Dead Sleep

20

As I walk along the oak-shaded sidewalk of Esplanade, Agent Wendy trailing a few yards behind, my mind swirls with images I have no desire to ponder, and my stomach rolls with the low-level nausea I’ve felt since Dr. Lenz badgered Roger Wheaton into telling us his disease rendered him impotent years ago. Frank Smith’s revelation of Wheaton’s plea for euthanasia only made it worse. The impact of my shoes against the sidewalk offers a metronomic distraction from those thoughts, so I focus my mind on that.

From Esplanade I turn onto Royal Street, which farther on becomes the center of the antique trade in the Quarter, but here on the downriver end it’s a peaceful lane of homes and shuttered warehouses. I spent a good deal of time walking this grid of streets when I moved here at seventeen, getting to know a world at once seamier and more exotic than the provincial one I left in north Mississippi. Two decades later the sights, smells, and sounds are the same. Ornate wrought-iron balconies laden with ferns and flags climb the faces of pastel buildings, not so bright as those in the Caribbean, but festive in their stately way; the aromas of baking bread and simmering gumbo drift from the direction of St. Philip Street; and shouted cries of the urban New Orleans patois collide with rapid precise French spoken by tourists standing on the corner of Ursulines.

Just three blocks to my left, beyond Decatur Street and the levee, rolls the Mississippi River, where great ships bob higher than the roofs of the buildings. I feel myself drawn toward it, but since the water is blocked by the wharf at the end of Ursulines, I stay on Royal, walking at a native’s clip. My inner ear confirms what I have long known, that I am below sea level, walking in a world that exists only provisionally, that a hurricane making landfall here would spill the lake and the river into the Quarter like a great bowl and cover everything from the Lucky Dog men to the tourist traps of Bourbon Street, leaving only cathedral spires, Andy Jackson on his horse, and screeching gulls circling the electrical towers.

At St. Philip I break left, making for the river. Wendy’s flats go staccato as she moves to keep pace with me. The sound of a slide guitar jangles from the doorway of the Babylon Club, and with every step the Quarter grows more commercial. There are restaurants and pubs now, lawyers’ offices, small hotels. Yet still the odd doorway leads down a tunnel that opens onto a secluded courtyard, beckoning with the promise of midnight trysts and masked soirees. I shudder in sudden awareness that the Sleeping Women may have been painted in one of these courtyards. How strange to know that last night, while the people down here drank and laughed and loved and slept, government planes crisscrossed the sky above, shooting thermal images of the buildings, searching for a garden private enough in which to paint a dead woman without interruption.

Joan of Arc awaits me at the Place de France, a little concrete island in the traffic. She sits high on a golden horse, holding a golden flag against the gray clouds, an imperfect monument to a woman who overstepped what those in power saw as her place; an honest monument would show her burning at the stake. Wendy moves alongside me here, for suddenly we are awash in a sea of humanity, surging waves of tourists and cars and French Market merchants hawking vegetables, coffee, and strange souvenirs. I can smell the river now, a muddy, fetid scent on the cool air. Slipping between two fat cream-colored columns, I trot up some flagstone steps, and then I’m looking over a narrow parking lot at the levee and the booms of a freighter whose red-painted waterline floats at the level of my eyes.

“Where are we going?” asks Wendy.

“The river. There’s a walkway on the levee, across the streetcar tracks.”

“I know. The Moonwalk.”

She stays at my shoulder as I march to the little streetcar stop at Dumaine, then cross over the tracks and climb to the brick walkway atop the levee. The river is wide here, and the water high for this time of year, a gray-brown flood separating New Orleans from Algiers. Pushboats and tugs churn across the water at surprising speed, gulls dipping and diving around them. We walk toward Jackson Square, and in the distance I see the hotels and department stores of Canal Place, the old Trade Mart building, the Aquarium of the Americas, and the twin bridges arching across to the west bank.

We’re not alone on the walkway. There are tourists with cameras, joggers wearing headphones, buskers with open guitar cases full of change, and restless bums trying to catch the eyes of passersby, searching for likely marks. As we approach and pass each, I feel Wendy tense beside me, then slowly relax.

