Dead Sleep

“They were beautiful?”

“Some.”

“Different from other women?”

“How do you mean? In bed?”

“Yes… but not just that. I don’t know. Like de Becque said. Like that Li, that woman we met on Cayman. Did they make you fall in love with them?”

He’s looking in my direction, but his mind is focused thousands of miles away. “I saw it happen a lot. People over here think it’s because Vietnamese women were more submissive than American women, but that’s not it. They just – I’m not talking about the city girls, now, the bar girls, but regular Vietnamese women – they had a naturalness about them. They were very demure, yet open about certain things. It’s seductive without trying to be. I knew a guy who deserted to be with one.”

“And I just made you feel like they made you feel?”

“Not the same. Only the intensity.” He touches my cheek. “You’re thinking about your father, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That he may have left you on purpose?”

I nod, unable to voice my fear.

“I’m not like your father, Jordan.”

“I know. You’re like the men he took pictures of.”

“What do you mean?”

John’s ceiling has a water stain. The house isn’t perfect after all. “They were more real than he was. He seemed to make them real, to bring them into existence with his camera. And in a way he did. The way I do. We make certain things real to the rest of the world. But the rest of the world doesn’t really matter. My father’s photos didn’t make soldiers eternal, the way someone wrote they did. What those soldiers did made them eternal. And whatever they did, I think, is still happening somewhere. All of it. All things, all the time. I probably sound nuts. That’s what comes from living on the West Coast, right?”

“You don’t sound nuts. The things I saw and did in Vietnam have never stopped for me. You know why I don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder? Because there’s nothing post about it. It’s just something I live with. Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away.”

“Tell me something, John. The truth. Do you think my father is involved in this thing?”

“No.” His eyes are steady and guileless.

“But you did before.”

“I wondered, that’s all. I still don’t know what’s happening. But if your father’s involved, the only way I can see it is if he’s in with de Becque somehow.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“What do you base that on?”

“My gut.”

I lay my hand on his flat stomach. “You don’t have much of one.”

“I’m glad you can still laugh.”

“It’s the same old choice. Laugh or cry.” I rub my hand slowly over his abdomen. “Why don’t you sleep for a while?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. Not with Thalia still out there. I can never sleep when things are breaking.”

“You want me to make coffee or something?”

“Coffee would be good.”

“What about food? You have anything in the fridge?”

“Can you cook?”

I laugh. “Mostly foreign dishes designed for campfires. But I don’t think there’s a Mississippi girl on the planet who can’t do the basics.”

“There are some chicken breasts in the freezer.”

“Rice in the cabinets? Onions?”

“Probably.”

“Jambalaya, then.” I kiss him on the chin and climb out of the bed.

“Would you mind bringing those Argus photos in here?”

“I think they can wait, but I’ll bring them.”

I retrieve the thick manila envelope from the coffee table and toss it onto the bed. “How many of those have you looked at already?”

“I don’t know. Until they adjusted the sensitivity of the program, I was looking at twenty different versions of the same face before it became recognizable as another one.”

“Pace yourself. Jambalaya and biscuits, coming up.”

I walk back to the kitchen and orient myself, but I’ve gotten no further than running water over the chicken breasts when John’s voice echoes up the hallway. Something in the sound makes me freeze with my hand on the sink tap. I run for the bedroom, in my mind seeing him turning blue from a blood clot broken free by our strenuous lovemaking.

“I know this woman,” he says, shaking a piece of paper at me as I come through the door.

“From where?” I ask, taking the picture from him. It’s a facial shot of a young blond woman, maybe eighteen. She’s like a template of an adult; her face has yet to develop the definition of personality. “Is she one of the missing persons you’ve been studying?”

“No. I saw her years ago. In Quantico.”

“You mean you knew her? Personally?”

He shakes his head impatiently. “No. Every year we have city and state cops coming through Quantico. Our National Academy program. Most of them have a case that’s dogged them for years, one they couldn’t solve or get out of their minds. Sometimes it’s a single murder. Usually it’s two or three they think might be connected. A police detective showed me this woman at Quantico.”

“A New Orleans detective?”

“That’s the thing. I think he was from New York. This is a really old case.”

My head is buzzing with a strange excitement. “How old?”

“Ten years? Remember at the Camellia Grill, when I told you I was working on something? I said if it panned out, I’d tell you? Well, maybe it has.”

“How do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“The youngest of our four suspects is Frank Smith, who’s thirty-five. Serial offenders don’t just wake up one day and start killing people in middle age. Baxter’s unit was checking all four suspects’ past residences for similar unsolved crimes. Vermont, where Wheaton’s from. Terrebonne Parish, where Laveau grew up. Those were easy. That left New York, for Smith and Gaines. Not to mention the possible accomplice. In fact, all four suspects have ties to New York. But when you’re talking about missing persons – which is what this case is, because of the lack of corpses – you’re talking about thousands of victims in New York, even if you only go back a few years. The VICAP computer is supposed to make those kinds of connections, but police compliance isn’t always great, and it’s worse the farther back you go. But I thought, What if there were unsolved homicides in New York that had only one or two similarities to this case?”

“Like…?”

“Women taken from grocery stores, jogging paths, et cetera, snatched off the street without a trace, no witnesses, nothing. A professional feel to them, yet no obvious similarities between the victims.”

“Did you check it out?”

“I called some New York cops I knew from the Academy program and asked them to poke around their old files. It was asking a lot, but I had to do it.”

“Did you talk to the cop who showed you this woman?”

“No, that guy’s retired now. And nobody’s gotten back to me yet. But this woman…”

“You still remember her?”