Dead Sleep

by Greg Iles

  “Are you—I mean, has it worked? Are you cured?”

  “It’s happening. I can feel it. I’m breathing more easily. My joints are less stiff.”

  “But you’re still wearing your gloves.”

  A tight smile. “My hands are too delicate to take chances. And there’s systemic damage. That will take time to heal.” He glances up at the darkening sky. “I want you to be quiet now. My light’s almost gone.”

  “I will. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

  He frowns, but I push on. “You say you killed the women you painted to release them from their plight. To spare them a life of pain and exploitation. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet each Sleeping Woman was raped before she died. How can you stand there and tell me you’re sparing them pain, when you’re putting them through the worst thing a woman can experience short of death?”

  Wheaton has stopped painting. His eyes glower with anger and confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “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.

  26

  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.

  The faucet continues to run, but Wheaton doesn’t come to investigate. When the level approaches the rim of the tub, I shut it off. I want to get up, but a soft wave of whatever has kept my mind hazy resists my intention, and I lie back against the enamel. Sleep wants to envelop me, but I force my eyes open and watch the slowly changing sky. The bathwater cools, then becomes cold. As I lie shivering in the dark, every star above me wheels slowly across the sky. Except one. Bright and stationary, it hovers just above the treetops.

  Polaris.

  It’s a matter of seconds to estimate where the horizon is, guess the angle between that imaginary line and Polaris, and subtract that number from ninety degrees. The answer sets my heart racing. Thirty degrees. I’m almost certainly still in New Orleans. If John Kaiser looks hard enough for me, he will find me. This possibility warms me more deeply than hot water could. And yet . . . I can’t rely on rescue from outside.

  Reaching up with a shaking hand, I turn the hot-water tap again, but this time I don’t sit and wait to be warmed. This time I stand on shaky legs and climb out of the tub.

  My muscles still aren’t quite my own, but they do function. The IV tube in my hand presents a problem, but the IV stand has wheels, and the floor appears to be painted concrete. With careful steps, I drag the stand over to the glass wall of the conservatory. What I find is discouraging. The first four feet of glass above the brick wall supporting the conservatory is encased in a diamond-shaped metal mesh. Smashing the glass with something heavy will get me nowhere. There’s a glass door leading outside, but it too has mesh between its metal struts, and a heavy padlock ensures that the door remains closed.

  The space my body displaced in the tub is filling quickly. What options do I have? Creep into the house proper and try to slip past Wheaton? Surely he expects this. And the sobs I heard before came from close by, not far away. He may be lying on a sofa in the next room, my pistol in his hand. Or the gun may be nowhere in the house. He probably still has the taser he used on me at the gallery. He may have a dog. Is it worth the risk of looking? When I think of his eyes as he screamed denial of the rapes, that option strikes me as rather like sneaking into a dragon’s lair. Do dragons really sleep? If they do, I fear, it’s only lightly.

  Think, says my father. What do you know that he doesn’t? What’s near to hand that can help you?

  What do I know? That I’m more than half addicted to Xanax, which is a cousin of Valium. It’s probably a cross-tolerance between those drugs that’s made it possible for me to wake and tiptoe around while Wheaton believes me to be asleep. What is near to hand that can help me? I don’t see any weapons. Not even paint-brushes. The table from which Wheaton took the hypodermic is bare. The room is as sterile and empty as a prison cell. Which it is. Not quite empty, I realize. On the floor behind my end of the tub sits the Igloo ice chest and the grocery bag. Conrad Hoffman’s things.

  I drag the IV stand toward them.

  The bag is half filled with the same junk food John found at Hoffman’s apartment. Pop-Tarts. Potato chips. Hostess Twinkies. Beef jerky. I stare at the boxes and bags, sensing important activity deep in my brain, but not quite understanding it. Slowly, the logic makes itself known to me. These aren’t weapons. They are defenses.

  Reaching into the bag, I quietly open the boxes and remove three shining foil packs of Pop-Tarts and a handful of cellophane-wrapped Twinkies. These I stash between the claw-foot tub and the mirror Wheaton uses to help paint himself into his picture. As I climb back into the tub, I realize I forgot to look at Wheaton’s painting-in-progress. Understanding that image might help me. But not as much as that ice chest, I think. How long has it been sitting there? How long since I saw Hoffman swirling away in the Mississippi? Moving to the Igloo, I say a silent prayer, then pop open the white fastener and lift the lid. It’s dark inside, so I blindly push my hands toward the bottom. They plunge into a rattling Arctic ocean of ice and water, with floating islands that feel like beer bottles. In seconds, pain radiates up my arms.

