Читать книгу Dead Sleep - Greg Iles - Страница 8

Careening out of the mouth of the alley, I come face-to-face with a spectacle I covered dozens of times early in my career. The classic fire scene: engines with red lights flashing and hoses spraying; squad cars and EMS vehicles arriving; cops yelling; a crowd of spectators, the eternal crowd, spilling out of the bar and the video store, gaping, drinking, and shouting into cell phones. Most of them poured out of the bar after hearing “an explosion,” and the smell of liquor spices the air. The police are trying to herd them back behind a taped perimeter, to protect them from falling brick and flying glass, but they’re slow to move. I walk right past the biggest cop and point my camera at the fire.

“Hey!” he yells. “Get back behind this tape!”

“The Post,” I tell him, holding up my camera.

“Let me see your card.”

“I don’t have it. I was having a drink in the bar with some friends. That’s why all I have is this crappy point-and-shoot. Give me a break, man, I’m the first one here. I can scoop everybody.”

As the cop deliberates, I turn back to the mouth of the alley, forty meters away, but no one comes running out of it. The corner wall blurs for a moment, though, the vertical line of brick seeming to wrinkle in the dark. Was that him? Is he trying to figure a way to get to me even now? A deep crack rumbles from the bowels of Wingate’s building, and masonry cascades into the street. The crowd gives its obligatory gasp.

“Come on, man! I’m missing the show!”

The cop jerks his head toward the building, and I’m past him in a flash, moving along the perimeter of the crowd, shooting as I go. No one seems to notice that I’m shooting the crowd and not the fire. Every now and then I point the camera up at the burning building, but I don’t waste any exposures on it.

The expressions on the faces are all the same: primitive fascination bordering on glee. A couple of female faces show empathy, a sense that this destruction is a tragedy, but with no shrieking mothers with infants leaping from windows, no teenagers trying to climb down burning bedsheets, the mood is more like a party.

If the guy in the alley didn’t set this fire, the person who did is probably in this crowd. Arsonists love to watch their fires burn, they almost have to do it. But what are the odds that this blaze was set by a firebug? Twenty-four hours after I discover a link between the Sleeping Women and the New Orleans victims, the only human connection to the artist is burned alive? The timing is too perfect. This fire was set to silence Christopher Wingate. And the man who did it could be standing within yards of me right now. I may already have his face on film.

From the reading I did after Jane was taken, I learned that serial killers often return to the scenes of their crimes, to revel in their success, to relive their dreadful acts, even to masturbate where they listened to their victims’ pleas. Killing Wingate would be nothing like killing the women in the paintings; it would be a utilitarian crime, an act of survival. But the murderer might well wait to be sure he accomplished his goal. And who knows what twisted history the two men might have shared? What did Wingate say to me? You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen.

As I turn back from the burning building, a furtive movement registers in my peripheral vision. Wide eyes dropping below the back edge of the crowd, off to my right. People are standing five deep at the tape now, and I can’t see the eyes anymore. But as I watch, a sock cap begins to move along the back of the crowd, coming in my direction. Throwing up my camera arm, I pop off a shot over the heads of the crowd. The head disappears, then reappears still closer. I squeeze the shutter release again, but it won’t depress, and then I feel the vibration of the rewind motor in my hand; the crowd noise prevented my hearing it.

I’m out of film.

The sock cap moves forward now, pushing slowly toward me through the crowd. I’m tempted to wait for a good look at his face, but what if he’s carrying a gun? Close enough to see is close enough to shoot, and I don’t want to die here. “Jordan Glass, Noted War Photographer, Shot Dead on Fifteenth Street in Chelsea.” That headline has the ironic ring of truth, and I’m not waiting for it to be borne out by events. Glancing around, I rush up to the fire captain, who’s standing by the one of the engines, talking to a cop.

“Captain!”

He gives me an annoyed look.

“Jane Adams, from the Post. I was shooting the crowd back there, and I passed a guy who smelled like gasoline. When I said something about it, he started following me through the crowd. He was wearing a sock cap.”

The fireman’s eyes go wide. “Where?”

I turn and point back to the spot I left moments ago. There, for an instant, I see a pale bearded face and blazing eyes beneath the sock cap. It vanishes so quickly, I wonder if it was there at all.

“There! Did you see him?”

The fire captain races toward the tape, followed by the cop who was standing beside him.

