Her phone lay beside the pad, the original painting glowing beneath a constellation of smudges.
“I’ll get onto that myself, huh?”Marcus asked.
“Hm?”
She looked up and almost smiled, as if suddenly realizing he was there.Then she tilted the page, considering the angle of the bird’s beak.“This one’s different.”
He sighed.“Different how?”
She pointed with the biro.“The miniature birds were looking frontwards.This one’s giving me the eye.”
“You should be so lucky,” Marcus quipped.
“You know what I mean.”She tapped the eye she’d drawn.“And he’s taken more time here.Every feather tracked.The way the head turns, the sprig is positioned….”
Marcus rubbed his face with both hands, then let them fall.“For what it’s worth, this one doesn’t feel like someone punishing parental neglect.Not the obvious flavour, anyway.No public falling-out, nobody walled-up in a nursing home, no ignored voicemails.Unless we missed the bit where Sarah Brennan sabotaged the plane her parents were on.”
Kate said nothing.
“That was a joke,” he added.“Admittedly a dark one.”
Still nothing.
“Kate?”
She finally looked up, as if surfacing from a long way down.“Sorry.What?I agree about the photos.”
“So you were listening?”
“Half.Sorry.”
She held his gaze for a second, then looked away.“Brennan reminds me of people I know,” she said.“Women trying to do something decent in a world that rewards sharks.People who care too much about the right things and not enough about self-preservation.This bastard took that and twisted it into some kind of morality play about filial duty.But what did she do that was un-dutiful?”
Marcus let that sit.He could see another layer she wasn’t naming: the parents, dead and unreachable; the sister in the city.The echoes it might have with Kate’s own complicated knot of family and grief.
“Okay,” he said finally.“Here’s what we know.Hayes ignored her dad in the nursing home.Our killer treated that as a sin of omission and staged his little sermon accordingly.Sarah, on the other hand, loses her parents young, has the decency to be traumatized about it, and this guy still puts her on her knees in front of their photos.So either he’s working off some extremely creative reinterpretation of ‘honor thy parents’ or…”
“Another possibility,” Kate said quietly.“He doesn’t really care about the specifics.He only cares about his own story.The parents are props.The victims are props.He’s not punishing real neglect, he’s punishing his idea of neglect.”
Marcus nodded slowly.“Which makes him less a religious enforcer and more a performer with a grudge.”
“And performers are dangerous,” she murmured.
He watched her thumb absently swipe back to the photograph, then to another image.One of the miniature crows that had accompanied the earlier crime scenes.
“You realize you just proved Sullivan right about you and work,” he said.“Give you a couple of gruesome art pieces and you’re gone to your happy place.”
“This is not my happy place,” she said, but there was the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.“Why berries?”she added, vacantly.“Why put berries on the last one?”
Marcus weighed options.They had at least four hours of paperwork and liaison ahead of them, calls to make, notifications to start.But Kate, in this state, was only half present; the other half was already in some mental studio, pinning the killer's images to the walls and walking around them.
He made a decision.
“All right,” Marcus said, standing.The chair creaked.“Here’s how we divide this.You keep communing with your feathered friend.Dig into whatever connections you can think of, consult your rabbi and your tame professors, whatever floats your metaphorical boat.I’ll track down the photos and the sister.”
Kate blinked.“Maya?”
"Yeah.Torres just texted me her contact details.I'll go with Sullivan, break the news in person, and see what she gives us on the parents' front.If there's a skeleton in the Brennan closet, she's our best shot at finding it."
