Dead Sleep

Dead Sleep Greg Iles Terrifying secrets and a stunning mystery power this page-turner from the New York Times No.1 bestseller.Objects of desire… or death?When prize-winning photojournalist Jordan Glass chances upon a portrait by an unknown artist in Hong Kong, she is shocked. The face staring back at her is her missing identical twin sister.The painting is part of an exhibition entitled ‘Sleeping Women’ and Jordan realizes that the portraits are all of women who have recently disappeared from New Orleans. Electrifying a case previously paralysed by a lack of bodies, this new evidence spurs the FBI’s serial killer unit into action.Working with the FBI, Jordan becomes both hunter and hunted in search for the artist- and is forced to confront terrifying secrets about her past in a final stunning showdown. GREG ILES Dead Sleep Dedication (#ulink_295a6467-f9ce-5acf-bdc4-a58de62a7757) In memory of Silous Marty Kemp Table of Contents Cover (#ude91a724-2970-5cd7-9b34-31bf02e2b34c) Title Page (#u954f21ce-500e-5d16-b658-42ba183d8d2c) Dedication (#u1116073d-e722-5f11-b56b-0ae199c5a923) Chapter One (#u0d0f667f-7b82-5358-aad8-49fa02f878e4) Chapter Two (#u28e00b30-088f-5266-8ddd-a06d119590e9) Chapter Three (#u88b86c9c-997b-547e-a90f-aba86f41fe86) Chapter Four (#u41407688-18e1-5dd3-b6fb-9e3cfe0e5fb2) Chapter Five (#uc28d9334-9eaa-57e4-8cfb-c559083b8634) Chapter Six (#u0d601d2d-8d42-5b79-b166-d607c89a139a) Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Books By Greg Iles (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) ONE (#ulink_2b5f0755-4e4a-519a-a2d4-11cf1ccef6fc) I stopped shooting people six months ago, just after I won the Pulitzer Prize. People were always my gift, but they were wearing me down long before I won the prize. Still, I kept shooting them, in some blind quest that I didn’t even know I was on. It’s hard to admit that, but the Pulitzer was a different milestone for me than it is for most photographers. You see, my father won it twice. The first time in 1966, for a series in McComb, Mississippi. The second in 1972, for a shot on the Cambodian border. He never really got that one. The prizewinning film was pulled from his camera by American Marines on the wrong side of the Mekong River. The camera was all they found. Twenty frames of Tri-X made the sequence of events clear. Shooting his motor-drive Nikon F2 at five frames per second, my dad recorded the brutal execution of a female prisoner by a Khmer Rouge soldier, then captured the face of her executioner as the pistol was turned toward the brave but foolish man pointing the camera at him. I was twelve years old and ten thousand miles away, but that bullet struck me in the heart. Jonathan Glass was a legend long before that day, but fame is no comfort to a lonely child. I didn’t see my father nearly enough when I was young, so following in his footsteps has been one way for me to get to know him. I still carry his battle-scarred Nikon in my bag. It’s a dinosaur by today’s standards, but I won my Pulitzer with it. He’d probably joke about the sentimentality of my using his old camera, but I know what he’d say about my winning the prize: Not bad, for a girl. And then he’d hug me. God, I miss that hug. Like the embrace of a great bear, it swallowed me completely, sheltered me from the world. I haven’t felt those arms in twenty-eight years, but they’re as familiar as the smell of the sweet olive tree he planted outside my window when I turned eight. I didn’t think a tree was much of a birthday present back then, but later, after he was gone, that hypnotic fragrance drifting through my open window at night was like his spirit watching over me. It’s been a long time since I slept under that window. For most photographers, winning the Pulitzer is a triumph of validation, a momentous beginning, the point at which your telephone starts ringing with the job offers of your dreams. For me it was a stopping point. I’d already won the Capa Award twice, which is the one that matters to people who know. In 1936, Robert Capa shot the immortal photo of a Spanish soldier at the instant a fatal bullet struck him, and his name is synonymous with bravery under fire. Capa befriended my father as a young man in Europe, shortly after Capa and Cartier-Bresson and two friends founded Magnum Photos. Three years later, in 1954, Capa stepped on a land mine in what was then called French Indochina, and set a tragic precedent that my father, Sean Flynn (Errol’s reckless son), and about thirty other American photographers would follow in one way or another during the three decades of conflict known to the American public as the Vietnam War. But the public doesn’t know or care about the Capa Award. It’s the Pulitzer they know, and that’s what makes the winners marketable. After I won, new assignments poured in. I declined them all. I was thirty-nine years old, unmarried (though not without offers), and I’d passed the mental state known as “burned out” five years before I put that Pulitzer on my shelf. The reason was simple. My job, reduced to its essentials, has been to chronicle death’s grisly passage through the world. Death can be natural, but I see it most often as a manifestation of evil. And like other professionals who see this face of death—cops, soldiers, doctors, priests—war photographers age more rapidly than normal people. The extra years don’t always show, but you feel them in the deep places, in the marrow and the heart. They weigh you down in ways that few outside our small fraternity can understand. I say fraternity, because few women do this job. It’s not hard to guess why. As Dickey Chappelle, a woman who photographed combat from World War II to Vietnam, once said: This is no place for the feminine. And yet it was none of this that finally made me stop. You can walk through a corpse-littered battlefield and come upon an orphaned infant lying atop its dead mother and not feel a fraction of what you will when you lose someone you love. Death has punctuated my life with almost unbearable loss, and I hate it. Death is my mortal enemy. Hubris, perhaps, but I come by that honestly. When my father turned his camera on that murderous Khmer Rouge soldier, he must have known his life was forfeit. He shot the picture anyway. He didn’t make it out of Cambodia, but his picture did, and it went a long way toward changing the mind of America about that war. All my life I lived by that example, by my father’s unwritten code. So no one was more shocked than I that, when death crashed into my family yet again, the encounter shattered me. I limped through seven months of work, had one spasm of creativity that won me the Pulitzer, then collapsed in an airport. I was hospitalized for six days. The doctors called it post-traumatic stress disorder. I asked them if they expected to be paid for that diagnosis. My closest friends—and even my agent—told me point-blank that I had to stop working for a while. I agreed. The problem was, I didn’t know how. Put me on a beach in Tahiti, and I am framing shots in my mind, probing the eyes of waiters or passersby, looking for the life behind life. Sometimes I think I’ve actually become a camera, an instrument for recording reality, that the exquisite machines I carry when I work are but extensions of my mind and eye. For me there is no vacation. If my eyes are open, I’m working. Thankfully, a solution presented itself. Several New York editors had been after me for years to do a book. They all wanted the same one: my war photographs. Backed into a corner by my breakdown, I made a devil’s bargain. In exchange for letting an editor at Viking do an anthology of my war work, I accepted a double advance: one for that book, and one for the book of my dreams. The book of my dreams has no people in it. No faces, anyway. Not one pair of stunned or haunted eyes. Its working title is “Weather.” “Weather” was what took me to Hong Kong this week. I was there a few months ago to shoot the monsoon as it rolled over one of the most tightly packed cities in the world. I shot Victoria Harbor from the Peak and the Peak from Central, marveling at the different ways rich and poor endured rains so heavy and unrelenting that they’ve driven many a roundeye to drunkenness or worse. This time Hong Kong was only a way station to China proper, though I scheduled two days there to round out my portfolio on the city. But on the second day, my entire book project imploded. I had no warning, not one prescient moment. That’s the way the big things happen in your life. A friend from Reuters had convinced me that I had to visit the Hong Kong Museum of Art, to see some Chinese watercolors. He said the ancient Chinese painters had achieved an almost perfect purity in their images of nature. I know nothing about art, but I figured the paintings were worth a look, if only for some perspective. Boarding the venerable Star Ferry in the late afternoon, I crossed the harbor to the Kowloon side and made my way on foot to the museum. After twenty minutes inside, perspective was the last thing on my mind. The guard at the entrance was the first signpost, but I misread him completely. As I walked through the door, his lips parted slightly, and the whites of his eyes grew in an expression not unlike lust. I still cause that reaction in men on occasion, but I should have paid more attention. In Hong Kong I am kwailo, a foreign devil, and my hair is not blond, the color so prized by Chinese men. Next was the tiny Chinese matron who rented me a Walkman, headphones, and the English-language version of the museum’s audio tour. She looked up smiling to hand me the equipment; then her teeth disappeared and her face lost two shades of color. I instinctively turned to see if some thug was standing behind me, but there was only me—all five-feet-eight of me—thin and reasonably muscular but not much of a threat. When I asked what was the matter, she shook her head and busied herself beneath her counter. I felt like someone had just walked over my grave. I shook it off, put on the Walkman, and headed for the exhibition rooms with a voice like Jeremy Irons’s speaking sonorous yet precise English in my headphones. My Reuters friend was right. The watercolors floored me. Some were almost a thousand years old, and hardly faded by the passage of time. The delicately brushed images somehow communicated the smallness of human beings without alienating them from their environment. The backgrounds weren’t separated from the subjects, or perhaps there was no background; maybe that was the lesson. As I moved among them, the internal darkness that is my constant companion began to ease, the way it does when I listen to certain music. But the respite was brief. While studying one particular painting—a man poling along a river in a boat not unlike a Cajun pirogue—I noticed a Chinese woman standing to my left. Assuming she was trying to view the painting, I slid a step to my right. She didn’t move. In my peripheral vision, I saw that she was not a visitor but a uniformed cleaning woman with a feather duster. And it wasn’t the painting she was staring at as though frozen in space, but me. When I turned to face her, she blinked twice, then scurried into the dark recesses of the adjoining room. I moved on to the next watercolor, wondering why I should transfix her that way. I hadn’t spent much time on hair or makeup, but after checking my reflection in a display case, I decided that nothing about my appearance justified a stare. I walked on to the next room, this one containing works from the nineteenth century, but before I could absorb anything about them, I found myself being stared at by another blue-uniformed museum guard. I felt strangely sure that I’d been pointed out to him by the guard from the main entrance. His eyes conveyed something between fascination and fear, and when he realized that I was returning his gaze, he retreated behind the arch. Fifteen years ago, I took this sort of attention for granted. Furtive stares and strange approaches were standard fare in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. But this was post-handover Hong Kong, the twenty-first century. Thoroughly unsettled, I hurried through the next few exhibition rooms with hardly a glance at the paintings. If I got lucky with a cab, I could get back to the ferry and over to Happy Valley for some sunset shots before my plane departed for Beijing. I turned down a short corridor lined with statuary, hoping to find a shortcut back to the entrance. What I found instead was an exhibition room filled with people. Hesitating before the arched entrance, I wondered what had brought them there. The rest of the museum was virtually deserted. Were the paintings in this room that much better than the rest? Was there a social function going on? It didn’t appear so. The visitors stood silent and apart from one another, studying the paintings with eerie intensity. Posted above the arch was a Lucite plaque with both Chinese pictographs and English letters. It read: NUDE WOMEN IN REPOSE Artist Unknown When I looked back into the room, I realized it wasn’t filled with “people”—it was filled with men. Why men only? I’d stayed a week in Hong Kong on my last visit, and I hadn’t noticed a shortage of nudity, if that was what they were looking for. Every man in the room was Chinese, and every one wore a business suit. I had the impression that each had been compelled to jump up from his desk at work, run down to his car, and race over to the museum to look at these paintings. Reaching down to the Walkman on the waistband of my jeans, I fast-forwarded until I came to a description of the room before me. “Nude Women in Repose,” announced the voice in my headset. “This provocative exhibit contains seven canvases by the unknown artist responsible for the group of paintings known popularly as the ‘Sleeping Women’ series. The Sleeping Women are a mystery in the world of modern art. Nineteen paintings are known to exist, all oil on canvas, the first coming onto the market in 1999. Over the course of the nineteen paintings, a progression from vague Impressionism to startling Realism occurs, with the most recent works almost photographic in their accuracy. Though all the paintings were originally believed to depict sleeping women in the nude, this theory is now in question. The early paintings are so abstract that the question cannot be settled with certainty, but it is the later canvases that have created a sensation among Asian collectors, who believe the paintings depict women not in sleep but in death. For this reason, the curator has titled the exhibit ‘Nude Women in Repose’ rather than ‘Sleeping Women.’ The four paintings that have come onto the market in the past six months have commanded record prices. The last offering, titled simply Number Nineteen, sold to Japanese businessman Hodai Takagi for one point two million pounds sterling. The Museum is deeply indebted to Mr. Takagi for lending three canvases to the current exhibit. As for the artist, his identity remains unknown. His work is available exclusively through Christopher Wingate, LLC, of New York City, USA.” I felt a surprising amount of anxiety standing on the threshold of that roomful of men, silent Asians posed like statues before images I could not yet see. Nude women sleeping, possibly dead. I’ve seen more dead women than most coroners, many of them naked, their clothes blasted away by artillery shells, burned off by fire, or torn away by soldiers. I’ve shot hundreds of pictures of their corpses, methodically creating my own images of death. Yet the idea of the paintings in the next room disturbed me. I had created my death images to expose atrocities, to try to stop senseless slaughter. The artist behind the paintings in the next room, I sensed, had some other agenda. I took a deep breath and went in. My arrival caused a ripple among the men, like a new species of fish swimming into a school. A woman—especially a roundeye woman—clearly made them uncomfortable, as though they were ashamed of their presence in this room. I met their fugitive glances with a level gaze and walked up to the painting with the fewest men in front of it. After the soothing Chinese watercolors, it was a shock. The painting was quintessentially Western, a portrait of a nude woman in a bathtub. A roundeye woman like me, but ten years younger. Maybe thirty. Her pose—one arm hanging languidly over the edge of the tub—reminded me of the Death of Marat, which I knew only from the Masterpiece board game I’d played as a child. But the view was from a higher angle, so that her breasts and pubis were visible. Her eyes were closed, and though they communicated an undeniable peace, I couldn’t tell whether it was the peace of sleep or of death. The skin color was not quite natural, more like marble, giving me the chilling feeling that if I could reach into the painting and turn her over, I would find her back purple with pooled blood. Sensing the men close behind me edging closer, I moved to the next painting. In it, the female subject lay on a bed of brown straw spread on planks, as though on a threshing floor. Her eyes were open and had the dull sheen I had seen in too many makeshift morgues and hastily dug graves. There was no question about this one; she was supposed to look dead. That didn’t mean she was dead, but whoever had painted her knew what death looked like. Again I heard men behind me. Shuffling feet, hissing silk, irregular respiration. Were they trying to gauge my reaction to this Occidental woman in the most vulnerable state a woman can be in? Although if she was dead, she was technically invulnerable. Yet this gawking at her corpse by strangers seemed somehow a final insult, an ultimate humiliation. We cover corpses for the same reason we go behind walls to carry out our bodily functions; some human states cry out for privacy, and being dead is one of them. Respect above all is called for, not for the body, but for the person who recently departed it. Someone paid two million dollars for a painting like this one. Maybe even for this one. A man paid that, of course. A woman would have bought this painting only to destroy it. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women, anyway. