“What?”
“You just found a friend at forty.”
A strange feeling akin to religious absolution rolls through my chest.
“Now, come on in this kitchen, girl.”
Thirty minutes later, I walk down the rickety stairs and hear John Kaiser whispering to me from the corner of the house.
I don’t want to see him, but there’s no avoiding it. When I go around the corner, he falls into step beside me.
“I’m sorry we heard that,” he says. “I’m sorry it happened to you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I must be walking very fast, because even with his long stride, Kaiser is having trouble staying beside me.
“I’m sorry about the way I talked about the rape Roger Wheaton stopped in Vietnam,” he says.
The van comes into sight, rolling slowly toward us along the street.
“What do you want, Jordan? Just tell me.”
“I want to go to my hotel and take a shower.”
“You’re on your way.”
“And I don’t want to ride in the van.”
“I’ll get a car here. I’ll wait with you, then drop you. Okay?”
I don’t look at him. I feel a powerful, irrational anger toward him, and at the knowledge that he desires me. He wants to hold me now, to comfort me, but he can’t. Only a woman I foolishly believed could have been involved with my sister’s disappearance could comfort me, and she has already done what she could.
The surveillance van stops, and its rear door opens. Kaiser trots over behind the door, then jogs back to me.
“A surveillance car is on the way. In one minute, you’ll be on your way to your hotel. Okay?”
I fix him with a level gaze. “Thalia didn’t know me. She’d never seen me before in her life. Which means she’s never seen Jane. You got that, right?”
“Right.”
“Good.”
17
In the shower in my hotel room, my composure finally blows apart, spinning images through my head without coherence: Wingate trying to save his painting, flames licking at his feet; soldiers tying my hands and pressing my face into the jungle floor; my brother-in-law kissing my neck, trying to bed the ghost of his wife; de Becque watching me with a glint in his eye as he doles out bits of information about my father…
I turn the water as hot as I can stand it, my eyes closed against the spray even as I see the four strange souls I encountered today: a dying man, a violent man, a feminine man, and a wounded woman. Yesterday I had some hope of resolution. I was fooled by the confidence of men in their systems and their evidence, by the illusion of progress, by the belief that time must inevitably yield some answer. But deep down I know that time, like fate, operates under no imperative. What are those men saying now, after the failure of their grand plan? Baxter. Lenz. Kaiser. They paraded me past their suspects and saw not one flicker of panic. Not even a flinch at my face -
A telephone is ringing. At first I think it’s in my head, because it’s impossibly loud. Then I pull back the shower curtain and see a phone mounted on the wall, low by the commode. I press my right palm into the white towel on the rack, then pick up the receiver.
“Yes?”
“It’s John.”
“John?”
“Kaiser.” He sounds uncomfortable.
“Oh. What is it?”
“I’m still downstairs.”
“Why?”
“We’re about to have a meeting. Before the official task force meeting. Baxter, Lenz, Bowles, and me. I know you’re upset, but I thought you might be more angry if you missed it.”
“I’m in the shower. It’s basically going to be a wake, right?”
“I don’t think so. I just spoke to Baxter on my cell. He says he has a couple of new things.”
“What things?”
“I won’t know till I get to the office.”
As badly as I want to crack open the minibar and flop onto my bed wrapped in towels, I know he’s right. I’ll feel worse if I don’t go.
“Give me five minutes.”
Kaiser hangs up, undoubtedly thinking that no woman he ever knew could go from naked in the shower to ready in five minutes.
He’s about to get a lesson.
This time we meet where we did the first time: SAC Bowles’s office. Kaiser leads the way with a perfunctory knock, and though I hear voices, the office appears empty. Through the long window to my right, Lake Pontchartrain looks gray against the afternoon sky, dotted with a few lonely sails.
Walking farther in, I see Baxter, Lenz, and SAC Bowles waiting in the private seating area in the deep leg of the L. Bill Granger, the violent-crimes supervisor, shakes Kaiser’s hand on his way out and gives me an embarrassed nod. Clearly, he was in the loop that heard the transmission from Thalia Laveau’s apartment. Wonderful.
Kaiser and I sit side by side on a sofa, facing Baxter and Lenz. SAC Bowles has a chair to himself on my right. No one looks happy, but neither do they look as dejected as I would have expected. They do look surprised to see me.
“You did a first-rate job today, Jordan,” Baxter says in a chamber-of-commerce voice.
“Too bad I didn’t shake anybody up.”
He looks at Kaiser. “We’ve got forty minutes before the joint task force meets, and I want to go in there solid. As of now, we have two agents on separate planes escorting all the evidence the NOPD gathered today to the lab in Washington. Everything from paintings to DNA samples. The Director himself put an expedite on it, which means a twelve-hour turnaround on some tests, twenty-four to forty-eight on others. Three days on the DNA if we’re insanely lucky.”
“Three
“Couple of the victims’ families have a lot of stroke. And thank God for it.” Baxter glances at me as though wondering whether to reassure me that the FBI works every case with equal fervor, but he doesn’t. Everyone in this room knows that if the eleven missing women were crack whores, the evidence on those planes could languish in the lab for weeks.
“Before we decide where we’re going,” he says, “let’s take stock of where we are. Today’s interviews didn’t produce the result we’d hoped for. Why not?”
“Two possibilities,” says Lenz. “One, none of the four suspects is the UNSUB/painter. This theory is unanimously supported by our art experts, who say the Sleeping Women weren’t painted by any of the suspects.
