Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“He said he’d never seen the artist’s face. It was all done with blind drops or something.”

“He used that term?” asks Baxter. “Blind drops?”

“He said he got it from spy movies.” I quickly summarize Wingate’s explanation of how he received the first painting, and the subsequent drops of cash in train station lockers.

“I suppose it could have happened that way,” Baxter concedes. “But from what I’ve got on Wingate so far, he was no font of truth.”

“What do you have on him?”

“For one thing, his name wasn’t Christopher Wingate. It was Zjelko Krnich. He was born in Brooklyn in 1956, to Yugoslavian immigrants. Ethnic Serbs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Krnich’s father abandoned his wife and kids when Zjelko was seven. The boy scrapped in the streets, then moved on to small-time drug dealing, then pimping. He hopped a freighter to Europe when he was twenty and kicked around there for a few years, selling grass and coke to feed himself. He hung out in resort areas, and his drug business put him in contact with some trendy people. He fell in with a Parisian woman who dealt in paintings, some genuine, others not. He picked up the trade from her. She gave him his Anglo name. After a couple of years, they fell out over money she claimed he stole. Krnich suddenly reappeared in New York, legally changed his name to Wingate, and started working at a small gallery in Manhattan. Twenty years later, he’s one of the hottest dealers in the world.”

“He was hot, all right. About three hundred and fifty degrees when I last saw him.”

“Residential fires burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Glass.” Baxter is not up for humor tonight, not even the gallows variety. His eyes are flint hard; his patience has come to an end. “I want the film you shot tonight.”

“Once I give you that, you’re going to cut me out.”

“That’s not true,” says Lenz. “You’re a relative of a victim.”

“Which counts for zero, in my experience. You weren’t around last year, Doctor. Back then it was like pulling teeth to get substantive information out of this guy.”

“I can assure you that won’t be the case this time,” Lenz says smoothly.

Baxter starts to speak, but the psychiatrist cuts him off with a wave of his hand. Arthur Lenz obviously pulls a lot of weight in the ISU.

“Ms. Glass, I have a proposal for you. One I think will interest you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Fate has handed us a unique opportunity. Your appearance in Hong Kong caused a disturbance not because of the connection between the paintings and the kidnappings; the people in the gallery knew nothing about that. They were upset because you looked exactly like a woman in one of the paintings.”

“So?”

“Imagine the reaction you might cause in the killer if you came face-to-face with him.”

“I may have done that tonight, right?”

Lenz shakes his head. “I’m far from convinced that the man who attacked you tonight is the man who painted this remarkable series.”

“Go on.”

“Forensic art analysis has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Not only is there X-ray analysis, spectrography, infrared, and all the rest. There may be fingerprints preserved in the oil paint itself. We may find hairs or skin flakes. Now that we know about the paintings, I believe they will lead us in short order to a suspect, or perhaps a group of them. Style analysis alone could produce a list of likely candidates. And once we have those suspects, Ms. Glass, you are the weapon I would most like to use against them.”

Lenz wasn’t kidding before. They do need me. They cooked all this up long before I got here.

“How would you feel about that?” asks the psychiatrist. “Posing as a special agent at suspect interviews? Casually walking into a room while Daniel and I observe suspects?”

“She’d kill to do it,” says Baxter. “I know that much about her.”

Lenz fires a harsh look at him: “Ms. Glass?”

“I’ll do it.”

“What did I tell you?” says Baxter.

“On one condition,” I add.

“Shit,” mutters Baxter. “Here it comes.”

“What condition?” asks Lenz.

“I’m in the loop from now till the day you get the guy. I want access to everything.”

Baxter rolls his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

“I want to know everything you know. You have my word that I won’t reveal anything you tell me. But I can’t be excluded like last year. That almost killed me.”

I expect Baxter to argue, but he just looks at the table and says, “Done. Where’s your film?”

“I dropped it in a mailbox at JFK.”

“A U.S. Postal Service box?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember which one?”

“It was near the American Airlines gates. It’s addressed to my house in San Francisco. I’ll give you the address. I bought the stamps and envelope near a newsstand. It was close to the mailbox as well.”

“We’ll get it. We can develop it at the lab right here.”

“I figured you guys had mastered mail theft.”

Baxter stifles an obscene reply and takes out a cell phone.

“One other thing,” I add. “I shot three photos of Sleeping Woman Number Twenty before I escaped the building. It was in bad light, but I bracketed the exposures. I think they’ll come out.”

With a look of grudging admiration, Baxter dials a number and tells someone to find out who the postmaster general is and get him out of bed. When he hangs up, I say, “I want digital copies of those pictures e-mailed to the New Orleans field office and a set printed for me. I’ll pick them up in the morning.”

“You’re going to New Orleans?” asks Lenz.

“That’s right.”

“It’s too late to get a flight tonight.”

“Then I expect you guys to get me a plane. I only came here at your request. I need to tell my sister’s husband what’s happened, and I want to tell him face-to-face. My mother, too. Before they hear about it some other way.”

“They won’t hear anything,” says Baxter.

“Why not?”

“What’s happened, really? You upset a few art lovers in Hong Kong. Nothing that would hit the papers.”

“What about the fire in New York? Your dead agent?”

“Wingate was reputed to have mob ties. FBI surveillance would be expected. One reporter has already speculated that Wingate torched the place for the insurance and killed himself in the process.”

“Are you saying you intend to keep this investigation secret?”

“As far as possible.”

“But you must be trying to gather all the paintings, right? For forensic analysis? Won’t that get out?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Look, Arthur is going to New Orleans in the morning, to speak to some art dealers there. Why don’t you fly down with him then?”

“I’d be happy to fly down tonight,” Lenz says, “if Ms. Glass feels such urgency. Can the plane be made ready?”

Baxter considers this. “I suppose. But Ms. Glass, please urge your brother-in-law to be discreet. And as for telling your mother… perhaps you should wait a bit on that.”

“Why?”

“We’ve had some contact with her in the past year. She’s not in the best shape.”

“She never was.”

“She’s drinking heavily. I don’t think we could rely upon her discretion.”

“It’s her daughter, Mr. Baxter. She deserves to know what’s going on.”

“But what do you really have to tell her? Nothing encouraging. Don’t you think it might be better to wait?”

“I’ll make that decision.”

“Fine,” he says wearily. “But your mother and brother-in-law are the limit of the circle. I know you worked for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans years ago. I’m sure you have friends down there. If you’re going to be effective in our investigation, no one can know you’re in town. No drinks with old friends, no human-interest story about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer back on her old beat. We’ll be glad to put you up in a hotel.”