Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You know her?” asked Buckner.

  Kali’s face was beautiful even in death. A perfect oval, with strong planes and sculpted ridges covered by nutmeg skin. Her eyes were open, the sclera like old ivory framing fixed onyx irises. There were lines in the skin at the corners of her eyes and lips, some wrinkles gathered at her throat, but few other signs of age. As I studied her face, I noticed something small and bright against the skin just below the jawline. I started to crouch and look, then realized that I was looking at the feathers of a tranquilizer dart.

  “Well?” grunted Buckner.

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  “Ever talk to her on EROS?” asked Mayeux.

  “How would I know that?”

  “Take a look at the rest,” said Buckner.

  “You don’t have to,” Mayeux said. “Your wife ID’d the other body.”

  I moved forward anyway, propelled by something deeper than thought. The center of the room was a circus of small red footprints, as though a dance had been held for bleeding women. The walls and everything hanging on them were spattered with blood. Flung drops on a framed print. A large splash near the baseboard. A fine spray across the faces of two guitars.

  “Where is she?”

  “Behind the headboard of the bed,” Buckner said.

  I took the required steps and stopped near the head of my twin bed. There, propped low against the wall, sat Erin’s nude body. If her eyes had been open, I probably could not have stood to look, so heavily did the responsibility for her death crash down upon me in that moment. Her dark hair hung mercifully over her breasts, but her legs were splayed grotesquely apart, as though she were a mannequin laid out for an anatomy lesson. I wanted to shout at Buckner to cover up her nakedness, but something caught my attention and held it with paralyzing power.

  Cut into Erin’s tanned abdomen, just above her pubic hair, was a vertical incision about three inches long. There was very little blood, just enough to define the wound. “Is that what killed her?”

  “No,” said Buckner from just behind me. “She’s got a big knife wound in her back, above her kidneys. Probably hit the heart. See the blood?”

  Then I did see. Erin was propped in a black pool of blood. I hadn’t noticed because the headboard made a shadow there. As I stared, one question filled my mind. “Does she have any head wounds?”

  “No,” Mayeux answered. “I checked.”

  I looked back at him. Both of us were asking the same silent question. Why not?

  “We found the murder weapon,” said Buckner. “Under the bed. It’s some kind of curved dagger. Looks like a movie prop.”

  For the Thugs, murder was a holy sacrament. . . . I gazed around the room, looking at the overturned furniture and scattered papers and drying blood, trying to fathom what had happened, what could possibly have brought Erin here so soon after our confrontation at her house.

  “Best we can figure,” Buckner said, “is one or more persons surprised your sister-in-law here in the house. She may have been in this room, she may not. Maybe she fled here. Your telephone lines were cut. . . .”

  Maybe she fled here—

  “. . . got a deputy out back fixing them up for you. He’s handy with that stuff. Take it easy, Detective, he’s saving the cut ends for the crime lab boys. Anyway, I’d say Mrs. Graham did something very unexpected in here. She snatched that sword off the wall—that is your sword, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she defended her life as best she could. She did a pretty good job of it, too. She hit that foreign woman at least five times on the arms, then ran her through like a pig on a spit. Of course by doing that she lost her weapon. At that point, I figure a second assailant got her.”

  “What makes you think there was another person here?”

  “Footprints. We found a pair of size-nine Reeboks that didn’t match the shoes of anybody working the scene.”

  Brahma wears Reeboks? “Oh.”

  “Found the actual shoes right in the middle of the floor. The perp obviously knew we could track him that way, so he walked through the puddle at the door, then tossed the shoes back in. He’s running barefoot now. That’s tough going in fields and woods, especially at night.”

  “How do you know he didn’t take a pair of shoes from my closet and put them on in the hall?”

  Buckner stared blankly at me for a moment. Then anger clouded his eyes. “Would you know if a pair was missing?”

  “Let me look.”

  One glance into the closet told me a pair of Nikes were gone. “Air Jordans. White with blue trim.”

