“Must be anartiste.”
I spared her a small smile. “You mean, he must sell pretentious collections for a cool mil that can only be described as ‘the communal sense of self is a wasteland,’ or ‘the absence of objectivity represents the performance of my manhood.’”
Quinn took a final puff from the butt of her cigarillo, dropped it to the ground, stomped it out with her heel, and muttered under her breath. She went to the side door and strolled in with the confidence of someone who lived in the building. I followed, the two of us quickly taking the stairs to the second floor. Quinn unbuttoned her coat as she reached the landing. Her steps slowed as she removed a pistol from her shoulder holster and approached the lone apartment door.
“I thought you were on suspension,” I whispered.
She glanced at me and raised the gun. “My off-duty weapon,” she said nonchalantly.
I stopped walking when Quinn held her hand back to put distance between us.
Her pistol held at low ready, Quinn knocked loudly on the door. “Mr. Dover!”
With the exception of what sounded like a jackhammer being added to the magnum opus downstairs, silence was her only response.
Quinn put both hands on her weapon. “NYPD!” she called next.
“We’ve already established he’s dead, Quinn,” I said from the stairs.
She ignored me, stepped to the side, and kicked the door with her boot. The lock broke, wood splintered, and the door flew back.
“Holy shit!” I shouted.
She pointed at the mess and glanced at me. “That door was already open. Right?”
“R-right,” I agreed, offering a quick nod before joining her. “I knew the door thing was cooler when cops did it.”
Quinn gave me a dubious expression, which I’d been on the receiving end of on more than one occasion, before walking into the apartment. She kept her pistol out, methodically checked each room, then motioned for me to enter. “All right, genius.”
“Dothe thing?” I asked, walking over bits of shattered wood on the kitchen floor.
“You got it.”
Moving past the spacious countertops and fancy fridge, I stepped by Quinn and into the main living room on the right. Expensive leather furniture. Big-screen television. Large windows overlooking the street. A few potted orchids were dead on the sill. It was a pretty generic pad for a middle-aged bachelor, although a few framed prints—black-and-white photographs, judging by the density of the shades—hung on the walls to break up the monotony. They were pleasant enough, but contemporary art was not my forte.
Quinn whistled from behind me like she’d found something interesting.
I left the living room, walked past the kitchen doorway again, and turned into a weird alcove nestled in the back of the apartment. This was much more in tune with what I expected from a professional artist—an at-home studio. Lots of frames and samples, mounting tools, a laptop, camera collection on a nearby shelf, and laid out on a worktable, various prints that never reached the final stage of “gallery-ready.”
“Find something?” I asked.
“These, for one.” Quinn motioned to the enlarged photographs carefully set out on the table.
I hastily took my magnifying glass out and leaned over to inspect the pictures. They were dated. Nothing antique or even retro about them, but for the fact they’d been taken on physical film. The quality of the photos had analivesensation to them that digital pixels always seemed to lack. Further examination of the unfortunate wardrobes worn by the subjects placed these pictures sometime in the ’90s.
The locations and faces were different in nearly every frame. The one constant—a human skull. Pictured alongside dusty, smiling men in a desert, on the cluttered desk in an office, in its own chair beside a sleeping woman at an airport gate, even settled in between two sweating cans of beer on what looked like someone’s back porch.
“Huh” was all I got out.
“Edward Cope,” Quinn stated.
“We don’t know that,” I warned. “It could be the skull of Henry IV.”
Quinn picked up a sheet from the table. “The Cope Chronicles,” she read aloud.
I raised my head, studied the printed title with Dover’s name underneath, looked at the photographs again, and swore. “UPenn accused the Museum of Natural History of losing their Cope skull after shipping artifacts for the upcoming exhibit, and AMNH insisted UPenn never even sent the skull.”
“The museum was right,” Quinn said.
