Color Blind Read Online Free Page B

end of the hall. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

    Floyd followed McNally’s slow shuffling steps.

    “Thought you might have some ideas,” said McNally, holding the door open for Floyd.

    The bad lighting in the conference room made McNally’s skin appear even greener. But Floyd’s attention was taken up by the crime scene photos pinned to the bulletin board, two different bodies, both women, so mutilated it was hard to tell what had happened to them.

    “This one’s in her early twenties, according to the ME,” said McNally, tapping one group of photos.

    Brown looked closer. The victim’s age was hard to tell with all the makeup she was wearing on her blank dead face. “Totally eviscerated. A real fucking mess,” said McNally. “Super found her. Freaked. They had to take her to Bellevue, feed her some meds.” McNally drew the back of his hand across his mouth, then licked his dry lips. “The other one’s also been gutted.”

    “That why you called me?” asked Brown, shifting his glare to the other photos, these of an older woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, he’d guess. “The similarity to my old case, the Gutter, because—”

    “No, no.” McNally shook his head vigorously, his jowls and the bags over and under his eyes doing a little cha-cha-cha. “No, that’s not it at all.”

    McNally led him down another corridor, one Brown knew well, toward the evidence room.

    “What d’ya think?” McNally gestured at the long metal table. On it were two paintings on slightly sagging unstretched canvas encased in clear plastic. Beside each painting was a number—the same numbers that Floyd had noted under the photos of the two bodies. “These were found at the scenes,” said the older cop. “One at each.”

    Brown narrowed his eyes. The paintings didn’t look like much. One was of fruit—apples, bananas, pears—the shapes of the fruit the only thing that identified them because the color was completely off. The banana was purple, the pear orange, the apple blue. The other painting was a street scene, almost entirely black and white except for a pink sky and bright red clouds. Floyd guessed the painter was experimenting, though he or she needn’t have bothered. To Floyd’s untrained eye they looked pretty bad.

    “So?” McNally regarded Brown through his hooded eyes.

    “I’d say the guy’s got a lot to learn.”

    “I was thinking that you might know something, have an idea. I mean, tell you the truth, if the Death Artist wasn’t dead, I’d be thinking maybe he was back in business.”

    “No, his work was nothing like this. The Death Artist didn’t just paint.” Brown thought back to the bizarre clues, the collages and postcards that McKinnon had deciphered for the squad, the only way they’d ever have caught that psycho. “He’d never do shit like this.” For a moment Brown realized he was insulted that McNally could even think that the Death Artist would do such bad art—as if the Death Artist really had been some kind of artistic genius. He blew air out the side of his mouth. “You said these were left at the scenes? You sure they didn’t belong to the vics?”

    “Possible.” McNally tugged at his blubbery chin. “But the lab’s tellin’ us that the paint used in both is the same. Ditto for the canvas. So either the vics took a painting class together”—he snickered—“or they shared art supplies. Pretty fuckin’ unlikely, wouldn’t you say?”

    “Name-brand paint and canvas?” Brown asked.

    McNally swiped a sheet of paper off the table. “Uh, lab just says oil paint. Canvas is cotton duck, it says.”

    Brown took the sheet from McNally’s hand. “Generic oil paint and cotton duck. Don’t know if that makes a match, Tim.” He offered his old boss a sorry look.

    McNally’s sad-sack face sagged a bit more.

    Floyd looked again at the paintings—the banal scene, the fruit, the weird color. They could be the work of the same person, but no way he could