  “Shit,” Buckner muttered, writing on a pad he produced from his khaki shirt pocket. “What size?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Well, that should slow him down a little.”

  Feeling a strangely protective urge, I moved back toward Erin’s body.

  “Your buddy Turner wear a nine?” Buckner asked sharply.

  “I don’t know what size he wears. But bigger than a nine. He’s skinny, but he’s well over six feet. Probably a twelve.”

  “What I can’t figure,” said Buckner, “is why one of the perps didn’t just shoot Mrs. Graham.”

  “They shot her with the dart gun,” Mayeux said. “In the shoulder,” he added, looking at me.

  “I meant a real gun.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have one.”

  Buckner shook his head. “That’s a pretty risky way to break into a house. Especially in Mississippi.”

  “I told you they’re not from Mississippi,” Mayeux said.

  Buckner gave him a scowl.

  I said, “You do know this guy has been using a private plane to get to the crime scenes? And there’s an old crop dusting strip about two miles west of this house.”

  “Deputies already found it,” Buckner said. “Tracks in the mud. Somebody used it tonight.”

  “Mud? How long has it been raining here?”

  “Sixty to eighty minutes. That plane probably took off less than an hour ago.”

  Good God, I thought, realizing how close Drewe had come to dying with her sister.

  “Something else,” said Buckner. “One of my men thinks the killer might have been wounded. Based on the amount of blood and the spatter patterns. Makes sense to me, with knives and swords flailing around.”

  “He might be a hemophiliac.”

  Buckner’s eyes came alive like a bird dog’s. “A what?” “A bleeder. He might be a bleeder.”

  “How in hell would you know that?”

  I thought of telling Buckner the truth, but that would probably put me in a jail cell. “Something I overheard an FBI agent say in Washington.”

  “I knew them sonsabitches was holding out on us!” Buckner said furiously. “I’m gonna burn some federal ass over this.” His right cheek twitched. “So maybe this asshole’s hurt bad enough to crash his plane?”

  “Harper,” Mayeux said gently. “I can’t understand why this dark woman caught a tranquilizer dart like your sister-in-law did. You got any ideas on that?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Do I need to call a lawyer?”

  Buckner turned on me then. “Son, you might need to call a bodyguard when Bob Anderson finds out what happened to his little girl.” And with that he marched out of the room, straight through the blood at the door.

  I covered my eyes with one hand. “What the hell am I going to tell her father?” I mumbled. “Her mother? Her husband?”

  Mayeux pushed me down onto the bed and sat beside me. “I’ve done it a hundred times. And it ain’t ever easy. This’ll be worse, ’cause it’s family.”

  “It’s not that. You realize what happened here? I killed her, Mike. I killed her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Miles Turner and I sat in this room for three days straight and tried our damnedest to stop that son of a bitch on our own. Only
it didn’t work out the way we expected.”

  “Holy Mary. That’s where you got that hemophilia stuff? You been talking to this freak on the computer?”

  “Hell, yes. So has Dr. Lenz. That’s how his wife got killed. But Miles . . . he told me there was no way Brahma could trace—”

  “Brahma? Who’s that?”

  “That’s what we call the killer. Miles swore he’d rigged a way to keep him from tracing our location. Something at the phone company switching station—”

  “Slow down, now.”

  “No! No . . . something’s wrong. There weren’t any typos in any of his messages to me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember the meeting in New Orleans? I told you the killer never makes any typographical errors. His communications are always perfect, and fast. But just before each murder, he makes as many mistakes as anybody else. Miles said he had a voice-recognition unit at his home base, but when he traveled it wouldn’t function reliably, so he didn’t use it. Just a notebook computer and a cellular phone like everybody else. That’s how we could predict when he was moving. His typos would skyrocket. But they didn’t! Something’s wrong, Mike.”

  “How long since you last talked to the guy? This Brahma?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. He could have flown here from anywhere since yesterday. As long as he didn’t contact you, you’d never have a chance to see any typos.”

