Dead Sleep

6

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 deliriously 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, cherie, 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 cherie 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. Bu 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 cluster-fuck. 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?”

“Yes. Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said it was a vicious killing.”

“It was that, all right. And it happened because Lenz did something supremely arrogant and stupid. He got there five minutes after she died on her own kitchen table.”

“God.”

“He retired after that. He’s done some consulting for Baxter since, but I don’t think he learned the right lesson from what happened. He still has too much faith in his own abilities.”

“What do you think about his plan to use me to rattle any suspects you dig up?”

“It could work, but it’s not as simple or safe as it sounds. The results could be inconclusive, and the strategy could put you right in the killer’s sights.”

Kaiser’s cell phone beeps again. He lifts it from the detritus of the meal and scans the LCD. “Lenz again.”

“Are you going to answer?”

“No.”

Since Kaiser took the conversation into personal territory, I feel justified in doing the same. “You’ve told me Lenz’s dirty laundry. What about yours? Why did you leave Quantico?”

“What did Lenz tell you?”

“Nothing. He said he’d leave it for you to tell me, if you would.”

Kaiser looks off toward a stand of palm trees, where two lovers and a dog lie on a blanket, an ice chest beside them. “It’s pretty simple, really. I burned out. It happens to everyone in that job, sooner or later. I just snapped a little more spectacularly than most.”

“What happened?”

“After four years at Quantico, I was pretty much Baxter’s right hand. I was handling far too heavy a load. Over a hundred and twenty active cases. Child murders, serial rapes, bombers, kidnappings, the whole sick spectrum. You can’t assign priorities in a situation like that. Behind every single case, every photo, is a desperate family. Distraught parents, husbands, siblings. Frustrated cops aching to help them. It got to where I was actually living at the Academy. When my personal life fell apart, I hardly noticed. Then one day the inevitable happened.”

This vague reference to his personal life makes me check his left hand. There’s no wedding band there.

“What was that?” I ask. “The inevitable?”

“Baxter and I were out at the Montana State Prison, interviewing a death-row inmate. He’d raped and murdered seven little boys. Tortured most of them before they died. It was no different from interviews I’d done a dozen times before, but this guy was really enjoying telling us what he’d done. A lot of them do, of course, but this time… I just couldn’t detach myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about this one little boy. Six years old, screaming for his mother while this guy shoved power tools up his rectum.” Kaiser swallows hard, like his mouth is dry. “And I lost control.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over the table. I tried to kill him.”

“How close did you come?”

“I broke his jaw, his nose, and assorted other facial bones. I damaged his larynx and put out one of his eyes. Baxter couldn’t pull me off. He finally clubbed the base of my skull with a coffee mug. Stunned me long enough for him to drag me out. The guy was hospitalized for twenty-six days.”

“Jesus. How did you keep your job?”

Kaiser slowly shakes his head, as if gauging how much to tell me. “Baxter covered for me. He told the warden the con jumped me and I defended myself.” Kaiser’s eyes search out the lovers again. “I guess you’re going to go all liberal on me now, tell me I violated his civil rights?”

“Well, you did. You know that. But I understand why. I’ve made myself part of the story before, instead of covering it. It sounds to me like you had a delayed reaction to something else.”

He looks back at me as though surprised. “That’s what it was, all right. I’d lost a little girl a week before. Working a rape-murder case in Minnesota. I was advising Minneapolis Homicide, and we were close to getting the UNSUB. Really close. But he strangled one more little girl before we did. If I’d been one day faster… well, you know.”

“It’s in the past. Isn’t that what you told me? You can’t change it, so forget it.”

“Glib bullshit.”

His honesty brings a smile to my face. “A while ago you said ‘clusterfuck.’ That’s a Vietnam term, isn’t it?”

He nods distractedly. “Yeah.”

“Were you there?”

“Yeah.”

“You look too young for it.”

“I was there at the end. Seventy-one and -two.”

