by Greg Iles
“I suppose it could have happened that way,” Baxter concedes. “But from what I’ve got on Wingate so far, he was no font of truth.”
“What do you have on him?”
“For one thing, his name wasn’t Christopher Wingate. It was Zjelko Krnich. He was born in Brooklyn in 1956, to Yugoslavian immigrants. Ethnic Serbs.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Krnich’s father abandoned his wife and kids when Zjelko was seven. The boy scrapped in the streets, then moved on to small-time drug dealing, then pimping. He hopped a freighter to Europe when he was twenty and kicked around there for a few years, selling grass and coke to feed himself. He hung out in resort areas, and his drug business put him in contact with some trendy people. He fell in with a Parisian woman who dealt in paintings, some genuine, others not. He picked up the trade from her. She gave him his Anglo name. After a couple of years, they fell out over money she claimed he stole. Krnich suddenly reappeared in New York, legally changed his name to Wingate, and started working at a small gallery in Manhattan. Twenty years later, he’s one of the hottest dealers in the world.”
“He was hot, all right. About three hundred and fifty degrees when I last saw him.”
“Residential fires burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Glass.” Baxter is not up for humor tonight, not even the gallows variety. His eyes are flint hard; his patience has come to an end. “I want the film you shot tonight.”
“Once I give you that, you’re going to cut me out.”
“That’s not true,” says Lenz. “You’re a relative of a victim.”
“Which counts for zero, in my experience. You weren’t around last year, Doctor. Back then it was like pulling teeth to get substantive information out of this guy.”
“I can assure you that won’t be the case this time,” Lenz says smoothly.
Baxter starts to speak, but the psychiatrist cuts him off with a wave of his hand. Arthur Lenz obviously pulls a lot of weight in the ISU.
“Ms. Glass, I have a proposal for you. One I think will interest you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Fate has handed us a unique opportunity. Your appearance in Hong Kong caused a disturbance not because of the connection between the paintings and the kidnappings; the people in the gallery knew nothing about that. They were upset because you looked exactly like a woman in one of the paintings.”
“So?”
“Imagine the reaction you might cause in the killer if you came face-to-face with him.”
“I may have done that tonight, right?”
Lenz shakes his head. “I’m far from convinced that the man who attacked you tonight is the man who painted this remarkable series.”
“Go on.”
“Forensic art analysis has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Not only is there X-ray analysis, spec trography, infrared, and all the rest. There may be fingerprints preserved in the oil paint itself. We may find hairs or skin flakes. Now that we know about the paintings, I believe they will lead us in short order to a suspect, or perhaps a group of them. Style analysis alone could produce a list of likely candidates. And once we have those suspects, Ms. Glass, you are the weapon I would most like to use against them.”
Lenz wasn’t kidding before. They do need me. They cooked all this up long before I got here.
“How would you feel about that?” asks the psychiatrist. “Posing as a special agent at suspect interviews? Casually walking into a room while Daniel and I observe suspects?”
“She’d kill to do it,” says Baxter. “I know that much about her.”
Lenz fires a harsh look at him. “Ms. Glass?”
“I’ll do it.”
“What did I tell you?” says Baxter.
“On one condition,” I add.
“Shit,” mutters Baxter. “Here it comes.”
“What condition?” asks Lenz.
“I’m in the loop from now till the day you get the guy. I want access to everything.”
Baxter rolls his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘every thing’?”
“I want to know everything you know. You have my word that I won’t reveal anything you tell me. But I can’t be excluded like last year. That almost killed me.”
I expect Baxter to argue, but he just looks at the table and says, “Done. Where’s your film?”
“I dropped it in a mailbox at JFK.”
“A U.S. Postal Service box?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember which one?”
“It was near the American Airlines gates. It’s addressed to my house in San Francisco. I’ll give you the address. I bought the stamps and envelope near a news-stand. It was close to the mailbox as well.”
“We’ll get it. We can develop it at the lab right here.”
“I figured you guys had mastered mail theft.” Baxter stifles an obscene reply and takes out a cell phone.
“One other thing,” I add. “I shot three photos of Sleeping Woman Number Twenty before I escaped the building. It was in bad light, but I bracketed the exposures. I think they’ll come out.”
With a look of grudging admiration, Baxter dials a number and tells someone to find out who the postmas ter general is and get him out of bed. When he hangs up, I say, “I want digital copies of those pictures e-mailed to the New Orleans field office and a set printed for me. I’ll pick them up in the morning.”
“You’re going to New Orleans?” asks Lenz.
“That’s right.”
“It’s too late to get a flight tonight.”
“Then I expect you guys to get me a plane. I only came here at your request. I need to tell my sister’s husband what’s happened, and I want to tell him face-to-face. My mother, too. Before they hear about it some other way.”
“They won’t hear anything,” says Baxter.
“Why not?”
“What’s happened, really? You upset a few art lovers in Hong Kong. Nothing that would hit the papers.”
“What about the fire in New York? Your dead agent?”
“Wingate was reputed to have mob ties. FBI surveillance would be expected. One reporter has already speculated that Wingate torched the place for the insurance and killed himself in the process.”
