knowingly and erroneously use Carrara marble powder for his statue when other types of flawed, low-grade marble of the Roman variety would be readily available to him for much cheaper.”
“I don’t follow,” said Burrell. “And what’s the difference really? The guy is obviously so obsessed with being like Michelangelo that he wanted to use the Carrara marble powder simply because it was Michelangelo’s favorite. Maybe he wanted to improve upon the original-make his Bacchus from better stuff than Michelangelo’s.”
“What Dr. Hildebrant is saying,” said Markham, “is that The Michelangelo Killer wouldn’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Because, from what we can tell about this guy, if he had originally planned on acquiring marble powder for his Bacchus, he would not have settled for anything other than a type of marble powder more in line with that of Michelangelo’s original. Thus, Dr. Hildebrant is telling you that The Michelangelo Killer used the Carrara marble most likely because he already had it-most likely because he had originally planned on using it for something else. Something more appropriate.”
“What?” asked Bill Burrell.
As Sam Markham held up his copy of Slumbering in the Stone, Cathy and the rest of the room saw the page to which he had turned.
It was just as Cathy had suspected.
Sam Markham was holding up a picture of Michelangelo’s David.
That afternoon The Sculptor was Christian again. With the females he had called himself Mike or Michael, sometimes Angelo-but now that he was with the boys, it would be Christian. Chris for short. Yes. Had to be Chris-seemed only fitting, unquestionably more appropriate.
Chris.
Chris, Chris, Chris.
Chris sat in his Toyota Camry about three blocks away from the Providence hotel where he had told RounDaWay17 to meet him. This gave Chris a clear view of Kennedy Plaza, where he knew his consort would soon be arriving. Chris had told RounDaWay17 he would compensate him handsomely for the bus trip from Boston, told him he was a businessman from New York City in Providence only for one night, and RounDaWay17 was just what he was looking for. RounDaWay17 told Chris that his real name was Jim; told him that he was twenty-one, but from his pictures, with his shirt off and all, he really appeared to be around sixteen or seventeen-probably of Hispanic descent; lean, but not too slight of build-of perfect proportion for The Sculptor’s next project. Of course, The Sculptor would not know for sure until he saw RounDaWay17 in person. Nonetheless, the man who today called himself Chris felt more than satisfied with his choice.
True, it had been hard to tell with the females, and when it came right down to it, both Michael and Angelo never really understood the females-never really knew what they were getting even though they had met the ladies in person first, had picked them up at night off the streets of South Providence. However, back then The Sculptor was not nearly as skilled as he was now; he did not know how to cloak his IP address while shopping for his material on Craigslist as he would for clothes at the Gap. Yes, when it came right down to it, back then The Sculptor was little more than an amateur.
Now, however-almost six years after he first spotted the angel in black at Series X, almost six years after he followed, watched, and freed him from his slumber-yes, almost six years after the Goth named Gabe brought him and Dr. Hildy together, The Sculptor had had more than enough time to practice.
And so the man named Chris was elated to see RounDaWay17 step off the bus at Kennedy Plaza and begin heading toward the hotel. Chris rested his elbow on the door and surreptitiously raised a small spyglass to his eye-he did not worry that it was daytime, or that someone might see him. No, the windows of his Camry were tinted and the license plates today were phonies-the car hardly noticeable amidst the countless others that crowded the busy streets of downtown Providence. And as RounDaWay17 made his way across the street with his overnight bag-passing right by the blue Camry-Chris was nearly brought to tears. The Sculptor had chosen his Jesus well-he would be the perfect size to complement his Mary. True, his Mary was not yet complete, but that was something he would take care of this weekend while the material for Jesus cured in the carriage house, in the big stainless steel hospital tub.
The Pietà would come together much more quickly than his Bacchus-would take much less planning, for the Pietà would not require the kind of hard-to-find material that had been needed for Bacchus. No, now that he had gotten the world’s attention, now that they had all begun to awaken from their slumber, The Sculptor understood that he could use the material that was readily available to him-bargain material that would serve the purpose just as nicely.
Besides, the most important part of his Pietà involved Dr. Hildy. Oh yes, he would have to thank her in some way for all her help; he would have to show her how truly grateful he was by giving her something much more than just an inscription on the base of a statue-an idea that seemed kind of silly to him now. Yes, The Sculptor hated the Internet, hated television and the media, but had understood from the beginning that part of his work would have to include the daily monitoring of the sales of Slumbering in the Stone and other books on Michelangelo, as well as keeping track of the public’s growing interest in the artist as a whole-the specials on the documentary channels, the magazine articles, the talk shows, the search engines, etcetera, etcetera. And although Dr. Hildy had not yet granted any interviews, although she had not yet spoken in public about her book, The Sculptor was thrilled nonetheless at the snowballing success of his Bacchus-success that only The Sculptor and perhaps the FBI knew was due in large part to good ol’ Dr. Hildy.
Yes, Chris said to himself as he started his car. There will be time to thank her later. That’s what this weekend is for.
His mind back on his prey, Chris let RounDaWay17 disappear down a side street before pulling out into traffic and looping around the block to intercept him. He slid into a parking spot at the curb and adjusted the rearview mirror-a hand over his slicked blond hair and a nudge of his glasses in as he waited for the young man to approach from the sidewalk.
“Jim?” called Chris, rolling down his window. RounDaWay17 stopped-startled, his eyes narrowing. Michael and Angelo had seen that look with the females, too-that red, hungry look of desperation, suspicion, poor judgment. From RounDaWay17’s pictures, however, Chris did not think the boy liked needles in the way the Goth named Gabe had, or like some of the females he found in South Providence. Of course, he wouldn’t know for sure until he got RounDaWay17 back to the carriage house, but hoped that-if in fact RounDaWay17 did like needles-the marks would be on the back of the legs like with the females.
But then again, those females had been bad material all around.
“It’s me, Jim. Chris.”
A light flickered in the young man’s eyes. Instinctively he scanned the street, then glanced quickly at Chris’s license plate. The females had done that, too.
“Oh my God,” said Chris as RounDaWay17 approached his window. “I’m so glad I ran into you before you got to the hotel. I was just going to leave a message for you at the front desk, but you saved me the trouble. They screwed up my reservation. I know I told you the Westin but I’m going to be staying at the Marriott instead. It’s over on Orms Street. Hop in.”
RounDaWay17 scanned the street again-the instinct, the suspicion.
“Or I can just meet you there,” Chris said, smiling. “It’s a bit of a walk, so you’ll have to grab a taxi. It’s up to you.”
RounDaWay17 hesitated only for a moment, then quickly made his way around to the passenger’s side-his overnight bag in the backseat.
Then they were off.
“I have to say, Jim,” Chris began after a moment. “You’re much better looking than your pictures.”
RounDaWay17 smiled thinly. Chris could see that the young man was nervous; he knew that he would soon start telling him how he hadn’t been at this long-perhaps might even say that this was his first time, as some of the females had. But just as Michael and Angelo had been smart enough to know that the females were lying, Chris was also smart enough to know that-if in fact RounDaWay17 did leap into such a narrative-the young man most likely would be lying, too.
Chris stopped at the traffic light for the on-ramp- Cranston, Route 10.
He was first in line.
That was fortunate.
“You ever been there?” asked Chris, pointing past RounDaWay17 to the Providence Place Mall.
“Coupla times,” said the young man.
“Maybe when we’re finished I’ll get you something nice.”
RounDaWay17 smiled again-wider, more relaxed.
The light turned green. Chris headed for the on-ramp.
“We going to Cranston?” asked RounDaWay17.
“You see the sign for that new clothing store up there?” Chris replied. And as RounDaWay17 craned his neck to look out the passenger side window-unwittingly baring his jugular-in a flash The Sculptor hit his target.
The hiss-pop of the gun startled the young man more than the pain of the dart, and RounDaWay17’s hand automatically went to his neck-his fingers closing around the dart at the same time he met his attacker’s gaze. But the damage was done, and just before RounDaWay17’s eyes glazed over, The Sculptor could see in them the grim flicker of realization, of fear.
Then the boy was out-slumped over and sleeping soundly in the passenger seat before The Sculptor even reached the highway.
The Sculptor pulled the dart from the boy’s neck, removed his wig and his glasses, and put everything under the seat. He looked in the rearview mirror-a hand over his bald shaved head.
Now again he was The Sculptor. And now again he was smiling; for The Sculptor knew that the next time RounDaWay17 opened his eyes, he would awaken in the arms of divine release.
“What’s bothering you, Cathy?”
It was late in the afternoon, and they were stuck in traffic at the Route 93/95 interchange-had hardly spoken a word to one another following the teleconference, the paperwork, and Cathy’s long orientation with Personnel.
“My life,” Cathy whispered suddenly. “My whole life has been dedicated to the work of Michelangelo. And now I’ll never be able to look at his statues, teach a class-never will be able to even think about him the same way again-I mean, without thinking about…”
Cathy trailed off into a quiet stream of tears. And as the Trailblazer inched slowly forward, Markham reached out his hand for hers. She let him take it-felt her fingers melt into his.
“I’m sorry,” was all the FBI agent said.
But for Cathy Hildebrant, it was enough. And once the Trailblazer found its way onto Route 95, once the traffic picked up and they were on their way again, Cathy realized her tears had dried.
The two of them drove the rest of the way to Cranston in silence.
Sam Markham, however, did not let go of Cathy’s hand.
“I’ll be flying off to Washington tomorrow,” he said, parking in front of the Polks’ house. “Official business and to gather the rest of my things-will be back Monday morning. We’ve still got people looking after you, but I want you to call me if you need anything. Even if you just want to talk. Okay, Cathy?”
“Only if you promise to do the same.”
Markham smiled.
“I promise.”
“Okay. I promise, too.”
Then Cathy did something she had never done before in her life: unsolicited and of her own accord, she leaned over and kissed a man on the cheek.
“Thank you, Sam,” she said, and was gone.
Only when she was safe inside the Polks’ kitchen, only when Janet asked her how her day had gone, did Cathy realize what she had done. And just as the shy art history professor began to giggle, back on the road Markham checked his face in the rearview mirror.
He was still blushing.
“Shake off your slumber, O son of God.”
Why is Papa speaking English?
The seventeen-year-old runaway from Virginia Beach smiled-happy to be home again. But for some reason his bed was cold and hard this morning, and he could feel his heart pounding in his back and in his side against-
The bus station floor. I fell asleep again at the bus station.
Paul Jimenez cracked his eyes-a bright ball of light stinging them to slits.
No, he thought. Something else. I can’t wake up.
“Bad shit,” he heard himself whisper. “Eliot, you motherfuck-”
But then Paul Jimenez remembered that he didn’t talk to Eliot anymore-had not even seen him in over six months, ever since the pigs picked him up for stealing those checks. And Paul never used that shit like Eliot did-never used that shit at all anymore. He had been lucky with that, had been warned about that shit almost a year ago on his first day in town by the guy he met at the Boston Public Library; the guy who smiled a big gold-tooth smile when Paul said he was clean; the guy who told him about the big bucks a kid like Paul could make on Arlington Street as long as he stayed clean.
“You start taking that shit, though,” the guy had said, “and you’re done, son. Hawks ain’t gonna drop that kinda coin for a junkie. Fresh and clean. Remember that.”
Paul’s eyes fluttered wide, and amidst a bright white haze the young man suddenly understood that he was not on the bus station floor; he was not even on the floor at Brian’s-that cold hardwood floor on which he had been crashing with his friends for the last couple of months, and on which a roach tried to crawl in his ear. But he was lying down-yes, could feel something steel-hard on his back and buttocks. And he was groggy, felt like he couldn’t move-had to be doped up on something. Yet at the same time he felt his veins pumping with energy, with the light above him, with the heart pounding beat of-
Music? Somebody slip me shit at the club? Some bathroom floor in Chinatown?
For a moment Paul thought he could see the dance floor, the lights flashing on the college boys-some looking for it for free, some looking to make some extra money to get their Abercrombie & Fitch fix. All the same.
Roofie motherfuckers.
“That’s it,” said the man’s voice-a voice that Paul recognized from someplace. “Come forth from the stone.”
Paul tried to speak, but his throat hurt-felt like he had swallowed a glass full of needles. Then he felt a dull prick, a tug on his forearm. His heart was racing-even more so than when he confessed to Papa that he liked boys; even more so than when Papa shut him in the hotel room with that prostitute hoping that he would come out a man; even more so than when Papa drove him to the Greyhound station, bought him a bus ticket to Boston, and told him never to come home again. But this was a different kind of heartbeat-harder, more painful-a heartbeat that he could feel all the way down to his fingers and toes, the tips of which felt like they wanted to pop.
“Where am I?” Paul asked, his voice cracking. The edges of the light before him solidified into a white rectangle-
Must be the Strand, he thought-the shit-bag movie theatre where, as “Jim,” he used to meet his clients in the back row for a quick swallow or no swallow-ten percent of either going to the theatre manager, of course. But that was before he started using the computer at the library; that was before he set himself up in business online-where the real money was. Yeah, he still worked Arlington Street sometimes, but only in a pinch; only when-
No, Paul thought. It ain’t the Strand-screen was too sharp, too close to his face in the darkness. And then Paul’s senses, Paul’s memory came back to him in one big rush-the images in his beating blood filling his brain like water in a balloon.
The man in the car. The big man in the suit. Chris. Was going well. Was buying Jim’s innocent act. Then he spit at me-no, pinched me in the neck; smiled at me when I-
Instinctively Paul tried to sit up, tried to separate himself from the cold steel behind him-but his head would not move, would not even turn from side to side. And he felt something on his shoulders-hairy and itchy. Paul tried to lift his hands, but his wrists were tied down; and although he could not see his chest, his thighs, or his ankles, he understood all at once that the man named Chris had strapped him down to a table.
Naked.
It’s finally happened, Paul thought, his mind scrambling for what to do. I finally got myself in with a loco.
