Dead Sleep (14 page)

“I'd just as soon not speculate about that yet.” Kaiser looks at his watch. “I'd like to ask you about something personal, if you don't mind.”

“What?”

“The phone call.”

“Phone call?”

“The one you got from Thailand.”

“Today I woke up thinking about that call. It was the most unsettling experience of my life.”

“I'm not surprised. I know you gave us a statement when it happened, but would you mind telling me about it?”

“Not if you think it might help you.”

“It might.”

“It was five months after Jane disappeared. A bad time for me. I was having to sedate myself to sleep. I don't remember if I told them that in my statement.”

“You said you were exhausted.”

“That's one word for it. I wasn't too happy with the Bureau then. Anyway, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It must have rung a long time to wake me up, and when I finally got to it, the connection was terrible.”

“What was the first thing you heard?”

“A woman crying.”

“Did you recognize the voice? Right at that moment?”

“No. It made me more alert, but it didn't zing straight to my gut. You know?”

“Yeah. What then?”

“The woman sobbed, ‘Jordan.' Then there was static. Then: ‘I need your help. I can't—' Then there was more static, like a bad cell phone connection. Then she said, ‘Daddy's alive, but he can't help me.' Then: ‘Please,' like she was begging, at her wits' end. At that point I felt that it was Jane, and I was about to ask where she was when a man in the background said something in French that I didn't understand and don't remember.” Even now, in seventy-degree sunlight, a chill goes through my body at the memory. “And I thought for a second—”

“What?”

“I thought he sounded like my father.” I look defiantly at Kaiser, daring him to call me a fool. But he doesn't. Part of me is glad, yet another part wonders if
he's
a fool.

“Go on,” he says.

“Then in English the man said, ‘No,
chérie,
it's just a dream.' And then the phone went dead.”

My appetite is gone. A clammy sweat has broken out under my blouse, sending a cold rivulet down my ribs. I press the silk against my skin to stop it.

“Do you have a clear memory of your father's voice?”

“Not really. More an impression, I guess. I think the voice on the phone reminded me of his because Dad spoke a little French sometimes. He learned it in Vietnam, I think. He called me
chérie
sometimes.”

“Did he? What happened next?”

“To be honest, my brain was barely functioning. I thought the whole thing was probably a delusion. But the next day, I reported it to Baxter, and he told me they had found a record of the call and traced its origin to a train station in Bangkok.”

“When you found that out, what did your gut tell you?”

“I hoped it was my sister. But the more I thought about it, the less I believed it. I know a lot of MIA families, from searching for my father for so long. What if it was a female relative of an MIA in the middle of a search? They go over there all the time. You know, a wife or daughter of an MIA, in trouble and needing help? Maybe she's drunk and depressed. She pulls my card out of her purse. The conversation fits, if you fill in the blanks a certain way. ‘Jordan . . . I need your help.
My
daddy's alive, but he'—referring to
her
father—‘can't help me.' ”

“But MIA relatives go over to try to help the missing soldier, right? Not the other way around.”

“Yes.”

“Did you check with the MIA families you knew?”

“Yes. The FBI did too. We never found anyone who would admit to calling me. But there are more than two thousand MIAs still unaccounted for. That's a lot of families. And at the meetings, they all talk to me, because I'm well-known and because I've traveled in the East so much.”

“If that were the case, who would the man's voice have belonged to?”

“A husband. A stepfather. Who knows? But I thought of another possibility. What if it was the killer playing a trick on me? Using some woman he knows to upset me.”

Kaiser shakes his head. “No other relatives of victims received such calls. I checked.”

“So, what do you think?”

He idly pokes a leftover slice of beef. “I think it might have been your sister.”

I take a deep breath and try to steady my nerves.

“I'm telling you this,” he says soberly, “because Baxter told me you were tough.”

“I don't know if I'm that tough.”

He waits, letting me work through it.

“This is why you didn't want Lenz here, isn't it?”

“Partly.”

“When I asked Lenz what he thought about the phone call, he brushed it off.”

Kaiser looks at the ground. “The consensus in the Unit is that your mystery caller was a member of an MIA family, just as you guessed. Lenz didn't ask you about it because he'd seen the statement you made at the time, and he'd consider that a more reliable description of the event than what you remember now.”

“That sounds like an official reply. What's your personal opinion?”

“If your sister is alive, it throws Lenz's present theory—whatever that might be—into question. Lenz talks a lot about how everything is possible, how there are no rules, but deep down he's wearing blinders. I don't think he always did. But these days he's prejudiced toward the tragic ending. I'm open to something else. That's it in a nutshell.”

“Why are you open to something else?”

A wistful smile touches the corners of Kaiser's lips and eyes. “Because I know the world obeys no laws. I learned that the hard way.” He picks up a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie, then discards it. “Lenz probably asked you about all sorts of family stuff. Right? Intimate stuff?”

“Yes.”

“That's the way he works. He likes to know all the underlying relationships. He's upset a lot of the victims' families doing that. I'm not criticizing him for it. He did some groundbreaking work early in his career.”

“That's pretty much what he said about you.”

“Really? Well, I won't kid you, I don't think he should be involved in this investigation.”

“Why not?”

“I don't trust his instincts or his judgment. He was involved in a case a while back that turned into a real clusterfuck. And Baxter places too much weight on what he says, because of their history.”

“Lenz told me his wife was killed during a case. Is that what you're talking about?”

“Yes. Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said it was a vicious killing.”

“It was that, all right. And it happened because Lenz did something supremely arrogant and stupid. He got there five minutes after she died on her own kitchen table.”

“God.”

“He retired after that. He's done some consulting for Baxter since, but I don't think he learned the right lesson from what happened. He still has too much faith in his own abilities.”