“Are you saying you intend to keep this investigation secret?”
“As far as possible.”
“But you must be trying to gather all the paintings, right? For forensic analysis? Won’t that get out?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Look, Arthur is going to New Orleans in the morning, to speak to some art dealers there. Why don’t you fly down with him then?”
“I’d be happy to fly down tonight,” Lenz says, “if Ms. Glass feels such urgency. Can the plane be made ready?”
Baxter considers this. “I suppose. But Ms. Glass, please urge your brother-in-law to be discreet. And as for telling your mother . . . perhaps you should wait a bit on that.”
“Why?”
“We’ve had some contact with her in the past year. She’s not in the best shape.”
“She never was.”
“She’s drinking heavily. I don’t think we could rely upon her discretion.”
“It’s her daughter, Mr. Baxter. She deserves to know what’s going on.”
“But what do you really have to tell her? Nothing encouraging. Don’t you think it might be better to wait?”
“I’ll make that decision.”
“Fine,” he says wearily. “But your mother and brother-in-law are the limit of the circle. I know you worked for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans years ago. I’m sure you have friends down there. If you’re going to be effective in our investigation, no one can know you’re in town. No drinks with old friends, no human-interest story about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer back on her old beat. We’ll be glad to put you up in a hotel.”
“I’ll probably stay with my brother-in-law. I haven’t seen my sister’s kids in a long time.”
“All right
. But you agree about the isolation? Until we have suspects and you’ve confronted them, you talk to nobody who knows you, and you stay out of sight.”
“Agreed. But I want a full update on the plane. That’s our deal, right?”
Baxter sighs and looks at Lenz as if the psychiatrist has named his own poison. “Arthur can handle that.”
Dr. Lenz stands and rubs his hands together, and I notice again how tall he is. “Why don’t we get some coffee and doughnuts?” he says. “There’s no in-flight service.”
“Just a minute, Arthur,” Baxter says. He looks at me, his eyes glacier cold. “Ms. Glass, I want you to listen to me. Nothing about this case fits known parameters. Our New Orleans UNSUB is not some low-self-image maintenance man with a gimp leg and a collection of mutilated Barbie dolls. We’re dealing with at least one highly organized personality. A man who has kidnapped and probably killed twelve women without a trace. You may be on his radar. We don’t know. We do know you’re about to enter his territory. Be very careful, Ms. Glass. Don’t let your mind wander for a moment. Or you could join your sister a lot sooner than God ever intended.”
Despite the melodramatic tone, Baxter’s warning gives me pause. This man does not speak lightly of danger. “Do you think I need protection?”
“I’m inclined to say yes. I’ll make a final decision on that before you land in New Orleans. Just remember: Secrecy is the best protection.”
“I hear you.”
He stands and gives me a curt nod. “I appreciate your willingness to help us.”
“You knew I would. It’s personal for me.”
Baxter reaches into the NOKIDS file and tosses out a photo of a brown-haired man in his late twenties, an All-American boy smiling like it’s his first job interview. Special Agent Fred Coates, no doubt. It’s hard to picture him with his throat cut, spitting blood into a cell phone.
“It’s personal for us too,” says Baxter.
He speaks softly, but behind his eyes burns a volcanic fury. Daniel Baxter has tracked and caged some of the deadliest monsters of our time. Until tonight, the one that took my sister was merely one among others still at large. But now Special Agent Fred Coates lies on a cold morgue slab somewhere. FBI blood has been spilled. And the situation has most definitely changed.
5
THE FBI LEARJET hurtles into the Virginia sky at three A.M., after a long wait for mechanical checks, refu eling, and a fresh flight crew. I should have waited for morning, but I couldn’t. I learned unflappable patience during twenty years of globe-trotting and thousands of hours behind my camera, but Jane’s disappearance robbed me of that. I can no longer bear waiting. If I’m standing still, I have too much time to think. Motion is my salvation.
The interior of the jet is strangely comforting to me. I’ve done a fair amount of corporate work in my career, mostly shooting glossy annual reports, and corporate-jet travel is one of the perks. Some of my purist colleagues have criticized me for this, but when all is said and done, I have to worry about paying my bills, and they don’t. I grew up poor; I can’t afford to be a snob. The interior of this Lear is configured for work. Two seats face each other over a collapsible desktop, and Dr. Lenz has chosen these for us. He seems accustomed to the cramped quarters of the cabin, despite his heavy frame. I imagine he once shuttled between murder scenes the way I shuttled between wars.
Lenz looks at least sixty, and his face has begun to sag with a look of permanent weariness that I recognize from certain men I know—men who have seen too much and run out of emotional energy to deal with the burdens they already carry, much less those of the future. He looks, in short, like a man who has surrendered. I don’t judge him for it. I’m twenty years younger, and I’ve come near to cracking myself.
“Ms. Glass,” he says, “we have a little over two hours together. I’d like to spend that time as profitably as we can.”
“I agree.”
“Interviewing you—particularly since you’re an identical twin—is almost like being able to interview your sister before the fact. I’d like to ask you some questions, some of them very personal.”
