“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“What do you base that on?”

“My gut.”

I lay my hand on his flat stomach. “You don’t have much of one.”

“I’m glad you can still laugh.”

“It’s the same old choice. Laugh or cry.” I rub my hand slowly over his abdomen. “Why don’t you sleep for a while?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. Not with Thalia still out there. I can never sleep when things are breaking.”

“You want me to make coffee or something?”

“Coffee would be good.”

“What about food? You have anything in the fridge?”

“Can you cook?”

I laugh. “Mostly foreign dishes designed for campfires. But I don’t think there’s a Mississippi girl on the planet who can’t do the basics.”

“There are some chicken breasts in the freezer.”

“Rice in the cabinets? Onions?”

“Probably.”

“Jambalaya, then.” I kiss him on the chin and climb out of the bed.

“Would you mind bringing those Argus photos in here?”

“I think they can wait, but I’ll bring them.”

I retrieve the thick manila envelope from the coffee table and toss it onto the bed. “How many of those have you looked at already?”

“I don’t know. Until they adjusted the sensitivity of the program, I was looking at twenty different versions of the same face before it became recognizable as another one.”

“Pace yourself. Jambalaya and biscuits, coming up.”

I walk back to the kitchen and orient myself, but I’ve gotten no further than running water over the chicken breasts when John’s voice echoes up the hallway. Something in the sound makes me freeze with my hand on the sink tap. I run for the bedroom, in my mind seeing him turning blue from a blood clot broken free by our strenuous lovemaking.

“I know this woman,” he says, shaking a piece of paper at me as I come through the door.

“From where?” I ask, taking the picture from him. It’s a facial shot of a young blond woman, maybe eighteen. She’s like a template of an adult; her face has yet to develop the definition of personality. “Is she one of the missing persons you’ve been studying?”

“No. I saw her years ago. In Quantico.”

“You mean you knew her? Personally?”

He shakes his head impatiently. “No. Every year we have city and state cops coming through Quantico. Our National Academy program. Most of them have a case that’s dogged them for years, one they couldn’t solve or get out of their minds. Sometimes it’s a single murder. Usually it’s two or three they think might be connected. A police detective showed me this woman at Quantico.”

“A New Orleans detective?”

“That’s the thing. I think he was from New York. This is a really old case.”

My head is buzzing with a strange excitement. “How old?”

“Ten years? Remember at the Camellia Grill, when I told you I was working on something? I said if it panned out, I’d tell you? Well, maybe it has.”

“How do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“The youngest of our four suspects is Frank Smith, who’s thirty-five. Serial offenders don’t just wake up one day and start killing people in middle age. Baxter’s unit was checking all four suspects’ past residences for similar unsolved crimes. Vermont, where Wheaton’s from. Terrebonne Parish, where Laveau grew up. Those were easy. That left New York, for Smith and Gaines. Not to mention the possible accomplice. In fact, all four suspects have ties to New York. But when you’re talking about missing persons – which is what this case is, because of the lack of corpses – you’re talking about thousands of victims in New York, even if you only go back a few years. The VICAP computer is supposed to make those kinds of connections, but police compliance isn’t always great, and it’s worse the farther back you go. But I thought, What if there were unsolved homicides in New York that had only one or two similarities to this case?”

“Like…?”

“Women taken from grocery stores, jogging paths, et cetera, snatched off the street without a trace, no witnesses, nothing. A professional feel to them, yet no obvious similarities between the victims.”

“Did you check it out?”

“I called some New York cops I knew from the Academy program and asked them to poke around their old files. It was asking a lot, but I had to do it.”

“Did you talk to the cop who showed you this woman?”

“No, that guy’s retired now. And nobody’s gotten back to me yet. But this woman…”

“You still remember her?”

“I told you before, I’ve got a knack for faces. This girl was pretty and young, and she stuck in my mind. That detective’s, too. She was his informant, now that I think about it. Will you bring me the cordless phone?”

I get him the phone, and he rings the field office, asking for Baxter.

“It’s John,” he says. “I think we caught a break… A big one. We need New York to liaise with NYPD in a big hurry…”

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the Argus-generated portrait again. It’s a strangely nonhuman image, yet lifelike enough to pull a ten-year-old memory from John’s brain. I say a silent thank-you to the photographer who confided the existence of Argus to me.

“Jordan?” says John, hanging up the phone. “Do you know what this means?”

“It means my sister wasn’t victim number five. Whoever is behind this started taking women more than a decade ago. In New York.”

He squeezes my arm. “We’re close now. Really close.”

23

I’m lying in John’s tub, soaking in hot water up to my neck, a pleasure I managed by jamming plastic wrap into the slits in the side of the circular metal thing that operates the drain. The glass bricks above me have slowly turned from black to blue with the coming dawn, and while I don’t feel rested, I do feel less frazzled than I did yesterday.

Last night passed in a flurry of confusion, elation mingled with depression, like sugar highs punctuated by exhaustion. Prompted by John’s recognition of the Argus photo, Daniel Baxter rousted the midnight homicide shifts at the NYPD. Using Argus-enhanced photos of the abstract Sleeping Women paintings, New York detectives managed to identify six of the eight unidentified victims in the NOKIDS case.

Once the women were identified, the story came together by itself. Between 1979 and 1984, a serial kidnap-murderer was operating in New York City area without anyone connecting more than three of his crimes. His victims were prostitutes and hitchhikers – neither category high on the NYPD’s list of priorities. The significance of this discovery was simple and devastating: the painter of the Sleeping Women had not begun his work two years ago in New Orleans, but more than twenty years ago in New York.

The ramifications were more complex. First, our youngest suspect, Frank Smith, had been only fifteen years old at the time. This alone did not exonerate him, but it shifted the focus of the investigation away from him. Second, not one Sleeping Woman had been sold at the time of the New York murders. Third, why would a serial killer murder eight women and then suddenly stop? In John’s experience, only prison or death stopped serial murderers from pursuing their work. But most puzzling was why, having stopped, the murderer would resume his work fifteen years later. Had he been locked up for a decade and a half, only to emerge as hungry for victims as before?

John drank nonstop cups of coffee to fight the sedative effects of his painkillers, and sat on the sofa working out theory after theory in an attempt to fit the new parameters of the case. Too exhausted to be any use to him, I went into the bathroom, took three Xanax, and got into bed.

Sleep came quickly, but that was no blessing. With sleep came dreams. All the fantastic input of the past seven days had been brewing in my subconscious, and it finally burst free with a vengeance. Most of the images I can’t remember, but one remains clear: I’m standing at the center of Roger Wheaton’s room-sized masterpiece, a circular canvas that’s no canvas at all, but a universe of forest and earth and stream and sky. Peering out at me from the twisted tree roots are shadowy grinning faces: Leon Gaines, his eyes blazing with lust; the murderous UNSUB on the levee; and capering through the trees like a beautiful demon, Frank Smith, naked, chasing Thalia Laveau, who struggles to keep a white robe from falling as she runs. The scene whirls around me like a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare while I stand transfixed, the floor under my feet flowing like a stream, and reflected in the stream, the face of my father.