“Or he may have meant to conceal their faces,” says Kaiser.
“This also is possible.”
“If any of these women are still alive,” I ask, “where could they possibly be? Why wouldn’t they have come forward by now?”
“The world is very wide, chérie. And full of people with strange appetites. I’m more concerned with you. I think this is an unstable time for the man painting these pictures.” De Becque’s eyes burn into mine. “I also think your involvement with the FBI may bring you to his attention. I would not have anything happen to you.”
“She’ll be protected,” says Kaiser.
“Good intentions aren’t enough, Monsieur. She should consider staying here with me until this thing is over.”
“What?” I ask.
“You would be free to come and go, of course. But here I can protect you. I haven’t much confidence in the FBI, to be frank.”
“I appreciate your concern, Monsieur, but I want to remain part of the effort to stop this man.”
“Then take a word of advice. Be very careful. These paintings show an artist in search of himself. His early work is confused and derivative, important only for what it led to. The recent paintings give us a certain view of death. Where is this man going? No one knows. But I would not like to see you come up for auction anytime soon.”
“If I do, buy me. I’d rather hang here than in Hong Kong.”
A white smile cracks the Frenchman’s tanned face. “I would top any price, chérie. You have my word upon it.”
De Becque stands suddenly and looks through his great glass window at the bay. I have photographed several prominent prisoners in my life, and something in the Frenchman’s stance throws me back to those occasions. Here in his multimillion-dollar mansion, with a fortune in art hanging on his walls, this expatriate shares something with the poorest convict pacing out a cell in Angola or Parchman.
“I think it’s time to go,” I tell Kaiser.
I wait for de Becque to turn back to me, but he doesn’t. As I walk to the door, he says in a melancholy voice: “Despite what your friend says, Jordan, remember this. The French know the meaning of loyalty.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Li will show you out.”
“Merci.”
At last de Becque turns to me and raises a hand in farewell. In his eyes I see genuine affection, and I’m suddenly sure he knew my father far better than he claimed.
“Your numbers!” I call. “I never got them.”
“They’re waiting in your plane.”
Of course they are.
THE RANGE ROVER hums steadily toward the airport. Bright sunlight glints off the hood and the road signs, chasing a blue iguana beneath a green roadside bush. As the reptile vanishes, the Sleeping Women I saw in de Becque’s gallery flash through my mind, and a minor epiphany sends a chill along my skin.
“I just realized something important.” Before I can continue, Kaiser grips my thigh behind the knee and nearly cuts off the circulation to my lower leg. I remain silent until we reach the plane, where our escorts load the equipment cases for us, then vanish without a word.
“What is it?” asks Kaiser. “What did you think of?”
“The paintings. I know where they’re being done.”
“What?”
“Not exactly where, but how. I told you, I don’t know anything about art. But I do know about light.”
“Light?”
“Those women are being painted in natural light. It’s so obvious that I didn’t notice it in Hong Kong. Not even today, not at first. But a minute ago it registered.”
“Why? How can you tell?”
“Twenty-five years of experience. Light is very important to color. To the natural look of things. Photographic lights are color-balanced to mimic natural light. I’ll bet artists are even pickier about it. I don’t know how important that is to the case, but doesn’t it tell us something?”
“If you’re right, it could help a lot. Is light shining through a window natural light?”
“That depends on the glass.”
“If he’s painting the women outdoors, that would mean a really secluded place. There’s lots of woods and swamp, but getting there with a prisoner or body could be tough.”
“A courtyard,” I tell him. “New Orleans is full of walled gardens and courtyards. I think that’s what we’re looking for.”
Kaiser squeezes my upper arm. “You’d have done well at Quantico. Let’s get on board.”
I don’t move. “You know, you weren’t very helpful back there. What was all that crap about France?”
He shrugs. “You don’t learn anything about a man in a short time by having a polite conversation with him. You push buttons and see what pops out.”
“De Becque just wanted to stroll down memory lane.”
“No. It was more than that.”
“Tell me.”
