As if he followed her thoughts, the way he so often did, Richard said, “Did you get any sleep today?”
“No. Did you?”
“I caught a couple of hours after lunch.”
She envied him both the nap and his stamina; he looked untouched by fatigue, as alert as he always was.
“You can sleep tonight,” he promised softly.
She squeezed his hand and pitched her voice low enough that Edward couldn’t hear. “Not all night, I hope.”
“I think I can guarantee that.” He squeezed her hand in return, and Sweeney sat in contented silence for the rest of the drive.
* * *
A tiny Italian restaurant was located across the street and several doors down from Sweeney’s apartment building. The restaurant was popular in the neighborhood, with a steady stream of nearby residents stopping by for takeout. Kai managed to snag a table by the window, seating himself so he could see anyone entering the apartment building.
Letting himself get involved in the plan to kill Candra had been partly impulse, because she’d been such a bitch and was planning to fire him anyway. The biggest consideration, however, had been the money. A hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a lot of money to some people, and it was a hell of a lot less than the million Candra had asked for in blackmail, but it would mean the difference between several years more spent taking penny-ante jobs and supplementing his income with infrequent modeling gigs for sleazy underwear catalogs, which usually included having to fuck some bony, middle-aged hag who thought she was hot because she wielded a lot of power over young men who needed the jobs she provided.
With a hundred thou, he could quit work, finish his art classes, and begin making a name for himself with his paintings. Kai had no doubt he was talented. He knew his stuff was a lot better than most of the crap he had helped sell at the gallery, and now he would be backed by a very influential name that would get him displayed in the most prestigious gallery in the city. He wasn’t going to start low and gradually increase his prices; he was going to ask a small fucking fortune right from the beginning; there were a lot of rich fools who would buy paintings carrying a high sticker just because they liked the idea that not everyone could afford to buy them.
Everything would be perfect, if it weren’t for that damn painting of Sweeney’s.
He regretted that. He liked Sweeney. She was funny and honest, and she had never looked at him as if he were nothing but a piece of meat. She was also genuinely talented, with a knack for realism that meant any portrait she painted would be a faithful re-creation of the subject. Too bad she’d turned out to be a fucking psychic, too.
So he waited, watching for her to come home. Unlike a certain other party, who wasn’t the most realistic person he’d ever met, he didn’t expect the cops to book her on the basis of that painting. They weren’t idiots; without physical evidence at the scene to back it up, they’d have a hard time convincing any D.A. to take the case to court. On the other hand, if she managed to convince them she was for real, they would be checking with her every day to see if she had finished the damn thing yet. Just getting rid of the painting wouldn’t be enough; its existence didn’t matter, just whether or not the other face was revealed. Sweeney would recognize it instantly, and then all hell would break loose.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Getting into her apartment had been easy. He had watched until the cops arrived; then after they took her away, he waited for his chance and slipped in with a crowd of people returning home from work, while the dumb-ass super was busy watching some dumb-ass game show and seldom looked up.
He took his time checking out the building. There wasn’t a hallway window on Sweeney’s floor that opened onto the fire escape, but there was such an access on the floor below hers. After ascertaining that, he took the elevator to the floor above Sweeney’s, just in case anyone noticed at what floor he got off, then bounded down the stairs to her floor.
Getting into her apartment hadn’t been easy, because she had locked both dead bolts. He listened at her neighbor’s door, and when he didn’t hear any noise from inside, he risked ringing the doorbell. Nothing, and these people hadn’t bothered with the dead bolt, trusting in the doorknob lock, which took him about ten seconds to open.
He slipped inside, and stood listening for a moment to make certain no one was in the shower or something like that. Reassured that the apartment was empty, though it might not be for much longer, he turned the flimsy little lock on the doorknob just in case the tenant showed up before Kai did what needed doing.
He had gone to a tiny bedroom on the side adjoining Sweeney’s apartment and climbed out the window onto the fire escape. Crouching beside one of the huge windows in her studio, he used a glass cutter to cut a hole in the window right next to the lock. Just in case anyone noticed him, he pretended to do some work in the fire escape, checking the joints and shit like that.
The lock on the window was stuck. Using his knife, he jimmied it open. Then he lowered the fire escape ladder down to the next level and left it. Someone might notice, but since it didn’t go down to street level no one would be very alarmed.
Once everything was set, he slipped back into the neighboring apartment and left as unobtrusively as he had entered. Then all he had to do was wait for Sweeney to come home.
He flirted with the waitress in the little restaurant, pretended to read a newspaper, dawdled over his pasta, and then ordered a dessert and coffee. His patience was rewarded a little after nine, when Richard Worth’s Mercedes rolled to a smooth stop outside the apartment building and both Sweeney and Richard got out. Richard took two canvases from the front seat and went inside with Sweeney. A few minutes later, he came out alone, and without the canvases.