Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (29 page)

Working a bit freed his mind, although he was conscious of Pris and Cat in the room with him.

He thought about the two hundred or so paintings he’d lost, some of them without even a photograph left due to his own negligence. He wondered why Pris hadn’t said how Buddhist that was, how clean he should feel now that half his life’s work no longer existed.

And how strange it was that the sum of who he was as an artist now belonged to other people. The only paintings he himself now owned were works in progress, his unfinished stumblings around after the fire: An abstracted image of Donnie all burned up, like a piece of human jerky. This unfinished painting from Cat’s dream. Everything else was spread throughout the world, in galleries, houses, a few middle-grade museums.

And he thought of something.

He set the brush down and turned around. “We’re looking at the wrong paintings.”

Cat righted herself on the couch. Pris stopped pacing.

“We’re looking at the paintings that no longer exist,” he said. “But what if the painting is still around, and our arsonist doesn’t know that?”

There was a long silence. Mick could practically see his words hanging in the air, like someone’s textual art.

“That’s good, Mick,” said Pris. “This is an amateur, after all. What if he failed?”

“We need the other database,” agreed Cat. “The one of the surviving paintings.” She scrambled to find it on her laptop.

They made quick work of the new list of paintings, and Mick identified another twenty-six that had been inspired by dreams. Of those, twelve were accompanied by images.

Cat called Sergeant Alvarez again, and explained their theory. “He could have assumed it was in Mick’s studio, since it was well known that Mick kept his work there. But it might not have been there. It could have been sold, or on loan.”

Mick wasn’t able to hear what Alvarez was saying, but it sounded as if she were skeptical, or else growing weary of their dead-end case.

“I know, I know,” said Cat. “You’re right. But just look at the remaining digital images, at least. I’ll even flag the ones that, um, look promising.”

Mick figured those would be the dreamslip paintings.

After Cat did some whiz-bang stuff on her laptop to transfer the images to the Miami PD, the three of them turned their attention to the new crop of twelve paintings.

The first three they were able to eliminate easily, as they were part of Mick’s most abstract stage, and they contained little that was discernible. He’d merely been inspired by the color and texture of those dreams, which hadn’t contained much substance anyway.

The next one gave them pause, as again it contained a number that seemed to be a serial number. Mick couldn’t remember what it was at first but then realized it was the serial number for his Fiat.

The two after that they analyzed for a good half hour each but couldn’t find anything in them to research further.

The next six paintings didn’t yield much either, though they certainly gave Cat plenty to search on, everything ranging from the name of an old-fashioned soda company to the time 2:21, which was prominent in the painting Mick had titled
When It’s At
.
 

So they reached a dead end. Again.

Mick looked over Cat’s shoulder at the full database of surviving paintings. “If it’s here,” he said, “it’s probably one of the paintings I don’t have an image of. Sure wish I’d done better on the documentation side.”

“Here, Uncle Mick,” said Cat, offering him her laptop. “Take a look at the descriptions.”

He tried reading her tiny screen, but the words were jumbling together, and he hated the glare. So he walked over to a drawer and fished around till he found the printed copy on forty-three pages that Beverly had given him after the fire.
One page for every year of my friend’s life,
he remembered.

He sat back down, flipping through the pages with Pris staring over his shoulder.

“Find the ones that might have been sold or loaned out right before the fire,” Cat said.

As soon as Cat said that, he flipped the page to where there was a description of a piece called
Three Views, One Girl
that he remembered letting his old friend Greta take back to New York with her two weeks before the fire. If Greta hadn’t been in touch with Beverly about his inclusion in a show at the Painted Stick so she could help publicize it, this painting would have been on the other list all along.

Pris leaned in over Mick’s shoulder. “Mickey.”

“Yes, sis?”

“The painting in that gallery in New York—what was the name of it, Cat? The one with the girl. The one you won’t sell.”

“The Painted Stick,” said Cat. “That’s the name of the gallery. Greta is the owner’s name.”

The mention of it gave Mick chills even though he was staring at the description already.
 

Cat seemed to know what Pris was onto. “Is that a dreamslip painting, Uncle Mick?”

The image of the redheaded girl flashed in his head. He remembered the dream that had produced it. He’d fused with someone who desired that girl, and he hadn’t liked the feel of that at all. So he’d popped out of his dreamer’s consciousness and then out of the dream entirely. The girl stayed with him, though, so he painted her. He painted her to rid himself of her.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why won’t you sell it?” asked Cat. “Greta told us you wouldn’t let her sell it.”

Mick saw the girl in his mind’s eye again. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I feel like she shouldn’t be sold.”

Cat and Pris looked at each other. “That has to be the one,” Cat said. Pris agreed.

“I’m thinking the same thing.” Mick felt terror clench his stomach. Why did he have to paint that girl? He’d known it even as he was painting her that he shouldn’t have, that he should have let her go. “That would make sense,” he said, the logical part of his brain working the details. “I sent the triptych to Greta in New York right after Thanksgiving, right before the studio fire.”

He told them about dreamslipping in some stranger’s dream, someone who desired the girl, how wretched it made him feel, and that he’d left the dream.

“Where were you, Mick?” Pris asked. “When you slipped into that dream.”

Mick tried to remember. Everything before and after the fire was a blur… And there it was. “At a party on Star Island.”

Cat asked, “Was it at that patron’s house—Kristoff Langholm?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But there were probably thirty, forty people there that night.”

Cat went into the kitchen and got a sheet of paper and a pen. She thrust them at him. “Write down the name of everyone you saw at that party. Everyone.”