“What was that?” asks another cop who suddenly appears at my side.

“I smelled gas on a guy over there. They went to check it out.”

“No shit? Good work. You with the Times?”

“The Post. I just hope they get him.” And what do I tell them if they do?

“Yeah. This is one fucked-up crime scene. He could be the guy, though.”

The cop is young and Italian, with a five-o’clock shadow that looks more like midnight. “What do you mean?”

“They just found a guy in a car across the street. Dead as a hammer.”

“What?” I whirl and try to see, but the crowd obscures my view. “How did he die?”

“Somebody cut his throat. You believe that? Wearing a suit and tie. Looks like he hasn’t been dead an hour. Something strange going on here.”

“Who was he?”

“No wallet. Like a slaughterhouse in that car.”

The fire captain is already pushing back toward us, the cop in tow.

“See anything?” the Italian cop calls to them.

The other cop shakes his head. “Crowd’s too big. Guy could be two feet away, we wouldn’t know except by the smell.”

“I’ll make a pass,” says the Italian, tipping his cap to me as he walks toward the tape.

The guy could be two feet away. And there isn’t any gasoline smell. He could kill me before I know he’s there. It’s time to go. But how? My cab is long gone, and walking isn’t an option. Neither is the subway.

As I ponder my options, a yellow taxi pulls to the end of the block and disgorges a kid with two cameras hanging from his neck. The official press. Knowing he’ll ask for a receipt, I start running, and I’m at full sprint before he has it in his hand.

“Taxi!” I yell. “Don’t let him go!”

For some reason—maybe because he’s seen my camera—the photographer holds the cab.

“Thanks!” I tell him, jumping into the backseat.

“Hey, are you with a paper?”

“No.” I thump the plastic partition. “JFK! Move it!”

“Wait. Don’t I know you?”

“Go!” I shout at the back of the cabbie’s head.

“Hey, aren’t you—”

With a screech of rubber, the cab is rolling toward the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

My flight lands at Reagan National at 10:15 p.m., and when I deplane, there’s a man in a suit waiting for me at the gate. He’s holding a white cardboard sign that says “J. GLASS,” but he doesn’t look like a limo driver. He looks like a buffed-up accountant.

“I’m Jordan Glass.”

“Special Agent Sims,” he says with a frown. “You’re late. Follow me.”

He sets off down the concourse at a rapid clip and walks right past the down escalator marked “Baggage and Ground Transportation.”

“I have some bags down there,” I call after him. “My cameras. They were on the earlier flight, so they’re probably in storage.”

“We have your camera cases, Ms. Glass. The airline lost your suitcase.”

Great. Agent Sims leads me through a door marked “Airport Personnel Only,” and a blast of cold air hits my face. It’s fall in Washington too, but unlike New York, the humidity here adds a taste of home to the air. Home as in Mississippi. My present residence is in San Francisco, but no place I’ve ever lived has replaced the fecund, subtropical garden of creeks, cotton fields, oak, and pine forests where I grew up.

The concrete is slick with rain, reflecting the bright lights of the terminal and the dimmer blue ones of the runway. Sims helps me onto a baggage truck and signals its jump-suited driver, who takes off across the airfield. My aluminum camera cases are stacked in luggage that is well behind us.

“I thought we were going into the city,” I shout over the engine noise. “To the Hoover Building.”

“The chief had to get back to Quantico,” Sims yells back. “That’s where the meeting is now.”

“How are we getting there?”

“On that.”

As he points into the darkness, I see the sleek lines of a Bell 260 helicopter on skids. The baggage truck squeals to a stop. Agent Sims loads my cases into the chopper, then returns for me. He’s a tall man, and the Bell is cramped quarters for him. Still, he doesn’t look unhappy. Most of his fellow agents probably make the twenty-mile drive to Quantico in a Ford Taurus.

In less than a minute we are lifting into the night sky over the capital, the Pentagon receding behind us as we rotor southward over the lights of Alexandria, roughly parallel to I-95. In less than ten we’re descending over the Quantico Marine base, arrowing down to the FBI Academy helipad. There’s an agent waiting to handle my baggage, but Sims leads me straight into the maze of the Academy building. After a short elevator ride and a walk along a darkened hall, I’m escorted into an empty room, sterile and white, like some convention hotel meeting space.

“Wait here,” says Sims.