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for the woman in the picture, on the chance that she was real. Then I moved on. The next painting hung beyond a small bench set against the wall. It was smaller than the others, perhaps two feet by three, with the long axis vertical. Two men stood before it, but they weren’t looking at the canvas. They gaped like clubbed mackerel as I approached, and I imagined that if I pulled down their starched white collars, I would find gills. No taller than I, they backed quickly out of my way and cleared the space before the painting. As I turned toward it, a premonitory wave of heat flashed across my neck and shoulders, and I felt the dry itch of the past rubbing against the present. This woman was naked as well. She sat in a window seat, her head and one shoulder leaned against the casement, her skin lighted by the violet glow of dawn or dusk. Her eyes were half open, but they looked more like the glass eyes of a doll than those of a living woman. Her body was thin and muscular, her hands lay in her lap, and her Victorian-style hair fell upon her shoulders like a dark veil. Though she had been sitting face-on to me from the moment I looked at the canvas, I suddenly had the terrifying sensation that she had turned to me and spoken aloud. The taste of old metal filled my mouth, and my heart ballooned in my chest. This was not a painting but a mirror. The face looking back at me from the wall was my own. The body, too, mine: my feet, hips, breasts, my shoulders and neck. But the eyes were what held me, the dead eyes—held me and then dropped me through the floor into a nightmare I had traveled ten thousand miles to escape. A harsh burst of Chinese echoed through the room, but it was gibberish to me. My throat spasmed shut, and I could not scream or even breathe. TWO (#ulink_70b1a2a9-5264-589e-8563-573428e4e1dd) Thirteen months ago, on a hot summer morning, my twin sister Jane stepped out of her town house on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans to run her daily three-mile round of the Garden District. Her two young children waited inside with the maid, first contentedly, then anxiously as their mother’s usual absence stretched beyond any they remembered. Jane’s husband Marc was working in blissful ignorance at his downtown law firm. After ninety minutes, the maid called him. Knowing you could walk one block out of the Garden District and be in a free-fire zone, Marc Lacour immediately left work and drove the streets of their neighborhood in search of his wife. He cut the Garden District into one-block grids from Jackson Avenue to Louisiana and methodically drove them a dozen times. Then he walked them. He left the Garden District and questioned every porch-sitter, shade-tree mechanic, can kicker, crack dealer, and homeless person he could find on the adjoining streets. No one had heard or seen anything of Jane. A prominent attorney, Marc immediately called the police and used his influence to mount a massive search. The police found nothing. I was in Sarajevo when Jane disappeared, shooting a series on the aftermath of the war. It took me seventy-two hours to get to New Orleans. By that time, the FBI had entered the picture and subsumed my sister’s disappearance into a much larger case, designated NOKIDS in FBI-speak, for New Orleans Kidnappings. It turned out that Jane was fifth in a rapidly growing group of missing women, all from the New Orleans area. Not one corpse had been found, so all the women were classified as victims of what the FBI called a “serial kidnapper.” This was the worst sort of euphemism. Not one relative had received a ransom note, and in the eyes of every cop I spoke to, I saw the grim unspoken truth: every one of those women was presumed dead. With no crime scene evidence, witnesses, or corpses to work with, even the Bureau’s vaunted Investigative Support Unit was stumped by the cold trail. Though women continued to disappear and still do, neither the Bureau nor the New Orleans police have come close to discovering the fate of my sister or any of the others. I should clarify something. Not once since my father vanished in Cambodia have I sensed that he was truly dead, gone from this world. Not even with the last frame of film he shot showing an executioner’s pistol pointed at his face. Miracles happen, especially in war. For this reason I’ve spent thousands of dollars over the past twenty years trying to find him, piggybacking my money with that of the relatives of Vietnam-era MIAs, giving what would have been my retirement money to scam artists and outright thieves, all in the slender hope that one lead among the hundreds will turn out to be legitimate. On some level, my decision to take the advance for my book was probably a way to be paid to hunt for my father in person, to tramp across Asia with an eye to my camera and an ear to the ground. With Jane it’s different. By the time my agency tracked me down on a CNN satellite phone in Sarajevo, something had already changed irrevocably within me. As I crossed a street once infested with snipers, a nimbus of dread welled up in my chest—not the familiar dread of a bullet with my name on it, but something much deeper. Whatever energy animates my soul simply stopped flowing as I ran, and the street vanished. I kept running blindly into the dark tunnel before me, as though it were nine years before, during the worst of it, when the snipers shot anything that moved. A CNN cameraman yanked me behind a wall, thinking I’d seen the impact of a silenced bullet on the concrete. I hadn’t, but a moment later, when the street returned, I felt as though a bullet had punched through me, taking with it something no doctor could ever put back or put right. Quantum physics describes “twinned particles,” photons of energy that, even though separated by miles, behave identically when confronted with a choice of paths. It is now thought that some unseen connection binds them, defying known physical laws, acting instantaneously without reference to the speed of light or any other limit. Jane and I were joined in this way. And from the moment that dark current of dread pulsed through my heart, I felt that my twin was dead. Twelve hours later, I got the call. Thirteen months after that—two hours ago—I walked into the museum in Hong Kong and saw her painted image, naked in death. I’m not sure what happened immediately after. The earth did not stop turning. The cesium atoms in the atomic clock at Boulder did not stop vibrating. But time in the subjective sense—the time that is me—simply ceased. I became a hole in the world. The next thing I remember is sitting in this first-class seat on a Cathay Pacific 747 bound for New York, a Pacific Rim sunset flaring in my window as the four great engines thrum, their vibration causing a steady ripple in the scotch on the tray before me. That was two whiskeys ago, and I still have another nineteen hours in the air. My eyes are dry and grainy, stinging. I am cried out. My mind gropes backward toward the museum, but there is something in the way. A shadow. I know better than to try to force the memory. I was shot once in Africa, and from the moment the bullet ripped through my shoulder till the moment I came to my senses in the Colonial Hotel and found myself being patched up by an Australian reporter whose father was a doctor, everything was blank. The missing events—a hectic jeep ride down an embattled road, the bribing of a checkpoint guard (in which I participated)—only returned to me later. They had not disappeared, but merely fallen out of sequence. So it was at the museum. But here, in the familiar environment of the plane, in the warm wake of my third scotch, things begin to return. Brief flashing images at first, then jerky sequences, like bad streaming video. I’m standing before the painting of a naked woman whose face is mine to the last detail, and my feet are rooted to the floor with the permanence of nightmares. The men crowding me from behind believe I’m the woman who modeled for the painting on the wall. They chatter incessantly and race around like ants after kerosene has been poured on their hill. They are puzzled that I am alive, angry that their fantasy of “Sleeping Women” seems to be a hoax. But I know things they don’t. I see my sister stepping out onto St. Charles Avenue, the humidity condensing on her skin even before she begins to run. Three miles is her goal, but somewhere in the junglelike Garden District, she puts a foot wrong and falls into the hole my father fell into in 1972. Now she stares back at me with vacant eyes, from a canvas as deep as a window into Hell. Having accepted her death in my bones, having mourned and buried her in my mind, this unexpected resurrection triggers a storm of emotions. But somewhere in the chemical chaos of my brain, in the storm’s dark eye, my rational mind continues to work. Whoever painted this picture has knowledge of my sister beyond the moment she vanished from the Garden District. He knows what no one else could: the story of Jane’s last hours, or minutes, or seconds. He heard her last words. He—He …? Why do I assume the painter is a man? Because he almost certainly is. I have no patience with the Naomi Wolfs of the world, but there’s no denying statistical fact. It is men who commit these obscene crimes: rape; stranger murder; and the pi?ce de r?sistance, serial murder. It’s an exclusively male pathology: the hunting, the planning, the obsessively tended rage working itself out in complex rituals of violence. A man hovers like a specter behind these strange paintings, and he has knowledge that I need. He alone in the world can give me what has eluded me for the past year. Peace. As I stare into my sister’s painted eyes, a wild hope is born in my chest. Jane looks dead in the picture. And the audio tour announcer suggested that all the women in this series are. But there must be some chance, despite my premonition in Sarajevo, that she was merely unconscious while this work was done. Drugged maybe, or playing possum, as my mother called it when we were kids. How long would it take to paint something like this? A few hours? A day? A week? A particularly loud burst of Chinese snaps the spell of the picture, waking me to the tears growing cold on my cheeks, the hand grasping my shoulder. That hand belongs to one of the bastards who came here today to ogle dead women. I have a wild urge to reach up and snatch the canvas from the wall, to cover my sister’s nakedness from these prying eyes. But if I pull down a painting worth millions of dollars, I will find myself in the custody of the Chinese police—a disagreeable circumstance at best. I run instead. I run like hell, and I don’t stop until I reach a dark room filled with documents under glass. It’s ancient Chinese poetry, hand-painted on paper as fragile as moths’ wings. The only light comes from the display cases, and they fluoresce only when I come near. My hands are shaking in the dark, and when I hug myself, I realize the rest of me is shaking too. In the blackness I see my mother, slowly drinking herself to death in Oxford, Mississippi. I see Jane’s husband and children in New Orleans, trying their best to live without her and not doing terribly well at it. I see the FBI agents I met thirteen months ago, sober men with good intentions but no idea how to help. I shot hundreds of crime scene photos when I was starting my career, but I never quite realized how important a dead body is to a murder investigation. The corpse is ground zero. Without one, investigators face a wall as blank as unexposed film. The painting back in the exhibition room is not Jane’s corpse, but it may be the closest thing anyone will ever find to it. It’s a starting point. With this realization comes another: there are other paintings like Jane’s. According to the audio tour, nineteen. Nineteen naked women posed in images of sleep or death. As far as I know, only eleven women have disappeared from New Orleans. Who are the other eight? Or are there only eleven, with some appearing in more than one painting? And what in God’s name are they doing in Hong Kong, halfway around the world? Stop! snaps a voice in my head. My father’s voice. Forget your questions! What should you do NOW? The audio tour said the paintings are sold through a U.S. dealer named Christopher something in New York. Windham? Winwood? Wingate. To be sure, I pull the Walkman off my belt and jam it into my crowded fanny pack. The movement triggers a display case light, and my eyes ache from the quick pupillary contraction. As I slide back into the shadows, the obvious comes clear: if Christopher Wingate is based in New York, that’s where the answers are. Not in this museum. In the curator’s office I will find only suspicious curiosity. I don’t need police for this, especially communist Chinese police. I need the FBI. Specifically, the Investigative Support Unit. But they’re ten thousand miles away. What would the boy geniuses of Behavioral Science want from this place? The paintings, obviously. I can’t take those with me. But the next-best thing is not impossible. In my fanny pack is a small, inexpensive point-and-shoot camera. It’s the photojournalist’s equivalent of a cop’s throwdown gun, the tool you simply can’t be without. The one day you’re sure you won’t need a camera, a world-class tragedy will explode right in front of you. Move! orders my father’s voice. While they’re still confused. Retracing my steps to the exhibition room is easy; I simply follow the babble of conversation echoing through the empty halls. The men are still milling around, talking about me, no doubt, the Sleeping Woman who isn’t sleeping and certainly isn’t dead. I feel no fear as I approach them. Somewhere between the document room and this place labeled “Nude Women in Repose,” I shoved my sister into a dark memory hole and became the woman who has covered wars on four continents—my father’s daughter. With my sudden reappearance, the Chinese draw together in excited knots. A museum guard is questioning two of them, trying to find out what happened. I walk brazenly past him and shoot two pictures of the woman in the bathtub. The flash of the little Canon sets off a blast of irate Chinese. Moving quickly through the room, I shoot two more paintings before the guard gets a hand on my arm. I turn to him and nod as though I understand, then break away toward the painting of Jane. I get off one shot before he blows his whistle for help and locks onto my arm again, this time with both hands. Sometimes you can b.s. your way out of situations like this. This is not one of those times. If I’m still standing here when Someone In Authority arrives, I’ll never get out of the museum with my film. I double the guard over with a well-placed knee and run like hell for the second time. The police whistle sounds again, though this time with a faint bleat. I skid to a stop on the waxed floor, backpedal to a fire door, and crash through to the outside, leaving a wake of alarms behind me. For the first time I’m glad for the teeming crowds of Hong Kong; even a roundeye woman can disappear in less than a minute. Three hundred yards from the museum, I hail a taxi and order him not to the Star Ferry, which someone might remember me boarding, but through the tunnel that crosses beneath the harbor. Back on the Hong Kong side, we race to my hotel. I’m staying at the Mandarin, which is too expensive for me but has great sentimental value. As a child, I received several letters from my father on its stationery. Inside my room, I throw my clothes into my suitcase, pack my cameras into their aluminum flight cases, and take a different cab to the new airport. I intend to be out of Chinese airspace before some enterprising cop figures out that, while they may not have my name, they have a perfect likeness of my face on their museum wall. They could have flyers at the airport and the hotels in less than an hour. I’m not sure why they would—I’ve committed no crime, other than stealing a Walkman—but I’ve been arrested for less before, and in the paranoid world of the Hong Kong Chinese, my behavior around multimillion-dollar paintings would make me an excellent candidate for “temporary detention.” Hong Kong International Airport is a babel of Asian languages and rushing travelers. I have a reservation on an Air China flight to Beijing, but that plane doesn’t leave for three hours. The departure screens show a Cathay Pacific flight leaving for New York in thirty-five minutes, with a two-hour layover at Narita in Tokyo. Presenting my worn passport at the Cathay counter, I let the ticket agent gut me for full fare on a first-class ticket. The money would buy a decent used car in the States, but after what happened in the museum, I can’t sit shoulder-to-shoulder with some computer salesman from Raleigh for twenty hours. That potential reality brings another to mind, and I ask the female agent if she can seat me next to a woman. On this day of all days, I cannot deal with being hit on, and twenty hours gives a guy a long time to strategize. Last year, on a flight from Seoul to Los Angeles, some drunk jerk actually asked if I wanted to go to the rest room with him and join the Mile High Club. I told him I was already a member, which was true. I’d joined nine years earlier, with my fianc?, in the cargo hold of a DC-3 somewhere over Namibia. Three days later, he was captured with some SWAPO guerrillas and beaten to death, which put me in an even more exclusive club: the Unofficial Widows. Now, at forty, I’m still single and still a member. The Cathay Pacific agent smiles knowingly and obliges my request. Which puts me where I am now: three scotches down and my short-term memory back in gear. The alcohol is serving several functions, one of them being to damp the embers of grief stirring at the bottom of my soul. But nineteen hours is a long time to hide from yourself. I have a supply of Xanax in my fanny pack, for the nights when the open wound of my sister’s unknown fate throbs too acutely for sleep. It’s throbbing now, and it’s not even full dark yet. Before I can second-guess myself, I pop three pills with a swallow of scotch and take the Airfone out of my armrest. There’s really only one useful thing I can do from the plane. After a few swipes of my Visa and some haggling with directory assistance, I’m speaking to the operator at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, who transfers me to the offices of the Investigative Support Unit. The ISU has more impressive digs than it once did, but Daniel Baxter, the chief of the unit, likes the bunker atmosphere of the old days, the era before Hollywood overexposure turned his unit into a myth that draws eager young college grads by the thousands. Baxter must be fifty now, but he’s a lean and hungry fifty, with a combat soldier’s eyes. That’s what I thought when I first saw him. A guy from the ranks who found himself an officer by default, the result of a battlefield promotion. But no one will ever question that promotion. His record of success is legendary in a war where victories are few and the defeats almost unbearable. To wit, my sister and her ten sisters in purgatory. Baxter’s unit scored a big zero on that one. But the grim fact is, when a certain kind of shit hits the fan, there’s no one else to call. “Baxter,” says a sharp baritone voice. “This is Jordan Glass,” I tell him, trying to hide the slur in my voice and not doing well at all. “Do you remember me?” “You’re hard to forget, Ms. Glass.” I take a quick swallow of scotch. “A little over an hour ago, I saw my sister in Hong Kong.” There’s a brief silence. “Are you drinking, Ms. Glass?” “Absolutely. But I know what I saw.” “You saw your sister.” “In Hong Kong. And now I’m in a 747, bound for New York.” “You’re saying you saw your sister alive?” “No.” “I’m not sure I understand.” I give Baxter as lucid a summary as I can manage of my experiences at the museum, then wait for his response. I expect some expression of astonishment—maybe not a Gomer Pyle “Shazam,” but something—but I should have known better. “Did you recognize any other New Orleans victims?” he asks. “No. But I never studied the photos of those beyond number six.” “You’re one hundred percent sure it was your sister’s face in that painting?” “Are you kidding? It’s my face, Baxter. My body, naked to the world.” “Okay … I believe you.” “Have you ever heard of these paintings?” “No. I’ll talk to our fine arts people in D.C. as soon as we get off. And we’ll start taking this Christopher Wingate’s life apart. When will you be in New York?” “Nineteen hours. Around five p.m. New York time.” “Try to get some sleep on the plane. I’m going to book you a flight here from JFK. American Airlines. It’ll be an e-ticket, just show your license or passport. I’ll drive up to Washington and meet you at the Hoover Building. I have to be up there tomorrow anyway, and that’s more convenient for you than Quantico. In fact, I’ll have an agent pick you up at Reagan Airport. Do you have any problem with that?” “Yes. I think they should have left it Washington National.” “Ms. Glass, are you all right?” “I’m great.” “You sound upset.” “Nothing pharmacological therapy won’t cure. Mixed with a little of Scotland’s finest.” A hysterical laugh escapes my lips. “I need to take the edge off. It’s been a tough day.” “I understand. But leave a little edge in place, okay? I need you sharp and thinking.” “It’s nice to be needed.” I terminate the connection and replace the Airfone in the armrest. You didn’t need me thirteen months ago, I say silently. But that was then. Now things have changed. Now they’ll want me around until they get a handle on the significance of the paintings. Then they’ll cut me off again. Exclusion is the worst fate for a journalist, and a living hell for a victim’s family. Better not to think about that right now. Better to sleep. I’ve practically lived in the air for twenty years, and sleeping on planes was effortless until Jane disappeared. Now it takes a little help from my friends. As the chemical fog descends over my eyes, a last cogent spark flashes in my brain, and I take out the phone again. I’m in no state to hassle with directory assistance, so I plug into an entirely different connection. Ron Epstein works Page Six at the New York Post; he’s a human who’s who of the city. Like Daniel Baxter, he’s addicted to his work, which means he’s probably there now, despite the early hour in New York. When the Post operator puts me through to his section, he answers. “Ron? It’s Jordan Glass.” “Jordan! Where are you?” “On my way to New York.” He responds with a giggle. “I thought you were off in the hinterlands, taking pictures of clouds or something.” “I was.” “You must need something. You never call just to kibitz.” “Christopher Wingate. Ever heard of him?” “Naturellement. Very chic, very cool. He’s made Fifteenth Street the envy of SoHo. The old dealers kiss his ass now, and the more they do, the more he treats them like shit. Everyone wants Wingate to handle their stuff, but he’s very picky.” “What about the Sleeping Women?” A coo of admiration. “Aren’t you in the circle. Not many American collectors know about them yet.” “I want to see him. Wingate, I mean.” “To photograph him?” “I just want to talk to him.” “I’d say you have to stand in line, but he might just be intrigued enough to talk to you.” “Can you get me his phone number?” “If I can’t, no one can. But it may take a while. I know he’s not listed. He lives above his gallery, but I don’t think the gallery’s listed either. It’s that exclusive. This guy will skip a sale just because he doesn’t like the buyer. Are you somewhere I can call you?” “No. Can I call you tomorrow? I’m going to sleep for a while.” “I’ll have it for you then.” “Thanks, Ron. I owe you dinner at Lut?ce.” “Let me choose the place, honey, and you’re on. I hope you’re not sleeping alone. No one I know needs love more than you.” I glance around the first-class cabin at a rumpled platoon of businessmen. “No, I’m not alone.” “Good. Tomorrow, then.” The fog is descending so fast now that I can barely get the Airfone back in the armrest. Thank God for drugs. I couldn’t bear to be alert right now. When I wake, the museum will seem like a bad dream. