Dead Sleep

7

The FBI field office is run from the fourth floor, which was designed so that you see nothing but hallways and doors unless you walk through one of the doors. A few of the doors are open, and as I walk past them, I sense people watching me. At a door marked “Patrick Bowles, Special Agent in Charge,” Kaiser gives me a look of encouragement.

“Don’t be shy. Just say what you think.”

“I usually do.”

He nods and ushers me into a large L-shaped room with a broad window overlooking Lake Pontchartrain. There’s a desk in the dogleg of the L, and sitting behind it is a florid man with quick green eyes and silver hair. On the way over, Kaiser told me that SAC Bowles is the senior FBI official in the state of Louisiana, in charge of 150 field agents and 100 support personnel. Trained as an attorney, Bowles has served in six other field offices and has supervised several major investigations. Fashion-wise, the SAC is the antithesis of John Kaiser: he’s wearing a three-piece suit that never hung on any department store rack, silver links on his French cuffs, and a silk tie. When he gets up to greet me, I see that his shoes are Johnston amp; Murphy, at the least.

“Ms. Glass?” he says, offering his hand. “Patrick Bowles.”

A little Irish in his voice. It makes me think of the Irish Channel, but of course the Channel is now home to black and Cuban families, not Irish immigrants. To avoid awkwardness I shake his hand and give him a guarded smile.

“Take a seat here,” he says, motioning toward a leather chair in a group.

Glancing to my left, I see Arthur Lenz on a sofa in a private seating area in the deep leg of the L. The good doctor doesn’t look happy, but he stands and walks over to us. He and Kaiser do not exchange greetings. Kaiser sits in a chair opposite mine, and Lenz claims the sofa against the wall to my right. SAC Bowles retakes his place behind his desk. He looks like a no-nonsense kind of guy, which is fine with me.

“Have you learned something about my sister?” I ask.

“You’ve met Daniel Baxter?” asks the SAC, ignoring my question. “Of the Investigative Support Unit?”

“You know I have.”

He glances at his watch. “Mr. Baxter wants to discuss something with the four of us. We’ll have a satellite video link in about thirty seconds.”

Bowles pushes a button on his desk, and a three-foot section of wall above Dr. Lenz slides back, revealing a large flat-panel LCD screen.

“Just like James Bond,” I say softly.

Lenz gets up with an irritated sigh and leans against the long window to the right of Bowles’s desk. I glance over at Kaiser, who gives no indication of his feelings. I guess there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in the FBI. There’s a lot of it in photojournalism, too. After a moment, the LCD screen goes blue and numbers begin flickering in the bottom right corner.

“There’s a camera above the screen,” says Bowles. “Baxter can see us all in a wide-angle shot.”

Suddenly, Daniel Baxter’s face fills the screen, and his voice emanates from hidden speakers.

“Hello, Patrick. Hello, Ms. Glass. John. Arthur.”

The video feed isn’t jerky like some home-computer hookup. It has the seamless resolution of corporate America’s tete-a-tetes. The ISU chief looks directly at me as he speaks, which gives me the feeling that he’s actually standing in the room.

“Ms. Glass, from the moment you called me from your return flight from Hong Kong, we’ve been using the combined weight of the Departments of Justice and State to gather the Sleeping Women paintings for forensic analysis. Negotiations like these usually take weeks, but the exigencies of this situation allowed us to apply unprecedented pressure. We now have six paintings in our possession. We’ve already begun our analysis, using both our own technicians and outside consultants. The bad news is, we’ve found no fingerprints preserved in the paint.”

“Damn,” curses Bowles.

“There are hundreds of prints on the frames, of course, but they’re probably meaningless. We have found traces of talc in the paint, which suggests that the artist wore surgical gloves while doing his work. We have what we believe to be the first painting, and it tests positive for talc, which means the UNSUB was intent on protecting his identity from the start. This guy doesn’t learn as he goes. He’s a savant. We’re X-raying the paintings to find out if there are any hidden messages or ghosts, but we-”

“What’s that?” asks Bowles. “A ghost?”

