Dead Sleep

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 fa

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.

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