Dead Sleep (50 page)

Moving only my eyes, I follow the glass down to within four feet of the ground, where it meets a brick wall. I'm in a conservatory of some type. A conservatory with a bathtub in it. Beyond the glass wall stand trees and tropical plants, beyond these a high brick wall. I'm almost convinced I'm dreaming when I hear the pad of feet.

“Welcome back,” says a male voice. “Add some hot water if you're cold.”

The voice sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it. It has the refinement of Frank Smith's voice, but it's pitched lower. With superhuman effort I turn my head to the left and find a scene so bizarre I am rendered speechless.

Roger Wheaton stands partly behind an artist's easel, a paintbrush in his white-gloved hand, working feverishly on a large canvas that I cannot see. He is naked but for a white cloth tied around his waist and between his legs, like those that Renaissance artists used to cover the genitals of Jesus in crucifixion paintings. Wheaton's body is surprisingly well muscled, but his torso is lined with bruises and hemorrhages, the kind I saw in Africa on pneumonia patients coughing themselves to death.

My first attempt to speak is only a rasp. But then saliva comes, and I get the words out. “Where am I?”

In one sense this is a rhetorical question. I'm in the place eleven other women occupied before me—twelve, including Thalia. I'm in the killing house. I am one of the Sleeping Women.

“You can't move, can you?”

When I don't answer, Wheaton walks over and turns the tap marked “H.” At first I shiver more, but then blessed heat begins to roll against my hip and stomach. He walks back to the painting, leaving me to push myself away from the steaming rush of water.

“Where am I?” I repeat.

“Where do you think you are?” Wheaton's gaze moves from the canvas to me, then back again.

“The killing house,” I reply, using John Kaiser's term.

He seems not to hear.

“Is Thalia dead?”

“Not clinically.”

I fight to keep my fear in check. “What does that mean? Is she sedated?”

“Permanently.”

“What?”

“Look at her.”

The surreal sense of horror that suffused me when I saw Wheaton is ratcheting down to pure animal fear, but I force myself to look at Thalia. The bathwater comes halfway up her breasts, which because they float seem more alive than their owner. I see no obvious wounds on her body. One arm hangs limp in the water, the hand wrinkled like the skin of a prune. Her other arm hangs outside the tub. Peering over the rim, I discover that my fear has barely begun to ascend the scale of terror. A white venous catheter enters her arm at the wrist, held in place by medical tape. From the catheter, a clear IV tube runs in a serpentine loop around the base of an aluminum stand and up to a bag hanging from an IV tree. The bag is empty, drained flat.

“What was in the bag?” I ask, trying to control my voice.

Wheaton holds the brush poised motionless in the air, then strikes the canvas quickly and repeatedly.

“Insulin.”

I shut my eyes, recalling Frank Smith's description of Wheaton's suicide plan:
Insulin is painless, but sometimes it doesn't bring death, just brain damage and coma. . . .

“She's in no pain,” he says, as though this mitigates the situation.

I try in vain to lift my right hand to turn off the faucet. “What's wrong with my arms?”

Wheaton ignores me, flicking the brush over the canvas with remarkable speed. A belated impulse makes me turn over my own hand. The left one. It seems to take an eternity, but finally, on the outside of my wrist, I see a plastic tube running into one of my own veins. I try to yank it out but haven't enough muscular control.

Wheaton admonishes me with an upraised finger. “Your bag is Valium. And a muscle relaxant. But that can easily change. So please, don't bother the equipment.”

Valium? My second-favorite drug . . .

“I expected you to be unconscious for at least another hour.”

Wheaton suddenly straightens, then turns as though looking at himself in a mirror. Which is exactly what he is doing. To my right, propped between the bathtub and the wall, is a huge mirror like the ones used in ballet studios. Wheaton is not only painting Thalia and me—he's painting
himself.

“What are you painting?”

“My masterpiece. I call it
Apotheosis.
”

“I thought the circular painting back at the Newcomb gallery was your masterpiece.”

He laughs softly, as though at a private joke. “That was
his
masterpiece.”

My mind flashes back to the primitive, childlike images finger-painted on the floor beneath the drop cloth at the gallery. Then Wheaton carrying me, stepping over the stunned FBI man's body.
I'm not the man who painted that. . . .

“This is my last,” he says.

“Last what?”

He gives me a sly look I could not have imagined on the Roger Wheaton I met a few days ago. “
You
know,” he says in a singsong voice.

“The last Sleeping Woman?”

“Yes. But this one's different.”

“Because you're in it?”

“Among other reasons.”

“You're not wearing your bifocals,” I think aloud.

“Those weren't mine.”

“Whose were they?”

He gives me a look I translate as
Duh.
Then he says, “They belonged to Roger. The weakling. The
fag.
”

My stomach turns a slow somersault. Jesus Christ. Two FBI profilers and a psychiatrist sit brainstorming around a table, and the photographer turns out to be right.

MPD, Dr. Lenz called it. Multiple-personality disorder. Fragments of the psychiatrist's patronizing lecture come back to me.
That's not how MPD works . . . that's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Welcome to my nightmare, Dr. Lenz. What else did Lenz say?
Always caused by extreme sexual or physical abuse . . .

“If you're not Roger Wheaton,” I say carefully, “who are you?”

“I have no name.”

“You must go by something.”

An odd smile. “When I was a boy, I read
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
I loved Captain Nemo. Nemo means ‘no one.' Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Sailing beneath the oceans of the world, trying to cure man of his self-destructive obsessions. I've wandered some of those same oceans. But I learned the truth much earlier than Nemo did. Man can't be cured. He doesn't
want
to be cured. Only a child can express the purity in human nature, and already the world is bearing down on him with all its weight, its corruption and filth, its violence.” Wheaton bites his lip, the gesture strangely childlike.