Which makes him forty-six or forty-seven, if he went over when he was eighteen. “The end was seventy-three,” I remind him. “Seventy-five, really. There was still a lot of ground fighting in seventy-one.”

“That’s what I meant. The end of the fighting.”

“What branch of service?”

“Army.”

“Were you drafted?”

“I wish I could tell you I was. But I volunteered. Every civilian was trying like hell to stay out of the military, every soldier was trying to get out of Vietnam, and I was trying to get in. What did I know? I was a kid from rural Idaho. I went to Ranger School, the whole nine yards.”

“How did you feel about journalists over there? Photographers?”

“They had a job to do, like I did.”

“A different job.”

“True. I met a couple who were okay. But some of them just stayed in the hotels and sent Vietnamese out to get their combat shots. I didn’t care much for them.”

“That still happens in some places.”

“I’ve seen your name under some pretty rough pictures. Are you a lot like your father?”

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. All I know is what people have told me about him. Guys who worked with him in the field. I think we’re different as photographers.”

“How so?”

“Wars attract different kinds. There are the hotel guys you talked about, who don’t even count. There are the Hemingway wanna-bes, out there to test themselves. Then you have the ones who get off on the danger, who live for the rush. They’re the crazy ones, like Sean Flynn, riding hell-for-leather through firefights on a motorcycle, with a camera in his hand. And then there are the good ones. The ones who do it because they feel it’s the right thing to do. They know the danger, they’re scared shitless, but they do it anyway. They crawl right into the middle of it, where the mortar rounds are dropping and the machine guns are churning up the mud.”

“That’s the kind of courage I respected over there,” Kaiser says quietly. “I knew some soldiers like that.”

His face is lined with silent grief; I wonder if he knows it. “Something tells me you were a soldier like that.”

He doesn’t respond.

“That’s the kind of courage my father had,” I tell him. “He wasn’t that gifted a photographer, when you get down to it. His composition was never that great. But he would get so close to the elephant that the crazies wouldn’t even go there. And when you’re that close, composition doesn’t matter. Just the shot. And that made his pictures unique. He went into Laos and Cambodia. He spent twelve days underground at Khe Sanh, during the worst of the siege. I have a photo a marine shot of him peeing in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

Kaiser’s eyes flick toward me at last. “Who told you that? About the elephant?”

“My dad. When I was a kid, I asked him why he did such a dangerous job, and he tried to make out like it wasn’t dangerous at all. He said the soldiers called combat ‘seeing the elephant,’ that it was like a big circus.”

“It was, in a lot of ways.”

“Later, when I got a taste of it myself, I understood better.”

“If you’re not like him, what kind of photographer are you? Why do you do it?”

“Because I have to. I don’t even remember making a conscious choice.”

“Are you trying to change the world?”

I laugh again. “In the beginning I was. I’m not that naive now.”

“You’ve probably changed it more than most people ever will. You change people’s minds, make them see things in a new way. That’s the hardest thing to do in this world, if you ask me.”

“Will you marry me?”

He laughs and hits me on the shoulder. “Are you that starved for affirmation?”

“This past year has really sucked.”

“The past two have sucked for me. Welcome to the club.”

Kaiser’s cell phone rings again. He ignores it, but this time it does not relent, and he finally picks it up and looks at the LCD. “That’s Baxter at Quantico.” He presses Send.

“Kaiser.” His face grows tight as he listens. “Okay, I will.” He hangs up and gathers the leftovers into the bags.

“What happened?”

“Baxter wants me back at the field office.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but he said to bring you with me. They’re setting up a video link to Quantico, and he wants you there.”

My heart stutters. “Oh, God. Do you think they’ve found out something about Jane?”

“No point in guessing.” He tosses the bags one after another at a metal trash can ten feet away. They bang in without touching the rim. “Baxter’s voice was on edge, though. Something’s popped somewhere.”