Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

catchers.”
    “Here they are,” Susa said, gesturing with graceful fingers at the eleven paintings.
    Lacey followed Ian and stood at his side while he stared at the car-wreck paintings.
    “What are you looking for?” she asked finally.
    “Don’t know.”
    “Well, that makes it easier.”
    A smile flickered over his mouth. “I feel like I’ve seen these before, or something like them.”
    “It’s possible,” Lacey said.
    “It is?”
    “Yeah. Assuming Grandpa only painted fourteen—an assumption I can’t prove—there are three missing.”
    Susa and Ian stared at Lacey.
    “How do you know?” he asked.
    “I’d like to say I’m psychic, and open my own woo-woo shop and sell vitamins,” Lacey said, “but my knowledge is more ordinary than that. The paintings are numbered along the stretchers on the back. Two is the lowest. Fourteen is the highest number. There’s no guarantee thereweren’t paintings numbered higher than fourteen. I only know I don’t have any.”
    Ian began checking the back of each car-wreck painting. “One, seven, and twelve are missing.”
    “It’s the same for each, uh, topic.” What a genteel way to describe three separate takes on death and murder. Mom would be so proud of me . “A broken sequence of numbers.”
    “What’s the other number written on the opposite side?” he asked.
    “I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the total number of the Death Suite.”
    “The what ?” Susa asked.
    “It’s my name for the dark paintings, not Grandpa’s. I don’t know if he separated them from the rest of his work in his own mind.”
    “But you do,” Susa said.
    “Wouldn’t you?” Lacey asked.
    Susa looked thoughtful. “Yes, of course. Are the other works numbered in any way at all?”
    “You mean the landscapes?” Lacey asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Not that I’ve found. No numbers. No dates. Only the dark ones are numbered and dated, or maybe dated—hard to tell. Two.six, four.six, and nine.two aren’t exactly the same as April eighth, nineteen-ninety. It could have been the numbers of attempts he made before he got one he liked, or it could have been a code as private as the vision he was painting. The paintings lend themselves to a more, um, ritual than rational explanation.”
    “Tactfully put,” Ian said, his voice sardonic. “Rituals could be another name for psychoses, right?”
    Lacey compressed her lips and shut up. Seeing the paintings through the eyes of people who hadn’t grown up with them gave the art a new dimension. It wasn’t a happy one.
    Grandpa, did you imagine these or…?
    She refused to finish the thought. Rubbing away the goose bumps that prickled coldly over her arms, she stepped back into the shadows and let Ian and Susa absorb the paintings.
    Ian paced silently from the drowning pool to the fire to the wreck. Each time he stopped in front of the wreck and studied the paintings as though he was trying to squeeze something out of them.
    “If those are dates,” he said, “there are only three of them. One for each way of dying. That’s a lot of painting in one day.”
    “Impressive but not impossible,” Susa said. “If an artist is seized by a theme, he or she might paint nonstop in a frenzy of creation. Ten paintings, twenty, thirty. As long as the body can take it.”
    Ian grunted. “Frenzy about covers it.”
    “Not pleasant,” Susa said, looking from painting to painting, death echoing. “Not cozy. Brilliant the way a sword is brilliant. It’s the steely essence of intelligence and tradition. It’s also a punishing reminder of man’s spotted soul.”
    With an impatient sound, Ian picked up one of the car-wreck paintings and shifted it slowly, letting light play over its dark surface. Night and hills and eucalyptus lifting like black torches to the moon-bright sky. The suggestion of parallel lines, perhaps tire tracks, rushing down a steep slope, straddling fire. The landscape shuddering as though at a blow. Every ripple of force came from and led back to the car.
    Except one line. As though the wind touched only a single tree, it bent like a finger pointing to the top of the slope, where something stood and watched. Caught within the shadows that might have been chaparral or a man, a single glow came from what might have been the ember of a match.
    Ian shifted the painting slowly, then shifted it again. The tiny glow winked in some lights like a firefly; in others, the glow was barely visible.
    Saying nothing, he set