The door shuts, then locks from the outside. Do they think I’m going to prowl the halls, looking for something to steal? If someone doesn’t show in the next two minutes I might just sack out on the table. The last thing I want to do is sit down; my behind feels like a massive hematoma. Despite my exhaustion, I’m still nervy from the fire and the knowledge that Wingate is dead. The investigation will be severely handicapped without him. One thing is sure, though. It’s not going to be like last year. Nobody’s shutting me out this time.

The doorknob clicks. Then the door opens and two men walk in. The first is Daniel Baxter, looking scarcely changed from thirteen months ago when I first met him. He’s dark-haired and compact, about five-ten, and corded with muscle. His eyes are brown and compassionate but steady as gunsights. The man behind him is taller—over six feet—and at least ten years older, with silver hair, an expensive suit, and a bluff Yalie look. But his grayish-blue eyes, hooded by flesh, suggest a sinister George Plimpton. Baxter doesn’t move to shake my hand, and he speaks as he takes his seat.

“Ms. Glass, this is Doctor Arthur Lenz. He’s a forensic psychiatrist who consults for the Bureau.”

Lenz extends his hand, but I only nod in return. Shaking hands with men is always awkward for me, so I don’t do it. There’s no way to equalize the size difference, and I don’t like them to feel they have an edge. The men I know well, I hug. The rest can make do.

“Please sit down,” says Baxter.

“No, thanks.”

“I suppose you have an explanation for missing the plane I booked for you?”

“Well—”

“Before you go any further, let me advise you that Christopher Wingate has been under Bureau surveillance since you called me from the airplane.”

I wasn’t sure whether I was going to admit being at the fire. Now there’s no way to deny it. “You had people outside his gallery?”

Baxter nods, his face coloring with anger. “We’ve got some nice shots of you entering the building about forty minutes before it went up.” He opens a file labeled “NOKIDS” and slides a photo across the table. There I am, in low-res digital splendor.

“I knew Wingate probably had information about my sister.”

“Did he?”

“Yes and no.”

Baxter’s anger boils over at last. “What the hell did you think you were going to accomplish in there?”

“I did accomplish something in there! And it’s a good thing I did, because he would have been dead by the time you guys decided to question him.”

This sets them back a little.

“And if you had people outside the gallery,” I push on, “why didn’t they bust in there and try to save us?”

“We had one agent at the scene, Ms. Glass, doing surveillance from his car. The fire started on the first floor, and it was explosive in nature. An incendiary device made of gasoline and liquid soap.”

“Homemade napalm.” I know it well from the “little wars” that don’t make the evening news.

“Yes. The sprinkler system was disabled prior to the device being detonated, the fire alarm as well. We’ve since determined that the fire escape ladders were also wired in the up position. All inoperative.”

“You think you’re telling me something? I had to jump to save myself. Your guy couldn’t do anything to help?”

“Our guy did do something. He died there.”

A wave of heat tells me my face is red.

Baxter’s eyes are merciless. “Special Agent Fred Coates, twenty-eight years old, married with three kids. When the bomb went off, he called the fire department. He got out of his car and shot pictures of the building and the first people on the scene, in case the perp stuck around. Then he got back into his car and called the New York field office on his cell phone. He was talking to his Special Agent in Charge when somebody reached through the window and slit his throat. The SAC heard him coughing up blood for twenty seconds. Then nothing. The killer stole his credentials and camera. He missed one flash memory card that had fallen between the console and Agent Coates’s seat. That’s where we got the shot of you. We lost his pictures of the crowd.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

Baxter spears me with an accusing look. “You think that helps anything? I told you to come straight here.”

“Don’t try to put this on me! I didn’t put that guy there, okay? You did. Whoever killed him would have set that fire whether I was there or not. And I do have pictures of the crowd.”

Both men lean forward, their mouths open.

“Where?” asks Dr. Lenz.

“We’ll talk about that in a minute. I want to clarify something right up front. This isn’t going to be a one-way conversation.”

“Do you realize how important every minute is?” Baxter asks. “By withholding that film—”

“My sister’s been missing for over a year, okay? I think she can wait another twenty minutes.”

“You don’t have all the facts.”

“And that’s exactly what I want.”

Baxter shows Lenz his exasperation.

“Could someone have killed Coates for his wallet and camera?” I ask. “Could his murder be unrelated to the fire?”