“A painting beneath a painting,” says Lenz, speaking for the first time.

“X rays might also detect fingerprints on the canvas beneath the paint,” Baxter continues. “Our UNSUB may not have been so careful as he made sketches, knowing that the surface would soon be covered with paint.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Kaiser says. “Artists know about X-ray analysis.”

“I’m glad you’re letting me in on all this,” I say to the screen. “But what’s it leading to? What’s the urgency?”

“Bear with me,” says Baxter. “We’ve made arrangements for eight paintings to be shipped to us in Washington. The owners of six more – all in Asia – have given us permission to send forensic teams to their homes or galleries to make the necessary studies. Those teams are en route now.”

“That leaves five,” says Kaiser. “Nineteen total, right?”

Baxter nods. “The remaining five are owned by a man named Marcel de Becque.”

“A Frenchman?” asks Bowles.

Something ticks in my brain, something Christopher Wingate said.

“It’s more complicated than that,” says Baxter. “De Becque was born in Algeria in 1930, but reared in Vietnam. His father was a French colonial businessman who put his money into tea plantations.”

“And he lives in the Cayman Islands,” I finish.

“How did you know that?” Baxter asks sharply.

“Wingate mentioned him.”

“De Becque won’t send us his paintings? ”asks Kaiser.

“He’s not only refused to ship his paintings to us, but also refused to allow our forensic teams to go to his estate on Grand Cayman to study them.”

Kaiser and Lenz share a look.

“What reason did he give?” asks the psychiatrist.

“He said it was inconvenient.”

“Frog son of a bitch,” growls Bowles. “What’s he doing in the Caymans? Probably running from something.”

“He is,” Baxter confirms. “In 1975, while we scraped the last Americans off the Saigon Embassy roof by helicopter, de Becque was slipping out in a private plane. He’d sold his plantations just before the Tet offensive, which is suspicious in and of itself. He was tied to intelligence people on both sides, and he undoubtedly played both ends against the middle when he could. Word is, he was heavily involved in the unofficial war economy throughout the conflict.”

“Black marketeer,” Kaiser says with obvious distaste.

“Four years ago,” says Baxter, “Marcel de Becque was implicated in a stock-fraud scheme on the Paris Bourse. The scam involved a fraudulent platinum discovery in Africa. He had to flee, but he netted close to fifty million from the deal.”

Bowles whistles from his desk.

“The French can’t extradite him from Cayman, because at some point he established residency in Quebec and obtained Canadian citizenship. Canada and the Caymans have no extradition treaty. We can extradite from Cayman, but de Becque has committed no crime on U.S. soil. He’s immune to pressure from us.”

“As far as we know,” says Bowles, “if we got enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant on conspiracy, we could go in and bring him back under the new laws.”

“That’s not an option at this time, Pat,” says Baxter.

Kaiser unexpectedly voices my thought for me. “What does all this have to do with Jordan Glass?”

Baxter turns to me again. “Monsieur de Becque has made a very unusual proposition. He personally told me that he would allow his Sleeping Women – that’s how he refers to them, as though they’re real women – he would allow them to be photographed – not forensically examined, mind you – but only if the photographer was Jordan Glass.”

The room goes silent, and cold apprehension climbs my spine.

“Why in the world would he ask for me?”

“I was hoping you could shed some light on that,” says Baxter.

“Maybe de Becque is the killer,” suggests Bowles. “He killed Jane Lacour, and now he’s discovered she has a twin sister. He wants to do her as well. Make a set.”

In a voice dripping with disdain, Lenz says, “Please confine your theories to subjects with which you’re familiar. Like bank robbery.”

“Arthur,” Baxter warns.

Bowles is so red he looks ready to pop a blood vessel.

“De Becque is seventy years old,” says Baxter. “He falls well outside all profiles for serial murder.”

“This may not be serial murder,” says Kaiser, earning odd looks from the other men. “And de Becque could easily be behind the selections. We need to find out if he’s come to New Orleans in the past eighteen months, and if so, how often.”

“De Becque owns his own jet,” says Baxter. “A Cessna Citation.”

