Dead Sleep (55 page)

Thalia. A hole in her thigh is spurting blood with every beat of her heart. She's still alive enough to die badly. Screaming in rage, I cling to Wheaton's wrists as the gun kicks my freezing hand across the bottom of the tub.

When silence returns, it shocks us both. Wheaton's face is bone white, and his arms have stopped struggling. The icy water has done its work. Before I know what I'm doing, I've let go of his wrists and scrambled out of the tub. The IV stand crashes to the floor beside me, and the catheter pops out of my wrist, sending a warm rush of blood down my hand.

Wheaton straightens slowly, and for a moment I think he's been shot. But he's not holding himself anywhere; he's struggling to remove the soaked gloves from his shaking hands. He looks like a burn victim trying to remove melted clothing. One glove drops to the wet floor, then the other, and then he's holding his hands up before him, fingers splayed and quivering. The fingers are blue. Not a pleasant blue, but the morbid blue-black that signals tissue death. As I stare, Wheaton's mouth forms an O and he roars in agony.

The scream snaps my trance. Backpedaling away from the tub, I turn toward the door of the main house. It seems a short distance away, but when I try to run, my legs go watery. I have to stop, bend, and grip my knees to stay on my feet. Panic balloons in my chest, cutting off my air. Is that the insulin too?

I need sugar.
Rather than try to reach my stash by the mirror, I fall backward onto my rump and throw my hand toward the grocery bag. Wheaton plods toward me, his eyes blazing, but he doesn't look like much of a threat. It's like being attacked by a man without hands. Scrabbling in the grocery bag, I rip open a Twinkie and stuff it into my mouth, swallowing the spongy cake almost without chewing.

Wheaton suddenly veers away, back toward the tub. He's looking down into it like a monk ordered to retrieve some relic from a kettle of fire. The gun. He's trying to summon the courage to plunge his dying hands back into the ice.

I rake my fingernails down my left forearm, drawing blood. The pain momentarily sharpens my senses, and in that window of clarity I force myself to my feet.

Wheaton bends over the tub and plunges one arm in up to the elbow. Then he pops erect like a jack-in-the-box, his gun arm trembling, and whirls to face me.

The pistol is rising when I charge him, arms outstretched. The gun bellows as my hands strike center mass, driving him backward over the tub and into the mirror propped against the wall. The mirror snaps five feet from the floor, and the top half crashes over us, bursting into lethal shards as big as china plates.

Wheaton falls across the tub, stunned but still conscious, straining to hold himself above the icy water. As I struggle to get off him, his eyes flash with life and he jams the gun barrel into my throat.

“Don't,”
I plead, hating myself for begging.
“Please.”

He smiles with odd regret, then pulls the trigger.

There's a hollow click.

Wild-eyed, he jerks back the gun to bludgeon me, but his flexing shoulder slips off the rim of the tub and sends him down into the water. He doesn't even scream. He sucks in a massive gulp of air, and one dark hand flies to his chest as though to massage his heart. Before pity can gain a foothold in mine, I put both hands on his head and shove it beneath the icy surface.

He struggles, but his strength has left him. I want to hold him down, if only to end his torture, but I can't afford to. The sugar in my blood could be metabolized by insulin before I get ten paces from the tub. If it is, I'll leave this place feetfirst with a tag around my toe.

I raise myself from the tub and stagger to the door behind the easel. The door leads to an oblong room containing a television, a sofa, and a telephone table. Stumbling through it, I find myself in a wide hall that runs forty feet to a great wooden door, much like the one in Jane's house on St. Charles Avenue. I start toward the door, focusing on my balance, but two-thirds of the way there my legs give way and I fall headlong into a white baseboard.

