The Sculptor

She stood in the doorway to their bedroom-naked, save for the button-down shirt of Markham ’s which she wore drawn tightly around her. They had spent that Sunday together driving along the coast-had ended up in Newport and strolled along the cliff-walk before taking in a late lunch at a restaurant overlooking the harbor. Upon their return to the safe house, the fax from Rachel Sullivan had already arrived: the coroner’s report, as well as a list of names taken from the East Greenwich Police investigation on the death of Damon Manzera-both requested by Sam Markham the evening before. Cathy had made the FBI agent promise to let them wait-convinced him that nothing could be done with the information until the following morning. And after another evening of wine and lovemaking, the once shy art history professor could not help but feel a certain amount of pride that her feminine wiles had won out yet again.

“It’s 12:15,” said Markham. “Ante meridiem. Technically it’s now tomorrow-haven’t broken my promise to you, have I?”

“I guess not. But you woke me up.”

“Sorry.”

Dressed in only his underwear, the FBI agent lay on the sofa in the common area-which also consisted of two recliners and a television, two desks complete with computers and printers, a copier and a fax machine, as well as an entire wall dedicated to the twelve video monitors that continually displayed surveillance from the building’s exterior, its second and third floor corridors, as well as its parking garage.

Sullivan’s fax lay scattered about on the floor-cast aside by Markham in deference to his copy of Slumbering in the Stone. Cathy sat down beside him.

“What’s got your attention now?” she asked.

“Wasn’t able to learn much from the fax, so I started reading again about David.”

“And?”

“I guess the thing that keeps jumping out at me is how tall the statue is-seventeen feet, you say?”

“Yes. You can’t really grasp its size, its magnificence until you see it in person.”

“But the way it was sculpted-the head and the upper torso, the hands slightly out of proportion to the lower half of the body-you say in your book you think this was intentional on Michelangelo’s part?”

“Yes. There are a number of theories about this. As I’m sure you’ve read, the enormous block of Carrara marble from which David was originally sculpted had already been worked by a couple of other artists-one of them being a student of Donatello-and then ended up being neglected in a courtyard for almost thirty years before the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo was commissioned to finish the project in 1501. Some scholars believe that Michelangelo had to work from a figure that had been blocked out earlier. However, I believe that the marble wasn’t nearly that far along when Michelangelo got to it. And as the guild that originally commissioned the statue had intended for it to sit atop the buttress of a cathedral-a plan that was later abandoned-when viewed from below, the proportions of David would be correct.”

“It took him a little over three years,” said Markham, reading. “And the statue ended up being installed outside the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio.”

“Yes. A representation of the biblical David whose defeat of Goliath and the Philistines came to symbolize the triumph of the Florentine Republic over its rival city-states, Michelangelo’s David was initially placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio-a fortresslike palace that served as the old seat of civic government in Florence. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe nowadays that the Florentines would have allowed what has become the most famous statue in the world to be subjected to wind and weather and pigeon poop before moving it indoors to the Galleria dell’ Accademia almost four hundred years later.”

Markham was silent-his eyes fixed on a photographic detail of David’s waist.

“You’re thinking about where he’s going to display it, aren’t you?” said Cathy. “You’re thinking about what to do in case we don’t catch The Michelangelo Killer before he creates his David.”

“Actually, I’m thinking about where he’s going to get his material.”

“What do you mean?”

“We know from our investigation thus far that no young males with a physique resembling the statue of David have been reported missing-a physique one can assume the killer will have a hard time finding among the population of male prostitutes from which we now know he’s drawn.”

“Yes.”