Kaiser’s eyebrows go up.

“We’re trying to trace its movements now.”

Lenz focuses on Kaiser. “Do you really think a murderer – or a kidnapper – who’s been so careful up to this point would invite his next victim to his lair through the medium of the FBI?”

“He might,” says Kaiser, “as a joke. A final joke. He’s getting old. He knows we’ve discovered the link between his victims and the paintings. He killed Wingate, or ordered his death, so his marketing conduit’s shut down. One way or another, he knows he hasn’t got much time. So he decides to immortalize himself by the way he goes out. Murder-suicide with a celebrity.”

Despite the antipathy between Kaiser and Lenz, the psychiatrist seems to be weighing this theory. “If he’s the suicidal type, why bother to kill Wingate at all?”

“Knee-jerk response. Like people who kill every snake they see. He perceived a threat and neutralized it before fully exploring how it would affect his situation.”

Lenz purses his lips in thought. “Did de Becque’s jet fly to New York yesterday?”

“No,” says Baxter. “It was on Grand Cayman for the past twenty-four hours. We’ve confirmed that. We are checking commercial carriers.”

“You can forget that,” mutters Lenz.

“De Becque says he’ll send his jet to pick up Ms. Glass and her equipment,” says Baxter. “The catch is, she has to go alone.”

Kaiser looks incredulous. “You’re not actually considering this.”

“John, we have to look at-”

Kaiser whirls on Lenz. “How long have you known about de Becque?”

“I heard what you did, when you did,” Lenz says quietly. Which is not exactly a denial.

“I’ll do it,” I tell them.

The room goes quiet again.

“If you do,” says Baxter, “it won’t be under de Becque’s conditions.”

“Under no conditions,” says Kaiser. “We have no control down there.”

“We have to see those paintings, John.”

“If she took one of our planes,” says Bowles, “we could put the Hostage Rescue Team inside. She goes in wired, and if it starts going south, they can bust in and bring them both out – Glass and de Becque.”

“If it starts going south?” echoes Kaiser. “You mean like if de Becque shoots her in the head? Then HRT, which is at the airport, starts for the estate?”

“Don’t waste your breath,” scoffs Lenz. “He’s talking about invading a foreign country.”

“We’d talk to the Brits first,” says Bowles. “Cayman is still a British colony.”

“Good God,” mutters Lenz, as though rendered speechless by the ignorance around him. Either the psychiatrist has forgotten whose territory he’s on, or he feels that Baxter’s patronage makes him bulletproof.

“Let me get this straight,” I say to Kaiser. “You think a seventy-year-old man is going around New Orleans kidnapping women in their twenties and thirties? Without leaving a trace? My sister ran three miles a day and worked out with weights. She could kick the crap out of most seventy-year-old men, pardon my French.”

“Seventy isn’t that old,” says Lenz, playing devil’s advocate. “There are seventy-year-old men in excellent health.”

“And you’re forgetting the taser wound on the Dorignac’s victim,” says Kaiser. “But if de Becque is behind it, I see him commissioning the paintings. Paying one or more men to take the women for him, and one artist to paint them. A guy like that? A wanted expatriate? He probably has all kinds of bodyguards on his property. Retired Israeli commandos. Ex-Paras or -Foreign Legion. Maybe even GIGN.”

“An elegant scenario,” says Lenz.

“You think de Becque could paint them himself?” asks Bowles.

“He’s a collector, not a painter.” Lenz sighs dismissively. “But if he commissions them, why does he only own five paintings? Why wouldn’t he have them all?”

“He could be selling them,” says Baxter.

“A guy worth fifty million?” asks Bowles.

“An elaborate hoax,” suggests Kaiser. “Turning the art world upside down. For kicks. For some twisted fantasy we don’t yet understand.”

I can’t tell who’s arguing for what. Though Lenz and Kaiser dislike each other, they clearly respect each other’s opinions, and Baxter respects them both, because he’s letting them run with the ball. As they bat it back and forth, something occurs to me.