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Don't you? Remember when you were a little girl? Remember when you believed in fairy tales? And the shock you felt as each one crumbled in the face of reality? No Cinderella. No Santa Claus. Your father wasn't perfect. He wasn't even
good.
He wanted things for himself alone. He wanted your mother behind a locked door. He wanted . . . other things. And it hurt you.”

“There was no perfect prince waiting to carry you off to his castle, was there?” Wheaton's smoldering eyes never leave the canvas now. “All the little pretenders wanted the same thing, didn't they? They didn't care about
you.
Not the soft little you that lived in your secret heart. They wanted to spend themselves inside you, anything for that, to use you and then ignore you, throw you away like trash.”

Wheaton's getting wound up, and I don't want him any more unstable than he already is. Time to change the subject. “I'm really hot now.”

He frowns in exasperation, but after a moment, he walks over and turns off the faucet.

“How did I get here?” I ask as he walks back to the canvas. In the deep valley between his back muscles, the bones of his spine show through his skin like a ladder.

“You don't remember?” he asks, lifting his brush again. “You were conscious. Think back, while I finish your eye. And try not to move.”

I do remember some things. Flashes of light, waves of vertigo. A gray sky, bubbles of glass, a bridge of white tubes, and a long fall. “The roof. You took me out on the roof.”

Wheaton chuckles.

“But there were FBI agents up there.”

“Not after Leon was shot. They all wanted to see the trophy. There's a catwalk of pipes running from the art center to the physical plant. It only runs over a narrow alley, but crawling over it with a woman on your back sure gets the heart pumping.”

“But how did you manage that? You're ill.”

Wheaton's lips curl in disdain. “That diagnosis is currently under review. Roger was weak. I am strong.”

What is he telling me? He's not sick anymore? What did Lenz say about MPD?
There's a documented case of one personality needing heart medication to survive, and the other not. . . .

“Why am I not like Thalia?”

Wheaton keeps painting. “Because I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“You're a twin. An identical twin.”

“Yes.”

“I painted your sister.”

Oh, God.
“I saw that painting,” I say aloud.

“I've done some reading on twins. It's an interest of mine. And I find a consistent theme in their stories of childhood. Many twins share a closeness that borders on telepathy. They tell remarkable tales: precognitions of disaster, intimations of death, silent conversations when in the same room. Did you and your sister experience any of that as children?”

“Yes,” I reply, since the answer he wants is so clear. “Some.”

“You want to know if your sister is alive or dead, don't you?”

I close my eyes against tears, but they come anyway.

“Don't you already know?”

Through the tears I see Wheaton's eyes locked upon mine. This is a test. He wants to know if I know Jane's fate. He's testing my assertion of paranormal ability.

“Which is it?” he asks. “Alive or dead?”

Trying to read him, I'm suddenly thrown back to the street in Sarajevo, to the instant the world blacked out and I felt a part of me die. Despite all my subsequent hopes, despite the phone call from Thailand, I knew then that Jane was dead.

“Dead,” I whisper.

Wheaton purses his lips and goes back to his painting.

“Am I right?”

He cocks his head as if to say,
Maybe yes, maybe no.

“Why are you so interested in twins?”

“Isn't it obvious? Two personalities from the same genetic code? Twins are exactly like me in that way.”

I don't know how to respond. He has clearly traveled far down this road, and I can only look for clues to what he needs to hear.

“When you first came into the gallery,” he says. “With Kaiser. I knew it was a sign. Sent by whom, I have no idea. But a sign nevertheless.”

“A sign of what?”

“That one half can survive without the other.”

His words hit me like a stake through the heart. Even though I knew it to be true, this confirmation dissolves some essential fraction of my spirit. “She's dead?” I whisper.

“Yes,” Wheaton says. “But you shouldn't be upset. She's far better off the way she is now.”

“You've seen my paintings. The Sleeping Women. Surely you understand?”

“Understand what?”

“The
point.
The purpose of the paintings.”

“But I don't. I never have.”

Wheaton lowers his brush and stares at me with incredulity. “The
release.
I've been painting the release.”

“The release?” I echo. “From what?”

“From the plight.” His face is like that of a monk trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a savage.

“The plight?”

“Femininity. The plight of being a woman.”

A moment ago I felt only grief. Now something harder quickens my blood. A desire to know, to understand.

“I don't understand what you're telling me.”

“Yes, you do. You've tried so hard to live as a man. You work relentlessly, obsessively. You haven't married, you've borne no children. But that's no escape. Not in the end. And you're learning that, aren't you? Every month, the little seed inside you cries out to be fertilized. Louder all the time. Your womb aches to be filled. You've let Kaiser use your body, haven't you? I saw it the morning you came back with him, to the house on Audubon Place.”

“Do you mean that killing women somehow releases them from pain?”

“Of course. The life of woman is the life of a slave. Lennon said it:
Woman is the nigger of the world.
From childhood to the grave, she's used and used again, until she's but an exhausted shell, broken by childbirth and marriage and housekeeping and—” Wheaton shakes his head as if too angry to further explain the obvious, then dips his brush in paint and goes back to the canvas.

Different voices are speaking in my head. Marcel de Becque, telling me that westerners fight against death while the people of the East accept it:
This posture of acceptance is portrayed in the Sleeping Women.
John's voice:
All serial murder is sexual murder; that's axiomatic.
Dr. Lenz, saying Wheaton's mother left home when he was thirteen or fourteen, details unclear. Lenz badgering Wheaton about it at the second interview, Wheaton evading the question.
That's
what all this is about—the paintings, the murders, everything—Wheaton's mother. But I'm not going to question him about her until I'm fairly sure I can survive the asking.