Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

He walks past the elevators and into the stairwell.

“We need the exercise?” I ask.

“The elevators are painfully slow.”

I follow him down one floor, and we emerge into a beehive of activity, a wide-open cube farm of glass-windowed partitions with well-dressed men and women hurrying between the workspaces. Ten seconds into the room, I realize something they managed to conceal upstairs: The New Orleans FBI office is a building under siege. The agents’ faces look hunted, their smallest movements marked by frustration. The air-conditioning is running full blast, but it can’t drive out the reek of desperation. For a year and a half – two sweltering summers -these men and women have labored in vain as an evergrowing string of victims generated fear and then panic in a city that in the early nineties grew inured to the highest murder rate in the nation. Outside this building, my sister is a dim memory, a blurred element of the free-floating paranoia tainting the streets of this usually laid back city. But here, in this seemingly corporate cube farm, Jane is remembered. Here the shame of impotence weighs heavily on civilian soldiers who have no idea who their enemy is. As I move through the room at Kaiser’s side, the looks I get run the scale from awe to resentment. There she is, they say to themselves. The one who found the paintings. The photographer. The one whose sister got it. The one who was in the fire…

In the corner of the huge room is an office with four real walls and an open door. Kaiser leads us inside, where a man in shirtsleeves sits behind a desk, talking on the phone. His office is a quarter of the size of the SAC’s upstairs, but his voice carries the weight of authority. When he hangs up, he winks at Kaiser.

“What’s up, John?” he says, his eyes ready for anything.

“Bill, this is Jordan Glass. Ms. Glass, Bill Granger, head of the Violent Crimes Squad.”

Granger leans forward and shakes my hand. “I’m sorry about your sister, Ms. Glass. We’ve been doing everything we can.”

“Thank you. I understand.”

“The SAC wants to put an agent with Ms. Glass for a few hours,” says Kaiser. “Maybe for the night. There’s no imminent threat, but we want someone armed with her. I was thinking of Wendy Travis. Can you spare her?”

Granger bites his bottom lip, then nods and picks up the phone. “I think we can spare her for a few hours.” He taps his fingers on his knee, then says, “Could I see you for a moment?…

Thanks.“ When he hangs up, he gives Kaiser a knowing look. ”I heard we’ve got a Quantico shrink upstairs, and Baxter himself may be flying down. You guys have a plan?“

“Working on one.”

“Anything for my people to do?”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

There’s a knock behind us, and I turn to see a young woman a couple of inches shorter than I, but twice as fit. She’s attractive in a well-scrubbed American way, dressed in a navy skirt, cream blouse, and a matching jacket that looks like Liz Claiborne. She could be an accountant for a Big Five firm, but for the pistol I see through the opening in her jacket.

“Ms. Glass,” says Granger, “this is Special Agent Wendy Travis. Agent Travis, Jordan Glass. I’d like you to spend the day with her. It’s a protective detail.”

Agent Wendy gives me a pert smile and offers me her hand. When I take it, she shakes with a firmness two levels above that of most female professionals.

“Let me get my purse,” she says. “And I’m ready to go.”

I expect her to leave, but she remains in the doorway, her eyes on John Kaiser.

Kaiser smiles and says, “Thanks, Wendy. I knew you were the one for this.”

Practically glowing with pleasure, Agent Wendy nods and walks briskly toward one of the glass cubes. When I turn back to the desk, Kaiser is blushing, and Bill Granger is smiling wryly and shaking his head.

I’m sitting on St. Charles Avenue in my rented Mustang, trying to work up the courage to knock on my brother-in-law’s door. I parked a little way up from the house in case my niece and nephew are watching through the windows. My female bodyguard is standing thirty yards away, beneath a spreading oak, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. Agent Wendy has turned out to be all right, and I feel safer than I have in years. Wendy would think Jane was a lightweight for running only three miles a day. It’s not hard to imagine her standing on a shooting range next to 250-pound men annoyed that a “goddamn girl” is outshooting them. She entered the FBI Academy in 1992, which tells me she’s probably one of the “Starlings” who signed up for the Bureau after seeing Jodie Foster’s inspiring portrayal of a fictional agent trainee in The Silence of the Lambs. I’m not knocking her. After I saw Annie Hall, I walked around in floppy pants, a man’s necktie, and a hat for three weeks. At least Wendy picked something worthwhile to emulate.

She also kindly followed me around town while I searched for presents for my niece and nephew. Henry is eight, and named after the father of my brother-in-law, Marc Lacour. Lyn is six, and named after my mother. I’ve only seen them once since I left New Orleans eleven months ago. I promised myself I would visit more often, but that was a hard promise to keep. The reason is simple: I look exactly like their missing mother. And no matter what their father says to prepare them for my visits, they end up confused and crying.

Wendy is staring at the Mustang, willing me to get out. She knows I’m nervous about the visit. An hour ago I persuaded her to take me to a funky little bar on Magazine. She didn’t drink, but I had two gin-and-tonics. To keep my mind off what was coming, I asked her about the New Orleans field office. She started with SAC Bowles, who initially found the ambiguities of Louisiana crime and politics – at one time virtually the same industry – a bit slippery. But now he has trials pending against a former governor and assorted other luminaries. The interesting thing was the way Wendy talked about John Kaiser. She didn’t volunteer information; I had to ask. And her self-conscious glances told me she was trying to gauge the nature and level of my interest.

Kaiser, it seems, is the resident hunk of the office. All the assistants and secretaries flirt shamelessly with him, but he has never asked one for a date, patted a rump, or even squeezed a shoulder, which impresses Agent Wendy to no end. Kaiser’s biography is interesting, too. He was sheriff in Idaho when Daniel Baxter was called in by a neighboring sheriff to consult on a string of murders that overlapped Kaiser’s county. With Baxter’s help, Kaiser ultimately caught the killer, proving exceptionally adept at interrogating suspects and extracting a confession. Duly impressed, Baxter encouraged the young sheriff to apply to the FBI Academy. Against the odds, the country boy from Idaho won admission, and after serving in the Spokane, Detroit, and Baltimore field offices, Kaiser was tapped by Baxter for the Investigative Support Unit. His record there was stellar until he snapped under the pressure. When I told Wendy I knew that part of the story, she couldn’t hide her suspicion. How, she wondered, had I learned something in one day that it had taken her weeks to discover?

“His wife left him,” she said. “Did he tell you that?”

“No.”

A satisfied smile. “She couldn’t take the hours he put in. That’s pretty common. We’re getting more and more intra-Bureau marriages now. But he didn’t even stop working then, to sort it out. He just let her go.”

“Kids?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“He told me he served in Vietnam. Do you know anything about that?”