“What about the fear? You said he didn’t have much.”
“Not enough,” said Prescott. “There are theories about that, but they’re just theories.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I need to hear everything that comes to mind when you look at him.”
“Once in a while the psychiatrists do tests on a certain kind of people—ones who jump out of airplanes a lot, or go for speed records, or whatever. Supposedly a lot of them have a deficiency in a chemical called monoamine oxidase. It’s a chemical that regulates other chemicals, and it’s released when you’re scared. When monoamine oxidase is released, it gives you more dopamine and norepinephrine, so you feel a rush. I think that could be what’s going on with him. He needs that rush, like an addict. But both intentionally and unintentionally, he’s been making himself resistant to fear. He needs more and more objective danger to trigger it.” He sighed. “But all of that stuff is invisible. It doesn’t have much to do with a picture.”
She handed the drawing to him, a refutation of what he was saying. There was the young, clean-cut man he had seen in the crisp security-guard uniform.
It seemed to Prescott that the last time he had seen the drawing it had been extremely good. The term for it was a “likeness.” But now something else had happened. The face was alive. In the skull that had simply been an accurate outline, then a three-dimensional shape, there were thoughts. He tried to analyze this impression, and realized it had to be the eyes. They were watchful in exactly the right way. The mouth was almost smiling, but the eyes were doing something different that made the smile just an extremely convincing lie. In the eyes was cunning opportunism; inside the pleasant young face a different person was waiting, with cold patience, for his chance.
“It’s him,” he said. “It’s the one.” He tried to say it more accurately: “It’s that man, and it’s nobody else.” That was what she had done. An hour ago, it had been a picture of the man. In subtle degrees, she had made it more like him, but absolutely not like other men who resembled him. She had eliminated them.
“Good,” she said, without surprise. She stood up and took the drawing away from him, then walked toward the other end of the room, where her workbenches and easels stood and everything was paint-spattered.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“It’s time to paint,” she said in a distracted voice, without removing her eyes from the drawing. “I’m a painter.”
“You already have him,” said Prescott, getting to his feet.
She kept walking. “Go sit down. Have more coffee, take a nap or something. This will take some time.”
“But why are you doing it?”
“I told you. I’m a painter. I’m not sort of a painter. I don’t quit just because some ignorant character comes in and tells me it’s good enough for him. It has to be good enough for me.”
Prescott sat and drank coffee. He paced the loft, looked out the windows at the night streets below, now surprisingly empty for New York. After a time, he lay on the couch and dozed, then woke. Each time he looked toward the other end of the loft, he could see her still standing, working intently, paying no attention to anything but the sketch and the canvas. It was daylight before she looked in his direction, then beckoned.
He walked to the easel and looked. The killer looked back at him. It was no longer just a representation. Somehow, contained in the painted version, there were all of the things that Prescott believed about this man and had told Cara Lee Satterfield. The painting was more like him than any blown-up color photograph could be. “When can I have it?”
“You don’t want this,” she said. “You want eight-by-ten photographs of it. I’ll take them now.”
The photographs took time. Big floodlights on stands had to be moved around, then white reflective screens arranged and rearranged until she was satisfied. She set up a camera on a tripod, took shot after shot, moved the lights and screens, then took more. At last, he heard the camera’s automatic rewinder humming. She popped the camera’s back open, took out the film, then looked at her workbench, tore the printed address off an old envelope full of slides, and handed him the address and the film. “That’s the place to get them developed.” She looked around, seeming to notice the daylight for the first time. “What time is it?”
“Nearly noon.”
“Good. They’re open.”
“You’re going to want to go to sleep, so maybe we’d better settle your fee before I go.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a checkbook.
She held up her hand. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“I keep this account’s balance pretty high,” he said.
She shook her head. “That’s just money. This is magic. It’s a collaboration, an experience. I figured out my price.”
“What is it?”
“You can’t pay off until you’ve finished chasing this guy,” she said. “About how long will it take?”
He looked at her uneasily. “You know, I don’t want to be dramatic, but the finish could be that I stop chasing because he kills me.”
“I’ve seen you, and now I’ve seen him,” she said. “I’ll take that chance. Give me a call when it’s done, and you can pay off.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Sure,” she said. “There are two things. You’ll fly back here to sit for me. I want to paint you.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“In November I have a one-woman show,” she said. “The opening is a big, pretentious party, and they’re awful. They’re boring, frightening, and embarrassing all at the same time. You will be my escort. The women will be nice to look at, but you won’t be able to, or I’ll be angry. The men are not all bad, either, but there will be a few . . . you’ll want to pinch their heads off. You won’t do that, either.”
“Why would you want me as an escort?”
She walked toward the steel door, and opened it for him. “I don’t have to tell you that, so I won’t. It’s my price. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
12
Prescott took the film to the photography lab and went to his hotel to sleep. When he awoke in the evening, he picked up the two hundred color prints. The diminished size of the photographs made the painting even sharper and the impression of perfection more striking. He was tempted to call Cara Lee Satterfield and tell her, but she had known long before he did. Instead, he packed his bags, took a cab to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Philadelphia. When he got there, he rented a car and drove west, deeper into Pennsylvania. What he wanted now was easier to obtain in some places than in others. After he had reached the hills, where there were farms and small towns, he made his first stop. He picked up the local newspaper, checked the bulletin boards in the first laundromat he saw, and then looked for flyers left at convenience stores. He was looking for announcements of private sales.
Prescott liked estate sales best, but not if they were big enough to be held as auctions. What he needed was a person he could talk to, and he preferred the closest female survivor. He would look over the dead man’s belongings, maybe buy something that was expensive and portable, like a rare book, a watch, or a set of cuff links. That would get him talking to the woman. He would talk about her wisdom in passing on possessions that someone else could use, listening for her lament that there were things she didn’t know what to do with. He would let slip that he was sure his wife—or daughter—would have the same problem: he was a gun collector, and guns were hard to resell. In some places, this was likely to give the woman the creeps, and the conversation would be over. But in these rural areas, more often than not, he would be led into the house to look over a gun cabinet.