Below us on the right lie the streetcar tracks and the parking lot that runs the length of the Quarter; to our left the levee slopes twenty-five feet toward the water, an earthen wall lined with riprap, the heavy gray rocks the Corps of Engineers uses for erosion control. Driftwood clogs the riprap at water’s edge, and every forty yards or so stands a fisherman with a cane pole or rod, hoping for a catfish or a gar.

“Wendy, do you remember the big scandal about FBI lab people giving false evidence testimony? Dummying up results to give prosecutors what they needed?”

“Yes,” she says in an inquisitive tone.

“Wasn’t it proved that a lot of the Bureau’s high-tech forensic tests weren’t half as accurate as claimed?”

“In some cases. But Louis Freeh made it a priority to correct all that. You’re thinking about the sable brush hairs?”

“I’m wondering if the four people we’ve been badgering are tied to this case in any way at all.”

“The lab wasn’t aiming for some known result in this case, Jordan. They just came up with a rare type and lot of brush hair, and one of the few places that lot went was New Orleans.”

Her answer is solid, and that reassures me a little. I can hear myself breathing harder from exertion, but Wendy speaks as though we’re sitting across from each other at lunch.

“I’ve never worked a murder case,” she says. “But I have total faith in John and Mr. Baxter.”

I nod, but my faith is far from complete. Down at water’s edge, a huge bearded man in an overcoat looks up the rocky slope as we walk past. He’s far enough away that Wendy doesn’t tense, but I sense that she could have her gun out in a second or less.

“What was Thalia Laveau like?” she asks.

“Really nice. She had a tough childhood. Her father and cousin sexually abused her.”

“Yuck.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“She was gay?”

“She still is, I hope.”

“God, yes.” Wendy’s face colors. “I didn’t mean that to sound like it did.”

“It’s okay.”

As we walk on, she seems to withdraw into her own thoughts. Then out of the blue she says, “I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I heard during the interview with Laveau, you told her you got raped once. Is that true?”

I feel a flash of temper, knowing the story is probably making the rounds of the field office, but it’s hard to be angry at Wendy, whose curiosity seems part of an eternal quest for self-improvement. “It’s true.”

“I really admire you for speaking up like that, knowing those guys could hear you on the wire.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Does it feel like a long time ago?”

“No.”

She nods. “That’s what I figured.”

“Have you ever had trouble like that?”

“Not that bad. A baseball player got really pushy with me in college once, in the backseat of his car. I waited until he exposed himself, and then I made him regret it.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah. But something like this, where they snatch you off the street, someone who’s all prepared with a rape kit-”

“We don’t know the victims are being raped,” I remind her.

“Well, right, except for the woman taken from Dorignac’s.”

A wave of heat comes into my cheeks.

“I shouldn’t assume anything about the others from that,” Wendy goes on. “We don’t know for sure the UNSUB took her.”

Her words stop me dead on the walkway. “The woman taken from Dorignac’s grocery was raped?”

Wendy looks confused. “Well, they found semen inside her. She could have just had sex, of course, but I think the opinion of the pathologist was that she was raped.”

As I stand speechless in the wind, a drop of rain touches my face. I had thought the police took DNA samples from the suspects to compare to skin found under the Dorignac’s woman’s fingernails. But they had more than that. And kept it from me. Turning left, I see a gray line of raindrops advancing across the river with the wind, dimpling the waves like soldiers marching over from the Algiers shore.

“I just put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?” says Wendy. “They didn’t tell you.”

“They didn’t tell me.”

“I guess they didn’t want you to suffer any more than you had to, with your sister and all.”

My rising anger is dwarfed by hurt at John’s betrayal. How could he hold this back from me? But then come images of Jane suffering terror and rape -

“God, I’m in trouble,” Wendy says. But instead of asking me to keep quiet, she says, “They should have told you.”

I turn and continue along the levee despite the rain, which is light and will probably pass quickly, if my memories of New Orleans are accurate.

“You know it’s raining,” says Wendy.

“Yes.”

The tourists and joggers are moving a little faster, but the fishermen stand their ground, knowing the odds favor a quick blowover.

