by Greg Iles
“That you coerced him? Yeah. You didn’t?”
“I did. But not with a drug charge. It was assault and battery.”
I feel the nausea of a sudden descent. “Assault?”
“Yes. I’ve reviewed the case file, but the details are sketchy. It happened outside a gay bar in Manhattan. Two men verbally abused a friend of Mr. Turner’s—a homosexual friend—and Turner abused back. The sequence of events is unclear after that, but the upshot is that both men were beaten severely by Mr. Turner. He apparently has some martial arts training.”
My anger at Miles for talking about me is vanquished by a question that has badgered me for a long time. “Doctor, do you think Miles is gay?”
Lenz smiles with bright irony. “Doctor-patient privilege, Cole. However, there’s no legal stricture keeping you from telling me what you know.”
I start to refuse, but if Miles didn’t want me to talk about it, why did he mention it to Lenz at all?
“We were kids,” I say. “Eleven or twelve. Best friends. Miles didn’t have many. He was hard to like. Some of the older guys actually hated him. He was twice as smart as they were, and he didn’t mind making them look like idiots in school. It was summer. The two of us were hunting for arrowheads on a little Indian mound out in a cotton field. Some kids had built a fort in a stand of trees on the mound. It was just a hole in the ground, with a foot-high wall of logs around it and a scrap-tin roof laid over. The hole stayed full of water most of the time. We were looking at the fort when four older kids came screaming up to us on their bikes. They started teasing us, especially Miles. Miles made a smart-ass remark, and that was it. They hit him a few times. Then the ringleader said he was going to teach Miles a lesson. He said there were water moccasins nesting in the fort, and unless Miles swore by his no-good daddy that he loved sucking nigger dicks, he was going into that hole. Miles was scared to death, but he wouldn’t say what they wanted. I think it was the part about his father that got him, not sucking dicks. Finally, they forced him kicking and screaming through the little entrance to the fort. I heard a splash, then nothing. The guy said if Miles came out before dark they’d break his arm.
“It was bad, Doctor. I wanted to help him, but I knew if I tried they’d just throw me in there with him. I was hoping they’d get bored and go away when I heard a sound that froze my blood. There was a snake in that pit, but it wasn’t any moccasin. Moccasins don’t make noise; they just bite you. This was a rattlesnake. Two seconds after it rattled, those assholes jumped on their bikes and hauled tail.
“I screamed at Miles to get out of there, but he didn’t come up. Then I heard a tiny little voice whimper, ‘I can’t.’ I jumped down beside the entrance hole and started whispering at him to back slowly toward my voice, but he just kept whimpering. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. After about a minute, I got up my nerve and reached my hand into that hole. I mean slow. My whole arm was tingling. Even at eleven years old, I knew a rattlesnake was a pit viper, and they see heat, not objects. And I knew my hand was a lot warmer than the wall of that wet hole. I edged my hand along the dirt for what seemed like an hour. Then my fingers felt cotton. I grabbed Miles’s arm and yanked him up out of there. His face was covered with tears and his jeans were soaked with piss. He was shaking like an epileptic.”
I wipe stinging sweat out of my eyes. “After he calmed down, he told me very quietly that one day those bastards would regret what they’d done to him.”
“Are you all right, Cole?”
Orderly rows of soft yellow lights passing my window finally break through, telling me we’re in a residential area. “Sure.”
“Is there more to the story?”
I consider holding back, but for whatever reason, I don’t. “Several years later, the ringleader of that little gang had a strange accident. He was bitten four times by a cottonmouth water moccasin. Or twice each by two cottonmouths. Anyway, he ended up losing a foot.”
Lenz catches his breath. “How did that happen?”
“The guy was going to college at Delta State, about a hundred miles north of Rain. He got into his car late one afternoon and these snakes just started hitting him around the ankles. Somehow they’d got into his car. They were lying under the driver’s seat, baking in the hot shade. The guy had left his window open. I guess they just dropped in from a tree limb. They do that, you know.”