“Let’s get on board first.”
He hustles me onto the Lear, then goes forward to confer with the pilots. After a moment, he walks back to my seat.
“I’ve got to call Baxter. It may take a while.”
“Tell me about de Becque first.”
“He was making some kind of decision about you.”
“What kind of decision?”
“I don’t know. He was trying to read you, to understand you.”
“He knows a lot about my father, I know that.”
“He knows a lot about more than that. He’s in this thing up to his neck. I can feel it.”
“Maybe the women really aren’t being killed. Maybe they’re being held somewhere in Asia.”
“Moved there on de Becque’s jet, you mean?”
“Maybe. Have you traced its movements over the past year?”
“We’re having some trouble with that. But Baxter will stay on it. He’s a bulldog with that kind of thing.”
Kaiser walks forward, takes the seat by the bulkhead, and in moments is holding a special scrambled phone to his ear. I can’t make out his exact words, but as the conversation progresses, I see a certain tension developing in his neck and arm. The jet begins to roll, and soon we’re hurtling north toward Cuba again. After about ten minutes, Kaiser hangs up and comes back to the seat facing me. There’s an excitement in his eyes that he can’t conceal.
“What’s happened? It’s something good, isn’t it?”
“We hit the jackpot. The D.C. lab traced those two brush hairs they took from the paintings. They’re unique, the best you can buy. They come from a rare type of Kolinsky sable, and the brushes are handmade in one small factory in Manchuria. There’s only one American importer, based in New York. He buys two lots a year, and they’re sold before he gets them. He has specific customers. Repeat customers. Most are in New York, but there are several sprinkled around the country.”
“Any in New Orleans?”
Kaiser smiles. “The biggest order outside New York went to New Orleans. The art department of Tulane University.”
“My God.”
“It’s the third order that’s gone there in the past year and a half. Baxter’s meeting with the president of the university right now. By the time we land, he’ll have a list of everyone who’s had access to those brushes in the past eighteen months.”
“Wasn’t one of the victims kidnapped on the Tulane campus?”
“Two. Another from Audubon park, near the zoo. Which is very close to Tulane.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s only three out of eleven. The grid analysis alone didn’t point to Tulane. But this definitely changes things.”
“Where was the next closest order of these brushes to New Orleans?”
“Taos, New Mexico. After that, San Francisco.”
My stomach feels hollow. “This might really be it.”
Kaiser nods. “Lenz told us the paintings would lead us to suspects. I was skeptical, but the son of a bitch was right.”
“You were more right than he was. You told
me yesterday you thought the killer or kidnapper was based in New Orleans. That the selections were being made there, and that the killer might be the painter. Lenz had the painter in New York.”
Kaiser sighs like a man whose premonitions are often borne out but bring little pleasure when they are. “You know something?”
“What?”
“De Becque lied to us in there.”
“How?”
“He told us he never saw the painting of Jane. This is a guy who can get on his private jet and fly to Asia anytime he wants. He’s pissed at Wingate for selling the later Sleeping Women out from under him, to Asian collectors. Even if he didn’t see those paintings when they were offered for sale, you think he didn’t fly to Hong Kong the minute they went on exhibition there?”
“It’s hard to imagine him not doing that.”
“And did you notice that he sent Li with us to see the paintings? He didn’t come himself?”
“Yes. You’d think he would have wanted to show off his collection.”
“And to watch your reaction. He’s got a thing about those paintings. And a thing about you. De Becque is a different breed of cat. I’ll bet he’s got a streak of kinki ness that’s off the chart. And he may have watched your reactions. I didn’t see any obvious surveillance cameras, but that doesn’t mean anything these days.”
“So, what are you saying?”
Kaiser looks out the porthole window, his face blue in the thickly filtered sunlight. “This is like digging up a huge statue buried in sand. You uncover a shoulder, then a knee. You think you know what’s down there, but you don’t. Not until it’s all out of the ground.” He cuts his eyes at me. “You know what feeling this gives me? The conspiracy angle, I mean. What it makes me think of?”