Sure, during his year on the streets of Boston, Paul had run into his share of freaks-had even let a hawk dress “Jim” up in a diaper once and whip him with a belt. Probably should have gone to the hospital after that one, but the money from that gig was so good he was able to rest up at Brian’s for a couple of weeks before going back to work. But now something was really wrong. He had been slipped something-could feel it in his chest, in his hands and feet, pumping hard, pumping painfully.
He had to think. Fast.
“I’ll roll which-you, lover,” he said as Jim. “But you gotta tell me what’s what first. Turn on the lights so I can see you, baby.” Paul’s voice felt sharp, clear, but seemed to disappear in front of him-sucked up dead into the darkness. Then suddenly the screen above him flickered into life.
The image floating before Paul’s eyes was that of a statue-dirty white marble against the darkness, floating just inches from his face. Paul recognized it immediately. It was the Jesus and Mary statue from atop his mother’s dresser; the small white figurine that she’d had since before he was born-the one he was never allowed to touch; the one she used to look at when she’d say her rosaries.
The Pietà, Paul said to himself. That’s what she used to call it. The Pietà.
Yes, there was Mary, draped in her flowing robes and staring down at the crucified Jesus in her arms-the very same version of Jesus that Paul had stared at so many times when his parents were out working. The memories came flooding back to him at once: the strange excitement at first; then, when he was older, the guilt he felt upon looking at Jesus’ body-a virtually naked body that even by the age of six had already begun to cause a strange stirring in his Toughskins.
“I gotch-you,” said Paul, said Jim. “This is what you’re into, it’s cool. But let’s talk business first so we can enjoy ourselves. Okay, lover?”
“Ssh,” said the voice again. “Look at the screen, O son of God.”
Paul knew it was Chris-the guy from the car, the guy from the Internet. Paul could feel himself beginning to panic-his mind racing in time with his heart. He had to stay calm, had to think clearly, had to fight the shit this prick had slipped him. Then suddenly the image of the statue shifted, and began closing in on the face of Jesus.
“That’s it,” said Chris from the darkness, from somewhere off to Paul’s right. “Shake off your slumber, O son of God.”
As did Tommy Campbell on the mortician’s table three months earlier, Paul tried to turn his head, tried to find the owner of the voice, but could see nothing except the image of the statue before him, which now had settled on a close-up of Jesus’ face. It was just as Paul remembered it, but better-much more detailed than the cheap souvenir copy that had been his mother’s. A face that was serene, at peace with death. A face that, even in his panic, Paul could not help but find simply beautiful.
“Seriously, lover-I getch-you. We can do whatever you want, but that shit you gave me is hurting me inside. And I gotta clean myself in back, baby. Know what I mean?”
Paul was telling the truth about the painful pounding in his veins, but as far as getting with this guy? No way. Soon as this loco untied him he was out-would kick him hard in the balls and make a dash for the door. Yes, Paul would take his chances naked outside. After all, even Jim could tell this guy was fucked up.
Paul strained hard against the straps when the image before him began to move again. And just as Tommy Campbell had become transfixed by the body of Bacchus scrolling before him, Paul Jimenez watched as the screen slowly panned down over Jesus’ chest-to the subtle indication of the wound in His side, to the small nail mark in His right hand, down His legs, and coming to rest on the wounds in His feet.
Suddenly-be it from the instincts of a hustler, the shit pumping through his veins, or both-all at once Paul understood. Yes, all at once Paul was overcome with the sweeping terror of knowing deep down that Chris-or whatever the fuck his name really was-meant to kill him.
“You motherfucker!” he screamed, his skin breaking out into cold sweat. “You let me go now and I won’t say nothin’. I got friends. They gonna know who you are, you dumb motherfucker! I told them where I was going! They gonna find you on the computer, you stupid fuck!”
No reply-except the painful pounding of his heart. The image on the screen flickered and changed, and then Paul saw only himself, saw only his face as he struggled against his restraints. He did not pause to ponder the strap and the wig of long wavy hair that had been placed on his head-the wig of long wavy hair that he knew right away was meant to look like Jesus’ hair.
“Help!” Paul screamed as the image on the screen began to pan down over his body. “Somebody help me!” Paul did not care to look for the camera, did not try to see who was filming him. No, for Paul there was one thought and one thought only: Get me the fuck out of here or I will die!
Paul pulled frantically at the straps, watching the screen with pounding terror as the camera moved down his body. He strained harder when he saw the strap across his chest, and as he did so, he saw the wound in his side split open and begin to run red down his rib cage. Instinctively he stopped. No pain, but the feeling of something warm and wet in his hands. And thus, even before the camera reached them, Paul knew what he would see. He began to cry.
“Please, God,” he said-the sight of the gaping holes in the back of his hands making him nauseous. “Don’t do this to me, please! I’ll go straight. I promise! I don’t wanna die. I wanna go home. I promise you, God.”
Paul began to convulse-the shit, the fear pumping through his veins now one and the same. His eyes felt like they would burst. He tried to shut them, tried to keep them in their sockets, but an invisible touch from behind overpowered him.
“Keep watching,” said Chris-his fingers resting gently on Paul’s eyelids and propping them open. “Keep watching and you will understand. Keep watching and you will be free.”
The image on the screen had come to rest on Paul’s feet-jerking, bleeding profusely from the holes that The Sculptor had spiked in them. Paul tried to turn his head, tried to look away from the horror of what had been done to him, but the tears in his eyes seemed only to make the image before him clearer.
“Please, God-I don’t wanna go to Hell…”
And as his heart exhausted itself in a final surge of adrenaline, more than from the terror of succumbing to The Sculptor’s chisel, the spirit of Paul Jimenez took flight on the wings of-
No one knows my name.
No one knows my name.
In tears, Cathy Hildebrant closed her laptop and flicked off the bedside lamp. It was late, and she was tired. Overtired, she thought, and perhaps a bit overemotional as well. Yet despite her rational side’s whisper of reassurance, Cathy could not help but feel profoundly disturbed upon finishing the online Providence Journal account of Tommy Campbell’s funeral-not because she was so touched by the fact that the entire Rebel team had flown in for the private, closed-casket ceremony down in Westerly; not because she was so moved by the line quoted from the eulogy given by Campbell’s childhood best friend: “He made a career of catching passes, but a lifetime of catching hearts.” No, what had driven Cathy to tears were the two lines at the end of the article-a little blurb, almost an afterthought, mentioning that a small private ceremony had been held in Cranston on Sunday morning, too.
And so Cathy cried herself to sleep with thoughts of Michael Wenick-a nagging voice in the back of her mind that wondered if The Michelangelo Killer hadn’t also read the article; a voice that at the same time taunted her with, “See? He was right!” even as it cried, “Shame on you, World! Shame on you for not seeing the satyr behind the Bacchus!” But Cathy did see the satyr-could not think of the Wenicks sitting in St. Mark’s Church without seeing that distorted face, that ghoulish smile munching on the stolen grapes. Yes, Cathy saw the satyr all too well-saw it floating next to her in the darkness of the Polks’ guest room as clearly if she had crawled inside Michael Wenick’s coffin with a flashlight.
It was just after midnight when Cathy awoke with a start. She had been dreaming of her mother-her heart still pounding from the chase down the street, from her close call with the van.
Mom was supposed to pick me up at school, Cathy thought. But she drove right past me in that strange, long black car. Somebody else was driving-she screamed to me out the window. I tried to run after her-ran out into traffic. But my legs were too heavy. Would have gotten killed by that van if I didn’t wake up.
For as often as she thought of her mother, for as much as she missed her mother, Cathy rarely dreamt of her mother. And more than she feared those memories of her encounter with The Michelangelo Killer’s Bacchus down at Watch Hill-memories that for two weeks now had been her constant companion in the dark at bedtime-Cathy was so disturbed by the strangeness of her nightmare that she turned on the light.
Cathy’s eyes landed on her copy of Slumbering in the Stone on the nightstand. Her dream quickly evaporating, the residue of her fear, however, remained. And for reasons Cathy Hildebrant would never quite understand, she instinctively opened Slumbering in the Stone to a page she had dog-eared the night before-just one of the many she had marked with the hopes of later finding a key into The Michelangelo Killer’s mind.
The photograph at the top of the page was a detail of Michelangelo’s Night, one of six marble figures the artist carved from 1520-1534 for the Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence -for the tombs of Dukes Giuliano and Lorenzo de’Medici specifically. The two marble façades were almost identical in their conception-each with an idealized marble statue of the Medici duke seated in a shallow niche above the sarcophagus that contained his remains. Two nude allegorical figures reclined on each of the curved sarcophagi lids-Night and Day for Giuliano, Dusk and Dawn for Lorenzo. The text to which Cathy had unconsciously turned read as follows:
With regard to Night specifically, scholars have long pondered over the unusual shape of the figure’s left breast. As I mentioned previously in our discussion of the proportional ratios in the Rome Pietà, art historians-and more recently, even plastic surgeons-have long argued that the execution of Night’s left breast once again reflects the artist’s supposed unconcern or unfamiliarity with the nude female figure. True, as in all of Michelangelo’s females, the breasts are misshapen and awkwardly “slapped onto” an undeniably masculine torso. However-even though there is a consensus amongst modern scholars that the unusual appearance of Night’s left breast is intentional and not a result of an aesthetic error or the statue’s slightly unfinished state-in a recent study of the figure, an oncologist with the Cancer Treatment Centers of America found in Night’s left breast three abnormalities associated with locally advanced breast cancer: a large bulge to the breast contour medial to the nipple; a swollen nipple-areola complex; and an area of skin retraction just lateral to the nipple-all of which indicate a tumor just medial to the nipple.
As the noted oncologist accurately points out, these abnormalities do not appear in the right breast of Night or in the companion figure of Dawn-or in any other of Michelangelo’s female figures for that matter. Hence, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo used for his model a woman-dead or alive-with advanced breast cancer, and thus accurately reproduced the physical anomalies in marble.
Yet, despite the detail of the diseased breast itself, curiously, once again we see both breasts awkwardly joined with a masculine frame-as if Michelangelo’s understanding of the female could go no further than a narrow and objective appraisal of the “parts” which differentiate the two sexes, but could never quite grasp how those parts worked together within the whole. Then again, there is the theory that Michelangelo might have intentionally sculpted his female figures as such-masculine with female parts-simply because, as we discussed earlier, he viewed the male body as aesthetically superior.
Nevertheless, given that Michelangelo depicted lumps in only one of the four naked breasts that adorn the Medici Chapel-and given that Night, the “darkest” and most allegorically ominous of all the figures, should be the one depicted with the ravaging disease-there can be no doubt that Michelangelo not only recognized the lump as not just an aesthetic anomaly, but also intentionally sculpted Night’s “disease of the breasts”-a disease during the Renaissance which was thought to have been caused by an excess of black bile-as just one of the many subtle details that comprise the metaphorical statement of the façade as a whole. However, the degree to which Michelangelo understood the disease as a form of cancer-that is, if he understood the reason behind the lumpy breast in a context other than traditional Renaissance “humor-based” medicine-is still open for debate.
Against the collage of disjointed images that had been her dream, Cathy sat up in the Polks’ guest bed searching the photograph of Night for a long time. She remembered vividly the circumstances surrounding the picture-a picture she had snapped on her old Nikon while still a graduate student at Harvard. At the time she had never thought she would use it for a book, let alone in such a prophetic context with regard to the disease that murdered her mother. Indeed, it was on the very afternoon that Cathy dropped off the film of Night at the photo lab in Florence that her mother dropped the terrible news over the telephone.
“I don’t want you to worry, Cat,” Kyon Kim had said. “We Korean women are strong. I’m gonna be just fine.”
More than the pain her memories brought with them, more than the wicked irony of the chapter she had written while her mother was undergoing treatment in Boston, which since had become an inadvertent testament to her as well, Cathy could not shake the terrible feeling that something beyond her dream-something that went much deeper than the lasting image of her mother screaming as the long black car raced past Eden Park Elementary School-had compelled her to turn to the section on Night and breast cancer.
“Yes, Dr. Freud,” Cathy said aloud. “I see the blatant symbolism. The long black car is cancer. The long black car belongs to Mr. Death. He’s the driver I can’t see-my mother sitting in the passenger seat beside him as he whisks her away. I don’t want him to take her.”
But the statue of Night, replied a voice in her head. Your compulsion to turn to the photograph taken on the very same day your mother told you she had breast cancer. Quite a coincidence, wasn’t that, Cat? But you didn’t make the connection back then, did you? Back in Florence? Only years later when you were working on your book-when your mother had already taken a turn for the worse-did you realize the irony of that day. Almost as if the gods were trying to warn you back then, Cathy-but you were incapable of hearing them.
“Are you trying to warn me of something, Mom?” Cathy asked. Her eyes fell back to the page, to the text below the detail of Night.
Hence, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo used for his model a woman-dead or alive-with advanced breast cancer, and thus accurately reproduced the physical anomalies in marble.
“A woman, dead or alive,” Cathy said to herself. Again, she read and reread the text which followed, so sure that she was missing something, so sure that there was a hidden connection between her dream and the statue of Night, between the circumstances surrounding the evolution of the chapter and the words on the page to which she had turned-words that held a clue into the mind of The Michelangelo Killer.
A message within a message, Cathy thought. See it before it slips away.
Mother, coincidence in Florence, breast cancer, Night.
Dream of Mother, compulsion to look at Night, breasts, The Michelangelo Killer.
“What’s the connection?”
Yet, despite the detail of the diseased breast itself, curiously, once again we see both breasts awkwardly joined with a masculine frame-as if Michelangelo’s understanding of the female could go no further than a narrow and objective appraisal of the “parts” which differentiate the two sexes, but could never quite grasp how those parts worked together within the whole.
