Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

Gaines’s stairs creak as I climb to the porch. The surveillance team says their thermal imaging camera shows Knapp still in the bed. I considered calling her first, but everyone agreed that would give her an easy chance to refuse to see me. Before doubt can assail me, I knock on the door. Three times, hard.

There’s no answer, so I knock again, hard enough to bruise my knuckles.

“Come on,” I say softly.

She doesn’t come to the door.

“Maybe she overdosed in there,” I say to the mike clipped to my bra.

Getting on tiptoe, I peer through the window set high in the door. Inside is the same dark and depressing cavern I wanted out of so badly the other day. Dirty clothes and pizza boxes litter the floor. The easel stands to my left, bare as a skeleton now. To my right is a blank wall that farther down becomes the wall of the hallway. Without warning, apprehension raises the hairs on my neck and arms.

Something is out of place.

What am I seeing? “Wrong question,” I murmur, as apprehension escalates into anxiety. It’s what I’m not seeing. The small abstract by Roger Wheaton, the one that hung on the wall to my right. It’s no longer there. Why would Gaines take it down? In answer, Frank Smith’s voice plays eerily in my head: Pond scum… Roger gave him a matched pair of abstracts as a gift, small but very fine. Leon sold one of them two weeks later – for heroin, I’m sure. Gaines took the painting with him because he’s going to sell it. For what? Drugs? Or money to run?

I grasp the handle and try the door. It’s locked, but the old wood panel rattles loosely in its frame. An eight-year-old could kick it open. Of course, if I do, Daniel Baxter will jerk me out of the house so fast I won’t even reach the bedroom.

Gripping the handle firmly with both hands, I set my shoulder against the door and lean forward. Wood and metal creak, even under the marginal stress of my 130 pounds. Keeping my leg against the door, I lean back, then lunge forward with the pad of my shoulder. The door gives way with a soft crunch.

“Hello, Linda,” I say for the benefit of the boys back in the van. “I wanted to talk to you if I could.”

The smell of feces hits me in a wave. I recoil, sensing death, but my brain reassures me that for thermal imaging cameras to see Linda Knapp on the bed, she has to be alive. Or very recently alive, says a small voice. I could have the guys in the van busting in here with one word, but if I do, I’ll lose any chance to question Linda Knapp alone. She may just be sleeping. The stink could be coming from an unflushed commode.

Bending over, I pull John’s featherweight.38 from the ankle holster and move quickly through the front room, holding the gun in both hands. I keep my eyes forward, not focusing on specific objects, but staying alert to any movement, the way a British soldier once taught me.

The hall closes around me with a claustrophobic closeness. There’s an open door ahead on my right. Crouching low, I ease my head past the frame. There’s no bed, just a mattress lying on the floor, piled with blankets and surrounded by dirty clothes. The room looks empty, though a closet door stands partly open in the corner. It looks empty – but the thermal camera says it’s not.

As I stand erect, the blankets piled on the bed suddenly coalesce into a recognizable shape. A human shape. With my eyes on the closet door, I dart to the mattress and jerk the blankets off the bed.

The stench nearly makes me vomit, but the sight is worse. Lying on the bed is a woman gagged with duct tape and wrapped in a blanket, the side of her head matted with blood, one eye open and staring sightless at the ceiling.

“John?” I whisper, but nothing audible comes out. “John, I need help. Help!”

The woman on the bed is Linda Knapp; the hard line of her jaw and the lank blond hair confirm it in my mind. Crouching over her, I put two fingertips beneath her jawbone and feel for a carotid pulse. There’s a weak throb against my hand.

As carefully as I can, I pull the duct tape away from her mouth to free her airway. Then the little house begins shaking under the pounding of male feet, and a voice roars: “Federal agents! Throw down your weapons!”

John and Baxter crash into the room with guns drawn, but there’s no one for them to shoot.

“She’s alive!” I cry. “She needs an ambulance! Hurry!”

While Baxter issues orders over a radio and John checks the closet, Dr. Lenz rushes to the bed, bends over,‘ and examines the beaten woman.

“Severe head trauma,” he says. “He hit her with something heavy.”

John points at a shadeless metal lamp lying on the floor with a shattered bulb. Its base is square and heavy and stained dark.

“Arrest Gaines right now,” Baxter orders over the radio. “Presume him armed and extremely dangerous, but try not to shoot him. Confirm as soon as it’s done.”

“He wrapped her in an electric blanket,” says Lenz. “Right around body temperature. Even if she died, we’d have been slow to notice anything.” He pulls up Knapp’s closed eyelid, then lets it close. “We’ll be lucky if she can ever tell us anything.”

“This is all wrong,” says John. “You don’t beat your girlfriend and leave her for dead, then go shopping at Wal-Mart.”

“The painting’s gone,” I say dully.

“What painting?” asks Lenz.

“The one Wheaton gave him. He must have taken it to sell.”

“He’s pulling a rabbit,” says John.

Baxter’s radio crackles. “Sir, this is Agent Liebe. My agents inside lost visual with the suspect a couple of minutes ago. We’re in the store in force now, but it’s full of people. I think maybe-”

“Shut it down!” Baxter orders. “Nobody goes in or out.”

The Kenner Wal-Mart is a riot waiting to happen. As we drove up, sirens blaring, I saw the parking lot half-filled with cars but empty of people, and though we entered the store through its rear loading dock, the low roar of an angry crowd rumbled through the service doors. In the twelve minutes it took us to get here, two agents sifting through the trapped customers and four searching the aisles and dressing rooms have turned up no sign of Leon Gaines, though his car still sits in the parking lot.

In the security room at the back of the store, a bank of video monitors displays feeds from three dozen video cameras mounted at various locations in the ceiling of the store. Baxter shows the head of security his FBI credentials, then asks the technician operating the VTRs to fast-forward from a point three minutes before Agent Liebe reported losing contact with Gaines to the point that he sealed the building.

“What’s this guy done?” asks the security chief.

“He’s a federal fugitive,” says John. “That’s all we can say.”

“I don’t think we can legally detain customers inside the store. The company could be liable.”

Baxter turns away from the screens. “Your store was sealed by the federal government. You’ve got no worries.”

“There’s Gaines,” says John, looking over the tech’s shoulder.

On the screen, Leon Gaines pushes a grocery cart along the hardware aisle. He’s wearing a dirty white T-shirt, black jeans, and has three days’ growth of beard on his face. His curly black hair is a tangled mess, and he moves with a jerky sort of energy, like a man looking for a fix. His cart holds a gallon of milk, a pack of precut hamburger patties, some toiletries, and a copy of Hot Rod magazine. After ten seconds, he moves out of the frame.

Baxter’s radio crackles. “Agent Liebe, sir. We just had to arrest an elderly gentleman at the main exit.”