They tried ramming the door, kicking it, putting their shoulders into it, but it didn’t budge.
“This is no good,” Joe said. “We’ll get the team up here.”
Conor stared at the door. Extra security plates had been installed around the door latch, so trying to jimmy the lock would be useless. Everything Conor had seen in the rooms, and the hardware on the other doors, appeared to be old bronze, from another era. But the Schlage lock was new and looked to be made of stainless steel or zinc. He pictured the pile of metal things in that tray in the office.
“Got gloves?” he asked Joe. He usually had some in his jacket pocket, but he hadn’t thought he would need tactical gloves on his wedding weekend. Joe handed him a pair, and he snapped them on.
Conor moved quickly down the hall to the desk in the library. With a gloved finger, he rummaged through the loose change. There were several keys in the tray, but only one Schlage. Conor took it to the locked room, inserted it into the knob, and turned. He heard the tumblers click, and he pushed the door open.
Conor and Joe stepped inside.
The room felt royal, as if it belonged in a castle. And it felt lived in: Air was circulating, not stale and musty like downstairs. There were no windows open. The fresh air came from vents in the ceiling. They saw the source of the sweet smell they had noticed downstairs: a cut glass diffuser with rods sticking up, spreading the scent of some essential oils through the room. It gave him a headache.
Crystal prisms dangled from a chandelier hanging over the large, canopied bed. The walnut headboard was ornately carved with flowers and angels. The white muslin canopy stirred very slightly in the moving air. A white linen coverlet, embroidered with gold threads, had been pulled back, and the sheets were rumpled.
Conor touched the mattress to feel if it was warm. It wasn’t, but it appeared that someone had lain here recently.
The polished wood floors were covered with blue-and-white Oriental rugs. Conor noticed that they were threadbare in places—they looked very old and valuable, probably made of silk like ones he had seen in Newport with Kate. A pair of pale-blue silk-covered armchairs flanked the marble fireplace.
A large black-and-white photograph over the bed showed a lion lunging over the bed of a young girl. It was shocking and violent, a disturbing tableau. It had a sepia tinge, indicating age. There was a feeling of motion, of stop-action, as if it was a still photo from a black-and-white film.
Conor took a photo on his iPhone. He noticed he had two bars of cell service—being high on the hill gave him some reception—so he texted the picture to Kate. It was habit, when he came upon artwork in an investigation, to ask her about it. He stared at the screen, wondering if the picture would go through and if there would be a reply. He couldn’t stop thinking of how she had looked at him after his confession about Belinda.
He looked at the image above the bed and realized it wasn’t a photo of an actual lion, but of a man wearing an animal disguise. The man loomed over the sleeping girl, her blanket made of white fur. The gauzy white canopy curtains softened the scene, illuminated by a candelabra. The room in which he stood was identical to the room in the photograph, as if a designer had come to the mansion and re-created the old photograph.
But how old was the photo? Maybe it had just been colored to make it look vintage.
“I’ve got to say, maybe that shit is staged, but it looks like a sex crime,” Joe said, standing beside Conor to stare at the photo.
“You think the picture inspires him?” Conor asked and pointed at the unmade bed. “Someone was just here.”
“You think he brought her in on the boat, like Grace said?” Joe asked.
“Maybe,” Conor said.
They were standing by the bed and turned their attention from the photograph to the sheets. Conor saw traces of blood at the foot of the mattress and roughly halfway down. It could have come from wounds on someone’s ankles and wrists. He thought of the handcuffs on the boat. Had the blood on them come from a current victim or one of the other women Grace had seen arriving on other nights?
Joe had grabbed a Bendix mobile when his team had arrived, and he used it now to call Danica Bouchard, the senior crime scene tech, and tell her to come up to the house as soon as she finished with theboat. Conor’s phone buzzed with a text. It was from Kate. The sight of her name jolted his heart.
The message was straightforward.
The photo is a still from a film by Jean Cocteau.
Conor took the hit. True, she hadn’t ignored him, but considering what she had just typed, her brevity spoke volumes. Conor replied:
Cocteau! Wow, Kate!
Conor had taken her to the south of France for her birthday, wanting to make a long-standing dream of hers come true. They had landed in Nice, rented a car, and driven to Villefranche-sur-Mer, a port town on the Mediterranean, where Cocteau had lived. Conor had made a reservation at the waterfront Welcome Hotel, where Jean Cocteau lived in 1924. Conor had loved surprising her by arranging for them to stay in his exact room.
Conor stared at his iPhone screen, wanting Kate to reply. When she didn’t, he wrote:
What film is it from?
A long wait before her reply, then:
La Belle et la Bête. A fantasy inspired by the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, it did. Belinda’s bullshit about their supposed nicknames.