“Why leave the cell phone behind?” Baxter counters. “And the car? His keys were found in the ignition.”

“What are the odds that a garden-variety arsonist would murder someone watching a fire?”

“Million to one against. Ms. Glass, that firebomb was planted to do exactly what it did. Kill Wingate and destroy his records. You’re lucky you didn’t go up with the rest.”

“It was Wingate who almost killed me. He could have saved himself, but he tried to save the stupid painting, and like a fool I tried to save him.”

“What painting?” asks Lenz.

“Sleeping Woman Number Twenty. It was the only one of the series he had in the place, and he killed himself trying to save it.”

“I wonder why,” Lenz says softly. “Surely it would have been insured.”

“The insurance wouldn’t have been enough.”

“Why not?”

“When I told Wingate I was going to the FBI, that the women in the pictures were almost certainly the victims from New Orleans, he was ecstatic. He said the new canvas would probably sell for double the standing bid on it, and that was £1.5 million sterling.”

“Did he mention the bidder’s name?”

“Takagi.”

“What did the painting look like?” Lenz asks. “Like the ones you saw in Hong Kong?”

“Yes and no. I don’t know anything about art, but this one was more realistic than the ones I saw. Almost photographically realistic.”

“The woman appeared to be dead?”

“Absolutely.”

Baxter reaches into the file, removes a photograph, and pushes it across the table at me. It’s a head shot of a young dark-haired woman, a candid shot, probably taken by a family member. It’s well off horizontal, which makes me think it was taken by a child. But that’s not what sends a shiver through me.

“That’s her. Damn it. Who is she?”

“Last known victim,” Baxter replies.

“How long ago was she taken?”

“Four and a half weeks.”

“What was the interval between her and the one before her?”

“Six weeks.”

“And before that?”

“Fifty-four days. Seven and a half weeks.”

This decreasing time span bears out my reading, as well. One theory says that as serial offenders get a taste for their work, their confidence grows, and they try to fulfill their fantasies more and more frequently. Another speculates that they begin to “decompensate,” that the neuroses driving them begin to fracture their minds, pushing them toward capture or even death, and the path they choose is accelerated murder.

“So you figure he’s due for another soon.”

The two men share a look I cannot interpret. Then the psychiatrist gives a slight nod, and Baxter turns to me.

“Ms. Glass, approximately one hour ago, a young Caucasian woman disappeared from the parking lot of a New Orleans grocery store.”

I close my eyes against the fearful impact of this statement. Jane has another sister in the black hole of her current existence. “You think it was him?”

Lenz answers first. “Almost surely.”

“Where was she taken from?”

“A suburb of New Orleans, actually. Metairie.”

He actually got the pronunciation right: Met-a-ree. He’s picked it up from a year and a half of working the case.

“What store in Metairie?”

“It’s called Dorignac’s. On Veterans Boulevard.”

This time he missed it. “Dorn-yaks,” I correct him. “I used to shop there all the time. It’s a family-owned store, like the old Schwegmann chain.”

Baxter makes a note. “The victim left her house a few minutes before the store closed—eight-fifty p.m. central time—to get some andouille sausage. She was making dip for a birthday party at her job tomorrow. She worked in a dental office, as a receptionist. By nine-fifteen, her husband started to worry. He tried her car phone and got no answer. He knew the store was closed, so he got the kids out of bed and drove down to see if his wife had a dead battery.”

“He found her empty car with the door open?”

Baxter gives a somber nod.

This happened to two victims before Jane. “It sounds like him.”

“Yes. But it could be a couple of other things. This woman could have been seeing a guy on the side. She meets him at the store to talk something over, maybe even for a quickie in the car. Suddenly, she decides to split for good.”

“Leaving her kids behind?”

“It happens.” Baxter’s voice is freighted with experience. “But talking to the detective, this doesn’t sound like that type of situation. The other alternative is conventional rape. A guy on the prowl with a van and a rape kit, looking for a target of opportunity. He sees her going to her car alone and snatches her.”

“Has anybody like that been operating in the area over the past few weeks?”

“No.”

“Did any other victims shop at Dorignac’s? Jane must have gone there sometimes.”

“Several shopped there occasionally. The store stocks some regional foods other stores don’t. The Jefferson Parish detectives are grilling the staff right now, and our New Orleans field office is already taking their lives apart. With help from the Quantico computers. It’s a full-court press, but if it’s like the others … none of that will come to anything.”