“I’ll answer what I think is relevant.”
He blinks once, slowly, like an owl. “I hope you’ll try to answer them all. By withholding information, you may prevent my learning something which could advance our efforts to find the killer.”
“You’ve been using the word ‘killer’ since I arrived. You believe all the women are dead?”
His eyes don’t waver. “I do. Daniel holds out some hope, but I do not. Does that bother you?”
“No. I feel the same way. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t imagine where they could possibly be. Eleven women—maybe twelve now—all held prisoner somewhere for up to eighteen months? Without one escaping? I can’t see it. And the women in the later paintings look dead to me.”
“And you have seen much death.”
“Yes. I do have one question, though. Are you aware of the phone call I received eight months ago?”
“The one in the middle of the night? That you thought might be from your sister?”
“Yes. The Bureau traced it to a train station in Thailand.”
Lenz grants me a smile of condolence. “I’m familiar with the incident. It’s my opinion that the guess you made the following morning was correct. That it was someone you’d met during your efforts to locate your father, someone from an MIA family.”
“I just thought maybe . . . me finding the paintings in Asia—”
”We’re certainly looking into it. Rest assured. But I’d like to move on now, if we could.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I understand you weren’t that close to your sister as an adult, so I’d like you to tell me how you grew up. What shaped Jane’s personality. And yours.”
It’s times like now I wish I smoked. “Okay. You know who my father was, right?”
“Jonathan Glass, the renowned war photographer.”
“Yes. And there was only one war in Mississippi. The one for civil rights. He won his first Pulitzer for that. Then he went off to the other wars, which meant he was almost never home.”
“How did the family react to that?”
“I handled it better than my sister or mother did. I understood why he went, even as a child. Why would you hang around the Mississippi backwoods if you could be roaming the world, going to the places in his pictures?”
“You wanted to travel to war zones as a child?”
“Dad shot all kinds of pictures in those places. I didn’t see any of his war stuff until I was old enough to go down to the public library and read Look and Life for myself. Mom wouldn’t keep those shots in the house.”
“Why did your mother marry a man who would never be home?”
“She didn’t know that when she married him. He was just a big handsome Scots-English guy who looked like he could handle anything that came along. And he could, pretty much. He could survive in the jungle with nothing but a pocketknife. What he couldn’t survive was married life in Mississippi. A nine-to-five job. That was hell for him.
“He tried to do right by her, to keep her with him as his career took off. He even moved her to New York. She lasted until she got pregnant. During her eighth month, he went on assignment to Kenya. She went down to Grand Central Station with six dollars in her purse and rode a train all the way to Memphis. Then the bus from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If she hadn’t been pregnant when she left, Dad probably never would have come back home. But he did. Not that often, but when he did, it was paradise for me. There were some glorious summers.”
“What about Jane?”
“Not so much for her. We were twins, but emotionally we were different from early on. Some of it was just bad luck.”
“How so?”
“Jane was mauled by a dog when she was four. It really tore up her arm.” I close my eyes against that memory, a vicious attack I watched from forty yards away. By the time my mother reached her, th
e damage had been done. “She had to go through rabies shots, the whole thing. It made her fearful for the rest of her life.”
“Did your mother dress the two of you identically, all that?”
“She tried. My father always resisted it when he was home, so I did too. He wanted us to be individuals. That’s the photojournalist ethos in a nutshell. Rugged individualism. He taught me that, and a lot more.”
“Photography?”
“Not so much that. He taught me to hunt and to fish. A little about the stars, trees, wild plants you could eat. He told me stories about all the far-off places he’d visited. Strange customs, things you’d never read in National Geographic.”
“Did he teach Jane those things?”
“He tried, but she wasn’t open to much. She was like my mother that way. I think his stories reminded them that he was only home for a little while, that one day they’d wake up and he’d be gone.”
“You were his favorite.”
“Yes. And Jane was Mom’s. But somehow that didn’t count for as much. Because Dad was the dominant personality, even when he wasn’t home. He was a doer. My mother just tried to cope, and didn’t succeed very well at that.”
“Jane resented his absences more as time passed?”
“Yes. I think she got to hate him before he disappeared, because of how sad Mom was, and because money was so tight.”
“Your father didn’t earn much money?”
“I don’t really know. Some of the leading photojournalists of the Vietnam era worked for almost nothing. Whether my father did or not, he never sent much money back to us. He was big on bringing presents, though. I’m not saying he was a great guy, okay? I’m just saying he and I had a bond.”
“Did your mother work?”
“For a while. Waitressing, a laundry, menial stuff. After she started drinking, not even that.”
“Why did your father marry her?”
“I honestly think he did it because it was the only way she would have sex with him.”
Lenz smiles wistfully. “That was common in my generation. Your mother was beautiful?”
“Yes. That was the irony that crippled the marriage. She looked exotic, but she wasn’t. That was her Alsatian blood, I guess, the exotic part. Outside, a mysterious princess—inside, plain as pabulum. All she wanted was a man to build her a house and come home from work every day at five-thirty.”
