Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “No,” I say, cutting him off. Miles’s manipulative tendencies are never far from the surface. As I consider his words, an image of Agent Margie Ressler’s gamine face comes into my mind. “What about a fictional woman?”

  “The plus is that she can be whatever you want. The negative is that she won’t really exist. Which means I’ll have to create her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bureaucracy. Social Security card, driver’s license, motor vehicle records, address. I’m sure the FBI faked credit cards and everything else for Lenz’s decoy.”

  “They did,” I confirm, recalling Lenz’s boasts in his car. “Can you do that?”

  Miles yawns heroically. “Sure. Only I don’t have the help they do. If we go that way, I’ll keep it simple. No medical records at all. That way, Brahma has to go with whatever you tell him.”

  Despite anxiety about the risks, I’m fascinated by Miles’s proposal. Rather than trying to lure a predator toward us in the hopes of trapping him—which is basically Lenz’s plan—Miles means to trick him into swallowing a hand grenade. As his eyes close, I say, “Those goals you mentioned? Contacting Brahma, keeping the relationship going long enough for him to switch to e-mail, all that?”

  “Yeah?” He opens one eye.

  “You forgot one.”

  Both eyes are open now. “What?”

  “Catching the son of a bitch before he decides to kill me.”

  He smiles; then both eyes close.

  Miles is snoring softly—with three cups of coffee in him, no less—while I sit at my desk with the contents of his briefcase spread in front of me. Drewe is still on the phone with her mother. Occasionally her voice rises above the hum of air conditioner and computer.

  There’s enough stolen information on my desk to fill twelve hours with steady reading. Not merely Nexis newspaper stories, but lab results and detectives’ case notes, things that would put Miles under a jail were they ever entered as evidence in a court of law. Yet all of it pales into insignificance beside the photographs of the victims.

  Confucius was right about pictures and words. All the words on the paper in this pile add up to mere statistics, but the faces are real. The faces are people. A more analytical man might look at those statistics and see gold, see his destiny, might feel certain that after enough solitary study of those lines and squiggles, a new relationship would emerge like a hologram from the chaos and point him toward the killer. But my analytical gift ends at murder. I feel too much empathy with the women in these searing images to place myself at the appropriate remove for objective study. Perhaps this is the reason I first strayed out of my father’s footsteps.

  Drewe has that capacity for distance. It may well be what allowed her to make logical leaps about Brahma while Miles and I plodded along like boys following bread crumbs. Strange that emotional distance would be a requirement for those who heal, whereas I, who feel others’ pain more keenly than most, have hurt far more people than I have helped.

  What can I do for these poor women? What do they need? Someone to avenge them? They’re certainly past hurting now. As this thought dies, I realize what holds my gaze to their haunted faces. They are eternally unattainable. Like Keats’s Grecian figures, they will possess their mystery, and thus their beauty, forever. I can never touch them. And if I can never touch them, I can never hurt them. Granting myself that reprieve, I am able to admit that I do know what they need. They need justice.

  But justice cannot be served until their killer has been hounded to his lair, chained, and brought to a place of judgment. It may be that Miles and I can assist with the first task. Yet my logic remains sound enough to comprehend the scale of the problem. For almost a year Brahma has gone about his business without hindrance. In all the world, I alone—because of a few ripples in the EROS net—perceived the foul wake of his passing. I reacted late, but I reacted, and by so doing created a window of opportunity. And then in Dallas the FBI squandered forever the only advantage it would ever have—surprise.

  Now Brahma is hiding. And he has an infinite matrix in which to conceal himself. I once thought the vastness of America was geographic, that miles of space or denseness of wood made massive measure. Then, on an icy Chicago street, I met a man and woman searching for their stolen child. After a single conversation, a couple of long looks into their hollow eyes, I saw that every mountain Lewis and Clark traversed, every steaming swamp De Soto pushed through, every plain the pioneers crossed has been transected by the compass, riven by the surveyor’s level, scarred by roads, photographed by satellites, and reduced to a thing you can fold into your glove compartment. But those lost parents stared across an uncharted sea of people, praying in vain for the phosphorous glow of a long-vanished trail, each town an eddy, each city a whirlpool that could swallow a hundred children without trace. And across that sea float the millions of milk cartons carrying photographs of the missing like messages in bottles, bound for garbage cans as surely as the ruins of last night’s dinner.

