Dead Sleep

12

The Camellia Grill stands at the intersection of Carrollton and St. Charles, with the river rolling past just beyond the levee. Like many New Orleans institutions, it’s a modest place, an old-time grill with pink walls, aproned employees, and stools at the bar. Agent Wendy and I have been here long enough to get menus when John Kaiser walks through the door and scans the room. He comes straight to us and looks down at Wendy, whose expression quickly morphs from surprise to discomfort.

“Could I see you alone for a minute?” he asks.

She gets up without a word and follows him outside. Through the window, I see Kaiser speaking, Wendy listening attentively. When they come back in, Wendy goes to the far end of the bar while Kaiser takes her stool beside me.

“That didn’t look very smooth,” I tell him. “What did you say to her?”

“That I needed to talk to you without Lenz hearing.”

“I see. She’s got a terrible crush on you.”

“I never encouraged it.”

“You think that makes it any better for her?”

Kaiser picks up a menu. “She’s a good girl, and she’s tough. She can handle it.” He glances up at me, and his eyes seem to hold more understanding than his words. The skin around his eyes is dark with fatigue.

“Okay,” I say, looking at my own menu. “What are we doing here?”

“This is our first date, isn’t it?” He says it deadpan, and I laugh in spite of myself.

“Come on. What’s going on?”

“Just what I told Wendy. I want to talk to you without Lenz around. Or Baxter, for that matter. I have a certain amount of anxiety that we’re behind the curve. That whoever’s running this thing is ahead of us. Maybe way ahead.”

I sense the disquiet in him, in the way he holds himself. “Okay. Tell me about it.”

“I can’t explain it. It’s a feeling. I want to do something about it, though.”

“What?”

“We’ll get to it. Let’s order.”

Kaiser signals a waiter, and he comes almost immediately. We order omelets and orange juice, and I ask for cafe au lait as well. It’s nice to be in a place where they’d look at you like an idiot if you asked for some fancy latte or exotic extras. Glancing to my left, I catch Wendy watching us over her shoulder.

“What will Baxter say about you talking to me alone?”

“I don’t think Wendy will tell him. She’ll give us the benefit of the doubt this time.”

“But he wouldn’t like it, would he?”

“He trusts me, to a point. He wouldn’t like what I’m going to say.”

“Which is?”

Kaiser puts his elbows on the counter and rotates his stool so that he faces me more directly. “Have you ever fired a handgun?”

“Yes.”

“An automatic or a revolver?”

“Both.”

“If I got you one, would you carry it?”

“What would Baxter think about that?”

“He wouldn’t like it. And the Office of Professional Responsibility would probably fire me.”

“So why are you suggesting it?”

“Because I think you’re in danger. If the UNSUB wants you, he could shoot Wendy before either of you knew he was there. Then it would just be you and him. If you’re armed, you might have a chance to react in time.”

“You mean kill him?”

“Could you do it?”

“If he shot Wendy in front of me? You’re damn straight.”

“What if he just knocked her out and tried to pull you into a car? Would you shoot him then?”

A wave of discomfort rolls through me, flashes of memory that I thrust back into the dark. “I’ll do what I have to do to save myself.”

Kaiser’s eyes never leave my face. “Have you ever shot anybody before?”

“I’ve been shot before. Let’s leave it at that.”

“I get the feeling your life has been exciting even by the standard of war correspondents.”

“It hasn’t been dull.”

“Has it taken a lot out of you?”

I look away and focus on Wendy’s straight back. The more I watch her, the more I like her. The path she chose is much more regimented than mine, but she brings to it the passion I brought to mine when I was younger. “Yes, it has.”

“That’s why you took time out to do this book you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been wanting to do that for a long time?”

“Yes.” I look back at Kaiser, into the hazel eyes that appear to hold genuine curiosity. “But once I really started, I wasn’t sure it was going to give me what I wanted out of it.”

“What was that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Our omelets and juice arrive, but neither of us lifts a fork.

“May I ask you a personal question?” he says.

“You can ask.”

“You’ve never been married?”

“That’s right. Does that shock you?”

“It surprises me. Not many heterosexual women who look like you make it to forty without getting married at least once.”

“Is that a nice way of asking what’s wrong with me?”

Kaiser laughs. “It’s a nice way of being nosy.”

