The Museum of Desire: An Alex Delaware Novel(102)
Three gleaming silver salvers on a table draped in whiskey-colored velvet.
In the left-hand tray, a severed hand. On the right, a foot.
Filling the center tray was a woman’s head, dark ringlets streaming over a fluted edge. Eyes wide open but vacant. Mouth formed in a final oval. The skin, chalky gray accented in mauve and sea green and in strategic spots, red.
Marc Coolidge said, “Oh, God.” His eyes trailed to the far end of the room.
Something in a corner the track lighting neglected. Barely visible in the sooty gloom.
The four of us got closer. Details materialized.
Six-foot white rectangle.
A deep freeze.
Again, Milo held us back and walked toward it. Lifting the lid, he peered inside and stumbled back involuntarily.
Reed, unused to seeing his boss off balance, managed a single croaked word. “Her.”
Milo said, “Blue hair,” and began lowering the lid.
His hand slipped.
It slammed.
CHAPTER
56
There’d be no trial in the matter of what the bloggers, the rumormongers, the conspiracy theorists, and the media, playing catch-up, had labeled The Stretch-Limo Massacre.
No quick resolution out of the public eye, the department doing its best to control leaks.
Impossible task. Gratifying the bloggers, the rumormongers…
* * *
—
Luminol tests of the gallery building revealed oceans of blood from several human sources, most of it upstairs throughout the loft. But evidence of mop-up was also found in the rear anteroom leading to the staircase, and those samples traced to Marcella McGann and Stephen Vollmann.
The charnel house would take time to sort out, and the DOJ lab could’ve been convinced to prioritize. But Milo’s bosses had decided on a go-slow strategy, hoping the internet noise would die down and they could stop fielding annoying questions.
As Alicia had said, the Clearwater house revealed nothing but art storage. The same combination of cheap poster art and centuries-old paintings yet to be cataloged.
The paintings were transferred to a temperature-controlled vault at the crime lab. Milo suggested Suzanne Hirto be brought in. His bosses felt otherwise and hired an art history professor from the U. who arrived with a squadron of eager graduate students. When their expertise was found lacking, the prof brought in Suzanne Hirto.
It took a while but the team managed to divide the trove into two categories. Nearly three hundred paintings ranging from Renaissance to impressionist were believed to have been looted by the Nazis, fifty-nine of them labeled with the business card of Heinz Gurschoebel.
That leaked out quickly, eliciting a hailstorm of demand letters from the legal departments of museums around the world, organizations claiming virtue, and lawyers representing Holocaust survivors.
A smaller grouping—thirty-four oils on panel—had been set aside in the smallest Conrock bedroom. A collection of grotesque, pornographic, often sadistic genre scenes, not dissimilar to the two paintings displayed in the loft.
Those, Hirto was willing to certify, likely came from Hermann G?ring’s collection of grotesquerie, a claim later supported by twenty-year-old correspondence unearthed in the Conrock house indicating that Stefan Sigmund Kierstead was a grand-nephew of Gurschoebel’s wife and she’d willed him the lot.
The Conrock house also gave up two exquisitely fashioned Fabbri shotguns from Italy, a more utilitarian Mossberg, an AK-47, eight handguns, and a collection of Japanese kitchen knives. Blood blowback on the Mossberg matched to Marcella McGann and Stephen Vollmann. Microscopic specks of blood on a cleaver, a boning knife, and a butcher knife matched to the four limo victims and Medina Okash. Okash’s blood was also found on a band saw in the Conrock garage.
Along with the saw and other tools, Milo found a box containing forty-four burner phones, most still in their wrappers but a few used sparingly.
One of those was the cell Candace Kierstead had employed to communicate with Richard Gurnsey. Their correspondence consisted of texts that grew increasingly explicit over the five months Candace and Gurnsey had cohabited. Some of their sessions had taken place in hotels and parks, others in Candace’s marital bed with Sig watching and masturbating appreciatively.
In a Conrock desk drawer, Alicia found papers documenting the transfer of ownership, a week prior to the murders, of two dogs from the high-kill animal shelter in Riverside. The recipient: S. Smith. The handwriting was a match to Candace’s.
A pair of pit bull mixes, one male, one female, estimated to be three and five years old, respectively.
Picked up as strays, they’d never been named.
* * *
—
No communication was found between Richard Gurnsey and Medina Okash, and Sean had found little of interest in the five-hundred-square-foot apartment. The exception was a dozen explicit videos downloaded from the internet and saved on a laptop Okash kept on a kitchen counter.
Erotica of a single theme: threesomes featuring two women and one man.
Sean told me about it in my office. Blushing, his freckles receding as the surrounding skin reddened. For all the things he’s seen, there’s always been an innocence about him.
He turned to religion years ago. That and the comfort he finds in family and clarity of values generally help him maintain a cheerful outlook. But even structure and support can fall short when you’ve come inches from dying terribly.