by Greg Iles
“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 take-out 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 criteria 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, f
amilies 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 aboveground.”
“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, chérie, 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 chérie 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. But 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.”