A clattering racket behind us startles Wendy, but it’s only the streetcar. In a few seconds it trundles past us and stops opposite Jackson Square. To our right is the burnt-orange roof of the Cafe du Monde, and the smell of coffee and frying beignets wafts over the levee, making my mouth water and my stomach ache.

“Pavlov’s dog,” I say quietly.

“Can we talk about something personal for a second?” Wendy asks in a hesitant voice.

“I thought we were.”

“This is different.”

I know what’s coming. “Sure,” I tell her, dreading the questions to follow.

“I think John has a thing for you.”

“He does,” I reply.

“And you have a thing for him?”

“Yes.”

As a tall man in a sock cap approaches, she tenses and waits for him to pass. After he does, she looks back over her shoulder until he’s well away.

“Well, I know you know I like him. John knows, too, I think. I mean, he’d have to be blind, I guess. When I feel something for somebody, I’m not very subtle about it.”

“Nobody is, when they really feel something.”

“I guess I’m just not what he’s looking for,” she says, her voice remarkably free of self-pity. “I mean, I know he likes me and everything, but… you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. It’s never easy.”

She shrugs. “The weird thing is, I’m not jealous of you. If it was another woman from the office, I probably would be.” She kicks a small rock lying on the bricks. “Who am I kidding? I know I would be. I’d be comparing myself to her and asking why I fell short. But you’re different.”

Ahead on our right, there’s a guitarist playing blues on a bench. A woman stands behind him, holding an umbrella over his head to protect the instrument from the rain. A knot of people listens with appreciation.

“Probably not as different as you think,” I tell her. “I’m just a woman.”

“No, you are. So many women I know – professional women – they’re struggling for respect all the time. They’re so conscious of how they’re being treated, constantly looking for respect, that they’re only using seventy percent of their brains for their job. Sometimes I feel like that. But you just go about your business like you never even think about it. You just expect respect, and you get it.”

“I’m older than you are. Got a lot more miles on me.”

“That’s it,” she says. “Not the age, but the miles. The fact that you’ve been all over the world, covered wars and stuff. Seen combat. I’ve never seen John or the SAC act the way they act around you – with another woman, I mean. Not even with female ASACs.”

“You’ll get there. It’s not any great watershed moment, though. One day you just realize you’re part of the game instead of a spectator. You’re on the inside, and there’s no getting back out again, even if you want to.”

“I’ll be glad when that day comes.”

“Don’t be in too much of a hurry.”

“I think about Robin Ahrens sometimes. She was the first female FBI agent to be killed in the line of duty. It happened in eighty-five. They were trying to arrest an armored car thief, and things got confused. She was shot by a male agent who mistook her for a bad guy.”

“You’re curious about what action is like, aren’t you?”

“I guess so. I mean, being on the SWAT team and all. You wonder about the real thing.”

“Robin’s story is a textbook lesson. Combat is total confusion from the first shot. Combat vets all say the same thing. Remember your training, and don’t try to be a hero. That’s pretty much the bible, right there.”

“I just want to do my job,” Wendy says. “Not mess up some stupid way and get someone hurt or killed.”

“You won’t. Your love life is more complicated than your job ever will be.”

She laughs ruefully. “You’re probably right about that. Well, anyway, I know why John is attracted to you, and it’s okay. You guys don’t have to hide from me or anything.”

I wonder if I could ever summon the selfless goodness that seems to flow from this girl. Probably not. I touch her forearm. “Thanks, Wendy. And I haven’t slept with him yet, if you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t asking that,” she says quickly. Then she bites her lip. “Though maybe I was wondering. A little.”

We both laugh, and suddenly the day does not seem quite so gray, or the rain so cold. I wave to the guitarist as we pass him, and then we’re at the artillery park and Jackson Square. Just across Decatur wait the tourist carriages, their horses standing wearily in the rain, with a Lucky Dog man lifting wieners from his steaming cart nearby. On St. Ann, the card tables of tarot readers line the cement, and sidewalk artists advertise their services with portraits of Barbra, the Duke, the Beatles, and Jerry Garcia.

“The rain’s not stopping,” Wendy says. “Maybe we should call for a car.”

