The Sculptor

Chapter 31

Bill Burrell raced down Route 95 at over ninety miles an hour—the colored lights of the Friday night traffic parting before his state trooper escorts like Christmas wrapping paper at a pair of scissors. Rachel Sullivan was about a half-hour ahead of him. She would meet him in Dr. Hildebrant’s room at Rhode Island Hospital after her team’s preliminary sit-down with the Cranston Police.

Son of a bitch, he thought. No way getting around the locals now.

It had all come together so fast—it was his wife who actually told him about the breaking news story down in Rhode Island only seconds before he got the call from Markham. It was all just too bizarre, he thought—yes, just like the media was already fucking calling it: “A bizarre twist in the case of The Michelangelo Killer.” The news-fuckers didn’t know about the DVD or that Steve Rogers was already dead. No, the simple fact that there was another disappearance in Rhode Island—the disappearance of the ex-husband of Dr. Hildebrant, that Brown University professor and resident expert on Michelangelo who had been associated with the case at the beginning—was enough meat for the vultures to chew on.

For now.

Son of a bitch, Burrell said to himself as he whizzed across the Rhode Island–Massachusetts border. Only a matter of time before the whole thing explodes, before they learn of Hildebrant’s connection to everything—not just this nutbag Michelangelo Killer, but to us.

But more than worrying about how the pretty art history professor who so reminded him of his wife would handle everything; more than worrying about how all the media attention she would soon receive was going to impede the FBI’s investigation; as he sped toward Rhode Island Hospital, Special Agent in Charge Bill Burrell could not ignore the sinking feeling that—even with this newest development—the strange case of The Michelangelo Killer would continue on and on as it had all along.

Cold.