  Looking at Miles’s stolen photographs, I know that somewhere in that same sea moves a man who saw final agony twist the faces of these women, who heard the last word or plea or wail that passed their lips. He moves comfortably, in the knowledge that maps do not exist to lead men to him. That he can do his grisly work in peace. That he can taunt his hunters. That only an accident will raise his head above the mob and mark him as a son of Cain.

  Chapter 27

  I found Brahma at eleven thirty p.m.

  To my surprise, he was deep in conversation with “Lilith”—Dr. Lenz’s personal Eliza Doolittle.

  I’d been looking for him for about an hour, stopping occasionally to run a global search of EROS, checking for “Anne Bridges,” the account name that backed up Lenz’s “Lilith.” I also searched a few chat lobbies for “Shiva” and “Levon” and “Prometheus” and “Kali.” As I searched, I wondered whether Brahma, like me, could roam behind the digital walls that appear solid to EROS’s subscribers but yield like curtains to its system operators. If so, he could see me searching. Yet I had no choice if I wanted to find him. After a while, Drewe leaned in, saw Miles sleeping, said good night, and padded away without offering a summation of Erin’s problems. I wasn’t about to ask for one.

  And then I got the hit.

  At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The alias interacting on-screen with “Lilith” was not “Shiva” or any of the other familiar noms de plume. It was “Maxwell.” Yet after reading less than twenty lines of text, I knew “Maxwell” was Brahma. My excitement made me clumsy when I tried to activate the new voice-synthesis program, but I finally got it going.

  Now my LaserJet printer hums and whispers as it records the conversation, while the digital voices of “Lilith” and “Maxwell” spar and weave and intertwine like mating serpents. They seem to be discussing a sexual incident that sounds like a cross between a group sex encounter and a gang rape.

  LILITH> It _was_ my decision.

  MAXWELL> I don’t accept that. Why did you let nine men have their way with you?

  LILITH> It’s not easy to explain.

  MAXWELL> Was it you who suggested it?

  LILITH > It wasn’t that clear-cut.

  MAXWELL> Wasn’t it suggested by the first man? The one who took you upstairs?

  LILITH> Why do you think it was upstairs?

  MAXWELL> It always is. Or else in a basement.

  LILITH> It was upstairs. At a fraternity house. And I don’t remember exactly. It was like . . . we were doing it, my date and I, on this bottom bunk. And then this other guy walks in. A boy really. He said, “Hey, I’m really drunk, I need to crash.” And then he climbed up on the top bunk to sleep.

  MAXWELL> But he didn’t sleep.

  LILITH> No. In a minute or so I opened my eyes and saw his head leaning off the edge of the top bunk, looking down, watching us. Looking into my eyes. He looked like he was watching God or something. Wide-eyed like a kid. And then his head disappear
ed and I noticed the top bunk was moving too. And like I knew what he was doing up there. He couldn’t help himself. And when my date finished a second later, I said, I think your friend is frustrated. He looked at me funny—he was pretty drunk, too—and he said, you wanna help him out or something? And I just laughed and said I felt sorry for him. Why not? I swear to God I’ll never know why I did that. So my date got up and laughed, and the kid from the top bunk came down. He was really timid at first, really gentle, but then he started thrashing and moaning. It took him like a minute and a half to finish. And by the time he did, I noticed the first guy was gone and there were two other guys standing by the door.

  MAXWELL> Inside the room?

  LILITH> Yes. The door was half open. And I don’t know why, but I just sat up and said, Who’s next? And they practically fought each other right there. It was like wild animals or something. After that it was all sort of a blur.

  MAXWELL> Nine men in a row?