Lenz stops the Mercedes at a turn and looks at me. “Are you saying Turner put those snakes in that man’s car?”
I choose my words carefully. “I’m telling you that if cops could trace snakes, they would have traced them right back to that little fort on the Indian mound.”
“My God. How many years after the initial incident was this?”
“Six or seven, at least. That’s one thing about Miles. He follows through. I’m not saying he’s a killer. After all, those guys had terrorized him. He was just giving back some of what they’d given him. Sort of a Southern tradition.”
I crush my Tab can flat and drop it on the floor. “Look, are we there or what? I want to get this over with in time to make that SWAT plane.”
Lenz turns onto still another residential street. The houses here are large, not as large as Bob Anderson’s, but undoubtedly more expensive. At last he swings the Mercedes into a bricked drive and parks.
“Cole,” he says in the sudden silence. “You reported the missing women because you knew something was terribly wrong. Are you ready to help me make it right?”
“Isn’t that clear by now?”
He just sits, letting the engine tick. “Even if the trail leads to Miles Turner?”
“Yes. But it won’t. Miles could kill, maybe. But not like that. I don’t think it’s in him. Do you?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t ruled it out.”
Lenz gets out of the car, and I do the same. But as I follow him around to a side door I see nothing of the house or grounds. I merely track his shoes, using the same trancelike vision that keeps my car on the road when my mind is a million miles from reality. Can Lenz count on me if the trail leads to Miles? I answered yes, but it was a reflex response. Because what I was thinking at that moment was how, after that Delta State guy was bitten by the cottonmouths, the state police showed up in Rain to question Annie Turner about her son. They’d heard some strange things about the kid and wanted to know his whereabouts on the day the guy was bitten.
Annie Turner didn’t know. But I did. And I did what any friend would do under the circumstances.
I lied.
Chapter 21
When Lenz opens the door to the FBI safe house, what I see in the glow of the porch light bears little resemblance to the mental picture I had. But then I suppose that picture was generated by trash fiction and bad films.
“Pretty swank,” I comment. “This is the safe house?”
“No, no,” he says in a strangely soft voice. “This is my home. I need some files from my desk, some clothes. I intended to have an agent pick them up, but I left it until too late. My wife’s probably sleeping.”
“I can wait out here, no problem.”
“No . . . no. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
“Afraid I’ll call a cab from your car phone?”
“Nonsense. Come along.”
Lenz creeps through his own house with the stealth of a burglar. I realize I’m doing the same as we pass through a laundry room and into a dark kitchen with copper pots and utensils hanging like ancient weapons above our heads. At the far end of the kitchen stands a wide arch that leads into a breakfast area. A dim bulb in the stove hood throws a yellow pool of light on the floor.
Lenz points to a chair. “I’ll only be a minute. Make yourself at home.” Then he disappears through the arch.
A low beating sound tells me he is going upstairs.
“Yes, please do,” says a woman’s voice, sending a cold shock up between my shoulder blades.
All my senses on full power, I focus on the table beyond the arch. Against a wall-
high curtain, I see the silhouette of a woman sitting in a straight-backed chair. A bar glass glints on the table in front of her. Lenz must have walked right past her.
“Janet?” he calls, and I hear his feet coming back down the stairs. “Janet? Are you awake?”
“No, I’m sleepwalking. Thank God I can still taste my drink. Where the hell have you been for three days?”
I can see the stairwell now. Lenz’s face drops below the level of the ceiling. “I’m working a case for Daniel. An important case.”
He comes down two more steps and looks at his wife. He seems caught between not wanting to invite me up to his office and not wanting to leave me down here with her. Why the hell didn’t he just leave me in the car?
“I’ll be right down,” he says finally. “Please take care of Mr. Cole.” And then he scurries back up the stairwell.
“Oh, I will,” says the woman in a slurred voice.