“Parts within the whole,” Cathy whispered, scanning frantically the words she had written over seven years ago. “Parts, parts, parts…”
Then again, there is the theory that Michelangelo might have intentionally sculpted his female figures as such-masculine with female parts-simply because, as we discussed earlier, he viewed the male body as aesthetically superior.
Masculine with female parts, Cathy said to herself. The male body as aesthetically superior.
A statement, intentional, a message to the viewer? A message from Michelangelo, from The Michelangelo Killer? A dream, a message from Mom?
What the fuck?
Mom. A woman. Dead or alive? Night. A woman. Dead or alive?
No.
Mom. Mom’s cancer. Disease. Breast cancer. Breasts? Breasts? The Michelangelo Killer and breasts?
Am I going crazy?
Perhaps, replied Sam Markham in her mind.
Cathy closed the book and returned it to the nightstand-her thoughts now a jumbled mess; the connection between her dream and her search for The Michelangelo Killer-a connection of which she had been so sure upon turning to Slumbering in the Stone-quickly fading into a gnawing sense of foolishness.
You’re a psychic now, too? asked a mocking voice in her head-a voice that sounded a lot like Steve Rogers.
Cathy dismissed it and turned off the light. She lay there a long time, unable to sleep-her mind racing with the jigsaw puzzle that had become her life.
“We’re missing something,” she whispered in the dark. “Aren’t we, Mom? Sam and I, the FBI-all of us. There’s something right there in front of us-just below the surface like the lump in Night’s breast. We see it but we don’t understand. We see it but we look right past it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Kyon Kim? Please, Mom, help me understand.”
As if chiseled from the lips of its marble namesake, the brutal silence of night was Cathy’s only reply. She had the urge to call Sam Markham, but because of the hour resolved to wait. Yes, best to talk to him after he gets back today-after she had time to sort things out. And so, with thoughts of Samuel P. Markham-the “P.” standing for “Professor Hildy Has a Crush On”-Cathy Hildebrant fell asleep.
As Cathy finally drifted off to sleep, Sam Markham-at home in his study with his feet on his desk-felt not the slightest bit sleepy when the clock in the bookcase ticked past 3:00 A.M. He would be flying back to Rhode Island in a few hours, and would have plenty of time to once again look over the material from Thursday’s briefing in the FBI plane that would transport him from Quantico to Providence. But something was bothering him; something wasn’t right; something needed to be addressed now.
In his lap was the report on the Plastination process from Dr. Morris-much of which had been taken from the Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination Web sites. And after carefully reviewing the entire printout, Markham had to agree with Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of Plastination, who said in his introduction that, like most successful inventions, Plastination is simple in theory.
Simple.
That was the word that kept bothering Markham.
Simple.
Yes, with the right equipment, it seemed to Markham that-at least on the surface-the Plastination process would be “simple” enough for anyone to execute. After decomposition was halted by pumping formalin into the veins and arteries, the key, as von Hagens said, was having the means to pull the liquid polymer into each cell by a process he called “forced vacuum impregnation,” wherein, after the initial fluid exchange step-the step in which water and fatty tissues are removed by submerging the body in an acetone bath-the specimen is placed in a vacuum chamber and the pressure reduced to the point where the acetone boils. The acetone is then suctioned out of the tissue the moment it vaporizes, and the resulting vacuum in the specimen causes the polymer solution to permeate the tissue. This exchange process is allowed to continue until all of the tissue has been completely saturated-a few days for thin slices; weeks for whole bodies.
Weeks.
And simple in theory, yes. But even if The Michelangelo Killer did have the money and intelligence to set up his own Plastination lab, unless he had a bunch of body parts lying around-
Yes. It was that little detail that was bothering Sam Markham the most. The printout from the Body Worlds Web site made it abundantly clear where the Institute for Plastination (IFP) in Heidelberg, Germany, “acquired” its specimens-the majority of which came from its “donation program,” wherein IFP donors legally signed over their bodies to be Plastinated by von Hagens and his crew after their deaths.
“But who are these people?” Markham asked out loud. “What are their names?”
Markham sifted through the printout again, unable to find the names of donors anywhere. Yes. It was the feel of the information he was reading; the feel of the whole von Hagens/Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination mind-set. A mind-set that, despite a brief and somewhat hollow overture of thanks to its donors both dead and alive, spoke of their bodies simply as a commodity, as material for the wide-ranging industry of anatomical study-an industry that was sorely in need of plastinated supplies.
Having been around many dead bodies himself, Sam Markham understood the need for objectivity in the world of medicine and anatomical study as much as he did the need for it in his line of work-understood all too well the need for detachment when looking at a murder victim in order to get his job done. So, yes, Markham could on one hand see the practicality of the industry-the need to treat the donated bodies simply as material. However, it was also clear to Markham that, with regard to the Body World exhibits themselves-exhibits in which its skinless subjects were posed sipping coffee, throwing karate kicks, even riding horses-the creators were subconsciously sending a message to the public that they should see the figures not only as “frozen in life,” but at the same time were asking them to look at just the body itself, completely divorced from the real life that had once activated it.
No, we should never ask who these people really were.
Markham thought of The Michelangelo Killer-of the kind of mind, the kind of spirit it would take to create the horror that was his Bacchus. Over his thirteen-year career with the FBI, Markham had learned there was always a certain amount of objectification that went on in the mind of a serial killer with regard to the perception of his victims. But with The Michelangelo Killer, things seemed quite different.
Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick were just material for his exhibition, he said to himself. Just as the epoxy compound and the wood and the iron and everything else was. Just one component of his art, of his message, of his quest to wake us from our slumber.
Material.
Markham flipped to the page in Slumbering in the Stone that he had dog-eared a couple of hours earlier-to the quote from Michelangelo which he had underlined in red: “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.”
Marble. Michelangelo’s material-some of which he would transform into works of artistic brilliance; some of which, depending on its location in the block itself, he would damn to the studio floor, to the garbage heap. Hence, both a reverence for the material itself, but yet the understanding that some would have to be discarded.
Dead bodies. The Michelangelo Killer’s material. He had to have experimented on others before Campbell and Wenick, had to have used humans before perfecting his technique-some of whom, perhaps just pieces at first, he transformed into plastinated works of art; others he simply discarded as waste. Hence, both a reverence for the material, the male figure as aesthetically superior, and the understanding that he would need to waste some of his victims to achieve greatness.
Marble. Material. Waste. Dead bodies. The male figure as aesthetically superior.
Something didn’t quite add up.
Something that was so close, so simple, yet still just so far out of reach.
Markham sighed and flicked off his desk lamp. He would force himself to sleep, to think about something else for a while. And as he crawled into bed, his thoughts immediately ran to Cathy Hildebrant. Markham hated to admit how much he had missed her over the last three days; he hated even more to admit how much he was looking forward to seeing her again. However, what really bothered Markham was the nagging suspicion that he was missing something very important; something that might put the art history professor in danger; something that might make him lose someone he cared about all over again.
Steven Rogers prided himself on his youthful appearance. At forty-five and with a head full of curly brown hair that he dyed regularly, the handsome theatre professor was still sometimes carded at the bars along with his graduate student girlfriend-a rare but flattering enough experience to which he actually looked forward, specifically, the patented double take from the doorman or waitress upon seeing the age on his driver’s license. Blessed in part with good genes, it was really his deep-seated sense of vanity that kept him looking so young-coupled with an unconscious desire to always be appealing to the opposite sex. Yes, Steven Rogers ran six miles five times a week; watched his fat and carb intake; still used the Bowflex that his ex-wife bought him for his fortieth birthday; and still lived whenever possible by the old adage his doting mother hammered into him as a child: “Early to bed, early to rise, Steven, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Healthy? Yes. Wealthy? He couldn’t really complain. But wise? Well, even Steve Rogers would have to agree that the jury was still out on that one.
Yes, Rogers had done a lot of dumb things in his forty-five years on this planet-the dumbest of all, perhaps, leaving those e-mails from Ali on his computer. It had been an honest mistake. He had to uninstall then reinstall his AOL software, forgot to change the “save mail to computer” setting, and his wife found everything a few months later. That was the worst part, Steve thought: The e-mails had been on there for months before Cathy happened to come across them.
Stupid stupid stupid.
No, Ali Daniels was not Steve Rogers’s first indiscretion during his twelve-year relationship with Cathy Hildebrant-his first student, yes, but not his first affair. There had been a handful of others of which his ex-wife was entirely unaware: a summer theatre actress here and there and a regular fling with an old girlfriend he ran into twice a year on the conference circuit. The latter had been going on since before both of them got married, so Rogers did not feel the slightest bit guilty about that one. Besides, she was the one with the kids.
In fact, Rogers was actually proud of himself for the degree to which he had remained “faithful” to Cathy Hildebrant over the course of their twelve-year relationship-for in his bachelor days he had been quite the satyr. Indeed, Steve Rogers always had a sneaking suspicion that if he had put as much effort into his acting career as he had into getting laid, he might have been the next Brando-or at least the next Burt Reynolds. He had often been compared to the latter in his youth-a comparison that he downright resented while at Yale; and later, one that he used to his advantage in his early thirties as a second-rate regional theatre actor.
Oh yes, Rogers was very, very vain. But more than his vanity, Rogers carried with him an unconscious yet subtle resentment for the hand that life had dealt him. True, on paper he had much to be proud of-after all, he was a graduate of the prestigious MFA in Acting Program at Yale University, and he was a tenured faculty member and the senior acting instructor in the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance at Brown University. Nonetheless, Rogers secretly felt like something of a failure-felt that for some reason the deck had been stacked against him from the beginning. It really had nothing to do with his mediocre acting career. No, even before entering Yale at the age of twenty-two, Rogers had already begun to feel as if he was somewhat unappreciated by his constituents, as if nobody really understood the depth of his talent. But rather than grow into a sense of bitterness, Steve Rogers’s perception of his place in the world evolved over the years into a sense of entitlement, of being owed something-so much so that when he cheated on Cathy Hildebrant, he actually felt like he deserved some recreational pussy for giving in to the concept of marriage in the first place.
Yes, cheating was one thing-getting caught was another. It was as if for Rogers only an acknowledgment of the act itself by the betrayed could really define it as adultery-If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, yada yada yada.
And so, more than the hurt he had caused his ex-wife, more than the guilt of his failed marriage, Rogers would forever curse himself for being so stupid as to let fate get the best of him once again. Sure, Cathy could have screwed him; she could have really taken him for a bath if she had wanted to-so yeah, he had to concede his good fortune with regard to the painlessness of his divorce. However, Steve Rogers could not help but feel somewhat the victim-could not help but feel somewhat abandoned. When it came right down to it, Rogers hated to admit to himself that he wished Cathy had fought just a little bit harder, been just a little bit more aggressive and spiteful to him over the last four months-for that would have proven that he really had meant something to her.
Yes, as his career as a second-rate actor had taught him, the only thing worse than hate was indifference.
Ironically, it was with a certain amount of indifference that Rogers held Ali Daniels-that great piece of graduate student ass whose MySpace generation I-have-to-get-an-e-mail-from-you-every-day-now-that-we’ve-fucked neediness ruined his good thing with Cathy. True, Steve Rogers had loved Cathy Hildebrant as much as he could possibly love someone other than himself-probably still did, in a way. And true, he was self-aware enough to realize that he had been jealous of her at times-of her PhD, of the success of her book and, most recently, of the attention she had received as a consultant or whatever-the-fuck-she-was on that nutbag Michelangelo case. Nevertheless, Rogers understood that he would miss Cathy and the routine, the security, the practical convenience of the life they had carved out as a couple. If only he had heeded his working-class father’s advice like he did his mother’s; if only he had lived by that credo, perhaps none of this nonsense would have happened to begin with.
“Remember, Steven, you don’t shit where you eat.”
Looks like all that shit is blowing over now, anyway, Rogers said to himself, his feet pounding the pavement.
And so, despite his brief moment of weakness the week earlier, Rogers peacefully resigned himself to the fact that it was now time to move on for good-from both Cathy Hildebrant and the annoyingly needy, pseudo-intellectual Ali Daniels.
Now that she’s graduated, Steve thought, now that she’s got her fucking useless Masters it’ll be easier to just let it drop. Won’t say anything unless I have to-maybe tomorrow when she calls from her new digs in New York City. Or maybe I’ll break the news to her in an e-mail. Wouldn’t that be a little poetic justice?
Rogers checked his time and kicked his pace into high gear as he usually did during the last mile of his morning run. He was ahead of schedule-might even make it home before it was light. That was good. More than anything else-even more than sex-Steve Rogers loved that feeling of having finished his run before most people were even awake; of having a leg up on the day ahead of him-a leg up on all those fat lazy slobs who stayed up the night before watching Letterman. It was a feeling that helped to ease the unconscious but palpable resentment that fate had forced him to be an actor; moreover, that fate had forced him into the actor’s schedule, into those late hours at the theatre which sometimes prevented him from staying ahead of the game the next morning.
“Early to bed, early to rise, Steven, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
Rogers rounded the corner onto the street that would loop him back to Garden City Center -the outdoor shopping mall in Cranston to which he made a special seven-minute drive from his house five mornings a week, and where he always parked his BMW Z4 roadster by the big gazebo at its center. Rogers had been coming here for years; the uneven terrain and low traffic of the surrounding middle-class neighborhood was ideal for his strict running regimen. Yes, he was making incredible time today, would make it back to the big gazebo, would sit on the bench, and breathe the cool May air and drink his Gatorade before any of the other runners even arrived-perhaps even without having seen a single light flick on in the kitchens of the houses as he passed. It was Monday morning. The people in this neighborhood worked. And it gave Steve Rogers a great sense of satisfaction to know that he had already accomplished more in a little over an hour than they would all week.
