Die for Me (40 page)

He was well below the line of sight of anyone who might later be asked if they’d seen anything related to the murder of the man they’d found dead in the alley.
If anyone can describe me, it would be in only the most general of terms.

Not that he had to worry. It was a rare person who met his eyes when he traveled this way. There was something about imperfection that made people look away. Leaving him free to move as freely as he chose.

Thursday, January 18, 8:30
P.M.

Daniel stared at his hands for a long moment before he spoke. “Simon was always a cruel bastard. Once I stopped him from drowning a cat and he was furious. I tried to whale the tar out of him, but he beat me to a bloody pulp. He was ten.”

Katherine frowned. “At ten Simon could overpower you? You’re not a small man, Agent Vartanian.”

“Simon is bigger,” Susannah said, far too quietly.

Daniel looked at down at her, a combination of tightly bound fury and pain in his eyes. But he went on. “Time passed, Simon got worse. My father became a judge. Simon’s activities were embarrassing to his career, so Dad pulled strings to smooth feathers. You’d be surprised what people are willing to overlook for a buck. When he was eighteen, Simon ran away. Then we heard about the car accident.”

“And we buried him,” Susannah said.

“And we buried him,” Daniel repeated with a sigh. “I moved to Atlanta and became a cop, but I was still coming home then. That last time I saw my parents, I’d come home for Christmas.” He paused for a long moment, then his shoulders sagged. “When I walked into the house I found my mother crying. She didn’t cry often. The last time had been at Simon’s funeral. But she’d found some pictures. Drawings Simon had made.”

“Of animals he’d tortured?” Scarborough asked.

“Some. But mostly people. He cut out pictures from really hard-core, violent magazines. He’d made drawings from the pictures. Simon was a gifted artist, but he always had a dark side. He kept posters of dark paintings on the wall of his bedroom.”

“Like?” Vito asked.

Daniel frowned. “I don’t remember.” He looked down at Susannah. “There was the
Scream
painting.”

“Munch,” she said. “And he liked Hieronymus Bosch. He also had a poster of a Goya depicting a massacre. Another of a suicide. Dorothy somebody.”

Daniel was nodding. “And there was the Warhol print. ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ That pretty much summed Simon up.”

“What summed him up,” Susannah murmured, “was what he kept under his bed.”

Daniel’s eyes widened. “You saw the pictures?”

She shook her head. “Not the pictures. I have no idea where he hid
them.
”

“What, Miss Vartanian?” Vito asked sharply. “What was under the bed?”

“His copies of serial killer art. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings. And others.”

Simon Vartanian had copied other people’s pictures, revered dark artists. Now he created his own art. And his own victims. There was a tension around the table, and Vito knew the others understood it, too. For a moment he worried someone would blurt it out. But no one did and Vito was relieved. There were still things the Vartanians hadn’t told them. Until they did, the flow of information couldn’t be complete.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone, Miss Vartanian?” Thomas Scarborough asked gently.

Again her chin came up, but in her eyes was shame. “Daniel was gone, and I had to sleep sometime. Then Simon was dead and the paintings disappeared. I didn’t know about the pictures from the magazines or his drawings of them. Until tonight.”

“Agent Vartanian, your mother had found these drawings and magazine clippings. So why did you fight with your father?” Vito asked.

Daniel looked at his sister. “Tell him, Daniel,” she said tightly.

“There were other pictures—snapshots. The magazine pictures were staged, but the snapshots looked real. Women, being raped . . . Simon had done drawings of these, too.”

There were a few beats of silence, then Jen cleared her throat. “I’m surprised Simon didn’t take the pictures with him,” Jen said. “Where did your mother find them?”

“In one of my father’s safes. He had several hidden through the house.”

“So your father knew about Simon’s secret stash?” Jen asked.

“Yes. My mother confronted him, and he admitted he’d found them in Simon’s room after he’d run away. Now I wonder if they weren’t the cause of Simon’s leaving. Maybe my father had finally had enough. I’ll never know. Once I saw the pictures, I said we had to report it. That the people in the snapshots had been victimized by someone. My father was outraged. Why should we dredge it all up now? he said. Simon couldn’t be punished. He was dead. It would only bring the family shame.”

His sister covered his hand with hers, her face grimly accepting of what was to come, but Daniel’s was distant as he remembered.

“I was so angry. It was like years of watching my father clean up after Simon came to a head and something in me snapped. My father and I almost came to blows so I left the house and took a walk. When I came back I’d decided to take the pictures and report it myself, but I was too late. I found the ashes in the fireplace.”

Nick shook his head, disbelieving. “Your father—a
judge
—destroyed evidence?”

Daniel looked up, his lips bent in bitter scorn. “Yes. I was furious, and I did hit him then. And he hit me back. We did some damage to each other that day. I walked away and promised them I would never come back. And I didn’t until last Sunday.”

“What did you do about the pictures?” Liz asked.

He shrugged. “What could I do? I obsessed over it for days. In the end I didn’t do anything. I had no evidence. I’d only gotten a glimpse of the pictures. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed or if the pictures were staged or real. And at the end of the day, it was my word against his.”

“But your mother saw them, too,” Jen said carefully.

“She wouldn’t have crossed my father,” Susannah said. “It simply wasn’t done.”

“Did you think these pictures were what Claire Reynolds was using to blackmail your father?” Vito asked.

“It crossed my mind at the beginning, but I didn’t know how she’d know about them, and I wondered if there weren’t other things that even I didn’t know about. I needed to know what the blackmail was. My sister’s career could be damaged.”

Susannah’s chin lifted again. “My career will stand on its own merits. So will yours.”

“I know,” he said. “When I got to the mailbox store, I found my mother had opened a box for me. She left these.” He pulled a thick envelope from his laptop case.

