No answer. I leaned my head toward the door. I thought I could hear someone in there moving around. I knocked again, a little harder.
Still nothing. I grimaced. I didn’t want to make a big scene and pound on the door, but I also didn’t want to walk away empty-handed. I sighed and gave a normal police knock.
The door was yanked open so suddenly that I took a defensive step back, then recovered and took stock of the man in the doorway. Above-average height, wearing worn jeans and a dark T-shirt, with light-blue eyes and a slender, unmuscled build. He was older than I’d expected, with gray scattered throughout his shoulder-length light-brown hair and lines adding texture to his face. Probably about my aunt’s age, I decided, and with an open almost-smile on his face that made him seem incredibly likable even before I’d spoken word one with him. A smell of cigarette smoke clung to him, and I could see a scattering of ash on the front of his shirt.
The almost-smile split into a true smile and he laughed. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I was listening to music on my iPod and was caught up in a little project, and then I heard the knocking on the door so I leaped up, thinking it was some kind of emergency, and then instead it’s a gorgeous woman, and I’m sitting here wondering what kind of lottery I won!” His grin was beyond infectious, and I found myself grinning as well.
“No lottery,” I replied. “Sorry. Actually, I’m with the police.” I handed him my business card. “I’m Detective Kara Gillian. I was wondering if you might have a few minutes to talk to me?”
The grin vanished, replaced by a wide-eyed-little-boy expression of awe. “Oh, wow, police! Has something happened?”
Was he really this innocent or was he one hell of an actor? “No. To be honest, this isn’t really a police matter. I’m hoping you can help me out with something.” This would get weird and uncomfortable if he’d never actually met Rhyzkahl. What little rep I had would go south pretty damn quick. “You’re Greg Cerise, the artist for the Shattered Realm comic, right?”
The smile returned, shy pride, but now with a touch of wariness. “Yeah, that’s my best work. What do you need to know?”
I shifted my notebook in my hand and gave a mild grimace. “This may take a moment to explain. Do you mind if I come in so we can talk?”
“Oh! Sure. I’m so sorry. Come on in!” He stepped back and gestured me in. He was like a puppy, all eager to please. A thick odor of nicotine surrounded me as I stepped into the office, which was so small I thought I could probably touch both walls at the same time by extending my arms. There was a small desk with a portable drawing table set upon it, with a work in progress of what looked like a mermaid fleeing a sea creature. An ashtray overflowing with butts perched precariously on the arm of a chair, and the walls had the faint yellowish stain of nicotine. Every wall was covered with more sketches and drawings, a few in color but the majority in either pencil or pen and ink. There was also nothing arcane in the room, I noted. No traces or resonance, which would be there if anything related to the arcane had ever been done in that room.
“Have a seat!” Greg said before I had a chance to examine any of the drawings on the wall closely. He picked up a stack of notebooks from a chair and dumped them onto the floor. I sat carefully as he perched on the edge of his work chair and looked at me expectantly.
I took a deep breath. This was where it was going to get weird. “Okay, this is going to sound kind of … out there,” I began. I pulled out the picture that I’d printed from the website. “Who is this?” I pointed to the drawing of the character that so resembled Rhyzkahl.
Greg went still, looking down at the drawing. I watched him closely as his animated face shuttered and withdrew, color fading in it like a dress left in a store window for too long. He gave the casual shrug that I was expecting. “It’s just a drawing. I mean, all my stuff is fictional.” He looked up at me, an expression of puzzlement on his face, but after seeing the true animation of before, I could see how this expression was a pale copy of his true emotions. He shrugged again, one shoulder twitching up on command. “It’s no one. Why?”
I touched the image lightly with my forefinger. “I don’t think this is no one.” I looked up at him with a small smile. “I think this is someone you met once.”
He swallowed visibly but gave another shrug. Each time he performed the gesture it became more and more twitchy and awkward, as if descending down a slope of unbelievability. Could he really be this ingenuous? If not, he was a fucking good actor.
“You can’t really be serious,” he said, shaking his head in a quick vibration. “It’s no one. Just something I thought of.”
I leaned forward, lowering my voice to make him work to hear me. “No, it’s not just something you thought of. I need to know when and where you met him.”