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“No, not with me. Don’t know if he called the studio. Lucia handles that crap. I never saw him again.”
“Did you work with anyone on the Juilliard shoot?”
“Yeah. I don’t know who. Some idiot or other.”
“The same idiot or other who was with you when you did the wedding in January, the shots of Rachel Howard?”
“Not likely. They don’t stick that long.” He managed a thin smile. “I’m temperamental.”
“You don’t say? Who has access to your disc files?”
“Nobody. Nobody should, but I guess anybody who co
mes through and knows what they’re doing.” He moved his shoulders. “I don’t pay attention. I never had to pay attention.”
He shoved the photos back at Eve. “I didn’t call a lawyer.”
“So noted. Why is that, Hastings?”
“Because this pisses me off. Plus, I hate lawyers.”
“You hate everybody.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” He rubbed his hands over his face, then dropped them on the table. “I didn’t kill those kids. That girl with the magic smile, this boy with the magic eyes. I’d never put those lights out.” He leaned forward. “Just from an artistic standpoint—what would that smile be like in five years, or those eyes in ten. I’d want to know, to see, to capture. And personally, I don’t get murder. Why kill people when you can just ignore them?”
Mirroring his move, she leaned toward him. “What about those lights? Wouldn’t you want them for your own? Take them while they’re young, innocent. Brilliant. Pull them in, through the lens, into yourself. Then they’re always yours.”
He stared, blinked twice. “You gotta be fucking kidding me. Where do you get that kind of woo-woo crap?”
Despite the horror of the situation, she let out a laugh. “I like you, Hastings. I’m not sure what that says about me. We’re going through your records again, to see if we find the shots you took of Kenby Sulu.”
“Why don’t you just move in, bring the freaking family? Your pet dog.”
“I’ve got a cat. I’ve got you scheduled for Truth Testing in about twenty minutes. I’ll have an officer escort you to a waiting area.”
“That’s it?”
“For now, that’s it. Do you have any questions or statements you wish to make at this time, on record.”
“Yeah, I got a question. I got a prize-winning question for you, Dallas. Am I going to have to wonder who’s next? Am I going to have to ask myself whose picture I took who’s going to end up dead?”
“I don’t have the answer to that. Interview end.”
“You believe him.” Peabody slid into the car beside Eve. “Even without the Truth Test.”
“I believe him. He’s connected, but not involved. And he’ll know the face of the next target. He’ll recognize it.” And it would cost him, Eve thought. She’d seen what it was already costing him on that ugly face of his.
“The killer is someone he knows, or at least someone who knows him and his work. Someone who admires it, or envies it . . . or thinks their own is superior.”
She toyed with that angle as she pulled out of the garage. “Somebody who hasn’t been able to achieve the same sort of commercial or critical success.”
“A competitor.”
“Maybe. Or maybe someone who’s too artistic, too above commercialism. He wants acknowledgment, otherwise, he’d be keeping the images for himself. But he sends them to the media.”
She played back pieces of the text the killer sent to Nadine.
Such light! Such strong light. It coats me. It feeds me. He was brilliant, this clever young man with the dancer’s build and the artist’s soul. Now he is me. What he was lives forever in me.