“What?”
“White slavery. Women kidnapped from their home-towns, sent far away, and forced into prostitution. It still happens in various ways, even in America. But it’s big business in Asia, especially Thailand. Crime syndicates steal young girls from the mountain villages and take them down to the cities. They lock them in small rooms, advertise them as virgins, and force them to service dozens of clients a day.”
I close my eyes and press down a wave of nausea. The mere mention of this horror forces me to accept that it is one of Jane’s possible fates. But even if it isn’t, the image created by Kaiser’s words makes me shiver with fear and outrage. I can walk through a corpse-littered battlefield and hold in my lunch, but the thought of a terrified young girl locked in some cubicle of hell until she contracts AIDS is too much for me.
“I’m sorry,” Kaiser says, lightly touching my knee. “My head is full of stuff like that, and sometimes I forget.”
“It’s all right. It’s just . . . of all the bad things, that’s the toughest for me.”
Though he tries to conceal it, the question in his mind shines through his eyes.
“Don’t ask. Okay?”
“Okay. Look, we’re a lot closer to finding him. Closer to stopping him. Focus on that.”
“Okay.”
“Can I get you some water or something?”
“Yes . . . please.”
He gets up and goes forward, and I snatch up a copy of the jet’s safety card from the seat back across the aisle. Anything to focus on, to keep my mind from following its own dark course. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? Lenz asked his patients. What’s the worst thing . . .
11
IN THE MAIN conference room of the New Orleans field office, a strategy meeting is deciding what direction the NOKIDS case will take from here. I am not at that meeting. I’ve been banished to SAC Bowles’s office. Once again, exclusion defines my status as an outsider. The meeting is being chaired by a deputy director of the FBI, and includes the U.S. Attorney for New Orleans, the New Orleans chief of police, the sheriff of Jefferson Parish, and various other big shots. It’s amazing how they come out of the woodwork when there’s a whiff of success in the air.
While I wait, my mind whirls with memories of Marcel de Becque, his paintings, his beautiful Vietnamese servant, and the photo of my father on his wall. But these memories are only static crackling around the electric knowledge that, if Daniel Baxter’s plan is not overruled, I will soon be facing suspects—men who may have killed my sister—in the hope of rattling them into betraying themselves. This prospect does more to settle my soul than anything I’ve tried in the past year.
Agent Wendy, my bodyguard, has walked in twice and tried to make small talk, but I couldn’t concentrate, and she took the hint. This time when Bowles’s door opens, John Kaiser walks in, his face all business. As the door closes behind him, I catch sight of Wendy looking in from the hall.
“You ready?” he asks.
“What’s happened so far?”
“Lots of nothing. The bureaucrats had to weigh in. Beaucoup jurisdictional asses to kiss on this one. The Deputy Director and the U.S. Attorney are gone. They wanted to meet you, but I told them you weren’t a big fan of the Justice Department.”
“There are certain elements I like better than others.”
Kaiser smiles. “The big news is, we have four suspects. And all of them were here in town the day Wingate died in New York. We’ll both hear the details in there. When we get done, I’d like to talk to you alone. We never got dinner. Maybe we can have a late meal, if you’re up for it.”
“Sure. Wendy, too?”
He blows air from his cheeks. “I’ll handle that. Let’s go.”
It’s a quick walk to the conference room, which is stunning in size and decor. I expected a ten-foot table and some doctor’s office chairs. What I find is a forty-foot-long room with a window running the length of it, giving a panoramic view of Lake Pontchartrain, recognizable in the dark by the receding lights of the causeway. The conference table is thirty feet long and surrounded by massive blue plush executive chairs with the FBI crest embroidered in the upholstery, where a tall man’s head would rest. At the near end of the table sit the usual suspects: Daniel Baxter, SAC Bowles, Dr. Lenz, and Bill Granger, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad. Piles of paper and files are spread out between Styrofoam coffee cups, half-empty water bottles, and a triangular speaker phone. Kaiser takes a seat beside Granger, opposite Bowles and Lenz, and I sit beside him.
