“Do you believe the death of Christopher Wingate is part of my sister’s case?”

“Yes.”

“You believe there’s more than one person behind all this.”

Kaiser cocks his head to the side. “Yes and no.”

“What do you mean? You don’t share Lenz’s theory? The kidnapper in New Orleans and the painter in New York?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Instinct, mostly. It’s an elegant theory, and it explains a lot. The reason we can’t find any common factors among the victims, for example. Lenz would say that since the New Orleans UNSUB is being paid to kidnap the women, he simply chooses them at random. But that’s not how this kind of thing is done. Predators will take targets of opportunity, yes, but there’s always an underlying pattern beneath the victims’ selection. Even if it’s just geographic.”

“You think something links all the victims?”

“Something always does. Serial murder is sexual murder; that’s axiomatic. It may appear otherwise, but always at bottom lies serious sexual maladjustment. And the criterion for victim selection usually arises from this. The victims are from New Orleans. My gut tells me the selections are being made here. And not randomly, either. We just don’t understand them yet.”

“Have you formed some picture of this guy, then? Of what drives him?”

“I’ve tried, but there’s not much to go on. The normal rules are out the window. Organized versus disorganized personality? Comparing this guy to Ted Bundy – who was classified as organized – is like comparing Stephen Hawking to Mister Rogers. No corpses. No witnesses. No evidence. The victims might as well have been kidnapped by aliens. And that frightens me more than anything.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s hard to hide a body well. Especially in an urban environment. Corpses stink. Dogs and cats root them out. Homeless people discover them. Passersby report suspicious actions more often than you’d think. And nosy neighbors see everything.”

“There’s a lot of swamp around New Orleans,” I point out. “I have nightmares about that. Jane wedged under a cypress stump somewhere.”

Kaiser shakes his head. “We’ve been dragging the swamps for months with no results. Lake Pontchartrain, too. And those swamps aren’t empty. There are hunters, fishermen, oil people. Game wardens, families living in shacks on the water. Think about it. If the UNSUB dumps a woman off a causeway, she’s going to float within sight of somebody. Eleven bodies in a row? Forget it. And if he goes deep into the swamp – carrying a dead body in a boat – he almost has to do it at night. Do you see an artist talented enough to paint these pictures striking out into a swamp full of snakes and alligators in the dead of night? I don’t. If they’re dead, I think he’s burying them. And the safest place to do that is beneath a house. A house he’s living in. A basement or a crawl space.”

“New Orleans houses don’t have basements. The water table’s too high. That’s why they bury people above ground.”

“That was always more out of custom than necessity,” he says. “And the water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn’t even stink.”

A beeping sound comes from Kaiser’s pocket. He takes out a cell phone and looks at its LED screen. “That’s Lenz, trying to find me. We’ll let him keep looking.”

“Excuse me… you just said if they’re dead.”

Kaiser carefully formulates his reply. “That’s right.”

“Doctor Lenz is positive they’re dead.”

“The doctor and I disagree about a lot of things.”

“You’re the first law-enforcement officer who’s expressed any real doubt. Baxter says he’ll hold out hope until he sees an actual body, but he’s just being courteous.”

“Baxter’s a nice guy.” Kaiser’s eyes bore into mine. “But he thinks they’re dead.”

“And you don’t?”

“I’ve never seen a case like this. Eleven women vanish into thin air? Absolutely no word from the UNSUB? Normally, a guy who snatched that many women and got away with it would be taunting us some way.”

“But what makes you think they might be alive? Where could they possibly be?”

“It’s a big world, Ms. Glass. There’s something else, though. The autopsy on the Dorignac’s victim is mostly complete. Externally, the body was clean, but we took some skin from beneath her fingernails. There’s nothing to compare that to right now, but later it could be very important. Toxicology will take a little longer.”

“All that’s great. But why does that make you think the victims could be alive?”

“It doesn’t. But we also found a strange burn on her neck. The kind of contact burn consistent with an electrical stun device, like a taser.”

My pulse quickens. “What does that tell you?”

“That while the snatches were previously thought to have been blitz attacks, the force used was not necessarily deadly force. That means the UNSUB may not have wanted to risk killing his victims, even by mistake.”

“Oh, God. Please let that be it.”

“I don’t want to create false hope, but it’s a good sign in my book. By the way, we’re telling the media that we don’t think the Dorignac’s victim is part of this case. We’re playing it as a random rape-murder. The dumping of the body supports that story.”

“I hope that fairy tale doesn’t come back to haunt you.”

Kaiser takes another bite of spicy beef and gives me a measuring look. “A couple of other things make this UNSUB very interesting to me.”

“Like what?”

“One, he’s the only serial offender I know of to earn enormous profit from his crimes. Most serials don’t profit in any way from what they do. Money isn’t part of the equation for them. But for this guy, it is.”

“Okay.”

“Two, he’s not after publicity. Not the usual kind, anyway. If the victims are dead, he’s not leaving the bodies where they’ll be found and cause big news. And if they’re not dead, he’s not sending severed fingers to relatives or the TV stations. So for him, the women are simply part of the process of creating the paintings. That’s what the murders are about. The paintings.”

“But aren’t the paintings a kind of publicity in themselves?”

“Yes, but a very specialized kind. Publicity and profit are linked here. If the artist were painting these images solely to fulfill his private needs, he wouldn’t need to sell them. Think of the risk he’s taking by putting them on the market. That’s the only way we’ve learned anything about him. If he hadn’t sold any paintings, we’d be as lost today as we were after the first kidnapping.”

“How are profit and publicity linked?”

“He wants the art world to see what he’s doing. Maybe critics, maybe other painters, I don’t know. The money might not be important in and of itself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hasn’t spent a dime of it. He probably knows that in our society, the value of art is determined by what people pay for it. Therefore, if the world is to pay attention to his work, it must sell for a great deal of money. That’s why he took the risk of dealing with Christopher Wingate. Or dealing with whoever killed Wingate for him. I’m only speculating, of course.”

“It makes more sense than what I’ve heard so far. What does he want people to get from his work? Why paint the women dead? And why start with almost abstract faces, then paint women who look asleep, and only later get to explicit views of death?”

“I’d just as soon not speculate about that yet.” Kaiser looks at his watch. “I’d like to ask you about something personal, if you don’t mind.”

“What?”

“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?”