There's a strange fog loose in my head. I want to lie on the soft wood and let it enfold me. But from the midst of the fog rises an image so indelible that my heart begins pounding under the force of it: shallow graves, eleven in a line, low mounds of dirt moldering in the dark beneath a house.
This house.
Beneath my feet wait the remains of eleven women whose husbands and parents and children pray each night to know their fates. My sister waits with them. And there is no question whom she's waiting for. My duty is not yet done.

Struggling to my knees, I crawl the last few yards to the door, then reach up with my right hand and turn the knob.

It doesn't move.

A few still-active brain cells paint the image of a window behind my closed eyes, but I've no hope of reaching one. I can go no farther.

“Please,”
I hear myself sob, and again the indignity of begging embarrasses me.
“Open.”

The door remains closed. A pathetic end for a decently lived life. Naked. Alone. Lost in a white fog that blows with insidious silence, deadening the sound of my sobs, then the rasp of my breathing. Soon all will be whiteness.

As my ears chase the last hissing echo of my respiration, an inhuman screech splits my fading consciousness like an ax. There's a pounding of drums, then a shattering cacophony like the mirror breaking in the conservatory. Black insectile figures swarm over me, their metallic voices ringing against my eardrums. One is trying to ask me something, his goggle eyes wide and earnest, but I can't understand him.

A scream of utter desolation cleaves the air, stretching toward infinity. It punches through my heart like a bullet of pure misery, fusing with the grief that has festered there so long. My hands fly up to cover my ears, but the scream smashes into a black wall, leaving only a ringing vibration in the air. The goggle eyes above me go wide, then vanish, and a human face appears in their place.

John Kaiser's face.

He thinks I'm dead. I see it in his eyes. The fog has almost swallowed me. I have to tell him I'm alive. If I don't, he might bury me. Deep in my mind, a spark winks to life. A lone pinpoint of white in a black sky. And from that star comes a voice. Not my father's voice. A woman's voice.

My sister's voice.

Two syllables fall from my lips with eerie clarity, and they trigger a burst of frantic activity. The word I say is “Sugar.” Then I slap my wrist.
“Sugar!”
I say again, slapping the bloody IV hole like a monkey on amphetamines.
“Sugar, sugar, sugar . . .”

A white-clad angel bends over me. “I think she wants us to check her glucose level.”

Then the star winks out, and John's face vanishes.

28

“JORDAN? JORDAN?”

White light spears my retinas, but I endure the pain. I don't want the dark. Anything but that.

“Jordan? Wake up.”

A shadow floats over my eyes, shielding them. A hand. After a moment, the hand pulls back and a face leans in.

John's face. It's creased with worry, and his eyes are red with fatigue.

“Do you know me?” he asks.

“Agent Kaiser. Right?”

The worry doesn't leave his face.

“I told you, John, I'm not a china vase.”

“Thank God.”

“Wheaton?”

John shakes his head. “He ran screaming into the hall when you were down. He had a gun. It was turned around in his hand, like a club. I shouted for SWAT not to fire, but by then someone had. He was killed instantly.”

“CK,” I whisper.

“What?”

“Clean kill.”

“Oh.”

Turning my head, I see that I'm lying on a table in what looks like an ER treatment room. There's an IV running into my arm. I have to fight the urge to rip it out.

“Where are we?”

“Charity Hospital. Your blood sugar's back to normal. The doctors say you're dehydrated, but they're fixing that now. Their main worry was your brain.”

“That's always been my worry, too.”

“Jordan.”

“I feel like I have a bad hangover. That's all, really.”

“Physically. But what about inside?”

Inside.
I pick at the bandage over the wrist where Wheaton's IV was. “A couple of times this past week, I got my hopes up for Jane. But deep down I knew she was gone. But Thalia . . . After Hoffman died in the river, I thought we might find her alive and all right. Waiting for the ax, you know?”

John's eyes are steady but somber. “She was probably in that coma within an hour or two after being taken. Once she evaded surveillance and Hoffman got her, there was nothing we could have done.”

I nod. “Where was I?”