  LILITH> Does this turn you on or something?

  MAXWELL> It saddens me, Lilith.

  LILITH> It shouldn’t. Don’t you understand what I told you? It’s what finally _liberated_ me.

  MAXWELL> I don’t believe that.

  LILITH> Because you don’t understand it. All these guys, these boys whose whole lives were wrapped up in their egos and the size of their penises, this macho thing, every one of them was the same. You see? They all wanted the same thing, me, and none was any better than the others, or any worse, and I could take whatever they dished out and reduce them to nothing. They came in like lions and went out like lambs.

  MAXWELL> You’re not telling the complete truth, Lilith. I _know_ it was degrading. Did they stand around watching each other do it to you?

  LILITH> I wouldn’t allow that. One at a time.

  MAXWELL> Was the room dark or light?

  LILITH> Dark.

  MAXWELL> Did they all have you the same way? Missionary position?

  LILITH> A couple tried to turn me over, but I knew better.

  MAXWELL> How long did each one last?

  LILITH> Why do you want to dwell on this stuff?

  MAXWELL> Lilith.

  LILITH> Some lasted a few minutes, others fifteen seconds. Most around two minutes, I guess.

  MAXWELL> So it was just twenty minutes out of your life. No big deal. That’s what you’re telling me?

  LILITH> No! I’m telling you it _was_ a big deal. But not in the way you think. After it happened, I no longer felt that stupid sense of obligation to satisfy whoever happened to want me. A guy has an erection, so what. That’s his problem. When I was younger I didn’t understand that. It may sound naive, but I didn’t.

  There is a sudden silence. I wait with my hands gripping the arms of my chair. Where is Lenz getting this stuff? Despite my assertions to the contrary with Miles, I’m having a hard time remembering that “Lilith” is a middle-aged psychiatrist sitting in McLean, Virginia. The “female” voice synthesized by the computer probably contributes to the illusion, but Lenz’s nightmarish story is freighted with the pain of real experience. As I begin to worry that he has somehow blown it, “Maxwell’s” voice and text resume.

  MAXWELL> You say you didn’t know any of these men?

  LILITH> I knew the first guy. He was the guy who asked me to the party. My date. Hah.

  MAXWELL> I think you knew someone else at the party, Lilith.

  LILITH> Like who?

  MAXWELL> A former lover?

  Another caesura, then:MAXWELL> Lilith?

  LILITH> I’m here.

  MAXWELL> I think you let these men have sex with you not to liberate yourself but to hurt someone else.

  LILITH> You don’t understand anything.

  MAXWELL> Be honest. Only truth can free you.

  LILITH> You think you’re pretty damned smart, don’t you?

  MAXWELL> I see what is. I sense pain.

  LILITH> Yes, he was there.

  MAXWELL> A former lover?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> He’d thrown you away for someone else?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> Was this someone else at the party too?

  LILITH> No.

  MAXWELL> Did this young man learn what you were doing upstairs? That you were servicing his friends?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> Did he come upstairs?

  The longest silence yet kicks up my pulse rate. But finally “Lilith” responds.

  LILITH> Yes. Someone pushed him into the room. They were yelling at him. Telling him to take a turn.

  MAXWELL> Did he?

  LILITH> No.

  MAXWELL> What did he do?

  LILITH> He started crying.

  MAXWELL> Really.

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> And?

  LILITH> I told him if he wanted me, he’d have to wait in line.

  MAXWELL> Someone was fucking you while you said this?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> What happened then?

  LILITH> He tried to stop it.

  MAXWELL> Did it stop?

  LILITH> No. They beat him up and threw him out.

  MAXWELL> How did you feel after that? After he left?

  LILITH> I wanted it to stop then. I wanted to go after him.

  MAXWELL> To explain? To tell him how badly he’d hurt you?

  LILITH> Yes. And how I’d wanted to hurt him back, so he’d understand what he’d done to me. MAXWELL> Did it stop?

  LILITH> No.

  MAXWELL> Why not?

