In yet one more, he’d started to write his autobiography. He’d titled it:
The Artist
The Gifted Life of Jonathan Harper Ebersole
Though he’d yet to reach beyond his own childhood, he’d written his own foreword.
I was born to create art, to realize my vision with pigment and brush. This is both my gift, and my curse. To be filled with this vision, this talent, this purpose, demands sacrifice, even suffering.
Every true artist faces the brutality of rejection, the cruelty of criticism. And worse than these, more brutal, more cruel, apathy.
How many of the gifted, through the ages, have been driven to suicide by the apathetic, by those who blithely consider themselves lovers of art?
While I sacrificed, while I suffered, while the blades of apathy cut deep, I determined this would not be my fate.
I would live. I would paint. I would humble those who turned their backs on my gift.
Some will condemn my methods, but they are less than nothing to me. Those who truly understand greatness know the power of art supersedes all else.
With my gift, with my art, I have bestowed immortality on those who were no one. Their life beats its pulse in the series I callThe New Master Emerges.
While my greatest works to date, these will not be the last. In the following pages, I will take you on the journey of a life dedicated, above all else, to the god of art.
When, at last, Roarke drove home, she sent memos to Reo, Mira, Whitney.
“I need Mira to observe, but right now, I’m coming down solid on legally sane. Crazy, oh, fuck yeah, but not over the legal line. He knows right from wrong, he just doesn’t give a damn. He used an alias on a cash receipt. His actions throughout? Carefully, systematically planned. He chose LCs because he considers them no one, and easy to lure, and he considers himself above the law. He sought to humble—his words—people who’d said no to him.”
“I’d lay a healthy wager he’s rarely heard the wordno.”
“You’d win that bet.” Eve scrubbed her hands over her face. “I get some satisfaction at knowing he’ll spend the night in a cell, waiting for someone to ride to his rescue. Next step’s tomorrow. I need verification from the lab on the drug, on the fibers from the back of the AT, on the victims’ clothes.”
Now she rubbed the tension in the back of her neck.
“I think he kept their clothes to use later.”
“To use?”
“Yeah. Costumes. Besides the ones he had made, he had other stuff. The shawl-type things, hats, fake jewelry, a couple of fancy dresses, andall that. We saw some of it in his other paintings around the house, in the studio.”
“And in those works, those previous works, there was at least a dull glimmer of talent.”
“Pedestrian.”
“Yes, at best. But the ones he killed for? No glimmer at all.”
He drove through the gates.
“You were right about the costumes—the paintings he planned to copy with them. It’s all written out.”
“Yet you worry. You have all the evidence, you have evidence in his own words. He held a weapon—such as it was—to his intended victim’s throat, then tried to attack you with it. And yet you worry.”
“Yeah, I do.” She got out of the car, walked to the door with him. “He’ll have money, influence, and power behind him. Hell, surrounding him. If you read his data, it’s clear he’s never done a single hard day’s work in his life, never earned his own way on anything.”
She looked over at him as she walked into the house. “He grew up exactly the opposite of us. Pampered, indulged, spoiled. Plenty of others are, and don’t turn into psychopaths, but it’s a factor in his pathology.”
He slid an arm around her waist as they started up the stairs. “You worry he’ll wiggle out on an insanity defense?”
“Some, yeah, but I’d take it. He’ll still be locked up. As plush as the Harpers could manage, but locked up. Nobody else dies. It wouldn’t be just, and still, I’d take it. I worry because I know they’ll throw everything they’ve got at getting him out, getting him off.”
