Eve sat back on her heels. “So Chablis came to the big city—she’s been here for seven years—and ends up just as dead as the woman who painted herself in this outfit a few centuries ago.”
She turned back to Roarke. “How about the face? Is it close to the original?”
“The skin tone’s deeper, but the features? It’s fairly close, yes, particularly the mouth. Here.”
Since he’d already brought up the image, he turned the screen of his PPC so she could see.
“Yeah, yeah, the shape of the face, the mouth. Nose is wrong, and the skin tone. He has to settle on some points.”
“Sir? The sprinkler system’s timed to run from three-thirty to four every morning.”
“Okay, good. She’s not wet, but the dress, where it’s laying on the ground? It’s damp, so the body was placed here after four.” She eased a hand behind the body. “Dry on the back, and the ground’s pretty dry now. What time was the nine-one-one?”
“We got the call at oh-six-forty-five, Lieutenant.”
“All right. Probably put her here before five. Between four-thirty and five. Quiet neighborhood’s going to be quiet.”
McNab pranced out in his red-and-blue-checked baggies, long tail of red-tipped blond hair swinging. “Security system went down at oh-four-thirty-six, Dallas. We’ve got a fifteen-minute jam. It’s a decent system. Not one of yours,” he said to Roarke.
“No, not one of mine.”
“He needed a decent jammer to interrupt the feed for fifteen.”
“He can afford decent. So it took him one hour and nineteen minutes after he strangled her to glue, wire, transport.” She turned back to the body. “He wouldn’t rush it. He’s too precise. Still, she’s dead, so how long would it take? Forty-five, maybe fifty minutes? Then he needs to load her into the car. Drive here, and you’ve got to take a few minutes, check for lights, movement, insomniacs before you park—double-park because there’s cars on the curb—then jam the feed before you get her out, carry her through the little gate.
“He lives downtown. He could live more Midtown East Side, but… New York’s loaded with art, but what areas do you associate with art first?”
“The Village,” Roarke said, “SoHo, Tribeca.”
“That’s exactly right. If he doesn’t live there, he has a studio there, in the heart of it. Private, no neighbors in the building, with a garage. McNab, you just closed one, right?”
He rubbed his hands together. “A big, fat, juicy one.”
“Check with Feeney, and if he clears it, you could start running a search for a single-occupancy building with garage. Upscale, nothing low-rent.”
“Got you.”
“I don’t see him sharing a building, but filter in a multiple occupancy with a unit with a private elevator to a garage. I don’t want to miss him by keeping the search too narrow.”
“Commercial buildings?”
“Not yet. If we crap out on this, we’ll try that.”
“I can run a parallel auto-search on commercial without pulling time from the primary.”
“You’re the e-geek, your call.”
She turned to Peabody as her partner came out. “She’s got to get her kids up in about fifteen.”
“Contact the morgue, give them the situation with minors on-site. Then tag the sweepers. I need a few more minutes with the body. We need to bag the left arm holding the board thing and the brushes.”
She crouched down to work. “The paint’s dry, and the brushes look new. We may be able to trace those. He’d need the paint dry enough so it wouldn’t run or drip because of the angle of the board. The board, palette, whatever, looks new, too. No other signs of paint on it, no smears, no drops, no wear.”
When she’d finished with the body, she stepped back, closed the shield.
“Morgue’s on the way, sweepers’re tagged.”
“Good. She had a place on Avenue B. We’ll go check it out. We have to run evidence to the lab. She had some trace—fabric threads—under her nail.”
