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.
5
The FBI Learjet hurtles into the Virginia sky at three a.m., after a long wait for mechanical checks, refueling, and a fresh flight crew. I should have waited for morning, but I couldn’t. I learned unflappable patience during twenty years of globetrotting and thousands of hours behind my camera, but Jane’s disappearance robbed me of that. I can no longer bear waiting. If I’m standing still, I have too much time to think. Motion is my salvation.
The interior of the jet is strangely comforting to me. I’ve done a fair amount of corporate work in my career, mostly shooting glossy annual reports, and corporate-jet travel is one of the perks. Some of my purist colleagues have criticized me for this, but when all is said and done, they have to worry about paying their bills, and I don’t. I grew up poor; I can’t afford to be a snob. The interior of this Lear is configured for work. Two seats face each other over a collapsible desktop, and Dr. Lenz has chosen these for us. He seems accustomed to the cramped quarters of the cabin, despite his heavy frame. I imagine he once shuttled between murder scenes the way I shuttled between wars.
Lenz looks at least sixty, and his face has begun to sag with a look of permanent weariness that I recognize from certain men I know – men who have seen too much and run out of emotional energy to deal with the burdens they already carry, much less those of the future. He looks, in short, like a man who has surrendered. I don’t judge him for it. I’m twenty years younger, and I’ve come near to cracking myself.
“Ms. Glass,” he says, “we have a little over two hours together. I’d like to spend that time as profitably as we can.”
“I agree.”
“Interviewing you – particularly since you’re an identical twin – is almost like being able to interview your sister before the fact. I’d like to ask you some questions, some of them very personal.”
“I’ll answer what I think is relevant.”
He blinks once, slowly, like an owl. “I hope you’ll try to answer them all. By withholding information, you may prevent my learning something which could advance our efforts to find the killer.”
“You’ve been using the word ‘killer’ since I arrived. You believe all the women are dead?”
His eyes don’t waver. “I do. Daniel holds out some hope, but I do not. Does that bother you?”
“No. I feel the same way. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t imagine where they could possibly be. Eleven women - maybe twelve now – all held prisoner somewhere for up to eighteen months? Without one escaping? I can’t see it. And the women in the later paintings look dead to me.”
“And you have seen much death.”
“Yes. I do have one question, though. Are you aware of the phone call I received eight months ago?”
“The one in the middle of the night? That you thought might be from your sister?”
“Yes. The Bureau traced it to a train station in Thailand.”
Lenz grants me a smile of condolence. “I’m familiar with the incident. It’s my opinion that the guess you made the following morning was correct. That it was someone you’d met during your efforts to locate your father, someone from an MIA family.”
“I just thought maybe… me finding the paintings in Asia-”
“We’re certainly looking into it. Rest assured. But I’d like to move on now, if we could.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I understand you weren’t that close to your sister as an adult, so I’d like you to tell me how you grew up. What shaped Jane’s personality. And yours.”
It’s times like now I wish I smoked. “Okay. You know who my father was, right?”
“Jonathan Glass, the renowned war photographer.”
“Yes. And there was only one war in Mississippi. The one for civil rights. He won his first Pulitzer for that. Then he went off to the other wars, which meant he was almost never home.”
“How did the family react to that?”
“I handled it better than my sister or mother did. I understood why he went, even as a child. Why would you hang around the Mississippi backwoods if you could be roaming the world, going the places in his pictures?”
“You wanted to travel to war zones as a child?”
“Dad shot all kinds of pictures in those places. I didn’t see any of his war stuff until I was old enough to go down to the public library and read
“Why did your mother marry a man who would never be home?”
“She didn’t know-that when she married him. He was just a big handsome Scots-English guy who looked like he could handle anything that came along. And he could, pretty much. He could survive in the jungle with nothing but a pocketknife. What he couldn’t survive was married life in Mississippi. A nine-to-five job. That was hell for him.
“He tried to do right by her, to keep her with him as his career took off. He even moved her to New York. She lasted until she got pregnant. During her eighth month, he went on assignment to Kenya. She went down to Grand Central Station with six dollars in her purse and rode a train all the way to Memphis. Then the bus from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If she hadn’t been pregnant when she left, Dad probably never would have come back home. But he did. Not that often, but when he did, it was paradise for me. There were some glorious summers.”
“What about Jane?”
“Not so much for her. We were twins, but emotionally we were different from early on. Some of it was just bad luck.”
“How so?”
“Jane was mauled by a dog when she was four. It really tore up her arm.” I close my eyes against that memory, a vicious attack I watched from forty yards away. By the time my mother reached her, the damage had been done. “She had to go through rabies shots, the whole thing. It made her fearful for the rest of her life.”
“Did your mother dress the two of you identically, all that?”
“She tried. My father always resisted it when he was home, so I did too. He wanted us to be individuals. That’s the photojournalist ethos in a nutshell. Rugged individualism. He taught me that, and a lot more.”
“Photography?”
“Not so much that. He taught me to hunt and to fish. A little about the stars, trees, wild plants you could eat. He told me stories about all the far-off places he’d visited. Strange customs, things you’d never read in
“Did he teach Jane those things?”
“He tried, but she wasn’t open to much. She was like my mother that way. I think his stories reminded them that he was only home for a little while, that one day they’d wake up and he’d be gone.”
“You were his favorite.”
“Yes. And Jane was Mom’s. But somehow that didn’t count for as much. Because Dad was the dominant personality, even when he wasn’t home. He was a doer. My mother just tried to cope, and didn’t succeed very well at that.”
“Jane resented his absences more as time passed?”
“Yes. I think she got to hate him before he disappeared, because of how sad Mom was, and because money was so tight.”
“Your father didn’t earn much money?”
“I don’t really know. Some of the leading photojournalists of the Vietnam era worked for almost nothing. Whether my father did or not, he never sent much money back to us. He was big on bringing presents, though. I’m not saying he was a great guy, okay? I’m just saying he and I had a bond.”
“Did your mother work?”
