The Cold Room

Three

John Baldwin decamped from the taxi ten minutes later. Perfect timing.

Taylor glanced around but didn’t see Elm anywhere. She’d have to introduce him to Baldwin, and based on their brief exchange, she had no idea how he would feel about the FBI being at their scene. When she was the lieutenant, it was her call, and she was always willing to have a fresh set of eyes. Elm struck her as the type of cop who would get territorial. Well, she’d cross that bridge when she got to it.

Taylor watched Baldwin walk up the drive, vivid green eyes taking in everything until they settled on hers. She wondered what he saw there, sometimes. He was a veteran of crime scenes, had been the lead profiler on hundreds of cases. He knew the score. Knew what kind of monsters lurked in her head. They lurked in his, too.

Her mind was drawn away from the crime. She forgot how big he was when he was away. As tall as she was, she still had to look up at him. She loved that. In the dark, his black hair looked like midnight, his angled cheekbones highlighting his mouth with shadows. As he got closer, she could see he hadn’t shaved, the soft stubble growing back at an alarming rate. Hmm.

He didn’t kiss her, though she wanted him to. It wasn’t professional-she knew that-but she hadn’t seen him in two weeks and she missed the feeling of him next to her. He did caress her arm, just above her wrist, and it burned as she walked him to the sign-in sheet, then into the house.

“Make it quick,” she said quietly. “We need to get her body down so the techs can finish up in here. And the new lieutenant is around somewhere. He might kick up a fuss that you’ve come.”

Baldwin nodded. He still hadn’t spoken, was simply processing. That’s what she liked about him. There was no extraneous bullshit, no posturing. Just an incessant curiosity about what made people do bad things. That was something they shared, a core desire to figure out the why behind the crimes.

She escorted him over to the body, then stepped away and let him assess the scene.

His lips were set in a tight, thin line, and she could see the dark circles under his eyes. He was exhausted. Working a case always did that to him. His job as the head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, BAU Two, was to guide the various profilers who worked for him, and to give the various law enforcement entities requesting help a thorough rundown of what they were dealing with. Taylor knew that it went deeper for him. He wanted to do more than look at crime-scene photos and pump out a report. He liked to get in the field, to smell the scene, see the crime in situ. Well, she was giving him his heart’s desire with this one.

Baldwin broke his verbal fast. “Where’s the blood?” he asked.

Taylor smiled. “I said the same thing. There’s something else totally bizarre. There was a classical piece from Dvořák playing on the house’s intercom system.”

“Really? Hmm.”

“The owner of the house is allegedly out of town. There was a piece of glass cut out of the back door so our suspect could turn the lock. The next-door neighbor is caring for the cat-she came over and found the body. She couldn’t say if the music was on or off when she arrived-she wasn’t paying attention. We included the CD in the evidence gathering. The lack of blood, the music, the position of the body-I can’t help but think this is a ritual. That’s why I wanted you to see it.”

He ignored her for a moment, moving back and forth between the wall and the column. He spoke absently. “The suspect could have been playing the music to cover any noise he might have been making. Taylor, step over here with me a second. Look at the wide view.”

She went as far back as the house allowed, to the bay window on the west side of the kitchen. He went with her, standing quietly while she looked. She had taken a picture earlier from this angle, a wide shot of the room face-on to the body.

“Okay. What am I missing?”

“Look at the painting on the wall by the door, in the left upper quadrant, line-of-sight to the column.”

That was it. The strange sense that something wasn’t right, the feeling that she was missing something. It was there in front of her the whole time.

“Son of a bitch. She’s posed just like the painting. Who is that, Picasso?”

“Yes. Demoiselles d’Avignon. The victim’s arms are up over her head, a perfect imitation of the center of the painting. And this was Picasso’s most famous piece from his African Period. Your victim is black. He’s accurately mirrored the painting. There’s no blood. But the race…”

He drifted off.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Taylor, you don’t want to hear what I have to say. I’m having a hard time believing it myself.”

“It’s too early to surmise that we might have a serial on our hands.”

“It’s not that. Actually, it’s much worse.”

“What then?”

“I think you may have my serial on your hands.”