Page 43 of A Talent for Murder

“Yes, just a few hours ago. Apparently the manner of death is similar to an unsolved homicide in the Portsmouth area from over a year ago. A woman alone, her throat cut during a home invasion.”

“That tracks,” I said. “I’ve been doing nothing but thinking of Ethan Saltz. He likes to fool people. My guess is that as soon as he figured out that he wanted to kill Martha Ratliff he checked up to see if there were unsolved cases close to her. And he found one, and he copied it. He did all this in about four hours, of course. But I think that fooling people—manipulation in general—is more important to him than the killings.”

“I can see that,” Henry said. “Or maybe he was the person who killed that other woman.”

“It’s all possible, I suppose.”

While we were talking, I checked my emails and saw that Alice Gilchrist had gotten back to me, saying she’d be happy to meet the next day at eleven in the morning.

Chapter23

I got to Queens at ten thirty and found a parking space half a block from the storefront where Alice Gilchrist worked. The studio was called Fledgling Ink, and I’d studied their website a little before leaving Shepaug that morning. I had no real interest in tattoos, but I’d scrolled through the designs and decided that I liked them.

Alice and I were meeting at a coffee shop just next door to the shop. We’d emailed a little bit back and forth and I’d told her that I wasn’t a client, that I was interested in learning about Ethan Saltz. She’d immediately emailed back, Jesus, that’s a name from the past. What did he do?

I told her I was just looking for information that might help me find him. She said she had no idea but that she’d be happy to meet up.

As I entered the small, packed coffee shop, I spotted Alice right away. She had white-dyed hair cut to shoulder-length, a nose ring, and was wearing baggy overalls. I was looking at the top of her head because she was bent over a sketchbook, but she must have sensed me looking, because she glanced up, her face a flat plane, wide, with smooth, shiny skin and pale brown eyes. I asked her if she needed another coffee and she said, “No, I’m good,” so I grabbed myself a tea and joined her.

“Thank you for meeting me,” I said.

“My shop is right next door, so it wasn’t too much trouble. I know I asked you on email, but what did he do?”

“Ethan?”

“Yes.” She smiled, revealing perfectly straight teeth. There was something disconcerting about her appearance, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

“I don’t know what he did. All I know is that he’s very hard to find.” I’d identified myself to Alice as Addie Logan, journalist, having sent my email through my alternative Gmail account. I’d also told her that a friend of mine had asked me to find Ethan as a favor.

“I just assumed he was in some kind of trouble. Legally,” Alice said.

“He might be, for all I know. When was the last time you saw him?”

“About five years after high school, and it was by accident. We were at the same gallery in New York. I don’t even remember where it was, but he was there, and he looked exactly like he did in school. A preppy serial killer.”

“You were friends in high school?”

“We were. Kind of. I thought he was funny.”

“How did you two meet?”

She thought for a moment, taking a sip of her cappuccino. “We were in Art Club together, but that’s not where we met. It’s where we became friends, though. It turned out that the teacher who started Art Club would basically leave us alone in the room and let us do whatever we wanted. There were no activities or anything, except for the one time we all went into New York to go to MoMA. I think that’s why most of us signed up in the first place, because of that trip, and because Art Club was something to put on our college applications. We kind of bonded on the trip to New York, I guess. I mean, we didn’t bond, but we talked. We were looking at all these modern pieces of art and he was going on about how brilliant they were, how the art world was the greatest scam in the whole world, and that his dream was to make a fortune selling fake art. And I was like, good luck with that. I mean, he was full of shit, but he was very entertaining. He told me once that he was a sociopath.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, but not on that trip, I think. It was when we knew each other better. There were two weeks in there when we were kind of best friends, inseparable, and then it just kind of ended. Or faded away. Or whatever you want to call it.”

“Which one of you ended the friendship?”

“I think it was him, to be honest. One day he just seemed to lose interest in me. I was hurt, I guess, but it was fucking high school. We weren’t married or anything.”

“Do you remember what you wrote in his yearbook?”

“Oh,” she said, looking surprised.

“That’s how I knew you were friends with him, your inscription in his yearbook.”

Her eyebrows rose a fraction as she tried to remember, and then I saw the memory pass across her features. “I kind of remember,” she said. “Only because it was a joke that I was signing it in the first place. I mean, Ethan wasn’t the type to go around getting his friends to sign his yearbook. He didn’t really have friends. And even when I signed it, we weren’t super-close. I think I ran into him after we’d all gotten our yearbooks and he was carrying his and I insisted that I get to sign it. I think I wrote something about how I’d one day see him on television when he was the subject of a manhunt. Something like that.”

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