“Get your filthy, disgusting hands off me!”
“I washed up. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law—”
Jonathan looked back at Eve with those eyes—those eyes that weren’t quite right.
“My family will ruin you. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
“I’ve got all the ideas.”
He bared his teeth and said, “Lawyer.”
“Yeah.” Eve nodded as Jenkinson and Reineke hauled him out. “I knew that was coming. Step-by-step. Here’s the next. Peabody, get Aaron’s statement, then arrange for his transportation home or wherever he wants to go.”
“Can I keep the money? He gave me a thousand, and… shit, why did I tell you that?” Aaron pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I think I’m in shock.”
“It’s helpful you did, and I’ll see what I can do. Everybody else? Seal up. And let’s take this place apart. Paintings, costumes, barbiturates, wire, glue, pigments. Bag ’em all. EDD, get into the e’s, find travel, correspondence, anything that applies. We’ve got airtight, but let’s put a big, shiny bow around it.”
She took a field kit from McNab, sealed up.
She walked to a draped canvas, uncovered it.
She thought the colors were close to the portrait she’d studied, but without the light that sort of hit the senses. As far as the face of the girl, to her eye it didn’t come near the same universe as the original, and not much closer to Leesa Culver.
“I’m no art expert, but I’m pretty sure I know crap when I see it.”
After handing Aaron his glass of wine, Roarke walked over, stood beside Eve to study.
“He killed to do this,” Roarke murmured. “It’s bollocks, absolute bollocks.”
“Meaning, in this case, crap?”
“Complete and utter crap.” Since his hands were sealed, he undraped another, and shook his head at Jonathan’s version ofThe Blue Boy. “Quite obviously, his ego far exceeds his talent. He has no feel for human expression.”
Eve dragged off the third drape. “He didn’t get very far on this one, of Chablis.”
“But Christ Jesus, what’s done is poorly done. Look at the brushstrokes, the proportions, how clumsily he’s painted her hands.”
She didn’t have to look at Roarke to see the anger, but she looked anyway. “It’s pissing you off.”
“Bloody well right it is.”
Roarke’s eyes had gone to ice-cold lasers with furious heat burning just behind.
“He killed three people, bastardized great works of art. He took their lives to feed his inflated sense of importance when he’s less than an amateur. He had every advantage, every advantage in the world from the time he drew his first breath. And he chooses to do this?”
“Would it matter if he’d painted masterpieces here? Would that change the fact he killed to do it?”
She watched Roarke take a calming breath.
“Of course not. No. But it somehow grinds down to my soul he’s not just a monster, and a spoiled git with it, but a talentless one who insists he’s gifted. Who’s murdered, and would have continued to, because he thinks that will bring him the accolades he deserves.”
She was strict and careful on the job, but she gave Roarke’s hand a quick squeeze. “That’s how we’re going to put him away. That, as much as rock-solid evidence, is why he’s going to spend the rest of his life in a cage.
“And,” she added with a glance back at where Peabody spoke with a visibly shaken Aaron, “you helped save a life tonight. His, and however many Ebersole planned for after him. Also? He won’t be finishing these crappy bollocks paintings.”
“I suppose that’s something.”
“Feeney and McNab can handle the e’s, for now anyway. Maybe you can hunt up any other costumes. You’d recognize the paintings he cribbed from quicker than any of us.
