Dead Sleep by Greg Iles

the connection to the missing women?”
    He laughs again. “It just happened that way. A Frenchman from the Cayman Islands bought the first five, but I found out he’d spent most of his life in Vietnam. Then a Japanese collector stepped in. A Malaysian. Also a Chinese. There’s something in these images that appeals to the Eastern sensibility.”
    â€œAnd it’s not very subtle, is it? Dead naked white women?”
    Wingate turns to me long enough to wrinkle his lips. “That’s crude, and it’s an oversimplification.
    â€œWhere is the painting in the crate going?”
    â€œAn auction house in Tokyo.”
    â€œWhy go to that trouble, Christopher? Why not auction them here in New York? At Sotheby’s or wherever?”
    Pure smugness now. “It’s like Brian Epstein with the Beatles. You’re number one in England, but at some point you have to take them to America. Maybe the time has come.”
    Wingate’s arrogance finally triggers something deep within me, a well of outrage I try to keep capped, but which sometimes explodes despite my best efforts or interests.
    â€œI was lying about the FBI,” I say in a cold voice. “I haven’t told them about the paintings yet. I wanted to talk to you first. But since you’re being such a prick, and you haven’t told me anything helpful, I am going to tell them. Do you know what will happen then? This canvas you’re drooling over will become evidence in a serial murder case, and it’ll be confiscated. And you won’t make jack shit off it, because it won’t be sellable. Not for a very long time, Christopher. It’s like assets being stuck in probate, only worse.”
    Wingate straightens up with the hammer and turns to face me. He still has a couple of nails in his mouth; I’d like to shove them down his throat.
    â€œWhat do you want to know?” he asks.
    â€œI want a name. I want to know who paints these pictures.”
    He hefts the hammer and drops its head into the palm of his other hand with a slap. “If you haven’t told the FBI yet, you’re not in a very good position to make that kind of demand.”
    â€œOne phone call.”
    Now he smiles. “A phone call requires access to a phone. Do you think you can get to that one?”
    He points the hammer at a cordless phone on the counter behind him. I could probably Mace him and get to it, but that’s not really the point. The point is that he’s willing to hurt me—maybe to kill me—to protect his little art monopoly. Which means he probably knows a lot more than he’s saying about the origin of the Sleeping Women.
    â€œWell?” he says, almost playfully.
    I back toward the iron staircase, finding the spray nozzle with my finger as I go.
    â€œWhere are you going, Jordan?” He takes three quick steps toward me, the hammer held waist high. As he does, a new scenario hits me with chilling force. What if the painter isn’t the killer at all? What if Wingate mas terminded the whole thing to earn millions in commissions? What if he kills the women and merely commissions the paintings from some starving artist? His dark eyes flash as he moves forward, and the violence in them unnerves me.
    In one movement I whip out the Mace can and blast his face from six feet, the powerful stream filling his eyes, nose, and mouth with enough chemical irritant to set his mucous membranes on fire. He screams like a child, drops the hammer, and starts clawing his eyes. I almost want to steer him to the sink, so pitiful are his cries, but I’m not that crazy. As I whirl toward the stairs, my heart beating wildly, a giant hand swats me back into the room and a fusillade of distant cannon hammers my eardrums.
    When I open my eyes, I see gray smoke and a screaming man. Wingate is shrieking so loudly that I can’t think. You don’t hear men scream like that except in war zones, when