Vito knew what he’d find inside. Still he cringed when he saw the pictures and the drawings a younger Simon Vartanian had created. “Your father didn’t destroy them.”

Daniel cocked his jaw. “Apparently not. And I don’t know why he kept them.”

Vito passed the photos to Liz and rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s connect some dots, shall we? First, Claire Reynolds. How did she know your parents?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Neither of us remembers that name from Dutton.”

“She wasn’t from Dutton,” Katherine said. “She was from Atlanta.”

“Our father went to Atlanta from time to time,” Susannah said. “He was a judge.”

Jen frowned. “But that doesn’t explain how Simon got involved. Did he know her?”

“The only time Simon ever went to Atlanta was when he had to be fitted,” Daniel said. “He was an amputee, and his orthopedist was in Atlanta.”

“Yes,” Jen hissed. “Claire was an amputee.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that before?” Liz asked.

Daniel’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t even suspect he was even alive until an hour ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Liz murmured. “This has been a shock for you.”

Daniel’s eyes flashed again, angrily. “You think so?” he said sarcastically.

Susannah squeezed his hand. “Daniel, please. So Claire knew Simon from the orthopedist. But how would she know about my father? And these pictures?”

“Plus there is the issue of Claire’s continuing the blackmail a year after she was dead,” Vito pointed out.

Nick grimaced. “Small problem, that. Maybe Simon picked up where she left off when he killed her. Maybe he wanted the money from your folks.”

“But the guy at the mailbox store said a
woman
had paid the bill,” Daniel said. “And we can’t check the store’s security tapes. They only keep them for thirty days.”

“Accomplice?” Jen asked.

Thomas shook his head. “Doesn’t fit the profile. I’d be shocked if Simon would trust anyone enough to be an accomplice. A pawn, maybe. But not an accomplice.”

“So we need to find out who this other woman is,” Liz said.

A piece of the puzzle clicked in Vito’s mind. “Claire had a girlfriend. Dr. Pfeiffer and Barbara at the library said Claire was gay.”

Liz’s brows furrowed. “And of course the library ladies didn’t have a name.”

Vito felt a small surge of energy. It was second-wind time. “No, but there was a newspaper photo—Claire kissing another woman. If we could find that picture . . .”

“You don’t know which newspaper, do you?” Jen asked.

“No, but it was taken during a march. Claire only moved here four years ago and she’s been dead a year. How many marches could there have been in three years?”

“So Claire just happened to end up at the same orthopedist here in Philadelphia?” Susannah asked. “The chances seem possible, but remote.”

“Pfeiffer was recruiting patients for a study to upgrade the microprocessor in the artificial knee,” Vito said. “Maybe that’s what brought both of them together.”

Daniel nodded. “If Claire knew Simon from the Atlanta doctor, she’d have known he was supposed to be dead. Several of the amputee patients came to his funeral.”

“She must have blackmailed Simon, too,” Katherine said. “That’s why he killed her.”

“And the other woman took up where Claire left off.” Nick shook his head. “Cold.”

“Why now?” Thomas Scarborough asked. “Whoever this second blackmailer is, she continued for a year after Claire died. Why did your father wait a year to come here?”

“He was running for public office,” Daniel answered, in a way that made Vito believe he’d answered this question himself days before. “He hadn’t made the announcement yet. In fact, his e-mails kept putting off the man who wanted him to run. I guess he figured as soon as he threw his hat in the ring the blackmail price would go up.”

“So who was controlling your dad’s computer last Sunday?” Jen asked. “Simon or this blackmailer number two? We should look at your father’s computer to find out.”

Daniel nodded. “I’ll have it priority shipped. How else can we help you, Detective?”

Vito stepped through the events in his mind. Several things weren’t adding up. “Your father came to Philly to find the blackmailer. But why did your mother come, too?”

Katherine nodded. “Good question. Your mother was very sick. No doctor should have permitted her to travel.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I’ve wondered that myself.”

“She would have come to see Simon,” Susannah said flatly. “It was always all about Simon.” Her words were tinged with brittle cynicism. “Poor, poor Simon.”

“How did Simon lose his leg?” Katherine asked.

Daniel shook his head. “My parents liked to tell everyone it was an accident.”

“But we knew better,” Susannah said. “We lived far out, past town. There was this old man who had a small place about a mile in back of ours. He had a collection of antique traps. One day a bear trap turned up missing. Everyone knew Simon had stolen it, but he had a silver tongue and convinced everyone he had no idea who’d taken it.”

“He got trapped in it,” Vito said. “Who found him?”

Daniel looked away. “I did. He’d been missing for a day, and we’d all split up to find him. I found him, bleeding, in terrible agony. Simon had no voice left. He’d screamed for hours, but there wasn’t anyone around to hear him.”

Vito felt a chill go down his back. There was the connection.

“And he blamed me,” Daniel continued heavily. “Until the day he left, he believed I’d known where he was and left him to suffer. I didn’t. But no one could make him see the truth. Simon was mean before he lost his leg, but after . . .”

Susannah closed her eyes. “After, Simon became a monster. He ruled our house. My mother became devoted to him, which I’ve never fully understood. But I’m certain if she thought he was still alive, she’d beg to be taken to him, no matter how ill she was.”

“Which means your parents either knew all along Simon wasn’t really dead or they found out and then made the trip.” Vito watched the Vartanians’ faces. “But you think at least your father knew all along Simon was alive, or you wouldn’t be worried about what you’d find in the casket once we dig it up.”

“Yes,” Daniel acknowledged evenly. “Now, we’re tired. If there’s nothing else—”

“I have two questions.”

Vito leaned forward to look at Sophie at the end of the table. She’d said not a single word the entire time. “What is it, Sophie?”