“I don’t know. What I do know is, he wasn’t Roger Wheaton or Leon Gaines or Frank Smith.”
“I know.”
“He said something else, John.”
“What?”
“If he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs, and I’d still make a pretty picture for the man.”
John’s face pales. “He said that? ‘For the man’?”
“For the man.”
“Jesus.”
The clatter of hooves on brick is closer. John takes his wallet out of his pants and opens it to show his FBI credentials.
“You lied to me, John.”
“What?”
“The Dorignac’s victim was raped, and you knew it. They found semen in her.”
He says nothing at first. Then: “The post was inconclusive as to rape.”
“You must have asked the husband when he last had sex with her.”
He sighs with resignation. “Okay, it was probably rape. I didn’t want that weighing on you. Especially before the interviews. I didn’t want you suffering needlessly, and nobody wanted you so mad at the suspects that you couldn’t be professional.”
“I understand all that, okay? But don’t ever hold anything back again.”
He nods. “Okay.”
“Nothing John.”
“I got it.”
The horses are upon us. Two cops – one black, one white – stare down with drawn guns.
“Get your hands up! Both of you!”
John holds up his credentials so that the cops can see them.
“Special Agent John Kaiser, FBI. This crime scene is to be secured for the joint task force. I’ve been shot and I can’t walk, so you men get to it.”
21
The wake of Wendy’s death is a blur to me now, as I ride the elevator up to the fourth floor of the FBI fortress on Lake Pontchartrain. While John spent ninety minutes in the accident room at Charity Hospital downtown, I sat in a waiting room with enough armed special agents to make me feel like the First Lady. Daniel Baxter and SAC Bowles rushed out from the field office, but only to make their presence felt with John and the doctors. They sped off to manage the hunt for the UNSUB’s body and a hundred other details, leaving me with images of Wendy fighting and dying to save me, her lifeblood spattered over my chest, and the UNSUB’s voice hot in my ear:
John came through surgery fine, but his doctor didn’t want to release him for twenty-four hours. John thanked the man, picked up the cane a physical therapist had deposited in his room, and limped out of the hospital. Assuming I was his spouse – or at least a significant other – the surgeon gave me dire warnings about caring for the wounded leg. I promised to do all I could, then followed John out to a waiting FBI car.
“Where to, sir?” asked the young field agent driving the car. He and John were technically of equal rank, but in times of crisis, a natural hierarchy asserts itself.
“The field office,” John replied. “Move it.”
Baxter, Lenz, and SAC Bowles are waiting for us in Bowles’s office. They’ve spent their last hours in the Emergency Operations Center, but Bowles’s office has a leather chair with an ottoman on which John can prop his swollen leg.
“How is it, John?” Baxter asks as I help him sit down.
“Stiff, but fine.”
Baxter nods in the way I’ve seen officers do when a needed noncom lies about a wound. Nobody’s going to tell John Kaiser to take a medical leave.
“How are you doing, Jordan?”
“Holding it together.”
“I know that wasn’t easy, seeing what happened to Wendy.”
I start to stay silent, but I feel I should say something. “You should know this. She did everything right. The first guy coming toward us looked much more suspicious, and he diverted her. When the well-dressed guy brought up his gun, she threw herself in front of me and was pulling out her gun as she jumped. Nobody could have done better. Nobody.”
Baxter’s jaw muscles clench as pain and pride fight for dominance in his eyes. “This is the first case where I’ve lost an agent to a serial offender,” he says softly. “Now we’ve lost two. It doesn’t need saying, but I’m going to anyway. We will not rest until every son of a bitch involved is rotting in maximum-security lockdown or dead.”
“Amen,” says SAC Bowles. “I’ve got a hundred agents downstairs ready to work twenty-fours a day. Wendy had a lot of friends.”
“We still don’t have his body?” John asks Baxter.
“No. The Coast Guard and contract divers are searching, but the Mississippi is unforgiving. Workers go off barges all the time without being found. We have to accept the possibility that we may never find his body.”
“What about the cell phone?” John asks.
“No prints.”
“No fingerprints on a cell phone? How is that possible?”
“It was wiped clean. He was carrying it wiped. This UNSUB was taking extreme precautions. He must have figured that if he dropped the phone during the abduction, prints would quickly lead to an ID. That’s the good news. I think if we find the body, we’ll get a name in no time.”
“What about the memory chips inside it?”
“The Engineering Research Facility at Quantico just got the phone. They say if the short didn’t fry the chips, we could get lucky. We should get a report anytime.”
Baxter taps his fingertips together like a benched athlete waiting to get back into the game.
“What about my pictures?” I ask.
“That’s the one bright spot. They were blurry but usable. The University of Arizona produced a decent enhancement of the best one, and it’s been running on the local TV stations for two hours. Three calls so far, but they didn’t pan out. The
“Well,” John half-groans. “We got what we wanted. We rattled the hell out of somebody. We just got a delayed reaction, and it was a lot tougher than we expected.”
“Yep,” Baxter agrees.
“What about the UNSUB’s gun?”
Baxter shakes his head. “The river’s high now, and the current fast. Also, the Mississippi has a sandy bottom in some places, and the water flows through it to some depth. Heavy objects sink into it in a matter of seconds. We’re making extraordinary efforts, but again, no great hopes. We have to find that body. Then we can start checking for connections to Wheaton, Gaines, or Smith.”
“Where were the three musketeers while this went down?” John asks.
“All present and accounted for. Wheaton was painting at the art center. Had been since you talked to him this morning. After Jordan left Smith’s house, he lunched at Bayona, shopped at the Hurwitz-Mintz furniture store, then went back home. He’s presently in the company of a handsome young gentleman we’ve yet to identify.”
