Page 82 of Girl, Sought

‘Good,’ Luca said. ‘Stay on the line just in case?’

‘Yeah. Go.’

Luca pocketed his phone while he began his search. He started in the bedroom. Seemed as good a place as any to begin unraveling the sailor’s knot that was Winters' psyche. Luca’s old mentor had once mentioned how you could tell everything about a man from two things; his bedroom and his shoes.

But if Winters' sleeping chamber held any deep, dark psychological treasures, they were buried deep. The room was as sparse and impersonal as a monk's cell - single bed, threadbare sheets, a battered dresser missing a drawer. The closet held a depressing collection of off-the-rack suits in nondescript grays and browns and not much else.

Luca rifled through pockets, checked under the sagging mattress, even pried up a loose floorboard or two. Nothing. No diaries or flash drives or paper trails leading straight to Winters' secret second home.

He moved on to the bathroom. Found the usual collection of toiletries and pharmaceuticals. The medicine cabinet was a bust, holding nothing more sinister than expired Rolaids and a crusty tube of Preparation H.

The kitchen was the last room on the list, and Luca didn't hold out much hope for a Eureka moment over the sink. Winters didn't seem the type to stash his master plans between the SOS pads and the spare sponges, but he had to be thorough.

And it was the stack of mail on the kitchen countertop that drew his attention first.

Most of it was junk that Winters hadn’t thrown out. Some of it was takeout menus, bills, handwritten envelopes that could very well have Christmas cards inside. Luca shoved aside a flyer for half-price carpet cleaning, and there, buried under the avalanche of dead trees - a sheaf of official-looking documents with a familiar name at the top.

St. Andrews Medical Museum.

A Division of the National Trust for Cultural Heritage.

St. Andrews. The burnt-out husk of a medical museum that had once housed one of the most extensive collections of anatomical oddities and forensic curios in the Mid-Atlantic. The same museum Vanessa Blackburn had been set to catalog and appraise before a fire had sent it all up in smoke.

Luca snatched up the papers. Insurance forms, lists of lost inventory, an entire binder's worth of legalese and fine print. And there, at the bottom of every page - the cramped, spidery scrawl of Lawrence Winters' signature.

The museum. An empty building – and one that Lawrence Winters would know about.

‘Ell,’ Luca barked into his cell. ‘Winters has links to that medical museum that burned down.’

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Ella watched as the EMTs worked on Vanessa Blackburn, but her thoughts were somewhere else.

'St. Andrews?' she said on the phone.

‘Yeah,’ Luca said. She could hear him rustling papers. ‘He’s processing the insurance claims. The paperwork is right here.’

Something clicked. Here was a man who helped process claims, who knew exactly which collectors were pure and which ones played the donation game. The perfect window into a world of obsession and greed.

‘Hold that thought.’

Ella was moving before the idea had fully formed, but there was no time to dwell on possibilities. If they didn’t move now, Lawrence Winters could disappear into the ether.

Vanessa was huddled on the sofa while a medic shone a flashlight into her bloodshot eyes. The ligature marks on her neck mapped out Lawrence Winters' failed masterpiece in shades of purple and black. Ella knew those marks would fade to yellow, then green, then nothing, but the memory of his attempt to add Vanessa to his collection would linger long after the bruises disappeared.

She knelt down to Vanessa's level, tried to gentle her voice into something approaching soothing. Vanessa blinked at her, slow and lizard-like. The EMT made herself scarce.

‘Lawrence,’ Vanessa rasped. ‘Did you...is he...?’

‘Not yet, but we’re real close. I just need to ask you something.’

The appraiser nodded.

‘The museum. St. Andrews. What do you know about it?’

Vanessa sighed heavily. For a moment Ella thought she'd pushed too hard, asked for too much from a woman who'd just stared down the barrel of her own mortality. But then Vanessa’s expressed hardened.

‘We were...buying it. Then it burned down.’

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