Color Blind by Jonathan Santlofer Read Free Book Online

expressionist brush stroke might mean he’s working fast and furiously, but a painter can put the color down correctly as quickly as he or she can put it down wrong.”

    “So it’s a choice?” Brown poured a cup of coffee, left it black, and offered it to Kate, who took it not because she wanted lousy cop coffee but because Brown had remembered she drank it black.

    “Perhaps.” She took a sip. It was even worse than she remembered. “Lots of artists have experimented with color. And there’s something about these that remind me—a little—of the German expressionist painter, Kirchner. I’ll show you some later.”

    McNally’s face lit up. “So our unsub’s a Kraut?”

    Kate shook her head, suppressed a grin. “No. What I’m saying is these paintings have a raw quality, an immediacy that reminds me of the German painters. It’s possible your unsub—or whoever painted these—knows the work of those artists, is trying to emulate them, or—” She shifted her gaze to the street scene. “I don’t know. This one’s mostly black and white and—”

    “Except for the sky,” said McNally, proud, as if he were pointing out something that everyone else had missed.

    “Right,” said Kate, exchanging the briefest look with Brown before going back to the paintings. “I’m really not sure what to say. The work looks unschooled, but there are artists who go for that look intentionally.”

    “Do you think they’re some sort of code?” Brown asked.

    “Maybe.” An image flashed across Kate’s brain—her face pasted over Andrea Mantegna’s painting of Saint Sebastian. That was code all right. The Death Artist. She leaned back against the lectern, a wave of nausea rising in her throat.

    Brown touched her arm. “You okay?”

    She was suddenly dying for a smoke after six months without a single puff. “I’m fine. Where was I?” She focused on the paintings. “The ways he’s drawn the streets and the fruit are okay. Nothing special; the objects are recognizable, adequate, though there is some distortion. Again, I can’t say if that’s intentional or not.” She pursed her lips and came in close again. “There appear to be suggestions of charcoal beneath the paint, which must be how he starts his paintings. And it looks like a bit of a letter, maybe a Y and an R .” She pointed them out. “See here, and here?”

    Kate stood back, took off her glasses, folded her arms across her chest, tried to assess the work coolly. “But what makes these paintings special—though I’m not sure that’s the right word for them—is the odd use of color. And I can’t figure out what he’s trying to accomplish with it because it doesn’t really make sense.” She turned to McNally. “If you have pictures of these, I’ll take them home and see if anything comes to me.”

    “Got some in my office,” he said, turning abruptly out of the room.

    A muffled jingle sounded from somewhere inside Brown’s clothes.

    “Pacemaker?” Kate asked, a wry smile on her lips.

    Brown tugged the cellular out of his inside breast pocket, hugged it to his ear. “Brown here.” He paused. “Uh-huh. Where? Shit. Who’s there? Right. Make sure the tech boys don’t destroy the scene until I’ve seen it.”

    He clicked off as McNally came chugging back into the room with an envelope for Kate. “Digitals,” he said, handing them over.

    “What is it?” Kate asked Brown.

    “A body. And a painting. In Midtown Manhattan.”

     

    B rown maneuvered the Impala through the traffic on the West Side Highway, siren blaring. The Hudson River was flying past Kate’s vision, bluish-green brush strokes painted below a steel-gray sky.
    But what was it she was feeling? Aside from a nagging desire to smoke a cigarette that would not go away, there was definitely something else. Could it possibly be adrenaline? Jesus. Those old cop instincts just kicked in whether she wanted them to or not. But no way she actually wanted to visit a