Eve flipped through the files. “Oh, yeah, we have the red hair dye and a couple of blue faux hairs that will match the blue dreads recovered a short distance from Screw U—you yanked out some of your own hair when you pulled them off, so we also have that. Then there’s the club itself, where we have additional eyewitnesses verifying you ordered the drink you then doctored and served to Loxie Flash. Then there’s the mink hoodie you stole—let’s go ahead and add that charge of grand theft while we’ve got you here.
“Are you following me here, Ann?”
Smith shifted her eyes up for an instant. The right showed the bruising and swelling caused by a dead-on backhanded blow. Eve saw the flicker of temper before Smith lowered her gaze again.
Good. She’d fan the flames.
“I can sit here and list all the evidence we have against you, but you already know all that. You may not know that I’ve just gotten a report from our lab, from our expert on hair and fiber. The coat you left behind at the club? She found both hair and fiber on it—you were in a hurry, after all. A strand of hair that matches the hair taken from a brush in your apartment, and the blue dreads. Some fibers from the clothes you wore the night you killed Loxie Flash match clothes recovered from your apartment. She put a rush on that work for me, so we can wrap this up, nice and neat.
“She’ll find trace on the reversible coat, too. And, you know, there’s just a little bit of blood on the sleeve of the reversible coat—the dark side. You probably didn’t notice, but we did. It’s going to be Chanel Rylan’s blood.”
Eve sat back, slid photos of the dead out of the file. “So, sloppy work, Ann. Careless, sloppy work.”
Smith’s shoulders tightened. She shook her head.
“Oh, yeah, sloppy and careless. Since we’ve got that in the bag, let’s move on to motive. We’ve got that, too. Blaine DeLano and her Dark series. We’re big fans, aren’t we, Peabody?”
“I love those books. Can’t get enough. The way Dark hunts down the bad guys? Man, she’s smart. And she’s fearless.”
“She’s a thief,” Smith muttered.
“Sorry, did you say something?” Peabody asked.
“She’s a thief.”
“Deann Dark?”
“No! Blaine DeLano. She stole from me.”
“Oh right, right.” Eve waved a hand in the air. “She mentioned something about some whack fan—that would be you—bitching and whining about her, DeLano, copying from the whack fan’s—yours—lame-ass excuse for a book.”
“My book is groundbreaking!”
And there’s a rise, Eve thought and nodded at Peabody.
Peabody reached into the satchel at her feet, pulled out the manuscript, dropped it with a thud on the table.
“Perfect cure for insomnia,” Peabody commented. “I was nodding off by page two.”
That earned a dark look under stubby lashes from Smith.
“You’re not wrong. Your book is bloated and self-indulgent,” Eve told Smith. “I can say that after suffering through the first chapter.”
“You know nothing about literature. Neither of you.”
“Literature? Is that what that waste of time and paper’s supposed to be?”
“More like purple pap.” Peabody snickered with it.
“Pap’s accurate. Just take the opening line. What was it? Yeah, yeah,” Eve murmured as she plucked up the first page. ‘With skill and grace, with focus and cunning, he tracked his victim like a sleek, predatory wolf to a plump, senseless lamb, but never showed the shine and keenness of his fangs.’ Seriously? If I didn’t get paid to do this, I’d have stopped right there. Bloated,” Eve said again. “And what’s the term—yeah, florid. DeLano writes lean and mean.”
Smith, an angry—and, yeah, sallow—face surrounded by incongruously cheery curls rapped a fist on the table.
“She took my work. My sweat and blood, and twisted it into something ordinary.”
“Your work doesn’t approach the lowest level of ordinary. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, she did. You get pissed off about that and kill Rosie Kent, Chanel Rylan, Loxie Flash?”
“Do you understand nothing?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Amanda Young killed Pryor Carridine. Justin Werth killed Amelia Benson. Gigi Hombly killed Bliss Cather.”
“Yeah, yeah, I read the books. Those are fictional characters, Ann. Fictional characters don’t bleed.”
“Of course they do.” Hazel eyes, edging toward brown—Jake had observation skills—bored into Eve’s. “You don’t understand, you’re incapable of understanding. You’re not a writer.”
“Explain it to me,” Eve invited. “Explain to me how and why as Young, Werth, and Hombly you killed Carridine, Benson, and Cather.”
Ann only shook her head, hunched up again.
“Come on, Ann, don’t be shy. A writer has to face criticism, right? Has to stand up to it. Defend your work!”
