Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Jordan perked up, too, if staring at the tip of a burning cigarette could be said to show an increase in cerebral activity. Time was the enemy Clare had nightmares about. Anna knew it ran out fast for stranger-abducted children. Most were dead within hours of the abduction. Few lasted days. It was the rare child who was allowed to survive to adulthood and, in many ways, not the luckiest.

  “Why is time running out?” Anna asked when it became apparent Jordan was locked into a paralysis of hope or fear, or simply the grip of Clare’s fingers around his esophagus.

  Danny didn’t look at her. Since the question was clearly one he wanted to answer, he directed his reply to Jordan. “It’s getting hotter by the day. Eventually even the toughest arbiter of bad taste is going to have to leave his sartorial signature at home.”

  Anna wondered which Ivy League college Danny had dropped out of when he became a traveler and why he wanted them to know it.

  Jordan flipped his cigarette butt into the street. Anna cringed inwardly. Violent crime was one thing. Littering was another. There was no motive for littering, nothing to gain. Under certain circumstances crime could be considered a career choice. Littering was just a character flaw.

  Ignoring her as he’d been doing so stunningly since Clare had subsided at the advent of the nest of gutter punks, Jordan reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a square of white paper. Unfolded, it was about twelve by twelve inches. After smoothing it carefully on his knee, he held it up for Tinka to look at.

  Interested, Anna scooted up her side of the steps until she could see it as well. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a face, a pretty good likeness to that of the man she’d chased when Mackie followed him, the man Clare had guessed was the one called Dougie. It was a face that was easy to remember and easy to caricature. The hair was thick and jet black and slicked down against the skull. His features resembled those of Elvis Presley, but they’d all been compressed into a narrow band between a low forehead and a short jaw.

  “This the guy?” Jordan asked.

  “Yeah,” Tinka said, squinting through whatever drugs clouded her vision. “Maybe. Yeah, I guess.”

  “Where did you get that?” Anna asked. For a moment she thought this question was going to be ignored as well, but Jordan decided to be civil.

  “An artist on the square drew it from my description.”

  “It’s good,” Anna said.

  Jordan folded the paper and slipped it back into his pocket; then he took out a billfold that looked as if it had been stuffed in hip pockets for a decade or more. Anna admired the attention to detail. Knowing a new wallet would clash with Jordan’s persona, Clare must have stolen or found it. Jordan took out two twenty-dollar bills, folded them in half lengthwise, and, with two fingers, held them up toward Tinka.

  Danny’s hand intercepted the transaction, and the forty dollars vanished into the front of his coat.

  “You gave me nothing tonight,” Jordan said evenly. “The money’s for nothing. Next time give me something I can use.” With that, he stood and slouched off, leaving Anna to trail behind, feeling about as surreal as a ghost, a real live dead ghost.

  Within a couple of blocks, Clare fought for and won supremacy again. Or, more likely, Jordan had abdicated for the time being. These changes of character were bothering Anna less and less. She wasn’t sure that was a healthy development.

  “We do have nothing,” Clare whispered. The whisper was broken, the end ragged. The woman was crying. Anna had watched a lot of people deal with weeping. Paul gathered them to him, and they felt safe and comforted. Molly let them cry it out in a supportive and therapeutic environment. Lisa, a woman she’d become friends with in Texas, broke down and cried with them, and they felt understood and less alone.

  Anna had never figured out what to do. She’d tried two of the three options, but it hadn’t worked out all that well for her. Probably she was too prickly for the first and too impatient for the second. She’d never tried Lisa’s method. It wasn’t that Anna never cried; she just didn’t like having witnesses.

  So she did what she always did; she pretended it wasn’t happening. “We’ve got your forty dollars’ worth,” she said as if Clare were sniveling over the pocket change and not the lives of her children. Anna began ticking off the night’s gains. “We have a lead on a man called the Magician from Delilah. It’s weak, but it’s a start. We’ve got the name of a high-end procurer from Tanya—the concierge at Les Bonnes Filles. We know Dougie has been to the quarter twice in seven days and that he ate at McDonald’s. That suggests pattern. Pattern gives us hope we’ll see him again and next time we’ll follow him.