Baxter looks tired but resolute at the head of the table, like a sea captain who has spent days riding out a hurricane but has now come within sight of his home port. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse.
“Ms. Glass, we’ve made phenomenal progress in the past eight hours. The sable brush hairs led us to the Tulane University art department. With the help of the president of the university, we’ve determined that this particular order was placed by one Roger Wheaton, the artist-in-residence at Newcomb College, which is part of Tulane.”
“The name sounds familiar.”
“Wheaton is one of the most highly regarded artists in America. He’s fifty-eight years old, and he came to Tulane just two years ago.”
“About the time the disappearances started,” says Bill Granger.
“Wheaton was raised in Vermont,” Baxter continues, “and except for four years spent in the Marine Corps, lived his life between Vermont and New York City. For the past ten years he’s been besieged by offers like the one that brought him to Tulane, but he’s something of a recluse, and he always rejected such offers before. But two years ago, he accepted the position at Tulane.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute. The main point is that Wheaton didn’t order the special sable brushes only for himself. He has three graduate students taking studio classes for full credit, and they’ve been studying under him since he arrived. Two are male, and followed him down from New York. The other is a woman, a Louisiana native.”
“One of your suspects is a woman?”
“She has access to the sable brushes, and the taser used in the snatch of the Dorignac’s victim makes a female perpetrator possible.”
As unlikely as this sounds to me, I go right to my next question. “Wheaton brought his own students with him?”
“Tulane hired Roger Wheaton for his reputation. It’s a feather in their cap to have him, and he was given absolute discretion over whom he would select for his program. Wheaton also teaches a lecture class—fifty-one students—and any of them could conceivably have got hold of these brushes. But we’re not going to use you in that phase of the investigation. Wheaton and the three graduate students will be our targets.”
“When are we talking to them?”
“Tomorrow. All of them, no matter how long it takes. I want to minimize any chance of interaction between them prior to questioning. Before we go into details, though, you should understand our position in the present climate. The Investigative Support Unit normally works in an advisory capacity for state or local police agencies. We provide expertise relating to serial offenders, but the police do the legwork. They conduct the interviews, make the arrests, and get the credit. However, in a long-running case like this one, where we have knowledge that crimes will likely be committed in the future, we become heavily involved in all aspects of the investigation.”
“I understand.”
“We have a unique situation here in New Orleans. The spread-out nature of the city has created a jurisdictional nightmare. There are seven separate police departments involved in these disappearances. And though not all of them have homicide detectives, there are over two dozen detectives working this case. We’re presently leading the joint task force, but all these police detectives would like to interview Wheaton and his students. However, the most potent weapon anyone could have in such an interview, Ms. Glass, is you. And to put it bluntly, you’re on our team.”
“For the moment.”
Baxter gives Kaiser a quick glance, but Kaiser remains expressionless. “We’ve also managed to gather many of the Sleeping Women at the National Gallery in Washington, something metropolitan police agencies could never have managed. Because of this, and because of jurisdictional rivalry, we’re going to be given the first shot at these suspects. All four have been under surveillance from the time they were identified, but they won’t be approached until after we go in tomorrow. The pressure on this investigation is enormous. The victims in this case come from affluent families. One of the Tulane students was—is—the daughter of a federal judge in New York. So, while we interview Roger Wheaton at the university, NOPD will be searching his residence from top to bottom. We’re already turning his life inside out, insofar as it exists on paper. His three students get the same treatment, though I’m not optimistic in two cases. Investigating art students is like investigating waiters; they almost don’t exist on paper. Right now none of the four has a paper alibi for the Dorignac’s snatch. All four were at an opening at the New Orleans Museum of Art until seven-thirty P.M. The chancellor verified that. Beyond that we know nothing.” Baxter’s dark eyes burn into mine. “Tomorrow, Ms. Glass, we are the point of a very bulky spear. We have to hit our target. If we miss, we lose the best chance we’ll ever have to surprise our UNSUB into a confession.”