Dead Sleep

5

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-a-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 fiance, 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. Sheriffs 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.