“Why do you think that is?”

“Because most guys have the one-up gene.”

“The what?”

“The one-up gene. They have to be in the superior position. They love the idea of being with me. But the reality is far from what they envision. Some don’t like that I make more money than they do. The ones who make more money than I do don’t like it when their friends act like my job is more important than theirs. Some can’t take the fact that I have a higher priority than them in my life. I don’t mean to complain about it. I just want you to understand.”

“I make sixty-eight thousand dollars a year,” says Kaiser. “I know you make more than that.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw your tax return.”

“You what?”

“We had to rule you out as a suspect. That was part of it.”

“Great.”

“But I don’t think your job is any more important than mine.” He picks up a fork and takes a bite of his omelet. “Do you?”

“No.”

“And I know I’m not the highest priority in your life.”

“True.”

“And I’m perfectly okay with that.”

I watch him as he pours hot sauce on his omelet, but I can’t read anything in his eyes. “What are we talking about?”

“I think you know.”

“Well, at least we’re on the same page.”

He smiles, and this time his white teeth show and his eyes sparkle. “I didn’t really come here to say that, but I’m glad I did. I feel awkward because of your sister.”

“That has nothing to do with my sister. What happened to Jane only confirmed something I learned a long time ago. If you wait to do things you want to do or ought to do, you may be dead before you get the chance.”

“I learned that too. In Vietnam. But it’s easy to lose sight of it in the rush of everyday life. To get so caught up in what you’re doing, people depending on you, that you develop tunnel vision. You know that feeling?”

“For a long time, the only part of the world I saw was through a lens.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m drifting. Until I found the paintings, anyway. But beneath that, I’m not really tethered to anything.”

“Can you handle another personal question?”

“Might as well.”

“Lenz told me you weren’t close to your sister. Yet you’re doing far more than any relative involved in this case. You’ve made it your mission to find her, or to find the truth. How do you explain that?”

How do I explain that? “I didn’t tell Lenz everything. Jane and I had problems growing up, yes. Some of those problems lasted into adulthood. But about three years ago, I had a bad health scare. I’d gone to the emergency room for pain, and the next thing I knew, I was in the oncology ward. They thought I had ovarian cancer. I was lucky it happened in San Francisco, and not while I was on assignment somewhere. But my friends were on assignment. I was alone and scared to death.”

I pause and swallow, fighting the lump rising in my throat. “Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to find Jane standing beside my bed, holding my hand. I thought I was dreaming. She said she’d awakened from a dead sleep the night before. She felt a painful shock go through her, like a labor contraction, and her mind filled with an image of my face. She called my house and got my machine. Then she called my agency and found out I was in the hospital. She left the kids with Marc and flew straight out to be with me. She slept in that hospital room for four days. She wheeled me to the tests, handled the doctors and nurses, everything. She never left my side.”

“You hadn’t been close before that?”

“No. And I’m not saying the sins of the past were magically redeemed. But she told me some things. She said that as she got older, she’d begun to understand the sacrifices I’d made to take care of her when we were kids. That she knew I’d only wanted the best for her, even if I didn’t always know what that was. I told her I respected the life she’d made for herself, even though I’d belittled it before. It meant a lot to her.” I pick up my fork and draw imaginary circles on the countertop. “It’s easy to feel independent when you’re young, that you don’t need anybody. But as time passes, family starts to matter. And with our mother in the shape she’s in, Jane and I only had each other.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense.”

“I don’t know what I believe right now. All I know is that I have to find her. Dead, alive, whatever. She’s my blood, and I love her. It’s that simple. I have to find my sister.”

Kaiser reaches out and gently squeezes my wrist. “You will, Jordan.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you ever wanted your own family? To settle down, have kids, the whole thing?”

“Every woman I ever knew wanted that in some form or fashion.”

“And you?”

“I hear the clock ticking. I visited my nephew and niece last night, and my feelings for them overwhelmed me.”

He glances down the counter. “Wendy said there might have been some trouble over there. At your brother-in-law’s.”

“You know, I can take you guys in my life up to a point. But there’s a line you don’t cross.”

“She only told us because it’s her job to protect you.”

“I won’t give up all my privacy to be protected.” I take a long sip of my coffee and try to keep my temper in check. “Just what do you know about me, anyway? My medical records? Everything down to my bra size?”

“I don’t know your bra size.” His face is absolutely serious.

“Do you want to?”

“I think I’m up to investigating the question.”

“Given adequate time, you mean.”

“Naturally.” He takes a sip of juice and wipes his mouth with his napkin. “How much time do you think that would be?”

“At least four hours. Uninterrupted.”

“We won’t get four hours tomorrow.”

“And we don’t have it tonight.”

He looks again at Wendy, who’s making a point of not looking at us. “No, we don’t. The task force is meeting right now in the Emergency Operations Center. I have to get back, and I don’t know when I can get out of it.”

“Speaking of that, you told de Becque you’re having trouble matching the abstract faces in the paintings to victims, right?”

Kaiser nods. “Eleven victims, nineteen paintings. Two major problems. There must be victims we don’t know about. Murders or disappearances that don’t match the crime signature exactly. Maybe they were hookers or runaways rather than society women, and nobody reported them missing. Maybe we’ve actually found their bodies, but since they match the more abstract paintings, we can’t tell. But a Jefferson Parish detective and I have gone over every homicide and missing person in New Orleans for the past three years, and we only have a handful of possibles, none very likely.”

“How many paintings have you matched to known victims?”

“Six definitive matches out of eleven. Two strong probables. But the faces are so vague in some of the paintings, or so distorted, that we just can’t get anywhere with them.”

“Who do you have working on them?”

“The University of Arizona. They’ve done great work for us in the past. Digital photo enhancement.”

“But not this time?”

“Not so far.”

“I think that’s because what you want in this case isn’t really photo enhancement. The distortions you want to correct aren’t the result of blur or a lack of resolution that masks reality. They’re distortions created in the mind of a human being, perhaps an insane one. They may have little or no correspondence with reality.”

Kaiser watches me with an unblinking gaze. “What do you suggest?”

“I know some photographers who work exclusively in the digital domain. I don’t want to mention names, but I recall one of them talking about a system that was being developed for the government – the CIA or NSA or somebody -for satellite photo interpretation. Its purpose was to try to bring visual coherence out of chaos. He couldn’t say much about it, and I wasn’t that interested, but I remember that much.”