by Greg Iles
After three rings, the bedsprings groan and a hoarse voice says, “Kaiser.” After a few moments, he says, “When? . . . Where? . . . Right. I’m on my way.”
After ten seconds of thrashing in the bedcovers and grunting in pain, John limps into the bathroom, his hair a mess but his eyes alert. “A pushboat crew just fished the UNSUB’s body out of the river, five miles downstream from where he went in.”
Adrenaline flushes through me in a dizzying rush. I get to my feet and snatch a towel from the rack.
“Baxter choppered a forensic team down to the site to fingerprint the corpse. They’ll be back at the office before we can get across the causeway.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It’s still there. Get dressed. We’re about to meet the man who tried to kidnap you.”
BAXTER AND LENZ are standing in the main computer room with coffee cups in their hands when we arrive at the field office. Three technicians wearing headsets sit before a bank of computer terminals with continuously changing data, while above them large CRTs show live TV of every possible approach to the field office.
“You broke some speeding laws getting here,” Baxter says to me, but he winks at John. “Chopper got the prints here five minutes ago. They’re already in IAFIS.”
IAFIS, as John explained on the way over, is the Integrated Automated Fingerprint System, a database of over two hundred million fingerprints.
“Our priority bumped everything in the queue,” says Baxter. “If there’s a match, we’ll have it any second.”
Dr. Lenz says, “When I started consulting, they did this job with note cards.”
“Where’s the body?” asks John.
“Going to the Orleans Parish morgue. Looked like four bullet wounds.”
“Sir?” says a female technician, looking up at Baxter. “We have a match. One hundred percent.”
The technician flicks her trackball and clicks a button. On her CRT, one large fingerprint superimposes upon another with near-perfect accuracy.
“Whose finger is that?” asks Baxter as we crowd around the screen.
The tech clicks again, and a criminal record pops onto the screen. In the top right-hand corner is a photograph, the face in it a younger version of the man who shot Wendy on the levee yesterday.
“Conrad Frederick Hoffman,” reads the tech. “Convicted felon. Born Newark, New Jersey, 1952.”
The three men tense around me.
“What was the crime?” asks Lenz.
“Murder.”
“Where did he serve his time?” asks John.
“Sing Sing,” says the tech. “New York State.”
A more pregnant silence I’ve never heard. As if speaking with one voice, the three men say, “Leon Gaines.”
“What years was Hoffman in Sing Sing?” asks Baxter. “Quick.”
While the tech searches her screen, John taps the shoulder of the male tech next to her and says, “Call up Leon Isaac Gaines on NCIC. I need the exact years he was in Sing Sing.”
“Hoffman served fourteen years for murder,” says the woman, “1984 to 1998.”
“Leon Isaac Gaines,” says the male tech. “Two terms in Sing Sing, the first 1973 to 1978, the second 1985 to 1990.”
“Son of a bitch,” John breathes. “That’s a five-year intersect. They had to know each other. And both were free at the time of the New York murders.”
“Sometimes the cards fall right,” says Baxter. “Let’s get back to the EOC.”
“We need the warden of Sing Sing,” says John, “and every convict we can get hold of who served during those years. Not just Gaines’s known associates. And everybody who was involved in the art program in the prison.”
John picks up a nearby phone. “Emergency Operations Center, please. Surveillance unit.” He nods at Lenz, who can apparently read his mind. “John Kaiser here. Where’s Leon Gaines right now? . . . What’s he doing there? . . . You have him covered? . . . How many cars and men? . . . Get a chopper in the air. I want zero chance of losing him when he comes out. . . . Right. Where’s his girlfriend? . . . Okay.”
“Where’s Gaines?” asks Baxter as he hangs up.
“He just pulled into the Kenner Wal-Mart. Isn’t it a little early for shopping?”
Baxter shrugs. “He’s a drunk and an addict, and he just woke up after sleeping twelve hours.”
The ISU chief steps up behind the two techs and squeezes their shoulders. “Thanks a lot, people. This was big.”
The gesture seems a little overdone, but both techs sit taller as we leave the room. Such is the gift of leadership.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, we’re grouped in SAC Bowles’s office, and the mood is grim. An hour of phone calls to Sing Sing has not yielded the hoped-for results. No one has been able to establish a personal relationship between Conrad Hoffman and Leon Gaines, even though the two spent five years in the same prison at the same time.
“We have three options,” says Baxter. “One, arrest Gaines now and interrogate him. Two, question him but don’t arrest him. Three, wait until we have more information.”
“You can’t wait!” I cry in disbelief. “You’ve already wasted too much time. Thalia Laveau could be dying somewhere right now!”