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a door. A door to a world I have no choice but to re-enter. Am I ready for that? “Sure,” I say aloud. “I was born ready.” But deep down, beneath the brittle old bravado, I know it’s a lie. THREE (#ulink_17e8f67d-4af3-5278-aee5-ad238806e0b4) Two hours before the Cathay Pacific jet landed in New York, I surfaced from my drug-induced dive, stumbled to the rest room and back, and asked the flight attendant for a hot towel. Then I called Ron Epstein and got Christopher Wingate’s number. It took an hour of steady calling to get the art dealer on the phone. I had worried that I might have to mention the Sleeping Women to get Wingate’s attention, but Epstein’s hunch proved correct: Wingate was intrigued enough by my modest celebrity to see me at his gallery after hours without explanation. I couldn’t tell much about him from his voice, which had an affected accent I couldn’t place. He did mention my book-in-progress, so my guess is that he hopes I’m looking for a dealer to sell my photographs to the fine art market. Meeting Wingate alone is a risk, but my work has always involved calculations of risk. Photographing wars is like commercial fishing off Alaska: you know going out that you might not come back. But on an Alaskan boat, it’s you against the ocean and the weather. In a war zone there are people trying to kill you. Going to see Christopher Wingate could be like that. I have to assume he’s heard about the scene at the museum by now. He won’t have my name, but he will know that the woman who caused the disturbance in Hong Kong looked exactly like one of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that one of the Sleeping Women looks like the photographer Jordan Glass? He knows my reputation, but it’s unlikely that he’s seen a photo of me. I haven’t lived in New York for twelve years, and my work wasn’t nearly so well known then. The real danger depends on how involved Wingate is with the painter of the Sleeping Women. Does he know that the subjects in the paintings are real? That they’re missing and probably dead? If so, then he’s willing to turn a blind eye to murder in order to earn a fortune in commissions. How dangerous does that make him? I won’t know until I talk to him. But one thing is certain: If I go on to Washington now and meet the FBI, they’ll never let me close to him. Every piece of information I get will be secondhand, just like it was after Jane disappeared. After I clear customs at JFK, I roll my bags to the American Airlines gate, collect my e-ticket to Washington, and check my bags on that flight. Then I walk out of the airport and hire a cab. I don’t like letting my cameras go to Washington without me, but later tonight, when I tell Daniel Baxter I got sick and missed my plane, he’ll be more likely to believe me. Before going to Lower Manhattan, I have the cabbie take me to a pawnshop on 98th Street. There, for $50, I buy a can of fortified Mace to carry in my pocket. I’d prefer a gun, but I don’t want to risk it. The NYPD takes weapons violations very seriously. When the cab pulls up to Wingate’s Fifteenth Street gallery in the failing light of dusk, I find a simple three-story brownstone like a thousand others in the city, with a bar on one side and a video rental store on the other. The tony atmosphere of the Chelsea art district stays in another part of Chelsea, I guess. After paying the cabbie to wait, I get out and study the doorway from the curb. There’s a buzzer by the front door, which looks normal enough but probably hides all sorts of security devices. I slip on sunglasses as I approach, in case there’s a videocam. There is. I push the buzzer and wait. “Who are you?” asks the stateless voice I recognize from my earlier call. “Jordan Glass.” “Just a moment.” The buzzer burps, the lock disengages, and I pull the door open. The ground floor of the gallery is half illuminated by fluorescent light from the second floor, spilling down an iron staircase. With my sunglasses, it’s hard to see, but the decor seems spare for a trendy New York art gallery. The floor is bleached hardwood, the walls white. The paintings look modern for the most part, or what my idea of modern is, anyway. A lot of stark color arranged in asymmetrical patterns, but it means little to me. I’ve been called an artist—often during attacks by purist photojournalists—but that doesn’t qualify me as a judge of art. I’m not even sure I know it when I see it. “Do you like that Lucian Freud?” asks the voice I heard on the speaker outside. There’s a man standing on the landing, where the iron staircase turns back on itself. Fixed squarely in a shaft of light, he looks as though he simply materialized there. He is wiry and balding, but he compensates for the baldness with a shadow of trimmed black stubble. In his black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket, he looks like the midlevel mafia thugs I saw in Moscow a few years back: slightly underfed but fiercely predatory, particularly around the eyes and mouth. “Not really,” I confess, with a quick look at the painting hanging nearest me. “Should I?” “Should doesn’t come into it. Though it would have a better chance of impressing you if you took off those sunglasses.” “I wouldn’t like it any better. I’m not here to see this.” “What are you here to see?” “You, if you’re Christopher Wingate.” He beckons me forward with his hand, then turns and starts back up the stairs. I follow. “You always wear sunglasses in the evening?” he asks over his shoulder. “Something wrong with that?” “It’s just so Julia Roberts.” “That’ll be the one thing we have in common, then.” Wingate chuckles. He’s barefoot, and his pale dirty heels seem to float up the steps. He passes the second floor, which houses sculpture, and continues up to the third. This is clearly where he lives. It has a Danish feel, all spare lines and Scandinavian wood, and it smells of fresh coffee. Standing in the middle of the room is a large, unsealed wooden crate with packing material spilling out of its open end. There’s a claw hammer lying atop the crate, a scattering of nails around it. Wingate brushes a proprietary hand against the wood as he passes the crate, which comes to his shoulder. “What’s in the box?” “A painting. Please, sit down.” I gesture at the crate. “You work up here? This looks like your apartment.” “It’s a special painting. It may be the last time I see it in person. I want to enjoy it while I can. Would you like an espresso? Cappuccino? I was about to have one.” “Cappuccino.” “Good.” He walks to a blue enameled machine on a counter behind him and starts to fill a small mug. While his back is to me, I move to the open crate. There’s a heavy gold frame inside. Peeking between the box and the frame, I can’t see much, but it’s enough: the upper torso and head of a nude woman, her eyes open and fixed in a strangely peaceful stare. Wingate is dispensing the cup as I back away. “So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asks the wall. “I’ve heard good things about you. They say you’re a very selective seller.” “I don’t sell to fools.” He sprays out some steamed milk with a flourish. “Unless they know they’re fools. That’s different. If someone comes to me and says, ‘My friend, I know nothing about art, but I wish to begin collecting. Would you advise me?’ This person I will help.” Another hissing jet of steamed milk. “But these pretentious WASP millionaires make me puke. They took art criticism at Yale, or their wife majored in Renaissance masters at Vassar. They know so much, what do they need me for? For cachet, yes? So fuck them. My cachet is not for sale.” “Not to them, anyway.” He turns with a grin and offers me a steaming cup. “I love your accent. You’re from South Carolina?” “Not even close,” I reply, stepping forward to take the mug. “But the South. Where?” “The Magnolia State.” He looks perplexed. “Louisiana?” “That’s the Sportsman’s Paradise. I’m from the home of William Faulkner and Elvis Presley.” “Georgia?” I’m definitely in New York. “Mississippi, Mr. Wingate.” “Learn something every day, right? Call me Christopher, okay?” “Okay.” After Ron Epstein’s characterization of Wingate, I half expected the man to make some crack about Mississippi being the home of the lynching. “Call me Jordan.” “I’m a huge fan of your work,” he says with apparent sincerity. “You have a pitiless eye.” “Is that a compliment?” “Of course. You don’t shy away from horror. Or absurdity. But there’s compassion there, too. That’s why people connect with your work. I think there would be quite a demand, if you were inclined to market it as fine art. Not much photography really qualifies, but yours … no doubt about it.” “You’re not living up to your advance billing. I heard you were a son of a bitch.” He grins again and sips his cappuccino. The pure blackness of his eyes is startling. “I am, to most people. But with artists I like, I’m a shameless flatterer.” I want to ask him about the painting in the crate, but something tells me to wait. “It’s been said that a photograph can be journalism or art, but not both.” “Such crap. The gifted always break the rules. Look at Martin Parr’s book. He turned photojournalism upside down with The Last Resort. Look at Nachtwey’s stuff. That’s art, no question. You’re every bit as good. Better in some ways.” Now I know he’s bullshitting me. James Nachtwey is the pre-eminent war photographer at Magnum; he’s won the Capa five times. “Such as?” “Commercial ways.” A glint of mischief in the black eyes. “You’re a star, Jordan.” “Am I?” “People look at your photos—stark, terrible, unflinching—and they think, ‘A woman was standing here looking at this, recording it. With a woman’s sensitivity. A woman has stood this, so I must stand this.’ It floors them. And it changes their perspective. That’s what art does.” I’ve heard all this before, and while largely true, it bugs me. It smacks of Not bad, for a girl. “And then there’s you,” Wingate goes on. “Look at you. Hardly any makeup, and still beautiful at—what?—forty?” “Forty.” “You’re marketable. If you’ll suffer through a few interviews and an opening, I can make you a star. An icon for women.” “You said I’m already a star.” He barely skips a beat. “In your field, sure. But what’s that? I’m talking pop culture. Look at Eve Arnold. You know who she is. But if I walk downstairs and ask a hundred people on the street, not one will know. Dickey Chappelle wanted to be a household name. That was her dream. She schlepped all over the world, from Iwo Jima to Saigon, but she never became what she most wanted to be—a star.” “I haven’t schlepped all over the world to become a star, whatever that means.” A feral gleam in the eyes betrays a new level of interest. “No, I believe that. So, why? Why do you traipse from pillar to post, cataloguing atrocities that would shock Goya?” “You haven’t earned the answer to that question.” He claps his hands together. “But I already know it! It’s your father, isn’t it? Dear old daddy. Jonathan Glass, the legend of Vietnam. The shooter’s shooter.” “Maybe you are a son of a bitch after all.” The smile widens. “I can’t help it, as the scorpion said to the frog. It’s my nature.” Some of the biggest bastards I ever met were charismatic, and Wingate is no exception. My gaze settles on the crate between us. “And the way he died,” Wingate exults, “shooting a Pulitzer-winning roll of film. That’s mythic. Then his daughter follows in his footsteps? It’s a legitimate phenomenon, no hype required. We could do a double show. Talk about free publicity. Who controls the rights to your father’s images?” “I don’t believe my father died in Cambodia,” I say in a flat voice. Wingate looks as though I just told him I don’t believe Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. “You don’t?” “No.” “Okay … so … that’s even better. We could—” “And I’m not interested in exploiting his work for money.” He shakes his head, his hands imploring. “You’re looking at it all wrong—” “What painting is so wonderful that you have to keep it this close to you?” I interrupt, pointing at the packing crate with my free hand. Momentarily off-balance, he answers without thinking. “It’s a painting by an anonymous artist. His work fascinates me.” “You like looking at pictures of dead women?” Wingate freezes, his eyes locked onto mine. “Are you going to answer my question?” He gives a philosophical shrug. “I’m not here to answer your questions. But I’ll answer that one. No one knows if the subjects are dead or not.” “Do you know the identity of the artist?” Wingate sips his cappuccino, then sets his mug on the counter behind him. I slip my hand into my pocket to feel the cold, reassuring metal of the Mace can. “Are you asking as a journalist?” he asks. “Or as a collector?” “All I can afford to collect is experiences and passport stamps. I figured you could tell that with one look at my shoes.” He shrugs again. Shrugs are a major part of this guy’s vocabulary. “One never knows who has money these days.” “I want to meet the artist.” “Impossible.” “May I see the painting?” He purses his lips. “I don’t see why not, since you already have.” He walks around to the open side of the crate, braces his feet against the bottom, and reaches in for the frame. “Could you give me a hand?” I hesitate, thinking about the claw hammer, but he doesn’t look like he wants to bludgeon me to death. Having been in situations where people wanted to do just that, I trust my instincts more than some people might. “Hold the other side while I pull,” he says. I set my cappuccino on the floor, then take hold of the other side of the crate while he slides out a padded metal frame that holds the gilt frame inside it. “There,” he says. “You can see it now.” I’m torn between wanting to step around the crate and wanting to stay right where I am. But I have to look. I might recognize one of the victims who was taken before Jane. The instant I see the woman’s face, I know she’s a stranger to me. But I could easily have known her. She looks like ten thousand women in New Orleans, a mixture of French blood with some fraction of African, resulting in a degree of natural beauty rarely seen elsewhere in America. But this woman is not in her natural state. Her skin should be caf? au lait; here it’s the color of bone china. And her eyes are fully open and fixed. Of course, the eyes in any painting are fixed; it’s the talent of the artist that brings life to them. But in these eyes there is no life. Not even a hint of it. “Sleeping Woman Number Twenty,” says Wingate. “Do you like it better than the paintings downstairs?” Only now do I see the rest of the painting. The artist has posed his subject against a wall, knees drawn up to her chest as though she’s sitting. But she is not sitting. She is merely leaning there, her head lolling on her marbled shoulder, while around her swirls a storm of color. Brightly printed curtains, a blue carpet, a shaft of light from an unseen window. Even the wall she leans on is the product of thousands of tiny strokes of different colors. Only the woman is presented with startling realism. She could have been cut from a Rembrandt and set in this whirlwind of color. “I don’t like it. But I feel … I feel whoever painted it is very talented.” “Enormously.” Genuine excitement lights Wingate’s black eyes. “He’s capturing something that no one else working today is even close to. All the arrogant kids that come in here, trying to be edgy, painting with blood and making sculpture with gun parts … they’re a fucking joke. This is the edge. You’re looking over it right now.” “Is he an important artist?” “We won’t know that for fifty years.” “What do you call this style?” Wingate sighs thoughtfully. “Hard to say. He’s not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is dead. Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?” “The what?” “Nabis. It means ‘prophets.’ Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard?” “What I know about art wouldn’t fill a postcard.” “Don’t blame yourself. That’s the American educational system. They simply don’t teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university.” “I didn’t go to college.” “How refreshing. And why would you? American institutions worship technology. Technology and money.” “Are you American?” A bemused smile. “What do you think?” “I can’t tell. Where are you from?” “I usually lie when someone asks that question. I don’t want to insult your intelligence, so we’ll skip the biography.” “Hiding a dark secret?” “A little mystery keeps me interesting. Collectors like to buy from interesting dealers. People think I’m a big bad wolf. They think I have mob connections, criminal clients all over.” “Do you?” “I’m a businessman. But doing business in New York, that kind of reputation doesn’t hurt.” “Do you have prints of other Sleeping Women I can see?” “There are no prints. I guarantee that to the purchaser.” “What about photographs? You must have photos.” He shakes his head. “No photos. No copies of any kind.” “Why?” “Rarity is the rarest commodity.” “How long have you had this one?” Wingate looks down at the canvas, then at me from the corner of his eye. “Not long.” “How long will you have it?” “It ships tomorrow. I have a standing bid from Takagi on anything by this artist. 1.5 million. But I have other plans for this one.” He takes hold of the metal frame and motions for me to brace the crate while he pushes the painting back inside. To keep him talking, I help. “For a series of about eight paintings,” Wingate says, “he could have been one of the Nabis. But he changed again. The women became more and more real, their bodies less alive, their surroundings more so. Now he paints like one of the old masters. His technique is unbelievable.” “Do you really not know if they’re alive or dead?” “Give me a break,” he grunts, straining to apply adequate force without damaging the frame. “They’re models. If some horny Japanese wants to think they’re dead and pay millions for them, that’s great. I’m not complaining.” “Do you really believe that?” He doesn’t look at me. “What I believe doesn’t matter. What matters is what I know for sure, which is nothing.” If Wingate doesn’t know the women are real, he’s about to find out. As he straightens up and wipes his brow, I turn squarely to him and take off my sunglasses. “What do you think now?” His facial muscles hardly move, but he’s freaked, all right. There’s a lot more white showing in his eyes now. “I think maybe you’re running some kind of scam on me.” “Why?” “Because I sold a picture of you. You’re one of them. One of the Sleeping Women.” He must not have heard about what happened in Hong Kong. Could the curator there have been afraid to risk losing his exhibit? “No,” I say softly. “That was my sister.” “But the face … it was the same.” “We’re twins. Identical twins.” He shakes his head in amazement. “You understand now?” “I think you know more than I do about all this. Is your sister okay?” I can’t tell if he’s sincere or not. “I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say no. She disappeared thirteen months ago. When did you sell the painting of her?” “Maybe a year ago.” “To a Japanese industrialist?” “Sure. Takagi. He outbid everybody.” “There were other bidders for that particular painting?” “Sure. Always. But I’m not about to give you their names.” “Look, I want you to understand something. I don’t give a damn about the police or the law. All I care about is my sister. Anything you know that can help me find her, I’ll pay for.” “I don’t know anything. Your sister’s been gone a year, and you think she’s still alive?” “No. I think she’s dead. I think all the women in these paintings are dead. And so do you. But I can’t move on with my life until I know. I’ve got to find out what happened to my sister. I owe her that.” Wingate looks at the crate. “Hey, I can sympathize. But I can’t help you, okay? I really don’t know anything.” “How is that possible? You’re the exclusive dealer for this artist.” “Sure. But I’ve never met the guy.” “But you know he’s a man?” “I’m not positive, to tell you the truth. I’ve never seen him. Everything goes through the mail. Notes left in the gallery, money in train station lockers, like that.” “I don’t see a woman painting these pictures. Do you?” Wingate cocks one eyebrow. “I’ve met some pretty strange women in this town. I could tell you some stories, man. