Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “The pineal is about the size of a pea,” Drewe explains. “The problem wouldn’t be getting it out but seeing it at all.”

  “What about a flexible probe with a fiber-optic camera and a cutting tool?” asks Miles.

  “You’re talking about an endoscope. I don’t think they have those for neurosurgery. But I guess you could use any endoscope if the patient was dead. I assume the FBI is looking at doctors as suspects?”

  Miles nods. “But doctors are only part of a much wider suspect group. Every police department has a different theory. The California police are working a cult angle. They’ve seen cult murders in the past where certain body parts were taken. No pineal glands, but adrenals, ovaries, testicles, all kinds of things.”

  “Dr. Lenz pretty much dismisses cult murders,” I tell them. “Almost all of them are committed for some conventional motive.”

  “Baxter has officially classified these murders as normal sexual homicides,” Miles says, “if there is such a thing. All the murdered women were raped after they were dead.”

  A short intake of breath from Drewe.

  “There’s a ton of forensic evidence,” he goes on, consulting his printouts. “Bite marks in some cases, not others. The marks don’t match. In one case they may have been made by a woman. With a couple of victims there was severe skin mutilation. The weird thing is that semen samples were found and analyzed in every case, and with seven victims they’ve found semen from at least four different men. Sometimes near the victim, other times inside the vagina. They’re waiting on DNA tests now. To compare to mine, no doubt.”

  The hair on my forearms is standing. “You mean four men raped each victim?”

  “No, no. Four men spread over all seven cases. Though in two victims there were two different semen samples found.” Miles shakes his head at Drewe. “I know what you’re thinking—one sample from a boyfriend or husband, the other from the killer, right? Wrong. Both samples in each woman were the result of postmortem sex.”

  “Good God,” I whisper.

  Miles takes a sip of coffee. “The problem with physical evidence is that the Behavioral Science people basically use a connect-the-dots approach to murder. They have checklists for cops to fill out. Condition of the body. Restraints, no restraints. Type of weapon. Cause of death. Post-offense behavior. Antemortem rape or postmortem rape? Penetration or just masturbation? All these things produce vastly differing profiles.” Miles sounds almost saddened by the imperfection of the system. “A guy who knows the system can put a few extra dots at each crime scene and distort the picture. If he puts in enough dots—or takes them away—there’s no picture at all.”

  “Like the radically different head wounds,” Drewe says. She pulls at the corner of her mouth with her forefinger. “What about the physician angle?”

  Miles shuffles his papers. “The current Unit profile includes butchers, dentists, doctors, male nurses, taxidermists, veterinarians, even people who’ve worked in slaughterhouses. They figure somebody’s expanding his horizons in new and exciting ways—with help, of course.”

  Drewe wrinkles her mouth in distaste. “Does anyone think just one man might be responsible for the crimes?”

  “Yes, but that presupposes an individual of staggering abilities. He’d not only have to have medical skill and access to things like blood and semen, but also detailed knowledge of law enforcement methods, forensics, locks, security systems, not to mention psychology and computers. It’s hard to picture one man—particularly a serial killer—having that kind of ability.”

  “Why? Wasn’t Ted Bundy a really smart guy?”

  “Not really. I did a Nexis search on serial killers, and I learned a lot. Bundy looks clever compared to the mean of his group—serial killers—but put him on a scale with the general population and he was nothing special. We’re talking about a guy who dug up women he’d killed weeks before to have sex with their corpses. He got a lot of press because he looked halfway preppie and could convince women to trust him. The truth is, most serial killers are genetic debris.”

  “Not Brahma,” I say. “You’ve read some of his stuff, haven’t you? He’s erudite as hell. And he can exploit insecurity like no one I’ve ever seen.”

  Drewe looks at Miles. “You agree with that?”

  “Yes. But I don’t think he’s a doctor. His computer skill level’s too high for that. Some doctors know computers, but not at the level I’m seeing.”

  “So what do you think?” I ask. “You think he’s a hacker?”

  “No. I think he might be a Real Programmer.”

  This silences me.

  “What’s that?” asks Drewe.

  “What Miles used to be. At MIT. People the media call ‘hackers’ get to know operating systems like UNIX and DOS and VMS very well, their design quirks and flaws. But Real Programmers can build operating systems. They’re supercoders. They call it programming on bare metal. They’re the demigods of hackerdom.”

  “The problem with that theory,” Miles interrupts, “is that a Real Programmer killing people doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about a dogmatically nonviolent personality type. His entire life is lived between silicon, metal, and bits. Someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings sixteen times and who’d be glad to spend an evening trying to conjugate Elvish verbs with you.”

  “You’re generalizing,” I tell him. “If this is a sexual thing, it doesn’t matter what his career is. You should know that better than anybody. Brahma doesn’t have control over what’s driving him. He could be a priest, for God’s sake.”

  “I think he does have control,” Drewe says quietly.

  “Most of the time anyway.”

  I suddenly recall Lenz telling me the same thing.

  “Why?” asks Miles.

  “Because the murders have an ultimate object,” she says. “The pineal gland. And because the killer has expended great effort to conceal that fact.”