Eve slapped her hands on the table. Ann Elizabeth Smith jumped, hunched tighter.
“You want to be somebody? You claim to be a writer, a groundbreaking writer? Your work’s so superior, so fucking lofty? Prove it. Prove it to me, A. E. Strongbow. Defend your work.”
Those eyes shifted up again, the fire in them brighter. “Art doesn’t need defending.”
“Bullshit. A true artist stands by her art, stands for it, fights for it. You want attention? You’ve got mine. Here and now. Defend your work or go back to being nothing and nobody, sitting in the shadows, cutting and pinning and sewing for rich bitches. Bitches like Blaine DeLano.”
“She’s the nothing! I’ve proven it already.”
“How? By killing make-believe people?”
“They’re flesh and blood. They must be flesh and blood. I made her cardboard characters flesh and blood. I transformed them and breathed life into them. A true writer must embody the characters she creates. Must live inside them. Occupy them. Think and speak and feel as they do.”
“But you embodied and you killed DeLano’s characters.”
“My characters! Mine. I made them mine, because I’m better. I showed her I’m better.”
She tapped her fisted hands on the table like beating a drum. Passion flushed the thin, sallow face.
“The villain is the key. The villain is the core. Anybody can write the expected, write the trite and tidy good overcomes evil. I showed her how much more creative, more real, more fascinating it is when evil triumphs. Why does Dark always win? Because DeLano has no real imagination, because she refuses to take creative risks. I showed her.”
“You didn’t kill three people on the pages of a book. Three actual people are dead. People you selected only because they fit the fictional profile created by another writer.”
“A hack,” Smith said dismissively. “I made them real.”
“You made them dead.”
“Art demands sacrifice.”
The fire burned hot now so Eve saw the fanatic. Saw Strongbow. She saw the rage, and the horrible pride the mousy Ann Smith concealed.
“How did you select Pryor Carridine’s surrogate for sacrifice?”
“It’s basic research to a serious writer. To write, you have to experience. I learned that. I’ll admit Blaine DeLano taught me that. I risked everything to come to New York, to give up the ordinary, the comfortable, and strive.”
“Your mother’s shop in Wilmington,” Eve prompted.
“My mother.” Smith sneered. “She was no mother to me. Did she ever encourage me to be more? No, it was always, ‘Control your temper, Ann. Stop daydreaming, Ann.’ She wanted me to sew for the rest of my life! ‘Make a good living,’ she’d say. And never, never believed in my dreams. A hobby. She called my writing a hobby!”
“She left her shop, her business, in your hands.”
“I didn’t want it. It only paid the bills, only trapped me inside the ordinary. Doing the ordinary while I wrote? I barely slept for months. Months. Years. It blurs.”
“You left the business, came to New York.”
“Blaine told me to.”
“She told you to come to New York?” Eve qualified.
“Yes, yes. She encouraged me to dream, and that’s the same thing. I loved her for that. I believed in her, I thought she believed in me, so I risked everything. I worked for hours to pay the rent while my mind wrote and wrote and wrote.”
The hard light in her eyes softened as she pressed both hands to her heart. “Coming home to take those scenes, those characters, out of my head and putting them on the page were the happiest hours of my life. I often wrote through the night, then went back to Dobb’s or took a side job so I could support my true art.
“You can’t know the joy, the thrill, the satisfaction in the soul of finishing a book, that labor of sweat and blood and love.”
The rage snapped back. “And what did she do when I sent her that labor of sweat and blood and love? She rejected me.”
“That stung.”
“It cut me to the quick. I was so angry, so disillusioned, so wounded. She was my mentor, my friend, my teacher, and she put lawyers between us? Agents and lawyers prevented her from reading my book? I tried to understand, to forgive. I tried. And then …”
She lived in it now, Eve noted. Smith lived in that murky world where reality and fiction blurred. And while she did, she had to tell her story.
“Sudden Dark,” Eve prompted. “You read Sudden Dark.”
“And I saw what she’d done, how she’d used and betrayed me. I trusted her and she murdered that trust. She killed my innocence. She crushed my dreams.”
“She had to pay.”
“She had to pay. She had to see. See me as I now saw her. The evil in her, the selfish, calculating evil in her. She used Deann Dark to destroy me. I would use Deann Dark to destroy her, and to show her, to show everyone duped by her how it should be done. How a real writer creates.”