T. Parker - Laguna Heat

Three microscopes were set up on the table, each with the specimen slides already inserted. Robbins checked the first, then motioned Shephard to do the same. “Some you’ve seen, some you haven’t,” he said, stepping away.

Shephard gazed into the eyepiece at the rich blue slab under the glass. Robbins’s voice came from behind him, patient but intense.

“Recognize it?”

“Cobalt.”

“Right, or almost right. I got cobalt when I did the scan the day you were here, and the reading was so high I let it slide. Shouldn’t have. What you’re looking at is a cluster of cobalt particles suspended in a base of oil. Try the next one, dick.”

Shephard moved to his right. The color that hit him as he bent to the eyepiece was as rich as the blue, but brighter. He hadn’t seen such a flagrant yellow since he stared at the sun once as a boy, then closed his eyelids and viewed it through his own skin.

“What we have here is the element cadmium. I found it connected to a hair on that dead dog’s neck. Routine scan, you know, but that yellow burned my eyes like it’s burning yours right now. You don’t find cadmium very often, about as often as you find cobalt or a beautiful woman who doesn’t know it. So I ran it through the scanner slow and got the same oil trace I found in with the cobalt. Not that it meant shit to me at the time.”

In the last microscope Shephard found the same truncated branch — camel hair — that he had seen a week ago. It was magnified to show the mounds of tocopherol acetate.

“Here’s the skinny,” Robbins said as Shephard worked the focus and continued to study the hair. “Last week you bring me a handful of gray hair from the fist of a dead man. I named it killer’s hair. And attached to that hair is a fleck of cobalt you don’t find a helluva lot these days. And a piece of hair from an animal that doesn’t even grow on this continent. A few days later more hair from the same guy. Both the camel hair and the human hair conditioned with the same stuff. This time there’s a piece of cadmium in the hair of the dog this guy has choked.”

Robbins threw off his lab smock and headed for the door. Shephard followed him to a small alcove filled with coffee and junk food machines. Robbins was silent while his coffee “brewed”; then he sipped and eyed Shephard over the cup.

“So I go home after the cadmium day and I’m halfway through a martini — a big one — and my wife asks what I did. It isn’t easy to explain what I do. But I was feeling good, so I told her about the cobalt and the cadmium and the camel’s hair dented in the middle. All of it. And she smiles and says, Robbins, you’re a dummy sometimes. All it took was a little art back in college to know that cobalt and cadmium are used in oil paints and camel hair brushes are what you put them on the canvas with.”

Robbins treated Shephard to coffee, light, then slurped loudly from his own cup and continued.

“I said that’s great, Carole, but you don’t condition paintbrushes. She tells me sorry, but that’s exactly what a serious painter does. They wash their brushes in shampoo and condition them with the best stuff they can afford. It keeps the filaments clean and supple. And when I pictured that camel’s hair again, I saw that we were just looking at the wrong end when we said it wasn’t from a hairbrush. The straight end goes into the metal that holds it in place with the others. That’s why it’s dented halfway — from the metal. That explains the oil base, too. Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow. I called a local art house this afternoon and they sell it all the time.”

Robbins trailed slowly back toward the lab, his head bent to the coffee. Inside he shut the door and looked at Shephard with a smile. “You got a killer who paints. An artist. Only in Laguna, young dick. Weird shit.”

An hour later Shephard entered the Laguna Art Mart with a stack of Identikit sketches in his hand. The clerk was a sweet young man who bore some resemblance to Elvis Costello, but with a pot belly. His name was Frank and he took the Identikit sketch, holding it close to his plastic-rimmed sunglasses.

“Oh God no,” he said quickly. “I’m sure I didn’t sell any Winsor and Newtons.”

“Winsor and Newtons?”

“Paint,” he said flatly. “If you want paint with real cobalt and real cadmium the only thing I sell is Winsor and Newtons. The best. Five ninety-five big tube three ninety-five small.” Shephard wondered if Frank had dropped commas from his vocabulary. “Aisle one,” Frank said in a blur, then threw back his head and went to help another young man struggling with a large picture frame.

Shephard found the paint tubes locked in a case on aisle one. He noted that Frank was correct in his prices. Leaning up to the glass, he spotted both Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Yellow among the uniform tubes. On the other side of the aisle were the paintbrushes. The camel hair brushes were moderate in price and came in a wide selection of shapes, sizes, and lengths.

As Shephard worked his way through the store, showing the Identikit to the clerks, he decided that the Art Mart must be the largest employer in the city. A toothy blond girl said he looked familiar but that she probably would have remembered because you have to unlock the case to sell Winsor and Newtons, and so far as she knew she hadn’t. A wide and serious woman with a head of healthy brown curls told Shephard that she had sold so many Winsor and Newtons in the last week that she couldn’t remember them all.

“Can you remember who bought them?” he asked earnestly.

“Come on, man,” she said. “I’m an artist, not a clerk. A face is a face.”

A red-headed boy with bright green eyes studied the Identikit sketch and pursed his lips grimly, as if wondering whether or not he should take a bet. He finally decided no and told Shephard to try Ella’s Corner because the best artists in town didn’t shop Laguna Art Mart anyway.

An hour later he merged onto Coast Highway and the slow knot of tourist traffic.

Ella’s Corner was just that, a nook filled with art supplies, owned and maintained by a substantial woman named Ella. She examined the Identikit patiently, once with her glasses on and once with them off. A poodle wearing a knit vest poked from behind the counter, smelled Shephard’s shoe, and clicked away.

“I didn’t exactly sell him the paints,” she said finally. “He said he didn’t have any money, so I took one of his works in trade. I do it a lot. That’s probably one of the reasons this is Ella’s Corner and not Ella’s place, house, or castle.” She smiled beautifully and leaned over the counter, watching her poodle wander toward the easels. The dog turned a pair of gooey eyes to Ella when she called its name. “The painting is hanging over there.” She pointed behind her and called the dog again.

Shephard picked his way through the crowded store to the far wall, which was covered with frames suspended on wooden pegs. Balanced above the top row was a large painting that grabbed his attention and sent a sparkle of nerves down his back.

It was done in reds and blacks, thickly applied, a dense canvas that was as visceral as any painting he had ever seen. In the upper left, a figure in black loomed from an angular bench of some kind, while below him a man with his back to the viewer gazed upward. Jutting from the center of the scene and disappearing off to the right was a thin stable of sorts, filled with beasts that had horses’ heads and the bodies of men. As Shephard stared at the presiding figure, it seemed at first to be a hooded man, then a demon, then perhaps a woman with severe black hair, then a large reptilian bird. Slashed in black across its shadowy form was a dark protrusion. An arm? Wing? Cape? And deep in the dark recess of the head, two deep red sockets glowed dully.