Dead Sleep (54 page)

“You showed him your Sleeping Women.”

Wheaton nods cagily. “There were only two then. You should have seen his face when he saw them. He knew immediately that the women were dead. He knew because he'd seen women that way. And when he looked back at me from the paintings, I let him see my true face. I dropped the mask.”

As you did with me, after tasing the FBI agent in the gallery.
“What did Hoffman do?”

“He reveled in it. When I saw that he understood, I felt some irresistible power well up within me. And I ravished him.”

“I wasn't like Roger—facedown and taking it in pain.
I
was the one in control. Conrad saw my genius, and he wanted to experience its totality. He was a vessel for my power.” Seeing shock in my face, Wheaton says, “Conrad was bisexual. He'd told me in the car. He picked it up in jail.”

“And after that, he started helping you?”

Wheaton is painting with almost mechanical speed now. “Conrad procured my subjects, mixed the drug cocktails, worked out what was best to keep them sedated while I worked. The insulin. He carried many burdens for me.”

“And he raped the women as a reward.”

Wheaton's brush hardly stutters. “I suppose he did. I doubt they were conscious while it happened.”

I pray they weren't.
“What made you stop? In New York, I mean?”

“Conrad killed someone in an argument. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He told me not to take any more, but I . . . I couldn't stop. I tried to pick up a girl in New York. She sensed something wrong, and she fought. Screamed. I barely escaped the police.
That's
what made me stop. Conrad had told me about prison. I couldn't go there. It would have been like being back in my father's house.”

“So you channeled your desires into the Clearing paintings. Didn't you? That's why they became more abstract.”

“Yes. And the more I put into them, the more famous Roger got. I wanted the world to see
my
work—
purely
—not through the distorted mirror of Roger's abstracts.”

“Is that why you started killing again, fifteen years later?”

“No.” He gives me a simple, clear gaze. “I was dying. I had to do what good I could, while I could.”

“Hoffman was out of prison by then? He helped you?”

“Six months after my diagnosis, he was released to make room for new inmates. I'd already moved to New Orleans. I had a juvenile fantasy of finding my biological father. Or his grave. Something tangible. But I never did. But yes, Conrad helped me begin my work again.”

“Why did you
sell
the paintings? Why take the risk? You already had money. Fame. Respect.”

“
Roger
had those things.” Wheaton's brush pecks the palette, then flies to the canvas. “In his bourgeois way. But when collectors saw my Sleeping Women, they recognized an entirely different level of truth.”

“Like Marcel de Becque?”

“He was one.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I know he buys my work. Nothing more.” Strangely, I believe him. So what explains the connections among de Becque, Wingate, and Hoffman? Were they all exploiting this tortured artist and his twisted vision?

“What do you intend to do now?”

“I'm going away. To live as myself. Openly. Money's not a problem, and Conrad established new identities for us long ago. Just in case.”

“Will you paint?”

“If I feel the need. After this one, I don't suspect I will.”

“What do you plan to do with me?”

“I'm going to give you what you most want. I'm going to reunite you with your sister.”

My eyes close. “Where is my sister?”

“Very close.”

“Driving distance? Walking distance?”

Wheaton sniffs. “Closer than that.”

John's voice sounds in my head, an echo of the first day I met him. Lakeshore Drive.
The water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn't even stink.

“Is she buried here? Under this house?”

There's not even a hitch in Wheaton's brush stroke as he nods. It's almost more than I can bear.

“The other women too?”

“Yes. Your sister was a bit different from the rest. She tried to escape. I'm not sure how she managed it, but she made it out to the garden. Conrad caught her, but she fought, and he had to end it there. He buried her immediately. I finished painting her using only a photograph.”

For the first time in many hours, anger boils to the surface. Reaching out to the tap, I turn it as I have twice before—only this time I open the cold valve. Wheaton doesn't seem to notice.

As I fight the tortured images called into being by his words, he puts down his brush, massages his hands again, then lifts a watch from the table behind him and looks at it. With a soft grunt, he turns and walks into the main house. There's a soft clatter followed by the low murmur of a voice. He's making a phone call.

I roll over, get to my knees, lean out, and drag the Igloo cooler up to the tub. Praying the running water will cover the noise, I take several panting breaths, then lift the cooler to the edge of the tub and dump the contents inside.

The icy shock sucks the breath right out of my lungs. Even my thoughts seem to stutter, so cold is the water, but I haven't time to waste. Three bottles of Michelob have fallen into the tub. I put them back into the empty cooler, then slide it back to its place. A droning voice floats through the doorway to my left. I hear the word “ticket” several times. Possibly the word “departure.”

God, it's cold.
I won't be able to stand much of this. My sluggish brain has already forgotten something critical. My insulin defense. Reaching down between the tub and mirror, I bring up a pack of Pop-Tarts and tear open the foil with stiff fingers. I break the hard pastries into pieces, shove them into my mouth, and chew them just enough to get them down my throat.

Wheaton is still talking. I rip open another foil pack and gobble two more Pop-Tarts.

Footsteps.

“Come to me,”
I say softly, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Said the spider to the fly.”

When Wheaton reappears, I suddenly realize how strange he looks in his white linen cloth. After two days of painting, I've gotten used to it. But after hearing him talk on the phone like a normal person, it's a shock. He looks like a man who believes he's Jesus. A sixty-year-old Jesus. He stands before the easel, examining the canvas with a critical eye.

The ice water feels like it's draining the life out of me, and the pain is greater than I anticipated. The line between ice and fire quickly vanishes.

“Is the painting done?” I ask.