As she stands up and moves toward me, light from the stove falls across her. The light is not flattering. Several years older than her husband, Janet Lenz is wearing some kind of sheer wrap over a filmy undergarment. I suppose it’s meant to be sexy, but with the smudged mascara and the smell of stale gin and cigarettes wafting across the kitchen, the effect is pathos. She is a thin, Waspish woman with a fading dye job and a spiderwork of wrinkles around her mouth that marks her as a lifelong smoker. Yet her eyes hold a gimlet glow of cleverness, as if her mind retains just enough clarity to be momentarily observant, or cruel. Her voice has an edge reminiscent of schoolteachers who enjoy dispensing discipline a little too much.
“Your accent,” she says. “It reminds me of North Carolina. My people are from Philadelphia, but I attended Greensboro, an all-female institution. They used to bus in boys from Duke, though. The most charming boys.”
“That’s nice.”
“Oh, it was,” she says in a lilting drawl about as authentic as Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois. “They knew how to be gentlemen, those boys. But they also knew when to stop being gentlemen. You know what I mean? Mister Cole?”
My noncommittal “Mmmm” trails off into an averted gaze. Mrs. Lenz demands my attention by tinkling the ice in her glass and clucking her tongue.
“That’s something Arthur never learned,” she goes on.
“He’s always such a gentleman. But the New England version can be so dull.”
“Dr. Lenz doesn’t seem like the dull type to me, ma’am.”
“Give him time, darling. He makes a terrific first impression. He’s blindingly analytical. But he’s also numbingly predictable.”
The uncomfortable silence grows more so as she moves closer and smiles with the yellow brilliance of a cheap diamond. I have the feeling she is circling me, like a scavenger.
“You’d think a man who knows Freud like the back of his hand would know his way around a bedroom, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh . . . I don’t think that’s any of my business.”
Still closer. “I must have gotten to know a hundred psychiatrists over the past twenty years,” she says. “The coldest bunch of jellyfish you ever shared pâté with. Half of them impotent, the other half queer.”
Deliverance arrives at last in the form of Dr. Lenz, who bounds into the kitchen carrying a suit bag and a briefcase. He’s probably well aware of what I’ve been enduring down here. I nearly stumble over my shoes making my escape.
Janet Lenz trails us to the laundry room. As her husband opens the door, she says, “Go play your little mind games. We can’t let any of those wicked boys out there have any fun, can we?”
I turn back in time to see Lenz slam the door.
As the Mercedes swallows the driveway with a low-throated growl, Lenz says, “As you can see, we all have our problems. Did she make a nuisance of herself?”
“Not at all. Just idle chitchat.”
He makes a curious sound in his throat. “She didn’t bring up the relative sizes of Caucasian versus Negroid sex organs?”
“I don’t recall it coming up.”
“You’re lucky.”
“What’s her problem?”
“Depression. Alcohol. An emotionally distant husband who is frequently an asshole. Not necessarily in that order.”
“None of my business.”
“Sorry to put you through it, nonetheless.”
Lenz is driving well over the speed limit now, fast enough that I grip the seat between my thighs. “We’re only a short distance from the safe house,” he says. “Makes it easy for me to commute. You can see why I need to be close.”
I nod as if I agree, but if I were in his place I’d have chosen a safe house in Los Angeles.
The trip takes less than ten minutes including stops for traffic lights. The safe house is more modest than Lenz’s home but easily worth over a hundred thousand in the Mississippi market. God knows what it appraised at here. As the automatic garage door whirs down behind the Mercedes, I decide the FBI chose well. A woman who could afford the fees for EROS wouldn’t live in a house less expensive than this.
Inside, I am surprised again. I expected stern FBI agents pacing around drinking coffee, but all I find is pristine cream carpeting, functional furniture, and framed watercolors that look like they were bought from a hotel chain. The place feels like a model home in a tract development.
“Doctor Lenz?” calls a woman’s voice.
From a hallway that must lead to the first-floor bedrooms steps a woman in her late twenties. She has auburn hair a little coarser than Drewe’s, green eyes, fair skin, and a slim but athletic figure. All in all, she’s a slightly harder version of my wife. She takes three steps into the room before I notice the holster and pistol slung tight under her left arm.