Depending on what time he started, the last leg of Steve Rogers’s run had the potential to be the darkest-especially in the winter, when he would reach the poorly lighted loop around Whitewood Drive well before sunrise. On this particular morning, Steve had risen at 4:00 A.M., was on the pavement by 4:15, and thus hoofed it onto the heavily tree-lined street just as the sky was beginning to change color out of sight beyond a jagged curtain of oaks and pines. Now that the semester was over, now that he had made the decision to move on from both the women in his life, Rogers kicked off his first official summer as a bachelor right on schedule. He had honored his pact with himself that he would have to work extra hard to get himself back on the market for some younger pussy. Yeah, he was going to take his buddy back in Chicago’s advice: he was going to try the Internet dating scene; would make a profile and shave ten years off his age and play the field of late-twenty-to-early-thirty-somethings in Boston for a while. Yeah, better to play that game on the road than to damage his reputation on his home turf any further.
“Remember, Steven, you don’t shit where you eat.”
His heart pumping powerfully, his thoughts clear and precise, Steve Rogers was deep in the zone when he came upon the blue Toyota Camry. The car was parked between the streetlights, at the side of the road in the shadow of a large oak tree-just one of the many cars he had passed that morning. No, the avid runner and born-again bachelor did not even give the blue Toyota Camry a second glance as his Nike Air Max sneakers carried him into the shadows and straight into the arms of The Sculptor.
It all happened so fast-so fast that Steve Rogers barely had time to be afraid. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw movement, then the flash of a red dot. A man stepped out from the thicket, from behind the bushes next to the large oak tree.
Hiss-pop!
Rogers felt a sharp pain in his shoulder-his trapezius muscle. He whirled around but kept running-backward-his hand instinctively reaching for the pain. His fingers found something, tugged, and pulled it free just as he entered the pool from the streetlight. Between his thumb and forefinger he saw a small yellow dart-about the size of a house key. He was about to cry for help when suddenly-
Hiss-pop!
Another sting-this time in his neck, in his jugular-as if the big blue bug on top of the New England Pest Control building had suddenly swooped down from the dark and bitten him. Again Rogers reached for the pain-his fingers closing around the dart just as he saw the man coming for him-a man in a tight black T-shirt, a big bald man with funny goggles and a wide white-toothed smile.
And as the shadows and the light from the street lamp began to iris inward, as his fingers went numb and his knees began to buckle, Rogers thought of Mr. Clean-and that he needed to wash the bathroom floor and get rid of Ali’s blond hair before he brought any new women home.
Over a week and a half passed before Steve Rogers would finally be reported missing by his distraught girlfriend, who had hopped a bus from New York City after her repeated e-mails and telephone calls went unanswered. Ali Daniels arrived at Rogers ’s home to find his mail piling up and the previous week’s issue of The Providence Sunday Journal lying in the middle of his unkempt front lawn. Rogers’s BMW Z4 roadster was nowhere to be found-had already been impounded after the groundskeeper who maintained the big gazebo in Garden City reported it abandoned, and Cranston’s finest simply hadn’t gotten around to notifying its owner yet.
To top things off, it would be twenty-four hours after Ali reported her boyfriend missing before the Cranston Police would finally connect the dots to Rogers ’s impounded roadster. And although Rogers had long been dead by the time the authorities began treating him as a missing person, the self-centered theatre professor might have taken comfort in knowing that fate had been kind to him in the end. For if he had dumped Ali before his meeting with The Sculptor, who knows how long his disappearance might have gone unnoticed, as it was not unusual for his colleagues, his family, and his friends not to hear from him for weeks at a time-especially after the end of the semester, when he and Cathy would sometimes vacation before summer theatre rehearsals began at Brown.
The Cranston Police, of course, were entirely unaware that another man had been recently reported missing in Boston -a young man known as “Jim Paulson,” or simply as “Jim.” And despite the cryptic description of Mr. Paulson’s lifestyle given by the young man’s friends, it soon became clear to the Boston Police that lover boy Jim and his constituents dwelt in that world where people rarely ask your last name, let alone your real one. Yes, the Boston Police were very familiar with the way things worked on Arlington Street. And given that-wherever he had gone-Mr. Paulson had taken with him almost everything he owned, until anything told them differently the Boston Police would treat Mr. Paulson as they had treated so many other boys whose cruel fates led them down the great white way of drugs and prostitution: Mr. Paulson either moved on or jacked too much shit; either way, he’d turn up eventually; either way, it wasn’t their problem.
And even if Paul Jimenez’s friends had known about his online persona as RounDaWay17, The Sculptor had long ago taken care of that loose end-had long ago hacked into Jimenez’s e-mail account, the most recent activity of which would have shown Jimenez taking care of business as usual from an IP address at the public library in Dayton, Ohio.
Yes, The Sculptor was very, very thorough.
It was late in the afternoon when Cathy received the call from the Cranston Police on her cell phone-an unknown number she immediately muted into voice mail. She and Markham were on their way to an interview-a scenario she had become quite familiar with since Markham ’s return from Quantico, one quite different than what she had expected via her television crime drama education. The people Cathy and Markham spoke to could use a good scriptwriter; they were not nearly as articulate or helpful as those witnesses on TV-who, after a string of three or four of them, always led the authorities straight to their man. Indeed, the handful of people who the FBI questioned with regard to the Gabriel Banford connection did not help at all. And the investigation into any other possible murders/disappearances that fit The Michelangelo Killer’s victim profile, as well the leads derived from the forensic evidence on which she and her new colleagues at the FBI Field Office in Boston had been briefed two weeks earlier, had all so far turned up nothing.
All, that is, except one curious clue: the Carrara marble dust found in The Michelangelo Killer’s paint.
“Except for the Carrara marble,” Markham said, pulling into the parking lot, “it seems almost as if The Michelangelo Killer had all that other stuff just lying around. The amount of formaldehyde, of acetone, the silicone rubber needed for the Plastination process-never mind the drugs-strange that we’re not able to get a lead from any of it, where this guy got hold of the large quantities of chemicals and equipment he would need to get his job done.”
“Unless he made the chemicals himself,” Cathy said. “Unless he distilled them from products that were much more readily available.”
“Yes. Like the acetone-the primary ingredient in paint thinner and nail polish remover. But then there’s the formaldehyde. Not something you can pick up at Lowes or Home Depot. And from what I’ve read, not only does it have a short shelf-life, it’s much more difficult to manufacture from other base products-that is, unless we’ve got a chemist with a large lab on our hands.”
“This man is very bright, Sam, and very thorough. He knew that the first thing the FBI would look into would be the unusual forensic evidence-wouldn’t have used anything that could be traced directly back to him. And given the fact that The Michelangelo Killer has been active for at least six years, he could have acquired his equipment and replenished his chemicals gradually. He could have even broken into any number of funeral parlors and stolen just enough formaldehyde here and there so it wouldn’t be noticed. I mean, the time and planning it took to prepare and display his figures-it’s almost as if The Michelangelo Killer also planned on what forensic evidence he would leave behind.”
“Nothing is left to chance.”
“The Carrara marble dust.”
“Yes. An interesting detail that I have a feeling The Michelangelo Killer wanted us to find. Let’s hope this interview turns up something.”
Despite the inconvenience that Carrara marble was still exported all over the world and in many forms-from blocks of raw material, to cheaply fashioned souvenirs, to large pieces of exquisite detail-Rachel Sullivan stumbled upon a police report from three years earlier that would eventually provide the FBI with their first real lead, their first big break in the strange case of The Michelangelo Killer.
Reverend Monsignor Robert Bonetti, who would be celebrating his eightieth birthday in less than a week, had served as resident pastor of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Providence longer than any other in parish history-twenty-nine years by his count-and had no plans on retiring anytime soon. This was his parish, his neighborhood, for not only had he grown up only a couple of miles away on Federal Hill, the Reverend Bonetti had over the years repeatedly turned down opportunities for promotion in order to remain among his people. And even though “St. Bart’s” was staffed by the Scalabrini Fathers-a Roman Catholic Holy Order that traditionally transferred its priests from parish to parish every ten years or so-because of Bonetti’s age, his impeccable record, his outstanding work within the community, his expansion of the church itself, and his desire to go on ministering to the masses long after he could have retired, the Scalabrini Fathers made an exception in his case and allowed him to stay on at St. Bart’s for as long as he wished.
The tall and lanky priest met Cathy and Markham on the front steps of St. Bart’s-a much more modern-looking structure than the traditional Romanesque Neo-Gothic churches that dotted the working-class neighborhoods in and around Providence. Cathy, as a professor in Brown University ’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, immediately pegged the church as having been built-or at least renovated-in the late sixties or early seventies.
“You must be Agent Markham,” said the Reverend Bonetti, offering his hand. “Which means that you, my dear, are Doctor Catherine Hildebrant.”
“Yes, I am. A pleasure to meet you, Father.”
“Likewise-the both of you.”
“You spoke with Special Agent Rachel Sullivan on the phone,” said Markham. “She explained why we wanted to talk to you?”
“Yes,” smiled the priest. “Ostensibly about our Pietà. But you see, Agent Markham, I’ve been around long enough to know that things aren’t always what they seem. The FBI wouldn’t trouble themselves with a curious little theft that happened three years ago-that is unless they felt it was somehow connected to something much more important.”
There was nothing condescending in the priest’s tone; nothing sarcastic or off-putting. No, the Reverend Bonetti spoke with the simple sincerity of a man who did not wish to play games; a man whose gentle, bespectacled eyes and thick Rhode Island accent spoke of someone who had indeed been around long enough to know what’s what.
“This is really about that Michelangelo Killer, isn’t it?” asked the priest. “About what happened down there at Watch Hill?”
“Yes, it is,” said Markham.
For the first time the Reverend Robert Bonetti’s gaze dropped to the ground, his mind entirely somewhere else. And after what seemed to Cathy like an interminable silence, the priest once again met Markham ’s eyes.
“Follow me,” he said.
Once inside the dimly lit church, the good reverend led Cathy and Markham to a small chamber off the main church-the devotional chapel dedicated not only to a large pyramid of votive candles, but also to a series of marble statues that lined the surrounding walls. The statues were of various saints and were themselves also bordered by smaller stands of candles, and the sweet smell of scented wax made Cathy feel queasy. Behind the pyramid of votive candles, at the rear of the devotional chapel, Cathy and Markham were surprised by what they found: a large, exquisitely carved replica of Michelangelo’s Rome Pietà.
“Exactly like the one that was taken three years ago,” said the Reverend Bonetti. “That one had been donated by a wealthy family a number of years before I arrived here at St. Bart’s. It was hand carved to the exact proportions of the original, as well as from the same type of marble Michelangelo used five hundred years ago. Carrara marble, it is called. And as is the case with the statue you see before you, our other Pietà was made by a skilled artisan in Italy whose studio produces only a couple dozen statues per year-usually ranging in size, like this one, from about three to four feet high. His name is Antonio Gambardelli, and his statues are much more accurate, much more expensive than any other replicas on the market not only because of their attention to detail, but also because of their proportional accuracy. Indeed, at least three years ago, a Gambardelli Pietà of this size was valued at close to twenty thousand American dollars. I know this because whoever took our statue not only left us with instructions on how to replace it, but also left us the means to do so.”
“Wait a minute,” said Markham. “You’re telling me that the thief left you twenty thousand dollars?”
“Twenty-five thousand to be exact,” smiled the priest. “A little detail that I neglected to tell the Providence Police upon their initial investigation. You see, Agent Markham, when you’ve been around as long as I have, you begin to understand something of human nature. The person or persons who took our Pietà left the money in cash, in an envelope addressed to me right there on the pedestal, so that I could replace it-not so that I could redecorate the evidence room at the Providence Police Station, if you take my meaning.”
Sam Markham was silent, his mind spinning.
“The extra five thousand was undoubtedly intended for us to cover the shipping costs of the statue, as well as to repair the damage from the break-in and to compensate us for our trouble.”
“Why report the theft at all then?” asked Markham, his voice tight. “Why not just take the money, replace your statue, and not be bothered-that is, since you intended not to cooperate fully with the authorities to begin with?”
“I was the only one who knew about the money, Agent Markham, as I was the first one in the church on the morning after the break-in. However, the damage to the side door and the absence of the statue itself could not be hidden from my fellow Scalabrini, let alone the congregation. You see, Agent Markham, the money was addressed to me-twenty-five thousand dollar bills in a sealed envelope. There was no need to report it, as whoever took our Pietà seemed to want it, seemed to need it more than we did here at St. Bart’s. And even though I may not have understood that need, I took the gift of the money as an act of faith, as a confidential act of penance. And up until the telephone call from the FBI, took the person who left the twenty-five thousand dollars in the statue’s place as a man with a conscience.”
Sam Markham was silent again, his eyes fixed on the Pietà.
“But now,” the Reverend Bonetti continued, “I see that my silence may have been misguided, for now I see that the FBI thinks the man who took our Pietà three years ago might be the same man who murdered those two boys-the same man who made them into that horrific sculpture down at Watch Hill.”
“The envelope,” said Markham, turning to the priest. “The sheet of instructions on how to replace the statue-I don’t suppose you saved them?”
The Reverend Robert Bonetti smiled and reached into the inside pocket of his black blazer.
“I hoped this might help you forgive me for not telling the authorities about the money sooner. But now I hope even more that it’ll change your opinion of me being just a simple and foolish old man.”
The envelope that the priest handed Markham had scrawled across it in neatly looped cursive the words, For Father Bonetti. Inside, Markham found a brief handwritten note not only giving instructions on how to obtain another Pietà from Gambardelli, but also a short apology for any inconvenience the thief may have caused Father Bonetti and his parish. Markham showed the note to Cathy. She recognized the handwriting immediately.
Flowery. Feminine. Precise.
The same handwriting from the notes she received five and a half years earlier.
She nodded.
“The man we are looking for is tall, Father Bonetti,” said Markham. “About six-three to six-six. And very big, very strong-would have been able to lift the statue off its base and carry it from the church himself with no problem. Most likely a bodybuilder or someone who’s into power lifting. Anybody you know fit that bill, Father?”