“What do you think about his plan to use me to rattle any suspects you dig up?”

“It could work, but it's not as simple or safe as it sounds. The results could be inconclusive, and the strategy could put you right in the killer's sights.”

Kaiser's cell phone beeps again. He lifts it from the detritus of the meal and scans the LCD. “Lenz again.”

“Are you going to answer?”

“No.”

Since Kaiser took the conversation into personal territory, I feel justified in doing the same. “You've told me Lenz's dirty laundry. What about yours? Why did you leave Quantico?”

“What did Lenz tell you?”

“Nothing. He said he'd leave it for you to tell me, if you would.”

Kaiser looks off toward a stand of palm trees, where two lovers and a dog lie on a blanket, an ice chest beside them. “It's pretty simple, really. I burned out. It happens to everyone in that job, sooner or later. I just snapped a little more spectacularly than most.”

“What happened?”

“After four years at Quantico, I was pretty much Baxter's right hand. I was handling far too heavy a load. Over a hundred and twenty active cases. Child murders, serial rapes, bombers, kidnappings, the whole sick spectrum. You can't assign priorities in a situation like that. Behind every single case, every photo, is a desperate family. Distraught parents, husbands, siblings. Frustrated cops aching to help them. It got to where I was actually living at the Academy. When my personal life fell apart, I hardly noticed. Then one day the inevitable happened.”

This vague reference to his personal life makes me check his left hand. There's no wedding band there.

“What was that?” I ask. “The inevitable?”

“Baxter and I were out at the Montana State Prison, interviewing a death-row inmate. He'd raped and murdered seven little boys. Tortured most of them before they died. It was no different from interviews I'd done a dozen times before, but this guy was really enjoying telling us what he'd done. A lot of them do, of course, but this time . . . I just couldn't detach myself. I couldn't stop thinking about this one little boy. Six years old, screaming for his mother while this guy shoved power tools up his rectum.” Kaiser swallows hard, like his mouth is dry. “And I lost control.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over the table. I tried to kill him.”

“How close did you come?”

“I broke his jaw, his nose, and assorted other facial bones. I damaged his larynx and put out one of his eyes. Baxter couldn't pull me off. He finally clubbed the base of my skull with a coffee mug. Stunned me long enough for him to drag me out. The guy was hospitalized for twenty-six days.”

“Jesus. How did you keep your job?”

Kaiser slowly shakes his head, as if gauging how much to tell me. “Baxter covered for me. He told the warden the con jumped me and I defended myself.” Kaiser's eyes search out the lovers again. “I guess you're going to go all liberal on me now, tell me I violated his civil rights?”

“Well, you did. You know that. But I understand why. I've made myself part of the story before, instead of covering it. It sounds to me like you had a delayed reaction to something else.”

He looks back at me as though surprised. “That's what it was, all right. I'd lost a little girl a week before. Working a rape-murder case in Minnesota. I was advising Minneapolis Homicide, and we were close to getting the UNSUB. Really close. But he strangled one more little girl before we did. If I'd been one day faster . . . well, you know.”

“It's in the past. Isn't that what you told me? You can't change it, so forget it.”

“Glib bullshit.”

His honesty brings a smile to my face. “A while ago you said ‘clusterfuck.' That's a Vietnam term, isn't it?”

He nods distractedly. “Yeah.”

“Were you there?”

“Yeah.”

“You look too young for it.”

“I was there at the end. Seventy-one and -two.”

Which makes him forty-six or forty-seven, if he went over when he was eighteen. “The end was seventy-three,” I remind him. “Seventy-five, really. There was still a lot of ground fighting in seventy-one.”

“That's what I meant. The end of the fighting.”

“What branch of service?”

“Army.”

“Were you drafted?”

“I wish I could tell you I was. But I volunteered. Every civilian was trying like hell to stay out of the military, every soldier was trying to get out of Vietnam, and I was trying to get in. What did I know? I was a kid from rural Idaho. I went to Ranger School, the whole nine yards.”

“How did you feel about journalists over there? Photographers?”

“They had a job to do, like I did.”

“A different job.”

“True. I met a couple who were okay. But some of them just stayed in the hotels and sent Vietnamese out to get their combat shots. I didn't care much for them.”

“That still happens in some places.”

“I've seen your name under some pretty rough pictures. Are you a lot like your father?”

“I don't know, to tell you the truth. All I know is what people have told me about him. Guys who worked with him in the field. I think we're different as photographers.”

“How so?”

“Wars attract different kinds. There are the hotel guys you talked about, who don't even count. There are the Hemingway wannabes, out there to test themselves. Then you have the ones who get off on the danger, who live for the rush. They're the crazy ones, like Sean Flynn, riding hell-for-leather through firefights on a motorcycle, with a camera in his hand. And then there are the good ones. The ones who do it because they feel it's the right thing to do. They know the danger, they're scared shitless, but they do it anyway. They crawl right into the middle of it, where the mortar rounds are dropping and the machine guns are churning up the mud.”

“That's the kind of courage I respected over there,” Kaiser says quietly. “I knew some soldiers like that.”

His face is lined with silent grief; I wonder if he knows it. “Something tells me you were a soldier like that.”

He doesn't respond.

“That's the kind of courage my father had,” I tell him. “He wasn't that gifted a photographer, when you get down to it. His composition was never that great. But he would get so close to the elephant that the cra zies wouldn't even go there. And when you're that close, composition doesn't matter. Just the shot. And that made his pictures unique. He went into Laos and Cambodia. He spent twelve days underground at Khe Sanh, during the worst of the siege. I have a photo a marine shot of him peeing in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”