  The simplicity of Brahma’s tactic dazed me. “Goddamn it! You’re right!”

  “But why should he kill your sister-in-law? Just because she was here? I don’t buy it. Not with that weird abdominal wound. He took something out of her, man. But it sure wasn’t her pineal gland.” Mayeux looked uncomfortably at me, then at the floor. “I think maybe it was her ovaries.”

  Jesus Christ. God help me.

  “What kind of shit did you talk about with this nut, anyway?”

  “He did most of the talking,” I said, trying to recall whether I said anything that could have led Brahma to this house. But I can’t. And even if he somehow traced the photo of Erin, that wouldn’t have led him here. Could he have been watching Erin’s house while I was there? Did he follow her from Jackson to here? Why the hell did she come out here anyway?

  “You okay, Cole?”

  “No. I want Erin’s body covered up. I want all these bastards out of my house. Right now!”

  “Calm down, man. That sheriff wants to arrest you. I told him you were with me when the murder went down, but he could still bust you. Material witness, whatever. He’s pretty steamed, this happening on his watch. That juice you used in Jackson cuts two ways, remember. Bob Anderson’s a big man around here, and his daughter just got butchered, pardon my French. Buckner’s cranking up a manhunt that’ll make the John Wilkes Booth posse look like Cub Scouts, and if you make the wrong kind of noise, he’ll stomp on you with hobnail boots.”

  I bent over, put my head beneath my knees, and breathed the way you’re supposed to when you take a kick in the groin. “An hour ago you wanted to arrest me, Mike. Why the change?”

  Mayeux laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You didn’t have nothing to do with this. Other than being stupid. I seen a lot of killing. And this is some real weirdness we got here.” He looked around the office again. “I think maybe this bad boy’s started coming apart. Decompensating, or whatever they call it. And I think maybe you’re the reason. Some way.”

  I straightened up and wiped the damp hair out of my eyes. “What are you going to do?”

  “Tell Buckner to put some security on your house. Call Baxter at Quantico and tell him he better get his federal shit together before this freak single-handedly cuts Investigative Support from the national budget. After that, I’m not sure.”

  “Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot.”

  Mayeux pulled me up from the bed, led me to the window, helped me climb out of it, then followed. The last thing I remember him saying was, “Smells like a goddamned slaughterhouse in there, Troop. Somebody get those bodies into a wagon.”

  With Drewe breathing deeply beside me, I sat listening to the bumps and curses and slamming doors and groaning engines of the uniformed battalion’s slow retreat. After the last vehicle pulled away, I realized I was avoiding looking at something. The telephone by the bed. Then I remembered it might not be working. As I reached out to check for a dial tone, it rang.

  It was Bob Anderson, calling from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. I didn’t hesitate or even try to soften the blow. With a guy like Bob, a man who’s been in combat, you give him the truth and let him deal with it his own way. After a stunned silence, he asked a couple of questions in a voice that sounded colder than Brahma’s digital facsimile. One was, “Did she suffer?” I lied and told him Erin had not. After that, his only concern was for the living.

  Satisfied that Drewe was all right for the time being, he focused on his wife and Patrick and Holly. He wanted to tell Margaret in person, but he was almost three hours from home. Most men would have given up there, but Bob decided to send a friend over to his house—not to console his wife but to cut the telephone line and head off any busybody neighbors who might take it into their heads to drive over and tell her the bad news. Before the wire could be cut, I was to call Margaret and tell her that Drewe and Erin had gone to Jackson on an errand. The prospect of telling this lie made me uneasy, but Bob didn’t give me time to equivocate.

  I felt like an infantryman being given orders by a veteran sergeant. When I reminded Bob that a crime like this might make the late news in Jackson, he said he’d take care of that too. To my embarrassed relief, he did not question me in detail about who might have killed Erin. Either he suspected Patrick and did not want to voice those suspicions, or he suspected the truth and did not want to flay me long-distance. After he signed off, I realized that Erin’s death was a tragedy Bob had probably rehearsed many times over the years.