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.” “You get the paintings through the mail?” “Sometimes. Other times they’re left downstairs, in the gallery. It’s like spy novels—what do they call that? A blind drop?” “What legitimate reason could there be for that kind of arrangement?” “Well, I thought it might be the Helga syndrome.” “The what?” “The Helga syndrome. You know Andrew Wyeth, surely?” “Of course.” “While everyone thought all he could do was rural American realism, Wyeth was secretly painting this woman from a neighboring farm. In the nude. Helga. Wyeth kept the paintings secret, and they were only revealed years later. The first Sleeping Woman I got was simply left here. It wasn’t one of the early ones. It was from his Nabi period. As soon as I saw it, I recognized the talent. I thought it might be by an established artist, one who didn’t want it known that he was experimenting in that way. Not until it was successful, at least.” “How do you pay him? You can’t leave millions in train station lockers. Do you wire the money to a bank account somewhere?” A languid expression comes over Wingate’s features. “Look, I sympathize with you. But I don’t see how this part of my business is your business, okay? If what you say is true, the police will be asking me all this soon enough. Maybe you’d better talk to them. And I better talk to my lawyer.” “Forget I asked that, okay? I’m not trying to hurt you. All I care about is my sister. All these women disappeared from New Orleans. Not one has been found, alive or dead. Now suddenly I discover these paintings in Hong Kong. Everyone assumes the women are dead. But what if they’re not? I have to find the man who painted these pictures.” He shrugs. “Like I said, we’ll just have to wait for the police to sort it out.” A buzz of alarm begins in the back of my brain. Christopher Wingate does not look like a man who would welcome the attention of police. Yet he is stalling me by claiming he wants to wait until they become involved. It’s time to get out of here. “Who knows about all this?” he asks suddenly. “Who else have you told?” I’m wishing my hand was in my pocket, wrapped around the Mace can, but he’s watching me closely, and the hammer is within his reach. “A few people.” “Such as?” “The FBI.” Wingate bites his bottom lip like a man weighing options. Then a half-smile appears. “Is that supposed to scare me?” He picks up the claw hammer, and I jump back. He laughs at my skittishness, then grabs a handful of nails, puts a few in his mouth, and begins hammering the side panel back onto the crate, like a man taking maximum precautions to protect his treasure. “Every cloud has a silver lining, right?” The nails between his lips make him answer out of one side of his mouth. “The FBI starts investigating these paintings in a murder case, they become worldwide news. Like the guy in Spain who murdered women and posed them like Salvador Dali paintings. That means money, lady.” “You are a bastard, aren’t you?” “It’s not illegal, is it? Yes, I’m going to make a lot more money on this painting than I thought. Maybe double the bid.” “What’s your commission?” I ask, stepping out of range of the hammer and sliding my hand into my pocket. “That’s my business.” “What’s a standard commission?” “Fifty percent.” “So this one painting could land you a million dollars.” “You’re quick at math. You should work for me.” The crate is nearly sealed. When he’s finished, he’ll tell me to leave, then get on the phone and start promoting his newly appreciated asset. “Why are you selling these paintings in Asia rather than America? Were you trying to delay the connection to the missing women?” He laughs again. “It just happened that way. A Frenchman from the Cayman Islands bought the first five, but I found out he’d spent most of his life in Vietnam. Then a Japanese collector stepped in. A Malaysian. Also a Chinese. There’s something in these images that appeals to the Eastern sensibility.” “And it’s not very subtle, is it? Dead naked white women?” Wingate turns to me long enough to wrinkle his lips. “That’s crude, and it’s an oversimplification. “Where is the painting in the crate going?” “An auction house in Tokyo.” “Why go to that trouble, Christopher? Why not auction them here in New York? At Sotheby’s or wherever?” Pure smugness now. “It’s like Brian Epstein with the Beatles. You’re number one in England, but at some point you have to take them to America. Maybe the time has come.” Wingate’s arrogance finally triggers something deep within me, a well of outrage I try to keep capped, but which sometimes explodes despite my best efforts or interests. “I was lying about the FBI,” I say in a cold voice. “I haven’t told them about the paintings yet. I wanted to talk to you first. But since you’re being such a prick, and you haven’t told me anything helpful, I am going to tell them. Do you know what will happen then? This canvas you’re drooling over will become evidence in a serial murder case, and it’ll be confiscated. And you won’t make jackshit off it, because it won’t be sellable. Not for a very long time, Christopher. It’s like assets being stuck in probate, only worse.” Wingate straightens up with the hammer and turns to face me. He still has a couple of nails in his mouth; I’d like to shove them down his throat. “What do you want to know?” he asks. “I want a name. I want to know who paints these pictures.” He hefts the hammer and drops its head into the palm of his other hand with a slap. “If you haven’t told the FBI yet, you’re not in a very good position to make that kind of demand.” “One phone call.” Now he smiles. “A phone call requires access to a phone. Do you think you can get to that one?” He points the hammer at a cordless phone on the counter behind him. I could probably Mace him and get to it, but that’s not really the point. The point is that he’s willing to hurt me—maybe to kill me—to protect his little art monopoly. Which means he probably knows a lot more than he’s saying about the origin of the Sleeping Women. “Well?” he says, almost playfully. I back toward the iron staircase, finding the spray nozzle with my finger as I go. “Where are you going, Jordan?” He takes three quick steps toward me, the hammer held waist high. As he does, a new scenario hits me with chilling force. What if the painter isn’t the killer at all? What if Wingate masterminded the whole thing to earn millions in commissions? What if he kills the women and merely commissions the paintings from some starving artist? His dark eyes flash as he moves forward, and the violence in them unnerves me. In one movement I whip out the Mace can and blast his face from six feet, the powerful stream filling his eyes, nose, and mouth with enough chemical irritant to set his mucous membranes on fire. He screams like a child, drops the hammer, and starts clawing his eyes. I almost want to steer him to the sink, so pitiful are his cries, but I’m not that crazy. As I whirl toward the stairs, my heart beating wildly, a giant hand swats me back into the room and a fusillade of distant cannon hammers my eardrums. When I open my eyes, I see gray smoke and a screaming man. Wingate is shrieking so loudly that I can’t think. You don’t hear men scream like that except in war zones, when they’re lying on the ground holding their guts or genitals in a bowl some medic gave them. Now Wingate is running around the room like a blind rat in a sinking ship; he might just go out a window. I scrabble to my knees and crawl toward the staircase, but the smoke only gets thicker. The lower floors of the gallery are on fire. “Is there a fire escape?” I shout, but he doesn’t hear me. He’s still trying to claw his eyes out. To my left I see a faint blue glow, a streetlight. That means a window. I crawl quickly to it and raise my head above the sill, hoping for a fire escape. I find a thirty-foot drop instead. Crabbing back toward the stairs, I stop halfway and wait for Wingate to rush by. A couple of seconds later he does, and I tackle him. “SHUT UP!” I shout. “IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” “My eyes!” he wails. “I’m blind!” “YOU’RE NOT BLIND! I MACED YOU! STAY HERE!” Standing erect in the thickening smoke, I rush to the sink and fill a coffee decanter with water. Then I stagger back to him and flush out his eyes. He screams some more, but the water seems to do him some good. “More,” he coughs. “No time. We have to get out. Where’s the fire escape?” “Bed … bedroom.” “Where is it?” “Ba—Back wall … door.” “Get up!” He doesn’t move until I yank his arm hard enough to tear a ligament. Then he rolls over and starts crawling beside me. As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire’s voice. I’ve heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There’s a reason human beings will jump ten floors onto concrete to escape being burned alive. That roar is part of it. I go through the bedroom door first. The smoke here is not as bad. There’s only one window. As I crawl toward it, Wingate grabs my ankle. “Wait!” he rasps. “The painting!” “Screw the painting!” “I can’t leave it! My sprinklers aren’t working!” The pressure of his hand on my ankle is gone. When I turn back, I see no sign of him. The fool is willing to die for money. I’ve seen people die for worse reasons, but not many. I stand in the door and try to see through the smoke, but it’s useless. “Forget the goddamn painting!” I shout into the gray wall. “Help me!” he calls back. “I can’t move the crate alone!” “Leave it!” No reply. After a few seconds, I hear something whacking the crate. Probably the hammer. Then a creaking sound like tearing wood. “It’s stuck!” he yells. Then a series of racking coughs cuts through the roar of the advancing fire. “I need a knife! I can cut the canvas loose!” I don’t much care if Wingate wants to commit suicide, but it suddenly strikes me that the painting in that frame is worth more than money. Women’s lives may depend on it. Dropping to my knees, I take a deep breath and crawl toward the coughing. My head soon bumps something soft. It’s Wingate, gagging as he tries to draw oxygen from the smoke. The flames have reached the top of the stairs, and in their orange glow I see the painting, half out of the crate but stuck against the side panel Wingate only partially removed. Unzipping my fanny pack, I take out my Canon, pop off three shots, then zip it back up and grab Wingate’s shoulder. “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DON’T MOVE!” His face is gray, his eyes nearly swollen shut. I grab his legs and try to drag him to the bedroom, but the exertion makes me dizzy, and for an instant my eyes go black. I’m near to fainting, and fainting here would mean death. Dropping his feet, I rush to the window, flip the catch, and shove it upward. The outside air hits my face like a bucketful of cold water, filling my lungs with rich oxygen and clearing my head. I have a momentary fantasy of going back for Wingate, but survival instinct overrides that impulse. Below me is the iron framework of a fire escape. It’s the classic New York model; one floor down, a latched ladder awaits only my weight to send it to the pavement below. But when I crawl down to the platform and pull the latch, the ladder stays where it is. A wave of smoke billows from the window behind me. I pull down on a rung with all my strength, but nothing moves. I lived in New York long enough to know how to work one of these things, and this one isn’t functioning. It’s fifteen feet to the cracked cement of the alley below, my best target a space between some garbage cans and a steam grate. A distant siren echoes up the chasm, but I don’t think the fire department will start their rescue work in this alley. I’ve got to get down, and there’s only one way to do it. Crawling over the railing, I lower myself until I’m hanging by my hands from the edge of the platform. I’m five feet eight, which shortens the drop to about ten feet. No great shakes for a paratrooper, but I don’t happen to be one. I did drop from a helicopter once in North Carolina, photographing an Army training mission. It felt like fifty feet, though it was supposedly twelve. What the hell. A broken ankle is nothing compared with Wingate’s fate. I open my hands and drop through the dark. My heels strike a glancing blow on the pavement and fly out from under me, leaving my right buttock and wrist to absorb the main force of the impact. I yell in pain, but the exhilaration of escape is a powerful anesthetic. Rolling to my left, I get to my feet and look back up at the platform. The window I crawled through moments ago is spouting fire. Jesus. My next instinct is to look down the alley, and what I see there sends a cold ripple along my flesh. There’s a man standing at the far end, watching me. I see him only in silhouette, because all the light is behind him. He looks big, though. Big enough to really mess me up. As I stare, he moves toward me, first uncertainly, then with a determined gait. He does not look like a fireman. My hand goes to my pocket, but the Mace is not there. I lost it upstairs. All I have is a camera, which is less than useless in this situation. I whirl and run toward the other end of the alley, toward the banshee wail of sirens. FOUR (#ulink_bb60c512-71f3-5ce6-91ab-34231724b21b) Careening out of the mouth of the alley, I come face-to-face with a spectacle I covered dozens of times early in my career. The classic fire scene: engines with red lights flashing and hoses spraying; squad cars and EMS vehicles arriving; cops yelling; a crowd of spectators, the eternal crowd, spilling out of the bar and the video store, gaping, drinking, and shouting into cell phones. Most of them poured out of the bar after hearing “an explosion,” and the smell of liquor spices the air. The police are trying to herd them back behind a taped perimeter, to protect them from falling brick and flying glass, but they’re slow to move. I walk right past the biggest cop and point my camera at the fire. “Hey!” he yells. “Get back behind this tape!” “The Post,” I tell him, holding up my camera. “Let me see your card.” “I don’t have it. I was having a drink in the bar with some friends. That’s why all I have is this crappy point-and-shoot. Give me a break, man, I’m the first one here. I can scoop everybody.” As the cop deliberates, I turn back to the mouth of the alley, forty meters away, but no one comes running out of it. The corner wall blurs for a moment, though, the vertical line of brick seeming to wrinkle in the dark. Was that him? Is he trying to figure a way to get to me even now? A deep crack rumbles from the bowels of Wingate’s building, and masonry cascades into the street. The crowd gives its obligatory gasp. “Come on, man! I’m missing the show!” The cop jerks his head toward the building, and I’m past him in a flash, moving along the perimeter of the crowd, shooting as I go. No one seems to notice that I’m shooting the crowd and not the fire. Every now and then I point the camera up at the burning building, but I don’t waste any exposures on it. The expressions on the faces are all the same: primitive fascination bordering on glee. A couple of female faces show empathy, a sense that this destruction is a tragedy, but with no shrieking mothers with infants leaping from windows, no teenagers trying to climb down burning bedsheets, the mood is more like a party. If the guy in the alley didn’t set this fire, the person who did is probably in this crowd. Arsonists love to watch their fires burn, they almost have to do it. But what are the odds that this blaze was set by a firebug? Twenty-four hours after I discover a link between the Sleeping Women and the New Orleans victims, the only human connection to the artist is burned alive? The timing is too perfect. This fire was set to silence Christopher Wingate. And the man who did it could be standing within yards of me right now. I may already have his face on film. From the reading I did after Jane was taken, I learned that serial killers often return to the scenes of their crimes, to revel in their success, to relive their dreadful acts, even to masturbate where they listened to their victims’ pleas. Killing Wingate would be nothing like killing the women in the paintings; it would be a utilitarian crime, an act of survival. But the murderer might well wait to be sure he accomplished his goal. And who knows what twisted history the two men might have shared? What did Wingate say to me? You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen. As I turn back from the burning building, a furtive movement registers in my peripheral vision. Wide eyes dropping below the back edge of the crowd, off to my right. People are standing five deep at the tape now, and I can’t see the eyes anymore. But as I watch, a sock cap begins to move along the back of the crowd, coming in my direction. Throwing up my camera arm, I pop off a shot over the heads of the crowd. The head disappears, then reappears still closer. I squeeze the shutter release again, but it won’t depress, and then I feel the vibration of the rewind motor in my hand; the crowd noise prevented my hearing it. I’m out of film. The sock cap moves forward now, pushing slowly toward me through the crowd. I’m tempted to wait for a good look at his face, but what if he’s carrying a gun? Close enough to see is close enough to shoot, and I don’t want to die here. “Jordan Glass, Noted War Photographer, Shot Dead on Fifteenth Street in Chelsea.” That headline has the ironic ring of truth, and I’m not waiting for it to be borne out by events. Glancing around, I rush up to the fire captain, who’s standing by the one of the engines, talking to a cop. “Captain!” He gives me an annoyed look. “Jane Adams, from the Post. I was shooting the crowd back there, and I passed a guy who smelled like gasoline. When I said something about it, he started following me through the crowd. He was wearing a sock cap.” The fireman’s eyes go wide. “Where?” I turn and point back to the spot I left moments ago. There, for an instant, I see a pale bearded face and blazing eyes beneath the sock cap. It vanishes so quickly, I wonder if it was there at all. “There! Did you see him?” The fire captain races toward the tape, followed by the cop who was standing beside him. “What was that?” asks another cop who suddenly appears at my side. “I smelled gas on a guy over there. They went to check it out.” “No shit? Good work. You with the Times?” “The Post. I just hope they get him.” And what do I tell them if they do? “Yeah. This is one fucked-up crime scene. He could be the guy, though.” The cop is young and Italian, with a five-o’clock shadow that looks more like midnight. “What do you mean?” “They just found a guy in a car across the street. Dead as a hammer.” “What?” I whirl and try to see, but the crowd obscures my view. “How did he die?” “Somebody cut his throat. You believe that? Wearing a suit and tie. Looks like he hasn’t been dead an hour. Something strange going on here.” “Who was he?” “No wallet. Like a slaughterhouse in that car.” The fire captain is already pushing back toward us, the cop in tow. “See anything?” the Italian cop calls to them. The other cop shakes his head. “Crowd’s too big. Guy could be two feet away, we wouldn’t know except by the smell.” “I’ll make a pass,” says the Italian, tipping his cap to me as he walks toward the tape. The guy could be two feet away. And there isn’t any gasoline smell. He could kill me before I know he’s there. It’s time to go. But how? My cab is long gone, and walking isn’t an option. Neither is the subway. As I ponder my options, a yellow taxi pulls to the end of the block and disgorges a kid with two cameras hanging from his neck. The official press. Knowing he’ll ask for a receipt, I start running, and I’m at full sprint before he has it in his hand. “Taxi!” I yell. “Don’t let him go!” For some reason—maybe because he’s seen my camera—the photographer holds the cab. “Thanks!” I tell him, jumping into the backseat. “Hey, are you with a paper?” “No.” I thump the plastic partition. “JFK! Move it!” “Wait. Don’t I know you?” “Go!” I shout at the back of the cabbie’s head. “Hey, aren’t you—” With a screech of rubber, the cab is rolling toward the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. My flight lands at Reagan National at 10:15 p.m., and when I deplane, there’s a man in a suit waiting for me at the gate. He’s holding a white cardboard sign that says “J. GLASS,” but he doesn’t look like a limo driver. He looks like a buffed-up accountant. “I’m Jordan Glass.” “Special Agent Sims,” he says with a frown. “You’re late. Follow me.” He sets off down the concourse at a rapid clip and walks right past the down escalator marked “Baggage and Ground Transportation.” “I have some bags down there,” I call after him. “My cameras. They were on the earlier flight, so they’re probably in storage.” “We have your camera cases, Ms. Glass. The airline lost your suitcase.” Great. Agent Sims leads me through a door marked “Airport Personnel Only,” and a blast of cold air hits my face. It’s fall in Washington too, but unlike New York, the humidity here adds a taste of home to the air. Home as in Mississippi. My present residence is in San Francisco, but no place I’ve ever lived has replaced the fecund, subtropical garden of creeks, cotton fields, oak, and pine forests where I grew up. The concrete is slick with rain, reflecting the bright lights of the terminal and the dimmer blue ones of the runway. Sims helps me onto a baggage truck and signals its jump-suited driver, who takes off across the airfield. My aluminum camera cases are stacked in luggage that is well behind us. “I thought we were going into the city,” I shout over the engine noise. “To the Hoover Building.” “The chief had to get back to Quantico,” Sims yells back. “That’s where the meeting is now.” “How are we getting there?” “On that.” As he points into the darkness, I see the sleek lines of a Bell 260 helicopter on skids. The baggage truck squeals to a stop. Agent Sims loads my cases into the chopper, then returns for me. He’s a tall man, and the Bell is cramped quarters for him. Still, he doesn’t look unhappy. Most of his fellow agents probably make the twenty-mile drive to Quantico in a Ford Taurus. In less than a minute we are lifting into the night sky over the capital, the Pentagon receding behind us as we rotor southward over the lights of Alexandria, roughly parallel to I-95. In less than ten we’re descending over the Quantico Marine base, arrowing down to the FBI Academy helipad. There’s an agent waiting to handle my baggage, but Sims leads me straight into the maze of the Academy building. After a short elevator ride and a walk along a darkened hall, I’m escorted into an empty room, sterile and white, like some convention hotel meeting space. “Wait here,” says Sims. The door shuts, then locks