Dead Sleep (45 page)

“Did Lenz tell you about my affair with my teacher?” I ask, watching his eyes as I move.

“No. But I saw something in his notes.”

“Lenz showed you his notes?”

“They were on the table in the conference room.” He looks troubled now. “I took a quick look.”

“Only natural, right?”

“I'm an investigator. Nosy by nature.”

“What did you think about what you read?”

“I don't judge anybody, as long as they don't hurt someone else.”

“Good. Because I was really in love with him.”

“I'm sorry about what happened.”

I arch my back, and John closes his eyes and groans deep in his throat. “You know one thing I really liked in that relationship?”

“What?”

“When I went to school after being with him the night before, or that morning, nobody knew. But
I
knew. I could still feel him. I felt marked, you know? I belonged to him.”

“That doesn't sound like you. Wanting to belong to somebody. Anybody.”

“Shows how much you know. I'm as independent as they come, right?” I settle my weight and begin moving in slow circles. “But you know what?”

“What?” he asks hoarsely.

“After we've been together long enough for the CDC or whoever to clear us, you know what I want?”

“What?”

“I want you to fill me up. I want you to mark your territory every day, so I can always feel you.”

“Jesus, Jordan—”

Tightening my muscles, I plant my palms on his chest and push. He moans with ineffable pleasure, and his eyes go wide, searching mine, trying to discover all that I am in a span of seconds. Foolish man. My neuroses alone would take years to plumb. He bites his lip against the pain of his leg and grasps my wrists in his hands.

“Now you see me,”
I whisper. “And I see
you.
I know what you want . . . how you want it. I'm all grown up, John. You can do what you want. Anything.”

At last he snaps out of himself, out of the man who sees me as someone to be protected and into the one who wants me beyond restraint. His hands fly to my hips, pulling me down as he flails into me, not caring anymore about my feelings or his leg, nothing but getting as deep into me as physical limits will allow, making me his alone. The bed, which only squeaked before, hammers the wall. The lamp on the end table crashes to the floor. None of it matters. I grip the headboard with all my strength and hold him against the mattress until he screams and goes into spasms you'd think would kill a man but which in fact bring him gasping and sweating back to life. When he collapses onto the pillow, I fall beside him.

“Jesus,” he says breathlessly.

“I know.”

“You're amazing.”

“Hardly.”

“How do you feel?”

“The same way you feel about me. You think all the boys get this treatment?”

“I didn't know.”

“Well, now you do.”

He smiles with contentment. “I love you, Jordan.”

“Take it easy. You're in shock.”

“I think you're right. I haven't been—I mean, I haven't felt like that since . . .”

“When?”

He blinks and looks at the ceiling. “I was going to say Vietnam.”

The mild euphoria I felt before slips away. “You slept with Vietnamese women over there?”

“Everybody did.”

“They were beautiful?”

“Some.”

“Different from other women?”

“How do you mean? In bed?”

“Yes . . . but not just that. I don't know. Like de Becque said. Like that Li, that woman we met on Cayman. Did they make you fall in love with them?”

He's looking in my direction, but his mind is focused thousands of miles away. “I saw it happen a lot. People over here think it's because Vietnamese women were more submissive than American women, but that's not it. They just—I'm not talking about the city girls, now, the bar girls, but regular Vietnamese women—they had a naturalness about them. They were very demure, yet open about certain things. It's seductive without trying to be. I knew a guy who deserted to be with one.”

“And I just made you feel like they made you feel?”

“Not the same. Only the intensity.” He touches my cheek. “You're thinking about your father, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“That he may have left you on purpose?”

I nod, unable to voice my fear.

“I'm not like your father, Jordan.”

“I know. You're like the men he took pictures of.”

“What do you mean?”

John's ceiling has a water stain. The house isn't perfect after all. “They were more real than he was. He seemed to make them real, to bring them into existence with his camera. And in a way he did. The way I do. We make certain things real to the rest of the world. But the rest of the world doesn't really matter. My father's photos didn't make soldiers eternal, the way someone wrote they did. What those soldiers
did
made them eternal. And whatever they did, I think, is still happening somewhere. All of it. All things, all the time. I probably sound nuts. That's what comes from living on the West Coast, right?”

“You don't sound nuts. The things I saw and did in Vietnam have never stopped for me. You know why I don't have post-traumatic stress disorder? Because there's nothing
post
about it. It's just something I live with. Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away.”

“Tell me something, John. The truth. Do you think my father is involved in this thing?”

“No.” His eyes are steady and guileless.

“But you did before.”

“I wondered, that's all. I still don't know what's happening. But if your father's involved, the only way I can see it is if he's in with de Becque somehow.”

“But you don't think so.”

“No.”

“What do you base that on?”

“My gut.”

I lay my hand on his flat stomach. “You don't have much of one.”

“I'm glad you can still laugh.”

“It's the same old choice. Laugh or cry.” I rub my hand slowly over his abdomen. “Why don't you sleep for a while?”

He shakes his head. “I can't. Not with Thalia still out there. I can never sleep when things are breaking.”

“You want me to make coffee or something?”

“Coffee would be good.”

“What about food? You have anything in the fridge?”

“Can you cook?”

I laugh. “Mostly foreign dishes designed for camp-fires. But I don't think there's a Mississippi girl on the planet who can't do the basics.”

“There are some chicken breasts in the freezer.”

“Rice in the cabinets? Onions?”

“Probably.”

“Jambalaya, then.” I kiss him on the chin and climb out of the bed.

