She made her calls to Father Ryan and Natasha as Billie drove.
By the time they reached the church, Father Ryan was prepared.
He’d set up a brazier in front of the main altar and he had large crucifixes for them to wear. He’d brought out one of his prayer books and was anxious to get going.
While they waited outside for Natasha, and for Quinn and Hattie to show up with the painting, Danni told Father Ryan what had happened in the middle of the night.
He nodded slowly. “I heartily believe that most men are good, just as I believe that faith and goodness will always prevail in the end. Not that evil doesn’t have a strong hold on the world. Whatever the reason, some people are just...bad.”
“What about children, Father Ryan?” Danni asked. “Do you think a child can be evil? I mean, can you be born evil?”
“Ah, Danni, that question is far too difficult for me to answer. I do believe that babies are born innocent. Yes, I’m a priest, but not terribly fond of the concept of original sin. But can we be born with faulty minds? Yes. We can be born with any number of physical birth defects, and it’s possible to have mental defects, as well. Look at the various forms of psychopathy. But is it nature or nurture? Or both? No one’s been able to completely answer that question. As far as specific examples...” Father Ryan paused for a minute. “I know there was a Boston boy named Jesse Pomeroy who was arrested for murder in 1874 when he was just fourteen. He’d tortured boys before that but only been sent to reform school. In England in the late sixties, Mary Flora Bell with the help of a friend became a killer at the age of eleven. Even more recently, in 1998 a fourteen-year-old was convicted of first-degree murder in Florida. He beat up an old woman—which was an accident, or so he claimed—but then stabbed her eleven times. None of us wants to think of such things, but...yes, children have murdered other children and adults throughout history. Carl Newton Mahan was only six when he killed his best friend. The boys were fighting over scrap metal and Carl wound up shooting the other boy with his father’s shotgun. That was in Kentucky, 1929.”
“You’re a priest and you know all this stuff?” Billie asked, grimacing.
“Yeah, how come?” Bo Ray added.
“I’ve studied both psychology and criminology,” Father Ryan told them, his mouth set in a grim line.
Natasha arrived. They greeted her, asking about Cosby Tournier.
He was still doing well, Natasha said, and would be released in a day or two.
Then Quinn showed up with Wolf, Hattie—and the painting.
“No coming in, no tea and crumpets. Straight to the church!” Father Ryan ordered. Danni loved Father Ryan’s church; it had been built in the mid-1800s. Stained-glass windows portrayed gentle pictures of Christ and the Apostles. There was a classic image of the Holy Trinity above the sanctuary; marble statues of Mary and Gabriel and other saints and angels sat about on their podiums.
Quinn brought the painting up to Father Ryan, who lit the brazier and suggested they fan out.
It was while they all did that—most trying not to see the Henry Hubert painting—that Danni decided that she had to look at it.
“Wait,” she said, and walked over to the painting. She studied it for a long moment.
Quinn was correct. It wasn’t a giclée.
But...
“Father, everyone. Quinn! I’m really sorry, but I have to see this in better light.”
Bo Ray groaned. “Danni, Quinn’s sure it’s not a giclée!” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Danni agreed. Quinn and Billie, somewhat reluctantly, carried the painting to the front door, where Danni asked that they step outside, into the natural light.
And when they did, when they stood in the bright sunshine, she knew.
“This isn’t the original,” she said.
“Danni, at Niles’s shop you two showed me the numbering,” Quinn argued.
“It isn’t one of the giclées,” Danni repeated. “But it isn’t the original.”
“How can you tell?” Quinn demanded.
“Well, we’d probably have to test the paint, but trust me, I’ve studied the giclée and I’ve looked at images of the original in enough art books by now. That’s not quite Hubert’s signature. The B isn’t right. And, if you examine the portrait over the fire, you’ll see there’s a difference—very slight, but the kind of mistake a forger might make—in the way the face is angled.”
