He drew a long curl of the wig down her left shoulder, added the props, set the angle of her arms, her hands.
“Look straight at me,” he told her as he began mixing the paint on the palette. “The slightest smile. No, a little less. There, that’s fine.”
To his pleasure, she held the pose very well. Better, in fact, than either of the others. When she whined for food, he buried his impatience and gave her cheese and flatbread, a little more wine.
And with that got another full hour.
Though he could have worked on, he knew timing mattered. So a last glass of wine, an invitation to sit and relax.
When he squeezed life out of her unconscious body, he felt that thrill, that indescribable power pour into him.
He used it to put her back in the pose with wire and glue. He’d planned to put her on a board, like the second, but he’d discovered that method was cumbersome.
And since it wasn’t a full-length, he dispensed with it.
He drove her back across town, then carried her inside the useless gate of a tiny courtyard of a dignified brownstone.
Working in silence, he propped her against a wall of the house, took time to fluff at the shawl, the white collar.
Then, still riding on the thrill, he drove home to paint.
Chapter Fourteen
When she finally slept, Eve slept deep.
As night slid slowly toward morning, she dreamed.
In the dream and alone, Eve walked into a gallery through air absolutely still, like a breath held. On the white, white walls, paintings hung in ornate gold frames. But they all blurred, their subjects indistinct, as if someone had wiped their hands over the canvases before the paint could dry.
She saw only vague shapes and smeared colors. She heard only the sound of her own bootsteps, echoing as she crossed the white floors.
Light flooded the spaces she walked. It seemed to soak the large rooms joined together by wide, open archways.
Like a museum empty of life.
She passed from one room to another, unsure what she was seeing or why.
She caught a glimpse of a window, wide and crystal clear. And through it, the lights and movement of New York at night streamed. On the sidewalk, LCs, almost like paintings themselves in their bold colors,strutted and strolled. The johns and janes who wanted them took their pick.
And still she heard no sound, not the street chatter, not the lives being raucously lived, not the traffic cruising by.
Only her own bootsteps echoing as she walked alone in the empty space, over pristine white floors inside pristine white walls. Then she turned toward a room as dark as the others were light.
When she stepped through, the lights sprang on, so sudden and bright, it shocked the eyes. She saw the portraits on the facing wall.
She knew them now, the Girl with the pearl, the headscarf, the Boy all in blue with ribbons on his shoes and a feathered hat in his hand. But unlike the paintings she’d studied on-screen, these had the faces of the victims.
Is this how he saw them? she wondered. Is this how he painted them?
As she watched, Leesa’s lips twisted into something between a sneer and a pout.
“I had plans,” she told Eve. “I was going to be a top level and live as large as it gets. Larger! Then he killed me, and now I’m stuck up here wearing this stupid outfit.”
“It blows hard,” Eve agreed. “Tell me something I don’t know. Or I guess it’s tell me something I haven’t figured out I know.”
“You’re the damn cop. I was just trying to make some easy money. He picked me because I was better than the rest of them on the block.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Inside the elaborate frame, Bobby turned to her. “He picked you because you fit the outfit and your face was close enough to some other dead girl.”