“Most of the men in our congregation are working class, Agent Markham-skilled laborers or others who work with their hands. They are mostly Italians, but we have a growing Hispanic population as well. Yes, a lot of these men are powerfully built, but only a few that tall. And I know of none who have twenty-five thousand dollars to blow on a statue.”
“You ever see anyone strange hanging around the church? Not a regular parishioner, but someone just dropping by once or twice to poke around?”
“Not that I remember, no.”
“No unusual confessions that I should know about?”
The priest smiled thinly.
“Even if there were, Agent Markham, I’m not at liberty to tell you.”
“Is there anything else you might be able to tell us, Father Bonetti?” asked the FBI agent. “Anybody you might know that would have knowledge of the statue and also the means to pay you twenty-five thousand dollars for it?”
“We used to have quite an extensive picture gallery on our Web site,” said Father Bonetti. “Since the theft, however, most of the pictures have been taken down. They were mainly shots of the church interior. One of them, of course, contained our Gambardelli Pietà. Perhaps your man simply recognized it and targeted us that way.”
Cathy and Markham traded glances.
“Thank you, Father,” said Markham. “You’ve been a great help.”
“I’ll walk you out,” said the priest. And once they had exited the church, once Cathy and Markham reached the bottom of the front steps, the Reverend Robert Bonetti called after them.
“I was down there, too, you know.”
Markham and Cathy turned to face him.
“Down at Watch Hill. At the Campbells ’ house on Foster Cove. Last time was over thirty years ago, before they owned the place. Used to belong to the family of a friend of mine-famous movie director, he was. Grew up with him. Even spent some time with him down at Watch Hill when we were kids. Lovely town, but a lot of evil lurking underneath. Never seen anything good come from that place. You best keep that in mind.”
Cathy and Markham exchanged an uneasy silence.
It was starting to rain.
“Everything is connected,” said the priest finally. “Remember that, you two. Everything is connected.”
And with that the Reverend Robert Bonetti disappeared back into the darkness of St. Bartholomew’s.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Cathy once she and Markham were on their way.
“I’m thinking a lot of things.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars for a statue that he planned on destroying. It wasn’t just the marble, Sam. The Michelangelo Killer wanted a flawless replica of the Rome Pietà itself-a Gambardelli Pietà specifically-and was willing to pay above market value for it when he could have just stolen it. Why?”
“Because money is no object for him. The only reason The Michelangelo Killer didn’t buy one directly from Gambardelli himself is so the statue couldn’t be traced back to him. And besides, to have simply stolen the statue would have been rude-self-centered and crass-just one of the many aspects of our culture that I suspect The Michelangelo Killer is trying to change.”
“But it’s the Rome Pietà, Sam. If we stick to the premise that The Michelangelo Killer used Carrara marble dust for his Bacchus because he had originally planned on using it for something else, that he should have stolen the Rome Pietà would indicate it was the re-creation of that statue-not Michelangelo’s David-that had originally been the killer’s goal.”
“And the Carrara marble from which that statue was carved, the specificity of that form, would help him-in an undoubtedly spiritual, even magical way-achieve the same kind of likeness, the same kind of proportional fidelity for his Pietà that we saw in his Bacchus. Hence, there would also be a connection between his material-the human bodies that would comprise his work-and the material that comprised Michelangelo’s work both in form and substance.”
“But, since he used the dust from the Pietà for his Bacchus, that means then that his plan did in fact change.”
“Yes. Perhaps he figured out another, even more intimate way for his victims to connect with the statue that they were about to become. Perhaps he scrapped his initial idea of the magic being in the marble itself. Perhaps he gained a deeper understanding of the opening quote to your book-that the magic lies only in the sculptor’s hand.”
“But, Sam, then that means-”
“Yes, Cathy,” said Markham, swerving onto the highway. “I was wrong about the profile for this killer. I had an inkling of this when I was back at Quantico, when I was going over the information on the Plastination industry, but couldn’t put my finger on it. There’s little if any self-gratification for The Michelangelo Killer in the actual act of murdering victims. Murder is only incidental for him-a means to an end in acquiring material for his sculptures. However, as we saw with Gabriel Banford, and as was surely the case with Tommy Campbell and his severed penis, it is crucial that The Michelangelo Killer’s victims, his material, become aware of their fate themselves-to awaken from their slumber, if you will, in order to truly become one of his creations. And I suspect that any self-gratification on the killer’s part would come from that. Yes, there may be a sexual component to this, but I suspect it arises out of a more intellectually and spiritually complex connection with his creations than simple, base-level sexual gratification-a connection that the killer would see as akin to Michelangelo’s connection with his creations. I’ve suspected from the beginning that The Michelangelo Killer is not seeking only some kind of self-gratification-sexual, spiritual, or otherwise-and always thought of him more in the context of a mission killer, that is, a killer with a specific goal. However, I see now that I made a crucial mistake with regard to his victims.”
“It’s why Sullivan and her team have been unable to establish a pattern,” Cathy said. “Why they’ve been unable to find any murders or disappearances of young men in Rhode Island that fit the profile of Banford or Campbell or Wenick. We’ve been looking in the wrong place, Sam. We’ve been looking only at men.”
“Yes, Cathy. Humans are The Michelangelo Killer’s material-both men and women. The killer has both a reverence for his material and the understanding that some of it has to be wasted. And just as I am sure he considers the male of the species as aesthetically superior, I am also sure now that, if he had to waste material in the experimentation with and development of his Plastination technique, he would focus solely on females. I suspect that if we start looking into the disappearance of female prostitutes in the last six years, we might come up with something.”
“So he had planned in the beginning on using a female for his Pietà?”
“It looks that way, yes.”
“And then for some reason he abandoned that project and began focusing on Michelangelo’s Bacchus? Perhaps because he saw the similarity between Bacchus and Tommy Campbell? Perhaps because he also found a better way of getting his message across to the public?”
“Perhaps.”
“But the breasts…” Cathy said absently.
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure, Sam. Something’s been bothering me for almost two weeks now-something, like you, I can’t quite sort out.”
As Cathy and Markham sped across town toward the East Side of Providence, a brown paper wrapped package-bundled neatly with the rest of her mail into a folded Pottery Barn catalog-sat waiting patiently in Cathy’s mailbox.
Even the postman had thought it a curious-looking parcel-felt bubble wrapped, about the size of a DVD case-but with no return address, and covered with far too many stamps-of various denominations, ten dollars worth in all-as if the sender did not want to go to the post office, but wanted to make sure it arrived at its destination. But what was even more curious to the postman was the way in which the sender saluted its recipient-a neatly written phrase above the street address which read simply:
Especially for Dr. Hildebrant.
Miles away, The Sculptor wiped the spittle from his father’s chin. Instead of seating him as he usually did in the big chair by the window, The Sculptor had served his father his supper in bed that evening. He had played a few episodes of The Shadow on the CD player inside the old Philco and thought he saw the left corner of his father’s mouth curl up ever so slightly during the introduction.
Then again, The Sculptor could not be sure. His mind might be playing tricks on him, for he was tired-very tired. And he had been working very, very hard lately. His Pietà was completed-had come together in just over two weeks from the afternoon he picked up RounDaWay17 at Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence. Then again, in a way he had cheated, for The Sculptor had finished off many components of his Pietà over a year ago-the metal frame, the rock of Golgotha on which the Virgin would be seated, the contours of her flowing robes. And of course, the most important parts of the Virgin herself-her head, her hands, her breasts-had been preserved, articulated, and painted long before Bacchus and his satyr went into the pressurized tub of chemicals.
Back then, when he first started experimenting with pieces of the women, the Plastination process took much longer than it did now-just as long as it still took von Hagens and his team over in Heidelberg, Germany. But The Sculptor had made improvements on von Hagens’s methods; he found that he could speed up the process considerably by alternating pressure and energy currents through the solvent, as well as by inserting thin “conductor tubes” at key points around the body between the various tissues. And unlike von Hagens, who skinned his subjects to display the muscles and internal organs, The Sculptor, who had no need for the insides, found that hollowing out the torso and placing a single conductor tube along the spine would help speed up the process even more. And so, whereas it took von Hagens months, sometimes a whole year to prepare and then pose a figure, it now took The Sculptor-working diligently, around the clock-just a little over a week.
Yes, The Sculptor could have made quite a bit of money patenting the improvements on von Hagens’s Plastination process if he wished. But then again, The Sculptor was not concerned with such base matters as money.
Ironically, it was the skin that had always given The Sculptor the most trouble, for during the process of preparing his figures The Sculptor found that, after dissolving the hair with depilatory cream and removing the lipid tissues from underneath, the skin became loose and slippery and very difficult to work with. And only through trial and error with the pieces of the women did he finally find the right balance of traditional tanning techniques and the methodology he adapted from von Hagens. The result gave him a tighter surface through which he could articulate the veins and muscle tissue underneath for desired definition and detail, yet the skin remained porous enough so that his mixture of special paint bonded with it nicely.
Indeed, once you got past all the trial and error, all the experimentation with this or that much of yada-yada-chemical, the rest of the process was pretty straightforward. After The Sculptor hung and drained his material from a large hook he had attached to the bottom of the mortician’s table-and after the internal organs had been discarded and the preliminary embalming of formaldehyde complete-The Sculptor followed his improvements upon the Plastination process until it was time to pose the prepared figures and let the silicone harden in a bubble of plastic sheeting heated by UV lamps. Unlike with his Bacchus, the appendages of which required a much more complex articulation process to get the positional ratios correct, the Rome Pietà did not take nearly as long. The Pietà was much tighter, much more compact in the way the original figures’ limbs had been carved from the marble. The real trick had been getting the angles right-the Virgin’s arms, the tilt of her head, the degree of incline of Christ on her lap.
As with his Bacchus, The Sculptor discovered that he could save himself a lot of trouble if he got the angles of the iron frame right first. And since the Virgin’s body would be almost entirely hidden under her robes, there was really no need to worry about damaging that material. Thus, The Sculptor had much more room for error, much more room with which to play in terms of manipulating the figure onto the frame. Then once both of the bodies were cured, stuffed, and mounted-and once the Virgin’s head and her hands and her breasts had been attached and the last of her robes laid on and starched into the right pattern of folds-The Sculptor adjusted Mother and Son’s plastinated limbs by tying them off and suspending them at various heights from rows of smaller hooks that he had fixed to the underside of the mortician’s table. After enclosing the statue in a ring of clear plastic sheeting running from the underside of the table to the floor, and after the silicone rubber had hardened under the heat of the UV lamps, all that he needed to do was sculpt the epoxy compound for Christ’s hair and his beard, let it dry, then layer his paint on with his pump sprayer until he achieved the desired finish.
The last of the paint had gone on that morning.
And even though he was tired, even though he had worked feverishly for days with little or no sleep, as The Sculptor pulled the blankets up to his father’s chin, he was nonetheless pleased not only with how quickly his Pietà had come together, but also with how beautiful it had turned out in the end. Even better than my Bacchus, he thought, smiling. The Sculptor could not help but feel giddy when he imagined what Dr. Hildy’s reaction would be-knew that when it was all over she would thank him when she saw, when she understood how his work had changed the world. Yes, very soon she would learn to appreciate him.
Of course, in the end, it was really he who appreciated her. Oh yes, The Sculptor had much to thank her for. And hopefully, when she saw the DVD he sent her, when she understood just one of the many reasons why fate had brought them together, maybe she would already start to appreciate him.
Just a little.
The Sculptor knew that Dr. Hildy would most likely receive the DVD today or tomorrow-might have already watched it, for that matter. He hoped she had, for the information she and the FBI would get from watching it would help him in his plan. The Sculptor had wanted to deliver the DVD personally-had wanted to slip it in her mailbox himself just like the old days when he used to sneak into the List Art Center to deliver the notes, his heart pounding with fear and excitement. But now things were different, and he dared not get too close. Yes, The Sculptor knew the FBI was probably still watching Dr. Hildy very closely; which was why, since the unveiling of his Bacchus, he had driven by her place on the Upper East Side only twice-in disguise; in his third car, his ’99 Porsche 911. The Sculptor always used his Camry to drive by the Polks’-much less conspicuous in that neighborhood. The Sculptor could tell by the metal mailbox next to Dr. Hildy’s front door that she was still picking up her mail even though she was staying with her friend Janet-the older woman, the one who looked like that tennis player from the 1970s, Billie Jean King.
Tennis players. The Sculptor hated tennis players.
As the Shadow set off in pursuit of this week’s villain, The Sculptor watched his father closely. And when he saw his eyes begin to flutter, The Sculptor removed the syringe from his forearm and dabbed the needle mark with an alcohol swab. He had given him just enough of the sleepy juice to keep him dreaming until morning. Yes, The Sculptor knew deep down that his father dreamt-had to be dreaming from the way his face jerked and his eyes twitched when The Sculptor sat in the big chair by the window watching him when he himself could not sleep. Indeed, The Sculptor had conditioned himself over the years to sleep very little-had no need for it other than to repair and rebuild the torn muscle tissue from his strenuous workouts in the cellar. And unlike his father, as far as The Sculptor knew, as far as he could remember, he never dreamt himself.
The Sculptor replaced his father’s colostomy bag, washed his own face and hands in the upstairs bathroom, and lay down naked on his big four-poster bed. He had many years ago redecorated the room in the baroque style of which he had always been the fondest, but his bedroom still carried with it the memories of his youth, especially memories of his mother who, sometimes-when his father was away on business and she had had too much to drink-would crawl into bed naked with him to apologize, to warm him up from the ice baths into which she often plunged him facedown when he was naughty.
The Sculptor reached for the remote control and pressed the On button-the DVD player and the big television in the armoire flickering to life simultaneously. There was no TV reception here-no cable hookup in the main house. No, The Sculptor merely thought of the big TV in the armoire in the corner of the room as his “memory box.” Yes, he would relax for a while in the old routine-he might even allow himself to take a little nap before the big night ahead of him.