“What?” Wheaton says in a distant voice. “Oh. Almost. I—”

The ringing telephone cuts him off. He looks confused. It rings again, faint but insistent. With a quick glance at me, he goes back into the house.

I have an almost irresistible compulsion to leap out of the tub.
Turn on the hot water,
says a voice in my head.
A little won't hurt—

This time the footsteps return at a run. Wheaton rushes into the room, his face blotched red again, only this time there's a gun in his hand. A Smith & Wesson featherweight .38. The gun John gave me.

“What's the matter? What happened?”

“They hung up.” His voice is a ragged whisper.

“That happens all the time.”

“Not here. And it wasn't dead when I got there. They listened for a few seconds before they hung up.”

I try to keep my eyes flat as hope blossoms in my chest, “It was probably a kid. Or some pervert.”

Wheaton shakes his head. The animal awareness shining in his eyes is a fearsome thing to see: survival instinct honed to a gleaming edge.

“Why are you making explanations?” he asks. “Why do you care?”

“I don't. I just—”

“Shut up!” He turns and looks at his unfinished painting, then back at me. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Why?”

“Sometimes I know things. And I never second-guess that feeling. This place isn't safe anymore.”

I feel a sudden urge to leap out of the freezing tub, but before I can act, Wheaton says, “I know you can move.”

My heart stutters.

“Don't pretend you can't. I ran out of muscle relaxant. I have to get ready to leave. I'm going to walk over there and put some more Valium into your IV. Enough to knock you out for a while, but not enough to kill you.”

His face looks sincere, but I know who I'm talking to. “You're lying. You already said you're going to kill me.”

“Jordan. I could shoot you right now if I wanted to kill you.”

“Maybe we're too close to other houses. Or maybe you can't stand to kill that way. Using insulin gives you the illusion of euthanasia.”

A strange smile touches his lips and eyes. “I shot a lot of people in Vietnam. That's not a problem.”

He crouches four feet from the tub and looks me in the eye. “Why doesn't Valium work on you, Jordan? Do you have a little
habit
? Is that it?”

“Maybe a little one.”

He laughs appreciatively. “You're a sly one, aren't you? A survivor, like me.”

“So far.”

He stands and goes into the other room, then returns with a syringe. “Stay right where you are. If you try anything, I'll have no choice but to shoot you. Same thing if you pull out the IV.”

Wheaton walks out of my field of vision, and though I can't see him, I know what he's doing: leaning in from as far away as possible and injecting the contents of the syringe into my IV bag. Could he be telling the truth about the Valium? Would he really let me live? He hasn't let anyone else. They're all buried somewhere under this house.

My wrist should start burning, but it doesn't. Wheaton reappears on my left side and crouches again, three feet away. He doesn't say anything. He just watches.

“You're shivering,” he says at length. “How do you feel?”

“Scared.”

“There's nothing to fear. Don't fight it.”

“Fight what?”

“The Valium.”

“It's not Valium.” A wave of nausea rolls through me. “Is it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because my wrist isn't burning.”

He sighs, then smiles with something like compassion. “You're right. Trust a junkie to know her drugs. It's insulin. Soon you won't have a care in the world. No pain at all.”

Four feet opposite me, Thalia Laveau looks exactly like what she is: a living corpse. I cannot end my life like that. I only pray that Conrad Hoffman didn't rape her before she went into a coma.

“Sleepy yet?” asks Wheaton, cradling the gun in his left hand.

The sugar that the Pop-Tarts flushed into my blood will give only limited immunity to the insulin, depending on the dose he gave me. If he comes no closer than he is now, I'll pass out before I can do anything to save myself. Unless I pull out the IV. And then he'll shoot me.

“I . . . I am,” I say in a slurred voice. “Am. Sleepy.”

“That's right,” he half-whispers, glancing past me, through the glass wall of the conservatory. He looks as if he expects to see armed men crossing his garden at any moment.

The bathwater doesn't feel as cold as it did before, and for a second I'm thankful. Then I understand: the insulin is affecting my perception. Near panic, I shake myself, then kick my legs up out of the tub, which sends me sliding down into the water. My behind skids between Thalia's thighs, and my head slips beneath the surface.

It takes a supreme act of will to hold my head under the water, but this is the only path to survival. I make a show of fighting to get my head above the water.

A shadow appears above the tub, then coalesces into a definable shape. A head. Shoulders. Wheaton is looking down into the tub. What does he see? A replay of the first woman he ever killed? The waif? With a macabre sense of dislocation, I watch my last moments on earth through his eyes. He wants to pull my head clear of the water; I can feel it. To give me a more humane death.

Starved for oxygen and stunned by the cold, my lungs burn to reach the surface. I can't wait for Wheaton to reach in. With a scream of desperation I explode out of the water, hands extended like claws. His eyes bulge in terror, and he tries to wheel backward, but I have him by the wrists. He roars and tries to fight, but his feet haven't enough purchase on the wet floor to allow him to use his weight against me. With all my weight, I jerk both his hands down into the icy tub.

His eyes go wide with the incomprehension of a child being tortured for reasons it cannot guess, and his feet go out from under him.

Still I hold on.

New faces come alive in his eyes: the abused boy who could read his father's lustful thoughts; the soldier who heard the enemy's bare feet from fifty meters. As I struggle to keep his hands pinned, one of his wrists jerks in my hand, and a muted explosion hammers my ears. Blood swirls through the bathtub. His wrist jerks again, and my ears ring like cymbals.

He's firing the gun under the water.

I don't feel hurt, but sometimes you don't know. Amplified by the tub, the blast alone stuns me, but I don't let go. Bright red blood sprays through the ice water as though from a hose.