Baxter nods slowly. “Nine-one-one in New York got the call about the Wingate fire at seven fifty-one p.m. eastern time. The Dorignac’s victim disappeared from Metairie between eight fifty-five p.m. and nine-fifteen central time. That’s a maximum difference of two hours and twenty-four minutes.”

“So there’s no way the same person could have done both. Not even with a Learjet at his disposal.”

“There’s one way,” says Baxter. “The incendiary device used to ignite the gallery had a timer on it. If it was set long enough in advance, the same person could have gotten back to New Orleans in time to take the woman from Dorignac’s.”

“But it wasn’t,” I think aloud. “He wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw him.”

“What?”

As quickly as I can, I describe the drama of the man from the alley, shooting the blind photo over the crowd, and sending the fireman and cop after him.

“Where’s your film?” asks Baxter, his eyes burning with excitement.

“Not here, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you positive Wingate’s murder was related to my sister’s case?”

“Virtually certain,” says Lenz.

“So you’re saying there’s more than one person behind the disappearances.”

“I’m not saying it. The evidence is. Two UNSUBs, not one.”

UNSUB is FBI-speak for Unknown Subject. “Two killers operating as a team?”

“It happens,” says Baxter. “But teams usually work side by side. Two ex-cons in a van, snatching and torturing women, that kind of thing. What I’m postulating would be something far more sophisticated.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that before? People cooperating over a long distance to facilitate serial murder or kidnapping?”

“Only in child pornography,” says Baxter, “and that’s a different thing.”

“It’s unprecedented in the literature,” says Dr. Lenz. “Which does nothing to rule out the possibility. Harvesting women’s skins was unknown until Ed Gein was caught doing it in the fifties. Then Tom Harris used it in a book and made it part of the national consciousness. In our business, you proceed from a very simple given: everything imaginable is possible, and may well be happening as we ponder it.”

“How would it work?” I ask. “How do you see it?”

“Division of labor,” says Lenz. “The killer’s in New Orleans, the painter in New York.”

“But Wingate was killed in New York.”

“Different motive. That was self-preservation.”

“I had the same thought up there. So the New Orleans guy kidnaps the women. How does the New York guy do the paintings? He works from photographs? Or he flies to New Orleans to paint corpses?”

“If that scenario is the answer,” says Baxter, “I pray to God he flies. We can take backbearings from airline computers and work out a list of potential suspects.”

“Could it really be that easy?”

“It just might be. It’s been a long eighteen months, Ms. Glass. Nobody knows that better than you. We’re due for a break.”

I nod hopefully, but inside I know better. “If Wingate was killed to silence him, how do you think it happened? The logic of it?”

Baxter leans back and steeples his fingers. “I think Wingate himself told the UNSUB in New York about the Hong Kong incident. Wingate’s phone records show a call from the curator of the Hong Kong exhibit to his gallery within an hour of your making the disturbance in Hong Kong.”

“Wingate knew about Hong Kong while I was talking to him?”

“Undoubtedly. Though I doubt he knew it was you who caused the disturbance.”

“If he did, he was a hell of an actor.”

“Did he try to get information from you?” asks Lenz.

“Not really.” A hot flash brings sweat to my face. “What if he was setting me up for the killer and got caught in his own trap?”

“Quite possible,” says Baxter. “If Wingate somehow knew it was you in Hong Kong, then he knew your sister was in one of the paintings. Maybe he knew everything about the crimes. He calls the UNSUB and tells him you’re coming to the gallery, but he doesn’t want any violence there. He also wants to know who you’ve talked to before you die. Wingate thinks you’re going to be murdered after you leave his place, but the UNSUB has a better idea. He sees his chance to take you both out.”

“That’s it,” I murmur. “Jesus. Wingate ensured his own death.”

“Almost certainly,” says Lenz. “And Wingate could have been the key to this whole case. Goddamn it.”

“I’m not sure he knew that much.”

“You believe what he told you?”

“To a point. I don’t think he knew the killer’s name. He said he wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman.”

“What?” both men ask in unison.

“He said he’d never seen the artist’s face. It was all done with blind drops or something.”

“He used that term?” asks Baxter. “Blind drops?”

“He said he got it from spy movies.” I quickly summarize Wingate’s explanation of how he received the first painting, and the subsequent drops of cash in train station lockers.

“I suppose it could have happened that way,” Baxter concedes. “But from what I’ve got on Wingate so far, he was no font of truth.”

“What do you have on him?”

“For one thing, his name wasn’t Christopher Wingate. It was Zjelko Krnich. He was born in Brooklyn in 1956, to Yugoslavian immigrants. Ethnic Serbs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Krnich’s father abandoned his wife and kids when Zjelko was seven. The boy scrapped in the streets, then moved on to small-time drug dealing, then pimping. He hopped a freighter to Europe when he was twenty and kicked around there for a few years, selling grass and coke to feed himself. He hung out in resort areas, and his drug business put him in contact with some trendy people. He fell in with a Parisian woman who dealt in paintings, some genuine, others not. He picked up the trade from her. She gave him his Anglo name. After a couple of years, they fell out over money she claimed he stole. Krnich suddenly reappeared in New York, legally changed his name to Wingate, and started working at a small gallery in Manhattan. Twenty years later, he’s one of the hottest dealers in the world.”

“He was hot, all right. About three hundred and fifty degrees when I last saw him.”

“Residential fires burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Glass.” Baxter is not up for humor tonight, not even the gallows variety. His eyes are flint hard; his patience has come to an end. “I want the film you shot tonight.”

“Once I give you that, you’re going to cut me out.”

“That’s not true,” says Lenz. “You’re a relative of a victim.”

“Which counts for zero, in my experience. You weren’t around last year, Doctor. Back then it was like pulling teeth to get substantive information out of this guy.”

“I can assure you that won’t be the case this time,” Lenz says smoothly.

Baxter starts to speak, but the psychiatrist cuts him off with a wave of his hand. Arthur Lenz obviously pulls a lot of weight in the ISU.

“Ms. Glass, I have a proposal for you. One I think will interest you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Fate has handed us a unique opportunity. Your appearance in Hong Kong caused a disturbance not because of the connection between the paintings and the kidnappings; the people in the gallery knew nothing about that. They were upset because you looked exactly like a woman in one of the paintings.”

“So?”

“Imagine the reaction you might cause in the killer if you came face-to-face with him.”

“I may have done that tonight, right?”

Lenz shakes his head. “I’m far from convinced that the man who attacked you tonight is the man who painted this remarkable series.”

“Go on.”

“Forensic art analysis has come a very long way in the past twenty years. Not only is there X-ray analysis, spectrography, infrared, and all the rest. There may be fingerprints preserved in the oil paint itself. We may find hairs or skin flakes. Now that we know about the paintings, I believe they will lead us in short order to a suspect, or perhaps a group of them. Style analysis alone could produce a list of likely candidates. And once we have those suspects, Ms. Glass, you are the weapon I would most like to use against them.”