I’m about to speak, when shock steals my breath. “Wait a minute. By what you’ve told me, the man who took the woman from Dorignac’s couldn’t have killed Wingate.”

Baxter nods slowly. “Nine-one-one in New York got the call about the Wingate fire at seven fifty-one p.m. eastern time. The Dorignac’s victim disappeared from Metairie between eight fifty-five p.m. and nine-fifteen central time. That’s a maximum difference of two hours and twenty-four minutes.”

“So there’s no way the same person could have done both. Not even with a Learjet at his disposal.”

“There’s one way,” says Baxter. “The incendiary device used to ignite the gallery had a timer on it. If it was set long enough in advance, the same person could have gotten back to New Orleans in time to take the woman from Dorignac’s.”

“But it wasn’t,” I think aloud. “He wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw him.”

“What?”

As quickly as I can, I describe the drama of the man from the alley, shooting the blind photo over the crowd, and sending the fireman and cop after him.

“Where’s your film?” asks Baxter, his eyes burning with excitement.

“Not here, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you positive Wingate’s murder was related to my sister’s case?”

“Virtually certain,” says Lenz.

“So you’re saying there’s more than one person behind the disappearances.”

“I’m not saying it. The evidence is. Two UNSUBs, not one.”

UNSUB is FBI-speak for Unknown Subject. “Two killers operating as a team?”

“It happens,” says Baxter. “But teams usually work side by side. Two ex-cons in a van, snatching and torturing women, that kind of thing. What I’m postulating would be something far more sophisticated.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that before? People cooperating over a long distance to facilitate serial murder or kidnapping?”

“Only in child pornography,” says Baxter, “and that’s a different thing.”

“It’s unprecedented in the literature,” says Dr. Lenz. “Which does nothing to rule out the possibility. Harvesting women’s skins was unknown until Ed Gein was caught doing it in the fifties. Then Tom Harris used it in a book and made it part of the national consciousness. In our business, you proceed from a very simple given: everything imaginable is possible, and may well be happening as we ponder it.”

“How would it work?” I ask. “How do you see it?”

“Division of labor,” says Lenz. “The killer’s in New Orleans, the painter in New York.”

“But Wingate was killed in New York.”

“Different motive. That was self-preservation.”

“I had the same thought up there. So the New Orleans guy kidnaps the women. How does the New York guy do the paintings? He works from photographs? Or he flies to New Orleans to paint corpses?”

“If that scenario is the answer,” says Baxter, “I pray to God he flies. We can take backbearings from airline computers and work out a list of potential suspects.”

“Could it really be that easy?”

“It just might be. It’s been a long eighteen months, Ms. Glass. Nobody knows that better than you. We’re due for a break.”

I nod hopefully, but inside I know better. “If Wingate was killed to silence him, how do you think it happened? The logic of it?”

Baxter leans back and steeples his fingers. “I think Wingate himself told the UNSUB in New York about the Hong Kong incident. Wingate’s phone records show a call from the curator of the Hong Kong exhibit to his gallery within an hour of your making the disturbance in Hong Kong.”

“Wingate knew about Hong Kong while I was talking to him?”

“Undoubtedly. Though I doubt he knew it was you who caused the disturbance.”

“If he did, he was a hell of an actor.”

“Did he try to get information from you?” asks Lenz.

“Not really.” A hot flash brings sweat to my face. “What if he was setting me up for the killer and got caught in his own trap?”

“Quite possible,” says Baxter. “If Wingate somehow knew it was you in Hong Kong, then he knew your sister was in one of the paintings. Maybe he knew everything about the crimes. He calls the UNSUB and tells him you’re coming to the gallery, but he doesn’t want any violence there. He also wants to know who you’ve talked to before you die. Wingate thinks you’re going to be murdered after you leave his place, but the UNSUB has a better idea. He sees his chance to take you both out.”

“That’s it,” I murmur. “Jesus. Wingate ensured his own death.”

“Almost certainly,” says Lenz. “And Wingate could have been the key to this whole case. Goddamn it.”

“I’m not sure he knew that much.”

“You believe what he told you?”

“To a point. I don’t think he knew the killer’s name. He said he wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman.”

“What?” both men ask in unison.

“He said he’d never seen the artist’s face. It was all done with blind drops or something.”

“He used that term?” asks Baxter. “Blind drops?”

