Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“But MIA relatives go over to try to help the missing soldier, right? Not the other way around.”

“Yes.”

“Did you check with the MIA families you knew?”

“Yes. The FBI did too. We never found anyone who would admit to calling me. But there are more than two thousand MIAs still unaccounted for. That’s a lot of families. And at the meetings, they all talk to me, because I’m well known and because I’ve traveled in the East so much.”

“If that were the case, who would the man’s voice have belonged to?”

“A husband. A stepfather. Who knows? But I thought of another possibility. What if it was the killer playing a trick on me? Using some woman he knows to upset me.”

Kaiser shakes his head. “No other relatives of victims received such calls. I checked.”

“So, what do you think?”

He idly pokes a leftover slice of beef. “I think it might have been your sister.”

I take a deep breath and try to steady my nerves.

“I’m telling you this,” he says soberly, “because Baxter told me you were tough.”

“I don’t know if I’m that tough.”

He waits, letting me work through it.

“This is why you didn’t want Lenz here, isn’t it?”

“Partly.”

“When I asked Lenz what he thought about the phone call, he brushed it off.”

Kaiser looks at the ground. “The consensus in the Unit is that your mystery caller was a member of an MIA family, just as you guessed. Lenz didn’t ask you about it because he’d seen the statement you made at the time, and he’d consider that a more reliable description of the event than what you remember now.”

“That sounds like an official reply. What’s your personal opinion?”

“If your sister is alive, it throws Lenz’s present theory – whatever that might be – into question. Lenz talks a lot about how everything is possible, how there are no rules, but deep down he’s wearing blinders. I don’t think he always did. But these days he’s prejudiced toward the tragic ending. I’m open to something else. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Why are you open to something else?”

A wistful smile touches the corners of Kaiser’s lips and eyes. “Because I know the world obeys no laws. I learned that the hard way.” He picks up a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie, then discards it. “Lenz probably asked you about all sorts of family stuff. Right? Intimate stuff?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the way he works. He likes to know all the underlying relationships. He’s upset a lot of the victims’ families doing that. I’m not criticizing him for it. He did some groundbreaking work early in his career.”

“That’s pretty much what he said about you.”

“Really? Well, I won’t kid you, I don’t think he should be involved in this investigation.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t trust his instincts or his judgment. He was involved in a case a while back that turned into a real cluster-fuck. And Baxter places too much weight on what he says, because of their history.”

“Lenz told me his wife was killed during a case. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes. Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said it was a vicious killing.”

“It was that, all right. And it happened because Lenz did something supremely arrogant and stupid. He got there five minutes after she died on her own kitchen table.”

“God.”

“He retired after that. He’s done some consulting for Baxter since, but I don’t think he learned the right lesson from what happened. He still has too much faith in his own abilities.”

“What do you think about his plan to use me to rattle any suspects you dig up?”

“It could work, but it’s not as simple or safe as it sounds. The results could be inconclusive, and the strategy could put you right in the killer’s sights.”

Kaiser’s cell phone beeps again. He lifts it from the detritus of the meal and scans the LCD. “Lenz again.”

“Are you going to answer?”

“No.”

Since Kaiser took the conversation into personal territory, I feel justified in doing the same. “You’ve told me Lenz’s dirty laundry. What about yours? Why did you leave Quantico?”

“What did Lenz tell you?”

“Nothing. He said he’d leave it for you to tell me, if you would.”

Kaiser looks off toward a stand of palm trees, where two lovers and a dog lie on a blanket, an ice chest beside them. “It’s pretty simple, really. I burned out. It happens to everyone in that job, sooner or later. I just snapped a little more spectacularly than most.”

“What happened?”

“After four years at Quantico, I was pretty much Baxter’s right hand. I was handling far too heavy a load. Over a hundred and twenty active cases. Child murders, serial rapes, bombers, kidnappings, the whole sick spectrum. You can’t assign priorities in a situation like that. Behind every single case, every photo, is a desperate family. Distraught parents, husbands, siblings. Frustrated cops aching to help them. It got to where I was actually living at the Academy. When my personal life fell apart, I hardly noticed. Then one day the inevitable happened.”

This vague reference to his personal life makes me check his left hand. There’s no wedding band there.

“What was that?” I ask. “The inevitable?”

“Baxter and I were out at the Montana State Prison, interviewing a death-row inmate. He’d raped and murdered seven little boys. Tortured most of them before they died. It was no different from interviews I’d done a dozen times before, but this guy was really enjoying telling us what he’d done. A lot of them do, of course, but this time… I just couldn’t detach myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about this one little boy. Six years old, screaming for his mother while this guy shoved power tools up his rectum.” Kaiser swallows hard, like his mouth is dry. “And I lost control.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over the table. I tried to kill him.”

“How close did you come?”

“I broke his jaw, his nose, and assorted other facial bones. I damaged his larynx and put out one of his eyes. Baxter couldn’t pull me off. He finally clubbed the base of my skull with a coffee mug. Stunned me long enough for him to drag me out. The guy was hospitalized for twenty-six days.”

“Jesus. How did you keep your job?”

Kaiser slowly shakes his head, as if gauging how much to tell me. “Baxter covered for me. He told the warden the con jumped me and I defended myself.” Kaiser’s eyes search out the lovers again. “I guess you’re going to go all liberal on me now, tell me I violated his civil rights?”

“Well, you did. You know that. But I understand why. I’ve made myself part of the story before, instead of covering it. It sounds to me like you had a delayed reaction to something else.”

He looks back at me as though surprised. “That’s what it was, all right. I’d lost a little girl a week before. Working a rape-murder case in Minnesota. I was advising Minneapolis Homicide, and we were close to getting the UNSUB. Really close. But he strangled one more little girl before we did. If I’d been one day faster… well, you know.”

“It’s in the past. Isn’t that what you told me? You can’t change it, so forget it.”

“Glib bullshit.”

His honesty brings a smile to my face. “A while ago you said ‘clusterfuck.’ That’s a Vietnam term, isn’t it?”

He nods distractedly. “Yeah.”

“Were you there?”

“Yeah.”

“You look too young for it.”

“I was there at the end. Seventy-one and -two.”

Which makes him forty-six or forty-seven, if he went over when he was eighteen. “The end was seventy-three,” I remind him. “Seventy-five, really. There was still a lot of ground fighting in seventy-one.”