This vague reference to his personal life makes me check his left hand. There’s no wedding band there.

“What was that?” I ask. “The inevitable?”

“Baxter and I were out at the Montana State Prison, interviewing a death-row inmate. He’d raped and murdered seven little boys. Tortured most of them before they died. It was no different from interviews I’d done a dozen times before, but this guy was really enjoying telling us what he’d done. A lot of them do, of course, but this time… I just couldn’t detach myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about this one little boy. Six years old, screaming for his mother while this guy shoved power tools up his rectum.” Kaiser swallows hard, like his mouth is dry. “And I lost control.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over the table. I tried to kill him.”

“How close did you come?”

“I broke his jaw, his nose, and assorted other facial bones. I damaged his larynx and put out one of his eyes. Baxter couldn’t pull me off. He finally clubbed the base of my skull with a coffee mug. Stunned me long enough for him to drag me out. The guy was hospitalized for twenty-six days.”

“Jesus. How did you keep your job?”

Kaiser slowly shakes his head, as if gauging how much to tell me. “Baxter covered for me. He told the warden the con jumped me and I defended myself.” Kaiser’s eyes search out the lovers again. “I guess you’re going to go all liberal on me now, tell me I violated his civil rights?”

“Well, you did. You know that. But I understand why. I’ve made myself part of the story before, instead of covering it. It sounds to me like you had a delayed reaction to something else.”

He looks back at me as though surprised. “That’s what it was, all right. I’d lost a little girl a week before. Working a rape-murder case in Minnesota. I was advising Minneapolis Homicide, and we were close to getting the UNSUB. Really close. But he strangled one more little girl before we did. If I’d been one day faster… well, you know.”

“It’s in the past. Isn’t that what you told me? You can’t change it, so forget it.”

“Glib bullshit.”

His honesty brings a smile to my face. “A while ago you said ‘clusterfuck.’ That’s a Vietnam term, isn’t it?”

He nods distractedly. “Yeah.”

“Were you there?”

“Yeah.”

“You look too young for it.”

“I was there at the end. Seventy-one and -two.”

Which makes him forty-six or forty-seven, if he went over when he was eighteen. “The end was seventy-three,” I remind him. “Seventy-five, really. There was still a lot of ground fighting in seventy-one.”

“That’s what I meant. The end of the fighting.”

“What branch of service?”

“Army.”

“Were you drafted?”

“I wish I could tell you I was. But I volunteered. Every civilian was trying like hell to stay out of the military, every soldier was trying to get out of Vietnam, and I was trying to get in. What did I know? I was a kid from rural Idaho. I went to Ranger School, the whole nine yards.”

“How did you feel about journalists over there? Photographers?”

“They had a job to do, like I did.”

“A different job.”

“True. I met a couple who were okay. But some of them just stayed in the hotels and sent Vietnamese out to get their combat shots. I didn’t care much for them.”

“That still happens in some places.”

“I’ve seen your name under some pretty rough pictures. Are you a lot like your father?”

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. All I know is what people have told me about him. Guys who worked with him in the field. I think we’re different as photographers.”

“How so?”

“Wars attract different kinds. There are the hotel guys you talked about, who don’t even count. There are the Hemingway wanna-bes, out there to test themselves. Then you have the ones who get off on the danger, who live for the rush. They’re the crazy ones, like Sean Flynn, riding hell-for-leather through firefights on a motorcycle, with a camera in his hand. And then there are the good ones. The ones who do it because they feel it’s the right thing to do. They know the danger, they’re scared shitless, but they do it anyway. They crawl right into the middle of it, where the mortar rounds are dropping and the machine guns are churning up the mud.”

“That’s the kind of courage I respected over there,” Kaiser says quietly. “I knew some soldiers like that.”

His face is lined with silent grief; I wonder if he knows it. “Something tells me you were a soldier like that.”

He doesn’t respond.

“That’s the kind of courage my father had,” I tell him. “He wasn’t that gifted a photographer, when you get down to it. His composition was never that great. But he would get so close to the elephant that the crazies wouldn’t even go there. And when you’re that close, composition doesn’t matter. Just the shot. And that made his pictures unique. He went into Laos and Cambodia. He spent twelve days underground at Khe Sanh, during the worst of the siege. I have a photo a marine shot of him peeing in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

Kaiser’s eyes flick toward me at last. “Who told you that? About the elephant?”

“My dad. When I was a kid, I asked him why he did such a dangerous job, and he tried to make out like it wasn’t dangerous at all. He said the soldiers called combat ‘seeing the elephant,’ that it was like a big circus.”

“It was, in a lot of ways.”

“Later, when I got a taste of it myself, I understood better.”

“If you’re not like him, what kind of photographer are you? Why do you do it?”

“Because I have to. I don’t even remember making a conscious choice.”

“Are you trying to change the world?”

I laugh again. “In the beginning I was. I’m not that naive now.”

“You’ve probably changed it more than most people ever will. You change people’s minds, make them see things in a new way. That’s the hardest thing to do in this world, if you ask me.”

“Will you marry me?”

He laughs and hits me on the shoulder. “Are you that starved for affirmation?”

“This past year has really sucked.”

“The past two have sucked for me. Welcome to the club.”

Kaiser’s cell phone rings again. He ignores it, but this time it does not relent, and he finally picks it up and looks at the LCD. “That’s Baxter at Quantico.” He presses Send.

“Kaiser.” His face grows tight as he listens. “Okay, I will.” He hangs up and gathers the leftovers into the bags.

“What happened?”

“Baxter wants me back at the field office.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but he said to bring you with me. They’re setting up a video link to Quantico, and he wants you there.”

My heart stutters. “Oh, God. Do you think they’ve found out something about Jane?”

“No point in guessing.” He tosses the bags one after another at a metal trash can ten feet away. They bang in without touching the rim. “Baxter’s voice was on edge, though. Something’s popped somewhere.”