Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“I’ll probably stay with my brother-in-law. I haven’t seen my sister’s kids in a long time.”

“All right. But you agree about the isolation? Until we have suspects and you’ve confronted them, you talk to nobody who knows you, and you stay out of sight.”

“Agreed. But I want a full update on the plane. That’s our deal, right?”

Baxter sighs and looks at Lenz as if the psychiatrist has named his own poison. “Arthur can handle that.”

Dr. Lenz stands and rubs his hands together, and I notice again how tall he is. “Why don’t we get some coffee and doughnuts?” he says. “There’s no in-flight service.”

“Just a minute, Arthur,” Baxter says. He looks at me, his eyes glacier cold. “Ms. Glass, I want you to listen to me. Nothing about this case fits known parameters. Our New Orleans UNSUB is not some low-self-image maintenance man with a gimp leg and a collection of mutilated Barbie dolls. We’re dealing with at least one highly organized personality. A man who has kidnapped and probably killed twelve women without a trace. You may be on his radar. We don’t know. We do know you’re about to enter his territory. Be very careful, Ms. Glass. Don’t let your mind wander for a moment. Or you could join your sister a lot sooner than God ever intended.”

Despite the melodramatic tone, Baxter’s warning gives me pause. This man does not speak lightly of danger. “Do you think I need protection?”

“I’m inclined to say yes. I’ll make a final decision on that before you land in New Orleans. Just remember: Secrecy is the best protection.”

“I hear you.”

He stands and gives me a curt nod. “I appreciate your willingness to help us.”

“You knew I would. It’s personal for me.”

Baxter reaches into the NOKIDS file and tosses out a photo of a brown-haired man in his late twenties, an All-American boy smiling like it’s his first job interview. Special Agent Fred Coates, no doubt. It’s hard to picture him with his throat cut, spitting blood into a cell phone.

“It’s personal for us too,” says Baxter.

He speaks softly, but behind his eyes burns a volcanic fury. Daniel Baxter has tracked and caged some of the deadliest monsters of our time. Until tonight, the one that took my sister was merely one among others still at large. But now Special Agent Fred Coates lies on a cold morgue slab somewhere. FBI blood has been spilled. And the situation has most definitely changed.

The FBI Learjet hurtles into the Virginia sky at three a.m., after a long wait for mechanical checks, refueling, and a fresh flight crew. I should have waited for morning, but I couldn’t. I learned unflappable patience during twenty years of globetrotting and thousands of hours behind my camera, but Jane’s disappearance robbed me of that. I can no longer bear waiting. If I’m standing still, I have too much time to think. Motion is my salvation.

The interior of the jet is strangely comforting to me. I’ve done a fair amount of corporate work in my career, mostly shooting glossy annual reports, and corporate-jet travel is one of the perks. Some of my purist colleagues have criticized me for this, but when all is said and done, they have to worry about paying their bills, and I don’t. I grew up poor; I can’t afford to be a snob. The interior of this Lear is configured for work. Two seats face each other over a collapsible desktop, and Dr. Lenz has chosen these for us. He seems accustomed to the cramped quarters of the cabin, despite his heavy frame. I imagine he once shuttled between murder scenes the way I shuttled between wars.

Lenz looks at least sixty, and his face has begun to sag with a look of permanent weariness that I recognize from certain men I know – men who have seen too much and run out of emotional energy to deal with the burdens they already carry, much less those of the future. He looks, in short, like a man who has surrendered. I don’t judge him for it. I’m twenty years younger, and I’ve come near to cracking myself.

“Ms. Glass,” he says, “we have a little over two hours together. I’d like to spend that time as profitably as we can.”

“I agree.”

“Interviewing you – particularly since you’re an identical twin – is almost like being able to interview your sister before the fact. I’d like to ask you some questions, some of them very personal.”

“I’ll answer what I think is relevant.”

He blinks once, slowly, like an owl. “I hope you’ll try to answer them all. By withholding information, you may prevent my learning something which could advance our efforts to find the killer.”

“You’ve been using the word ‘killer’ since I arrived. You believe all the women are dead?”

His eyes don’t waver. “I do. Daniel holds out some hope, but I do not. Does that bother you?”

“No. I feel the same way. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t imagine where they could possibly be. Eleven women -maybe twelve now – all held prisoner somewhere for up to eighteen months? Without one escaping? I can’t see it. And the women in the later paintings look dead to me.”

“And you have seen much death.”

“Yes. I do have one question, though. Are you aware of the phone call I received eight months ago?”

“The one in the middle of the night? That you thought might be from your sister?”

“Yes. The Bureau traced it to a train station in Thailand.”

Lenz grants me a smile of condolence. “I’m familiar with the incident. It’s my opinion that the guess you made the following morning was correct. That it was someone you’d met during your efforts to locate your father, someone from an MIA family.”

“I just thought maybe… me finding the paintings in Asia-”

“We’re certainly looking into it. Rest assured. But I’d like to move on now, if we could.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I understand you weren’t that close to your sister as an adult, so I’d like you to tell me how you grew up. What shaped Jane’s personality. And yours.”

It’s times like now I wish I smoked. “Okay. You know who my father was, right?”

“Jonathan Glass, the renowned war photographer.”

“Yes. And there was only one war in Mississippi. The one for civil rights. He won his first Pulitzer for that. Then he went off to the other wars, which meant he was almost never home.”

“How did the family react to that?”

“I handled it better than my sister or mother did. I understood why he went, even as a child. Why would you hang around the Mississippi backwoods if you could be roaming the world, going the places in his pictures?”

“You wanted to travel to war zones as a child?”

“Dad shot all kinds of pictures in those places. I didn’t see any of his war stuff until I was old enough to go down to the public library and read Look and Life for myself. Mom wouldn’t keep those shots in the house.”

“Why did your mother marry a man who would never be home?”

“She didn’t know-that when she married him. He was just a big handsome Scots-English guy who looked like he could handle anything that came along. And he could, pretty much. He could survive in the jungle with nothing but a pocketknife. What he couldn’t survive was married life in Mississippi. A nine-to-five job. That was hell for him.

“He tried to do right by her, to keep her with him as his career took off. He even moved her to New York. She lasted until she got pregnant. During her eighth month, he went on assignment to Kenya. She went down to Grand Central Station with six dollars in her purse and rode a train all the way to Memphis. Then the bus from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If she hadn’t been pregnant when she left, Dad probably never would have come back home. But he did. Not that often, but when he did, it was paradise for me. There were some glorious summers.”