Mick sat staring at the white page in front of him. He jotted down
Kristoff and Carrie
, followed by
Serena Jones
.

“I wish we had a copy of that painting,” Cat said to Pris. Mick resented the way they sometimes discussed his case as if he wasn’t there. “Maybe Greta used it in promotional materials,” Cat continued, popping open her laptop again.

“Most likely not,” said Pris. “Since Mick didn’t wish to sell it. Remember? It was in the back of the gallery, marked ‘NFS.’”

Mick cleared his throat. “Well, you know, I could call Greta and ask her to send a photo from her phone. She is my friend, after all.”

Pris and Cat looked at him in amused surprise. Then the three of them burst out laughing, glad to have something break the tension.

Mick called Greta, who was in her gallery, thankfully, and not busy. She was curious about the request but sent the image to Cat without too many questions. Mick’s phone was too old-school to handle digital images. Cat did some techie magic to get the image on her laptop and then projected it onto the wall.

And there she was, in triplicate. His wan heroine, his redheaded lady-child. She wasn’t yet eighteen, as he’d tried to capture in the budding quality of her breasts under a white tank top. She had an unnatural thinness about her as well, as if slightly malnourished. The whole time he’d painted her, he felt as if he wanted to save her. That was the attempt in painting her, to save her and rid himself of her haunting eyes at the same time. But he felt strongly now that he had failed. And in his failure, he’d simply failed her.

“What if it’s her,” said Cat, suddenly. “There’s nothing in the painting that seems searchable—no numbers or codes or passwords of any kind. Maybe it’s the girl herself.”

“Perhaps she’s missing,” said Pris. She ran her hands over her bare arms, as if suddenly cold. “I don’t like the way this case feels.”

“Neither do I,” said Cat. “This is ramping up into something else. We need to be more careful.”

“You’re right, Cat,” said Pris. “You know it’s not my nature to say this, but I’m not sure whom we can trust.”

Mick felt his hands grow clammy, the pen slipping where he was still writing the names of the people who were at the party that night. “What about Rose?” he asked.

Pris put her hand on his shoulder. “Tell her no more than she already knows.”

“The same goes for Ernesto,” Cat said to Pris, pointedly.

“I suppose you’re right.” Her voice was reluctant.

“He was at the party that night,” Mick said, eliciting surprised looks from both of them. He wrote
Ernesto Ruíz
on the paper in front of him.

“Well, they are his clients,” said Pris, as if to explain.

“Was Jerry O’Connell there?” Cat asked.
 

“Who’s that?” replied Mick.
 

“He bought several of your paintings,” said Cat.

The name still wasn’t ringing a bell.

Cat cleared her throat. “He talked you down in price for them.”

“Oh, that guy.” Mick remembered Jerry, a sly piece of work, that one. “I can’t recall if he was there or not. It doesn’t seem like it would have been his crowd, but you never know.”

“What about Chester Canon?” Cat said. Mick figured she was running through the suspects.

“Nope.”

“Clive Smith?”

“No, although with his recent meteoric rise, he’ll probably be on the next invite list.”

“Annie Lin?”

“Negative.”

“Norris Grayson?”

“Nein.”

“Maysie Ray Duncan?” Pris put in, her tone light.

Mick cracked a smile. “Hardly.”

“I should think Ms. Duncan would be a delight at a house party,” Pris countered.

“Tell that to Langholm,” said Mick.

There was a long break in their conversation as Cat typed notes in her laptop, Pris gazed at the triptych projected on-screen, and Mick wrote down more names.
Pennington James
, he scrawled. That was the name of a friend he sometimes met for drinks and to shoot the shit. He was there that night, too, as were a few other artists.
We were the cheap entertainment for the evening
, Mick thought somewhat bitterly, although he’d swallowed his aversion to such things years ago, and that’s how he stayed in business, as it were. But would any of these artists be twisted enough to hurt the girl? His imagination was already running through the kinds of trouble a young girl could find herself in. He couldn’t imagine any of his artist friends capable of such things, but then people like that hid their crimes well. What a bloody awful thing he’d somehow got mixed up in, and all he’d ever wanted to do was paint.

Tina Wright
came next.
Samantha Forrester
. Those were the artists he knew, but there were other people, Langholm’s wealthy set, who were also there. The main guests. Not entertainment, but people there to be entertained. He closed his eyes, pushing himself to remember. A judge wearing a bolo tie, as if South Florida were Texas hill country. He couldn’t remember his name. An owner of an educational software company who used to teach back in his “poor” days, he’d said.
Philip Peters.
Mick remembered that because he called him “the man with two first names.” A few women, maybe friends of Carrie’s. One hit on Mick; she’d seemed to be the type to pour money into a male gigolo. Not his speed, so he’d avoided her.
Danielle something
.

And so it went. He filled the page with names, half names, and descriptions when he couldn’t come up with anything else. Then he turned it over to Cat, who was busy texting the triptych image to Sergeant Alvarez.

>>>

“Let me know if you need any help with the investigation,” Rose said. She was sprawled underneath the sink in his studio, trying to fix it. “I mean, not that I have any idea how to do that.”

“Well, at least you know your plumbing,” he said.

Rose laughed. “That’s a funny thing to say to me, considering.”

Mick had been referring to the fact that Rose learned the plumbing trade from her father. But then he got her meaning.

“You can really snake a pipe,” he said, keeping the joke going.

“You’re a real wit, Travers. Now get down here and give me a hand.”

Mick crouched down beside Rose, who lay on her back, her face underneath the pipes.

“Grab the sealant,” she instructed.

Mick looked around on the floor beside them, feeling dumb.