“In a minute.” I look to our left, where wide wooden steps march right down into the swollen river. “Let’s go down to the old Jax Brewery. Get some coffee.”

Wendy nods, but I can see it goes against her instincts. I pick up the pace, fighting my anger at John for holding back on me. The rain has thinned out the walkway traffic, but two men are approaching, a young one with greasy jeans and an unkempt beard, and a few yards behind him a man wearing khakis and a teal Ralph Lauren button-down. Wendy tenses, watching the bearded man, then glances over her shoulder as he passes. While she watches him, the man in the Polo shirt brings up his right arm, and polished nickel gleams in the rain.

I shout a warning to Wendy, and before the sound fades she’s in front of me, her hand flying under her jacket to the pistol holstered there.

A gunshot explodes over the levee, and something hot and wet stings my face. Wendy seems to stutter in place, then falls backward onto the bricks with a flat thump like a sack of sand. My white blouse is spattered with a fine red mist. Wendy’s blood. Screams erupt from the parking lot, and I sense more than see people diving to the ground.

The man in the Polo charges me, his gun pointed at my chest, and grabs my arm with his free hand. “Move your ass!” he shouts, dragging me toward streetcar tracks. “Move!”

My eyes are locked on Wendy, who lies on her back, eyes open and fixed on the sky, a large bubble of blood on her lips. As I stare, my captor pulls up his gun and shoots her again, this time in the side. She doesn’t make a sound.

I try to yank my arm free, but he swings the gun in a quick savage arc against my forehead, and the world blanks out for a moment.

“Move or I’ll kill you right here!”

A jumble of thoughts: his tremendous strength; his lack of hesitation in shooting Wendy, as John predicted; the realization that this is no random attack, that he shot Wendy to get to me, that he wants me alive; that this is him - the kidnapper, the UNSUB, the motherfucker who took my sister. There’s no hunting him anymore. He’s hunting me. And he has me.

As he drags me toward the streetcar tracks, I notice one man in the parking lot who’s not lying prone on the gravel. Both his arms are leveled in our direction, and I’m starting to duck when I recognize John Kaiser.

“Jordan!” he cries. “Drop!”

As I start to fall, my captor jerks me in front of him like a shield. John moves left, angling for a shot, but I’m in his way. The man holding me throws up his free arm and fires three times quickly in John’s direction. John spins, trying to avoid the shots, but his spin continues to the ground and he does not get up.

“Dead cop,” says the voice in my ear. The barrel of his pistol touches my temple. “Move.”

He wants me in the parking lot. I can’t let him get me into a car. My mind flashes onto the gun John gave me, but it’s lying useless in its holster in my rented Mustang, parked at the FBI office. The only weapon I have is the knowledge that the man holding me doesn’t want to kill me here. He has a much more exotic fate in mind.

I fire my elbow into his rib cage, earning a crack and a howl of agony. His arm goes limp for an instant, and in that instant I wrench myself loose and run back toward Wendy, an image of her gun in my head. But as I near her I realize she’s lying on top of the still-holstered weapon. If I stop to turn her over, he’ll catch me. There’s no cover here but the river, so I lunge left, toward the wooden steps that lead down to the water. As I reach the top step, a shot rings out behind me.

“Don’t make me kill you!”

I’m silhouetted on the edge of the steps like a duck in an arcade, and I can’t possibly reach the water in one leap. I’m going to have to wait for a better chance.

As I turn back, he marches up with the gun, his dark eyes blazing. He looks a little older than I am, with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a deeply lined face. I’ve never seen his face, but I recognize the dark light in his eyes, from places I prefer not to remember.

“We’re going to my car,” he says. “If you fight, I’ll shoot you in the spine. You’ll go limp as a rag doll, and I’ll have to carry you, but you’ll still be nice and warm between the legs and you’ll still make a pretty picture for the man.”

The icy conviction in his voice paralyzes me, wiping out every emotion but terror. Seizing my arm, he pulls me back across the walkway, his eyes full of purpose.

Thirty yards away, John lies on his stomach, struggling in vain to reach his knees. When we pass him, my attacker will fire a bullet into him, just as he did with Wendy. My limbs are heavy with the inevitability of nightmares -

“Jooordan!”

