Portrait one
Name:
Date:
Circumstances:
Portrait two
Name:
Date:
Circumstances:
Portrait three
Name:
Date:
Circumstances:
Portrait four
Name:
Date:
Circumstances:
I glance around to make sure nobody is looking over my shoulder. If someone asks, I’ll just say I’m writing a book or something. I bet writers look up all kinds of weird stuff on theinternet. Probably not when they’ve been witness to an actual murder just days before, but you know.
The computer screen finally wakes up, so I type in the temporary-log-in details while I chew on the end of my pen and think about where to begin. I decide to print off some decent-quality pictures of The Four for my murder board first. That way if I find any details about the BBK murders, I can try to compare the posing, if there was any—the old sketches yesterday didn’t suggest much. I know it’s a long shot, but I’m certain I’m on the right track—I just need to think like a psychopath.
I find some decent jpeg files from the Heywood Gallery’s website and send them to print, going through the faff of topping up a temporary account to pay. I collect them, and the woman in the portrait on top catches my eye. It’s the final one in the series, and she seems slightly more defiant than the others, her black hair painted with golden streaks from the burst of light behind her. Even though the fear in her eyes is obvious, there’s something about the tilt of her head and the curl of her lip that suggests she is full of disdain for the painter. I slip the pictures into my notebook and open an internet browser with renewed determination.
I Google The Four and go to their Wikipedia page first, scrolling down to the tab labeled “Provenance.” Maybe if I have an idea of where the paintings have been I can find some clues that way. I skim through the details I already know—found with a fifth painting and the artist’s dead body—and instead focus on the date and the location of where they were found: 18th July 1911. New York City.
Okay. Let’s start there.
I type “New York newspapers 1911” into Google and scroll until I find a website I can browse for free. I click through and a scanned image of a paper calledThe Tribuneloads on the screen. The front page is crammed with tiny boxes and columns that separate the stories, and it’s dominated by a hand-drawn depiction of two firemen in old-timey uniforms, saving a child from a burning building. I close my eyes. There must be hundreds of stories here alone. I consult my notes from yesterday, and that allows me to narrow the search to the short period before the paintings and artist’s body were found. I skim over front pages of newspapers calledThe SunandThe Evening World, but so many of the stories have bold, sensationalized headlines that the process is a slow one.
It’s almost half an hour before I find something that looks promising. I zoom in and read the article, my heart rate increasing as I do.
MUTILATED BODY FOUND IN RENOVATION SITE
The shouts of construction workers on the Lower East Side drew the attention of a shopkeeper on St.Mark’s Place early yesterday morning. The workers were shocked to find the mutilated corpse of a prostitute occupying the otherwise empty building. Police have removed the body, which they described as “bound and bled,” to the county morgue to await identification.
Bound and bled. BBK. This has to be the first murder, because the nickname isn’t there yet. You only get a nickname when you’ve done something more than once. I check the date against the dates of BBK’s murders I found yesterday and add it to the table—Portrait 1, July3, 1911.
Buoyed by this horrendous story, I keep going and find a similar entry that says a murder occurred on July10, followed by two more, on the 14th and the 17th. I fill in each date part of the table diligently, but the circumstances are all the same. Vulnerable women found murdered in abandoned buildings. There are no real details, and no connections made between the victims, but just a quick scroll through the newspaper archive paints a picture of the Lower East Side in the same light as the Wild West. The city was rife with crime, and murder was not an uncommon occurrence. I lean back in my chair. The women are all unidentified so far. What if, just like the artist, no one ever claimed their bodies?
I might never be able to find out who they were.
I hit print on the four articles and collect them, then stretch my shoulders before I sit back down. Four murders with the same MO, within exactly two weeks. But what if there are more than four? If there were, then I’ve been barking up the wrong tree, and as much as I hate that thought, I have to check.
I spend another half hour scrolling through articles that go way past the end of July and cannot find another headline that fits. Okay, that seems like progress. I can speculate that the artist completed The Four on July17, when he committed his last murder, then he was found the next day. I sit back, pleased withmy findings, until I realize all I’ve done is make a list of dates. I write out a quick list of the things the victims seem to have in common—their apparent vulnerability, the similar locations where they were found—and stare at the sparse results.