“ Wingate told me de Becque bought the first five Sleeping Women,” I tell Baxter. “So how did you test the first painting for talc?”

“The paintings didn’t sell in the order they were painted,” he replies. “We tested the first one painted. One of the more abstract ones. It was the realistic ones that sold first and started the phenomenon.”

“His Nabi period,” says Lenz.

“The Nabis,” I echo. “Wingate mentioned them. Hebrew for ‘the Prophets.’”

“Just so.”

“Did de Becque know I’m already involved with you?” I ask.

“He seemed to,” says Baxter.

“How the hell would he know that?” Kaiser asks.

“I don’t know, John.”

Kaiser turns to Bowles. “How tight have you kept this?”

The Irishman’s lips tighten. He is, after all, Kaiser’s boss. “If there’s a leak, it’s not our people.”

Kaiser doesn’t look convinced. Neither does Lenz.

“So, what are we going to do?” asks the SAC.

“I’m going to Grand Cayman,” I tell them. “One way or another.”

Lenz nods approval, but Kaiser gives me a hard look.

“This isn’t some jaunt through Somalia with a press pass in your pocket.”

Now my face is red. “I’m flattered by your desire to protect me, Agent Kaiser, but I don’t think it’s going to advance this investigation.”

“She’s right,” says Lenz.

“What we’re going to do,” Baxter says in a conclusive tone, “is let Ms. Glass go about her business. We know her wishes. It’s up to us to decide what strategy makes the most sense.”

“She needs protection,” says Kaiser. “We have no idea what’s going on in this case, no idea about motive. De Becque could have people in New Orleans right now. They could snatch or kill her any time.”

“Agreed,” says Baxter. “Patrick, could you put one of your agents with Ms. Glass until we contact her?”

Bowles nods assent.

“Ms. Glass,” Baxter says in a conclusive tone, “I appreciate your willingness to go through with this. And if Agent Kaiser knew you like I do, he’d know there’s no point in arguing with you.”

Bowles looks at Kaiser. “Take her outside and find her some protection, John. Somebody you’ll be satisfied with.”

Kaiser gets up and walks out without a glance in my direction.

I stand and say, “Gentlemen,” with the panache I’ve developed over twenty years working in a profession dominated by men, then follow him out.

Kaiser is waiting in the hall, his jaw tight.

“Your work has dulled your ability to assess risk,” he says. “You think because you’ve tromped through a few battlefields, a visit to the Cayman Islands is nothing. But there’s a difference. In a war zone, a journalist’s enemy is bad luck. You might take a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel, but nobody’s trying very hard to kill you. De Becque may have nothing else on his mind but killing you. Do you get that? You could walk in the front door, and he could stick a knife in your throat and laugh in your face.”

“Are you through?”

“Not if you still think you’re going. We can get pictures of those paintings some other way. You have no business taking that kind of risk.”

“Do you have a sister, Agent Kaiser?”

“No.”

“A brother?”

“Yes.”

“So why are we arguing?”

He sighs and looks at the floor. I start past him, but he takes hold of my shoulder.

“What about the protection?”

“Find me somebody who’s not a robot, and I’m fine with it.” I touch him lightly on the elbow. “I’m not stupid, okay?”

“What do you plan on doing his afternoon?”

“Buying presents for my niece and nephew. I’m supposed to stay with them tonight. My brother-in-law’s house.”

“That’s where your sister disappeared. The Garden District.”

“Which proves no neighborhood’s safe, right? Unless you move across the lake with all the white flight. Where do you live?”

“Across the lake. Most of the agents here do.”

“What does that say about your crime-fighting efforts?”

Kaiser turns and starts toward the elevators, and I follow. “Homicides don’t fall under our jurisdiction,” he says.

“Except very special ones.”

“Right.”

“I don’t guess you’re available to guard me this afternoon?”

He chuckles. “No. I’ve got someone good in mind, though.”

“Is he tough?”

“Why do you assume it’s a man?”

“Okay, is she tough?”

“Her hobby’s competitive pistol shooting. She’s a member of our SWAT team.”

“Is she going to make a pass at me?”