Play.
The Sony DVD logo dimmed, then was replaced with the trip to Niagara Falls -the first of the eleven 3-minute-long Super 8 films The Sculptor had strung together and digitized onto DVD. The trip to Niagara Falls was silent-shot in 1977 when the boy named Christian was only two years old. There he is in his mother’s arms, waving to the camera by the old-style, coin-operated observation binoculars-the falls misting like ghosts far off in the distance behind them. The mother-a lovely looking woman with large lips and a yellow scarf around her neck-whispers something in the boy’s ear. He laughs and waves again.
Cut to-
The boy is now in his father’s arms, standing next to the same coin-operated binoculars. He waves happily as his father bounces him up and down. No, unlike the man in the room next door, the father has no trouble moving-looks young and handsome and strong in his tight white polo shirt. And his eyes-so full of life, of love for his son and the woman out of sight behind the camera. He blows her a kiss. Does it again. Speaks to his son, and then they both blow her a kiss.
Cut to-
Panning across the falls.
Cut to-
Close-up of the mother at the railing. She gazes out at the scene before her, unaware that her husband is filming. She looks happy, but lost in thought. And The Sculptor, watching from his bed, wonders, as he has done now for many years, what she was thinking at that moment-knows that it is too early for her to be thinking about the tennis pro, the man with whom she would have an affair years later. The mother realizes she is being filmed, smiles, and mouths to the camera shyly, “Eddie stop!” But her husband goes on filming. The wind blows her hair, her yellow scarf, as she tries to look natural. She starts to speak-
Cut to-
The mother with the boy looking out over the falls. The boy has his thumb in his mouth and is snuggled tightly against his mother’s bosom. He seems somewhat afraid-is not crying, but looks only at the camera while his mother speaks to him.
Cut to-
The mother-smiling, holding the sleeping boy in her arms-gets into the passenger side of the white Ford LTD.
Cut to-
The mother, again with the sleeping boy-darker, this time filmed inside the car from the driver’s seat. The camera zooms on the boy named Christian-his thumb still in his mouth.
Cut to-
The father driving, laughing, and speaking to the camera as his wife films him.
Cut to-
A quick series of shots of the road, of the scenery, and then the first reel ends.
The rest of the Super 8s-shot over the next three years-follow the same happy pattern: Lake George, the Story Land theme park in New Hampshire, a trip to the beach at Bonnet Shores. But only the last of the eleven has any sound-shot in 1980, when the boy named Christian was just five years old.
It is his birthday party, in fact, filmed outside in the backyard, against the woods on a bright sunny day of ice cream cake and pin the tail on the donkey. The boy named Christian opens some presents-a soccer ball, a Tonka truck-while other children and people whose names The Sculptor has long forgotten look on with oohs and ahs. The Sculptor knows all the dialogue by heart; he has watched this film many, many times.
“What’s my present gonna be, Mary?” asks his father from behind the camera, to which his mother smiles and replies, “How about a fat lip?”
The partygoers laugh.
There are a couple of quick shots of the boy named Christian kicking the soccer ball across the lawn with a little girl, then finally the scene The Sculptor has looked forward to for thirty-three minutes-the scene for which he always waits so patiently.
The boy named Christian is sitting alone outside at the table-the open canisters of blue and green Play-Doh barely noticeable amidst the paper cups and frosting covered plates that litter the plastic Empire Strikes Back tablecloth. He is hard at work on something-entirely unaware that his father is filming him.
“What are you making, Christian?” asks his father from behind the camera.
“My friend David,” says the boy perfunctorily, not looking up.
“Who’s David?” whispers another man off camera.
“His imaginary friend,” the father whispers back. “Says he lives out back in the carriage house.”
The unidentified man off camera mumbles something inaudible. And with the sounds of partygoers, of happy children echoing off in the distance, just as the camera begins to zoom in on the boy named Christian and his blue-green Play-Doh sculpted man, the home movie of The Sculptor’s fifth birthday party abruptly cuts to black.
Cathy Hildebrant and Sam Markham sat in silence outside her East Side condo-the intermittent sound of the windshield wipers swiping in time to the dull tick-tick of the Trailblazer’s idling motor. Since his return from Quantico, they had been in this position many times-sitting like teenagers in the car outside the Polks’ in what Cathy had come to think of as their stereotypical “awkward end of the date scene.”
Unlike the afternoon two weeks earlier when she had kissed him on the cheek, Cathy had yet to make such a bold move again. Upon his return from Quantico, Markham seemed distant-much more professional and much less apt to reveal anything personal. Even on the handful of occasions when they had been alone in his tiny office in downtown Providence, working on his computer and studying the printouts from Boston late into the evening, Special Agent Sam Markham always made sure that he was occupied away from her, always made sure that he did not get physically too close to his new partner. And on the one occasion when he accidentally brushed up against her-the only time their eyes met and their faces were so close that Cathy was sure he’d kiss her-instead, Markham only smiled and turned his flushed cheeks away from her.
But worse than anything, Cathy thought, was that in all their interviews, in all their trips around New England in the Trailblazer to question this person or that, Special Agent Sam Markham had yet to reach for her hand again.
Something was wrong; something was holding him back.
Deep down Cathy understood this-could feel it in a way that she had never felt before-but her conscious, rational side simply could not sort it out, did not know what to do with this knowledge, this newfound perception into a man’s heart-a man who seemed at once so close but yet still so distant from her.
“You’re going to be all right staying alone now?” Markham asked finally.
“Yes. Janet and Dan are leaving for the beach tomorrow. They want me to go with them, of course-and I will visit this summer-but I need to cut the cord and get back on my own. I’ll call them once I get inside and let them know I’ll be staying here tonight. After all, this is my home now.”
“I don’t want you to be afraid of anything, Cathy. We’ll still have people watching you around the clock. I’ll make sure they know you’re back here. And you know you can always call me, too.”
“I know.”
The awkward silence again.
“What is it, Sam?” The question had fallen from Cathy’s lips before she realized she was speaking, and Markham looked taken aback.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just that, well, I thought-” As she met his gaze, when she saw behind his eyes what she knew to be his feelings for her retreating once again, suddenly Cathy felt foolish-felt like she wanted to cry, like she had to get out of there.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gathering her things. “It’s just me being stupid. Just give me a call when you need me again.”
“Cathy,” Markham said, “Cathy, wait.”
But she had already slammed the door-her heels clicking noisily on the cement walkway as she made her way to the porch. Markham sat frozen, helpless behind the wheel. Then, in a flash of impulse, he was out-caught up to her just as she stepped inside. The bundle of mail fell to the floor; and when Cathy turned to him, when Markham saw the tears in her eyes, he finally gave over to his heart and kissed her.
There, into the evening, they made love amidst a sea of cardboard boxes-all the while oblivious to the muted phone calls that went on Für Elise-ing in Cathy’s handbag.
If Steve Rogers had known that the two Cranston Police detectives had missed his ex-wife at her East Side condo by only a matter of minutes, had he known that Janet Polk had unintentionally misinformed them that her best friend would be staying with her in Cranston that night, the vain and self-centered theatre professor most certainly would have thought that fate had gotten the best of him once again. His only consolation might have been the pretty redhead who-albeit with selfish motives herself-had inadvertently taken up his cause. Meghan O’Neill-chief of the newly appointed, three-man WNRI investigative team whose sole purpose was to look into leads and develop stories in connection to The Michelangelo Killer-got an unexpected break that evening. Her team had been patiently monitoring the police bands for weeks now with the hopes of hearing one of two words: Michelangelo or Hildebrant. And so, when news came across the wire that the Cranston police were having a hard time locating the latter for questioning in the disappearance of her ex-husband, O’Neill scrambled her three-man crew into the Eye-Team van and headed for the East Side.
“If Hildebrant is home,” she told them, “we’ll shoot the segment there. If not, we’ll move to Cranston and use Rogers ’s house as a backdrop.”
Either way, O’Neill’s team understood: she would be the one to break the story.
The house was dark, and Cathy-lying naked on the sofa in Markham ’s arms-was just drifting off again when the doorbell startled her awake. Markham put his finger to his lips and, reaching for his gun, moved silently out into the hall. The doorbell rang again, but even before the FBI agent reached the peephole, the light filtering through the blinds told Cathy who was standing on her front porch.
Spotlights, she thought, covering herself with a blanket. Another news crew. What do they want now?
“Reporters,” Markham whispered, and signaled for Cathy to stay put. He stood leaning in the archway to the hallway with his back to her-his gun at his side as if he were considering whether or not to ambush them. Cathy smiled-wished he would-and despite the interruption, despite the sudden longing for the sanctuary that had been the Polks’, Cathy could not help but be aroused at the sight of Markham’s muscular physique-the back and shoulders, the buttocks and thighs that looked to her in the milky gloom like nothing less than sculpted marble.
The spotlight went out and Markham again disappeared into the hallway. Cathy heard the sound of a car starting, then speeding off outside. And after a moment, the FBI agent returned with their clothes. He placed Cathy’s handbag and the bundle of dropped mail on top of a cardboard box.
“They’re gone,” he said. “What they could want from you at this point is beyond me.”
“Maybe they wanted to know what kind of lover you are.”
Markham laughed, embarrassed, and the two of them got dressed in the dark-silently, a bit awkwardly, but with the unspoken certainty of a long-awaited love affair just begun. And soon they were in the kitchen, sipping tea at the table in the warm glow of the stove light. Markham held Cathy’s hand, but they spoke to each other only in spurts-funny stories and details about their lives separated by long periods of silence-neither of them really knowing what to say, but nonetheless content simply to be in each other’s presence.
“I should probably get going,” said Markham when he saw the clock on the stove tick past nine o’clock. “Will be in Boston all day tomorrow to brief Burrell and to coordinate our findings with Sullivan’s team and my people back at Quantico.”
“On Saturday?”
“Sucks, huh?”
“You can spend the night here if you like,” she said, the words coming from her like another language-the first time in twelve years that she had invited a man to spend the night at her place. “Is that proper etiquette? You’ll have to forgive me, Sam. I don’t usually do this.”
“Neither do I,” said Markham. And then he did something unexpected. The FBI agent took her hands and kissed them. “I’m sorry about before,” he said. “About closing off from you. I know you noticed. I know you felt it, and it wasn’t fair of me-to pretend like that or to make you feel vulnerable and silly. That’s not me, Cathy. I don’t play games. It’s just that, well, this kind of thing is hard for me-it’s just so new and out of the blue. I’ll tell you about it another time, but know that, despite the circumstances in which I found you, and no matter what happens and how stupid I may act, all this is real-you and me, Cathy, and the way you know I feel about you, it’s real. Just be patient with me, okay?”
Cathy’s heart skipped a beat, and then she kissed him-long and passionately-and when they parted, Markham smiled.
“I could do this all night. But if I were you, I’d call your Auntie Janet. It’s getting late and she’s probably worried sick about you.”
“Shit,” said Cathy, her eyes darting around the kitchen. “I forgot all about her-thinks I’m staying there tonight. My bag. Where’d I put my bag?”
“Relax. I put it in the living room. First cardboard box on the right.”
In a flash, Cathy disappeared out into the darkened hallway and was back with her handbag, her cell phone already at her ear. She plopped her bag and the banded bundle of mail onto the table.
“Five missed calls from her. And looks like two voice mails. She’s got me worried now.”
Markham finished his tea and placed his cup on the table-noticed right away the curious-looking parcel sticking out part way from the Pottery Barn catalog.
“Hey, Jan, it’s me,” said Cathy behind him, drifting back out into the hallway.
It was not the plethora of stamps that caught the FBI agent’s attention, but the partially visible handwriting-the familiar, flowery, and precise way the sender had written Providence, Rhode Island 02912.
“I know, Jan, I’m sorry. I’m at my place. Was working late and-”
Markham snapped off the elastic band and removed the brown paper wrapped parcel from the bundle of mail.
“What?” he heard Cathy say from the hall.
Markham rose from the table-studied the handwriting in the light from the stove: “Especially for Dr. Hildebrant.”
“When was the last time she heard from him?”
Markham removed from his back pocket the envelope that had been given to him by the Reverend Bonetti. He compared it to the brown paper wrapped parcel-the handwriting was identical.
“All right, all right,” Cathy said, returning to the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Jan, I’m fine-yes, will call them right now. Okay. I’ll let you know. Love you, too.” Cathy closed her cell phone. “It’s Steve, Sam. My ex. Janet said the police want to talk-”
The look on Markham ’s face told her everything-stopped her cold like a slap. And as the FBI agent held up the brown paper wrapped package-when Cathy saw the envelope from the Reverend Robert Bonetti in his opposite hand-all at once the pretty art history professor knew something very, very bad had happened to her ex-husband.
Her heart beating wildly, the opening of the DVD player sounded to Cathy like thunder-the Sony logo on the television screen casting the darkened living room in the light blue wash of a gathering storm. Markham had opened the brown paper package in the kitchen-used a paring knife to slice the tape and handled the bubble wrapped contents carefully with a paper towel. The DVD case, like the disc inside, was eerily blank-no writing or any other distinguishing marks-and still carried with it the scent of newly minted plastic. Markham placed the disc into the DVD player and took his seat next to Cathy on the sofa.
The screen dimmed, went black for a moment, and then a countdown began-four seconds, grainy black and white in the style of an old film countdown. Black again, and then a gentle whisper in the darkness of: “Come forth from the stone.”
Cathy’s heart dropped into her stomach when she saw Steve Rogers’s face fade into the frame-a strap across his forehead and what appeared to be two stubby leather pads by his ears holding his head in place. He was sweating badly, his eyes blinking hard.
“Oh my God, Sam,” Cathy cried. “It’s Steve.”