“Would you mind bringing those Argus photos in here?”

“I think they can wait, but I'll bring them.”

I retrieve the thick manila envelope from the coffee table and toss it onto the bed. “How many of those have you looked at already?”

“I don't know. Until they adjusted the sensitivity of the program, I was looking at twenty different versions of the same face before it became recognizable as another one.”

“Pace yourself. Jambalaya and biscuits, coming up.”

I walk back to the kitchen and orient myself, but I've gotten no further than running water over the chicken breasts when John's voice echoes up the hallway. Something in the sound makes me freeze with my hand on the sink tap. I run for the bedroom, in my mind seeing him turning blue from a blood clot broken free by our strenuous lovemaking.

“I know this woman,” he says, shaking a piece of paper at me as I come through the door.

“From where?” I ask, taking the picture from him. It's a facial shot of a young blond woman, maybe eighteen. She's like a template of an adult; her face has yet to develop the definition of personality. “Is she one of the missing persons you've been studying?”

“No. I saw her
years
ago. In Quantico.”

“You mean you knew her? Personally?”

He shakes his head impatiently. “No. Every year we have city and state cops coming through Quantico. Our National Academy program. Most of them have a case that's dogged them for years, one they couldn't solve or get out of their minds. Sometimes it's a single murder. Usually it's two or three they think might be connected. A police detective showed me this woman at Quantico.”

“A New Orleans detective?”

“That's the thing. I think he was from New York. This is a really old case.”

My head is buzzing with a strange excitement. “How old?”

“Ten years? Remember at the Camellia Grill, when I told you I was working on something? I said if it panned out, I'd tell you? Well, maybe it has.”

“How do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“The youngest of our four suspects is Frank Smith, who's thirty-five. Serial offenders don't just wake up one day and start killing people in middle age. Baxter's unit was checking all four suspects' past residences for similar unsolved crimes. Vermont, where Wheaton's from. Terrebonne Parish, where Laveau grew up. Those were easy. That left New York, for Smith and Gaines. Not to mention the possible accomplice. In fact, all four suspects have ties to New York. But when you're talking about missing persons—which is what this case is, because of the lack of corpses—you're talking about thousands of victims in New York, even if you only go back a few years. The VICAP computer is supposed to make those kinds of connections, but police compliance isn't always great, and it's worse the further back you go. But I thought, What if there were unsolved homicides in New York that had only one or two similarities to this case?”

“Like . . . ?”

“Women taken from grocery stores, jogging paths, et cetera, snatched off the street without a trace, no witnesses, nothing. A professional feel to them, yet no obvious similarities between the victims.”

“Did you check it out?”

“I called some New York cops I knew from the Academy program and asked them to poke around their old files. It was asking a lot, but I had to do it.”

“Did you talk to the cop who showed you this woman?”

“No, that guy's retired now. And nobody's gotten back to me yet. But this woman . . .”

“You still remember her?”

“I told you before, I've got a knack for faces. This girl was pretty and young, and she stuck in my mind. That detective's, too. She was his informant, now that I think about it. Will you bring me the cordless phone?”

I get him the phone, and he rings the field office, asking for Baxter.

“It's John,” he says. “I think we caught a break. . . . A big one. We need New York to liaise with NYPD in a big hurry. . . .”

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the Argus-generated portrait again. It's a strangely nonhuman image, yet lifelike enough to pull a ten-year-old memory from John's brain. I say a silent thank-you to the photographer who confided the existence of Argus to me.

“Jordan?” says John, hanging up the phone. “Do you know what this means?”

“It means my sister wasn't victim number five. Whoever is behind this started taking women more than a decade ago. In New York.”

He squeezes my arm. “We're close now. Really close.”

23

I'M LYING IN John's tub, soaking in hot water up to my neck, a pleasure I managed by jamming plastic wrap into the slits in the side of the circular metal thing that operates the drain. The glass bricks above me have slowly turned from black to blue with the coming dawn, and while I don't feel rested, I do feel less frazzled than I did yesterday.

Last night passed in a flurry of confusion, elation mingled with depression, like sugar highs punctuated by exhaustion. Prompted by John's recognition of the Argus photo, Daniel Baxter rousted the midnight homicide shifts at the NYPD. Using Argus-enhanced photos of the abstract Sleeping Women paintings, New York detectives managed to identify six of the eight unidentified victims in the NOKIDS case.

Once the women were identified, the story came together by itself. Between 1979 and 1984, a serial kidnap-murderer was operating in the New York City area without anyone connecting more than three of his crimes. His victims were prostitutes and hitchhikers—neither category high on the NYPD's list of priorities. The significance of this discovery was simple and devastating: the painter of the Sleeping Women had not begun his work two years ago in New Orleans, but more than twenty years ago in New York.

The ramifications were more complex. First, our youngest suspect, Frank Smith, had been only fifteen years old at the time. This alone did not exonerate him, but it shifted the focus of the investigation away from him. Second, not one Sleeping Woman had been sold at the time of the New York murders. Third, why would a serial killer murder eight women and then suddenly stop? In John's experience, only prison or death stopped serial murderers from pursuing their work. But most puzzling was why, having stopped, the murderer would resume his work fifteen years later. Had he been locked up for a decade and a half, only to emerge as hungry for victims as before?

John drank nonstop cups of coffee to fight the sedative effects of his painkillers, and sat on the sofa working out theory after theory in an attempt to fit the new parameters of the case. Too exhausted to be any use to him, I went into the bathroom, took three Xanax, and got into bed.