Flirting with Disaster

This time his breath left him on a rush, and he stepped back in alarm.

What the hell?

His gaze skipped off that painting and moved to the next one, trying to escape the sight or just make sense of it, but the second one was no better. Just a mess of blood and sinew and flayed skin and glistening muscles.

Narrowing his eyes, he forced himself to step closer to the first easel, but that only made it worse. Her painting was of a human abdomen, except that this person’s skin had been peeled off to reveal the connective tissue beneath it. It was so incredibly detailed that he could make out the smallest capillaries on the underside of the peeled skin.

Even worse than the paintings were the photos taped to the sides of the canvas frames. These were actual pictures of bodies stripped of their skin and humanity. They were corpses. And she was re-creating them.

“You don’t like them?” she asked from only a few feet away. Tom jumped, spinning toward her, his hand tightening on his gun. He didn’t draw it, though. He had that much sense left.

“What the hell kind of art is this?” Was she a provocateur or just some sort of sicko?

She grinned at him, and he changed “sicko” to “serial killer” in his mind. Clearly, she was sociopathic. “I’m an anatomical painter.”

“Yeah, I damn well see that.”

Now she was actually laughing. “You should see your face.” She wiped a tear from her eye. She was laughing so hard she was crying.

“What is this?” he barked.

“Just what I said it is. I work on commission for textbooks and medical art companies.”

He blinked and forced his tension down a notch, but it wasn’t easy. He hated seeing dead bodies. Really hated it. “Textbooks?” he managed to ask more calmly.

“Yes. Biology. Anatomy. Some surgical instruction. Photos don’t really work well. There’s not enough definition and contrast, usually. And digital art sucks. Don’t tell anyone I said that. Ninety percent of work is digital now. 3-D rendering has its uses, I suppose. But my niche is oil. Not very common these days. It’s specialty work.”

He looked at the nearest painting again then turned back to her. He could feel the horrified confusion etched into his face, and he could see it in the laughter that still swam in her eyes.

“I also do posters for doctors’ offices. You know, the ‘This is your knee joint’ kind of thing.”

“This is—” he shook his head “—awful.”

“Really?” She shrugged, as if she couldn’t fathom his reaction. “You probably don’t want to see the comparison ones, then. A small child winding up for a softball pitch on one side, and the same small child as a skeleton in the next. They’re a little morbid, but the kids love them.”

“The kids?” he gasped, looking over his shoulder again. His eyes focused on the next easel and a photo taped there. It was a thigh, half the flesh removed, the other half still intact, a tattoo of a dragon livid against the pale skin. He felt the blood leaving his head and took a deep breath to try to steady himself. “Jesus, Isabelle. How can you do this?”

Her smile finally faded. “What do you mean? It’s my job. Medical students need to learn about the body. So do high school kids. Would you rather schoolkids had to work with cadavers?”

The word cadaver was almost too much for him. The memory of his brother’s pale, stiff body flashed into his head, but he forced it back. He could control it. It was the same every time he had to deal with death, and death was part of his job. But this...

“This is your home,” he said. “Where you sleep at night.”

“I work here, too. It’s no big deal.”

No big deal. Right. Here he’d been warming to her, and the woman was a freak. A freak who looked at pictures of dead people all day. In her secluded cabin. In the dark woods. “Well,” he managed to say, “the house is all clear. You’re safe.”

“Thank you. Want to sit down and stay awhile?” she teased.

“No, thanks,” he muttered as he brushed by her. Her laughter followed him to the front door. “Have a good night,” he called over his shoulder. “And lock the door.”

Or bar it. From the outside.

Maybe this woman’s secret was more dangerous than he’d suspected.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_4425d75a-f2bd-573f-82ae-4f1a29033083)

IT WAS 11:00 P.M., and Tom was staring at the computer instead of sleeping. He’d planned to get right back to Judge Chandler’s basement and do some research into Isabelle West, but instead he’d walked in to find his second-in-command, Mary Jones, yelling at their tactical commander over the phone.

Mary, the senior deputy marshal whenever Tom was out of the room, had rightly made the decision to move the judge’s twenty-six-year-old daughter into his home for the trial. Veronica Chandler lived alone in an apartment just off Jackson town square, and Mary had decided that the woman would be safer in her father’s home, where the security detail could keep an eye on her, as well.

Chris Hannity, the tactical command specialist, had bristled at being cut out of the decision, especially as he’d already scouted Veronica’s place and had made schedules to patrol her block.

An acute case of male pride, as far as Tom was concerned, and he’d quickly dismissed the issue with a few curt words for Hannity.

“He’s still pissed about that disciplinary hearing,” Mary said from behind him, her Southern drawl ruining the hard edge of the words. She set a plate of cookies at his elbow. “The cookies are courtesy of Veronica Chandler.”

“Thanks. And he’ll get over it.”

“You think? It’s been a year. I told you not to report it.”

Tom grabbed a cookie and shot Mary a look, noticing that she was chewing on her thumbnail. She did that only when she was tired enough to forget. “He called you a dyke. In front of me.”

“It’s not the worst I’ve heard.”

“Then he chose the wrong place to say it. And you’re chewing your nail again.”

“Shit,” she muttered, clenching her hand into a fist and forcing it to her side.

“He’ll get over it,” Tom repeated. “And he won’t disrespect you or anyone else on the team again.”

Mary was forty-five, but she looked a lot younger. Couple that with her small frame, curly blond hair and heart-shaped face, and she sometimes had trouble commanding respect. Actually, that wasn’t true. She commanded respect. Her men followed her orders to a T. But there were always a few holdouts on other teams who considered her authority an insult to their testicles.

She made it a policy never to show weakness in front of those assholes, and she hated giving away that she might be stressed.

“I already read the day’s report,” he said as he polished off a second cookie. “Everything’s in place for the trial?”

“Yes. You still think we’ll hear from the brother again?”

“I hope not,” Tom said, rolling his shoulders to release some of the tension. “But I’ve got a bad feeling. And the judge? How is he handling the detail?”

Mary shrugged. “He seems entirely comfortable with an entourage. Like he was born to it.”

Tom snorted. That was no big surprise. The judge was a blowhard and pretty damn impressed with his position in the community.

“He actually calls Wes his ‘driver.’”

Tom guffawed at how much that must chap Wes’s hide. “I’ve got to see that myself.”