“What the fuck?” said her ex-husband on the television screen before them-his voice hoarse and gravelly.
“That’s it,” said a man’s voice off camera. “Shake off your slumber, O Mother of God.”
“What the fuck is-”
Cathy and Markham watched like gaping zombies as Rogers struggled then abruptly stopped with a look of confusion across his face. The light on his shiny cheeks had changed ever so slightly, and he seemed to be watching something above him-his eyes widening and narrowing in an eerie silence.
“That’s it,” said the man’s voice again. “Shake off your slumber, O Mother of God.”
Rogers attempted to turn his head toward the voice.
“Who are you? What the fuck you want?”
The light on Rogers ’s face changed again, and he stopped straining. In their stunned silence, Cathy and Markham could tell that something had caught the man’s eye. Rogers ’s breathing seemed to quicken all at once, when suddenly the camera angle shifted-a bit jumpy now, filmed directly above him.
“He’s using two cameras,” Markham said absently. “One stationary, the other handheld.”
The continuity of the cut was seamless as the camera began to pan slowly down from Rogers ’s face to his neck. And just as the first of the bloody stitches scrolled upward from the bottom of the screen, Steve Rogers began to scream.
“What the fuck! What the fuck you do to me!”
“Dear God, no,” Cathy gasped when she saw the breasts-plump and white and stitched like eggs at awkward angles onto her ex-husband’s muscular chest. She cupped her hand to her mouth as Steve Rogers went on screaming on the screen.
“I’m sorry, Cathy!” she heard him yell. “I’m sorry!”
And as the camera continued to pan down over her ex-husband’s stomach, over the thick leather strap which held him down to the steel table, Cathy felt like her head would explode. It was as if she had already seen in her mind what was coming next-knew deep down that she couldn’t bear the sight of it. And in a flash she was up off the sofa and vomiting in the hall as Markham, frozen in horror, watched the bloody stitches where Steve Rogers’s penis should have been rise onto the television screen.
The screaming stopped for a moment. Another edit. Then the last part of the scene played again from the angle of the stationary camera-the screams of her ex-husband echoing once again through the walls of Cathy’s East Side condo; the soul of Steve Rogers taking flight before Sam Markham’s eyes just as Cathy fainted into black.
Bill Burrell raced down Route 95 at over ninety miles an hour-the colored lights of the Friday night traffic parting before his state trooper escorts like Christmas wrapping paper at a pair of scissors. Rachel Sullivan was about a half-hour ahead of him. She would meet him in Dr. Hildebrant’s room at Rhode Island Hospital after her team’s preliminary sit-down with the Cranston Police.
Son of a bitch, he thought. No way getting around the locals now.
It had all come together so fast-it was his wife who actually told him about the breaking news story down in Rhode Island only seconds before he got the call from Markham. It was all just too bizarre, he thought-yes, just like the media was already fucking calling it: “A bizarre twist in the case of The Michelangelo Killer.” The news-fuckers didn’t know about the DVD or that Steve Rogers was already dead. No, the simple fact that there was another disappearance in Rhode Island-the disappearance of the ex-husband of Dr. Hildebrant, that Brown University professor and resident expert on Michelangelo who had been associated with the case at the beginning-was enough meat for the vultures to chew on.
For now.
Son of a bitch, Burrell said to himself as he whizzed across the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border. Only a matter of time before the whole thing explodes, before they learn of Hildebrant’s connection to everything-not just this nutbag Michelangelo Killer, but to us.
But more than worrying about how the pretty art history professor who so reminded him of his wife would handle everything; more than worrying about how all the media attention she would soon receive was going to impede the FBI’s investigation; as he sped toward Rhode Island Hospital, Special Agent in Charge Bill Burrell could not ignore the sinking feeling that-even with this newest development-the strange case of The Michelangelo Killer would continue on and on as it had all along.
Cold.
Sam Markham’s brain sizzled like a slab of bacon-his thoughts sputtering and popping inside his skull with the panic of what to do next. Cathy had suffered a mild concussion, but would be okay-he knew that deep down. But as he sat beside her hospital bed, his anxiety fired back and forth between his need to go looking for The Michelangelo Killer, and his concern, his gnawing guilt for the woman he loved.
Sullivan’s team would be the ones to scramble on the information he’d gleaned from the DVD, for Markham knew he had to be there when Cathy woke up. He had heard the smack of her head on the hardwood floor when she fainted-a dull thud out in the hallway that could have been prevented had he been there to catch her, had he not been so transfixed by the horrible DVD death of Steve Rogers. But worse for Cathy than the fall was when Markham revived her-the shock at first, then the hysterics that followed when her mind attempted to wrap itself around what she had just witnessed.
“Mother!” she had screamed in the ambulance. “You were right, Mother! You tried to warn me but I didn’t listen! I’m sorry, Steven!”
The EMTs had to strap Cathy to the gurney and administered a sedative on the ride over to the hospital. And as Markham held her hand, as she started to calm, Cathy whispered to him what he already knew.
“The Pietà, Sam. The breasts. He used Steve for the body of his Pietà.”
From his reading of Slumbering in the Stone, Sam Markham knew all about the Rome Pietà-knew that Michelangelo had ingeniously sculpted the Virgin Mary out of proportion to Jesus in order to get the correct visual relationship between the two figures. He also knew right off the bat that the real Rome Pietà was still on display in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and thus instinctively ordered Sullivan to mobilize the local police forces outside of every church named St. Peter’s in Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts, and northern Connecticut. But deep down Markham knew it wouldn’t be that easy-knew that The Michelangelo Killer wouldn’t tip his hand to Dr. Hildebrant and the FBI just like that.
Perhaps he was even trying to throw them off the trail.
Nonetheless, before climbing into the ambulance with Cathy, Special Agent Sam Markham had the good sense to grab from the Trailblazer his now ragged copy of Slumbering in the Stone. He had pored desperately over the chapters on the Rome Pietà at Cathy’s bedside while she slept-learned that the statue was originally commissioned as a grave marker by the French cardinal Jean de Billheres. Its first home had been the Chapel of St. Petronilla, a Roman mausoleum located in the south transept of St. Peter’s which the cardinal had chosen for his funerary chapel. There it had lived for a short time until the chapel was demolished. The Pietà occupied a number of locations around St. Peter’s when finally, in the eighteenth century, it came to rest in its current location in the first chapel on the right of the Basilica. Markham relayed all this information to Sullivan, but her subsequent Internet search came up empty. She could not with any certainty link these details (St. Peter’s, St. Petronilla, funerary chapels, Cardinal Billheres, etc.) to any specific site in Rhode Island-in all of New England for that matter.
And so Sam Markham felt helpless. He felt that he could see the future rolling, unstoppable, toward him in his mind-could see so clearly The Michelangelo Killer’s upcoming Pietà: a heinous sculpture with a woman’s head and hands and breasts sewn onto Rogers ’s body à la Frankenstein. As a result of his research into the Plastination process, Sam Markham’s rational side told him that-even if The Michelangelo Killer had already murdered his Mary and his Jesus long ago-the killer would not have had nearly enough time to preserve Rogers ’s body. His gut, however-that intuition that all the best “profilers” learn to follow despite “the facts”-told him otherwise.
Yes, Markham knew in his gut that not only was he missing something very important, but that he was also running out of time.
He needed Cathy-needed her to wake up and to talk to him calmly.
An agent from the Resident Agency poked his head into the room. “Burrell is on his way,” he said, and Markham nodded. There were two Providence agents posted outside the door, and Markham knew Burrell would square the FBI protective custody for Cathy himself. That was good; it would be much better than the surveillance they had placed on her-the depth of which Cathy had no idea. Yes, although the FBI had watched Cathy’s every move now for almost a month, although she was most certainly never in any real danger, Markham felt nonetheless ashamed that Cathy had been used involuntarily as bait.
That couldn’t be avoided.
But now things had to be different; now The Michelangelo Killer had killed for her personally-murdered her ex-husband, used him specifically for his Pietà in what was undoubtedly a gesture of gratitude to Dr. Hildebrant for all her help. Hence, Markham understood there was no other way now except for Cathy to go into hiding. But for how long? And would Cathy even want to once the reality of what had happened sank in? How many times, Markham wondered, had she secretly wished for Steve Rogers to get run over by a truck or to slip on the ice and split his head open? And now, would she ever be able to forgive herself? Would she ever be able to get over the guilt that she was somehow responsible for her ex-husband’s death?
As Markham studied Cathy’s face in the dim light of the hospital room, he thought of Michelle. He wanted to spare Cathy that pain; he wanted to untie the canvas straps that held her down and just carry her away from it all.
Then Markham thought of Steve Rogers strapped down to his bed-the steel table on which The Michelangelo Killer had most likely operated on him, the steel table on which he filmed Rogers ’s last breath.
The epinephrine, Markham thought. The killer gives them a heart attack while they stare at themselves-at the statue they are about to become, above them on a television screen. It’s important they understand-just like Gabriel Banford had to understand way back when. And through the terror of that understanding, the terror of being born again, they awake from their slumber and are freed from the stone-just as Cathy and I suspected.
Markham ’s mind began to wander.
There were chains running up from the side of the table. Looked as if it was suspended from the ceiling-perhaps so it could be raised and lowered like in those Frankenstein movies. A high ceiling. Yes. A winch system-would have to be hooked on a ceiling too high for a cellar. A garage or a warehouse maybe. Money. The killer has money. Lots and lots of money-twenty-five G to blow on a statue.
The Pietà.
“Exactly like the one that was taken three years ago,” he heard the Reverend Robert Bonetti say in his mind. “That one had been donated by a wealthy family a number of years before I arrived here at St. Bart’s.”
A wealthy family…
“We used to have quite an extensive picture gallery on our Web site…One of them, of course, was of our Gambardelli Pietà. Perhaps your man simply recognized it and targeted us that way.”
Markham looked at his watch: 1:03 A.M. Too late to wake up the old priest on a hunch-not even a hunch. A long shot. And a desperate one at that. And besides, he was running out of time; he knew instinctively that something was going to happen this weekend, maybe even tonight-if it hadn’t happened already. If only he knew where.
Where, where, where!
“Cathy,” he whispered in her ear. “Cathy, I need you now.”
Her eyes fluttered, and Markham ’s heart leapt into his throat.
“Sam?” she said groggily-the sedatives fighting to keep her under.
“Yes, Cathy, it’s me. You’re safe. Everything is going to be all right now.”
“Where am I? I can’t move my-”
“You’re all right, Cathy.” Markham said, untying her wrists. “You’re in the hospital. You bumped your head, but you’re fine. The doctors strapped your hands to the bed so you won’t hurt yourself-because you were hysterical. But there, you see? You’re free now. I’m here, Cathy. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“It was Steve, Sam,” Cathy sobbed. “It’s all my fault-”
“Ssh, Cathy. Stop it now. It’s not true. Don’t think like that.”
“But the Pietà. He made Steve into the Pietà for me.”
“Ssh. Cathy, listen to me. You’ve got to stay calm. You’ve got to be strong for me. We don’t have much time. The Michelangelo Killer wouldn’t have sent you that DVD unless he was sure that it wouldn’t hinder his plan, unless he was convinced that it wouldn’t lead us to where he was about to exhibit his Pietà-at least until it was too late for us to catch him.”
“St. Peter’s,” Cathy said, swallowing hard. “The real Pietà is in St. Peter’s.”
“I know, Cathy, but that’s too easy. I’ve got those bases covered, yes, but my gut tells me we’re going in the wrong direction. This guy is too smart for that. You’ve got to think of someplace else the killer might want to exhibit his Pietà.”
Cathy was quiet for a moment, her eyes locked with Markham ’s-the love she saw reflected in them giving her the strength to continue.
“The statue was originally located in the Chapel of St. Petronilla.”
“Yes. St. Petronilla. I read about it in your book-commissioned for the tomb of a French cardinal by the name of Billheres.”
“The chapel itself was initially an old Roman mausoleum that had been converted by the Christians on the first site of St. Peter’s-before the church was redesigned and rebuilt in the early sixteenth century by Donato Bramante, a famous Italian architect. The chapel in its Roman form no longer exists, and there is much debate as to what it originally looked like before Bramante got his hands on it. However, if you take into account how Michelangelo designed his Pietà for that space specifically, one thing is certain.”
“What?”
“If the Pietà is lit by natural light falling from above, as it would have been in the Old St. Peter’s, the Virgin’s face is cast in shadow, while the body of Christ is fully illuminated. The metaphorical implications are obvious-the light, the eternal life in the dying flesh of the Savior, etcetera. But you see, one has to ultimately remember that the statue was originally intended to be a funerary monument, not just a devotional image-although it is that, too. The overall design of the Pietà-the way the Virgin’s gaze and open arms direct our attention first to her Son, then to the mortal remains buried beneath her-in its original installation, in its original lighting, it demanded that we see the statue as Michelangelo intended, that is, a context in which the viewer not only reflects on Christ the Savior, but also on our own mortality, as well as that of Cardinal de Billheres.”
“So you think then that the light from above is the key to the overall effect of the statue?”
“Yes. If you look again at the pictures in my book, you will notice in the close-ups a fine line inscribed in the Virgin’s forehead. Seen at a distance under light from above, this line creates the illusion of a thin veil-an ingenious device, yes, but one that requires the trick of the light in order to be seen. Otherwise, it looks like just a line in her forehead.”
“So,” said Markham, “it’s not so much about the connection to St. Peter’s as it is to a chapel, perhaps even a mausoleum, where the light would hit the statue from above. That means then that the location itself is very important to the killer in terms of how it relates to the viewer’s overall experience of the sculpture. Like the killer’s Bacchus. Dodd’s topiary garden served as more than just a historical allusion, a re-contextualization of the statue’s original location. Yes, perhaps the killer exhibited his Bacchus in Dodd’s garden because it would subliminally mimic a Renaissance viewer’s experience of Michelangelo’s Bacchus-an experience that The Michelangelo Killer wanted to provide for us just as it was five hundred years ago.”
