The Postcard Killers

    Jacob made an effort to understand, and also to keep his emotions in check. “So an event, or a series of events, can be a work of art?” he asked.

    “Of course. Both Mac and Sylvia were determined to take their work to its ultimate limits.”

    Jacob remembered Dessie’s stories of the art student who faked a psychotic attack for her examination piece, and the guy who smashed up a car on the subway and called his artwork Territorial Pissing. He described these cases to Everett.

    “Could the Rudolphs ever do anything like that?”

    Nicky Everett pressed his glasses firmly onto his nose. “The Rudolphs were more meticulous in their expression. That all sounds rather superficial.

‘Territorial Pissing’?”

    Jacob ran his fingers through his hair. “So,” he said, “explain it to me: how can that be art? I want to hear this and understand it as best I can.”

    The student looked at him with complete indifference in his face.

    “You think a work of art should be hung on a wall and sold on the commercial market?”

    Jacob realized the futility of going any further down this road and changed the subject. “They started an art group, the Society of Limitless Art…”

    “It was more of a web project. I don’t think anything ever came of it.”

    “What was their social life like otherwise? Family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends.”

    Nicky Everett seemed not to understand, as though the very idea that he might possess such insignificant facts was completely ridiculous.

    “Do you know if they were upset when their guardian died here in L.A.?”

    “Their what?”

    Jacob gave up.

    “Okay, I think we’re good,” he said, standing up. “It’s a shame the Rudolphs couldn’t afford to stay on here. Imagine all the incredible art they could have created…”

    He turned to go back to his car.

    Nicky Everett had also stood up, and for the first time, a genuine expression showed on his face. “‘Couldn’t afford to stay on here’? Sylvia and Mac were exceptional talents. They both had scholarships. There was no problem with fees.”

    Jacob stopped short.

    “No problem? So why did they leave, then?”

    Everett blinked a few times, a sure sign that he was agitated.

    “They created the work Taboo and were expelled. They showed up the bourgeois limitations and the hypocrisy of our society, and of this institution, of course.”

    Jacob stared at the student.

    “What did they do? What was Taboo? What was it that got them expelled?”

    Nicky Everett’s mouth curved into a smile.

    “They committed an act that was entirely relevant within the frame of their art. They had intercourse in a case in the exhibition hall.”

Chapter 109

    JACOB SAT IN THE car with the GPS switched off and his duffel bag beside him on the passenger seat. The more he found out about the Rudolphs’

    background, the weirder they became. Taboo went way beyond TerritorialPissing.

    If he started with this latest piece of information, the signals he had picked up on from the recording at the Museum of Modern Art had been correct. The siblings had an erotic relationship. It was possible that people had different preferences within the world of conceptual art, but in Jacob’s reality, you didn’t have intercourse with your twin in public, not unless you had a whole toolbox full of loose screws.

    The long trail of slashed throats they had left behind them couldn’t be a coincidence either. The question was, What came first, the chicken or the egg?

    Had Sylvia discovered her murdered parents and been traumatized for life? Was she trying to get over the experience by repeating it, again and again, in the form of macabre works of art? Or was she the one who had killed her mother and father at the age of thirteen? Was that even physically possible?

   Would she have had the strength to do it? The neck was tough. It was full of muscles, sinews, and ligaments. But above all, why would she have killed her parents?

    He took it for granted that the twins had murdered the guardian who had embezzled the whole of their inheritance.

    And who was Sandra Schulman, the friend mentioned by the gardener?

    He would have to track her down, too. And the boyfriend, William Hamilton. For some reason he suddenly saw Dessie Larsson before him, her long hair and graceful profile, her slender fingers, her vigilant green eyes. Had the mob of journalists finally given up waiting outside Dessie’s door?

    Had she gone back to her old routine?

    Was she thinking of him? Was she all right?

    Irritated, he shrugged off the thought. He had more work to do in L.A.

Chapter 110

    WILLIAM HAMILTON, OR BILLY as his friends called him, opened the door with his long, dirty blond hair standing on end and wearing nothing but a pink bath towel.

    “What?” he said abruptly, blinking in the dim light from the stairwell.

    “What now?”

    “Police,” Jacob Kanon said, holding up his badge, obscuring the NYPD.

    “Can I come in? Of course I can.”