Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

to one side while he photographed another. When his truck was full, he drove down the row and around the corner to the new unit and stacked the canvases inside. A lot faster than he would have believed, the storage unit was down to the Death Suite. With the sun pouring through the open door, the paintings looked darker than ever. And oddly more intense, more detailed.
    “It’s a shame Susa didn’t see these in the daytime,” Lacey said. “I’d forgotten how vivid the contrasts are in strong light.”
    “Vivid.” He shook his head. “There’s a nice, neutral word.”
    “Would you prefer chiaroscuro?”
    He smiled, but it quickly faded. “Do you agree with Susa that a man could have painted these all at once?”
    “Each subject at a different time but all the same subject at once—wreck, house, pool?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ve gone on a few painting sprees in my time, but nothing this epic. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling the emotions as intensely.”
    Working swiftly, Ian separated the paintings into the three distinct subjects: wreck, drowning, fire. “I don’t have a trained eye, but it seems odd that all these were done at once.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, even assuming that he was stoked on drugs or some kind of manic high”— because he’d just murdered someone , Ian added to himself—“why would he treat the numbers differently on the same subject? Circled in red here”—he pointed to the canvas—“painted in red and circled in black there, black and black there, all red there, and so on.”
    Lacey walked closer. She’d noticed the small differences before, but hadn’t thought much of them. The similarity of the subject matter overwhelmed everything else. Then there was the fact that she really hadn’t spent much time looking at the darker paintings. They’d simply made her too uncomfortable.
    They still did.
    Tough, she told herself. Pretend a stranger painted them.
    Shoving aside the mental picture of her beloved Grandpa Rainbow whistling tunelessly as he painted death after death, she squatted on her heels in front of the paintings of the car wreck. There were subtle differences among the canvases, shades of gold and orange and hues of darkness that weren’t the same from painting to painting.
    “If he painted these wrecks all at once,” she said slowly, “there are two ways he could have gone at it. Decorator-art style or—”
    “What’s that?” Ian interrupted.
    “You start with a batch of prepared canvases, paint one aspect of each subject—rocks or trees or beach or whatever—in the same place oneach canvas with the same color of paint, then go on to the next element of the landscape, and then the next, moving from canvas to canvas so that all of them are always at the same stage of painting. Saves all kinds of time on mixing paints, and each canvas is, technically, original art, though they’re actually one short step up from prints.”
    “Said original oil painting is then sold to decorators at inflated prices for their clients’ homes or businesses,” Ian said.
    “Right. It’s the sort of thing that gave figurative painting a bad name. Then”—Lacey grinned slyly—“modern art became so popular that motels started using it. Mortified a lot of academics.”
    “So you think these paintings are the result of that kind of assembly-line art?”
    “No. Look at the oranges and yellows and shadows in these paintings. Granddad made his own paints from scratch. He bought the lead white for priming the canvas, but after that he ground his own pigment and combined it with turpentine and oil himself. The more pigment and the less turpentine, the more intense the color.”
    Ian made an encouraging sound.
    “The point is,” she said, looking narrowly at the paintings of the burning wreck, “if he was doing the decorator thing, all the shades of the same colors would be nearly equal because they would have come from the same batch of paint.”
    “Makes sense.”
    “But these aren’t the same shades from canvas to canvas. Look at the orange in this one and in this one and in this,” she said, pointing quickly. “Different shades of the same color to depict the same part of each painting. If they’d been painted at the same time, they’d be the same shade of orange all the way across.”
    Ian looked thoughtfully at the paintings. “What you’re telling me is that your grandfather’s homemade paints were like commercial dye lots.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Okay.