“You’d think I’d be a prize catch, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“A lot of guys think that. From a distance.”

“What’s wrong up close?”

“I’m not like most women.”

“How so?”

“Well, it goes like this. I meet a guy. Good-looking, successful, independent. Doctor, journalist, investment banker, A-list actor. Whatever. He can’t wait to go out with me. I’m a not-so-ugly woman in what a lot of people see as a glamour job. The first few dates, he shows me off to his friends. We like each other. We get intimate. Then, in a week or a month, I get a new assignment. Afghanistan. Brazil. Bosnia. Egypt. And not a fly-in-and-out Dan Rather junket. A month on the ground schlepping cameras. Maybe this particular guy is making international partner the next week and wants me at his celebration party. Maybe the Oscars are next week. But I take the assignment. I won’t even discuss turning it down. And by the time I get back, he’s decided maybe the relationship isn’t working out after all.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because most guys have the one-up gene.”

“The what?”

“The one-up gene. They have to be in the superior position. They love the idea of being with me. But the reality is far from what they envision. Some don’t like that I make more money than they do. The ones who make more money than I do don’t like it when their friends act like my job is more important than theirs. Some can’t take the fact that I have a higher priority than them in my life. I don’t mean to complain about it. I just want you to understand.”

“I make sixty-eight thousand dollars a year,” says Kaiser. “I know you make more than that.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw your tax return.”

“You what?”

“We had to rule you out as a suspect. That was part of it.”

“Great.”

“But I don’t think your job is any more important than mine.” He picks up a fork and takes a bite of his omelet. “Do you?”

“No.”

“And I know I’m not the highest priority in your life.”

“True.”

“And I’m perfectly okay with that.”

I watch him as he pours hot sauce on his omelet, but I can’t read anything in his eyes. “What are we talking about?”

“I think you know.”

“Well, at least we’re on the same page.”

He smiles, and this time his white teeth show and his eyes sparkle. “I didn’t really come here to say that, but I’m glad I did. I feel awkward because of your sister.”

“That has nothing to do with my sister. What happened to Jane only confirmed something I learned a long time ago. If you wait to do things you want to do or ought to do, you may be dead before you get the chance.”

“I learned that too. In Vietnam. But it’s easy to lose sight of it in the rush of everyday life. To get so caught up in what you’re doing, people depending on you, that you develop tunnel vision. You know that feeling?”

“For a long time, the only part of the world I saw was through a lens.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m drifting. Until I found the paintings, anyway. But beneath that, I’m not really tethered to anything.”

“Can you handle another personal question?”

“Might as well.”

“Lenz told me you weren’t close to your sister. Yet you’re doing far more than any relative involved in this case. You’ve made it your mission to find her, or to find the truth. How do you explain that?”

How do I explain that? “I didn’t tell Lenz everything. Jane and I had problems growing up, yes. Some of those problems lasted into adulthood. But about three years ago, I had a bad health scare. I’d gone to the emergency room for pain, and the next thing I knew, I was in the oncology ward. They thought I had ovarian cancer. I was lucky it happened in San Francisco, and not while I was on assignment somewhere. But my friends were on assignment. I was alone and scared to death.”

I pause and swallow, fighting the lump rising in my throat. “Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to find Jane standing beside my bed, holding my hand. I thought I was dreaming. She said she’d awakened from a dead sleep the night before. She felt a painful shock go through her, like a labor contraction, and her mind filled with an image of my face. She called my house and got my machine. Then she called my agency and found out I was in the hospital. She left the kids with Marc and flew straight out to be with me. She slept in that hospital room for four days. She wheeled me to the tests, handled the doctors and nurses, everything. She never left my side.”

“You hadn’t been close before that?”

“No. And I’m not saying the sins of the past were magically redeemed. But she told me some things. She said that as she got older, she’d begun to understand the sacrifices I’d made to take care of her when we were kids. That she knew I’d only wanted the best for her, even if I didn’t always know what that was. I told her I respected the life she’d made for herself, even though I’d belittled it before. It meant a lot to her.” I pick up my fork and draw imaginary circles on the countertop. “It’s easy to feel independent when you’re young, that you don’t need anybody. But as time passes, family starts to matter. And with our mother in the shape she’s in, Jane and I only had each other.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense.”