  “We’ve also got direction, which is more than we had when we started out this morning. Tomorrow, you’ll hypnotize Candy and we may get something from that. Then you’re going shopping.”

  “Shopping?” Clare asked, confusion pulling her out of her funk.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “We’re moving Jordan uptown.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Anna woke just before eleven. It had been years since she’d slept past seven in the morning and, most nights, she was in bed by ten. The 5:00 A.M. quitting time and the long morning’s sleep, so reminiscent of her college days, left her with a not unpleasant sense of walking on the wild side. Following on the heels of this taste of youth was the realization of age: Time was running out. She snatched her shorts from the floor, wriggled into them, and cinched the belt. Pattering down the narrow stairs, she pulled on one of Paul’s old sheriff’s shirts, the patches cut off, and buttoned it before she grabbed her laptop and let herself out of the courtyard.

  At CC’s, a hot latte on the table beside the laptop, she hooked into the Wi-Fi. Frederick had come through. She downloaded the files he’d sent and was home before noon. Sitting at the little patio table in the courtyard, she called 411 on her cell phone and got the number for Les Bonnes Filles. Clare had undoubtedly given Jordan not only a last name but a full history when she was creating the character. Anna had no idea what it was, so she made the reservation in the name of Jordan Sinclair. Maybe it was the name Clare that suggested it, but Anna thought it sounded like the name of a rich man, and she wanted the concierge to smell money.

  That done, she called her husband and let his love and the magic of the Arabica beans of her second latte bring her gently into the mellow spring in Geneva’s courtyard. Mackie, Jordan’s color-assisted dog, was outside and amused himself by watching turtles watching him.

  As she was saying good-bye to Paul, the complaining of the rusted gate on Jordan’s side of the house cried across the bricks. By Mackie’s exultant rush down the walkway, Anna guessed it was Clare returning from wherever she’d spent the morning.

  “Back here,” Anna called.

  Clare, wearing Jordan’s clothes but having cleaned up for her morning’s work, came into the courtyard dragging a rolling suitcase with several bags hooked around the handle riding it piggyback. Her arms were filled with more bags, all with the Brooks Brothers logo on them.

  “Holy smoke,” Anna said. “Brooks Brothers? You must be hemorrhaging money.”

  “Five thousand six hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-seven cents,” Clare said, dumping it all to the bricks and dropping her cheaply polyestered rump into the chair across the table from where Anna was nursing her coffee.

  “There was no way around it. Concierges at the better hotels know more about men’s clothes—and some women’s clothes, too, for that matter—than a lot of tailors. What they know is money: what it costs, how much the guy wearing it is worth. If this guy Tanya turned us on to is procuring for high-end swingers, then he’ll have an eye for who can afford his services. Would you believe I paid sixty dollars a pair for the boxer shorts in that sack?” Clare nudged one of the bags with the toe of her beat-up Payless shoes.

  “You plan on showing the concierge your underpants?” Anna asked with a laugh.

  “Maybe. I doubt he’ll bother checking out the rooms of his customers,
but you never know. He might be canny enough to rifle through a few suitcases and closets to see if he’s being set up by whatever vice cops might be conducting investigations in the area, things like that. If he did, and my boxer shorts were from Walmart, he’d know something was up.”

  Anna felt like a fool for not thinking of that herself. “You’re good at this,” she said honestly.

  “It’s all theater,” Clare said wearily. She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and rested her head in her hands. Malnutrition, stress, and the fatigue of the weeks since the fire were evident in the curve of her spine. “You wear an eighteenth-century corset and woolen drawers, you move more like a woman of that era,” Clare mumbled. “Clothes make the man in more ways than people think.”

