Sloane was still analyzing the physical evidence, but I’d seen all I needed to see—all I could stand seeing. A small part of me couldn’t help drawing parallels between this crime scene and the first one I’d ever seen—my mother’s.
She fought. She bled. They took her.
The difference was that Celine had been taken on a Fibonacci date, and that meant that if this was the work of the Masters, we weren’t looking for a missing girl, a potential Pythia.
We were looking for a corpse.
“I’d like to see the victim’s bedroom,” I said. I owed it to Celine Delacroix to get to know her, then to come back down here and walk through it all over again, until I found whatever it was that we’d been overlooking.
That was what profilers did. We submerged ourselves in the darkness again and again and again.
“I’ll take you to Celine’s room.” Michael didn’t wait for permission before he started walking toward the main house. I caught Agent Sterling’s gaze. She nodded for me to follow Michael.
“I’ll wait down here,” Dean told me.
When we’d been profiling, I hadn’t felt the crushing distance between us, but now, my mind went to the secrets I was keeping from him, his father’s mocking words.
“I want to go over the scene again,” Dean continued. “Something about this doesn’t feel right.”
Nothing feels right, I thought. And then, deep inside of me, something whispered, Nothing ever will. I would give everything I had to this case. I’d give and give, until the girl I’d been—the girl Dean had loved—was gone, worn away like a sand castle swept out with the tide.
Ignoring the dull ache that accompanied that thought, I turned and followed Michael into the house. Lia fell in beside me.
“You’re coming with?” I asked.
Lia gave a graceful little shrug. “Why not?” The fact that she didn’t even
try to lie about her motivations gave me pause. “Keep up,” Lia told me,
breezing past. “I’d hate to have any alone time whatsoever with Michael in his ex-girlfriend’s room.”
Michael had said that Celine was the one person who’d cared about him growing up. He’d said that she was beautiful. He’d called her by a nickname. And Lia and Michael’s on-again off-again relationship had a tendency to end badly.
Every time.
We caught up with Michael just as he halted at the threshold of Celine’s room. As I came to stand next to him, I saw the thing that had made him pause.
A self-portrait. I didn’t question the instinct that said that Celine had painted this piece herself. It was big, larger than life. Unlike the photographs I’d seen of our victim, this painting showed a girl who wasn’t elegant, didn’t want to be. The paint was thick and textured on the canvas, nearly three- dimensional. The strokes were rough and visible. Celine had only painted herself from the shoulders up. Her skin was bare, dark brown and luminescent. And the expression on her face…
Naked and vulnerable and fierce.
Beside me, Michael stared at the painting. You’re reading her, I thought. You know exactly what the girl in that painting is feeling. You know what the girl who painted it was feeling. You know her like you know yourself.
“She didn’t use a brush.” Lia let that comment register before she continued. “CeCe dearest painted that one with a knife.”
My brain instantly integrated that tidbit into what I knew about Celine. “How much do you want to bet our knife-wielding Picasso cleans her brushes with kerosene?” Lia asked. “Turpentine would be more common, but
I’m guessing Celine Delacroix doesn’t do common. Does she, Michael?” “You a profiler now?” Michael asked Lia.
“Just an aficionado of fine art,” Lia retorted. “I lived in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for six weeks, back when I was on the streets.” I raised an eyebrow at Lia, utterly unable to tell if that was true or a bald-
faced lie. In response, Lia pushed past Michael and into Celine’s room.
“If Celine cleans her brushes in kerosene,” I murmured, thinking out loud, “she would have had some on hand. Not a ton, but…”
But enough that you might not have had to bring it with you. I paused.
And if you didn’t bring it with you, you might never have intended to burn her alive.
It could have been a coincidence. All of it—the date, the kerosene. “You think the FBI doesn’t realize that some people use kerosene as a
paint thinner?” Michael asked me, reading my thoughts in my expression. “You really think Briggs and Sterling didn’t go down that road before they took this case?”
Back at the crime scene, the smell of kerosene had been overwhelming.
This wasn’t a little spill we were talking about here—but for some reason, Lia had wanted me to entertain the possibility that it was.
Why?
Michael stepped over the threshold and into Celine’s room. After one last glance at Lia, I followed.
“Two more paintings on the walls,” I commented, breaking the silence.
Celine had hung the paintings side by side, matched pieces of an eerie, abstract set. The canvas on the left appeared to be painted entirely black, but the longer I stared at it, the easier it was to see a face staring back from the darkness.
A man’s face.
It was subtle, a trick of light and shadows in a painting that, at first glance, held neither. The second canvas was mostly blank, with a few bits of shading here and there. It looked like a completely abstract painting, until you realized that the white space held its own design.
Another face.
“She doesn’t paint bodies.” Michael came to stand in front of the paintings. “Even in elementary school, Celine refused to draw anything but faces. No landscapes. Not so much as a single still life. It used to drive the art teachers her parents hired mad.”
That was the first opening Michael had given me to ask him about this girl, this piece of his past that none of us had even known existed. “You’ve known each other since you were kids?”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure Michael would answer the question.
“Off and on,” he said finally. “When I wasn’t at boarding school. When she wasn’t at boarding school. When my father wasn’t pushing me to make friends with the sons of people more important than a partner he already had eating out of his hand.”
I knew that Michael’s father had a temper. I knew he was abusive, nearly impossible to read, wealthy, and obsessed with the Townsend name. And now I knew something else about Thatcher Townsend. No matter how much money you make, no matter how high up the social ladder you climb—it will never be enough. You will always be hungry. You will always want more.
“Good news.” Lia’s voice broke into my thoughts. When Michael and I looked over at her, she was removing a false bottom from a chest at the foot of Celine’s bed. “The police took our victim’s laptop into evidence, but they didn’t take her secret laptop.”
“How did you—” I started to ask, but Lia cut me off with a wave of her hand.
“I did a stint as a high-end cat burglar after I got kicked out of the Met.” Lia set the laptop up on Celine’s desk.
“We’ll need Sloane to hack the—” Michael cut off as Lia logged on.
It wasn’t password-protected. You hide your laptop, but don’t password- protect it. Why?
“Let’s see what we have here,” Lia said, opening files at random. “Class schedule.” I had just enough time to commit Celine’s class schedule to memory before Lia moved on. She opened a new file—a photograph of two children standing in front of a sailboat. I recognized the little girl immediately. Celine. It took me longer to realize that the little boy standing next to her was Michael. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.
“Enough,” Michael said sharply. He tried to close the photo, but Lia blocked him. On the laptop’s screen, I noticed the photo begin to shift, to change.
Not a photo, I realized after a long moment. A video. An animation.
Slowly, the children in the photo morphed, until I was looking at a nearly identical photograph of two teenagers standing in front of a sailboat.
Celine Delacroix, age nineteen, and Michael Townsend, now.