from the outside. Do they think I’m going to prowl the halls, looking for something to steal? If someone doesn’t show in the next two minutes I might just sack out on the table. The last thing I want to do is sit down; my behind feels like a massive hematoma. Despite my exhaustion, I’m still nervy from the fire and the knowledge that Wingate is dead. The investigation will be severely handicapped without him. One thing is sure, though. It’s not going to be like last year. Nobody’s shutting me out this time. The doorknob clicks. Then the door opens and two men walk in. The first is Daniel Baxter, looking scarcely changed from thirteen months ago when I first met him. He’s dark-haired and compact, about five-ten, and corded with muscle. His eyes are brown and compassionate but steady as gunsights. The man behind him is taller—over six feet—and at least ten years older, with silver hair, an expensive suit, and a bluff Yalie look. But his grayish-blue eyes, hooded by flesh, suggest a sinister George Plimpton. Baxter doesn’t move to shake my hand, and he speaks as he takes his seat. “Ms. Glass, this is Doctor Arthur Lenz. He’s a forensic psychiatrist who consults for the Bureau.” Lenz extends his hand, but I only nod in return. Shaking hands with men is always awkward for me, so I don’t do it. There’s no way to equalize the size difference, and I don’t like them to feel they have an edge. The men I know well, I hug. The rest can make do. “Please sit down,” says Baxter. “No, thanks.” “I suppose you have an explanation for missing the plane I booked for you?” “Well—” “Before you go any further, let me advise you that Christopher Wingate has been under Bureau surveillance since you called me from the airplane.” I wasn’t sure whether I was going to admit being at the fire. Now there’s no way to deny it. “You had people outside his gallery?” Baxter nods, his face coloring with anger. “We’ve got some nice shots of you entering the building about forty minutes before it went up.” He opens a file labeled “NOKIDS” and slides a photo across the table. There I am, in low-res digital splendor. “I knew Wingate probably had information about my sister.” “Did he?” “Yes and no.” Baxter’s anger boils over at last. “What the hell did you think you were going to accomplish in there?” “I did accomplish something in there! And it’s a good thing I did, because he would have been dead by the time you guys decided to question him.” This sets them back a little. “And if you had people outside the gallery,” I push on, “why didn’t they bust in there and try to save us?” “We had one agent at the scene, Ms. Glass, doing surveillance from his car. The fire started on the first floor, and it was explosive in nature. An incendiary device made of gasoline and liquid soap.” “Homemade napalm.” I know it well from the “little wars” that don’t make the evening news. “Yes. The sprinkler system was disabled prior to the device being detonated, the fire alarm as well. We’ve since determined that the fire escape ladders were also wired in the up position. All inoperative.” “You think you’re telling me something? I had to jump to save myself. Your guy couldn’t do anything to help?” “Our guy did do something. He died there.” A wave of heat tells me my face is red. Baxter’s eyes are merciless. “Special Agent Fred Coates, twenty-eight years old, married with three kids. When the bomb went off, he called the fire department. He got out of his car and shot pictures of the building and the first people on the scene, in case the perp stuck around. Then he got back into his car and called the New York field office on his cell phone. He was talking to his Special Agent in Charge when somebody reached through the window and slit his throat. The SAC heard him coughing up blood for twenty seconds. Then nothing. The killer stole his credentials and camera. He missed one flash memory card that had fallen between the console and Agent Coates’s seat. That’s where we got the shot of you. We lost his pictures of the crowd.” “Jesus. I’m sorry.” Baxter spears me with an accusing look. “You think that helps anything? I told you to come straight here.” “Don’t try to put this on me! I didn’t put that guy there, okay? You did. Whoever killed him would have set that fire whether I was there or not. And I do have pictures of the crowd.” Both men lean forward, their mouths open. “Where?” asks Dr. Lenz. “We’ll talk about that in a minute. I want to clarify something right up front. This isn’t going to be a one-way conversation.” “Do you realize how important every minute is?” Baxter asks. “By withholding that film—” “My sister’s been missing for over a year, okay? I think she can wait another twenty minutes.” “You don’t have all the facts.” “And that’s exactly what I want.” Baxter shows Lenz his exasperation. “Could someone have killed Coates for his wallet and camera?” I ask. “Could his murder be unrelated to the fire?” “Why leave the cell phone behind?” Baxter counters. “And the car? His keys were found in the ignition.” “What are the odds that a garden-variety arsonist would murder someone watching a fire?” “Million to one against. Ms. Glass, that firebomb was planted to do exactly what it did. Kill Wingate and destroy his records. You’re lucky you didn’t go up with the rest.” “It was Wingate who almost killed me. He could have saved himself, but he tried to save the stupid painting, and like a fool I tried to save him.” “What painting?” asks Lenz. “Sleeping Woman Number Twenty. It was the only one of the series he had in the place, and he killed himself trying to save it.” “I wonder why,” Lenz says softly. “Surely it would have been insured.” “The insurance wouldn’t have been enough.” “Why not?” “When I told Wingate I was going to the FBI, that the women in the pictures were almost certainly the victims from New Orleans, he was ecstatic. He said the new canvas would probably sell for double the standing bid on it, and that was ?1.5 million sterling.” “Did he mention the bidder’s name?” “Takagi.” “What did the painting look like?” Lenz asks. “Like the ones you saw in Hong Kong?” “Yes and no. I don’t know anything about art, but this one was more realistic than the ones I saw. Almost photographically realistic.” “The woman appeared to be dead?” “Absolutely.” Baxter reaches into the file, removes a photograph, and pushes it across the table at me. It’s a head shot of a young dark-haired woman, a candid shot, probably taken by a family member. It’s well off horizontal, which makes me think it was taken by a child. But that’s not what sends a shiver through me. “That’s her. Damn it. Who is she?” “Last known victim,” Baxter replies. “How long ago was she taken?” “Four and a half weeks.” “What was the interval between her and the one before her?” “Six weeks.” “And before that?” “Fifty-four days. Seven and a half weeks.” This decreasing time span bears out my reading, as well. One theory says that as serial offenders get a taste for their work, their confidence grows, and they try to fulfill their fantasies more and more frequently. Another speculates that they begin to “decompensate,” that the neuroses driving them begin to fracture their minds, pushing them toward capture or even death, and the path they choose is accelerated murder. “So you figure he’s due for another soon.” The two men share a look I cannot interpret. Then the psychiatrist gives a slight nod, and Baxter turns to me. “Ms. Glass, approximately one hour ago, a young Caucasian woman disappeared from the parking lot of a New Orleans grocery store.” I close my eyes against the fearful impact of this statement. Jane has another sister in the black hole of her current existence. “You think it was him?” Lenz answers first. “Almost surely.” “Where was she taken from?” “A suburb of New Orleans, actually. Metairie.” He actually got the pronunciation right: Met-a-ree. He’s picked it up from a year and a half of working the case. “What store in Metairie?” “It’s called Dorignac’s. On Veterans Boulevard.” This time he missed it. “Dorn-yaks,” I correct him. “I used to shop there all the time. It’s a family-owned store, like the old Schwegmann chain.” Baxter makes a note. “The victim left her house a few minutes before the store closed—eight-fifty p.m. central time—to get some andouille sausage. She was making dip for a birthday party at her job tomorrow. She worked in a dental office, as a receptionist. By nine-fifteen, her husband started to worry. He tried her car phone and got no answer. He knew the store was closed, so he got the kids out of bed and drove down to see if his wife had a dead battery.” “He found her empty car with the door open?” Baxter gives a somber nod. This happened to two victims before Jane. “It sounds like him.” “Yes. But it could be a couple of other things. This woman could have been seeing a guy on the side. She meets him at the store to talk something over, maybe even for a quickie in the car. Suddenly, she decides to split for good.” “Leaving her kids behind?” “It happens.” Baxter’s voice is freighted with experience. “But talking to the detective, this doesn’t sound like that type of situation. The other alternative is conventional rape. A guy on the prowl with a van and a rape kit, looking for a target of opportunity. He sees her going to her car alone and snatches her.” “Has anybody like that been operating in the area over the past few weeks?” “No.” “Did any other victims shop at Dorignac’s? Jane must have gone there sometimes.” “Several shopped there occasionally. The store stocks some regional foods other stores don’t. The Jefferson Parish detectives are grilling the staff right now, and our New Orleans field office is already taking their lives apart. With help from the Quantico computers. It’s a full-court press, but if it’s like the others … none of that will come to anything.” I’m about to speak, when shock steals my breath. “Wait a minute. By what you’ve told me, the man who took the woman from Dorignac’s couldn’t have killed Wingate.” Baxter nods slowly. “Nine-one-one in New York got the call about the Wingate fire at seven fifty-one p.m. eastern time. The Dorignac’s victim disappeared from Metairie between eight fifty-five p.m. and nine-fifteen central time. That’s a maximum difference of two hours and twenty-four minutes.” “So there’s no way the same person could have done both. Not even with a Learjet at his disposal.” “There’s one way,” says Baxter. “The incendiary device used to ignite the gallery had a timer on it. If it was set long enough in advance, the same person could have gotten back to New Orleans in time to take the woman from Dorignac’s.” “But it wasn’t,” I think aloud. “He wasn’t.” “How do you know?” “Because I saw him.” “What?” As quickly as I can, I describe the drama of the man from the alley, shooting the blind photo over the crowd, and sending the fireman and cop after him. “Where’s your film?” asks Baxter, his eyes burning with excitement. “Not here, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you positive Wingate’s murder was related to my sister’s case?” “Virtually certain,” says Lenz. “So you’re saying there’s more than one person behind the disappearances.” “I’m not saying it. The evidence is. Two UNSUBs, not one.” UNSUB is FBI-speak for Unknown Subject. “Two killers operating as a team?” “It happens,” says Baxter. “But teams usually work side by side. Two ex-cons in a van, snatching and torturing women, that kind of thing. What I’m postulating would be something far more sophisticated.” “Have you ever seen anything like that before? People cooperating over a long distance to facilitate serial murder or kidnapping?” “Only in child pornography,” says Baxter, “and that’s a different thing.” “It’s unprecedented in the literature,” says Dr. Lenz. “Which does nothing to rule out the possibility. Harvesting women’s skins was unknown until Ed Gein was caught doing it in the fifties. Then Tom Harris used it in a book and made it part of the national consciousness. In our business, you proceed from a very simple given: everything imaginable is possible, and may well be happening as we ponder it.” “How would it work?” I ask. “How do you see it?” “Division of labor,” says Lenz. “The killer’s in New Orleans, the painter in New York.” “But Wingate was killed in New York.” “Different motive. That was self-preservation.” “I had the same thought up there. So the New Orleans guy kidnaps the women. How does the New York guy do the paintings? He works from photographs? Or he flies to New Orleans to paint corpses?” “If that scenario is the answer,” says Baxter, “I pray to God he flies. We can take backbearings from airline computers and work out a list of potential suspects.” “Could it really be that easy?” “It just might be. It’s been a long eighteen months, Ms. Glass. Nobody knows that better than you. We’re due for a break.” I nod hopefully, but inside I know better. “If Wingate was killed to silence him, how do you think it happened? The logic of it?” Baxter leans back and steeples his fingers. “I think Wingate himself told the UNSUB in New York about the Hong Kong incident. Wingate’s phone records show a call from the curator of the Hong Kong exhibit to his gallery within an hour of your making the disturbance in Hong Kong.” “Wingate knew about Hong Kong while I was talking to him?” “Undoubtedly. Though I doubt he knew it was you who caused the disturbance.” “If he did, he was a hell of an actor.” “Did he try to get information from you?” asks Lenz. “Not really.” A hot flash brings sweat to my face. “What if he was setting me up for the killer and got caught in his own trap?” “Quite possible,” says Baxter. “If Wingate somehow knew it was you in Hong Kong, then he knew your sister was in one of the paintings. Maybe he knew everything about the crimes. He calls the UNSUB and tells him you’re coming to the gallery, but he doesn’t want any violence there. He also wants to know who you’ve talked to before you die. Wingate thinks you’re going to be murdered after you leave his place, but the UNSUB has a better idea. He sees his chance to take you both out.” “That’s it,” I murmur. “Jesus. Wingate ensured his own death.” “Almost certainly,” says Lenz. “And Wingate could have been the key to this whole case. Goddamn it.” “I’m not sure he knew that much.” “You believe what he told you?” “To a point. I don’t think he knew the killer’s name. He said he wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman.” “What?” both men ask in unison. “He said he’d never seen the artist’s face. It was all done with blind drops or something.” “He used that term?” asks Baxter. “Blind drops?” “He said he got it from spy movies.” I quickly summarize Wingate’s explanation of how he received the first painting, and the subsequent drops of cash in train station lockers. “I suppose it could have happened that way,” Baxter concedes. “But from what I’ve got on Wingate so far, he was no font of truth.” “What do you have on him?” “For one thing, his name wasn’t Christopher Wingate. It was Zjelko Krnich. He was born in Brooklyn in 1956, to Yugoslavian immigrants. Ethnic Serbs.” “You’re kidding.” “Krnich’s father abandoned his wife and kids when Zjelko was seven. The boy scrapped in the streets, then moved on to small-time drug dealing, then pimping. He hopped a freighter to Europe when he was twenty and kicked around there for a few years, selling grass and coke to feed himself. He hung out in resort areas, and his drug business put him in contact with some trendy people. He fell in with a Parisian woman who dealt in paintings, some genuine, others not. He picked up the trade from her. She gave him his Anglo name. After a couple of years, they fell out over money she claimed he stole. Krnich suddenly reappeared in New York, legally changed his name to Wingate, and started working at a small gallery in Manhattan. Twenty years later, he’s one of the hottest dealers in the world.” “He was hot, all right. About three hundred and fifty degrees when I last saw him.” “Residential fires burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Glass.” Baxter is not up for humor tonight, not even the gallows variety. His eyes are flint hard; his patience has come to an end. “I want the film you shot tonight.” “Once I give you that, you’re going to cut me out.” “That’s not true,” says Lenz. “You’re a relative of a victim.” “Which counts for zero, in my experience. You weren’t around last year, Doctor. Back then it was like pulling teeth to get substantive information out of this guy.” “I can assure you that won’t be the case this time,” Lenz says smoothly. Baxter starts to speak, but the psychiatrist cuts him off with a wave of his hand. Arthur Lenz obviously pulls a lot of weight in the ISU. “Ms. Glass, I have a proposal for you. One I think will interest you.” “I’m listening.” “Fate has handed us a unique opportunity. Your appearance in Hong Kong caused a disturbance not because of the connection between the paintings and the kidnappings; the people in the gallery knew nothing about that. They were upset because you looked exactly like a woman in one of the paintings.” “So?” “Imagine the reaction you might cause in the killer if you came face-to-face with him.” “I may have done that tonight, right?” Lenz shakes his head. “I’m far from convinced that the man who attacked you tonight is the man who painted this remarkable series.” “Go on.” “Forensic art analysis has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Not only is there X-ray analysis, spectrography, infrared, and all the rest. There may be fingerprints preserved in the oil paint itself. We may find hairs or skin flakes. Now that we know about the paintings, I believe they will lead us in short order to a suspect, or perhaps a group of them. Style analysis alone could produce a list of likely candidates. And once we have those suspects, Ms. Glass, you are the weapon I would most like to use against them.” Lenz wasn’t kidding before. They do need me. They cooked all this up long before I got here. “How would you feel about that?” asks the psychiatrist. “Posing as a special agent at suspect interviews? Casually walking into a room while Daniel and I observe suspects?” “She’d kill to do it,” says Baxter. “I know that much about her.” Lenz fires a harsh look at him. “Ms. Glass?” “I’ll do it.” “What did I tell you?” says Baxter. “On one condition,” I add. “Shit,” mutters Baxter. “Here it comes.” “What condition?” asks Lenz. “I’m in the loop from now till the day you get the guy. I want access to everything.” Baxter rolls his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘everything’?” “I want to know everything you know. You have my word that I won’t reveal anything you tell me. But I can’t be excluded like last year. That almost killed me.” I expect Baxter to argue, but he just looks at the table and says, “Done. Where’s your film?” “I dropped it in a mailbox at JFK.” “A U.S. Postal Service box?” “Yes.” “Do you remember which one?” “It was near the American Airlines gates. It’s addressed to my house in San Francisco. I’ll give you the address. I bought the stamps and envelope near a newsstand. It was close to the mailbox as well.” “We’ll get it. We can develop it at the lab right here.” “I figured you guys had mastered mail theft.” Baxter stifles an obscene reply and takes out a cell phone. “One other thing,” I add. “I shot three photos of Sleeping Woman Number Twenty before I escaped the building. It was in bad light, but I bracketed the exposures. I think they’ll come out.” With a look of grudging admiration, Baxter dials a number and tells someone to find out who the postmaster general is and get him out of bed. When he hangs up, I say, “I want digital copies of those pictures e-mailed to the New Orleans field office and a set printed for me. I’ll pick them up in the morning.” “You’re going to New Orleans?” asks Lenz. “That’s right.” “It’s too late to get a flight tonight.” “Then I expect you guys to get me a plane. I only came here at your request. I need to tell my sister’s husband what’s happened, and I want to tell him face-to-face. My mother, too. Before they hear about it some other way.” “They won’t hear anything,” says Baxter. “Why not?” “What’s happened, really? You upset a few art lovers in Hong Kong. Nothing that would hit the papers.” “What about the fire in New York? Your dead agent?” “Wingate was reputed to have mob ties. FBI surveillance would be expected. One reporter has already speculated that Wingate torched the place for the insurance and killed himself in the process.” “Are you saying you intend to keep this investigation secret?” “As far as possible.” “But you must be trying to gather all the paintings, right? For forensic analysis? Won’t that get out?” “Maybe yes, maybe no. Look, Arthur is going to New Orleans in the morning, to speak to some art dealers there. Why don’t you fly down with him then?” “I’d be happy to fly down tonight,” Lenz says, “if Ms. Glass feels such urgency. Can the plane be made ready?” Baxter considers this. “I suppose. But Ms. Glass, please urge your brother-in-law to be discreet. And as for telling your mother … perhaps you should wait a bit on that.” “Why?” “We’ve had some contact with her in the past year. She’s not in the best shape.” “She never was.” “She’s drinking heavily. I don’t think we could rely upon her discretion.” “It’s her daughter, Mr. Baxter. She deserves to know what’s going on.” “But what do you really have to tell her? Nothing