  LILITH> I was trapped.

  MAXWELL> By your own perversity.

  LILITH> I guess. I don’t like to think about that part of it.

  MAXWELL> The door to the room was open, wasn’t it?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> People were watching.

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> How many, Lilith?

  LILITH> I don’t know.

  MAXWELL> How many had you?

  LILITH> I don’t KNOW! Some got in line two or three times.

  MAXWELL> And what was it like?

  LILITH> Horrible.

  MAXWELL> What was it _like_, Lilith?

  LILITH> Like drowning. Like they were holding my head under water. I couldn’t . . . fight. They were too strong.

  MAXWELL> Did you call out for help?

  LILITH> Yes.

  MAXWELL> To whom? Your mother?

  LILITH> No. If my mother had seen me that way

  I would have killed myself.

  MAXWELL> Your father?

  LILITH> My father was dead. There was no one.

  MAXWELL> The police?

  LILITH> I didn’t report it.

  MAXWELL> You couldn’t, could you? You’d agreed to have sex with more than one man. At what point did it become rape?

  LILITH> I knew that’s how a cop would see it.

  How men would see it.

  MAXWELL> Women too, Lilith. Women are far more cruel judges of female character than men, I assure you.

  LILITH> You don’t have to tell me that. But I meant what I said before about how it changed me. At some point during the thing, I just rose above it all. Like I died and rose ten feet above the bed and hovered there, and saw myself being humped by these brainless bastards.

  MAXWELL> How did you feel about them?

  LILITH> I didn’t feel anything. I saw them like a pack of wolves. Biological jello in the evolutionary chain. Consciously, they were just animals trying to show off to each other. Unconsciously they were trying to spread their genes. I just thank God I didn’t get pregnant from it. I might have killed myself.

  MAXWELL> You talk a lot about killing yourself.

  LILITH> I used to think about it a lot. Before that night, anyway. Like after a date when I had let a guy screw me, and then he wouldn’t call. That kind of purgatory feeling when all the other girls are out with their boyfriends, and you know they’re holding out for that letter jacket or that pin or that wedding ring, “Oh no, Jimmy,
not there, not yet, just on the outside of my panties. I’m so sorry, sweetie. I can help you though, I’ll just use my hand, okay?”

  MAXWELL> It sounds like you’ve been there yourself.

  LILITH> Guys have told me that stuff.

  MAXWELL> And you never held out for anything?

  LILITH> Not back then. I dropped my panties for any good-looking guy with a hard-on.

  MAXWELL> And now?

  LILITH> I still don’t “hold out.” Because someone who holds out is on the defensive. I’m not on the defensive anymore.

  MAXWELL> No?

  LILITH> No. I fight for what I want, and I get it. I’ll bet I make more money than any of those idiot jocks who raped me.

  MAXWELL> I wouldn’t be surprised, Lilith. There’s just one thing I want to know.

  LILITH> My address, right? Or what color is my pubic hair? Christ, you’re all alike.

  MAXWELL> Not at all. I would like to know what you’re doing on EROS.

  I am praying Lenz will reply quickly, but the next voice that speaks is not his.

  MAXWELL> It doesn’t seem to me that someone who has experienced what you say you have, and grown spiritually from it, would be spending time on a sexual online service. N’est-ce pas?

  LILITH> I’m not a sexual being anymore? Is that your point? Maybe you’ll figure it out eventually. Maybe you’ll see me again here. Maybe you won’t.

  MAXWELL> I’m sure I will.

  LILITH> I have a question for you, Max.

  MAXWELL> Yes?

  LILITH> How long is your cock?

  MAXWELL> I shall not dignify that.

  LILITH> I mean it. I like them thick at the bottom. Think you can follow fifteen guys in one night?

  MAXWELL> Not to my taste, thank you. I’m a fastidious man.

  LILITH> You’re a liar. I’ll bet you’re playing with yourself right now.

  MAXWELL> You’re a hostile person, Lilith. Where did all that rage begin?

  LILITH>