  “Keep going.”

  “The fact that the women were raped throws me. But drop that from the equation for a minute. The pineal gland is the primary object because the killer takes it away with him. I mean, if his goal were merely to rape dead women, he could kill just about anybody and do that.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So the killer is a doctor.”

  Miles looks disappointed. “Proof?”

  “Occam’s razor,” Drewe counters. “It’s the simplest answer, therefore the most likely. You’re resisting it because you’re biased against doctors.”

  “I am not.”

  Drewe laughs. “The killer broke into your computer system and you don’t know how. Therefore, you assume he must be a member of the secret fraternity of the world’s smartest people—those who do what you do. But you’re shortchanging doctors.”

  Miles’s face is red. “I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why else should the killer hide the fact that he’s taking pineal glands? Unless it could somehow lead to him? And who does the pineal lead to? You said there were no cults known for taking the pineal. And in the one victim where there was no major head wound, the gland was removed using a standard neurosurgical approach that, despite the fantasies of the FBI, would not be the likely one chosen by a butcher or dentist.”

  Drewe begins walking around the kitchen, seemingly propelled by the tide of her reasoning. “Look at the areas of expertise you mentioned. Postulate a brilliant surgeon and medicine is taken care of. Law enforcement is a technical undertaking usually handled by men from . . . what? The fiftieth to eightieth percentile of intelligence?”

  Miles and I watch her with fascination. The logical ruthlessness of a smart woman can be chilling.

  “Who better than a doctor could plant false biological evidence at crime scenes? He could get blood, urine, semen, stool samples, hair. Locks and security systems are child’s play compared to microsurgery. Human psychology? Again, an experienced physician. That leaves—”

  “Computers,” Miles finishes.


  Drewe stops beside the stove. “Yes. Now please listen, Miles. If I were to drop all my personal prejudices, I’d have to admit that a person like you, a computer genius, could have been a brilliant surgeon had he chosen that path. And because I believe that, I must believe the reverse could be true.”

  He looks unconvinced. “I understand your reasoning, but you just don’t see that in real life.”

  “I’ll tell you why you don’t see computer experts becoming surgeons. Because it requires a minimum of nine, sometimes eleven years of postgraduate training. The learning curve on computers is much shorter. You can jump in and begin working almost immediately, because if you screw up, you’ve only killed a machine or a program, not a person.”

  Miles stares stubbornly at the table.

  “But once you’re really seduced by computers,” she continues, “it’s too late for medicine. You’re into hardware and software, not wetware.”

  Her accurate use of this computer term for the human brain, and by extension human beings, surprises us both.

  “But surgeon as computer expert?” she asks, moving across the floor again. “The stereotype of no spare time in medical school is false. People do get married, have hobbies. If we posit a medical student who had little or no social life but an obsession with computers, I can easily see him attaining the skill level you’re talking about. Especially if he has the aptitude. And a practicing surgeon would have whatever spare time he wanted, plus the money to pursue his obsessions.”

  Miles looks up in defeat.

  “The question,” Drewe concludes, “is what is he taking the pineal gland for? What does he do with it? What does the FBI think?”

  Miles drums his long fingers on the table and scans a new sheet of paper. “Possibilities range from eating it to burning it to selling it to Asians who render certain hormones from it.”

  Drewe stops again. “Melatonin.”

  “That’s right,” says Miles.

  “Do you know what melatonin does?”

  “It regulates the sleep cycle. There’s apparently a craze right now where people use it as a natural sleeping pill. Some think it’s a magic antiaging pill. I know a few computer people who take it, along with a hundred other vitamins and herbs.”

  Drewe finally comes to the table and takes a seat. “After Harper got back from New Orleans,” she says, “he told me about the pineals being taken. The next day, I punched a few queries into the Medline computer at University Hospital. It told me more than I knew before, but not a lot. Just enough to lead me in the right direction. There’s a neurobiologist on staff at University; he hasn’t been there long, but he’s good. You should have seen him come to life when I asked about the pineal gland. He was still jabbering when I left forty-five minutes later.

  “Melatonin is hot right now because research teams in different parts of the world have recently come up with some startling new findings on it. But before I tell you what they’re doing, I’m going to tell you why these women are being killed.”

  Miles stares at Drewe with the wonder of a kid watching a magic show.

  “Let me ask one question first,” she says. “What were the ages of each of the victims?”

  Miles’s eidetic memory spits out the digits like bingo numbers. “26, 23, 24, 25, 26, 25, 47.”

  “Is that in order? By date of death?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old is the kidnapped woman? Rosalind whatever?”

  “Fifty.”

  Drewe smiles. “There it is. Someone is trying to transplant pineal glands between human beings.”

  “What?” Miles cries.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “To add fifteen to twenty vital years to the human life span. Perhaps ultimately to his own life.”

  Miles and I are silent.