  I know now that I’ve rehearsed for it too, the way we do with any friend whose life is ruled by chance or driven by demons. Yet for her to die this way leaves me feeling ambushed by fate, as though a relative had survived cancer only to be run over by a truck. Steadying my shaking hands, I pick up the phone and dial the Anderson house.

  “Hello?” Margaret says. “Erin?”

  I feel like I’ve connected to a parallel universe where physical events register only after a confusing time delay. Pulling the phone into the bathroom, I shut the door and say, “This is Harper, Mrs. Anderson.”

  “Oh. Is Erin there? She told me not to call, but it’s getting late. I’m worrying myself into a migraine, Harper. She was acting so strangely.”

  Keep your voice steady, says my instinct. A mother can sense danger to her children like a shark smells blood. “Erin’s not here, Mrs. Anderson. Drewe either. They went to Jackson on some kind of shopping errand. They left a note, but they didn’t say what they were after.” I pause. “What time did you see Erin?”

  “She called around three-thirty and asked if I could keep Holly while she talked to Drewe about something.”

  My heartbeat skips, then starts to race.

  “You know me,” Margaret goes on, “I didn’t want to butt in, so I didn’t ask any questions.”

  “You’ve got Holly?”

  “Lord, yes. She got so hungry I finally fed her supper. I know Erin’s finicky about what this girl eats, but I didn’t have anything healthy so I gave her frozen pizza. Erin will just have to get over it.”

  For the first time tonight, tears well in my eyes. “I’m sure it’s okay, Mrs. Anderson.”

  This time Margaret says nothing. Just as I am about to speak, she blurts, “Harper, is Erin going to leave Patrick?”

  She’s already left him, says a manic voice in my head. “I don’t know, Mrs. Anderson. They’ve been having some problems, I think.”

  “She can’t leave him, Harper. She can’t. That boy worships the ground she walks on. I
want you to talk to her. She might listen to you.”

  I’m squeezing the phone so hard that the skin on the back of my hand feels like it might split. “I’ll do what I can, Mrs. Anderson. I think you’re doing the best thing you can just by keeping Holly. In fact, if she gets sleepy, why don’t you just put her to bed over there?”

  Another silence. “I hear you. All right, I’ll do that. And you do what you can to straighten this mess out.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Bye.”

  “Bye-bye.”

  My heart is still racing, but my hands are steadier. Holly is safe. At least there’s that. As silently as possible, I slip back into the bedroom. Drewe’s chest rises and falls with comforting regularity beneath the coverlet. Not wanting to wake her, I sit in a hard wooden rocker in one corner and resume my vigil.

  Why in God’s name did Erin come to our house? If she called her mother at three-thirty, she did it right after I left her house. She told Margaret she had to talk to Drewe about something. What? Did she decide I didn’t have the guts to tell Drewe the truth about Holly after all? Maybe. But even if she did, she would have given me a chance to do it. Maybe she decided that telling the truth would be a mistake after all. Did she rush after me to stop me? Unlikely. Her resolve to finally be rid of the lie was ironclad. So why did she come?

  Then I see it. She must have decided that telling Drewe the truth was not my obligation, but hers. Drewe and I are husband and wife now; we weren’t at the time of the affair. But Drewe and Erin were sisters. And by that logic, Erin’s was the greater betrayal. Of all the alternatives, this is the noblest, and nobility was Erin’s predominant state of mind when I last saw her. Alive, I mean.

  Rocking quietly in the dark, I recall the unalloyed panic that jolted me when I believed Holly unaccounted for. If she really had been missing, I would have been the one that required sedation. Children are stolen from parents every day in this country, by monsters as brutal as Brahma. I met two such parents in Chicago. And though Erin is lost to me now, to us all, I thank whatever god or fate exists that I am not now thrashing through the fields in search of my daughter, that Holly is safe and warm in the loving arms of her grandmother.