Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Enuresis?” asks Kaiser.

“No record of it. Both parents are deceased, but they weren’t the kind to have sought medical care for that. Still, we’re trying to track down physicians working in the area at the time.” More shuffling paper in the semidark. “Gaines is a two-time loser, once for aggravated battery, once for attempted rape.”

“Jesus,” mutters Bowles.

“No gang affiliations while incarcerated, but he was part of a bad riot at Sing Sing. We’re tracking down his cellmates and sending agents to interview them. Gaines never picked up a paintbrush in his life until his first term in Sing Sing -1975. He showed so much promise that the warden showed his stuff to some New York dealers. They apparently kept an eye on him, because during his second hitch, they made some sales for him. He attracted the attention of the New York art community, much as Jack Henry Abbott attracted the attention of Norman Mailer and those other chumps with his ‘Belly of the Beast’ nonsense.”

“Is that when Wheaton first heard about Gaines?” asks Kaiser.

“Wheaton isn’t mentioned by anyone at that time in connection with Gaines. Wheaton’s always been a recluse, associates with no other artists. Since his diagnosis, he’s broken off all contact with everyone but his dealer and his students. Local patrons of the arts in New Orleans have invited him for parties, dinner, like that, but he always declines. The president isn’t happy about that.”

“What does Gaines paint?” asks Kaiser.

“He started with prison scenes. Now he paints nothing but his girlfriend. Whatever girlfriend he has at the time. As far as we can tell, he’s regularly abused every woman he’s ever been with. He paints that, as well, by the way. Reviews of his stuff call it ‘violent,’ and that’s a quote.”

“How many applicants did Wheaton have to choose from when he picked this guy?”

“More than six hundred.”

“Jesus. Why did he pick Gaines?”

“You can ask him that tomorrow.”

Kaiser tenses beside me. “I’m doing the interview?”

“We’ll get to that after we cover these bios,” Baxter says quickly.

The rivalry between Kaiser and Lenz will surely come to a head over this.

“So Gaines is essentially painting a series, as well?” I ask. “The same subject again and again? Just like Wheaton and the UNSUB?”

“The others are too, in their ways,” says Lenz. “Wheaton apparently used this as a criterion in his selection. He’s on record as saying that only deep study of a particular subject can produce new understanding, deeper levels of truth.”

“That and fifty cents’ll buy you a cup of coffee,” cracks Bowles.

“I’m inclined to agree,” says Baxter. “But they pay Wheaton very big bucks.”

“How much?” asks Kaiser.

“His last painting went for four hundred thousand dollars.”

“That’s not even close to the Sleeping Women prices.”

“True. But Wheaton’s a lot more prolific than our UNSUB. You should note that NOPD has been called to Leon Gaines’s duplex several times by neighbors, but the girlfriend has yet to swear out a complaint. Gaines is usually drunk when they get there.”

“I think we’ve got the picture on Gaines,” says Kaiser.

“Not quite. He owns a Dodge utility van with tinted windows all around.”

The room goes silent.

“Anybody else have that kind of transport?” asks Kaiser in a soft voice.

“No,” says Lenz.

“We’ve got to get inside that van. If we find biological trace, we can compare it to samples from our victims’ DNA bank.”

“Where did you get DNA from the victims?” I ask. “You have no bodies.”

“For four victims, we have locks of hair saved from childhood,” says Kaiser. “Two victims were breast cancer survivors, and have bone marrow stem cells stocked at hospitals for future transplant. Two victims have eggs stored at fertility clinics. And two stocked umbilical cord blood when their youngest children were delivered. That’s not a direct match to the mother, but it could be helpful.”

“I’m impressed.”

“John put that together,” Baxter says proudly. “All grist to the mill.”

“As an identical twin,” says Kaiser, “you could add to the bank for your sister. I meant to ask you before.”

“Anytime.”

“As soon you conclude Gaines’s interview tomorrow,” says Baxter, “NOPD will confiscate the van.”

“What’s the deal with the utility van? Good way to move a body?”

Kaiser turns to me, his face a shadow with glinting eyes. “Rapists and serial killers favor this type of vehicle by a huge margin. It’s the most important part of their equipment, a means to quickly get the victim out of sight, even in a public place. Later, it often becomes the scene of the final crime.”

I try in vain to shut out images of Jane being raped and cut up inside a dark and stinking van.

“My money’s on Leon Gaines,” says Baxter. “But we need to cover everybody. Let’s have Frank Smith, Tom.”

Gaines’s face is replaced by the almost angelic visage I saw earlier in the composite.

“This one’s a riddle,” says Baxter. “Frank Smith was born into a wealthy family in Westchester County in 1965. He focused on art from an early age, and took an MFA degree from Columbia. Smith is openly gay, and he’s painted homosexual themes – usually nude men – from his college days.”

“Not nude sleeping men?” asks Kaiser.

“If only,” says Baxter. “By all reports, Smith is enormously talented, and paints in the style of the old masters. His paintings look like Rembrandt to me. Really unbelievable.”

“More like Titian, actually,” says Lenz, earning a snort from the SAC. “Frank Smith stretches his own canvases and mixes his own pigments. The mystery is what he’s doing in Wheaton’s program at all. He’s already famous in his own right. Wheaton has far more stature, of course, but I’m not sure what Smith could learn from him.”

“I’ll ask Smith tomorrow,” says Kaiser.

Lenz sighs and looks at Baxter, who gazes pointedly at the table. The blue light of the projector beam highlights the fatigue lines in the ISU chief’s face.

“Smith’s paintings now sell for upwards of thirty thousand dollars,” Lenz adds.

“Oh, I forgot,” says Baxter. “Wheaton’s currently working on a painting that takes up a whole room over at the Woldenberg Art Center at Tulane.”

“You mean a whole wall?” asks Kaiser.

“No, a whole room. Multiple canvases stretched over curved frames to form a perfect circle. He’s painted on curved canvases for years, to create a feeling that you’re walking into this clearing he’s painting. Monet tried this as well. But this new thing is a complete circle. Huge. Takes up half of a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot gallery.”

I know photographers who’ve tried this for exhibitions. It usually comes off as cheap and contrived, like some clunky diorama exhibit.

“Does Smith have a jacket?” asks Kaiser.

“He got popped a couple of times for unnatural acts in his twenties, during park sweeps. Nothing major. His parents made the sodomy charges disappear, but he’s mentioned the arrests in interviews. He seems proud of them. I got the old arrest records from New York to verify them.”

“What about alibis for these people?” I ask. “For all the disappearances? Is anybody checking that?”

“About two hundred cops,” growls Bowles. “Plus us. That’s something the police know how to do. But until they actually interrogate the suspects, they can only do so much. It’s all paper trails. Credit card charges, like that. So far, all the suspects appear to have been in the city during the kidnappings. After your interviews tomorrow, the gloves come off. These people will go under the hot lights. Then they’ll hire lawyers, and the whole thing will become a media nightmare.”