Murder as a Fine Art by John Ballem Page A

rounded the first music hut and ran across the service road. With a whooshing roar, a towering pine exploded into flame. The path was filled with running figures shouting instructions to each other. Laura hurried across the footbridge and then stopped dead in her tracks. The boat studio was on fire. Except that it wasn’t just a fire, it was a roaring, orange inferno that was literally vaporizing the dry, weathered hull. If Erika was trapped inside that holocaust she was beyond hope.
    Laura scanned the gathering crowd for a glimpse of her friend. The flames leaping skyward lit the scene as if it were high noon. With growing desperation, she darted from person to person, searching each face. But none was the one she was looking for. A gasp went up as another tree burst into crackling flames like a giant firecracker. Erika must be sleeping in her room at Lloyd Hall. After all, it was two-thirty in the morning and she had been exhausted to begin with. Clinging to the thought, Laura headed back toward the residence, running against the tide of excited people, most of them with coats or jackets hastily thrown over nightclothes, streaming toward the fire. With a wailing crescendo of sirens and urgent blatting of horns, three fire trucks turned down the service road and ground to a halt. Firefighters, bulky in their yellow fire resistant gear, jumped down and ran toward the fire, unreeling hoses as they went.
    Moments later, the police arrived, the lights of the cruiser flashing red and blue against the walls of the music huts. When Laura saw Corporal Lindstrom getting out of the passenger side, she changed direction and hurried over to the police officer. “Karen, that studiobelongs to a friend of mine — Erika Dekter, you remember her, don’t you?” The corporal nodded and Laura went on, “I can’t find her anywhere. I’m going to her room to see if she’s there.”
    â€œYou do that,” said the policewoman crisply. “And report back to me right away.”
    Frantically, Laura pounded on Erika’s door. Rattling the doorknob, she yelled at Erika to wake up, but there was no answer. Maybe she had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Heart pounding against her ribs, Laura tore down the hall and ran back with a wooden chair, the one the janitor dozed on while he waited for his afternoon shift to end. She smashed it against the door until it finally broke apart in her hands. Dropping the remnants of the chair, she called out to Erika in a despairing voice. There was no answer. By now, she wasn’t expecting one. Sleeping pills or not, no one could have slept through the unholy racket she had made.
    The boat studio had burned to the ground and the firefighters had shifted their efforts to trying to save the rest of the colony. Streams of water arced skyward as they soaked the trees on the perimeter of the fire. Fortunately, there was no wind to send the flames leaping from treetop to treetop. Laura thought of her own studio and the months of work represented by the paintings in it. But that was swept aside by the unthinkable possibility that Erika had perished in the fire. Once again, Laura scanned the crowd of onlookers in the garish light of the flames, but this time with diminished hope. She saw Corporal Lindstrom panning the crowd with her video camera.
    The Mountie wasn’t the only one taping the fire; Laura saw John Smith at the edge of the crowd squinting through the viewfinder of his camera. He wouldprobably use the footage in one of his performances. Or maybe the fire
was
his performance. The idea was not as preposterous as it first seemed.
    Laura pushed her way through the crowd and tapped a Mountie on the arm. He turned around and she saw it was Constable Peplinski. He recognized her, and she told him she had to talk to the corporal. He waved Karen over, but she had already spotted Laura and was heading toward her.
    â€œShe’s not in her room,”