We paint each other’s toenails. The chain-link fence? The goddamn desert? Forget about it. This is my home, no matter what you think. I own the Rooster. John paid for it.”
Saying his name she quaked as if an old, unendurable torment was about to erupt. She leaned forward and, one arm moving jerkily like a string puppet’s, she began smashing teacups on the tray with her fist.
Shards flew. When she stopped her hand was bleeding profusely. She put it in her lap and let it bleed.
“On your way, bud,” Eileen said to Peter. “Would you mind asking Lourdes to come in? I think it may be time for my meds.”
While he was waiting at the Las Vegas airport for his flight to Houston, delayed an hour and a half because of a storm out of the Gulf of Mexico, Peter composed a long e-mail to Echo, concluding with: So far I can’t prove anything. There’s at least two more of them I need to see, so I’m on my way to Texas. But I want you to get off the island now. No good-byes, don’t bother to pack. Go to my Uncle Charlie’s in Brookline. 3074 East Mather. Wait for me there, I’ll only be a couple of days.
By the time he boarded his flight to Houston, there still was no acknowledgment from Echo. It was six thirty-six P.M. on the East Coast.
John Ransome was still working in his aerie studio and Echo was taking a shower when the Woman in Black walked into Echo’s bedroom without a knock and had a look around. Art books heaped on the writing desk. The blouse and skirt and pearls she’d laid out for a leisurely dinner with Ransome. Her silver rosary, her Bible, her laptop. There was an e-mail message on the screen from Rosemay, apparently only half-read. Taja scrolled past it to another e-mail from a girl whom she knew had been Echo’s college roommate. She skipped that one too and came to Peter O’Neill’s most recent message.
This one Taja read carefully. Obviously Echo hadn’t seen it, or she wouldn’t have been humming so contentedly in the slow-running shower, washing her hair.
Taja deleted the message. But of course if Peter didn’t hear from Echo soon, he’d just send another, more urgent e-mail. The weather was decent for now, the Wi-Fi signal steady.
She figured she had four or five minutes, at least, to disable the laptop skillfully enough so that Echo wouldn’t catch on that it had been sabotaged.
But Peter O’Neill was the real problem— just as she had suspected and conveyed to John Ransome in the beginning, when Ransome was considering Echo as his next subject.
No matter how he rated as a detective, he wasn’t going to learn anything useful in Texas. Taja could be certain of that.
And she had a good idea of where he would show up during the next forty-eight hours.
TEN
“Eventually they would have reconstructed her face,” the late Nan McLaren’s aunt Elisa said to Peter. “The plastic surgery group is the best in Houston. World-renowned, in fact.”
He was sitting with the aging socialite, who still retained a certain gleam that diet and exercise afforded septuagenarians, in the or-angerie of a very large estate home in Sherwood Forest. There was a slow drip of rain from two big magnolias outside that were strung with tiny twinkling holiday lights. The woman had finished a brandy and soda and wanted another; she signaled the black houseboy tending bar. Peter declined another ginger ale.
“Of course Nan would never have looked the same. What was indefinable yet unique about her youthful beauty—gone forever. Her nose demolished; facial bones not just broken but shattered. Such unexpected cruelty, so deadly to the soul, destroyed her optimism, her innocent ecstasy and joie de vivre. If you’re familiar with the portraits that John Ransome painted, you know the Nan I’m speaking of.”
“I saw them on the Internet.”
“I only wish the family owned one. I understand all of his work has increased tremendously in value in the past few years.” Elisa sighed and shifted the weight of the bichon frise dog on her lap. She stared at a recessed gas log fire in one angle of the octagonal garden room. “Who would have thought that a single, unexpected blow from a man’s fist could do such terrible damage?”
“In New York they’re called ‘sly-rappers,'” Peter said. “Sometimes they use a brick, or wear brass knuckles. They come up behind their intended victims, usually on a crowded sidewalk, tap them on a shoulder. And when they turn, totally defenseless, to see who’s there—”
“Is it always a woman?”