encouraging. Don’t you think it might be better to wait?” “I’ll make that decision.” “Fine,” he says wearily. “But your mother and brother-in-law are the limit of the circle. I know you worked for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans years ago. I’m sure you have friends down there. If you’re going to be effective in our investigation, no one can know you’re in town. No drinks with old friends, no human interest story about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer back on her old beat. We’ll be glad to put you up in a hotel.” “I’ll probably stay with my brother-in-law. I haven’t seen my sister’s kids in a long time.” “All right. But you agree about the isolation? Until we have suspects and you’ve confronted them, you talk to nobody who knows you, and you stay out of sight.” “Agreed. But I want a full update on the plane. That’s our deal, right?” Baxter sighs and looks at Lenz as if the psychiatrist has named his own poison. “Arthur can handle that.” Dr. Lenz stands and rubs his hands together, and I notice again how tall he is. “Why don’t we get some coffee and doughnuts?” he says. “There’s no in-flight service.” “Just a minute, Arthur,” Baxter says. He looks at me, his eyes glacier cold. “Ms. Glass, I want you to listen to me. Nothing about this case fits known parameters. Our New Orleans UNSUB is not some low-self-image maintenance man with a gimp leg and a collection of mutilated Barbie dolls. We’re dealing with at least one highly organized personality. A man who has kidnapped and probably killed twelve women without a trace. You may be on his radar. We don’t know. We do know you’re about to enter his territory. Be very careful, Ms. Glass. Don’t let your mind wander for a moment. Or you could join your sister a lot sooner than God ever intended.” Despite the melodramatic tone, Baxter’s warning gives me pause. This man does not speak lightly of danger. “Do you think I need protection?” “I’m inclined to say yes. I’ll make a final decision on that before you land in New Orleans. Just remember: secrecy is the best protection.” “I hear you.” He stands and gives me a curt nod. “I appreciate your willingness to help us.” “You knew I would. It’s personal for me.” Baxter reaches into the NOKIDS file and tosses out a photo of a brown-haired man in his late twenties, an All-American boy smiling like it’s his first job interview. Special Agent Fred Coates, no doubt. It’s hard to picture him with his throat cut, spitting blood into a cell phone. “It’s personal for us too,” says Baxter. He speaks softly, but behind his eyes burns a volcanic fury. Daniel Baxter has tracked and caged some of the deadliest monsters of our time. Until tonight, the one that took my sister was merely one among others still at large. But now Special Agent Fred Coates lies on a cold morgue slab somewhere. FBI blood has been spilled. And the situation has most definitely changed. FIVE (#ulink_6e41773b-f85c-5cf1-be43-7916dea2fd6d) The FBI Learjet hurtles into the Virginia sky at three a.m., after a long wait for mechanical checks, refueling, and a fresh flight crew. I should have waited for morning, but I couldn’t. I learned unflappable patience during twenty years of globetrotting and thousands of hours behind my camera, but Jane’s disappearance robbed me of that. I can no longer bear waiting. If I’m standing still, I have too much time to think. Motion is my salvation. The interior of the jet is strangely comforting to me. I’ve done a fair amount of corporate work in my career, mostly shooting glossy annual reports, and corporate-jet travel is one of the perks. Some of my purist colleagues have criticized me for this, but when all is said and done, they have to worry about paying their bills, and I don’t. I grew up poor; I can’t afford to be a snob. The interior of this Lear is configured for work. Two seats face each other over a collapsible desktop, and Dr. Lenz has chosen these for us. He seems accustomed to the cramped quarters of the cabin, despite his heavy frame. I imagine he once shuttled between murder scenes the way I shuttled between wars. Lenz looks at least sixty, and his face has begun to sag with a look of permanent weariness that I recognize from certain men I know—men who have seen too much and run out of emotional energy to deal with the burdens they already carry, much less those of the future. He looks, in short, like a man who has surrendered. I don’t judge him for it. I’m twenty years younger, and I’ve come near to cracking myself. “Ms. Glass,” he says, “we have a little over two hours together. I’d like to spend that time as profitably as we can.” “I agree.” “Interviewing you—particularly since you’re an identical twin—is almost like being able to interview your sister before the fact. I’d like to ask you some questions, some of them very personal.” “I’ll answer what I think is relevant.” He blinks once, slowly, like an owl. “I hope you’ll try to answer them all. By withholding information, you may prevent my learning something which could advance our efforts to find the killer.” “You’ve been using the word ‘killer’ since I arrived. You believe all the women are dead?” His eyes don’t waver. “I do. Daniel holds out some hope, but I do not. Does that bother you?” “No. I feel the same way. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t imagine where they could possibly be. Eleven women—maybe twelve now—all held prisoner somewhere for up to eighteen months? Without one escaping? I can’t see it. And the women in the later paintings look dead to me.” “And you have seen much death.” “Yes. I do have one question, though. Are you aware of the phone call I received eight months ago?” “The one in the middle of the night? That you thought might be from your sister?” “Yes. The Bureau traced it to a train station in Thailand.” Lenz grants me a smile of condolence. “I’m familiar with the incident. It’s my opinion that the guess you made the following morning was correct. That it was someone you’d met during your efforts to locate your father, someone from an MIA family.” “I just thought maybe … me finding the paintings in Asia—” “We’re certainly looking into it. Rest assured. But I’d like to move on now, if we could.” “What do you want to know?” “I understand you weren’t that close to your sister as an adult, so I’d like you to tell me how you grew up. What shaped Jane’s personality. And yours.” It’s times like now I wish I smoked. “Okay. You know who my father was, right?” “Jonathan Glass, the renowned war photographer.” “Yes. And there was only one war in Mississippi. The one for civil rights. He won his first Pulitzer for that. Then he went off to the other wars, which meant he was almost never home.” “How did the family react to that?” “I handled it better than my sister or mother did. I understood why he went, even as a child. Why would you hang around the Mississippi backwoods if you could be roaming the world, going the places in his pictures?” “You wanted to travel to war zones as a child?” “Dad shot all kinds of pictures in those places. I didn’t see any of his war stuff until I was old enough to go down to the public library and read Look and Life for myself. Mom wouldn’t keep those shots in the house.” “Why did your mother marry a man who would never be home?” “She didn’t know that when she married him. He was just a big handsome Scots-English guy who looked like he could handle anything that came along. And he could, pretty much. He could survive in the jungle with nothing but a pocketknife. What he couldn’t survive was married life in Mississippi. A nine-to-five job. That was hell for him. “He tried to do right by her, to keep her with him as his career took off. He even moved her to New York. She lasted until she got pregnant. During her eighth month, he went on assignment to Kenya. She went down to Grand Central Station with six dollars in her purse and rode a train all the way to Memphis. Then the bus from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If she hadn’t been pregnant when she left, Dad probably never would have come back home. But he did. Not that often, but when he did, it was paradise for me. There were some glorious summers.” “What about Jane?” “Not so much for her. We were twins, but emotionally we were different from early on. Some of it was just bad luck.” “How so?” “Jane was mauled by a dog when she was four. It really tore up her arm.” I close my eyes against that memory, a vicious attack I watched from forty yards away. By the time my mother reached her, the damage had been done. “She had to go through rabies shots, the whole thing. It made her fearful for the rest of her life.” “Did your mother dress the two of you identically, all that?” “She tried. My father always resisted it when he was home, so I did too. He wanted us to be individuals. That’s the photojournalist ethos in a nutshell. Rugged individualism. He taught me that, and a lot more.” “Photography?” “Not so much that. He taught me to hunt and to fish. A little about the stars, trees, wild plants you could eat. He told me stories about all the far-off places he’d visited. Strange customs, things you’d never read in National Geographic.” “Did he teach Jane those things?” “He tried, but she wasn’t open to much. She was like my mother that way. I think his stories reminded them that he was only home for a little while, that one day they’d wake up and he’d be gone.” “You were his favorite.” “Yes. And Jane was Mom’s. But somehow that didn’t count for as much. Because Dad was the dominant personality, even when he wasn’t home. He was a doer. My mother just tried to cope, and didn’t succeed very well at that.” “Jane resented his absences more as time passed?” “Yes. I think she got to hate him before he disappeared, because of how sad Mom was, and because money was so tight.” “Your father didn’t earn much money?” “I don’t really know. Some of the leading photojournalists of the Vietnam era worked for almost nothing. Whether my father did or not, he never sent much money back to us. He was big on bringing presents, though. I’m not saying he was a great guy, okay? I’m just saying he and I had a bond.” “Did your mother work?” “For a while. Waitressing, a laundry, menial stuff. After she started drinking, not even that.” “Why did your father marry her?” “I honestly think he did it because it was the only way she would have sex with him.” Lenz smiles wistfully. “That was common in my generation. Your mother was beautiful?” “Yes. That was the irony that crippled the marriage. She looked exotic, but she wasn’t. That was her Alsatian blood, I guess, the exotic part. Outside, a mysterious princess—inside, plain as pabulum. All she wanted was a man to build her a house and come home from work every day at five-thirty.” “And Jane wanted the same thing?” “Absolutely. From her father and her husband, when she found one. Dad never gave it to her, but she found a husband who did.” Lenz holds up his forefinger. “A few moments ago you used the word ‘disappeared’ about your father. Isn’t it generally accepted that he died in Vietnam?” “Yes. Cambodia, actually. But I’ve never accepted that. I never felt that he was dead, and over the years there’ve been occasional sightings of him in Asia by former colleagues. I’ve spent a lot of money through the years trying to find him.” “What sort of scenario do you envision? If your father survived, that might mean that he chose not to return to America. That he chose to abandon you, your sister, and your mother.” “Probably so.” “Do you think he was capable of that?” I pull back my hair, digging my fingernails into my scalp as I go. “I don’t know. I always suspected that he had a woman there. In Vietnam. Maybe another whole family. Lots of servicemen did. Why should photographers be any different?” Lenz’s blue-gray eyes flicker with cold light. “Could you forgive him that?” The central question of my life. “I’ve spent a lot of time in distant countries photographing wars, just as he did. I know how lonely it can be. You’re cut off from the world, sometimes from any friendly contact. You might be the only person for a hundred miles who understands English, living in a hell no one else will ever really see. It’s a loneliness that’s almost despair.” “But Vietnam wasn’t like that. It was bursting with Americans.” “Dad worked a lot of other places. If I find out he’s alive—or that he did survive for a while—I’ll deal with it then.” “You said you never felt your father was dead. What about Jane? Do you feel she’s dead?” “I felt it twelve hours before I got the call.” “So you two shared the sort of intuitive bond that many twins speak of?” “Despite our differences, we had that. It’s a very real thing, in my opinion.” “I don’t dispute it. You’re being very forthcoming with me, Jordan, and I appreciate that. I think we could save a lot of time if you would just describe what you consider the seminal events in your lives as siblings.” “I don’t recall any particularly seminal events.” Lenz’s eyes appear soft, but there is a hardness beneath them, a cruelty even, and it shows now. Perhaps that’s a requirement for his type of work. “This is not psychotherapy, Jordan. We don’t have weeks to labor through your defense mechanisms. I’m sure if you think about it, certain events will come to mind.” I say nothing. “For example, I noticed in your file that you never graduated high school. Jane graduated with honors, participated in all sorts of extracurricular activities. Cheerleading, debate, et cetera. You did none of that.” “You guys really dig, don’t you?” “I also discovered that you had the highest ACT score in your school. So.” He folds his arms and raises his eyebrows. “Why would such a student drop out?” The small jet suddenly seems smaller. “Look, I don’t see how questions about my high-school life are going to help you understand Jane.” “What happens to one child happens to the other. Think back. The two of you are twelve years old. Your father has died, your mother can’t cope, there’s no money to buy necessities. You’re twins, you have the same teachers, yet you turn out opposites. What’s the story?” “You just summed it up, Doctor. Let’s move on to something that might actually help you find Jane’s killer. That’s the goal here, right?” Lenz only watches me. “You’re a photographer. You use filters to produce certain visual effects, yes? To modify light before it reaches the film?” “Yes.” “Human beings use similar filters. Emotional filters. They’re put in place by our parents, our siblings, our friends and enemies. Will you concede that?” “I guess.” “Daniel and I intend to use you for a critical purpose in this case. But before we bring you into contact with any suspects, I must understand you. I need to be able to correct for your particular filter.” I look at the porthole window to my left. There’s not enough moonlight to show clouds. We could be at five thousand feet or thirty-five thousand. That’s how I feel in relation to my past and future, unanchored, floating between the unknown and the known-too-well. Lenz wants my secrets. Why? Psychiatrists, like photographers, are essentially voyeurs. But some things are between me and my conscience, no one else. Not even God, if I can help it. Still, I feel some obligation to cooperate. Lenz is the professional in this sphere, not me. And he is trusting me not to screw up his investigation. I suppose I have to trust him a little. “The years after my father disappeared were difficult. The truth is, Jane had been living as though he were dead for several years before that. Her strategy was assimilation. Conformity. She studied hard, became cheerleader, then head cheerleader, and kept the same boyfriend for three years. I give her a lot of credit. Being popular isn’t easy without money.” “Money seems to be a recurring theme with Jane.” “Not only with her. Before Dad was gone, I didn’t realize how poor we were. But by thirteen, you start to notice. Material things are part of high school snobbery. Clothes and shoes, what kind of car you have, your house. Mom wrecked our car, and after that we didn’t have one. She drank more and more, and it seemed like the power company cut our electricity every other month. It was embarrassing. One day, prowling through the attic, I discovered three footlockers filled with old camera equipment. Mom told me that when she got pregnant with us, she persuaded Dad to open a portrait studio, to try to make their lives more stable. I don’t know why he went along with her. It never came to anything, of course. But he kept the equipment. A Mamiya large-format camera, floodlights, a background sheet, darkroom equipment, the works. Mom wanted to sell it all, but I threw a fit and she let me keep it. Over the next few months, I taught myself to use the stuff. A year later, I was running a portrait studio out of our house and shooting snaps for the Oxford Eagle in whatever spare time I had. Our lives improved. I was paying the light bill and buying the groceries, and because of that, I could pretty much do what I wanted.” Lenz nods encouragement. “And what did you want?” “My own life. Oxford’s a college town, and I rode all over it on my ten-speed bicycle, watching people, shooting pictures. Sony introduced the Walkman in my junior year of high school, and from the moment I got one, I lived with a soundtrack pouring into my ears and a camera around my neck. While Jane and her friends were dancing to the Bee Gees, I listened to homemade tapes of my father’s records: Joni Mitchell, Motown, Neil Young, the Beatles, and the Stones.” “It sounds like an idyllic childhood,” Lenz says with a knowing smile. “Is that what it was?” “Not exactly. While other girls my age were riding out to Sardis Reservoir to fumble around in backseats with guys from the football team, I was doing something a little different.” A deep stillness settles over Lenz’s body. Like a priest, he has heard so many confessions that nothing could surprise him, yet he waits with a receptivity that seems to pull the words from my mouth. “The first week of my senior year, our history teacher died. He was about seventy. To fill his shoes, the school board hired a young alumnus named David Gresham, who was teaching night classes at Ole Miss. Gresham had been drafted in 1970, and served one tour in Vietnam. He came back to Oxford wounded, but his wounds weren’t visible, so the school board didn’t notice them. After a few days in his class, I did. Sometimes he would stop speaking in midsentence, and it was clear that his mind was ten thousand miles away. His brain had skipped off track, jumped from our reality to one my classmates couldn’t even guess at. But I could. I watched Mr. Gresham very closely, because he’d been to the place where my father vanished. One day after school, I stayed to ask him what he knew about Cambodia. He knew a lot—none of it good, except the beauty of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat. When he asked why I was interested, I told him about my father. I hadn’t meant to, but when I looked into his eyes, my pain and grief poured out like a river through a broken dam. A month later, we became lovers.” “How old was he?” asks Lenz. “Twenty-six. I was seventeen and a half. A virgin. We both knew it was dangerous, but there was never any question of him seducing an innocent child. Yes, there was a void in my life because of my father’s death; yes, he was a sympathetic older man. But I knew exactly what I was doing. He taught me a lot about the world. I discovered a lot about myself, about my body and what it could do. For me and for someone else. And I gave some peace to a boy who had been broken in some fundamental way that could never be corrected, only made less painful.” “It’s amazing that you found each other,” Lenz says without a trace of judgment in his eyes. “This did not end well, of course.” “We managed to keep our relationship secret for most of the year. During that time, he opened up about Vietnam, and through his eyes I experienced things my father must have seen as well. Seen, but kept out of his letters. Even out of his photographs. In April, one of David’s neighbors saw us kissing at the creek behind his house—with my flannel shirt open to the waist, no less—and took it on himself to report it to the school board. The board called a special meeting, and during something called ‘executive session’ gave David the option of resigning and leaving town before they opened an investigation that would destroy both our futures. To protect him, I denied everything, but it didn’t help. I offered to leave town with him, but he told me that wouldn’t be fair to me. Ultimately, we were incompatible, he said. When I asked why, he said, ‘Because you have something I don’t.’ ‘What?’ I asked.” “A future?” Lenz finishes. “Right. Two nights later, he went down to the creek and managed to drown himself. The coroner called it an accident, but David had enough scotch in him to sedate a bull.” “I’m sorry.” My eyes seek out the porthole again, a round well of night. “I like to think he was unconscious when he went under the water. He probably thought his death would end the scandal, but it only got worse. Jane had a breakdown brought on by social embarrassment. My mother just drank more. There was talk of putting us in foster homes. I went back to school with my head high, but it didn’t last. My Star Student award was revoked. Then my appointment book went blank. No one wanted me shooting their family portraits. I’d done a lot of the senior pictures, but people didn’t even pick them up. They had them reshot elsewhere. When I refused to abase myself in contrition, various mothers told the school board that they didn’t want their daughters exposed to a ‘teenage Jezebel.’ They really called me that. Before long, the ostracism bled over onto Jane. She was cut dead a hundred times on the street by parents who thought she was me. At that point, I did what David should have done. I had three thousand dollars in the bank. I took two thousand, packed my clothes and cameras, rode the bus to New Orleans, got a judge to emancipate me, and scratched up a job developing prints for the staff photographers at the Times-Picayune. A year later, I was a staff photographer myself.” “Did you continue to support your family financially?” “Yes. But things between Jane and me only got worse.” “Why?” “She was obsessed with being a Chi-O. She thought—” “Excuse me? A what?” “A Chi-Omega. It’s a sorority. The apogee of southern womanhood at Ole Miss. Blue-eyed blondes raised with silver spoons in their mouths. Like that song, ‘Summertime’? ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-lookin’ …’” “Ah.” “Several of her cheerleaders friends were going to pledge Chi-O. Their sisters were already in, or their mothers. Like that.” “Legacies,” says Lenz. “Whatever. Jane really thought she had a chance. She thought I was the only obstacle to her getting it. She claimed active Chi-Os had seen me around Oxford on my bike, looking ratty and saying whatever I felt like, and thought I was her. That probably did happen. But the truth was, she never had a chance. Those bitches wouldn’t have given her that. They got their self-esteem from excluding girls like Jane, who wanted it terribly but had some flaw. And Jane had several. She had no money—therefore no high-end clothes, car, or any of the other trappings; her father had been a celebrity, but not the right kind; and then there was me. Jane was prettier than all of them, too. You hear beauty is its own aristocracy, but that’s not always true. A lot of attractive women fear beauty.” “Interesting, isn’t it?” Lenz’s eyes play over my body in a strange way, not lustfully, but in a coldly appraising manner. “Jane broke down after the scandal over you and the teacher?” “She wouldn’t leave the house. But when they started talking about making us wards of the state, she went back to school. She graduated salutatorian, but she never got to be a Chi-O. She pledged Delta Gamma, which was considered decent but definitely second tier.” “You’ve asserted how beautiful Jane was. You’re her identical twin. How do you feel about your own looks?” “I know I’m attractive. But Jane cultivated her looks in a way I never have. Toward the ideals of southern beauty, you know? That’s a weird thing that extends from your appearance right into your personality. For me looks are secondary. I’ve used them to gain advantage in my work—I’d be a fool not to—but it makes me uncomfortable. Beauty is an accident of genetics for which I deserve no credit.” “That’s disingenuous, to say the least.” This makes me laugh. “You’re a man, okay? You don’t know how many times I’ve listened to my mother whine about how much ‘potential’ I have, that if I’d just do something with it, fix myself up a little—like Jane, is the subtext—I’d find a wonderful provider who’d marry me and take care of me for the rest of my life. Well, wake up, Mom. I don’t need a goddamn provider, okay? I am one.” “For whom do you provide, Jordan?” “Myself.” “I see.” Lenz looks at his watch, then taps his knees. “Jane married a wealthy attorney?” “That’s right.” “Jump to her disappearance. You didn’t handle it well? The file says you interfered with the investigation.” “I don’t take exclusion well, okay? I’m a journalist. This was my sister. And the FBI was getting exactly nowhere with the case. I badgered them for the victims’ families, walked the streets, worked my old contacts at the Times-Picayune. But none of it did any good.” “So what did you finally do?” “Took off and tried to bury myself in work. Literally. I went to Sierra Leone. I took crazy risks, had some close calls. Word got back to my agency. They begged me to slow down, so I did. I slowed down so much that I couldn’t get out of bed. I was sleeping around the clock. When I finally came out of that, I couldn’t sleep at all. I had to have prescription drugs just to close my eyes without seeing Jane being raped, tied hand and foot in some dark room.” “Was rape a particular fear of hers?” “It’s a particular fear for every woman.” “What about you? You must have placed yourself in some very dangerous situations vis-?-vis rape. War zones full of men. Teenagers with guns.” “I can take care of myself. Jane’s a lot softer.” Lenz nods slowly. “If we found Jane tomorrow—alive—what would you say to her? In other words, what have you most regretted not saying to her?” “That’s none of your business.” “I’ve explained why—” “Some things are too personal, Doctor. Let’s leave it at that.” Lenz rubs his face with his hands, then inclines his head to me. “Some years ago, I worked a very difficult murder case. I lost my wife during that investigation. She was murdered. Violently. Viciously. And I felt responsible. Perhaps I was. We had grown apart in our marriage, but that hardly lessened the agony. We’ve all done terrible things to the people we love, Jordan. It’s our nature as humans. If there’s something like that between you and your sister, it would help me to know. To see her as she really was.” The pain in Lenz’s eyes looks genuine, but he’s an old hand at this game. He could have a stock of stories like this one, barter beads he uses to elicit intimacies. “There’s nothing like that.” He takes a frustrated breath through his nose, and I’m reminded of a surgeon working to remove a bullet, his gloved thumb and finger in forceps, trying first one angle and then another, probing for a route to the heart of the wound. “Certain types of people become targets for predators,” Lenz says. “The same way that injured or weak animals are chosen as prey by leopards. Certain types of children tend to be molested, for example: the shy ones, those who don’t fit in, who play at the edge of the group, who separate themselves for various reasons. The same holds true for adults. I’m currently profiling every known victim in this case. Some had very low self-image, but others were super-achievers. Some had siblings, others none. Some were housewives, others career women. I must find—” “I’ve told you all I know, Doctor.” “You haven’t begun to tell me what you know.” He shifts in his seat, and the cruelty reappears in his eyes. “Why have you never married, Jordan?” “I was engaged. He was killed. End of story.” “Killed how?” “He was an ITN reporter. He was shot down in a helicopter over Namibia and tortured to death.” “You’ve lost your father, your fianc?, and your sister to violent death?” “Bad things come in threes, right?” “You’re forty years old. There must be more to your romantic life than one engagement.” “I’ve had lovers. Does that make you happy?” “Did Jane have lovers?” “One boyfriend through high school, like I said. She never had sex with him.” “How do you know?” “I just know. Okay? After him, she dated around, but nothing serious. Then in college she met a guy from a wealthy family in New Orleans. Married him his senior year of law school. She found the handsomest, most reliable provider she could, married him, had two kids, and lived happily ever after.” For some reason this inaccurate summary brings a wave of tears to my eyes. “I need a drink. Do you think they have any of those little airplane bottles stowed on this plane?” “No. Jordan, I want you to—” “Get off it! Okay? You wanted our story, you’ve got it. We’re poster girls for nurture in the nature-versus-nurture debate. We’re identical right down to our mitochondria, but emotionally we’re opposites. Jane acted like she despised me, but she was so jealous of me it made her sick. She was jealous of my name. She thought ‘Jordan’ was exotic, while hers was literally plain Jane. I called her that when I was angry. She hated having to depend on me for money, for her cheerleading outfits and expenses. She wanted Izod shirts and Bass Weejuns, and I made her wear J.C. fucking Penney! That’s how petty it was, okay? But to girls in our situation, that was a big deal. Was she weak or frail in some way? Yes. But weaker people can’t help being weak, you know? I tried to protect her. Until she stopped wanting me to, and even then I tried. Jane became a southern belle because it was the only choice she was capable of making. She had to feel safe.” “We’re all defined by the choices we make to survive,” Lenz says in a fatherly voice. “The Walter Mittys and the monsters.” His paternalistic bit finally snaps my patience. “Is that supposed to be profound? Doctor, you may have lost your wife to a killer, but I suspect that most of the trauma you’ve encountered was vicarious. Told to you by patients or prisoners. It can be tough to hear things, I know. I’ve heard some bad things myself. But I have also endured some bad things. I have descended into the pit of hell, if you want to know. I have seen some shit. And all this talk we’re doing means nothing. Jane is alive or she’s dead. Either way, I have to know. That’s the way I’m built. But your games aren’t taking us any closer to an answer. I don’t think anything connects all these victims, except the fact that they’re women.” “Jordan, don’t you want to—” “What I want is what Baxter promised me. A complete breakdown of the FBI’s investigation so far. I want it clear and concise, and I want it now.” Lenz splays his age-spotted hands on the desktop and leans back. “Did that outburst make you feel better?” “Start talking, damn it!” “There’s not much to tell. We’re now gathering every known painting that belongs to the Sleeping Women series.” “Where?” “The National Gallery in Washington.” “How many do you have so far?” “None. Four will arrive by plane tomorrow, several more the next day. Some collectors have refused to ship their paintings but agreed to allow Bureau forensic teams and art consultants to travel to their collections. First we’ll try to match the paintings to the known victims in New Orleans. In some cases it should be easy. Harder with the more abstract canvases, but we have some ideas about that. Then we’ll establish the order in which the canvases were painted, if we can; it may differ from the order in which they were sold. While this is being done, we’ll be searching the canvases for fingerprints, hairs, skin flakes, other biological artifacts. The paint itself will be analyzed and lot numbers traced, if possible. Brush fibers may be found and traced. Connoisseurs will make studies of the painter’s style and try to draw comparisons with known artists. And that’s only the beginning of what the paintings will go through.” “Who’s in charge of the case for the Bureau?” “Overall responsibility will be held by the Director. Tactically, there are different tracks to the investigation. Daniel will run the Washington track; he’ll be in charge of all profiling, with me consulting. The New Orleans SAC will run that end of the case.” “Who’s the SAC? Same one as last year?” “No. Patrick Bowles. He’s a competent man.” Lenz looks as though he’s about to continue, but he stops himself. “What is it?” “Another man in New Orleans may be playing the primary role in the investigation at this point. That’s one of the things I’m going down there to address.” “Who?” Lenz sighs. “His name is John Kaiser. He’s a journeyman agent now, but two years ago he was a member of the Investigative Support Unit.” “In Quantico? With Baxter?” “Yes.” “Why is he in New Orleans?” “He transferred out of the Unit at his own request. Daniel tried to get him to take a leave of absence and come back, but Kaiser refused. He said if he didn’t get journeyman duty, he’d resign from the Bureau.” “Why? What happened to him?” “I’ll let him tell you. If he will.” “Why would Kaiser have the primary role in this case?” “The atmosphere in New Orleans has become highly charged over the past year. You can imagine: victim after victim being taken, no progress by the police. Not even a lead. The NOPD is under tremendous pressure. Complicating the issue is the multijurisdictional nature of the investigation. What people think of as New Orleans is actually a group of communities—” “I know all about it. Jefferson Parish, Slidell, Kenner, Harahan. Sheriff’s departments and cops all mixed together.” “Yes. And the only man in the area with any real experience in cases like this—full time, on the ground—is John Kaiser. It’s my understanding that he resisted involvement when he arrived, but as more victims were taken, he began to work the case. Now he’s obsessed with it.” “Has he made any headway?” “No one had, until you found those paintings. But I’ve no doubt that John Kaiser knows more about the victims and attacks than any man alive. Except the killer, of course. And perhaps the painter, depending on the degree to which they interact.” “You really believe this is some sort of team? A conspiracy?” “I do. It helps explain the extreme professionalism of the kidnappings in New Orleans. The fact that we have no witnesses and no corpses. I’m starting to think the painter in New York is masterminding the operation, and merely paying a pro to snatch the women for him.” “Who’s a professional at kidnapping?” Lenz shrugs. “Perhaps the painter spent some time in prison. He might know a convict from New Orleans. Or perhaps he’s originally from New Orleans himself. He may have many contacts there. That would explain the selection of the city in the first place.” The psychiatrist’s theory makes logical sense, yet I feel that it’s wrong somehow. “Was this Kaiser good when he was at Quantico?” Lenz looks over at the porthole. “He had a very high success rate.” “But you don’t like him.” “We disagree about fundamental issues of methodology.” “That’s psychobabble to me, Doctor. I’ve learned one thing in my business, like it or not.” “What’s that?” “You don’t argue with results.” Lenz keeps looking out his window. “What do you think about Baxter’s theory? Catching one of the guys by using airline computers? Tracing passengers on New York flights?” “I’m not hopeful.” I lean back in my seat and rub my eyes. “How much longer to New Orleans?” “About an hour.” “It’s too late to call my brother-in-law. I think I’ll get a room at the airport hotel, call him tomorrow.” “I’m staying at the Windsor Court. Why don’t you sleep there?” I hope I’ve misunderstood his tone. “In your room?” He wrinkles his mouth as though the idea were absurd. “For God’s sake. At the hotel.” “As I recall, the Windsor Court is about five hundred dollars per night. I’m not going to pay that, and I know the FBI won’t.” “No. But I’ll treat you.” “Are you rich?” “My wife’s insurance policy has made a certain standard of living possible, one I never enjoyed before.” “Thanks, but I’ll stay at the airport.” Lenz studies me with a strange detachment in the dim light, like an anthropologist studying some new primate. “You know, I used to ask everyone I interviewed three questions.” “What were they?” “The first was, ‘What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?’” “Did people answer that?” “A surprising number did.” “What was the second?” “‘What moment are you proudest of in your life?’” “And the third?” “‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’” I force a casual smile, but something slips in my soul at his words. “Why didn’t you ask me those things?” “I don’t ask anyone anymore.” “Why not?” “I got tired of hearing the answers.” He shifts in his seat, but his eyes never leave my face. “But in your case, I think I’d like to know.” “You’re old enough to be accustomed to disappointment.” He waves his hand. “Something tells me that before all this is done, I’m going to find out anyway.” A high beeping sounds in the cabin. Lenz reaches into his jacket, removes a cell phone, and presses a button. “Yes?” As he listens, he seems to shrink in his seat. “When?” he says at length. “Yes … Yes … Right.” “What is it?” I ask as he drops the phone in his lap. “What’s happened?” “Twenty minutes ago, two teenagers found the body of the woman taken from Dorignac’s grocery store.” “Her body?” Lenz wears an expression of deep concentration. “She was lying on the bank of a drainage canal, nude. The kids climbed a wall behind some apartments to drink beer and heard noises by the water. She was lying in the weeds. A nutria was feeding on her, whatever that is. The police sealed the crime scene for a Bureau forensic team. Her husband just identified the body.” “It’s a big water rat.” “What? Ah,” Lenz says, his mind a thousand miles away. This news nauseates me, but not because of its ugliness. “It wasn’t him,” I say quietly. “If they found a body, it’s unrelated.” “Not necessarily. It could still be him.” Lenz nods with a strange intensity. “Think about it. It’s been four and a half weeks since the last victim. The New Orleans UNSUB was on the prowl tonight—maybe all afternoon. He may have known what happened in Hong Kong, but he didn’t know what his partner did: that Wingate was about to be silenced, along with you. He snatches the woman from Dorignac’s and takes her back to his house. When he arrives, he finds an urgent message on his machine from his partner. Or maybe he gets a call. The victim was found, what”—Lenz checks his watch—“seven hours after he took her? Plenty of time. His New York partner tells him Wingate is no longer a problem, and also that Jordan Glass got away. The investigation is about to get very hot. So, instead of painting this woman, he kills her and dumps her in a canal. Sometime in the last seven hours.” Lenz slaps his knee with excitement. “Seven hours, by God. I won’t be surprised if there’s staging. Not at all.” “What’s staging?” I ask, searching my memory for remnants of the crime classification manuals I read in the month after Jane vanished. Lenz’s eyes are glowing. Like all of Baxter’s team, he’s a hunter at heart. “Staging is an attempt to mislead investigators by altering the crime scene or the corpus. The UNSUB may mutilate the body in an attempt to create the impression of a violent rape, a satanic murder, any number of things. No, we can’t discount this victim just because we found her body.” I want to believe him, but for some reason I don’t. “But we know he’s smart enough to dump the body without it being found.” “That’s the point!” Lenz snaps. “He’s letting us find her, in order to confuse the trail.” “But isn’t that risky, if he’s actually had her in his possession? I mean, with all the forensics at your disposal?” The psychiatrist smiles for the first time in a long while. “Yes, it is. We can establish a baseline of hair and fiber evidence. Perhaps there’s even semen for DNA. And if we’re very damned lucky, some biological artifact from one of the paintings will match something we find on or in the body. That’s a long shot if the painter and kidnapper are two different men, but it’s possible. It would be one hell of a start.” “God forgive me, I hope it was him that took her.” Lenz squeezes his left hand into a fist. “If it was, this is the turning point of the case.” “Because you have a body?” “No. Because he’s no longer calling the tune. He’s reacting to us.” “To me,” I remind Lenz. “Finding the paintings.” Images of the canvases I saw in Hong Kong float through my mind with eerie clarity. “What makes this guy tick, Doctor? He’s trying to re-create some fantasy, right? What is it?” An odd serenity eases the lines of Lenz’s face. “If I knew that, he’d be in custody right now.” The psychiatrist closes his eyes and lays his hands on the armrest of his seat. “Please don’t speak. I need to think.” Shit. I reach into my fanny pack, open my trusty pill bottle, and swallow three Xanax. By the time I hit the airport hotel, I’ll be like a zombie, and glad for it. The last thing in the world I want to do right now is think. SIX (#ulink_190531b3-b87d-5e0c-8f54-f2decb3b3970) This morning I slept in, and I’m glad. Except for my right flank, which feels like a mule kicked it, my muscles have that deliciously liquid feeling that only sex or too much sleep can give. It’s been a while since I had the former, so I owe my thanks to a quiet hotel room in America, which can be quite a luxury for me. I ate breakfast in the lobby, then called Budget and rented a Mustang convertible. After traveling in the East for months, riding in underpowered taxis, cyclos, and even rickshaws, an American muscle car feels exactly right. It’s late October in New Orleans, but I have the convertible top down. The leaves are green and still on the trees, and the morning sun tells me the temperature could hit eighty by lunchtime. That’s the way this city is: heat and rain, rain and heat. When winter finally comes, the humidity makes it cold, but winter doesn’t last long. I’m late for my meeting with the FBI, because nobody bothered to tell me they moved the field office from downtown—where they were forever—to a brand-new building on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, between Lakefront Airport and the University of New Orleans. It’s a massive four-story brick structure designed to look like a college campus building, but the closer I get, the more it looks like a fortress in disguise. Set far back from the main road, the building is surrounded by a heavy iron fence topped with sharp fleur-de-lis and fronted by a guardhouse with antiterrorist barriers embedded in the concrete road. The armed gate guard checks my driver’s license, radios upstairs, then raises the barrier and waves me into the parking lot. As I lock the Mustang and walk toward the entrance, I sense that I’m being watched on screens inside. I won’t win any fashion awards today: jeans, a silk blouse, espadrilles, and my fanny pack. No purses for Jordan Glass, unless I’m doing a formal party. I know how to dress up, but I don’t do it for the FBI. The entrance is also built on the heroic scale, with flags and black marble inscribed with the FBI motto: “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Other law enforcement agencies have come up with more derogatory words for the acronym, but I’ll reserve my opinion today. A metal detector at the door leads me into a small vestibule not unlike a doctor’s office, where a female receptionist waits behind glass. When I give her my name, she pushes a sheet through a slot for me to sign, and assures me someone will be down for me in a minute. Thirty seconds later, the door opens and a tall man with deep-set eyes and a day’s growth of beard steps through the door by her window. “Jordan Glass?” “Yes. Sorry I’m late. I went to the federal building downtown.” “That’s our fault, then. I’m John Kaiser.” This guy does not look like the FBI agents I’ve known. He’s six feet two, lanky, and looks as comfortable in his white button-down shirt and sport jacket as a cowboy in a tuxedo. His dark brown hair is past the unwritten regulation length, and his aura is about as unofficial as anything I can imagine. He looks like a law student who’s been studying for three days without sleep. A forty-five-year-old law student. As if reading my mind, he pulls out his wallet and flips it open to reveal his FBI credentials. His bona fides are there in black and white: “Special Agent John Kaiser.” His photo looks much neater than the man standing before me, but it’s him all right. He cleans up well. “You don’t look like an FBI agent.” A lopsided grin. “My SAC is fond of telling me that.” “Why did they move the field office?” “After the bombing in Oklahoma City, the government mandated a hundred-foot setback from the road. This office has twice as much space as downtown, and a hell of a lot better view. They moved last September, a month before I got here.” “Are we going upstairs?” He lowers his voice. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather talk to you alone first. Do you like Chinese food? I haven’t eaten since last night, so I ordered some. I ordered for two.” “I like Chinese. But why don’t you want to eat it in your office?” Kaiser has hazel eyes, and they focus on mine with subdued urgency. “Because I’d rather talk without any interference.” “From whom?” “You met him last night.” “Doctor Lenz?” He nods. “So the dislike is mutual?” “Afraid so.” “You can’t keep Lenz out of your office?” “I’m not sure. But I can definitely keep him off a picnic table on Lakeshore Drive, especially if he doesn’t know I’m going there.” “I’ll go if we take my car.” “You read my mind, Ms. Glass.” Kaiser collects his sacks and follows me through the main doors. He tries to match his stride to mine, but with the height differential it’s a struggle. “We got your film from the fire scene,” he says. “What did it show?” “You got some good crowd shots. New York is busting its collective ass trying to trace every face in them. It’s a big job. The good news is, the video store had a list of members, and the bartender says a lot of his patrons that evening were regulars.” “I thought maybe I got a shot of the guy who set the fire. It would have been a downward shot, forty-five degrees toward the back of a crowd.” Kaiser gives me a strange look. “You’re not going to believe this.” “What?” “You got the top of some heads, and a Caucasian hand flipping you the bird.” “Flipping …? You’re kidding me.” “My sense of humor doesn’t extend to cases like this one.” “Do you think it was him? Or just some kid?” “Photo analysts say it’s an adult hand, likely but not positively male. You think the UNSUB saw what you were doing in time to duck down and flip you off?” “He saw what I was doing, all right. He was moving along the back of the crowd, following me. I think he was trying to get close enough to kill me. That’s why I got the firefighters after him.” “That was smart.” “I thought I got that camera up quick enough. Damn.” “It’s in the past,” he says. “You can’t change it, so forget it.” “You make it sound easy. Is that what you do when you screw up?” “Do as I say, not as I do.” “This is it.” He stops beside the red Mustang and flashes a broad smile of pleasure. “Pony car.” I unlock the Mustang with the remote, climb in, and put the top down. Kaiser drops his takeout sacks on the tiny backseat and folds his long frame into the passenger seat beside me. In seconds we’re roaring down Lakeshore Drive, headed for the green expanses beside Lake Pontchartrain. He leans his head back and looks up at the sky. “Damn, this feels good.” “What?” “Riding in a ragtop with a pretty girl. It’s been a long time.” Despite the strangeness of the situation, I feel a little flush of pleasure. Being noticed by John Kaiser is a lot different from objectively discussing my looks with Dr. Lenz. “A long time since you’ve been in a ragtop? Or close to a pretty girl?” He laughs. “I plead the fifth.” Kaiser looks a few years older than I, but he’s aged well. And though I hate to admit it, he reminds me a little of David Gresham, the history teacher I told Lenz about. Something about the way he carries himself, more than physical similarity. There’s a wariness in his motion, as though he’s always aware of exactly where he is, and of his immediate surroundings. I wonder how much Lenz told him about last night’s “interview” on the plane. Braking to a near stop, I nose the Mustang into a cement semicircle by a wooden bench on the lake side of the road. While I put up the top to keep the gulls from trashing the interior, Kaiser carries the food to the bench, straddles one end, and lays out the cardboard containers and drinks in front of him. As he sits, his pant legs ride up his ankles, revealing a black holster with the butt of an automatic pistol protruding from it. “I got Peking Chicken and Spicy Beef,” he says. “Also some shrimp fried rice, egg rolls, and two iced teas, unsweetened. Take whatever you want.” “Peking Chicken.” I straddle the other end of the bench and reach for one of the cups. “Go for it,” he says. I spread some white rice onto a tiny plate, top it with the spicy chicken and zucchini, and dig in. “Do you want to start?” he asks. “Or do you want me to?” “I will. I want you to know this is a strange situation for me. I didn’t handle Jane’s disappearance well, but in the past year I’ve managed to deal with it. On some level, I accepted that I’d never see her again, and that the case would never be solved. Now all that certitude has been taken away. And I’m glad it has. It’s just … disturbing. I feel vulnerable again.” “I understand, believe it or not. I’ve seen similar things happen before. Missing-person cases that have lain dormant for years, then suddenly the child or husband turns up. It’s disorienting to people. Homo sapiens survived by adapting rapidly to change, even terrible change. Being forced to reverse an adaptation you’ve made to survive can cause a lot of strange feelings. A lot of resentment.” “I don’t feel any resentment.” He watches me, his eyes full of kindness. “I wasn’t saying you did. I’ve just seen it in other cases.” I take a long sip of tea, and I feel the caffeine in my skin and heart. “I’d like to know where you are on the case. And what you think the odds are of solving it.” Kaiser has already polished off an egg roll; now he’s exploring the spicy beef. “I don’t like giving odds. I’ve been disappointed too many times.” “Do you believe the death of Christopher Wingate is part of my sister’s case?” “Yes.” “You believe there’s more than one person behind all this.” Kaiser cocks his head to the side. “Yes and no.” “What do you mean? You don’t share Lenz’s theory? The kidnapper in New Orleans and the painter in New York?” “No, I don’t.” “Why not?” “Instinct, mostly. It’s an elegant theory, and it explains a lot. The reason we can’t find any common factors among the victims, for example. Lenz would say that since the New Orleans UNSUB is being paid to kidnap the women, he simply chooses them at random. But that’s not how this kind of thing is done. Predators will take targets of opportunity, yes, but there’s always an underlying pattern beneath the victims’ selection. Even if it’s just geographic.” “You think something links all the victims?” “Something always does. Serial murder is sexual murder; that’s axiomatic. It may appear otherwise, but always at bottom lies serious sexual maladjustment. And the criterion for victim selection usually arises from this. The victims are from New Orleans. My gut tells me the selections are being made here. And not randomly, either. We just don’t understand them yet.” “Have you formed some picture of this guy, then? Of what drives him?” “I’ve tried, but there’s not much to go on. The normal rules are out the window. Organized versus disorganized personality? Comparing this guy to Ted Bundy—who was classified as organized—is like comparing Stephen Hawking to Mister Rogers. No corpses. No witnesses. No evidence. The victims might as well have been kidnapped by aliens. And that frightens me more than anything.” “Why?” “Because it’s hard to hide a body well. Especially in an urban environment. Corpses stink. Dogs and cats root them out. Homeless people discover them. Passersby report suspicious actions more often than you’d think. And nosy neighbors see everything.” “There’s a lot of swamp around New Orleans,” I point out. “I have nightmares about that. Jane wedged under a cypress stump somewhere.” Kaiser shakes his head. “We’ve been dragging the swamps for months with no results. Lake Pontchartrain, too. And those swamps aren’t empty. There are hunters, fishermen, oil people. Game wardens, families living in shacks on the water. Think about it. If the UNSUB dumps a woman off a causeway, she’s going to float within sight of somebody. Eleven bodies in a row? Forget it. And if he goes deep into the swamp—carrying a dead body in a boat—he almost has to do it at night. Do you see an artist talented enough to paint these pictures striking out into a swamp full of snakes and alligators in the dead of night? I don’t. If they’re dead, I think he’s burying them. And the safest place to do that is beneath a house. A house he’s living in. A basement or a crawl space.” “New Orleans houses don’t have basements. The water table’s too high. That’s why they bury people above ground.” “That was always more out of custom than necessity,” he says. “And the water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn’t even stink.” A beeping sound comes from Kaiser’s pocket. He takes out a cell phone and looks at its LED screen. “That’s Lenz, trying to find me. We’ll let him keep looking.” “Excuse me … you just said if they’re dead.” Kaiser carefully formulates his reply. “That’s right.” “Doctor Lenz is positive they’re dead.” “The doctor and I disagree about a lot of things.” “You’re the first law enforcement officer who’s expressed any real doubt. Baxter says he’ll hold out hope until he sees an actual body, but he’s just being courteous.” “Baxter’s a nice guy.” Kaiser’s eyes bore into mine. “But he thinks they’re dead.” “And you don’t?” “I’ve never seen a case like this. Eleven women vanish into thin air? Absolutely no word from the UNSUB? Normally, a guy who snatched that many women and got away with it would be taunting us some way.” “But what makes you think they might be alive? Where could they possibly be?” “It’s a big world, Ms. Glass. There’s something else, though. The autopsy on the Dorignac’s victim is mostly complete. Externally, the body was clean, but we took some skin from beneath her fingernails. There’s nothing to compare that to right now, but later it could be very important. Toxicology will take a little longer.” “All that’s great. But why does that make you think the victims could be alive?” “It doesn’t. But we also found a strange burn on her neck. The kind of contact burn consistent with an electrical stun device, like a Taser.” My pulse quickens. “What does that tell you?” “That while the snatches were previously thought to have been blitz attacks, the force used was not necessarily deadly force. That means the UNSUB may not have wanted to risk killing his victims, even by mistake.” “Oh, God. Please let that be it.” “I don’t want to create false hope, but it’s a good sign in my book. By the way, we’re telling the media that we don’t think the Dorignac’s victim is part of this case. We’re playing it as a random rape-murder. The dumping of the body supports that story.” “I hope that fairy tale doesn’t come back to haunt you.” Kaiser takes another bite of spicy beef and gives me a measuring look. “A couple of other things make this UNSUB very interesting to me.” “Like what?” “One, he’s the only serial offender I know of to earn enormous profit from his crimes. Most serials don’t profit in any way from what they do. Money isn’t part of the equation for them. But for this guy, it is.” “Okay.” “Two, he’s not after publicity. Not the usual kind, anyway. If the victims are dead, he’s not leaving the bodies where they’ll be found and cause big news. And if they’re not dead, he’s not sending severed fingers to relatives or the TV stations. So for him, the women are simply part of the process of creating the paintings. That’s what the murders are about. The paintings.” “But aren’t the paintings a kind of publicity in themselves?” “Yes, but a very specialized kind. Publicity and profit are linked here. If the artist were painting these images solely to fulfill his private needs, he wouldn’t need to sell them. Think of the risk he’s taking by putting them on the market. That’s the only way we’ve learned anything about him. If he hadn’t sold any paintings, we’d be as lost today as we were after the first kidnapping.” “How are profit and publicity linked?” “He wants the art world to see what he’s doing. Maybe critics, maybe other painters, I don’t know. The money might not be important in and of itself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hasn’t spent a dime of it. He probably knows that in our society, the value of art is determined by what people pay for it. Therefore, if the world is to pay attention to his work, it must sell for a great deal of money. That’s why he took the risk of dealing with Christopher Wingate. Or dealing with whoever killed Wingate for him. I’m only speculating, of course.” “It makes more sense than what I’ve heard so far. What does he want people to get from his work? Why paint the women dead? And why start with almost abstract faces, then paint women who look asleep, and only later get to explicit views of death?” “I’d just as soon not speculate about that yet.” Kaiser looks at his watch. “I’d like to ask you about something personal, if you don’t mind.” “What?” “The phone call.” “Phone call?” “The one you got from Thailand.” “Today I woke up thinking about that call. It was the most unsettling experience of my life.” “I’m not surprised. I know you gave us a statement when it happened, but would you mind telling me about it?” “Not if you think it might help you.” “It might.” “It was five months after Jane disappeared. A bad time for me. I was having to sedate myself to sleep. I don’t remember if I told them that in my statement.” “You said you were exhausted.” “That’s one word for it. I wasn’t too happy with the Bureau then. Anyway, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It must have rung a long time to wake me up, and when I finally got to it, the connection was terrible.” “What was the first thing you heard?” “A woman crying.” “Did you recognize the voice? Right at that moment?” “No. It made me more alert, but it didn’t zing straight to my gut. You know?” “Yeah. What then?” “The woman sobbed, ‘Jordan.’ Then there was static. Then: ‘I need your help. I can’t—’ Then there was more static, like a bad cell phone connection. Then she said, ‘Daddy’s alive, but he can’t help me.’ Then: ‘Please,’ like she was begging, at her wits’ end. At that point I felt that it was Jane, and I was about to ask where she was when a man in the background said something in French that I didn’t understand and don’t remember.” Even now, in seventy-degree sunlight, a chill goes through my body at the memory. “And I thought for a second—” “What?” “I thought he sounded like my father.” I look defiantly at Kaiser, daring him to call me a fool. But he doesn’t. Part of me is glad, yet another part wonders if he’s a fool. “Go on,” he says. “Then in English the man said, ‘No, ch?rie, it’s just a dream.’ And then the phone went dead.” My appetite is gone. A clammy sweat has broken out under my blouse, sending a cold rivulet down my ribs. I press the silk against my skin to stop it. “Do you have a clear memory of your father’s voice?” “Not really. More an impression, I guess. I think the voice on the phone reminded me of his because Dad spoke a little French sometimes. He learned it in Vietnam, I think. He called me ch?rie sometimes.” “Did he? What happened next?” “To be honest, my brain was barely functioning. I thought the whole thing was probably a delusion. But the next day, I reported it to Baxter, and he told me they had found a record of the call and traced its origin to a train station in Bangkok.” “When you found that out, what did your gut tell you?” “I hoped it was my sister. But the more I thought about it, the less I believed it. I know a lot of MIA families, from searching for my father for so long. What if it was a female relative of an MIA in the middle of a search? They go over there all the time. You know, a wife or daughter of an MIA, in trouble and needing help? Maybe she’s drunk and depressed. She pulls my card out of her purse. The conversation fits, if you fill in the blanks a certain way. ‘Jordan … I need your help. My daddy’s alive, but he’—referring to her father—‘can’t help me.’” “But MIA relatives go over to try to help the missing soldier, right? Not the other way around.” “Yes.” “Did you check with the MIA families you knew?” “Yes. The FBI did too. We never found anyone who would admit to calling me. But there are more than two thousand MIAs still unaccounted for. That’s a lot of families. And at the meetings, they all talk to me, because I’m well known and because I’ve traveled in the East so much.” “If that were the case, who would the man’s voice have belonged to?” “A husband. A stepfather. Who knows? But I thought of another possibility. What if it was the killer playing a trick on me? Using some woman he knows to upset me.” Kaiser shakes his head. “No other relatives of victims received such calls. I checked.” “So, what do you think?” He idly pokes a leftover slice of beef. “I think it might have been your sister.” I take a deep breath and try to steady my nerves. “I’m telling you this,” he says soberly, “because Baxter told me you were tough.” “I don’t know if I’m that tough.” He waits, letting me work through it. “This is why you didn’t want Lenz here, isn’t it?” “Partly.” “When I asked Lenz what he thought about the phone call, he brushed it off.” Kaiser looks at the ground. “The consensus in the Unit is that your mystery caller was a member of an MIA family, just as you guessed. Lenz didn’t ask you about it because he’d seen the statement you made at the time, and he’d consider that a more reliable description of the event than what you remember now.” “That sounds like an official reply. What’s your personal opinion?” “If your sister is alive, it throws Lenz’s present theory—whatever that might be—into question. Lenz talks a lot about how everything is possible, how there are no rules, but deep down he’s wearing blinders. I don’t think he always did. But these days he’s prejudiced toward the tragic ending. I’m open to something else. That’s it in a nutshell.” “Why are you open to something else?” A wistful smile touches the corners of Kaiser’s lips and eyes. “Because I know the world obeys no laws. I learned that the hard way.” He picks up a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie, then discards it. “Lenz probably asked you about all sorts of family stuff. Right? Intimate stuff?” “Yes.” “That’s the way he works. He likes to know all the underlying relationships. He’s upset a lot of the victims’ families doing that. I’m not criticizing him for it. He did some groundbreaking work early in his career.” “That’s pretty much what he said about you.” “Really? Well, I won’t kid you, I don’t think he should be involved in this investigation.” “Why not?” “I don’t trust his instincts or his judgment. He was involved in a case a while back that turned into a real clusterfuck. And Baxter places too much weight on what he says, because of their history.” “Lenz told me his wife was killed during a case. Is that what you’re talking about?” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/greg-iles/dead-sleep/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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