“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 takeout 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.
“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 criterion 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, families 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 above ground.”
“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
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
