Page 35 of Nothing Hiding

"I'll need to go." He took a deep, worried breath, but seeing Juliette's face, he hesitated. "Let me make this call as quick as I can. Perhaps it'll get you somewhere."

He took out his cellphone and dialed quickly.

Then he spoke rapidly and scribbled down a few words.

"Okay. This is the best I can do for you. My contact remembers that this was his London studio, but I don't know if it still is. Perhaps he’s working from there again now. It's the best I can do. I hope this gets you somewhere."

He rushed out, and Juliette stared down at the paper.

It was an address. A lead from Fenton.

And the abusive artist might just be there.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When Juliette and Wyatt rushed out of the gallery and back to the car, they found Sierra, looking excited, busy screenshotting some of the information from her laptop.

"I've got a lead," she said.

"We got one too. What do you have?" Two good leads felt like progress. Suddenly, this case was powering forward. She hoped this would allow them to find the killer, despite the obstructive Scotland Yard team, who were so hell bent on doing it themselves.

"He's not a commercial artist, he's more like a social media personality who dabbles in art and crafts,” Sierra explained. “He has a blog here, and it's entitled Wicked Waxworks. His name's Walter Wax, according to the blog, but I think it's actually Walter Homer. He doesn't seem to do wax sculpture though. It's more coating everyday objects in wax and changing their nature and appearance through paint. He's been doing it with flowers, and fruit, and inanimate objects like shoes and tools."

"Sounds like a promising lead?" Juliette said, although she wasn't sure. But then Sierra added the information that did make a difference.

"He then got into trouble because he did it a while ago with a dead mouse that he found in a field. He chopped it up, set the pieces in wax, and posed it on a canvas. It didn’t work, and the wax melted, and the whole thing turned into a disaster, but along the way, it caused a huge amount of controversy. People started calling him a psycho and saying that he should never do that, it was too shocking, and what would be next? Seems like he defended himself and said some pretty weird things. Most of which have been removed from the blog. I’m picking up snippets of them from the hidden archives."

"Now that is interesting,” Juliette agreed. “That seems like it might have been a starting point for something more serious."

"How long ago was this?" Wyatt asked.

"The field mouse incident was six months ago. Since then, the blog's been more sporadic. That was definitely a turning point for him," Sierra said.

"We need to go and find him. Do you have an address?"

"Not yet. I think after the mouse incident he took it down. But I've set a program to search in the hidden archives, because there was one originally, it looks like."

She stared up at Juliette, brown eyes wide.

Juliette felt encouraged. They now had two strong possibilities. One artist, and one blogger. Both had shown dark tendencies, and both could have veered into deeper waters, their psychopathic side revealed.

"While your program runs, we're going to see if Oliver Sutton is working in his old studio," Juliette said. "He's another strong lead, who worked with models that he coated in wax, and this studio address is about three miles from here."

“We can’t waste any time,” Wyatt said.

And that fact was brought home to Juliette by the loud ringing of her phone. It was Ebury calling, and seeing his number come up on the screen again so soon gave her a wrench of fear.Please not another body,she thought, quickly picking up.

“Juliette,” he said, “what’s going on there? We’ve received a call from someone high up in Scotland Yard asking that we back off on the case. Do you know anything about it? What on earth is happening there?”

Juliette swallowed, hard. This was escalating and turning nastier than she’d ever thought it would.

“The ambassador got very emotional when he heard his daughter was dead. He immediately insisted that Scotland Yard be brought in and work in tandem with us. The problem is they’re not doing that. They’re refusing to work together, and they’re withholding information from us. They want to solve this case on their own.”

“And you can’t deal with that?” Ebury asked incredulously.

“We’re following two strong leads, right now,” Juliette said. “Working with the Scotland Yard detectives was just creating delays.” She sighed. “I did my best, but I think they’ve got historic problems with the FBI, and they’re using their Scotland Yard protocol as a reason not to. Saying that they’re waiting for the right permissions to come through.”

“Well, we’re not backing off on this. I’ll tell the high-level representative that the FBI will continue to be involved. But, on the hands-on side, you’re going to have to deal with this yourself. I can’t influence their decision making.”

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