“You okay?” he asks, touching my cheek.

“I guess. What about you? Can you wait until whenever we get back here?”

He nods, but his heart is not in his answer.

“Do we have thirty seconds to spare?”

He nods again.

“Stay here.”

On the counter by the sink is a sampler pack of soap, shampoo, conditioner, and hand lotion. I uncap the lotion and get back into the tub.

“I’m breaking one of my own rules,” I tell him, “but you can pay me back later.”

He groans as I close my moistened hands around him, but in the few seconds it takes him to lose consciousness, my head fills with images of the empathetic woman I met this afternoon, the semi-lesbian Sabine artist, Thalia Laveau, and my heart balloons with terror for her, a woman who fled her home and family to escape sexual abuse, who is now at the mercy of a man without mercy, a woman I am unlikely ever to see again.

The Emergency Operations Center, which has been kept from me until now, is the pounding heart of the NOKIDS investigation. It’s huge – more than three thousand square feet – with long rows of tables marching toward the front of the room, like a high school science lab built to heroic scale. Behind each row of tables sit rows of men and women with banks of phones before them, the unused ones showing bright red decals reading “NOT SECURE!”

John posts Wendy at the door, then leads me into the EOC. Wendy was quiet during the ride over, and even when John tried to draw her into our conversation, her answers were clipped and professional. I felt for her, but there’s more to worry about now than hurt feelings. As John and I reach the first table, at least twenty faces turn to mine, then look at each other with puzzlement. The unspoken question might as well be painted on the air: What the hell is she doing in here? But after a few seconds, they go back to their work.

At the front of the Operations Center, facing the tables, is an array of oversized computer monitors showing views of various buildings. The buildings are the residences of the four main suspects, plus the Woldenberg Art Center at Tulane. As I watch, a car drives past Frank Smith’s cottage on Esplanade. I’m looking at live television surveillance of various parts of New Orleans. Beyond the monitors hangs a massive wall-mounted screen with lines of type scrolling down it a few clicks at a time. There are time notations beside each line. It’s an unfolding timeline of the entire investigation-in-progress, reporting everything from the movements and phone calls of the suspects to the activities of the various law-enforcement agencies investigating Thalia Laveau’s disappearance. I feel like I’m standing in the headquarters of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984.

“So this is it,” I say softly. “Where are Baxter and Lenz?”

“Baxter’s right here,” says a voice behind me.

“As is Lenz,” says the psychiatrist.

“Joined at the hip,” I say, turning to face them.

The ISU chief looks as though he hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours. The dark circles under his eyes have become black bags, and his skin has a prison pallor. He gives John a reproving glance but voices no displeasure at my presence. Dr. Lenz appears to have changed suits and freshened up since this afternoon; he probably had an agent chauffeur him over to the Windsor Court for tea and scones and a midnight rubdown.

“How did she do it?” asks John.

“I’ll show you,” Baxter replies.

He walks up to a technician near the monitors and says something, then returns. One of the screens goes dark, and then we’re looking at a frontal view of the Victorian house in which Thalia rented rooms. It’s night, and sheets of rain cloud the view. As we watch, a woman wearing a floppy hat and carrying an umbrella runs out of the house and gets into a white Nissan Sentra parked on the puddled street.

“That’s Jo Ann Diggs,” says Baxter, “one of the women who rents a room on Laveau’s floor.”

The Sentra pulls quickly away from the curb, but a few yards down the street it skids to an abrupt stop, then backs up. Diggs gets out, runs back to the house, and disappears inside, looking for all the world like a woman who forgot her purse or the DVD she was supposed to return to Blockbuster. About twenty seconds later, she hurries back out of the house with a book in her hand, trots to her car, and drives away.

“That,” says Baxter, “was Thalia Laveau.”

“The roommate helped her,” says John.

“Laveau was waiting just inside the door. She took the hat and umbrella and ran out to Diggs’s car, while Diggs went back up to Laveau’s apartment and watched television to cover.”

“How did you figure it out?” I ask.

“Earlier today, Laveau called a woman friend from the campus and made an appointment to meet her at eleven tonight. The woman lives on Lake Avenue, on the Orleans-Jefferson Parish line. When Laveau didn’t show by midnight, the friend called the NOPD. NOPD called us.”

“The woman claimed Laveau was coming over for tea and sympathy,” says Lenz, “but obviously it was more than that. She evaded our surveillance to protect her lover’s identity.”

“Maybe it wasn’t sexuality she was hiding,” says John. “Laveau could be involved strictly as the painter. Today’s police interrogation could have scared her enough to make her bolt. By setting up a meeting with this other woman, then missing it, she leads us to conclude that she’s become a victim.”

Baxter starts to speak, but exasperation makes me jump in first. “You guys need a woman on your team around the clock.”

“Why is that?” asks Lenz.

“To keep your heads out of your asses. I’m going back to my hotel. You don’t have a prayer of finding Thalia with this kind of thinking.”

“John,” says Baxter. “Arthur wasn’t guessing. Laveau did evade the surveillance to protect this woman. She’s gay but very private. They had a long-standing relationship. Only her fear for Laveau made her tell us the truth. She can alibi Thalia not only for the Dorignac’s snatch, but also for at least five of the other abductions.”

I shake my head, fighting unexpected tears of helplessness.

“I’m sorry,” John says. “I can’t help thinking that way. It’s a habit, working out the logic.”

“It’s not you,” I tell him.

Neither Baxter nor Lenz speaks, and I’m not sure whether it’s because of my tears or because they sense our new intimacy.

“I think I have to go.”

I walk past them toward the wide door, but Baxter calls after me. “What would you do, Jordan? To find Thalia?”

I stop and turn, but I don’t go back to them. “I’d assume the obvious. One of the male suspects has been lusting after Thalia from the start. Our questioning rattled him. He knows it’s a matter of time before he’s nailed. Faced with that, he decides he has nothing to lose by indulging himself with Thalia.”

“All three were under round-the-clock surveillance,” says Lenz.

“Thalia didn’t have any trouble eluding it.”

Baxter sighs and turns to John. “Frank Smith was in a restaurant at the time Laveau left her house, and afterward. It couldn’t be him.”

“Wheaton and Gaines?”

“Gaines was at his shotgun on Freret. By the way, forensics says his van was clean. No blood, hair, fibers, nothing. Like it was steam-cleaned in the last day or two.”

John nods suspiciously, but his mind has already gone past this information. “What about Wheaton?”

“Wheaton was painting at the Woldenberg Center.”

“What about Jordan’s idea of natural light? Have we got aerial shots of all the courtyards or enclosed gardens in the city?”

“That’s just not practical,” says Baxter. “This city stretches over two hundred square miles, and that’s being conservative. The killing house – or painting house, I guess – could be anywhere in that area, and owned under a name we can’t possibly trace to one of the suspects.”