“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?