“Four blocks from Wheaton's house on Audubon Place. Five blocks from St. Charles Avenue. One block from Tulane.”

“Jesus, they had some nerve. What's happening there now?”

He gives me a hard look. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“They've taken two corpses from shallow graves under a crawl space.”

“Jane's?”

“No IDs yet. We
^'
re in the process of gathering all the victims' families at a hotel. We're going to proceed very slowly on the exhumations. We don't want any mistakes.”

“I understand. Wheaton told me the New York victims are buried in a clearing on the family farm in Vermont.”

John nods as though not surprised. “We're already working on paperwork up there. That farm is mostly a commercial district now. Big deal to start poking random holes in search of bodies.”

“I don't want to stay here tonight.”

“The doctors want to keep you.”

“I don't care. You're the FBI. Do something about it.”

He takes a deep breath, then lays his hand on my arm. “Listen, there's something you're going to want to know.”

“What?” I ask, my throat tight with fear.

“We just got a message from Marcel de Becque.”

“What?”

“An invitation, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wants to talk to you. In person.”

“De Becque's here? In the U.S.?”

“No. He wants to see you at his house. In the Caymans. He says he'll send his jet if you need it.”

“Do I need it?”

“No. There are still serious questions in this case, and only de Becque can answer them now. Baxter says we can take the Bureau jet. ”

“When?”

“When you're strong enough.”

“For a two-hour flight? Tell them to get the plane ready. And go handle the doctors. I don't want to deal with that.”

John looks at me like a parent who knows his child will not take no for an answer. Then he squeezes my shoulder, bends, and kisses me on the forehead.

“I guess we're taking a trip.”

 

GRAND CAYMAN LIES like an emerald on the Caribbean, smooth and flat after the mountains of Cuba. Our pilot lands the Lear at the airport near Georgetown, but this time there's no pair of escorts waiting with a Range Rover. At the FBI Director's request, the governor of the islands has provided state transportation, a black limousine flying the Caymanian flag from its fenders. Our native driver speaks with a crisp British accent, and he loses no time shepherding us to de Becque's colonial estate on North Bay.

The door is answered by Li, who stands with the same self-possession I noticed the first time we were here.

“Mademoiselle,” she says with a slight inclination of her head. “Monsieur. This way, please.”

This time there will be no body search. John is carrying two service pistols, and the governor knows it. De Becque knows it too, and he's made no objection.

Li leads us to the great hall at the back of the mansion, where the massive window looks out onto the harbor. Just as before, the tanned, silver-haired French expatriate stands framed in the lower corner of his window, staring out to sea like a man with an unquenchable yearning.

“Mademoiselle Glass,” Li announces, and then she backs soundlessly down the hall.

De Becque turns and nods with courtly grace. “I'm glad you came,
chérie.
I'm sorry to bring you so far, but alas, my legal situation does not allow me to travel to you.” He takes a step toward us, then hesitates. “I have things to tell you that you must know. For my sake, and for yours.” He motions us deeper into the room. “
S'il vous plaît
—come in. Please.”

John and I walk over to the sofa we sat on less than a week ago and sit side by side. De Becque remains standing. He seems ill at ease, and he paces as he speaks.

“First, the matter of the Sleeping Women. I want to assure you that I never knew the identity of the painter, or of his associate. I did know Christopher Wingate, the art dealer, and it's him that what I have to say concerns. As you know, I bought the first five Sleeping Women he offered for sale. The sixth painting was also promised to me, and I paid a deposit on it. Then Wingate ‘stiffed' me, as they say. He sold the painting to Hodai Takagi, a Japanese collector, though he knew I would match any price Takagi paid.”

“Why would he do that?” I ask.

“To open new markets,” John replies. “Right?”

“Quite so,” says de Becque. “It's a business, after all. But this painting had been promised to me, and I was angry. I'm not a man to brood over an injustice. I'm not what the psychiatrists call ‘passive'—I'm sorry, what is the term?”