Robert Ellis - The Dead Room

Why had Nash insisted on it? What was the idea he said he needed confirmed? What two things does the city grow best ?

“Page two-O-nine,” Jill shouted.

Teddy looked up and saw the terror on her face.

“Two-O-nine,” she said, catching her breath.

He found the page and started reading. It was the story of Michelangelo’s struggle to carve Hercules as a young man. Day after day he stared at the blank stone, unable to find the magic. He felt inept, even unworthy of the subject. How could he approach the stone without first knowing what was inside the man? Any man? He considered the idea of stealing a body from the graveyard for his studies, but realized he couldn’t pull it off without getting caught. Several days passed and a new idea came to mind. The morgue. A place called the dead room .

Teddy’s eyes lit up. The writer likened it to a sign from God. Michelangelo sneaking into the dead room every night with his knife and candle. Ripping the bodies apart with a slice down their chest. Cutting their ribs away, examining their muscles and organs and feeling the tissue in his hands until he understood what a human being was made of.

What two things does the city grow best ?

Nash was working up a profile of the killer. He’d been right. He’d been right all along.

“Shit,” Teddy said.

He threw the book down and grabbed the phone. Nash was still in his office and sounded tired, almost as if he’d been waiting for the call.

“Lawyers and artists,” Teddy said. “That’s what the city grows best. The killer is an artist. That’s why the faces all look the same. He’s working on a painting or sculpture.”

He looked at Jill standing before the desk. The investigation was another step closer and he could tell she knew it as well.

“It would seem so,” Nash said over the phone. “But I wanted your thoughts first. He rejected Darlene Lewis because of her tattoos, and he cut Valerie Kram open because he wanted to look inside.”

“But Michelangelo did it because of his time in history,” Teddy said. “He didn’t have the materials available today. He was starting from scratch.”

“That’s true,” Nash said. “And he was working on cadavers, dissecting them as if a scientist, learning about anatomy for the first time. The man we’re looking for isn’t Michelangelo, although he may think he is. The man we’re looking for is beyond the pale.”

Holmes’s makeshift art studio flashed through Teddy’s head. “Holmes is an artist,” he blurted out.

“So you’ve said before.”

“I didn’t get a good look at his work.”

“If it would ease your mind any, I think you should have another look,” Nash said. “Just make sure you’re here in my office tomorrow by one o’clock. I’m having a criminal psychiatrist over. He’s coming up from Washington and works with the FBI. I want a rough semblance of a profile completed by the end of the day.”

Teddy hung up the phone. Something about the idea of an artist becoming a serial killer rattled his bones. The two might pass each other on the sidewalk, but they were headed in opposite directions.

Jill cleared her throat and seemed upset. “I’m sorry about what I said before. I didn’t mean it was a game. I didn’t understand.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, checking the time and dialing Carolyn Powell’s number over at the DA’s office.

A man picked up the phone. Michael Jackson, not the dancer but the detective with the old gun.

“I’m glad you’re there,” Teddy said. “I need to speak with Powell first.”

“She was just walking out, kid. Let me see if I can grab her.”

The phone went dead. Teddy waited a moment, noticing that Jill had returned to the couch with another slice of pizza and was reading the book again. He heard the phone click and Carolyn’s voice come on.

“What is it, Teddy?”

“I need another look at Holmes’s apartment.”

“I got a call from Ferarro in missing persons,” she said. “He thinks something’s up.”

“Good,” he said. “Because something’s up.”

“What have you got?”

“Nothing that would change your mind. Not yet anyway. All I’ll say is that you guys should be helping Ferarro, not the other way around.”

There was a long pause.

Teddy remained undaunted. “Jackson answered the phone so I know he’s there. Can I get into Holmes’s apartment tonight or what?”

“He’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she said. Then, without a good-bye, she hung up.

Michael Jackson made it up the steps to Holmes’s penthouse apartment on the third floor. Once the hacking stopped he lit another cigarette and unlocked the door. His jacket was open, and Teddy got another look at the gun clipped to the detective’s belt. He could tell it had a history, and wondered if it wasn’t a throw-down gun. Teddy had read that some cops, the dirty ones anyway, were known to carry two weapons. The first gun was registered with the department. The second couldn’t be traced to anyone and had a far darker purpose.

Jackson spotted Teddy’s eyes on the gun and smiled as he swung the door open. “Two times in one day,” he said. “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, kid. People might get the wrong idea.”

“This won’t take long,” Teddy said.

“I hope not. I clocked out a half hour ago. I could charge them for this, but it’s on the way to my favorite watering hole.”

Teddy entered the apartment, heading straight for Holmes’s studio. He knew he couldn’t sleep tonight with the chance that they might be off track. He needed to see the man’s work and get a feel for it. He needed to know whether or not Holmes had any reason to study human anatomy first hand in a psychotic misinterpretation of Michelangelo’s dead room.

He turned the lock and yanked the door open. Switching on the lights, he crossed the room to the easel and flipped the dust cloth over for a look at Holmes’s work. It was a landscape without any people. But it wasn’t complete either.

He looked around and spotted the canvases leaning against the wall. There were five stacks, ten to twelve paintings deep. Teddy flipped through the paintings as quickly as he could. It was difficult because he realized Holmes’s talent was genuine. Holmes had a way of playing with color that drew out the viewer’s emotions. A hill might be black, the sky red. It was a singular view of seeing the world. A unique vision. There was a certain violence in the work, but it seemed to be a part of Holmes’s natural style. And there were people as well, but they lacked detail. They looked like shadows, silhouettes-almost as if you took an abstract photograph of a strange landscape with the sun behind your back, casting your shadow across the foreground in a field of deep blue grass.

The works of art were remarkable.

It suddenly occurred to him that there wasn’t a single painting by Holmes hanging in his sister’s house. Sally and Jim Barnett had shown him the renovation of their home in detail, and Teddy had walked through every room. He would have remembered the style if he’d seen it before. As he thought it over, he played back the words the Barnett’s had used to describe Oscar Holmes in his head. Odd. Different. Holmes never seemed to fit in and always had to do things his own way. Teddy looked back at the paintings. No wonder Holmes was having problems with depression. He wasn’t a mailman who painted on the side. Holmes was an artist forced to deliver the mail in order to make a living. He wasn’t odd, but special. While Van Gogh had his brother Theo behind him, all Holmes had were Sally and Jim Barnett. Two people who could have helped him, but didn’t get it and seemed obsessed with the idea of making him fit in. Two people, who on the day of his arrest, wouldn’t even take his phone call. Teddy felt sorry for them, for everyone involved, whether Holmes was guilty of the murders or not.