“You’re positive?” Quinn asked, his voice filled with disappointment and weariness.
“I’m sorry, Quinn.”
“When I touched the color—the red on the sofa—it was damp. I was sure my fingers had touched...blood,” Quinn said. “It might have been the blood of a victim or blood from the killer. Maybe it was an attempt to activate the painting—to ‘awaken’ it. Whether or not that would be successful, since this isn’t the real thing...I don’t know.” He turned to Danni. “I can tell the difference between blood and red paint.”
“I know you can, Quinn,” she said, trying to calm his agitation. “It’s even possible that blood was used in creating the actual painting.”
“Oh.” Hattie Lamont, deflated, walked back into the church and took a seat in the rear pew.
“Burn the copy,” Natasha said decisively. “Burn the copy.”
“What if there’s evidence on it?” Quinn asked. “If someone’s tried feeding the copy with blood, it could be the killer’s.” He shook his head. “I should’ve told Larue about this. I should’ve had it tested. I’ve become so aware of the evil that can’t always be touched—or explained—that I sometimes forget about actual police work.”
“It doesn’t matter. Natasha is right,” Father Ryan chimed in. “We need to get rid of it, just get rid of it. I have to believe it was left where it was for a reason. You were supposed to find it. Maybe so you’d believe this was all over, that you’d solved it.” He paused. “Nonetheless, the intent was evil. We have to destroy the thing.”
Quinn was silent. “Okay,” he finally said. “I guess that’s for the best. We burn it and keep quiet about it. Hell, one reason I didn’t take it for testing is that I was afraid to leave it with anyone else. That’s when I thought it was the real thing. Still, this one scares me almost as much.” He looked at Danni again, and the weariness in his eyes made her feel sad—and guilty. “You’re sure, really sure, it’s not Hubert’s painting?”
“Quinn, like you said, we can have it tested. But I’m just as worried as you are about exposing anyone else to it.... Anyway, this is a good copy. But it is a copy.”
“So, Father, that’s what you all think we should do? Burn it?”
They did. They trooped back into the church. Father Ryan held the service; they all participated. The copy of the painting was burned.
“Now, I need everyone out,” Father Ryan said. “I have a Mass later this evening. Quinn, you want to dump the ashes in the river? We’ll scatter them in the wind just over the water.”
“Sure. Yep, sure,” Quinn said.
Billie, Quinn and Father Ryan swept up the ashes. Danni didn’t want to tell him what she was beginning to suspect, but she knew she’d have to.
The painting had been full of people. Evil people.
“Do you want to come with me?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I need to go back home. And I really have to get the shop open again. But I need to speak with you as soon as you’re done.”
She glanced toward the church. Hattie was still inside; she’d been exceptionally generous about financing their activities, but Danni didn’t like depending on others. For the moment, though, she had no choice.
Her father had told her never to close the shop, except in the most dire of circumstances.
And she needed the shop; she survived on the proceeds from it.
Quinn understood. “I’ll take Bo Ray with me for this. You go ahead and bring Billie and Hattie back to the store. Ron’s going to want to get to work, so I’ll ask Natasha to drop him off.”
> Danni nodded. “May I have Wolf for the time being?”
“Of course,” Quinn said. “You can have him anytime you want, you know that. Is there a particular reason right now?”
“Yes. When you’re not there...oh, I don’t know. I don’t even feel safe in my own place lately. So hurry back, okay?”
“I will,” Quinn promised her.
They all left, going their separate ways.
Danni hoped she’d feel differently once she got back home; she didn’t. And it didn’t help that Wolf growled menacingly when they arrived. But then he was eager to get inside, barking at the door until she opened it.
When she, Hattie and Billie had gone in, Wolf took up a position at the courtyard door, as if this was where he needed to make a stand.
“I’ll get the shop open,” Billie told Danni.
“Is there a way for me to help you?” Hattie asked Danni.
