The Timer Game (21 page)

She knew that name. She’d seen it on the medical chart. The salesclerk glanced at her for the first time and she gestured at the brochures. “Could you hand me that one for the Robert Harling Frieze exhibit, please? The one that’s tonight?”

He passed it to her silently. She was almost to the door when he looked up from the cash register and said, “Excuse me. Miss?” He was frowning, the unsigned sales receipt still in his hand. “Is your name Grace?”

Grace grew very still. “Do you have something for me?”

The woman he was helping shifted impatiently.

“Actually, you have something for me.”

“I do?”

“A stopwatch?”

Grace pulled it out of her pocket. He took it from her and turned it off. Four minutes left. A lifetime. He carried it with him back behind the counter.

“Wait. I do have something for you now.”

He ducked and came up with a copy of
Art Digest
and a square box the size of a pack of playing cards.

“And you have no idea who left this here, or what he looked like.”

“Excuse me.” The woman’s voice was heavy with impatience. “I’ve got a flight to catch.”

The clerk cut her a sympathetic look. “I’m so sorry ma’am.” To Grace he said, “All I know is, a man in black face paint came in here about an hour or so ago, said you might be by. Said not to give you anything, even if you came up and identified yourself, unless you picked up the Frieze brochure. That was the signal.”

Grace looked at him.

“And then I was supposed to take the stopwatch. That’s my payment. For helping out. It was a game,” the cashier said. “That’s what he said. You’d be playing a game.”

Masking tape secured the box and Grace snicked a fingernail across the edge as she walked outside, ripping the tape off. Inside was an electronic hourglass. Digital grains of sand floated from the top down through a compressed neck and settled in drifts along the bottom. She had no idea how much time she had left. She stood on the street and watched the sand moving, getting a sense of it. There was still a good 75 percent of it left to be filled in. If the Spikeman had come into the shop an hour ago, that meant she still had three hours to go.

More than enough time to drive to Robert Harling Frieze’s gallery opening in Los Angeles. Providing she was reading the timer correctly. She bit her lip and surveyed the street. The mail box annex Office on the Go was only a few blocks past where she’d parked the car.

Maybe the Spikeman had gotten careless and left her a clue when he’d sent the fax with the smiley face to the taco van owner, Mr. Esguio.

But that wouldn’t give her any margin for error heading north. On the other hand, this might be the only chance she’d have to ask questions. She dropped the timer into her bag and cut through an empty lot, passing Corvette’s and a gregarious crowd of dinner celebrants.

Office on the Go was decorated in red, white, and blue bunting, a small mailbox way station wedged between shops for an acupuncturist and a fortune teller, both closed. Grace flashed her crime lab badge and got the clerk to pull information about the fax. She had a beak nose with beautiful shoulders and toned arms. She was tall for a woman and wore a knit suit more suitable for afternoon lunch, and her ring finger held the faint outline of a missing band.

“Now I remember.” She brightened. “He paid cash to send the fax.”

“You were here?” Grace leaned in. “Ma’am, this is important. What did he look like?”

“Well, that’s just it, I don’t know.” The clerk sounded apologetic and slightly embarrassed. “He was wearing a clown suit. Blue. Said he was on his way to Children’s Hospital for a benefit. I’d been in the Junior League for years, so we started talking.”

“Anything that jumps out at you?”

“You mean, besides the clown suit? Yeah. He said he was with the police auxiliary, and well…” She shrugged, hesitating, and Grace realized she was feeling foolish.

“Even if it’s little, something you think doesn’t really matter.” Grace edged closer.

“He didn’t know what the Junior League was. We work at Children’s all the time, at least I did, and with the police auxiliary, too, and so, I don’t know, it just made me think maybe he wasn’t with the auxiliary after all, you know?”

A clown suit. In blue. To match the wrapping paper covering the bloody doll. He was toying with her. Playing a deadly game, with Katie’s safe return as the ultimate prize.

Grace walked numbly through the crowded street. Everywhere she looked, there were eyes.

Chapter 23

Saturday, 8:53 p.m.

