The Sculptor

Sam Markham’s brain sizzled like a slab of bacon-his thoughts sputtering and popping inside his skull with the panic of what to do next. Cathy had suffered a mild concussion, but would be okay-he knew that deep down. But as he sat beside her hospital bed, his anxiety fired back and forth between his need to go looking for The Michelangelo Killer, and his concern, his gnawing guilt for the woman he loved.

Sullivan’s team would be the ones to scramble on the information he’d gleaned from the DVD, for Markham knew he had to be there when Cathy woke up. He had heard the smack of her head on the hardwood floor when she fainted-a dull thud out in the hallway that could have been prevented had he been there to catch her, had he not been so transfixed by the horrible DVD death of Steve Rogers. But worse for Cathy than the fall was when Markham revived her-the shock at first, then the hysterics that followed when her mind attempted to wrap itself around what she had just witnessed.

“Mother!” she had screamed in the ambulance. “You were right, Mother! You tried to warn me but I didn’t listen! I’m sorry, Steven!”

The EMTs had to strap Cathy to the gurney and administered a sedative on the ride over to the hospital. And as Markham held her hand, as she started to calm, Cathy whispered to him what he already knew.

“The Pietà, Sam. The breasts. He used Steve for the body of his Pietà.”

From his reading of Slumbering in the Stone, Sam Markham knew all about the Rome Pietà-knew that Michelangelo had ingeniously sculpted the Virgin Mary out of proportion to Jesus in order to get the correct visual relationship between the two figures. He also knew right off the bat that the real Rome Pietà was still on display in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and thus instinctively ordered Sullivan to mobilize the local police forces outside of every church named St. Peter’s in Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts, and northern Connecticut. But deep down Markham knew it wouldn’t be that easy-knew that The Michelangelo Killer wouldn’t tip his hand to Dr. Hildebrant and the FBI just like that.

Perhaps he was even trying to throw them off the trail.

Nonetheless, before climbing into the ambulance with Cathy, Special Agent Sam Markham had the good sense to grab from the Trailblazer his now ragged copy of Slumbering in the Stone. He had pored desperately over the chapters on the Rome Pietà at Cathy’s bedside while she slept-learned that the statue was originally commissioned as a grave marker by the French cardinal Jean de Billheres. Its first home had been the Chapel of St. Petronilla, a Roman mausoleum located in the south transept of St. Peter’s which the cardinal had chosen for his funerary chapel. There it had lived for a short time until the chapel was demolished. The Pietà occupied a number of locations around St. Peter’s when finally, in the eighteenth century, it came to rest in its current location in the first chapel on the right of the Basilica. Markham relayed all this information to Sullivan, but her subsequent Internet search came up empty. She could not with any certainty link these details (St. Peter’s, St. Petronilla, funerary chapels, Cardinal Billheres, etc.) to any specific site in Rhode Island-in all of New England for that matter.

And so Sam Markham felt helpless. He felt that he could see the future rolling, unstoppable, toward him in his mind-could see so clearly The Michelangelo Killer’s upcoming Pietà: a heinous sculpture with a woman’s head and hands and breasts sewn onto Rogers ’s body à la Frankenstein. As a result of his research into the Plastination process, Sam Markham’s rational side told him that-even if The Michelangelo Killer had already murdered his Mary and his Jesus long ago-the killer would not have had nearly enough time to preserve Rogers ’s body. His gut, however-that intuition that all the best “profilers” learn to follow despite “the facts”-told him otherwise.

Yes, Markham knew in his gut that not only was he missing something very important, but that he was also running out of time.

He needed Cathy-needed her to wake up and to talk to him calmly.

An agent from the Resident Agency poked his head into the room. “Burrell is on his way,” he said, and Markham nodded. There were two Providence agents posted outside the door, and Markham knew Burrell would square the FBI protective custody for Cathy himself. That was good; it would be much better than the surveillance they had placed on her-the depth of which Cathy had no idea. Yes, although the FBI had watched Cathy’s every move now for almost a month, although she was most certainly never in any real danger, Markham felt nonetheless ashamed that Cathy had been used involuntarily as bait.

That couldn’t be avoided.