Kaiser frowns, but his eyes are smiling. “If you were in the Bureau, you’d be disciplined for that remark.”

“But I’m not.”

“Are you suggesting that aggressive career women are sometimes gay?”

“I’ve run across it in my time.”

He pauses in the corridor and looks me up and down. “You fit that category pretty well yourself, Ms. Glass.”

“I do, don’t I?”

Now he’s looking at my left hand. It takes men longer to wonder about the marriage state. Seeing no ring, he raises his eyebrows. I can’t help but smile. “Don’t worry, Agent Kaiser. I like my bread buttered on the traditional side. Now introduce me to my bodyguard.”

He walks past the elevators and into the stairwell.

“We need the exercise?” I ask.

“The elevators are painfully slow.”

I follow him down one floor, and we emerge into a beehive of activity, a wide-open cube farm of glass-windowed partitions with well-dressed men and women hurrying between the workspaces. Ten seconds into the room, I realize something they managed to conceal upstairs: The New Orleans FBI office is a building under siege. The agents’ faces look hunted, their smallest movements marked by frustration. The air-conditioning is running full blast, but it can’t drive out the reek of desperation. For a year and a half – two sweltering summers -these men and women have labored in vain as an evergrowing string of victims generated fear and then panic in a city that in the early nineties grew inured to the highest murder rate in the nation. Outside this building, my sister is a dim memory, a blurred element of the free-floating paranoia tainting the streets of this usually laid back city. But here, in this seemingly corporate cube farm, Jane is remembered. Here the shame of impotence weighs heavily on civilian soldiers who have no idea who their enemy is. As I move through the room at Kaiser’s side, the looks I get run the scale from awe to resentment. There she is, they say to themselves. The one who found the paintings. The photographer. The one whose sister got it. The one who was in the fire…

In the corner of the huge room is an office with four real walls and an open door. Kaiser leads us inside, where a man in shirtsleeves sits behind a desk, talking on the phone. His office is a quarter of the size of the SAC’s upstairs, but his voice carries the weight of authority. When he hangs up, he winks at Kaiser.

“What’s up, John?” he says, his eyes ready for anything.

“Bill, this is Jordan Glass. Ms. Glass, Bill Granger, head of the Violent Crimes Squad.”

Granger leans forward and shakes my hand. “I’m sorry about your sister, Ms. Glass. We’ve been doing everything we can.”

“Thank you. I understand.”

“The SAC wants to put an agent with Ms. Glass for a few hours,” says Kaiser. “Maybe for the night. There’s no imminent threat, but we want someone armed with her. I was thinking of Wendy Travis. Can you spare her?”

Granger bites his bottom lip, then nods and picks up the phone. “I think we can spare her for a few hours.” He taps his fingers on his knee, then says, “Could I see you for a moment?…

Thanks.“ When he hangs up, he gives Kaiser a knowing look. ”I heard we’ve got a Quantico shrink upstairs, and Baxter himself may be flying down. You guys have a plan?“

“Working on one.”

“Anything for my people to do?”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

There’s a knock behind us, and I turn to see a young woman a couple of inches shorter than I, but twice as fit. She’s attractive in a well-scrubbed American way, dressed in a navy skirt, cream blouse, and a matching jacket that looks like Liz Claiborne. She could be an accountant for a Big Five firm, but for the pistol I see through the opening in her jacket.

“Ms. Glass,” says Granger, “this is Special Agent Wendy Travis. Agent Travis, Jordan Glass. I’d like you to spend the day with her. It’s a protective detail.”

Agent Wendy gives me a pert smile and offers me her hand. When I take it, she shakes with a firmness two levels above that of most female professionals.

“Let me get my purse,” she says. “And I’m ready to go.”

I expect her to leave, but she remains in the doorway, her eyes on John Kaiser.

Kaiser smiles and says, “Thanks, Wendy. I knew you were the one for this.”

Practically glowing with pleasure, Agent Wendy nods and walks briskly toward one of the glass cubes. When I turn back to the desk, Kaiser is blushing, and Bill Granger is smiling wryly and shaking his head.