Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Conrad Hoffman. Before he died, he had a gun to my head. He told me he was going to rape me. He said that even if he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs.”

Wheaton’s eyes narrow to slits. “You’re lying.”

“No.”

“Then he was trying to intimidate you, to get you into the car.”

I shake my head. “I saw his eyes. Felt the way he touched me. I’ve been raped before. I know how rapists’ eyes look.”

A strange cast of compassion comes over the long face. “You were raped?”

“Yes. But that’s not the point. The last woman taken before Thalia – the one taken from Dorignac’s and dumped in the drainage canal – the pathologist found semen inside her.”

His head jerks as if avoiding a blow.

“Was it yours?” I ask softly.

Wheaton throws down his brush and takes two steps toward me. “You’re lying.”

The prudent thing would be to stop, but my salvation may lie in the root of this paradox. “The FBI is sure you killed the Dorignac’s woman. They worked out the timing of Wingate’s death, and they know when Hoffman flew back from New York. Hoffman couldn’t have taken her.”

Wheaton is wheezing now, like a child with asthma. “I took her, but-” He stands with his mouth open, unable to continue.

He really does believe that by killing those women he was sparing them. But I can’t spare him. Somewhere, buried behind those deranged eyes, is the gentle mind of the artist I met earlier in the week.

“Help me understand,” I plead. “A man who saves a twelve-year-old girl from being raped in Vietnam turns around and helps some pervert rape the women he claims he’s saving?”

Wheaton’s chin is quivering.

“I guess it was Roger who saved that girl in Vietnam-”

“No!” A single, explosive syllable. “I did that!”

I say nothing. The fault line running through Wheaton’s mind is torturing him more painfully than I possibly could. His face twitches, and his hands shiver at his sides. With a jerk of his head he looks up at the nearly dark sky. Then he walks to a table behind his easel, lifts a hypodermic syringe from it, and walks back toward me, his face devoid of emotion.

My newfound confidence vaporizes, leaving pure terror in its wake. If Wheaton wants to stick me with that needle, there’s nothing I can do about it. That reality sends me hurtling back to Honduras, to the night my innocence died forever, when I learned the most terrible of life’s lessons: you can shriek and fight and beg for someone to stop hurting you, but it won’t make them stop; you can plead to God and your mother and father, and they will not hear you; your cries will not move to pity those who rend you.

When Wheaton steps behind my head, the skin of my neck crawls, awaiting the prick of the needle. Summoning all my strength, I twist my neck to look up and back. He is standing by my IV tree, injecting the contents of his syringe into my IV bag. I scream now, with all my power, but he tosses the empty syringe on the floor and walks back to his easel. My left arm begins to burn at the wrist, and tears of anger and helplessness flow from my eyes. Sucking in great gulps of air, I try to fight the unknown poison, but in a matter of seconds my eyelids fall as surely as shutters being pulled down by a man with a hook.

This time the world returns as stars in a black sky, a universe of stars slightly blurred by glass, and the sound of a man sobbing. The anguished sobs seem to echo all the way from a distant planet. The planet of childhood, I suspect.

I’m shivering again, which is not such a bad thing. It’s when you stop shivering that you’re in trouble. I can barely see Thalia across from me in the tub, so dark is the night. But I’m thankful for the darkness. I’ve been many places where my only light at night was the stars, and I know this: if I can see Polaris and the horizon, I can estimate my latitude. Not with enough accuracy to navigate a ship by – not without a sextant – but enough to guess my location in general terms. It’s one of the practical tricks my father taught me. A good thing for a world traveler to know, he said, especially if you’re ever hijacked on a boat or a plane, which he once was.

I don’t know which star is Polaris yet, because I can’t see either the Big or Little Dipper, which are the quickest guides. Polaris may not even lie within my field of vision. But I am facing north and surrounded on three sides – and overhead – by glass, my view only partly obscured by tree branches. If I can watch long enough, stay conscious long enough, all the stars will move around the sky but one: Polaris, which rotates in a two-degree circle above the north pole. The Pole Star. The North Star. That constant light has guided many a desperate traveler, and I am certainly that now.

My problem is the horizon. I can’t see it, because of the high brick wall outside. Not to worry, says my father. You can use an artificial horizon. The best is a bowl of mercury on the ground. Mercury reflects stars remarkably well; you simply measure the angle between Polaris and its reflection, then divide by two. That’s if you have a sextant, which I don’t. In the absence of a mercury bowl, the surface of a pool of water can be substituted, and that I do have. But the conservatory glass distorts the starlight enough so that, combined with the movement of the bathwater caused by breathing and blood circulation, no clear reflection exists. Not the end of the world, my father assures me. You can guess where the horizon is -

The anguished sobbing has stopped.

I sense that Wheaton is lying on the floor somewhere, but I can’t see him. As I try to make out objects in the room, an amazing new reality comes to me.

My muscles are under my control.

Leaning back, I look up at the silver line of my IV stand. The hanging bag is flat. Whatever was keeping my muscles in limbo has stopped flowing into me. But my mind is not yet clear. It seems unnaturally focused on the idea of the stars and where I am. But this information is important. New Orleans lies roughly on the thirtieth parallel. If I can verify that I’m on the thirtieth parallel, I can reasonably assume that I’m still in New Orleans, that Wheaton has not flown me to some distant killing house, where the other victims await me like the living sculpture Thalia has become. Of course, Polaris will not tell me my longitude; so the thirtieth parallel could put me in Bermuda, the Canary Islands, or even Tibet. But these are outside possibilities. For me, thirty degrees latitude will mean a real chance of rescue by the FBI.

Control of my muscles brings to mind another possibility: that of saving myself. After flexing most of my cramped limbs, I decide I can probably get out of the tub. The problem is Wheaton. He’s close by, even if I can’t see him. Is he close enough to stop me from breaking out of this glass room? Surely he’s thought of that. But do I really need to break out to save myself? I was wearing a pistol on my ankle when he overpowered me at the gallery. It must be here somewhere. But before I look for it – or do anything that entails risk – I must know how close he is, and what he will do when he hears noise. Reaching out with my right hand, I turn the hot-water tap and wait.

For twenty or thirty seconds the new water is cold. Then it begins to warm, and blissful heat flows under and around me, bringing blood to my bluish skin. The bathwater can’t be that cold, I tell myself. No colder than the temperature of the air, which Wheaton must keep at close to seventy degrees because of his hands. It doesn’t have to be that cold, my father reminds me. You lose heat to water thirty times faster than you do to air. Sustained immersion can kill you. Without regular infusions of hot water, Thalia might already have died of hypothermia.