“Oh, Hattie, no, but thank you,” Danni said. Then she rethought her answer. “Wait, maybe. Hattie, how familiar are you with computers?”
Hattie laughed. “Ah, yes, old people know nothing about technology, is that it?”
“No!” Danni protested, but flushed.
“My husband was a tech genius, remember?” Hattie said. “I can easily handle a computer.”
“Great. Then come with me. I’m going to keep reading Eloisa Hubert’s journal—and I need you to search for serial killers or especially cruel people who might have lived or visited the Geneva area around the same time Henry Hubert did.”
Hattie looked at her, startled. “Oh. Certainly. But do you really think there were that many serial killers running around Lake Geneva in one summer?”
“I hope not,” Danni said. “But...see what you can find.”
“Will do.”
“I’ll get you a computer.”
“I have my own—and it’s a new, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art laptop,” Hattie assured her.
Danni smiled. “Okay. I’m getting the journal and my art books. You grab your computer.”
“Where shall we work?”
Danni didn’t want to go back down to the basement just then. She wanted the daylight to surround her. Light came to the basement, too, since it was really the ground floor. But not the way it streamed into the kitchen.
“Right here. Kitchen table. Seems like that’s our place these days,” she told Hattie.
Ten minutes later, they sat at opposite ends of the table. Danni noticed that Hattie seemed, not surprisingly, extremely competent as she clicked through a number of websites.
Danni turned her attention to the journal, reading about Eloisa Hubert and her relationship with the young Herman, Lord Guillaume.
She’d barely started when Billie came into the kitchen. “Niles Villiers is here. Says not to bother you if you’re busy. He just wanted to say hello. Shall I tell him you’re otherwise engaged?”
“No, no, let me at least thank him for stopping by!” Danni said. “I’ll be right back,” she promised Hattie.
Hattie gave her a distracted wave, deeply involved in something she was reading on her computer.
Danni hurried into the shop. Niles was looking at some of the leather bracelets she’d displayed on a plastic wrist on the counter. He turned when she came in.
“Danni!” Walking over to her, he kissed her on both cheeks. “Glad to see you home, although you didn’t take much of a vacation.”
“Hey, you never take a vacation,” she reminded him.
He shrugged comically, but then his smile faded. “There were more bad things happening while you were away. I guess Quinn knows all about that,” he said. He shook his head. “Maybe you should’ve stayed away. I don’t think they got the guy yet.”
“Oh, we needed to be home, Niles,” she said. “But thank you so much for keeping an eye on the place.”
“Of course, Danni, anytime. I know you’d do the same for me.” That brought a smile to his lips again. “You got the giclée, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, thank you very much. I’ll write you a check—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a gift.”
“Oh, Niles, I couldn’t...”
“Danni, you gave me your exquisite painting of the river! It’s a fair trade.”
She laughed. “Hardly. I’m not exactly as well-known as Hubert—or at least as well-known as he is now,” she added wryly.
“But you will be one day!” he said cheerfully, ignoring her reference to the recent horrors. “And you gave me a painting. All I gave you is a giclée.”
“Well, then, thank you.”
“Guess I’ll get back to the gallery,” Niles said. “Good to see you, Danni.”
“You, too, Niles.” She waved as he left the store.
Billie groaned and rolled his eyes. “You couldn’t figure out a way to return that wretched giclée to him, eh?”
“We might need it yet.”
Billie shuddered. “As you say, lass.”
“Thanks, Billie. I’m going back to my reading. You okay out here?”
“Right as rain, girl. Right as rain.”
She hurried into the kitchen, smiling at Hattie as she took her seat and started to read again.
She quickly became immersed in the material. She discovered that the hedonist’s son and the artist’s wife had formed a strong friendship.
In fact, Danni wondered if it had been more than a friendship, although Eloisa had never remarried.
At first, her journal entries concerning Herman were casual, about the two of them meeting for chocolate or coffee. Soon after that, the two of them began to have dinners, and then they “paid call upon each other” at their homes.
