as her psychologist, Dr. Miller, had suggested she do when she was confronted by any source of fear, she whispered the mantra over and over, “When I’m afraid, I’ll trust in the Lord. When I’m afraid, I’ll trust in the Lord.”
She took comfort in her faith even as disbelief and terror that this whole nightmare was happening took hold of her stomach and twisted her insides into tight knots.
Officer Johnson, twentysomething with a clean-shaven jaw and a lump at the bridge of his nose, opened the back door of the white cruiser with the blue lettering of the NYPD across the side.
Her gaze strayed to the ten-story building a half a block away. She counted the windows up three floors and across six to her apartment. She just wanted to go home and cocoon herself inside the four walls where everything was neat and orderly. Where there were no dead men, and no police detective who looked at her with accusation in his jade-colored eyes, making her feel like she were scum on the bottom of his shoe.
“Ma’am,” Officer Johnson prodded with a gesture to the interior of the car.
Swallowing back her panic, she told herself, Cars are safe. She’d be safe. Nothing bad was going to happen to her in the car. Only in a car she wasn’t in control. Walking, she could control. She could control her steps, her pace and her path.
She slid onto the seat in the back of the cruiser, the cracked leather creaking beneath her. The car smelled like stale coffee and greasy food, making her stomach riot with nausea. She shuddered, wishing she had her lemon-scented air freshener handy.
Officer Johnson slid into the driver’s seat and soon they were sloshing their way through the late evening traffic.
She stared straight ahead and briefly met the officer’s gaze in the rearview mirror. Did he, too, think she killed those men?
Quickly she averted her eyes to watch the neighborhood go by. She counted how many people she saw wearing brimmed hats, beanie caps and how many were braving the elements with bare heads. But she kept losing count as the frightening picture of the two dead men crept into her mind.
The image of her scissors embedded deep into the stomach of Mr. Drake would forever be imprinted on her brain.
She gagged, fighting to control her body’s need to lose the salad she’d had for dinner.
She replayed the whole evening over and over again, looking for some way to make the outcome different. But that was an impossibility.
The past could not be undone.
A lesson she’d learned long ago but still struggled to come to terms with. She so wanted to be able to turn the clock back, to force events to be redone so that her father wouldn’t have been murdered and her life shattered by grief and illness.
Stop it, she commanded herself. She wouldn’t go down that road. Not now. Now, she had to think about tonight and the two men who had died in the gallery.
She’d been in the workroom tending to the Wahlberer, a lovely landscape of the Mexican Riviera, with lots of color and bold strokes that were softened by featherlight shading that inspired, giving the onlooker a sense of place that only the masters usually accomplished.
But she’d met the artist Wahlberer, a talented young upstart out of Canada who’d flirted shamelessly and hadn’t really taken seriously his good fortune at having his work displayed at the Sinclair Gallery. His flippant attitude about his art and the gallery had grated on her nerves.
As she’d told Detective Wallace, she couldn’t understand the compulsion of either of the two dead men to buy the painting. The amount had been way above the value, and, yes, a boon for the gallery and the artist, but a poor investment in her mind.
Then when Mr. Vanderpool had shown up, saying he’d been told that he could have the painting, the yelling had started. Overwhelmed by the feral angriness of the two men, Megan had retreated in search of her boss.
Why hadn’t Sinclair been in his office? He always worked until eight. A shiver hit her flesh as possibilities of what could have happened ran rampant through her brain.
There had been another person in the gallery. But who? And why murder the two men?
A thought clamped on to her mind and wouldn’t let go. If she hadn’t gone in search of her boss, would she, too, have been killed?
TWO
“A 9 mm revolver,” Andy said, holding up the weapon with his pencil through the trigger guard. “Found in the Dumpster out back.”
Paul moved to the exit leading to the back alley of the building. Putting his overcoat back on before stepping outside, he blinked to clear his vision as a sheet of cold snow hit him in the face. A streetlamp provided a small measure of light over the Dumpsters, while lamps had been set up to illuminate the work area for the CSI team as they continued their part of the investigation.
Paul found the team leader and asked her to extend the search in the upper part of gallery.
“Already on it,” Barbara Sims stated in her no-nonsense way. “We’ve dusted the door and lifted at least a dozen prints on the outside, but inside, everything…” She paused to emphasize her words. “And I mean nearly every square inch of that workroom has been wiped clean.”
Megan rubbing down her pumps before using the cloth to set them on the floor of the closet flashed in Paul’s mind.
Had her routine with the shoes been for real or for show?
He reentered the workroom, his gaze taking in the orderly way the room was arranged. Packing materials lined up neatly in one corner, brushes hung upside down from a rack, shortest to longest. The worktable where Megan claimed to have been working hardly looked messy at all.
A ball of string sat on one corner of the table, a tape dispenser beside it, a ruler next and a roll of brown packing paper, all lined up with the beveled edge. Everything one would need to secure a package, except the scissors.
“Lemon,” Paul said as he breathed in the scent.
Andy held up a can of lemon-scented air freshener. One of five that were lined along the bottom shelf of the workbench. “This.”
The same spray Megan had used earlier. Paul also noted the dozen boxes of antibacterial wipes stacked next to the air-freshener cans.
A commotion back in the gallery drew Paul’s attention. He and Andy moved together out of the workroom and found a uniformed officer trying to prevent a short, thin, elderly gentlemen, wearing a long trench coat, from entering the crime scene.
“What’s going on here?” the man asked, his nasally voice echoing off the walls. “I’m Lester Sinclair. I own this gallery.” Mr. Sinclair spotted Paul and directed his words to him. “I demand you tell me what’s going on this instant.”
Paul nodded for the officer to let Mr. Sinclair pass. “Sir, I’m Detective Wallace and this is my partner, Detective Howell. There has been a double homicide on the premises.”
Mr. Sinclair’s face turned ashen. “Oh, mercy no. Is Megan…?”
“Ms. McClain is fine. She’s been taken to the station for further questioning.” Paul pulled
