Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“It hasn’t been dull.”

“Has it taken a lot out of you?”

I look away and focus on Wendy’s straight back. The more I watch her, the more I like her. The path she chose is much more regimented than mine, but she brings to it the passion I brought to mine when I was younger. “Yes, it has.”

“That’s why you took time out to do this book you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been wanting to do that for a long time?”

“Yes.” I look back at Kaiser, into the hazel eyes that appear to hold genuine curiosity. “But once I really started, I wasn’t sure it was going to give me what I wanted out of it.”

“What was that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Our omelets and juice arrive, but neither of us lifts a fork.

“May I ask you a personal question?” he says.

“You can ask.”

“You’ve never been married?”

“That’s right. Does that shock you?”

“It surprises me. Not many heterosexual women who look like you make it to forty without getting married at least once.”

“Is that a nice way of asking what’s wrong with me?”

Kaiser laughs. “It’s a nice way of being nosy.”

“You’d think I’d be a prize catch, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“A lot of guys think that. From a distance.”

“What’s wrong up close?”

“I’m not like most women.”

“How so?”

“Well, it goes like this. I meet a guy. Good-looking, successful, independent. Doctor, journalist, investment banker, A-list actor. Whatever. He can’t wait to go out with me. I’m a not-so-ugly woman in what a lot of people see as a glamour job. The first few dates, he shows me off to his friends. We like each other. We get intimate. Then, in a week or a month, I get a new assignment. Afghanistan. Brazil. Bosnia. Egypt. And not a fly-in-and-out Dan Rather junket. A month on the ground schlepping cameras. Maybe this particular guy is making international partner the next week and wants me at his celebration party. Maybe the Oscars are next week. But I take the assignment. I won’t even discuss turning it down. And by the time I get back, he’s decided maybe the relationship isn’t working out after all.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because most guys have the one-up gene.”

“The what?”

“The one-up gene. They have to be in the superior position. They love the idea of being with me. But the reality is far from what they envision. Some don’t like that I make more money than they do. The ones who make more money than I do don’t like it when their friends act like my job is more important than theirs. Some can’t take the fact that I have a higher priority than them in my life. I don’t mean to complain about it. I just want you to understand.”

“I make sixty-eight thousand dollars a year,” says Kaiser. “I know you make more than that.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw your tax return.”

“You what?”

“We had to rule you out as a suspect. That was part of it.”

“Great.”

“But I don’t think your job is any more important than mine.” He picks up a fork and takes a bite of his omelet. “Do you?”

“No.”

“And I know I’m not the highest priority in your life.”

“True.”

“And I’m perfectly okay with that.”

I watch him as he pours hot sauce on his omelet, but I can’t read anything in his eyes. “What are we talking about?”

“I think you know.”

“Well, at least we’re on the same page.”

He smiles, and this time his white teeth show and his eyes sparkle. “I didn’t really come here to say that, but I’m glad I did. I feel awkward because of your sister.”

“That has nothing to do with my sister. What happened to Jane only confirmed something I learned a long time ago. If you wait to do things you want to do or ought to do, you may be dead before you get the chance.”

“I learned that too. In Vietnam. But it’s easy to lose sight of it in the rush of everyday life. To get so caught up in what you’re doing, people depending on you, that you develop tunnel vision. You know that feeling?”

“For a long time, the only part of the world I saw was through a lens.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m drifting. Until I found the paintings, anyway. But beneath that, I’m not really tethered to anything.”

“Can you handle another personal question?”

“Might as well.”

“Lenz told me you weren’t close to your sister. Yet you’re doing far more than any relative involved in this case. You’ve made it your mission to find her, or to find the truth. How do you explain that?”

How do I explain that? “I didn’t tell Lenz everything. Jane and I had problems growing up, yes. Some of those problems lasted into adulthood. But about three years ago, I had a bad health scare. I’d gone to the emergency room for pain, and the next thing I knew, I was in the oncology ward. They thought I had ovarian cancer. I was lucky it happened in San Francisco, and not while I was on assignment somewhere. But my friends were on assignment. I was alone and scared to death.”

I pause and swallow, fighting the lump rising in my throat. “Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to find Jane standing beside my bed, holding my hand. I thought I was dreaming. She said she’d awakened from a dead sleep the night before. She felt a painful shock go through her, like a labor contraction, and her mind filled with an image of my face. She called my house and got my machine. Then she called my agency and found out I was in the hospital. She left the kids with Marc and flew straight out to be with me. She slept in that hospital room for four days. She wheeled me to the tests, handled the doctors and nurses, everything. She never left my side.”

“You hadn’t been close before that?”

“No. And I’m not saying the sins of the past were magically redeemed. But she told me some things. She said that as she got older, she’d begun to understand the sacrifices I’d made to take care of her when we were kids. That she knew I’d only wanted the best for her, even if I didn’t always know what that was. I told her I respected the life she’d made for herself, even though I’d belittled it before. It meant a lot to her.” I pick up my fork and draw imaginary circles on the countertop. “It’s easy to feel independent when you’re young, that you don’t need anybody. But as time passes, family starts to matter. And with our mother in the shape she’s in, Jane and I only had each other.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense.”

“I don’t know what I believe right now. All I know is that I have to find her. Dead, alive, whatever. She’s my blood, and I love her. It’s that simple. I have to find my sister.”

Kaiser reaches out and gently squeezes my wrist. “You will, Jordan.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you ever wanted your own family? To settle down, have kids, the whole thing?”

“Every woman I ever knew wanted that in some form or fashion.”

“And you?”

“I hear the clock ticking. I visited my nephew and niece last night, and my feelings for them overwhelmed me.”

He glances down the counter. “Wendy said there might have been some trouble over there. At your brother-in-law’s.”

“You know, I can take you guys in my life up to a point. But there’s a line you don’t cross.”

“She only told us because it’s her job to protect you.”

“I won’t give up all my privacy to be protected.” I take a long sip of my coffee and try to keep my temper in check. “Just what do you know about me, anyway? My medical records? Everything down to my bra size?”