“And look there. And there.” Foster pointed left, then right. “There. And there.” Amelia had also painted Mallory Rea with her wig, and while one of the other faces belonged to someone she’d never seen before, the other belonged to Silva.
Li stepped back to get a panoramic view. “Holy crap.” She searched the painting. “I don’t see Wicks. Do you see Wicks?”
Wicks wasn’t there. Foster ran her finger over Silva’s face, painted all in black. “Still damp. She was here after the attack.”
Li backed away to contact the team that had been sent to Amelia’s loft. “Yeah, Al, anything?”
Foster looked over the canvas, finding little disparate things—musical notes, eyeglasses, toy trains, a child’s dollhouse, an old SUV. None of it made sense to her. Amelia alone held the key. But the damp image of Silva said a lot. Li rejoined her, but the look on her face wasn’t encouraging. They stepped away from Lenk to confer.
“She’s not at her loft,” Li whispered. “Symansky says the neighbors haven’t seen her since early yesterday, which apparently isn’t unusual. She comes and goes. Holed up in her place for days, gone for days.”
“Have they seen anybody who looks like an Uncle Frank?”
Li shook her head. “No one matching the description we just got has been seen hanging around her place.” Foster gave the canvas another long sweep. “We’ve been looking at the wrong Morgan.”
She and Li returned to Lenk, who stood in the center of the room looking extremely worried. Even the dog beside her seemed to be feeding off her anxiety. “Ms. Lenk, did this man smell of cigarette smoke?” Foster asked.
“I didn’t get too close to him, but yeah, now that you mention it, when he left, the whole place smelled like tobacco. I had to spray the room. I can’t stand the smell.”
Foster didn’t have to say it. Li didn’t have to hear it. Tom Morgan was likely the man who’d followed them both home. The man who’d marked their cars and stood in Foster’s yard staring up into her windows, leaving his spent butts behind. He’d killed Lost. And it was clear now that killing was the Morgan family business. She looked over at Li, dread blooming. “Uncle Frank.”
“My ass,” Li said.
CHAPTER 69
Tom watched Amelia pace around the empty living room, too gone to appreciate its charms, too scattered, too muddled, to care that he’d been very careful with the purchase, finding just the right kind of house, in just the right spot, with a basement that would work for both of them. It didn’t appear that Amelia had slept much or eaten. Her clothes were disheveled, her look distant. He was witnessing her unraveling.
Amelia stopped. “She’s alive. I messed up. I should have slit her throat instead, then plunged the knife into her. You would have known to do that. It was the headlights coming. I felt rushed. I don’t do well when I’m rushed.”
“You need to calm down,” he said.
Her pacing resumed. “Can’t calm down. Not until she’s dead.”
“Am.” But she wasn’t listening. Her hand skimmed the walls as she passed them, her head shaking. He’d never imagined that this was who she was beneath her confident exterior. All the time he’d watched her grow, he’d seen strength and resilience . . . intelligence, not this. He’d hoped to create a killer in his own image. He’d planned it, cultivated the entire thing.
“Amelia!” She stopped and turned to face him. “Breathe.” There was no furniture in the house yet, or he would have told her to sit. Instead, he instructed her to lean against the windowsill, close her eyes, get ahold of herself. As his protégé, she was no good to him like this. How could she possibly carry the mantle of his genius in such a state? If she didn’t rally, the house was useless, his plans gone to waste.
“All’s not lost,” he said.
“But . . .”
“Quiet. Think.”
Even if Amelia was a scattered mess, he was not. The doctor was alive. That was a problem. Am had acted impulsively and had put them both at risk. The police had already linked her to Bodie, and he knew that Bodie would eventually break. And he knew the police, once on the scent, wouldn’t be so easily distracted. Who had seen him? The woman in Amelia’s studio, the one with the dog. Maybe someone in Bodie’s building when he’d dropped off the train.
Amelia lifted off the sill. “I have to run. Close up the studio.”
He despised impulsivity. It was a sign of weakness. He’d expected so much more of Amelia. As he watched her, there was an empty feeling inside him, as though he’d lost something precious that he prized above all else, something he would need to let go of. Maybe he could find another. It wasn’t too late to try the experiment again. He’d been lucky when he’d crossed paths with that young mother with her two babies. That was when he’d decided to see if he could be normal, human, like everyone else. If he could hate, he’d reasoned, why couldn’t he also love? But did he love, or did he only covet? Even now he wasn’t sure.
Whatever the case, he had to deal with this cock-up. A cleanup on aisle eight, so to speak. Tom grinned at his own joke as Amelia slowly settled and appeared to come back to herself. But his respect, his affection, had waned. “Better?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve let you down.”
She had, but maybe he could retrain and redeem her. “You haven’t, kiddo.” He moved around the room, checking Amelia, not seeing the promise he once had, letting the lie comfort her. The loving smile he had perfected, the one that worked so well with babies and children, brightened his face. “Every problem has a solution. Now this is what we’re going to do.”
CHAPTER 70
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” Foster said, with Li and the others huddled up in the office. “We still have Morgan here. Amelia’s going to want to help him. That’s what Silva was about, I think. Another attack while we still had eyes on him was supposed to make us believe we had the wrong guy.”
“But she messed that up big time,” Kelley said.
“Now she’s got her own problems,” Lonergan groused. “We got every cop in the city lookin’ for her with that ID from the doc. We got her so far for attempted murder, and if Silva dies, the full ride. She’s not gonna be hangin’ around here.”
“And we swept Morgan’s place,” Symansky said. “No reflective paint. The only thing’s got us looking his way is Silva fingering him and the fact that he’s the oddest damn duck I’ve ever encountered.”
“I’m still looking for Priscilla,” Li said. “And Tom.”
Foster tacked photos of Amelia’s canvas up on the board. “Meanwhile, this is the painting she’s been working on. Li and I photographed the entire thing. It’s huge.”
“Good God, she’s all over the place with that,” Kelley said from his perch on Symansky’s desk. “Where’s the cohesiveness? The through line?”
“We’re not critiquing the quality of her work,” Lonergan bit back. “Head in the game, will ya?”