“I don’t know what I believe right now. All I know is that I have to find her. Dead, alive, whatever. She’s my blood, and I love her. It’s that simple. I have to find my sister.”

Kaiser reaches out and gently squeezes my wrist. “You will, Jordan.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you ever wanted your own family? To settle down, have kids, the whole thing?”

“Every woman I ever knew wanted that in some form or fashion.”

“And you?”

“I hear the clock ticking. I visited my nephew and niece last night, and my feelings for them overwhelmed me.”

He glances down the counter. “Wendy said there might have been some trouble over there. At your brother-in-law’s.”

“You know, I can take you guys in my life up to a point. But there’s a line you don’t cross.”

“She only told us because it’s her job to protect you.”

“I won’t give up all my privacy to be protected.” I take a long sip of my coffee and try to keep my temper in check. “Just what do you know about me, anyway? My medical records? Everything down to my bra size?”

“I don’t know your bra size.” His face is absolutely serious.

“Do you want to?”

“I think I’m up to investigating the question.”

“Given adequate time, you mean.”

“Naturally.” He takes a sip of juice and wipes his mouth with his napkin. “How much time do you think that would be?”

“At least four hours. Uninterrupted.”

“We won’t get four hours tomorrow.”

“And we don’t have it tonight.”

He looks again at Wendy, who’s making a point of not looking at us. “No, we don’t. The task force is meeting right now in the Emergency Operations Center. I have to get back, and I don’t know when I can get out of it.”

“Speaking of that, you told de Becque you’re having trouble matching the abstract faces in the paintings to victims, right?”

Kaiser nods. “Eleven victims, nineteen paintings. Two major problems. There must be victims we don’t know about. Murders or disappearances that don’t match the crime signature exactly. Maybe they were hookers or runaways rather than society women, and nobody reported them missing. Maybe we’ve actually found their bodies, but since they match the more abstract paintings, we can’t tell. But a Jefferson Parish detective and I have gone over every homicide and missing person in New Orleans for the past three years, and we only have a handful of possibles, none very likely.”

“How many paintings have you matched to known victims?”

“Six definitive matches out of eleven. Two strong probables. But the faces are so vague in some of the paintings, or so distorted, that we just can’t get anywhere with them.”

“Who do you have working on them?”

“The University of Arizona. They’ve done great work for us in the past. Digital photo enhancement.”

“But not this time?”

“Not so far.”

“I think that’s because what you want in this case isn’t really photo enhancement. The distortions you want to correct aren’t the result of blur or a lack of resolution that masks reality. They’re distortions created in the mind of a human being, perhaps an insane one. They may have little or no correspondence with reality.”

Kaiser watches me with an unblinking gaze. “What do you suggest?”

“I know some photographers who work exclusively in the digital domain. I don’t want to mention names, but I recall one of them talking about a system that was being developed for the government – the CIA or NSA or somebody -for satellite photo interpretation. Its purpose was to try to bring visual coherence out of chaos. He couldn’t say much about it, and I wasn’t that interested, but I remember that much.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two or three years.”

“Did this system have a name?”

“At the time he called it Argus. You know, the mythical beast with a hundred eyes?”

“I’ll ask Baxter to talk to the other acronym agencies and see what he can find out.”

“Okay. There’s my contribution. Is the Bureau buying this breakfast?”

“I think the Bureau can afford it.” Apropos of nothing, Kaiser reaches out and touches my hand, and the thrill that races up my arm sets an alarm bell ringing in my brain. “Look,” he says, with another glance at Wendy, “why don’t we-”

I pull back my hand. “Let’s don’t push it, okay? It’s there. We know it’s there. Let’s see what happens.”

He nods slowly. “Okay. It’s your call.”

We eat the remainder of our meal in silence, watching each other and the gentle comedy of late diners around us. I’m grateful that he doesn’t feel pressured to make small talk; it bodes well.

After he pays the check, he leads me over to Wendy and thanks her for the time she gave us. He speaks and moves with such professional detachment that Wendy seems to take heart. This is no reflection on her intelligence. All of us see what we want to see until we’re forced to see otherwise.

Outside, amid a throng of partying Tulane students, Kaiser bids us farewell and leaves for the field office. Wendy doesn’t talk much on the way back to her apartment, and I’m glad for it. As much as I like her, I think tomorrow would be a good day to find a hotel.