Joel Goldman - The Dead Man

The maroon brick building was narrow across the front, set long and deep into its lot. A heavy wooden door was cut into the brick and shrouded beneath an arch. The parking lot on the east side was empty.

I looked east and west on Twentieth, then north and south on McGee, the next cross street east of the gallery. Traffic was light. I gave Carter a few minutes and then turned to Lucy.

"Showtime."

She held her hand out to me, palm up. "Me first. Give me your gun."

"Carter shows up and sees you with a gun, could be a lot of trouble."

"I'll tell him I took it from you so you wouldn't accidentally shoot yourself."

I smiled. "Kick-ass in the clutch. I can't wait to see this."

I handed her my gun and the key card and followed her to the front door. She tried the handle but the door was locked. She ran the card across the sensor, the lock giving way with a firm click.

Holding the gun with both hands, arms extended down in front of her, she leaned against the door, pushing it open an inch, testing the sound it would make, waiting a beat for a reaction from the other side. The door and the gallery were silent. She looked back at me, one step below her. I nodded and she ducked her chin, slammed her shoulder into the door, and we blew across the threshold. Lucy went to the right and I went to the left, dividing the field of fire for anyone who may be waiting for us.

The door opened into the main gallery, a broad, high-ceilinged hall with smaller rooms on each side. Paintings hung on the walls, interspersed with sculptures mounted on pedestals and the floor. There were no lights on, the only illumination coming through the open door and the windows, leaving the recesses of the main hall in shadow. Wide stairs at the back led to a landing, an additional set of stairs at each end continuing to the second floor.

Anthony Corliss was the only one waiting and he was dead. His body lay across the stairs. He was nude, his chest and belly a torn quilt of stab wounds, his blood running down the stairs into a dark puddle on the floor, his right ear gone, another souvenir, a serrated gash on the side of his head taking its place.

We kept our distance from Corliss's body, not wanting to disturb the scene any more than was necessary to make certain no one else was in the building. Lucy made a quick check of the side rooms and the second floor.

"It's clear," she said.

I walked outside, standing on the front steps, and started to punch in Carter's number on my phone when I saw him turn the corner from Oak, his partner McNair riding shotgun. Lucy came up behind me and slipped my gun back into the holster. I leaned against the wall and shook, the bricks absorbing the tremors, Lucy squeezing my arm.

McNair got out of the car, pushed past us like we weren't there, and into the Gallery. Carter stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Who is it?" he asked me.

"Anthony Corliss. He was stabbed to death. The killer stripped him and cut off his ear."

"Naked and mutilated. Staged for us. Just like Anne Kendall."

"The way it looks."

"It's not being wrong about Corliss that bothers me," Carter said.

"I know. It's being late."

Cops, ambulances, news crews, and gawkers came in predictable succession, sawhorses and yellow tape keeping people where they belonged. Lucy and I had found the body so our place was inside the perimeter until Carter cut us loose. He put Lucy in the backseat of his unmarked and me in a squad car. We weren't suspects but he was playing it straight, making certain that he got each of our stories instead of one we'd told each other.

Carter gave McNair the perfect job, one where he could do no harm, stationing him at the entrance of the Gallery, deciding who got in like a bouncer working the rope line at a hot nightclub. McNair was in his element, strutting without straining.

I looked out the window at the gathering crowd. People love a parade. They're drawn by the pomp and pageantry, the marching bands and smiling faces. Fathers hoist little kids on their shoulders, those too big for shoulders climbing lampposts or straddling mailboxes for a better view.

The dead man is just as big a draw, the spectacle of the crime scene offering a dangerous whiff of mortality. Its attraction is hypnotic. Though some people are afraid to look while others can't bear to look away, no one wants to miss any of it. The visceral reminder of our shared vulnerability tweaks a primal fear, leaving us entranced and relieved that this time wasn't our time.

Rachel Firestone jostled her way to a sawhorse directly across from me, waving until I nodded, holding her thumb to her ear and her pinky to her mouth, gesturing me to call her. Jason Bolt tapped her on the shoulder, saving me from responding. Rachel gave me a parting wave and followed him into the crowd.

I settled back against the seat, my assumptions about this case once again upended. Corliss wasn't the perfect fit but he was the best fit I had, not because the evidence against him was overwhelming. It wasn't. It was circumstantial, reinforced by more assumptions predicated on his relationships with the victims, their shared history of abuse, and what had happened to Kimberly Stevens in Wisconsin. My suspicion of Corliss depended as much on what I didn't know as what I did know. The biggest gap in my knowledge was that there was no plausible alternative.

Having guessed right about the Gallery was small consolation, though Corliss's murder had given me that plausible alternative-Gary Kaufman. He had picked up the key to the Gallery from Sherry Fritzshall's secretary. When I talked to him on Monday he was nonchalant about the deaths of Delaney and Blair, saying that we all died, adding that it made no difference if a few people went ahead of schedule. I passed it off as lame humor and even more lame philosophy, though his wife, Janet, had recoiled, admonishing him that two people were already dead, as if to say that was enough. It was a reach to now put the murders on Kaufman, but that's what you did when you guessed wrong and had nothing else.

If Gary Kaufman were the killer, I had little doubt that Maggie Brennan was next on his list. He'd save his wife for last, debating whether to end his spree with a murder-suicide or just another murder. I knew my latest scenario was a castle in the air, the foundation built on missing pieces. I called Simon, hoping he had found some of them.

"What's up chief?" he asked.

"Corliss is dead." I gave him the quick and dirty.

"Since Kaufman had the key to the Gallery, sounds like that puts him at the top of the leader board."

"Only because there's not much competition. You told me he had a juvie record. What did you find out about that?"

"Those records are impossible to get into. Best I could do was check newspaper reports, see if there were any stories that matched the location and time frame."

"And?"

"Kaufman grew up in a suburb of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I found a story in the local newspaper about a kid charged with animal cruelty around the same time Kaufman's record pops up. The kid in the newspaper story was put on probation. The paper didn't identify him because he was a juvenile. A week or so later, there's a letter to the editor from a woman who says it was her cat the kid killed and that he should have been tried as an adult and sent to jail."

"Tell me you found the woman and talked to her."

"Got off the phone with her about twenty minutes ago. She's old and hard of hearing and she slurs her words like she's half in the bag or maybe she had a stroke. Anyway, from what I could make out, she claims the kid strangled her cat, gutted it, and amputated its paws. When I asked her if the kid's name was Gary Kaufman, she started crying."

"Kaufman wouldn't be the first kid to graduate from torturing animals to being a serial killer."