The sculpture was of Medusa in dark blue, with golden snakes twisting out of her broken skull. The snakes slithered down her back and made holes in it until they were coming out of her gaping ribcage.
It looked so realistic, so powerful.
“That’s beautiful,” I said. “And powerful. You can see her wrath and her fearlessness in her eyes, and the snakes… their hunger.”
“Thank you,” a deep voice said from behind me. “It took me a while to perfect that look in her eyes.”
I turned around and gasped. I immediately recognized the face. He was much older than the one I had of him from the case file, but it was the man from the coffee shop. Logan Jones. One with the vandalism charge against him. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, his voice soft, loving.
“She is. You sculpted her?” I asked, studying his face. He wasn’t wearing a hoodie anymore. The suit was costly, and there were no paint smudges on his clothes. He looked powerful, and his smile was confident and charismatic.
He gave me a nod, running his fingers through his hair. “She’s a difficult woman to understand, but once I understood her, she came alive in my hands.”
“I love how real she looks and yet untouchable.”
“She’s real. She’s honest. There’s no lies in her. No masks.”
My eyes went to his shining brown ones, and he smiled. A flash of something passed in his eyes, and the snakes on Medusa slithered down my spine. Cold. It was so cold.
“I’m Logan Jones. I have a few more pieces lying around. You’ll enjoy them.” His smile was glib before he walked away toward a crowd of men and women staring at another sculpture. This wasn’t the surly man who ordered coffee in a cold voice. This man was charming, and he knew how to work the crowd.
“Are you alright?” Ryden asked as he softly caressed my spine. “You look uncomfortable.”
“I met him before and I got a bad feeling about him,” I said to Ryden, twisting my fingers.
Logan Jones was now talking with a tall woman, and she was laughing at whatever he said. The way The Strangler was so kind… the way all these women died without having a single defensive wound… they trusted him not to hurt them until the very last moment.
I didn’t know why looking at Logan Jones reminded me of The Strangler, but could he be… The Strangler? The meeting at Coffee Connexion didn’t feel like a coincidence. I didn’t believe in coincidences.
He looked so fucking harmless, and his smile didn’t feel forced. After spending years trying to distinguish men from monsters, I was so good at reading a person, but I suddenly felt lost, confused.
Logan Jones didn’t fit the profile, but he also made me feel uneasy.
Ryden and I walked to the next display and the next, talking about them, when another voice cut us off and this time, Ryden smiled.
“I see you’ve brought a beautiful woman with you,” the man in front of us said.
He was tall and pale, with brown hair that was cropped closer to his skull and pale blue eyes. He stopped in front of me and pushed a hand forward, showing off his tattooed fingers. “You must be the one who made my guy go raving mad over the past few weeks.”
“I did?” I shook his hand with a smile.
“You know you did. Don’t pretend like you don’t know anything about it,” Ryden said with a frown before he turned to the man. “You can let her hand go now, Enzo.” He stared at Enzo’s hand in mine, and I smirked. He was so fucking jealous, and I loved it. “Yara, this is Enzo. My friend. Enzo, this is…”
Enzo. I remembered that name. He was the one who was a partner at Onyx.
“Doctor Death.”
I laughed. “Doctor Death? Is that my nickname?”
“Don’t mind him. He’s a pain in my ass, and he himself is a master of death. He owns a funeral home,” Ryden said to me, and my ears perked with curiosity as I scanned Enzo. The two men looked comfortable around each other, and Ryden wasn’t bursting with anger or fake charm. He looked… at ease. He looked like himself.
Ryden Sinclair had a best friend who owned a funeral home.
I now knew exactly where Phil disappeared. Into the fucking fire. Until he was nothing but ashes. Marvelous.
Oh, how useful!
I once had a best friend who carried a small plastic bag she used to fill with pineapple candies.