“I think Laveau is dead already,” says Lenz, not even looking at me. “Even if she’s not, Gaines may not know where she is. If he’s merely the painter in the conspiracy, I mean.”
“You think she’s dead?” I ask, coming half out of my chair. “Who gives a goddamn what you think? How many times have you been right in the past week? Once?”
The four men gape at me in amazement, but I can’t hold in my anger any longer. “Right now, Thalia is wherever all the Sleeping Women were painted. In a killing house, like you talked about in the beginning. The house where the courtyard is. The house you can’t find. And if that painter is Leon Gaines, Thalia is waiting for an artist who won’t ever show up, because he knows we’re watching him. She could be dying while Gaines strolls around Wal-Mart, dreaming about painting her and laughing at us!”
“That’s true,” John says quietly. “But Gaines can’t help us with Thalia without admitting complicity in serial murder. And without knowing more, we can’t offer him immunity. The victims’ families would crucify us. The grim reality is that right now, we have no way to make Gaines talk. No legal way, anyhow.”
A strange hush follows this statement, and Baxter hurries to break it. “Six hours,” he says. “For six hours we work every possible lead, every snitch at Sing Sing. Go back over every fact of Gaines’s past to see if we missed something. We rip his life apart. If we find something we can use against him, hallelujah. If not, we fall on him like a brick shithouse and try to scare him into talking.”
“Bluff a streetwise ex-con?” mutters Lenz.
“We’ve got no other option!” Baxter shouts, in a rare breach of professionalism.
In the stunned silence that follows, I ask, “What about the girlfriend? Linda Knapp?”
“What about her?” asks Baxter.
“If you could talk to her away from him, she might recant her support for his alibis. She did it once.”
“And then she went right back to him,” says John. “Knowing he’d beat the crap out of her.”
“She’s alone in the house right now,” Lenz says thoughtfully, his eyes on me. “Gaines is at Wal-Mart.”
“Damn it,” says Baxter, only now realizing what the psychiatrist already has. “Jordan, you almost got killed yesterday. You haven’t had enough?”
“Hoffman’s dead. Gaines isn’t home. Wire me up and send me in there with the girl. If Gaines starts home, knock on the door and I’ll get the hell out of there.”
Baxter is not convinced, but SAC Bowles looks like he has no objection, and John knows better than to get involved at this point.
“You know a woman has a better chance with her than any of you,” I insist.
“We have plenty of female agents,” says Baxter.
&n
bsp; “Not one who knows this case like I do. Not one with something personal at stake. Knapp will feel that from me.”
“She’s right,” says John. “We can’t turn Gaines’s woman against him with some bullshit come-on. And Knapp knows her already.” His eyes lock onto Baxter’s with dark intensity. “It’s all we’ve got, Daniel.”
“Goddamn it,” mutters Baxter, throwing up his hands in surrender. “Let’s get over there before Gaines fills up his shopping cart.”
BAXTER AND DR. LENZ are hunched in the surveillance van one block from Gaines’s shotgun house on Freret Street. I’m parked behind the van in my Mustang, John’s featherweight .38 strapped to my right ankle beneath my jeans. John leans into my window and points toward my foot.
“Everything secure?” he asks, knowing Baxter and Lenz can hear me over the wire.
“Good to go.”
Seeing worry in his face, I slip my hand into my blouse and flatten the pad of my thumb over the microphone clipped there. “I’m not going to need it.”
“That’s just when you do need it,” he whispers. “Like the camera in your fanny pack.” He lays his hand on my upper arm. “I’ve never seen a female serial killer of the classic type, but we do get women who help men carry out vicious murders. Serials, even. And Linda Knapp fits the profile of that type of woman. Poor self-image, dominated by an abusive male—”
“I’m just going to talk to her, John. If she comes at me, I promise I’ll shoot her. Now let me get going, before Gaines gets back.”
He squeezes my arm, then backs away from the car. I wave and pull into the street.
Gaines’s neighborhood is a sad sight in the early morning. I have a feeling that even the old people don’t start stirring until well after daylight. Wheeling over to the broken curb in front of Gaines’s shotgun, I kill the motor and sit for a moment. I don’t want to appear too eager or rushed. Like an actress preparing for a scene, I let the worries of the present bleed away, and allow the emotions I keep buried in my heart to rise to the surface. My fears for Jane, my longing for my father, the humiliation of my rape—things I loathe, but which can be my allies now.
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.”
24
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.”
Dr. Lenz chuckles softly.
Baxter holds the radio to his mouth. “Keep the lid on.”
“Give us the cameras covering the exits,” says John.