  “Or the woman into the man,” Anna said. She sipped her coffee and watched the actress. Jordan burned, and that fire, though consuming him, gave him the energy to move forward. Clare’s energy was derived from another source. She was not so much moving forward of her own volition as being driven by horrors that filled her waking—and, undoubtedly, sleeping—moments. If she didn’t sleep and eat and do a few self-sustaining chores, she wasn’t going to make it many more days. Anna considered suggesting food and rest but knew she’d go unheard. Clare might last long enough to find her children. If they were alive, they’d cure her. If they were dead, it wouldn’t really matter.

  All Anna could do was keep her company and lift heavy objects. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get that stuff put away, then see what you can hypnotize out of Candy.”

  Standing, she reached down and hooked her fingers through the loops on the nearest sack. She’d gathered up two more and was reaching for the suitcase handle before Clare struggled up out of the chair. As if dazed by the sudden change in altitude, she stared vacantly around her. Her eyes lit on Anna’s laptop.

  “You want I should bring that?” she asked, sounding like a lost child.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “My bro—” She cut herself off. Had she told Clare that the FBI agent helping her was her brother-in-law? Anna couldn’t remember. She hoped not. If the proverbial hit the fan, and Clare told anyone he’d helped them, he could be up on charges regardless of whether or not he’d officially known he was aiding a suspected murderess. Because he was FBI—even retired FBI—he would be held to a higher standard of conduct than an ordinary citizen.

  “The guy who was looking into things for me e-mailed what he’d found. It’s all on there. I haven’t had time to go through it yet,” she said. Leading the way, she took Clare’s keys from her and unlocked and opened the door to her apartment. Taking the one chair from its home in front of the computer, Anna sat down and read through what Frederick had found while Clare unpacked the trousers, shirts, socks, shoes, and half a dozen other items of wearing apparel she’d dropped over five grand on.

  Frederick had paraphrased what he’d discovered. For that Anna was grateful. Plowing through the agent-speak of official reports was time-consuming. “Daoud Suliman, name legally changed to David Sullivan June 2003,” she read aloud.

  “After 9/11 he thought it would be better for business and the girls if he wasn’t so obviously Mideastern,” Clare said.

  “Ah. Wife, two daughters, under investigation from 2006 to 2009 for human trafficking. Suspected of illegally importing garment workers from Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Lebanon. Suspected of procuring garment workers for factories in New Jersey, Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles. Suspected of using undocumented workers in two of his own manufacturing plants. Suspected of paying below minimum wage, not providing health care, limiting workers’ freedoms, and—oooh,” Anna said. “Here’s where he’s getting into big trouble. Evading income taxes and channeling money to Muslim charities thought to be a cover for terrorists.”

  Clare had stopped moving and stood in the middle of the unfurnished bedroom holding a shirt by the collar with one hand, the other on its cuff out to the side as if she stood in the arms of an invisible dance partner.

  “That sound about right?” Anna asked.

  “Yes,” Clare said without hesitation. “I chose to think he was rescuing women from situations that were worse than what they’d face here. For some, I think that was true, women accused of a crime or on the outs with their in-laws or breaking some religious taboo. Others, I suppose their families sold them.”

  Anna looked at her for a moment, not judging, but wondering what it was she, Anna, chose to believe that was untrue, what she hid from herself so effectively she didn’t even suspect she was doing it, what rules she lived by that were arbitrary and destructive.

  “And Jalila,” Anna said. “The second wife?”

  “She was from Saudi. David felt Saudis were superior to people from other Muslim countries. He wouldn’t marry a Pakistani, and never anybody from Afghanistan. Too uncivilized.”

  Anna forgave her the sneer. Until a country treated its women equally and fairly, it wasn’t going to climb all that far up on Anna’s list of civilized places either.

  She went back to the screen. “The investigation stopped three months ago; that’s interesting. No disposition, nothing. Frederick thinks that means, to keep himself out of jail, David went to work for the FBI, either by rolling on his buddies or by working undercover in whatever scheme they had pinned on him.”

  Clare began moving again, hanging up the shirt she’d been dancing with.