“I don’t know, Sam,” Cathy sighed, her eyes again welling with tears. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Ssh,” said Markham, kissing her forehead. “Know that I care about you, Cathy. Know that I’m going to take care of you, now. I won’t let anything hurt you.”
Cathy felt her heart melt, felt her eyes about to overflow in unexpected streams of joy. She wanted to tell Sam Markham she loved him, but a voice from across the room interrupted her.
“Sam?”
Markham and Cathy turned to see Bill Burrell standing in the doorway.
“I have to go now, Cathy,” Markham said, kissing her again. “I’ll call a nurse to see if you need-”
“Don’t leave me, Sam.”
“I have to, Cathy. You’ll be fine. The place is crawling with FBI agents. You just sleep for a while and I’ll be back before you know it.”
Cathy turned away.
“I’m going to catch this guy for you,” Markham said, turning her face back to him with a gentle finger on her chin. “I promise you that, Cathy. It’s personal now.”
Cathy smiled weakly-the sedatives dragging her down again.
“Thank you, Sam,” she whispered.
Markham laid his hand on her cheek. And when he saw that she had fallen back to sleep, he joined Bill Burrell out in the corridor.
“She’s doing all right?” the SAC asked.
“Yes. She’ll be fine.”
“We’ll take care of her now.”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the DVD? I want to see it.”
“Forensics has got it-analyzing the paper, the tape for trace evidence-but they won’t find anything, I’m sure. He’s too smart for that. Nonetheless, they’re going to dump it onto the computer to see if we can pick up anything through digital enhancement. They’ll dupe you a copy and you can take a look at it shortly.”
“Good. Now tell me you got something more for me, Sam.”
“Something’s going down this weekend-soon, maybe in the next couple of hours if it already hasn’t.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The DVD. It was meant to confuse us, yes, but it’s also a challenge from the killer-a dare to try and stop him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I am. But I need to get on the Internet-need to get on a computer right now here in the hospital.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain it to you on the way. But I’m telling you, Bill, I have a very bad feeling The Michelangelo Killer plans to unveil his next exhibit tonight. And if I can figure out where, we might be able to get there before he does.”
The Sculptor backed his big white van out of the carriage house, made a three-point turn, and drove slowly down the tree-lined dirt driveway. This was the only area of his family’s property that The Sculptor never maintained-thought it best to leave it grassy and overgrown in case any unwanted visitors happened to take a wrong turn off the paved driveway at the front of his house. About halfway down, he stopped the van and got out to move the large tree trunk that he usually left lying about for added protection. No need to replace it once he passed, however; for it was late, and he did not have to worry about any unwanted visitors at this hour.
In no time The Sculptor was back in his van and on his way. He emerged onto the darkened road through the break in the old stone wall that lined his family’s property. There were very few streetlights here, and no sidewalks; most of the homes in The Sculptor’s wealthy East Greenwich neighborhood were, like his own, set back off the road among the trees. Most of the lots were also enclosed by the fieldstone walls that weaved their way for miles through the surrounding woodlands. Indeed, as a boy, The Sculptor and his father had often followed them for hours-sometimes running into their neighbors and chatting with them along the way. But those days were gone, and The Sculptor and his father never spoke to their neighbors anymore.
The Sculptor reached the main road on which he would have to travel for some time. The overall distance was relatively short-and he would drive for the most part along the back roads just to be safe-but here, in the light, with the occasional car passing, he knew he was the most vulnerable, had the greatest chance of being spotted by the police. Such a risk could not be avoided, however; and thus The Sculptor was prepared with an adequate stockpile of loaded weapons under the passenger seat-his Sig Sauer.45 and the double barrel shotgun that had been in his family for years. He also had with him his tranquilizer guns-both the pistol and the sniper’s rifle he had used on Tommy Campbell-just in case he ran into some irresistible bargain material along the way.
Such a prospect, however-as well as his having to use the guns-The Sculptor knew was slim, for when it came right down to it, The Sculptor was not really worried that the police might ever pull him over-even in the daylight. Indeed, the police might actually want to avoid him, for one of the first things The Sculptor had done when he was experimenting with the women was to purchase some additional colors of Starfire auto paint that would enable him to duplicate exactly the Channel 9 Eye-Team logo on the side of his van.
Sam Markham sat at the doctor’s desk-the harsh, speedy pulse of the fluorescent lights battering his tired eyes as he typed the words “topiary garden” and “ Rhode Island ” into the Google search engine.
“But Sam,” said Bill Burrell, leaning over his shoulder, “what makes you so sure The Michelangelo Killer discovered the location for his Bacchus on the Internet?”
“Something the Reverend Bonetti said about their stolen Pietà-that they used to have a picture of it on their Web site. Just bear with me-I’m sort of working backward here.”
Markham clicked on a couple of links; then, unsatisfied, he typed the words “Earl Dodd” and garden Watch Hill without quotes-but still came up empty. Markham thought for a moment, then flipped through his copy of Slumbering in the Stone to the page on the history of Michelangelo’s Bacchus.
“ The Bacchus was originally commissioned by Cardinal Raffaele Riario,’” Markham read aloud. “‘Who rejected it upon its completion on the grounds that the statue was distasteful. We know that by 1506, the Bacchus had found its way into a collection of ancient Roman sculptures belonging Jacopo Galli, Michelangelo’s banker. There the Bacchus lived for some seventy years, weathering the elements at Cancelleria in Galli’s Roman garden, until it was bought by the Medici family and transferred to Florence in 1576.’ ”
Markham typed the words Roman garden and Rhode Island into the search engine.
“Bingo,” he said, and clicked on the sixth result from the top. The link brought him to a Web site titled, Homes of the Elite. A couple more clicks and Special Agent Sam Markham found exactly what he was looking for: a single photograph of Earl Dodd’s topiary garden-no name, no address, just a caption that simply read, “A lovely Roman garden in Rhode Island-overlooking the sea!”
“Jesus Christ,” said Burrell. “He must have driven around for weeks just trying to find the fucking place.”
“And must have thought it nothing short of divine providence when he learned that the owner of his Roman garden was in finance like Jacopo Galli-wouldn’t have settled for anyplace else, I suspect. It’s why he went through so much trouble to display the statue there.”
Markham flipped to Cathy’s chapter on the Rome Pietà. He skimmed, then read aloud, “‘In such a fashion, with the body of Christ illuminated by the natural light falling from above, the Pietà in its original installation must have seemed to the visitors at the Chapel of St. Petronilla as physically accessible yet at the same time untouchable; material yet undoubtedly supernatural-like the Savior himself, corporal yet divine.’“
“You’re searching like he would,” said Burrell. “You’re using Hildebrant’s words to find your destination like you think he did.”
“The light,” whispered Markham, typing. “It has to do with the light.”
Natural light falling above chapel Rhode Island.
Nothing.
Light above chapel Rhode Island.
Nothing.
Chapel Rhode Island.
Nothing-too many.
Markham backtracked through Cathy’s section on the Rome Pietà-his finger tracing along the text like a lie detector needle.
The Pietà is thus an expressive and decorous funerary monument, but at the same time perhaps the greatest devotional image ever created: a private memorial built for one man, but a public donation of faith intended for all of mankind.
“But you see,” Cathy said in Markham ’s mind. “One has to ultimately remember that the Pietà was originally intended to be a funerary monument, not just a devotional image.”
Markham typed, Rhode Island funerary monument private memorial public.
Nothing.
Funerary, Markham thought frantically. Odd word.
Impulsively, he changed his search criteria to, Rhode Island cemetery monument memorial public faith.
Markham clicked on the first of his search results. What he saw next made his breath stop in his throat.
The first photograph was an exterior shot of a small, circular structure that appeared to be built from marble, and that reminded Markham of the columned temples of Ancient Rome. The columns themselves were situated around an interior wall, through which there appeared to be only a single entrance. Beneath the photograph was the caption:
The Temple of Divine Spirit is located at the heart of Echo Point Cemetery. Its circular design-inspired by the “round” Temple of Hercules in Rome -is intended to represent an all-inclusive memorial for those who have passed on, as well as a monument to those who have been left behind. It is a place of prayer and contemplation open to the public and people of all faiths. On your next trip to Echo Point Cemetery, please feel free to remember your loved ones in the Temple of Divine Spirit.
Beneath this text was another photograph-this one of the temple’s interior.
Markham did not bother to read the accompanying caption.
No. The single shaft of sunlight streaming down from the oculus in the temple’s ceiling told him everything he needed to know.
As Sam Markham and Bill Burrell scrambled to gather their agents, as Rachel Sullivan frantically alerted both the local and state police to get their asses over to the remote Echo Point Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, The Sculptor was already installing his Pietà under cover of darkness. The rain had stopped earlier that evening, but the skies remained cloudy-the air humid enough to break The Sculptor’s face into sweat beneath his night vision goggles. The distance he needed to carry his Pietà was much shorter than the distance he’d carried his Bacchus a few weeks earlier-a straight shot of only about twenty-five feet from the back of his van. But his Pietà was much heavier than his Bacchus-was much more awkward and difficult for the muscular Sculptor to maneuver due to the delicacy of the painted starched robes. However, once he managed to carefully load the statue onto a dolly that he constructed over a year ago specifically for this purpose, The Sculptor ultimately had no trouble dragging his Pietà down the flagstone path and up the steps into the Temple of Divine Spirit.
The Sculptor methodically unloaded his Pietà into place directly beneath the temple’s oculus-that opening in the ceiling which The Sculptor knew would mimic perfectly the original visual dynamic in the catacomb which the Christians had renamed the Chapel of St. Petronilla. The “veil effect” he had created in the Virgin’s forehead with a strand of tightly tied fishing line was breathtaking, but The Sculptor paused only briefly to admire his work-dared to stand only for a minute in the cavernous temple with his night vision goggles and ogle over the aesthetic divinity created by the downcast, cloud-filtered moonlight.
Yes, the nameless material he had harvested from the streets of South Providence, the whore’s head that he had chosen to be his Virgin’s, had turned out perfectly-her youthful visage sad but serene, full of loving and longing but at the same time at peace with the knowledge that her Son will soon triumph over death. And the RounDaWay17 material had turned out brilliantly, too; it was perfectly proportioned to the Virgin’s body, and, as seen through the night vision goggles, reflected as planned the supernatural luminescence of the falling moonlight-just as Dr. Hildy described in her book.
Oh yes, The Sculptor could stand there gazing upon his Pietà all night, but The Sculptor knew that that would be foolish, or at the very least would be a waste of time.
As The Sculptor had hoped, in addition to their regular duties, the local and state police-at the FBI’s request-had been spread out on stakeouts of churches all over Rhode Island -none of which happened to be near Echo Point Cemetery. And so The Sculptor took his time gathering his things back into the van entirely unaware that an FBI agent named Sam Markham had discovered the location for his latest exhibition. Back in the driver’s seat, The Sculptor relaxed for a moment before turning the key in the ignition-was just about to shift into drive when the reflection of flashing blue lights on the headstones caught him completely by surprise.
Bad luck, he said to himself. Someone must have called the police.
His heart all at once beating fast, The Sculptor removed his night vision goggles-knew the approaching headlights would temporarily blind him if he didn’t-and reached under the passenger’s seat. The Sculptor’s fingers immediately closed around his Sig Sauer.45, and when he again looked out the windshield, he could see the two police cars winding their way among the headstones from the opposite side of the cemetery.
Only two, The Sculptor thought. But he knew instinctively that more would follow-knew instinctively that he had only one chance.
Yes, The Sculptor said to himself. Only one chance to take them by surprise then get out of here.
The Sculptor climbed out the passenger door and quickly made his way around to the back of the temple, darting behind the headstones as he backtracked his way toward the road. The Channel 9 Eye-Team logo would be the bait-would hopefully lure the policemen out of their cars and thus buy him enough time to sneak up behind them and put a bullet in their heads. The Sculptor hid himself behind a nearby tree and removed a black ski mask from his back pocket, pulling it tightly over his bald head, his sweaty face.
Then he waited.
And soon, just as he expected, the two Exeter police cars-locals, thankfully-pulled up in front of the temple. The Sculptor could see from the flashes of light off the van, off the white marble of the temple and surrounding headstones, that each car held only one officer.
That was fortunate.
“You guys can’t be here,” he heard one of them shout upon emerging from his car. And as the two officers approached the van-their guns not even drawn-The Sculptor was upon them before they even had a chance to turn around.
As was the case when he went shopping for his material with the tranquilizer guns, The Sculptor did not pause when he shot them. However, instead of aiming for their necks, he pointed the red dot from his laser sight just underneath their police hats-one silenced bullet in each of their heads, then two more once they hit the ground just to be safe.
The Sculptor hopped back into his van and drove quickly away from the scene. He did not mourn the fact that he had just wasted good material or whether or not the police dash-cams had recorded the whole event. His face was covered, of course, and he could always repaint the van. He would have it safely hidden away again in the carriage house before the police had time to review the video. And so The Sculptor opted to take his chances on the highway rather than risk being cornered by the police on the back country roads. He had just kicked the van up to sixty-five when he saw the state police cars and the black FBI vehicles speeding past him down Route 95-in the opposite direction, toward the Echo Point Cemetery exit.
The Sculptor smiled. He had no way of knowing, however, that Sam Markham and Bill Burrell saw him, too-had no idea that they both cursed aloud when they spotted the Channel 9 Eye-Team van whizzing past, both of them furious at the local cop who had rolled this time.
“Fucking vultures,” the SAC grunted.
Oh yes, if The Sculptor had heard that little comment, he most certainly would have giggled.
Indeed, many of the local and state authorities would see The Sculptor’s Eye-Team van that night, but just as The Sculptor had hoped when he first painted the logo on its sides, their only wish had been to avoid it.