The scream stops me cold, and in some sliver of a second I know it came from Wendy Travis’s throat. Twisting my neck, I see her lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her pistol clenched in both hands, her eyes shining brightly through the blood and rain. An arm whips around me to aim at her, but I bat it aside and throw myself as far away as I can.

Orange flame bursts from the barrel of Wendy’s gun.

An explosive grunt sounds beside me. My attacker staggers, then pulls his gun back up. Wendy’s gun spits again. He bellows in rage and pain, then charges her with blind fury. Wendy fires again but misses, and he starts shooting, round after round. He misses four times, but then Wendy’s head snaps back and I’m screaming in denial, knowing in my bones that she’s gone.

He turns back to me, but he’s wounded and can’t move well. Blood has matted the teal Polo to his chest and shoulder. From twenty yards away, he raises his gun and points it at me. My eyes are full of tears, and I can see that he’s abandoned his plan. He means to kill me now.

The gun wavers, steadies, then flies skyward as thunder booms behind me and ricochets back from the far shore. I whirl to find John kneeling at the edge of the levee, his.40-caliber automatic leveled with absolute stillness.

“Hit the bricks!” he yells.

I dive onto the walkway, and John empties his clip, blast after blast roaring across the river, the echoes of his first shots smashing into the reports of the later ones. When I look up, my attacker is gone.

As the last shot fades, I crawl across the bricks to Wendy, hoping it’s not too late. The hair at the back of her head is a mass of blood and brain matter, and my heart knots against the truth. The first thing I learned in a military field hospital is that visible brain matter means the casualty won’t make it.

“Get down!” John shouts. “Find cover!”

I kiss Wendy’s hair, then get slowly to my feet and walk to the crest of the wooden steps and look down. The man in the Polo is doubled over near the bottom step, gasping for breath and trying to hang on to a wooden chain post. As I watch, my heart empty of pity, his hand slips off the post and he tumbles headfirst into the river.

After a moment he bobs to the surface, floating in place, his mouth opening and closing like that of a landed fish. Then he slowly turns away as the current takes hold of him. I feel no urge to save him, but as the current pulls him along the bank, I realize that if the river takes him, we may never know who he was, never find Thalia, or Jane, or any of the others – or even learn what happened to them.

Hopping over the chain, I try to keep pace with him by running along the treacherous riprap. Navigating the gray rocks without breaking an ankle is difficult, and the high water carries him rapidly along, not only downriver but into the main channel. He’s twenty feet from the bank and slipping farther away.

“Help!” he shouts, panic filling his dull eyes. “I can’t breathe!”

His lungs are probably filling with blood. He could drown internally before the river gets him. I can’t go in after him; he could drown me even without meaning to.

“Please!” he shouts. “I can’t stay up!”

“Go to hell!” I yell, though I need to save him.

He’s twenty-five feet into the channel now, turning in slow circles in the wake of a distant tug. Spinning away from me, he shouts something I can’t hear. Then, as his face comes around, again he repeats it.

“Your sister’s alive!”

A bolus of adrenaline flushes through my veins, and I have to fight every muscle to keep from leaping in after him. That’s just what he wants, of course. He has to be lying.

“Where is she?” I cry.

“Save me!” he yells again. “I can save her! Please!”

“Tell me first!”

His head slips under the water, then bobs up again. I struggle down to the river’s edge, where a big piece of driftwood lies wedged in the rock. It’s a long branch, worn smooth by the water on its journey south.

“Jordan!” shouts a voice from miles away. It’s John, back at the steps. “Bring him in with the branch!”

I pull at the limb with all my strength, but I can’t free it from the rocks. Every second he slips farther downstream, my sister’s fate going with him. I can’t save the bastard without jumping in myself, and that would be insanity. Good swimmers drown in the Mississippi, even without someone trying to kill them.

Suddenly, without conscious thought, my hand flies to the zipper of my fanny pack, and my hand jerks out the Canon point-and-shoot I used at the gallery fire in New York.

