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There were large black clips attached to the edges of the plastic bags which held the unstretched paintings, pushpins stuck through them to hold them on to the bulletin board alongside the crime scene photos, also pushpinned, which Kate wished they had chosen to put elsewhere—preferably anywhere that she wasn’t.
    McNally huffed his way into the room. “Sorry.” His face was flushed. “No one told me you were here.”

    Brown made the introductions.

    Kate could feel the Bronx chief looking her over, sizing her up. She knew people often assumed from her style and dress, the quality of her speech that she was a product of private-school, summer-home, Mercedes-Benz wealth, when in fact she was simply her own best invention.

    On the desk beside the lectern someone had set out a coffee urn along with the ubiquitous stack of Styrofoam cups, Cremora, a dish strewn with packets of sugar and Sweet ’n Low. There were even cookies, Oreos, on a plastic plate.

    Kate avoided looking at the crime scene photos, though they were busy imprinting on her brain via her peripheral vision.

    But the paintings drew her in. Was it the fact that she’d been spending half her days for the past six months reading everything on color, from Josef Albers’s famous Interaction of Color to interviewing Ellsworth Kelly, to poring through Mondrian’s and Van Doesburg’s writings on primary color, even flying to Germany to chat with Gerhard Richter about his color-chart paintings—or was it simply that the color in these awkward paintings was so damn off that it was riveting all by itself? Kate wasn’t sure.

    “What do you think?” McNally nibbled an Oreo.

    Kate moved closer to the still life of fruit. “Well, you could call it fauve —the French painters who experimented with color, Matisse, Derain, Dufy—but I don’t think so. Les fauves —that’s French for wild beasts—were trying to structure a painting entirely through color. But this, well, there’s nothing connective about the color. It’s bold and garish, and certainly wild, but it doesn’t add up to anything.”

    Brown leaned in. “So you think whoever painted it is an amateur?”

    “Could be. Maybe he’s what the art world calls an outsider .”

    Brown cocked his head. “Meaning?”

    “Outsider art. It’s the English equivalent of what was originally called l’art brut, which the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined in, oh, the late 1940s—it encompasses the untrained, unschooled, and the art of the insane.”

    “You tellin’ me that people care about the art made by a bunch of nut jobs?” McNally shook his head, bewildered.

    “Yes, they do,” said Kate. “Quite seriously. The French surrealists were influenced by the art of the insane and revered it. Nowadays, lots of people collect it.”

    McNally shook his head again. “Beats the hell out of me.”

    Kate plucked her reading glasses out of her bag, came in for a closer inspection, first of the still life and then the street scene. “The edges are interesting, “ she said, taking note of the almost perfect one-inch border that ran around the perimeter of both paintings. “He’s making his own sort of frame.” She regarded the loops and curls of graphite, unintelligible, basically a mass of gray scrawl. “Pencil, I think, mainly scribbles, labor-intensive ones, for sure, but scribbles.” She moved closer into the color part of the paintings. “Whoever painted these is really laying into his brush.” She pointed out an area of paint that looked scrubbed onto the canvas. “There are individual bristles that have broken off the brush and have stuck into the paint.”

    McNally flicked Oreo crumbs off his shirt and leaned toward the painting, as did Brown.

    “So he’s painting them fast and hard?” asked Brown.

    “You could say that,” said Kate.

    McNally squinted at the paintings. “That why the color is so fucked up? ’Cause he’s painting them fast?”

    “Not necessarily. A forceful,