“He said he got it from spy movies.” I quickly summarize Wingate’s explanation of how he received the first painting, and the subsequent drops of cash in train station lockers.

“I suppose it could have happened that way,” Baxter concedes. “But from what I’ve got on Wingate so far, he was no font of truth.”

“What do you have on him?”

“For one thing, his name wasn’t Christopher Wingate. It was Zjelko Krnich. He was born in Brooklyn in 1956, to Yugoslavian immigrants. Ethnic Serbs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Krnich’s father abandoned his wife and kids when Zjelko was seven. The boy scrapped in the streets, then moved on to small-time drug dealing, then pimping. He hopped a freighter to Europe when he was twenty and kicked around there for a few years, selling grass and coke to feed himself. He hung out in resort areas, and his drug business put him in contact with some trendy people. He fell in with a Parisian woman who dealt in paintings, some genuine, others not. He picked up the trade from her. She gave him his Anglo name. After a couple of years, they fell out over money she claimed he stole. Krnich suddenly reappeared in New York, legally changed his name to Wingate, and started working at a small gallery in Manhattan. Twenty years later, he’s one of the hottest dealers in the world.”

“He was hot, all right. About three hundred and fifty degrees when I last saw him.”

“Residential fires burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Glass.” Baxter is not up for humor tonight, not even the gallows variety. His eyes are flint hard; his patience has come to an end. “I want the film you shot tonight.”

“Once I give you that, you’re going to cut me out.”

“That’s not true,” says Lenz. “You’re a relative of a victim.”

“Which counts for zero, in my experience. You weren’t around last year, Doctor. Back then it was like pulling teeth to get substantive information out of this guy.”

“I can assure you that won’t be the case this time,” Lenz says smoothly.

Baxter starts to speak, but the psychiatrist cuts him off with a wave of his hand. Arthur Lenz obviously pulls a lot of weight in the ISU.

“Ms. Glass, I have a proposal for you. One I think will interest you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Fate has handed us a unique opportunity. Your appearance in Hong Kong caused a disturbance not because of the connection between the paintings and the kidnappings; the people in the gallery knew nothing about that. They were upset because you looked exactly like a woman in one of the paintings.”

“So?”

“Imagine the reaction you might cause in the killer if you came face-to-face with him.”

“I may have done that tonight, right?”

Lenz shakes his head. “I’m far from convinced that the man who attacked you tonight is the man who painted this remarkable series.”

“Go on.”

“Forensic art analysis has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Not only is there X-ray analysis, spectrography, infrared, and all the rest. There may be fingerprints preserved in the oil paint itself. We may find hairs or skin flakes. Now that we know about the paintings, I believe they will lead us in short order to a suspect, or perhaps a group of them. Style analysis alone could produce a list of likely candidates. And once we have those suspects, Ms. Glass, you are the weapon I would most like to use against them.”

Lenz wasn’t kidding before. They do need me. They cooked all this up long before I got here.

“How would you feel about that?” asks the psychiatrist. “Posing as a special agent at suspect interviews? Casually walking into a room while Daniel and I observe suspects?”

“She’d kill to do it,” says Baxter. “I know that much about her.”

Lenz fires a harsh look at him. “Ms. Glass?”

“I’ll do it.”

“What did I tell you?” says Baxter.

“On one condition,” I add.

“Shit,” mutters Baxter. “Here it comes.”

“What condition?” asks Lenz.

“I’m in the loop from now till the day you get the guy. I want access to everything.”

Baxter rolls his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

“I want to know everything you know. You have my word that I won’t reveal anything you tell me. But I can’t be excluded like last year. That almost killed me.”

I expect Baxter to argue, but he just looks at the table and says, “Done. Where’s your film?”

“I dropped it in a mailbox at JFK.”

“A U.S. Postal Service box?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember which one?”

“It was near the American Airlines gates. It’s addressed to my house in San Francisco. I’ll give you the address. I bought the stamps and envelope near a newsstand. It was close to the mailbox as well.”

“We’ll get it. We can develop it at the lab right here.”

“I figured you guys had mastered mail theft.”

Baxter stifles an obscene reply and takes out a cell phone.

“One other thing,” I add. “I shot three photos of Sleeping Woman Number Twenty before I escaped the building. It was in bad light, but I bracketed the exposures. I think they’ll come out.”