Eventually Eloisa began to confide a number of their conversations to her journal—if not their emotional or possibly physical relationship.
My dear Herman was quite appalled by his father’s exploits, and, of course, shamed by his ignoble end. Herman had lost his mother years before, but had come to live with her family in England, avoiding his father. Alain Guillaume wanted his son to “be a man,” to learn to enjoy life as he did—hunting, drinking and enjoying depraved relationships with women. Herman had noted once, when he was still young, that a serving girl had gone missing. He’d seen her with his father, and then she’d disappeared. That was long before the man was suspected of murdering those poor, wretched innocents he seduced. Herman was quite sure that his father kept company with other men of his social standing who had like tastes and similar proclivities. How far their interest in depravity went, he didn’t know.
Hattie suddenly gasped.
Danni jerked her head up. “What is it?”
“Lady Mimette Lamere!”
Danni stared at her blankly.
“I’ve found someone who might be one of those you’re looking for, my dear. Lady Mimette Lamere. She was known to keep company with Alain Guillaume at his castle. In fact, after his wife’s death, the two were supposed to be...having an affair. This is a site from a Swiss university. They’ve done some research on her. She joined him at the castle the summer before he died. In fact, the goings-on of that pair were part of what alerted the authorities to the man’s atrocities!”
Danni stood up and walked around to Hattie’s computer. She skimmed the information—and held her breath as she studied a painting of the woman.
“Can you enlarge that?” Danni asked tensely.
Hattie did. The face sprang up large and clear on the screen.
Danni stood back. “We’ve found one,” she announced.
“What do you mean?” Hattie asked.
Danni still didn’t want to touch the giclée by the garage. Instead, she led Hattie to her studio and went in, uncovering her own work. Her rendition of the painting.
The face of the woman on the divan was the same face they’d just seen.
Hubert had indeed used the faces of people he’d known or known of in his painting; he’d put a pistol into the hands of Mimette Lamere, a woman wi
th whom Alain Guillaume had probably tortured and killed some of his victims.
Hattie, behind her, gasped again.
“How many?” she whispered.
“Eleven,” Danni said. “I believe we have to identify and find eleven people in all and then we have to figure out where they’re all buried.”
* * *
Quinn returned from his trip to the river with Bo Ray to see Hattie and Danni feverishly at work; they had notes spread all over the table.
“We’re finding them. We’re finding so many!” Hattie told him excitedly.
“So many what?”
“Horrible people!” Hattie exclaimed.
Quinn looked at Danni for an explanation.
“Remember how Michel Dumont was saying that there’d been a woman, but she disappeared?”
“Into the fog,” he said, nodding.
“I think Hubert was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this painting. All of the characters in it are based on actual killers—I’m convinced of it. I started thinking about this a while ago. Remember when we talked about the fact that he was believed to have taken all his characters from real life? Well, Hattie and I are proving that’s true—and more than that, everyone in the painting was a killer, a murderer who really existed, including the child on the floor.” Danni paused. “I don’t know if he managed to find and use their blood or ripped skin or...or tissue, maybe from remains in the crypt, for his pigments, but I’m absolutely sure we’re right about this,” Danni said.
“How would he have known what they looked like?” Quinn asked.
“From sketches in the newspapers or paintings done during their lifetimes. In some cases, maybe even the bodies themselves—or their remains. He was a trained artist. He would’ve had the ability to create remarkable likenesses based on whatever images or descriptions he found.”
“But the child,” Quinn said. “The child looks to be about three—”
“A little artistic license was taken there. The child was actually six. He was Jermaine Wasser, the son of a local carpenter. He killed his baby sister with a hammer and went on to stab his mother with a pick. His father killed himself. At that time, Alain Guillaume was applauded for being such a great and giving man. He took the child in—using the argument, of course, that the boy hadn’t known what he was doing.”