She wasn't exactly sure when she had switched to this. She’d been trying to lose herself in painting, anything, but hadn't been able to do it. Even painting the auras of Chloe and Adrienne, which she knew from absolute memory, had been impossible.
And then the dark aura had taken over.
Paige knew what this was. This was her painting of the man who had attacked her. This is what she saw when she tried to remember him. The blackness. The shadows.
Brett was standing behind her with his hand gently grasped over hers. She felt the stiff muscles of her arm as he lowered her hand down to her side.
"Are you all right?” His deep voice was a whisper in her ear.
"I think so." She set the paint brush in a jar of cleaner on the table by her easel. "That's him. That's what I remember when I think of the day that I was attacked. Instead of seeing his face, I just see this.”
She felt Brett's hands come up and begin rubbing her upper arms, his long fingers easing her tight muscles.
"You need to eat something. And definitely drink some water if you haven't had any this whole time."
She spun her head back slightly to look at him. "How long has it been?"
"Almost five hours."
No wonder she was so stiff and tired. She sometimes got caught up in painting like this but usually had a bottle of water and some fruit within easy reach of her easel. Her mind had learned to take care of her physical body –grabbing whatever hydration or nutrients she needed- so that she could continue long hours of painting.
But she hadn't planned on long hours of painting today.
She fully turned so she could face Brett. "The drawings. Did you see them all? Will it help you in any cases?"
“Let’s eat a little and then we can go over it. But yes, your pictures are definitely going to be helpful."
In the kitchen they worked together to make some soup and sandwiches. Neither of them said much as they ate, both caught up in their own thoughts.
After cleaning the dishes Paige didn't resist when Brett led her back into the living room. She had to face those pictures. Knew he would have questions about them. It was time.
Most of them she hadn't seen since the day she drew them. She didn’t know the order or the dates, but now wished desperately she did.
"I haven't studied these pictures. I just want you to know that. I don't know much about them and haven’t looked at many of them since the mornings I found them and then just put them in the portfolio.”
She was relieved when Brett nodded. "It's understandable. Some of them are pretty graphic in their violence."
Paige hardly recognized her living room as they walked through the entryway. Brett had moved the couch all the way back to get more space to lay out the pictures.
The drawings, there were well over one hundred of them, were laid out in very specific groupings all over her floor.
"Wow." She murmured.
"I found some sticky notes in your kitchen drawer and used them. I hope that's okay. Normally I wouldn't do something like that with artifacts involving potential cases, but I figured we were never going to log these into official evidence."
Paige walked closer to the pictures trying to figure out the patterns Brett had used. “That’s fine.”
“The first thing you should know, if you don’t already, is that you drew every single picture more than once.”
Paige’s eyes flew to his. “I did? I knew I drew them again if I destroyed them, which is why I started to keep them. But I drew them all more than once?”
“Yes. Every single one. Most at least half a dozen times.”
At least that meant she hadn’t drawn a hundred dead women.
Brett took a step further in the room. “The yellow stickies have numbers on them. I didn’t want to lose the order you had them in the portfolio, just in case that means something.”
She looked around more carefully. ”But you don't have them laid out in the order that I drew them, right?"
"No, they are laid out by victims. I tried to group together each woman that you've drawn as best as I could. Although some I'm not sure about."
The pattern was obvious now that he laid it all out on her living room floor. What Paige had assumed were dozens of women that she drawn were actually less than ten in total. If you eliminated the repeats she’d just drawn them in different stages of an attack. So she hadn't recognized that some of the drawings of the women with no bruising were the same women with the bruising. Alive and dead. The same women.
Brett had grouped the drawings according to victims.
"It looks like you drew two or three pictures of each victim. One before the trauma and one after the trauma for all of them. And then the third picture for some of them is obviously once they are dead."
Brett's voice was not cold, but he obviously had been trained to look at this from a professional point of view. Paige didn't have that same training. She struggled to hold on to the contents of her stomach.
In most of the later pictures the bruising was so severe Paige couldn't believe Brett had been able to recognize them as the same woman as before the attack.
Paige walked to the first grouping of pictures. "How can you tell that this is the same woman? In the before picture she's wearing what's obviously a lower cut dress and in the after picture" –after meaning the woman had been beaten to where she was unrecognizable– "she's wearing a collared shirt."
Paige didn't wait for Brett to answer. She studied the other groupings of pictures more closely. "It's like that with a lot of them. Is there some detail I’m missing? How are you able to group these pictures together?”
"Because four of them, including Teresa Cavasos, are all murder cases I've been looking into."
Paige shut her eyes. So that confirmed at least four of the women she’d drawn were dead. There was no reason to believe any of the other ones were still alive either.
"More than that," Brett continued, "I think all of these women were murdered by the same person. And that he meant to murder you too, but you got away."
Chapter Twenty-Three
Brett gave Paige a little bit of time to look over the pictures as he grabbed his phone to call Alex, even knowing he would’ve already gone home by now.
"I need you to meet me at the station in a few minutes."
"Wagner, you know we’re not dating, right? This is two nights in a row you're dragging me out of my apartment."
Brett chuckled. "Just do it. Get a conference room where we can spread out and make sure Captain Ameling is gone. I'm going to be bringing Paige with me."
“This is sounding dirtier and dirtier. “
“In your dreams, Olivier. We’ve got a serial killer on our hands. I'm sure of it now."
Alex whistled through his teeth. "All right, I'll see you in a few."
Brett walked back to where Paige was still studying the pictures.
"I can only recognize some of them because of their files,” he told her. “If I hadn't already seen pictures of them like this I would never be able to reconcile them with the earlier pictures either. There's no reason to think you should've been able to."
"I really had hoped I was just crazy. That my brain was broken after the attack or whatever. That I just had something dark inside me that needed to get out while I was sleeping and I was just drawing violence against pretend women.”
He knew it had to be hard. "I wish they were just figments of your imagination too." Not only because of the loss of human life but because it would've made Paige feel so much better.
"Don't you think it's really freaky that I did this? Aren't you tempted to arrest me or question me further?"
Brett took her hand and led her out of the room.
"No. Not at all."
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. "How can you say that? There has to be some sort of doubt. That I had to be present at these crimes or something like that."
Brett sat her down at the table so that he could face her eye to eye.
"This is why I left last night. I had to work through what I saw to be my three options."
"That I was a criminal had to be one option."
Brett nodded. "Yes, that was an option. Actually, honestly, it was really less that I thought you were involved in the crimes and more that I thought you could've hacked into the Portland PD computer files or something."
Realization dawned in her eyes. "That I saw the pictures and then drew them. That I lied about being asleep when I did it."
Brett could see the possibility of it hurt her. But this conversation was necessary. He had to let her know that he had considered all the options, but when it was all said and done, he trusted her.
"Yes. That was actually the most logical choice. Nobody could blame you if you needed law enforcement attention focused back on you. "
He hated that tears welled in her eyes.
"You thought I was crazy."
Brett smiled at her gently. "Actually, wanting attention made you not crazy. Believing you drew murder victims in your sleep? That made both of us a little crazy. I needed something that was a possible logical explanation."
"I can't blame you for that. I know I'm telling the truth and it still sounds completely nuts to me."
"It was less about believing you and more about it going against everything I knew about law enforcement. If you could do this, Paige.” Brett gripped her arms gently, wanting to make sure she knew how difficult this was for him. “If I accepted that you could draw murder victims in your sleep, then it had to change how I looked at law enforcement in general.”