Dead Sleep. Greg Iles

The FBI did too. We never found anyone who would admit to calling me. But there are more than two thousand MIAs still unaccounted for. That’s a lot of families. And at the meetings, they all talk to me, because I’m well known and because I’ve traveled in the East so much.”

      “If that were the case, who would the man’s voice have belonged to?”

      “A husband. A stepfather. Who knows? But I thought of another possibility. What if it was the killer playing a trick on me? Using some woman he knows to upset me.”

      Kaiser shakes his head. “No other relatives of victims received such calls. I checked.”

      “So, what do you think?”

      He idly pokes a leftover slice of beef. “I think it might have been your sister.”

      I take a deep breath and try to steady my nerves.

      “I’m telling you this,” he says soberly, “because Baxter told me you were tough.”

      “I don’t know if I’m that tough.”

      He waits, letting me work through it.

      “This is why you didn’t want Lenz here, isn’t it?”

      “Partly.”

      “When I asked Lenz what he thought about the phone call, he brushed it off.”

      Kaiser looks at the ground. “The consensus in the Unit is that your mystery caller was a member of an MIA family, just as you guessed. Lenz didn’t ask you about it because he’d seen the statement you made at the time, and he’d consider that a more reliable description of the event than what you remember now.”

      “That sounds like an official reply. What’s your personal opinion?”

      “If your sister is alive, it throws Lenz’s present theory—whatever that might be—into question. Lenz talks a lot about how everything is possible, how there are no rules, but deep down he’s wearing blinders. I don’t think he always did. But these days he’s prejudiced toward the tragic ending. I’m open to something else. That’s it in a nutshell.”

      “Why are you open to something else?”

      A wistful smile touches the corners of Kaiser’s lips and eyes. “Because I know the world obeys no laws. I learned that the hard way.” He picks up a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie, then discards it. “Lenz probably asked you about all sorts of family stuff. Right? Intimate stuff?”

      “Yes.”

      “That’s the way he works. He likes to know all the underlying relationships. He’s upset a lot of the victims’ families doing that. I’m not criticizing him for it. He did some groundbreaking work early in his career.”

      “That’s pretty much what he said about you.”

      “Really? Well, I won’t kid you, I don’t think he should be involved in this investigation.”

      “Why not?”

      “I don’t trust his instincts or his judgment. He was involved in a case a while back that turned into a real clusterfuck. And Baxter places too much weight on what he says, because of their history.”

      “Lenz told me his wife was killed during a case. Is that what you’re talking about?”