Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“New Orleans houses don’t have basements. The water table’s too high. That’s why they bury people above ground.”

“That was always more out of custom than necessity,” he says. “And the water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn’t even stink.”

A beeping sound comes from Kaiser’s pocket. He takes out a cell phone and looks at its LED screen. “That’s Lenz, trying to find me. We’ll let him keep looking.”

“Excuse me… you just said if they’re dead.”

Kaiser carefully formulates his reply. “That’s right.”

“Doctor Lenz is positive they’re dead.”

“The doctor and I disagree about a lot of things.”

“You’re the first law-enforcement officer who’s expressed any real doubt. Baxter says he’ll hold out hope until he sees an actual body, but he’s just being courteous.”

“Baxter’s a nice guy.” Kaiser’s eyes bore into mine. “But he thinks they’re dead.”

“And you don’t?”

“I’ve never seen a case like this. Eleven women vanish into thin air? Absolutely no word from the UNSUB? Normally, a guy who snatched that many women and got away with it would be taunting us some way.”

“But what makes you think they might be alive? Where could they possibly be?”

“It’s a big world, Ms. Glass. There’s something else, though. The autopsy on the Dorignac’s victim is mostly complete. Externally, the body was clean, but we took some skin from beneath her fingernails. There’s nothing to compare that to right now, but later it could be very important. Toxicology will take a little longer.”

“All that’s great. But why does that make you think the victims could be alive?”

“It doesn’t. But we also found a strange burn on her neck. The kind of contact burn consistent with an electrical stun device, like a taser.”

My pulse quickens. “What does that tell you?”

“That while the snatches were previously thought to have been blitz attacks, the force used was not necessarily deadly force. That means the UNSUB may not have wanted to risk killing his victims, even by mistake.”

“Oh, God. Please let that be it.”

“I don’t want to create false hope, but it’s a good sign in my book. By the way, we’re telling the media that we don’t think the Dorignac’s victim is part of this case. We’re playing it as a random rape-murder. The dumping of the body supports that story.”

“I hope that fairy tale doesn’t come back to haunt you.”

Kaiser takes another bite of spicy beef and gives me a measuring look. “A couple of other things make this UNSUB very interesting to me.”

“Like what?”

“One, he’s the only serial offender I know of to earn enormous profit from his crimes. Most serials don’t profit in any way from what they do. Money isn’t part of the equation for them. But for this guy, it is.”

“Okay.”

“Two, he’s not after publicity. Not the usual kind, anyway. If the victims are dead, he’s not leaving the bodies where they’ll be found and cause big news. And if they’re not dead, he’s not sending severed fingers to relatives or the TV stations. So for him, the women are simply part of the process of creating the paintings. That’s what the murders are about. The paintings.”

“But aren’t the paintings a kind of publicity in themselves?”

“Yes, but a very specialized kind. Publicity and profit are linked here. If the artist were painting these images solely to fulfill his private needs, he wouldn’t need to sell them. Think of the risk he’s taking by putting them on the market. That’s the only way we’ve learned anything about him. If he hadn’t sold any paintings, we’d be as lost today as we were after the first kidnapping.”

“How are profit and publicity linked?”

“He wants the art world to see what he’s doing. Maybe critics, maybe other painters, I don’t know. The money might not be important in and of itself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hasn’t spent a dime of it. He probably knows that in our society, the value of art is determined by what people pay for it. Therefore, if the world is to pay attention to his work, it must sell for a great deal of money. That’s why he took the risk of dealing with Christopher Wingate. Or dealing with whoever killed Wingate for him. I’m only speculating, of course.”

“It makes more sense than what I’ve heard so far. What does he want people to get from his work? Why paint the women dead? And why start with almost abstract faces, then paint women who look asleep, and only later get to explicit views of death?”

“I’d just as soon not speculate about that yet.” Kaiser looks at his watch. “I’d like to ask you about something personal, if you don’t mind.”

“What?”

“The phone call.”

“Phone call?”

“The one you got from Thailand.”

“Today I woke up thinking about that call. It was the most unsettling experience of my life.”

“I’m not surprised. I know you gave us a statement when it happened, but would you mind telling me about it?”

“Not if you think it might help you.”

“It might.”

“It was five months after Jane disappeared. A bad time for me. I was having to sedate myself to sleep. I don’t remember if I told them that in my statement.”

“You said you were exhausted.”

“That’s one word for it. I wasn’t too happy with the Bureau then. Anyway, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It must have rung a long time to wake me up, and when I finally got to it, the connection was terrible.”

“What was the first thing you heard?”

“A woman crying.”

“Did you recognize the voice? Right at that moment?”

“No. It made me more alert, but it didn’t zing straight to my gut. You know?”

“Yeah. What then?”

“The woman sobbed, ‘Jordan.’ Then there was static. Then: ‘I need your help. I can’t – ’ Then there was more static, like a bad cell phone connection. Then she said, ‘Daddy’s alive, but he can’t help me.’ Then: ‘Please,’ like she was begging, at her wits’ end. At that point I felt that it was Jane, and I was about to ask where she was when a man in the background said something in French that I didn’t understand and don’t remember.” Even now, in seventy-degree sunlight, a chill goes through my body at the memory. “And I thought for a second-”

“What?”

“I thought he sounded like my father.” I look defiantly at Kaiser, daring him to call me a fool. But he doesn’t. Part of me is glad, yet another part wonders if he’s a fool.

“Go on,” he says.

“Then in English the man said, ‘No, cherie, it’s just a dream.’ And then the phone went dead.”

My appetite is gone. A clammy sweat has broken out under my blouse, sending a cold rivulet down my ribs. I press the silk against my skin to stop it.

“Do you have a clear memory of your father’s voice?”

“Not really. More an impression, I guess. I think the voice on the phone reminded me of his because Dad spoke a little French sometimes. He learned it in Vietnam, I think. He called me cherie sometimes.”

“Did he? What happened next?”

“To be honest, my brain was barely functioning. I thought the whole thing was probably a delusion. But the next day, I reported it to Baxter, and he told me they had found a record of the call and traced its origin to a train station in Bangkok.”

“When you found that out, what did your gut tell you?”

“I hoped it was my sister. Bu the more I thought about it, the less I believed it. I know a lot of MIA families, from searching for my father for so long. What if it was a female relative of an MIA in the middle of a search? They go over there all the time. You know, a wife or daughter of an MIA, in trouble and needing help? Maybe she’s drunk and depressed. She pulls my card out of her purse. The conversation fits, if you fill in the blanks a certain way. ‘Jordan… I need your help. My daddy’s alive, but he’ – referring to her father – ‘can’t help me.’”