I point the lens at the drowning man and shoot one exposure, then scrabble along the riprap, leaping from rock to rock with no regard for my bones, trying to get close enough for a clear shot. But the channel has him now. He’s thirty-five feet out and spinning away. As his face comes around again, I shoot three quick shots, then sprint along the tops of the rocks, hoping for another turn. When he’s forty feet out, I get off two more; then his head slips below the surface and does not return.

Panting with exhaustion, I turn away from the water and climb carefully to the top of the levee. John is sitting on top of the steps, fifty yards away, a cell phone in his hand. The sound of approaching sirens rolls over me from the direction of the Quarter. As I trot down to where John sits, he puts down the phone and tightens his belt, which he has tied around his thigh.

“You’re hit in the leg?” I ask.

Clearly in great pain, he nods, then points down the steps. “Go down there and see if you can find his gun. He might have dropped it. Fingerprints.”

I study every inch of weathered wood as I work my way down the steps, but there’s no gun. There is blood, and a lot of it.

“Look on the rocks just under the water,” calls John.

They don’t call the Mississippi the Big Muddy for nothing. You can’t see through it. Dropping to my knees, I feel my way along the first submerged step, but a soft splinter is my only reward. The second is coated with funk. Moving sideways, I feel among the submerged rocks, and again find nothing. But as my hand comes out of the water, I freeze. Lying between two rocks in a rainbowed pool of oily water is a cellular telephone. Retrieving it from the water, I see blood on it.

“What have you got?” John shouts.

Holding the phone by its antenna, I climb back up the steps.

“Son of a bitch,” John groans.

“It’s still on,” I tell him, looking at the water-filled LCD screen.

“Careful.” He takes the phone by its antenna and holds it before his eyes. “Shit! It just shorted out. While I was looking at it!”

“You can still get prints, though, right?”

“Maybe. But what we really need is the memory chip. This phone’s getting on a plane to Washington. Don’t mention it to any beat cops. Wait for Homicide.”

He points down the levee toward the French Market, where two white-helmeted mounted policemen are spurring their horses across the streetcar tracks.

I sit beside John, and in the first seconds of stillness, I start to shake. I wring my hands, trying to make them stop.

“Wendy’s dead,” I say softly.

He nods.

“She threw herself in front of me.”

“I saw her. She did her job. She was a good kid.”

“She wasn’t a kid. She was a hero. And she worshiped the ground you walked on.”

“I know. Goddamn it.”

“She deserves a medal. For her family.”

“Goes without saying.”

“So what the hell were you doing here?”

John shakes his head but doesn’t look at me. “I didn’t feel good about you walking around the Quarter. I knew you’d gotten upset at Frank Smith’s, and I’ve always felt you were in more danger than anyone realized. I also knew you didn’t have your gun.”

I squeeze his hand. “I’m glad you’re paranoid.”

“What did the guy say to you down there?”

“He said Jane was alive.”

John looks at me, his eyes hard. “Did you believe him?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is, he wasn’t Roger Wheaton or Leon Gaines or Frank Smith.”

“I know.”

“He said something else, John.”

“What?”

“If he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs, and I’d still make a pretty picture for the man.”

John’s face pales. “He said that? ‘For the man’?”

“For the man.”

“Jesus.”

The clatter of hooves on brick is closer. John takes his wallet out of his pants and opens it to show his FBI credentials.

“You lied to me, John.”

“What?”

“The Dorignac’s victim was raped, and you knew it. They found semen in her.”

He says nothing at first. Then: “The post was inconclusive as to rape.”

“You must have asked the husband when he last had sex with her.”

He sighs with resignation. “Okay, it was probably rape. I didn’t want that weighing on you. Especially before the interviews. I didn’t want you suffering needlessly, and nobody wanted you so mad at the suspects that you couldn’t be professional.”

“I understand all that, okay? But don’t ever hold anything back again.”

He nods. “Okay.”

“Nothing John.”

“I got it.”

The horses are upon us. Two cops – one black, one white – stare down with drawn guns.

“Get your hands up! Both of you!”

John holds up his credentials so that the cops can see them.

“Special Agent John Kaiser, FBI. This crime scene is to be secured for the joint task force. I’ve been shot and I can’t walk, so you men get to it.”