  “According to the neurobiologist,” Drewe says, “foreign researchers working on the pineal began by focusing on melatonin as a dietary supplement, just the way people are taking it now. They found that mice ingesting a regular regimen of the hormone were not only healthier but also lived longer than the control mice. This prompted them to try a more radical approach. They had microsurgeons transplant pineal glands between mice—the pineals of young mice into old mice and vice versa. The results were astounding. Far more dramatic than oral dosages. The coats of the old mice regained their luster, the animals regained their sexual appetite and ability, T-cell counts went up, certain tumors disappeared, and a dozen other results, all positive.”

  “And the young mice?” Miles asks.

  “They immediately began to age rapidly. But the most fascinating thing is that the old mice with transplanted pineals maintained their reinvigorated state almost up to the point of death. To put it simply, they never got old. They just died.”

  The kitchen is so quiet that the cheeep of crickets outside sounds like a roar.

  “If that were true,” I say finally, “American pharmaceutical companies would be researching melatonin twenty-four hours a day.”

  “How do you know they’re not? They may be duplicating these experiments right now. It just might be that a gland thought vestigial until 1963 is the engine that controls the human aging process. The number of people taking melatonin nationwide is staggering. It’s also frightening, because no one knows what its effects are over time. The pineal gland basically rules the endocrine system, Harper. It controls sexual development by regulating other hormones. It affects body temperature, kidney function, immunity. It controls hibernation in mammals, migration in birds, it changes skin color in chameleons. All this was new to me. When the neurobiologist started asking why I was so interested, I made excuses and got out of there. But by then it was clear to me.”

  Miles is tapping his fingertips together. “You’re saying the age disparity between the first six victims and Karin Wheat is explained by the fact that the killer was taking—”

  “Harvesting,” Drewe corrects him.

  “Harvesting the pineal glands of young women for transplant? You’re saying he put these first few glands in the freezer until he got ready to start kidnapping older women to test his theory on?”

  She shakes her head. “I think the first murders were part of a training program. Transplantation of a human pineal has never been tried. The pineal gland has the highest blood flow by weight of any organ other than the kidneys. A transplant would be fantastically difficult, probably impossible. Lots of microvascular stuff, severing and reattaching minute blood vessels. We’re talking groundbreaking neurosurgery. I think whoever’s doing this knew he would need practice in the vasculature surrounding a pineal gland—probably a pineal as close to the living state as he could get it.”

  “So according to your theory,” says Miles, “just prior to the murder of Karin Wheat, this mad doctor decided he was ready to make a transplant attempt?”

  “Karin Wheat is the flaw in my reasoning,” Drewe says quickly. “To make a transplant attempt, the surgeon would obviously need his recipient alive in an operating room, not dead in New Orleans. But I still think the last young woman killed prior to Wheat was meant to be a transplant donor. What was the elapsed time between her death and Karin Wheat’s murder?”

  “Six weeks,” I reply.

  She sighs in frustration. “That’s too long. No way a gland would remain viable that long.”

  “Oh no,” I nearly moan.

  “What?” Miles asks.

  “Brahma’s primary topic of conversation with Karin Wheat was immortality. That was the subject of her last novel. They both seemed obsessed with it.”

  “Score one for my theory,” says Drewe.

  “But he didn’t kidnap Karin Wheat,” Miles reminds her. “He murdered her.”

  “But he did kidnap Rosalind May,” she counters. “And May was almost the same age as Wheat, right? Fifty is definitely the downhill side of the hormonal roller coaster. Perfect candidate for what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe the killer wanted to kidnap Wheat,” I suggest.<
br />
  “But something went wrong.”

  “Maybe,” Miles allows. “She was the only victim who died with a drug in her system. Ketamine. It’s an animal tranquilizer.”

  “Your tech called me two nights ago. Baxter said May had been missing for two days. That means she was kidnapped—”

  “The night after Wheat was murdered.”

  I nod. “They wanted to kidnap Wheat, somehow bungled it, and decided to go for May as a substitute.”

  “A preplanned backup,” Miles suggests.

  “But what went wrong with the Wheat scenario? Why kill her?”

  Drewe slaps the tabletop, stunning us both. “There’s another victim,” she says.

  “What?” Miles asks.

  “There has to be. Wheat was the intended transplant recipient. Something went wrong, so they took Rosalind May the next night. But who’s the donor? The last murder of a young girl—that we know about—was six weeks before Wheat’s death. That’s too long for a harvested pineal to remain medically viable. That means another young woman was kidnapped in the interval, or is about to be. She’s the donor.”

  “My God,” I whisper, starting to believe for the first time.

  Drewe looks at me. “How long does it take you to find out an EROS woman is dead or missing?”

  “Weeks, usually. I only found out about Karin so fast because she was a celebrity.”

  “What about Rosalind May? She was only taken days ago.”

  “It’s complicated, but it comes down to coincidence. She was a blind-draft account holder who hadn’t been active for a while but was still paying her fees. When her account went to zero, one of Miles’s techs started poking around. A week ago, her account went active again. It looks like she was talking to Brahma right up until the second he took her.”

  “My God. Are there more accounts like that?”

  “About fifty.”

  Drewe goes still. “The donor is one of those fifty. Only her account hasn’t dropped to zero yet, so nobody but the killer knows she’s part of this. Both she and May could be lying on an operating table right now, waiting for—”