I frowned. That side of the table?
“Maybe it wasn’t me,” I told Dean after a moment. “If I was terrified and fighting for my life, the first chance I got, I would go for the door.”
Unless I was looking for a weapon. Unless I had reason to believe that I could fight and win.
Dean’s hands clenched themselves slowly into fists. “I could have done it.” He swept his hands over the table, a vein in his neck jumping out against his suntanned skin. “To scare you. To punish you.”
I pictured glass flying everywhere. This studio is mine. My space. My haven. What Dean was saying made sense only if the UNSUB knew that—and only if he’d known, on some level, that Celine would stay and fight.
That she wouldn’t run.
I took in the rest of the room and integrated it with what I’d seen in the initial crime scene photos. The overturned table. The curtain, torn down from the rod. The broken easel. The remains of Celine’s painting, broken and dying on the floor.
“What about the kerosene?” Lia had been remarkably quiet while we’d been profiling, but she’d reached the limit on biting her tongue.
Her question jarred me out of Celine’s perspective and into the UNSUB’s. If you’d planned to abduct her, you wouldn’t have brought the kerosene with you. And if you’d planned to burn her alive here, you would have torched the place.
“Maybe I couldn’t do it,” Dean said softly. “Maybe, going in, I didn’t realize what it would be like.” He paused. “How much I would like it.”
How much you would like the fight. How much you would like her fury, her terror. How much you would want to make this one last.
“The good news,” I said, my voice horrible and bitter and low, “is that if this is the work of one of the Masters, she’s definitely his first.”
Sloane was still analyzing the physical evidence, but I’d seen all I needed to see—all I could stand seeing. A small part of me couldn’t help drawing parallels between this crime scene and the first one I’d ever seen—my mother’s.
She fought. She bled. They took her.
The difference was that Celine had been taken on a Fibonacci date, and that meant that if this was the work of the Masters, we weren’t looking for a missing girl, a potential Pythia.
We were looking for a corpse.
“I’d like to see the victim’s bedroom,” I said. I owed it to Celine Delacroix to get to know her, then to come back down here and walk through it all over again, until I found whatever it was that we’d been overlooking.
That was what profilers did. We submerged ourselves in the darkness again and again and again.
“I’ll take you to Celine’s room.” Michael didn’t wait for permission before he started walking toward the main house. I caught Agent Sterling’s gaze. She nodded for me to follow Michael.
“I’ll wait down here,” Dean told me.
When we’d been profiling, I hadn’t felt the crushing distance between us, but now, my mind went to the secrets I was keeping from him, his father’s mocking words.
“I want to go over the scene again,” Dean continued. “Something about this doesn’t feel right.”
Nothing feels right, I thought. And then, deep inside of me, something whispered, Nothing ever will. I would give everything I had to this case. I’d give and give, until the girl I’d been—the girl Dean had loved—was gone, worn away like a sand castle swept out with the tide.
Ignoring the dull ache that accompanied that thought, I turned and followed Michael into the house. Lia fell in beside me.
“You’re coming with?” I asked.
Lia gave a graceful little shrug. “Why not?” The fact that she didn’t even try to lie about her motivations gave me pause. “Keep up,” Lia told me, breezing past. “I’d hate to have any alone time whatsoever with Michael in his ex-girlfriend’s room.”
Michael had said that Celine was the one person who’d cared about him growing up. He’d said that she was beautiful. He’d called her by a nickname. And Lia and Michael’s on-again off-again relationship had a tendency to end badly.
Every time.
We caught up with Michael just as he halted at the threshold of Celine’s room. As I came to stand next to him, I saw the thing that had made him pause.
A self-portrait. I didn’t question the instinct that said that Celine had painted this piece herself. It was big, larger than life. Unlike the photographs I’d seen of our victim, this painting showed a girl who wasn’t elegant, didn’t want to be. The paint was thick and textured on the canvas, nearly three-dimensional. The strokes were rough and visible. Celine had only painted herself from the shoulders up. Her skin was bare, dark brown and luminescent. And the expression on her face…
Naked and vulnerable and fierce.
Beside me, Michael stared at the painting. You’re reading her, I thought. You know exactly what the girl in that painting is feeling. You know what the girl who painted it was feeling. You know her like you know yourself.
“She didn’t use a brush.” Lia let that comment register before she continued. “CeCe dearest painted that one with a knife.”
My brain instantly integrated that tidbit into what I knew about Celine.
“How much do you want to bet our knife-wielding Picasso cleans her brushes with kerosene?” Lia asked. “Turpentine would be more common, but I’m guessing Celine Delacroix doesn’t do common. Does she, Michael?”
“You a profiler now?” Michael asked Lia.
“Just an aficionado of fine art,” Lia retorted. “I lived in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for six weeks, back when I was on the streets.”
I raised an eyebrow at Lia, utterly unable to tell if that was true or a bald-faced lie. In response, Lia pushed past Michael and into Celine’s room.
“If Celine cleans her brushes in kerosene,” I murmured, thinking out loud, “she would have had some on hand. Not a ton, but…”
But enough that you might not have had to bring it with you. I paused. And if you didn’t bring it with you, you might never have intended to burn her alive.
It could have been a coincidence. All of it—the date, the kerosene.
“You think the FBI doesn’t realize that some people use kerosene as a paint thinner?” Michael asked me, reading my thoughts in my expression. “You really think Briggs and Sterling didn’t go down that road before they took this case?”