with a strange intensity. “Think about it. It’s been four and a half weeks since the last victim. The New Orleans UNSUB was on the prowl tonight—maybe all afternoon. He may have known what happened in Hong Kong, but he didn’t know what his partner did: that Wingate was about to be silenced, along with you. He snatches the woman from Dorignac’s and takes her back to his house. When he arrives, he finds an urgent message on his machine from his partner. Or maybe he gets a call. The victim was found, what”—Lenz checks his watch—“seven hours after he took her? Plenty of time. His New York partner tells him Wingate is no longer a problem, and also that Jordan Glass got away. The investigation is about to get very hot. So, instead of painting this woman, he kills her and dumps her in a canal. Sometime in the last seven hours.” Lenz slaps his knee with excitement. “Seven hours, by God. I won’t be surprised if there’s staging. Not at all.”
“What’s staging?” I ask, searching my memory for remnants of the crime classification manuals I read in the month after Jane vanished.
Lenz’s eyes are glowing. Like all of Baxter’s team, he’s a hunter at heart. “Staging is an attempt to mislead investigators by altering the crime scene or the corpus. The UNSUB may mutilate the body in an attempt to create the impression of a violent rape, a satanic murder, any number of things. No, we can’t discount this victim just because we found her body.”
I want to believe him, but for some reason I don’t. “But we know he’s smart enough to dump the body without it being found.”
“That’s the point!” Lenz snaps. “He’s letting us find her, in order to confuse the trail.”
“But isn’t that risky, if he’s actually had her in his possession? I mean, with all the forensics at your disposal?”
The psychiatrist smiles for the first time in a long while. “Yes, it is. We can establish a baseline of hair and fiber evidence. Perhaps there’s even semen for DNA. And if we’re very damned lucky, some biological artifact from one of the paintings will match something we find on or in the body. That’s a long shot if the painter and kidnapper are two different men, but it’s possible. It would be one hell of a start.”
“God forgive me, I hope it was him that took her.”
Lenz squeezes his left hand into a fist. “If it was, this is the turning point of the case.”
“Because you have a body?”
“No. Because he’s no longer calling the tune. He’s reacting to us.”
“To me,” I remind Lenz. “Finding the paintings.” Images of the canvases I saw in Hong Kong float through my mind with eerie clarity. “What makes this guy tick, Doctor? He’s trying to re-create some fantasy, right? What is it?”
An odd serenity eases the lines of Lenz’s face. “If I knew that, he’d be in custody right now.” The psychiatrist closes his eyes and lays his hands on the armrest of his seat. “Please don’t speak. I need to think.”
Shit. I reach into my fanny pack, open my trusty pill bottle, and swallow three Xanax. By the time I hit the airport hotel, I’ll be like a zombie, and glad for it. The last thing in the world I want to do right now is think.
This morning I slept in, and I’m glad. Except for my right flank, which feels like a mule kicked it, my muscles have that deliciously liquid feeling that only sex or too much sleep can give. It’s been a while since I had the former, so I owe my thanks to a quiet hotel room in America, which can be quite a luxury for me. I ate breakfast in the lobby, then called Budget and rented a Mustang convertible. After traveling in the East for months, riding in underpowered taxis, cyclos, and even rickshaws, an American muscle car feels exactly right. It’s late October in New Orleans, but I have the convertible top down. The leaves are green and still on the trees, and the morning sun tells me the temperature could hit eighty by lunchtime. That’s the way this city is: heat and rain, rain and heat. When winter finally comes, the humidity makes it cold, but winter doesn’t last long.
I’m late for my meeting with the FBI, because nobody bothered to tell me they moved the field office from downtown—where they were forever—to a brand-new building on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, between Lakefront Airport and the University of New Orleans. It’s a massive four-story brick structure designed to look like a college campus building, but the closer I get, the more it looks like a fortress in disguise. Set far back from the main road, the building is surrounded by a heavy iron fence topped with sharp fleur-de-lis and fronted by a guardhouse with antiterrorist barriers embedded in the concrete road. The armed gate guard checks my driver’s license, radios upstairs, then raises the barrier and waves me into the parking lot.
As I lock the Mustang and walk toward the entrance, I sense that I’m being watched on screens inside. I won’t win any fashion awards today: jeans, a silk blouse, espadrilles, and my fanny pack. No purses for Jordan Glass, unless I’m doing a formal party. I know how to dress up, but I don’t do it for the FBI. The entrance is also built on the heroic scale, with flags and black marble inscribed with the FBI motto: “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Other law enforcement agencies have come up with more derogatory words for the acronym, but I’ll reserve my opinion today.
A metal detector at the door leads me into a small vestibule not unlike a doctor’s office, where a female receptionist waits behind glass. When I give her my name, she pushes a sheet through a slot for me to sign, and assures me someone will be down for me in a minute. Thirty seconds later, the door opens and a tall man with deep-set eyes and a day’s growth of beard steps through the door by her window.
“Jordan Glass?”
“Yes. Sorry I’m late. I went to the federal building downtown.”
“That’s our fault, then. I’m John Kaiser.”
This guy does not look like the FBI agents I’ve known. He’s six feet two, lanky, and looks as comfortable in his white button-down shirt and sport jacket as a cowboy in a tuxedo. His dark brown hair is past the unwritten regulation length, and his aura is about as unofficial as anything I can imagine. He looks like a law student who’s been studying for three days without sleep. A forty-five-year-old law student.
As if reading my mind, he pulls out his wallet and flips it open to reveal his FBI credentials. His bona fides are there in black and white: “Special Agent John Kaiser.” His photo looks much neater than the man standing before me, but it’s him all right. He cleans up well.
“You don’t look like an FBI agent.”
A lopsided grin. “My SAC is fond of telling me that.”
“Why did they move the field office?”
“After the bombing in Oklahoma City, the government mandated a hundred-foot setback from the road. This office has twice as much space as downtown, and a hell of a lot better view. They moved last September, a month before I got here.”
“Are we going upstairs?”
He lowers his voice. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather talk to you alone first. Do you like Chinese food? I haven’t eaten since last night, so I ordered some. I ordered for two.”
“I like Chinese. But why don’t you want to eat it in your office?”
