Gregory Funaro - The Sculptor

“Yes?”

The man on the front steps held up his ID. His lips were moving but Laurie could not hear him through the glass; for upon the sight of those three little letters- FBI -Laurie Wenick went deaf with the overwhelming terror of understanding.

No, little Michael Wenick’s mother did not need the FBI, the press conference in Westerly to tell her why she had reached for the jar of jelly. She would have been unable to hear them anyway; for just as her fragile eggshell mind cracked again under the weight of her anguish, the once pretty young nurse watched herself collapse into the black.

Yes, all at once Laurie Wenick fainted, for all at once she knew that her son was dead.

Bill Burrell sat with Thomas Campbell Sr. in his den, their coffee long gone cold. Neither of them had drunk much, for their cups were only props in a scene they had played many times over the last three months. The set was the same-the comfy leather chairs, the bookcases, the warm paneled walls peppered with family photographs. Today, however, the mood, the color of the scene was different, for today the wealthy businessman had finally learned what had become of his only son. And as Special Agent Rachel Sullivan concluded her press conference on the television in the corner, as if on cue a thud was heard above Burrell’s head.

“She’ll be fine,” said Campbell, clicking the remote. “Her sister is up there with her. Probably dropped something is all.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Burrell took a sip of his cold coffee. Instant. Bitter. Maggie Campbell did not make it for him today; did not brew her special blend of Sumatra as she usually did on the SAC’s visits. No, Burrell had learned from Agent Sullivan that, upon identifying her son, upon seeing him frozen white in the horror that was Bacchus, Maggie Campbell had gone first into shock, then into a fit of inconsolable hysteria-so much so that by the time Burrell arrived at the house on Foster Cove later that afternoon, Tommy Campbell’s mother had since collapsed into her bed upstairs, exhausted from her bout with borderline madness. And save for the handful of reporters that still lingered at the end of the driveway, the house in which Rhode Island ’s favorite son grew up was as quiet as a tomb.

“Someone was found dead on this property, too,” Campbell said. “Did you know that, Bill?”

Burrell looked up from his coffee. Thomas Campbell was staring back at him blankly-his eyes like slits, red from weeping; a haggard shell of the man standing with his son in the photograph on the bookshelf behind him.

“In the summer of 1940,” Campbell continued. “Out on the front lawn, a caretaker for the family who owned the house before us. Story goes he was attacking their boy, and a couple of strangers just happened to be passing by. Stabbed the guy dead and then took off. The boy was there the whole time-saw the whole thing. Went on to become a famous movie director-made all those horror pictures in the sixties and seventies. Died last year. Remember him?”

Burrell nodded vaguely.

“Saw a bunch of his movies when I was a kid-scared the hell out of me. We bought the house from his uncle-gosh, going on almost thirty years ago now. Nice old fella-his uncle, I mean. A lot of those old-timers around here still remember all that-the story about the murder and all. Tommy had heard that story, too. When he was a kid. And for years he used to swear that there was a ghost in this house. You know how kids are. But you know what, Bill? I remember him telling me, even when he was little, that he wasn’t afraid-that he hoped they could be friends someday, he and the ghost. Isn’t that something? A little kid not being afraid of ghosts?”

Burrell nodded, looking down again at his cup.

“That’s the kind of boy my Tommy was,” Campbell said, his voice beginning to break. “A good friend to everybody. Not afraid to love even a ghost.”

“I know, Tom. He was a good kid. The best.”

“It’s why they took advantage of him out there in that world of his-those people, that slut model he asked to marry him. He was so trusting. He just thought that everybody who smiled at him meant it the same way he did when he smiled back-that’s why that whoring cunt was able to break my boy’s heart.”

Burrell was silent. They had been over it before-had long ago exhausted the possibility that Tommy’s ex-fiancée, Italian supermodel Victoria Magnone, was somehow involved in the star Rebel’s disappearance. Even before Burrell had met Tommy Campbell’s father, even before the wide receiver had gone missing, the SAC had followed the young couple’s very public romance and breakup in the media-couldn’t help but hear about it every time he turned on the TV or clicked on his goddamn Yahoo! homepage to check his stocks. But what the media hadn’t told him, what Burrell hadn’t learned until he met Tommy Campbell’s father, was the degree to which the ending of their relationship had broken the boy’s heart. Only after spending time with the Campbells at their house on Foster Cove, only after learning about the loving son behind the image portrayed of him in the media did Bill Burrell begin to feel guilty. For as many times as he had watched him play for the Rebels on TV, as many times as he had seen his image splattered across the Internet and on the covers of magazines, only after Bill Burrell met the missing footballer’s grieving parents did he start to think of Tommy Campbell as human.

“Tell me, Bill-tell me you know why somebody would want to hurt my boy.”

Burrell could say nothing-could only drop his gaze back into his cup-for now that Tommy Campbell had been found, now that the moment for which they had waited three months had finally arrived, incredibly the SAC could not bring himself to comment, let alone ask his friend any more questions. Thomas Campbell Sr. thus turned once again to the television-his eyes as blank as the screen on which only moments before Rachel Sullivan had confirmed for the rest of America what he already knew.

Special Agent in Charge Bill Burrell was satisfied with the way his girl had fielded the press’s questions, but at the same time he was deeply disturbed-angry, of course, because they had to put on the fucking sideshow in the first place and because the news of Tommy Campbell’s murder had been leaked to the press before he gave the go. Oh yes, he would find out who opened his mouth; and when he did, Bulldog would take great pleasure in personally shutting it for them.

However, it was the flurry of questions at the end of the press conference that really bothered the SAC-questions that seemed to bother even the reporter who asked them. Burrell, of course, had no way of knowing that O’Neill had just been fed the information through her earpiece. He had no way of knowing that the reporter was at the same time irritated that her five hundred dollars had failed to yield this little tidbit of information: that Tommy Campbell and the unidentified person with whom he was discovered had been posed to look like a statue. A statue by Michelangelo. A statue by the name of Bacchus.

Even though only a handful of Westerly policemen knew the details about the statue, even though over a dozen state troopers had been brought in immediately to help secure the area around Dodd’s estate, it had been the FBI who-upon their initial forensic inspection of The Sculptor’s exhibit-discovered the dedication to Dr. Hildebrant beneath a light covering of beach sand on the base of the statue. And so it happened that, prior to Burrell’s arrival at the crime scene, Special Agent Sam Markham had given strict orders not to mention the art history professor’s name in the company of anyone other than federal agents. And so, as Burrell had watched Rachel Sullivan refuse to comment on the WNRI reporter’s questions, one thing became painfully clear: that even if a policeman, local or state, had recognized the statue to be a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Bacchus , it would have had to have been one of his guys that spilled the beans about Hildebrant-unless, of course, the killer had telephoned the media himself.