It was in Westwood not far from the botanical gardens on Hilgard Avenue, painted cobalt blue and lit with pink neon, three stories high with a crate elevator latched to the side. Grace got there at close to nine. A clump of emaciated women, all in black, spilled onto the sidewalk, holding plastic champagne glasses and smoking.

It was disorienting, racing through traffic, taking the smallest of breaks, rushing into L.A., and seeing how relaxed and casual those women were, chatting about inconsequential things. Her bones ached from the long drive. Her heart from the pain of missing Katie. It felt that the farther away she drove, the less chance she’d have of ever seeing her daughter alive again. And yet this is where he was sending her. Directing her.

She checked the digital hourglass as she walked through the door into the bright light. Everything but the top six rows were filled in and her stomach fluttered. Inside, there was someone who would take the timer from her and tell her what she had to do next. But she had to hurry; she was running out of time, and if she ran out of time—
no, she wouldn’t think about that
. It was a warehouse-sized room, with lighting and winter white walls. Neon pink stairs led to a loft on the second floor. Huge violent canvases in hot, electric colors adorned the walls of the gallery on the first floor, fractured photos thick with paint, glass shards, and broken pottery. In the middle of the room sat Plexiglas cubes with what looked like disembodied body parts. There was a car wreck and a train wreck and an underwater sea wreck—that one with a green-haired girl trapped inside a window, a hidden pump swirling her hair and making her silicon lips tremble. She looked just enough alive that Grace caught a breath and looked again.

About fifty people stood shouting over the noise, the decibel level so high it seemed to bang off the walls. There was a bar set up on the other side of the room and Grace made her way over, trailing behind a hollow-eyed woman and a tall man carrying a scythe. A bleached, aging bodybuilder manned the drink table. Grace ordered a Coke, yelling to be heard.

“What do you think?” the bartender shouted as he slid her drink across.

“About this?” She shrugged a look at the paintings and put the timer on the counter.

“That’s four bucks.” His eyes flicked to the timer.

“For a Coke?”

“You actually think somebody’s going to buy this effluvia?”

She fished money out of her shoulder bag and dropped an extra buck into his tip jar, glancing at a painting hanging behind him. Five feet high, a cheerleader screaming, inside of her mouth glossed in green, her tongue a blue snake, her perfect teeth the color of bad cheese. One breast hung out of her torn uniform, cruelly bisected with tattooed words:
sex. have some. Candy High. feel my. . . pain.

“I have enough bad dreams.”

He nodded, satisfied. “I’m not crazy about it, either.”

“It’s not a matter of not liking it. I think this Robert Harling Frieze guy is brilliant. I mean, one of them sold in New York for what? Close to half a mil?”

His eyes turned cold. “You done? I have customers.” He poured two white wines and took a twenty from a man.

Grace yelled over the thumping music and voices, “I’m actually interested specifically in his blue period.”

The bartender looked at her sharply and she swallowed in spite of herself.

“His most productive period, I’ve heard. Never seen a blue one, he apparently hordes them or something, and the value of one of those—”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

She nodded, let it pass.

“Why the blue period?” He rubbed a nonexistent spot on the counter.

She shrugged, her thoughts churning.
Why? Because that’s what you were creating when you discovered your baby would be born with a bad heart.

Instead she said, “It’s about loss. Grief. Over and over, eyes coming at you. Something unformed. A promise broken. Not broken so much as ruptured, I guess. Shredded apart.”

She’d memorized that driving up, the article spread on the seat next to her. She hoped if he read his own press, he waited a long time between reads. “See him here?”

Robert Harling Frieze stared at her coldly. “No.”

“Well, see him, you tell him he has a fan.” She stuffed a second buck into his tip jar.

“Upstairs.” His chest looked damp under his black silk shirt.

“Say what?”

“I think that blue stuff, saw it on the third floor.” He picked up the timer, and the pixeled sand particles blew in a sparkling cloud.

The walls of the loft on the second floor were hung with simple pen and inks, mounted in Plexiglas, depicting the end of the world. A sunburned guard sat on a folding chair, reading
Guns & Ammo.
He looked up, his eyes spaced close together so that his nose looked pinched. Grace studied a sketch hanging next to the stairs leading up to third. Bugs devoured humans in this one, only some of the bugs carried guns and briefcases. The steps were narrow, lit only by a dim bulb. She started climbing.