“In my experience. Young and beautiful, like Nan was.”
“Dreadful.”
“I understand Houston PD didn’t get anywhere trying to find the perp.”
“‘Perp?’ Yes, that’s how they kept referring to him. But it happened so quickly; there were only a couple of witnesses, and he disappeared while Nan was bleeding there on the sidewalk.” She reached up for the drink that the houseboy brought her. “Her skull was fractured when she fell. She didn’t regain consciousness for more than a week.” Elisa looked at Peter while the bichon friese eagerly lapped at the brimming drink she held on one knee. “But you haven’t explained why the New York police department is interested in Nan’s case.”
“I can’t say at this time, I’m sorry. Could you tell me when Nan started doing heroin?”
“Between, I think, her third and fourth surgeries. What she really needed was therapy, but she stopped seeing her psychiatrist when she took up with a rather dubious young man. He, I’m sure, was the one who— what is the expression? Got her hooked.”
“Calvin Cotrona. A few busts, petty stuff. Yeah, he was a user.”
Elisa took her brandy and soda away from the white dog with the large ruff of a head; he scolded her with a sharp bark. “Can’t give him any more,” she explained to Peter. “He becomes obstreperous, and pees on the Aubusson. Rather like my third husband, who couldn’t hold his liquor either. Quiet down, Richelieu, or mommy will become deeply annoyed.” She studied Peter again. ‘You seem to know so much about Nan’s tragedy and how she died. What is it you hoped to learn from me, Detective?”
Peter rubbed tired eyes. “I wanted to know if Nan saw or heard from John Ransome once she’d finished posing for him.”
“Not to my knowledge. After she returned to Houston she was quite blue and unsociable for many months. I suspected at the time she was infatuated with the man. But I never asked. Is it important?” Elisa raised her glass but didn’t drink; her hand trembled. She looked startled. “But you can’t mean—you can’t be thinking—”
“Mrs. McLaren, I’ve talked to two of Ransome’s other models in the past few weeks. Both were disfigured. A knife in one case, sulphuric acid in the other. In a day or two, with luck, I’ll be talking to another of the Ransome women, Valerie Angelus. And I hope to God that nothing has happened to her face because that’s stretching coincidence way too far. And already it’s scaring the hell out of me.”
In his room at a Motel 6 near Houston’s major airport, named for one of the U.S. presidents who had bloomed and thrived where a stink of corruption was part of the land, Peter called his Uncle Charlie in Brookline, Massachusetts. Thirty-six hours had passed since he’d e-mailed Echo from Vegas, but she hadn’t showed up there. He tried Rosemay in New York; she hadn’t heard from Echo either. He sent another e-mail that didn’t go through. In exasperation he tried leaving a message on her pager, but it was turned off.
Frustrated, he stretched out on the bed with a cold washcloth over his eyes. Traveling always gave him a queasy stomach and a headache. He chewed a Pepcid and tried to convince himself he had nothing to seriously worry about. The other Ransome women he knew of or had already interviewed had been attacked months after their commitments to the artist, and presumably their love affairs, were over.
Violent psychopaths had consistent profiles. Pete couldn’t see the urbane Mr. Ransome as a part-time stalker and slasher, no matter what the full moon could do to potentially unstable psyches. But there was another breed, and not so rare according to his readings of case studies in psychopathology, who, insulated by wealth and position and perverse beyond human ken, would pay handsomely to have others gratify their sick, secret urges.
There was no label he could pin on John Ransome yet. But the notion that Ransome had spent several weeks already carefully and unhurriedly manipulating Echo, first to seduce and finally to destroy her, detonated the fast-food meal that had been sitting undigested in his stomach like a bomb. He went into the bathroom to throw up, afterward sat on the floor exhausting himself in a helpless rage. Feeling Echo on his skin, allure of a supple body, her creases and small breast buds and tempting, half-awake eyes. Thinking of her desire to make love to him at the cottage in Bedford and his stiff-necked refusal of her. A defining instance of false pride that might have sent his life careering off in a direction he’d never intended it to go.