With a look of grudging admiration, Baxter dials a number and tells someone to find out who the postmaster general is and get him out of bed. When he hangs up, I say, “I want digital copies of those pictures e-mailed to the New Orleans field office and a set printed for me. I’ll pick them up in the morning.”

“You’re going to New Orleans?” asks Lenz.

“That’s right.”

“It’s too late to get a flight tonight.”

“Then I expect you guys to get me a plane. I only came here at your request. I need to tell my sister’s husband what’s happened, and I want to tell him face-to-face. My mother, too. Before they hear about it some other way.”

“They won’t hear anything,” says Baxter.

“Why not?”

“What’s happened, really? You upset a few art lovers in Hong Kong. Nothing that would hit the papers.”

“What about the fire in New York? Your dead agent?”

“Wingate was reputed to have mob ties. FBI surveillance would be expected. One reporter has already speculated that Wingate torched the place for the insurance and killed himself in the process.”

“Are you saying you intend to keep this investigation secret?”

“As far as possible.”

“But you must be trying to gather all the paintings, right? For forensic analysis? Won’t that get out?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Look, Arthur is going to New Orleans in the morning, to speak to some art dealers there. Why don’t you fly down with him then?”

“I’d be happy to fly down tonight,” Lenz says, “if Ms. Glass feels such urgency. Can the plane be made ready?”

Baxter considers this. “I suppose. But Ms. Glass, please urge your brother-in-law to be discreet. And as for telling your mother … perhaps you should wait a bit on that.”

“Why?”

“We’ve had some contact with her in the past year. She’s not in the best shape.”

“She never was.”

“She’s drinking heavily. I don’t think we could rely upon her discretion.”

“It’s her daughter, Mr. Baxter. She deserves to know what’s going on.”

“But what do you really have to tell her? Nothing encouraging. Don’t you think it might be better to wait?”

“I’ll make that decision.”

“Fine,” he says wearily. “But your mother and brother-in-law are the limit of the circle. I know you worked for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans years ago. I’m sure you have friends down there. If you’re going to be effective in our investigation, no one can know you’re in town. No drinks with old friends, no human interest story about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer back on her old beat. We’ll be glad to put you up in a hotel.”

“I’ll probably stay with my brother-in-law. I haven’t seen my sister’s kids in a long time.”

“All right. But you agree about the isolation? Until we have suspects and you’ve confronted them, you talk to nobody who knows you, and you stay out of sight.”

“Agreed. But I want a full update on the plane. That’s our deal, right?”

Baxter sighs and looks at Lenz as if the psychiatrist has named his own poison. “Arthur can handle that.”

Dr. Lenz stands and rubs his hands together, and I notice again how tall he is. “Why don’t we get some coffee and doughnuts?” he says. “There’s no in-flight service.”

“Just a minute, Arthur,” Baxter says. He looks at me, his eyes glacier cold. “Ms. Glass, I want you to listen to me. Nothing about this case fits known parameters. Our New Orleans UNSUB is not some low-self-image maintenance man with a gimp leg and a collection of mutilated Barbie dolls. We’re dealing with at least one highly organized personality. A man who has kidnapped and probably killed twelve women without a trace. You may be on his radar. We don’t know. We do know you’re about to enter his territory. Be very careful, Ms. Glass. Don’t let your mind wander for a moment. Or you could join your sister a lot sooner than God ever intended.”

Despite the melodramatic tone, Baxter’s warning gives me pause. This man does not speak lightly of danger. “Do you think I need protection?”

“I’m inclined to say yes. I’ll make a final decision on that before you land in New Orleans. Just remember: secrecy is the best protection.”

“I hear you.”

He stands and gives me a curt nod. “I appreciate your willingness to help us.”

“You knew I would. It’s personal for me.”

Baxter reaches into the NOKIDS file and tosses out a photo of a brown-haired man in his late twenties, an All-American boy smiling like it’s his first job interview. Special Agent Fred Coates, no doubt. It’s hard to picture him with his throat cut, spitting blood into a cell phone.

“It’s personal for us too,” says Baxter.

He speaks softly, but behind his eyes burns a volcanic fury. Daniel Baxter has tracked and caged some of the deadliest monsters of our time. Until tonight, the one that took my sister was merely one among others still at large. But now Special Agent Fred Coates lies on a cold morgue slab somewhere. FBI blood has been spilled. And the situation has most definitely changed.