“Hey.” The guard tossed down his magazine. His voice was adenoidal and his ears were chapped and peeling. “It’s off limits, third floor. No can do.”

Over the noise, she heard the groan of the freight elevator. “I was told—”

He stood up. He carried weight in his thighs and they bulged under his uniform. He flexed his fists casually and she stepped past him down the stairs.

“Fine.” She moved toward the neon staircase leading down to the main floor.

A couple arguing in German pushed past. The woman was bulky and short, wearing a thick tweed suit that made her hairy calves look enormous. The man gesticulated with his hands, flinging them out and stabbing the air. He had dark hollows under his eyes and his suit smelled like he’d worn it too long this trip. His hand flew out and clipped the woman—inadvertently, it seemed to Grace—and she reeled back toward the steel bars of the pony wall overlooking the main room. The guard lunged for her and caught her in a backward dip that looked like he was heavy-lifting a discus thrower. Grace used the distraction to dart up the stairs to third. Locked.

Not locked, warped. She pushed gently. It burst open and she lost her balance and fell forward into darkness. Into a body. Into a man. Fear juiced through her. She screamed. He grappled a hand over her mouth and yanked her to him. His other arm clamped around her and spun her against the door, slamming it shut. He pressed against her, his body huge, tight.

“You speak, you die.”

She didn’t move.

“Hear me? Try that again and I kill you. Understand?”

She nodded, his hand choking her airway. He pinned her tighter to the door and snapped on the light. Robert Harling Frieze on steroids. Bulked up, angry. A vein in his neck throbbed. Spidery lines bloomed across his nostrils. His hair was cropped and up this close, it looked gray, not blond. He had sculpted lips a little too pink for Grace’s taste and pretty, almost girlish ears, tucked close to his scalp. Graying chest hair tufted in the V of his black silk shirt, and he wore a gold necklace that made him look strangely out of date. All he needed was the hip jut and finger twirls and he could have been in the background behind Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He hadn’t let go. His fingers pressed her carotid. Lights popped in her eyes. She kept eye contact but she really couldn’t breathe now, getting to be a problem here. “Choking.”

For an instant he stared at her, puzzled. He dropped his hand. She doubled over, gulping air. Nausea roared up and she fought the impulse to vomit.

“Try anything—”

“Bathroom?”

He jerked his head and she rushed through a jumble of art crates and stacked canvases, suddenly sure she wasn’t going to get there in time. She leaned over the filthy bowl, her legs trembly, scalp wet with sweat. Long after her stomach emptied she kept throwing up.

She wiped her mouth and gargled with water she cupped in her palm.

“Here.” Robert shoved a shot glass at her filled with amber liquid. “Drink.”

She gripped the glass and tossed it down, not thinking.
Oh no oh God oh no oh God.

Scotch.
Warm
, golden scotch malt, 80 proof, had to be, burning gold in her mouth.

She spat it into the sink, furiously gargling over and over. That taste, that warm beautiful taste going down, she’d find a bar, buy one, just one…

“You’re starting to anger me,” he said. A muscle near his eye twitched.

She patted her way to the window and stared at the street. A couple were climbing into a limo at the curb. She could still taste the scotch. It made her knees weak. She didn’t know which side he was on, was the problem, and until she did, she wasn’t going to risk bringing up Katie.

“You owe me answers.” He pressed in a little too close and she shifted backward.

She glanced around the room. Did he have Katie? Was Katie there somewhere? Her eyes roved over the crates of canvases, taking in an easel with a half-finished painting that looked like one of those kids with the big eyes, only this kid had Legos for arms and stood over a land mine. Dusty filing cabinets. Mailers. Crates. Too many places. All without Katie.

“I told you,” she said. “The blue period, something about the eyes—”

“Eyes,
you think I don’t know my own press? Who are you and what do you want?”

He held his hands loosely, fingers taut, shoulders massive. A sharp pain galloped through her intestines and she ran for the bathroom again, shutting the door. He followed her; she could feel him breathing, listening, and she felt stripped and afraid. Had he done something to Katie?