  Scratching Mackie’s back absently and letting her mind float, Anna let the new information find and mate up with the other fragments she’d been told by Clare or gleaned from the gutter punks. It wasn’t much, but it did hang together.

  Clare took a wicked-looking knife from her trouser pocket, and Anna tensed, waiting to see if Jordan had sinister plans, but Clare began neatly cutting off price tags. “Best guess,” Anna said. “Do you think your husband was selling kids into the sex trade—or women?”

  “Best guess? No. David was a religious man. I don’t doubt he’d stone a woman to death for adultery without blinking an eye or losing a night’s sleep afterward, but he wouldn’t prostitute her.”

  “Not even if she was sold to him because she was an adulteress or whatever?” Anna asked.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think he would. For men like David, death is one thing—and not all that bad a thing, really—but desecration is another. Even if a woman had, by his standards, been desecrated either by choice or force, I don’t think he’d want to have any part of it. He wouldn’t save or harm her. She’d be dead to him.”

  “Same for children?”

  “More so, probably.” Clare snipped off the last tag from the clothes she’d hung in the closet and turned to Anna, knife open. “But then I thought a lot of things. And didn’t bother to think a lot of things. So I could be dead wrong.” Anna could see the choice of the phrase flashing like lightning in Clare’s mind as it did in hers. If Clare had been wrong, it wasn’t her own death she’d earned.

  “You are sure the corpse carried out of your house was David?” Anna asked.

  “It had on David’s pajamas,” Clare replied. Back against the wall, she slid down until she was sitting on her sleeping bag, knees up to her chest, expensive men’s undergarments scattered around her. Gathering the stuffed dog to her chest, she buried her nose in its back.

  Anna waited.

  “It was when I found Jalila murdered that I knew it was David on that stretcher,” Clare said finally.

  “Couldn’t David have murdered Jalila? Maybe she was going to leave him, or turn him in to the law. Maybe she was having an affair.”

  Clare thought about that for a while. “Oh, God,” she said, and, putting her hands to her head as if it was about to explode, she groaned. “I guess he could have. But there was Aisha . . .” Her voice trailed off and she appeared to be shrinking before Anna’s eyes.

  “Pack,” Anna said to keep her moving. Clare heaved herself to her feet, using the wall for support, and dragged the suitcase to the middle of the room.r />
  Anna went back to the report Frederick had sent. “It looks like David had at least two business partners, one in L.A. and one in New Orleans. Both port cities. The one in L.A. was known only as Big Fish and the guy in New Orleans as the Magician. You got that right,” she said to Clare. The woman needed to be reinflated somehow.

  Clare said nothing, just kept folding and stowing.

  “Maybe because he could make people disappear?” The thin nature of the information they had was disheartening. Anna wanted to ask Clare if she’d run off to New Orleans on the strength of a Cajun accent and the words “Bourbon Street Nursery.” She wanted to ask her why, if she believed the body on one stretcher was that of her husband, who she claimed had not been in the house when she’d come back from her night run to the pharmacy, she did not believe the two smaller corpses were those of the daughters. Why she was so certain the girls had been taken for the sex slave trade and not just killed and dumped. Knowing those questions might well render Clare useless, Anna changed tack.

  “Let’s get on with the hypnotism,” she said and closed the laptop.

  “Candy won’t be up,” Clare said dully.

  “We’ll get her up.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Candy was up but only just. She was still in her pajamas, a loose top and shorts, childlike in pink with white poodles. Her room, attached to a rambling old apartment shared by Delilah, Star, and their son, was cluttered to the point few of the original surfaces were visible beneath the tossed-off clothing and, to Anna the saddest and most poignant paraphernalia, dozens of Beanie Babies that looked much loved and played with.

  “Hello, Mrs. Jordan,” Candy said when Delilah let them into her bedroom. The baby stripper had yet to forgive Jordan for lacking family jewels. Sleepily, she combed the fine blond hair off her face, still puffy from the pillow, and stared at them with a look of anticipation and alarm. “You come to hippopotomize me?”