  God bless you, you sick bastard, I say silently. My heart pounds with new hope, but I can’t linger here. Warm water is lapping at my feet. The bathtub is overflowing, and not quietly. But this too is good. The spillover will wipe out the wet traces of my journey around the room, and perhaps convince Wheaton that I’m still in poor control of my faculties. Shutting the Igloo, I shove it a foot closer to the tub, then climb back into the near-scalding water.

  I’m reaching for the tap when I hear a noise in the dark. I lay my head back and close my eyes. The water runs on.

  “What are you doing?” bellows a groggy voice.

  I reach out and take hold of Thalia’s hand beneath the water. Footsteps approach the tub, stop.

  Wheaton must be looking down at me.

  “Beautiful,” he says, sending a chill to my core despite the burning water. The tap squeaks, and the faucet stops running. Then something dips into the steaming water, and warm waves lap against my breasts. Wheaton’s hand covers my left breast, gently, as though he’s reliving some distant memory. I force myself to breathe with a regular rhythm. The hand slides over my heart, feeling the blood beating there, then slips beneath the water. It covers my navel, kneading the little pad of fat there, then slides down between my legs.

  A sensation of falling nearly makes me scream, but numbness saves me. It spreads outward from my brain and heart, a numbness of self-preservation, born in the jungle of Honduras, neurochemical armor to help me endure anything in the cause of survival. Wheaton’s fingers tremble as they explore, but I do not. I lie still and breathe, in and out, in and out. His hand is not the paw of a brute, but the inquisitive hand of a boy. The fingers entwine in my pubic hair and cling with childlike tenacity. In the silence of the dripping faucet, a long, keening moan of grief cuts me to the quick. Like the cry of an orphaned animal beside its mother, it reverberates through the glass room, terminating in a sob. Then the fingers uncurl, and the hand vanishes.

  Footsteps move away, and I hear a clatter in the other room. Then the footsteps return, this time behind my head. My IV bag rattles in the stand. He’s changing it.

  “Soon,” he hisses. “Tomorrow.”

  As he walks away, my wrist begins to burn. Valium, I tell myself, even as my eyes try to close. Not insulin. Insulin doesn’t burn. But just in case, I reach between the tub and the mirror, strip the wrapper from a Twinkie, and gobble it in two bites, dumping protective sugar into my blood as fast as possible. Then I eat another. My dry throat makes it hard to swallow, but after a look at Thalia, I force down a third.

  Should I pull the IV catheter out of my vein? If I do, I’ll bleed into the tub, maybe for some time. And tomorrow Wheaton will see what I did. I could always say it was an accident. Beneath the water, I squeeze Thalia’s hand, wishing with all my heart that she could squeeze back. “We’re going to make it, girl,” I whisper. “You wait and see.”

  Pull out the tube, says my father. Lift your hand out of the water. The vein will clot in the air. . . .

  “I can’t feel my hand,” I tell him. “I—”

  I’m reaching for the IV catheter when my eyes go black.

  I AWAKEN IN full daylight, but I don’t open my eyes. Wheaton will expect me to be unconscious longer. For an hour I lie with my eyes closed, reconstructing my environment from sound alone. Just as yesterday, Wheaton stands behind his easel, painting with sure, rapid strokes. Now and then the easel
creaks, and the soft sibilants of his breathing alter with his stance. There’s a new urgency to his movements. How long will it take him to finish this painting? How long before he turns me into another Thalia?

  I have to slow him down. The longer I lie here alive, the more time John will have to find me. But I must also prepare for the possibility that he may not find me. That Wheaton will finish his work. First things first, says my father. Get him talking.

  When the sun shines noticeably brighter through my eyelids, I make a show of coming awake. “How does it look?” I ask.

  “As it should,” Wheaton answers in a clipped voice. He clearly doesn’t recall last night’s conversation with fondness.

  Rather than push him, I lie quietly and try not to look at Thalia, who seems several shades paler than she did yesterday.

  At length, Wheaton says, “I saw a report on television this morning. If the local anchors aren’t lying for the FBI, you told me the truth last night. About the rapes.”

  I say nothing.

  A quick glance at me as he paints. “Conrad was raping my subjects.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d do anything to change that. But I can’t. I should have known, I suppose. Conrad always had poor impulse control. That’s why he went to prison. But rape is just a symptom of what I told you about yesterday. The plight. If Conrad hadn’t done it, someone else would have. In a different way, perhaps. The husband’s way. But still. They’re all much better off now, your sister included.”

  Wheaton steps away from the canvas and studies himself in the mirror. “It’s worse for you that she’s dead, of course, but for her, there’s no more pain. No more helpless wishing, no more subservience.”

  If I think about Jane now, I won’t be able to keep it together. “I understand about the plight. I understand the Sleeping Women. But I don’t think you’re telling me everything.”

  His eyes flick to me, then back to the canvas as he resumes painting. “What do you mean?”