“Sherry’s in the back,” she tells Lenz. “And the guy from Engineering Research is in the spare bedroom upstairs.” Her eyes move to me. “Who’s this?”
“Special Agent Margie Ressler, meet Harper Cole. He’s one of the sysops for EROS. He’s going to help me get started tonight. How’s trade so far?”
“All I’ve done so far is send out for pizza. I ordered enough for everybody.” Agent Ressler cannot conceal the excitement in her eyes. “I figured since you haven’t gone online yet, nobody could be surveiling the house, right?”
When Lenz merely sighs, she adds, “I got supremes. Told them to leave off the anchovies, just in case. You want me to nuke a few slices for you?”
“Not hungry,” Lenz says distractedly. “Cole?”
“I’ll take some.”
“Diet Coke okay?”
“Great.”
“Bring it upstairs,” Lenz instructs her.
At the bottom of the carpeted staircase, he stops and calls back over his shoulder, “I didn’t see a car in the garage!”
Margie Ressler hurries back into the living room. “They’re delivering it tonight. Should be here anytime. It’s an Acura Legend, ninety-two model confiscated in a drug raid. Is that okay?”
“Fine. Make sure Sherry shows you everything you need to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the top of the stairs Lenz steps into what must have been designed as a bedroom. Now it sports a wall-size computer cabinet, a Dell desktop PC, a Toshiba subnotebook computer with PCMCIA modem slotted in and connected, a bank of wire telephones, a fax machine, a cellular phone, and a Sony television. Near the bathroom stands a refrigerator-freezer with a microwave oven on top, and against the far wall a twin bed.
“Planning to stay awhile?” I ask as Lenz deposits his suit bag in a closet half filled with men’s clothing.
He turns to face me, his gaze eerily intense. “This is where I live until Hostage Rescue carries Mr. Strobekker out in chains.”
He stares at me until I break eye contact. “What do you want me to do?” I ask.
“Show me the highways and byways of EROS. I want you to establish my bona fides.” He motions to one of two swivel chairs. “You take the Toshiba.”
“Have you logged on yet?”<
br />
“I didn’t want to risk doing anything stupid.”
“Lurked any on other services?”
“Lurked?”
“Lurking is logging on but not interacting with anyone. Watching the conversations of other people.”
“No.”
“But you’ve installed the EROS software.”
“The kid in the spare bedroom did.”
“Okay, sit.”
Lenz obeys without demur, taking the chair before the Dell.
“Got EROS’s eight hundred number entered into both systems?”
“Ready to go.”
“Password chosen?”
“Done.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Touchy. Okay, press ENTER and let the system make the connection. It’s all automatic, just like CompuServe or AOL.”
After checking the Toshiba for a keystroke-recording program (which would allow FBI technicians to replay everything I type on this computer)—and disabling the one I find—I log on and enter my password. “What does your status line say, Doctor?”
“Checking password . . . logging on to EROS at 14,400 bps. Welcome, Lilith.”
“Lilith? That’s your great alias?”
“Just wait. Where am I?”
“The main page.”
“Now it says ‘Downloading Image.’ That’s . . . the bust of Nefertiti. My God, the color and resolution are wonderful.”
“She’ll start spinning 3-D in a second. See? Okay, hit ENTER and she’ll go away. Look at the right side of the main page. See those little icons? That’s how you decide where you want to go. Into a live-chat area or forum, maybe the EROS library. You just move your mouse onto the icon you want and click.”
“I know how to use a mouse, Cole.”
“Congratulations. Look at the top line over the page. That’s your menu bar. See the choices? That’s where you decide what you want to do in those different locations—again, with your mouse. You can post messages to forums, compose and send e-mail, download files from the library, access the Internet, anything you want. You can even query the system to ask who’s in a given room at a given time. Of course, it will only give you their user names in answer.”
