Bad Blood
Page 12

Back at the crime scene, the smell of kerosene had been overwhelming. This wasn’t a little spill we were talking about here—but for some reason, Lia had wanted me to entertain the possibility that it was.
Why?
Michael stepped over the threshold and into Celine’s room. After one last glance at Lia, I followed.
“Two more paintings on the walls,” I commented, breaking the silence. Celine had hung the paintings side by side, matched pieces of an eerie, abstract set. The canvas on the left appeared to be painted entirely black, but the longer I stared at it, the easier it was to see a face staring back from the darkness.
A man’s face.
It was subtle, a trick of light and shadows in a painting that, at first glance, held neither. The second canvas was mostly blank, with a few bits of shading here and there. It looked like a completely abstract painting, until you realized that the white space held its own design.
Another face.
“She doesn’t paint bodies.” Michael came to stand in front of the paintings. “Even in elementary school, Celine refused to draw anything but faces. No landscapes. Not so much as a single still life. It used to drive the art teachers her parents hired mad.”
That was the first opening Michael had given me to ask him about this girl, this piece of his past that none of us had even known existed. “You’ve known each other since you were kids?”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure Michael would answer the question.
“Off and on,” he said finally. “When I wasn’t at boarding school. When she wasn’t at boarding school. When my father wasn’t pushing me to make friends with the sons of people more important than a partner he already had eating out of his hand.”
I knew that Michael’s father had a temper. I knew he was abusive, nearly impossible to read, wealthy, and obsessed with the Townsend name. And now I knew something else about Thatcher Townsend. No matter how much money you make, no matter how high up the social ladder you climb—it will never be enough. You will always be hungry. You will always want more.
“Good news.” Lia’s voice broke into my thoughts. When Michael and I looked over at her, she was removing a false bottom from a chest at the foot of Celine’s bed. “The police took our victim’s laptop into evidence, but they didn’t take her secret laptop.”
“How did you—” I started to ask, but Lia cut me off with a wave of her hand.
“I did a stint as a high-end cat burglar after I got kicked out of the Met.” Lia set the laptop up on Celine’s desk.
“We’ll need Sloane to hack the—” Michael cut off as Lia logged on.
It wasn’t password-protected. You hide your laptop, but don’t password-protect it. Why?
“Let’s see what we have here,” Lia said, opening files at random. “Class schedule.” I had just enough time to commit Celine’s class schedule to memory before Lia moved on. She opened a new file—a photograph of two children standing in front of a sailboat. I recognized the little girl immediately. Celine. It took me longer to realize that the little boy standing next to her was Michael. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.
“Enough,” Michael said sharply. He tried to close the photo, but Lia blocked him. On the laptop’s screen, I noticed the photo begin to shift, to change.
Not a photo, I realized after a long moment. A video. An animation.
Slowly, the children in the photo morphed, until I was looking at a nearly identical photograph of two teenagers standing in front of a sailboat.
Celine Delacroix, age nineteen, and Michael Townsend, now.
 
 
“You got something you want to share with the class, Townsend?” Lia’s tone was light and mocking, but I knew with every fiber of my being that this wasn’t a joke to her.
You came up here because you thought he was hiding something. From you. From all of us.
While Dean and I had been profiling the crime scene, Lia had been watching Michael. She must have seen some kind of tell. Even if he hadn’t lied, she must have noticed something that made her suspect…
What? What do you suspect, Lia?
“That’s not a photograph.” Michael gave Lia a look. “It’s a digital drawing. Celine took creative license with the old photo and updated it. Obviously. Unless you didn’t happen to notice that her schedule included a class on digital art?”
As a matter of reflex, I ran through the rest of Celine’s schedule in my head. Visual Thinking. Death and Apocalypse in Medieval Art. Theories, Practice, and Politics of Human Rights. Color.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Lia asked Michael. “When you went home over Christmas?”
Michael’s jaw clenched slightly. “I haven’t seen Celine in nearly three years. But I’m touched that you’re jealous. Really.”
“Who says I’m jealous?”
“The emotion reader in the room.” Michael glanced at me. “Maybe the profiler in the room can tell the lie detector that it’s borderline pathological to be jealous of one of our vics?”
Vics. As in victims. The Michael I knew wasn’t capable of thinking of someone he cared about that way. Celine Delacroix wasn’t a nameless, faceless victim to him. And I couldn’t help wondering—if Celine hadn’t seen Michael in three years, how had she captured the way he looked now so precisely?
“Tell me you’re not hiding something.” Lia gave Michael what seemed to be a perfectly pleasant smile. “Go ahead. I dare you.”
“I’m not doing this with you,” Michael said through clenched teeth. “This isn’t about you, Lia. This is none of your damn business.”
They were so caught up arguing with each other that they didn’t see the picture on the screen change again. This time, there was only one face depicted in the drawing.
Thatcher Townsend’s.
“Michael.” I waited until he looked at me to continue. “Why would Celine have a picture of your father on her computer? Why would she have drawn him?”
Michael stared at the computer screen, his face unreadable.
“Townsend, tell me you think this case has something to do with the Masters.” Lia went for the jugular. “Tell me that you haven’t known, from the second you saw that crime scene, that it does not.”