Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  Is she? whispers a voice in my head. Are you sure?

  The squeak of the rocker stops. Rising quickly, I go to the kitchen and look up the number of the Yazoo County sheriff’s department, which I memorize.

  “Sheriff Buckner, please,” I tell the dispatcher. “This is Harper Cole, from Rain. About the double homicide.”

  After about a minute, Buckner comes on the line. “What is it, Cole?”

  “I talked to Dr. Anderson.”

  “So did I. Just got off the phone with him.”

  “I think you should get some men over to his house and watch until he gets home. Maybe all night.”

  Buckner spits, probably into a cup, and takes his time about answering. “Doc told me he was going to have a friend of his take care of things.”

  “We’re not talking about the same thing, Sheriff. Erin’s three-year-old daughter is over there. I think she might be in danger. Especially if Bob’s friend cuts off communication with the house. You hear what I’m saying?”

  I can almost see Buckner snapping to attention in his chair. “You telling me this serial killer might go after Bob Anderson’s grandchild?”

  “I’m saying there’s no telling what he might do.”

  “Christ! You’ve stirred up some kind of shitstorm around here!”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Hell yes I’ll do it! I’m tempted to cordon off the place with a SWAT team.”

  “Don’t do that! If Mrs. Anderson sees cops, she’ll know something’s up. She’ll start trying to call her neighbors. Can you keep your men out of sight?”

  “You ain’t got to tell me my job, boy. I’ll take care of it. By the way, Doc’s already got a plane lined up. He was talking to me from a car phone on the way to the Memphis airport.”

  I calculate quickly. “How soon will he be here? Hour and a half?”

  “More like thirty minutes. Bob Anderson don’t fool around. He called whatever high roller he was meeting up there and got hold of a King Air. One of my deputies’ll be waiting at the new airport for him.”

  God Almighty. I look around the empty kitchen in a daze.

  “You there, Cole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gotta go. I got a manhunt to run.”

  After hanging up the phone, I look in on Drewe again. She’s still out. But for how long? With Vistaril she could sleep eight more hours or wake up any minute. What am I going to do when she does? What can I tell her? Sooner or later the tough questions will be asked. Should we even stay here in the house? No. Drewe will want to stay at her parents’ house. But she’s still going to wake up here. Bob could show up too. In fact, I should probably expect him. He’ll take care of his wife first, but then he’ll want to see Erin’s body, wherever it is. After that, he’ll come here. To see where it happened. To convince himself that it did happen. And to find out who in holy hell is responsible.

  One thing I do know: I don’t want Drewe or Bob to have to face the abattoir that is my office. Drewe saw it once, and that was too much. I may not be able to wipe out the acts that led to Erin’s death, but I can damn sure scrub every last drop of blood out of that office. If I can’t, I can repaint the goddamn thing by morning. Buckner and the FBI will probably crucify me for destroying evidence, but evidence hasn’t led anyone to Brahma yet. From a cabinet in the laundry room I remove a gallon of Clorox, a bucket, some rubber gloves that are too small for my hands, and a mop, and carry them to my office door.

  The smell hits me with more intensity than it did the first time. This is the coppery stench of death, the rotten fruit of violence. Pouring the Clorox into the bucket, I step into the bathroom and dilute it just enough to be able to breathe, then slosh the pungent mixture across the drying slick by the door. The bleach barely cuts the coagulated blood.

  I bear down hard with the mop in the relatively clear place where Kali lay dead an hour ago. As the black-red mess swirls into scarlet spirals, the anesthetizing torrent of chemicals that must have insulated me up to now begins to slow, and the dark siblings of grief and guilt stir to wakefulness in my soul.

  The mother of my only child is dead.

  My complicity in her death grinds in my belly like slivers of glass. I probably know more about the man who killed her than anyone alive, now that Kali is dead. But I don’t know how he found his way here. I do know he could not and would not have done so had Miles and I not played at catching him. We were fools. Or worse. Somewhere, perhaps not far from here, Brahma is fleeing for his life. He might even be wounded, trying to stanch a river of blood that contains no natural clotting factor. But his fate seems strangely irrelevant now.

  The mother of my only child is dead.

  Erin’s blood yields slowly to the corrosive bleach. My throat works in vain against what feels like a lozenge of acid I cannot swallow, and glutinous tears burn my eyes. They are not healing tears, but tears of self-disgust. My part in drawing Brahma here is nothing beside my true offense. Somewhere in the dark chambers of my brain, the small and fearful animal that rules my subconscious has already computed times and distances, already realized that Erin did not have time to tell Patrick the truth about Holly before she died. If she had, he would have shown up here long before now. One day soon, Patrick and Drewe and Bob and Margaret—someday even Holly herself—will know that through stupidity I invited a depraved killer into our insular world. That knowledge will forever change their opinion of me, as it has my own. But they will never untie the final knot in the twisted skein of desire and consequence that led Erin to this house on this fateful night. The chilling thought that possessed me for an instant this afternoon—that only death could stop her from revealing our secret—has been fulfilled. And as I scrub fiercely at her blood, fighting to feel only honest grief at her passing, the pathetic rat voice of human instinct whispers in my heart:

  Thank God they’ll never know.

  Chapter 39

  The high ring announcing a video link from EROS headquarters is more than enough to get me off my knees after two hours of scrubbing up blood with steel wool and Clorox. Hunched and aching, I shuffle from the far wall of the office toward the EROS computer.

  First there is only Nefertiti, revolving slowly on her black background. Then a window pops up on-screen, its top left corner flashing status numbers that precede the link. Pulling off the cramp-inducing dish gloves, I watch for Jan Krislov’s face to appear. Instead, like a human version of the Cheshire cat, Miles’s grinning visage materializes from the black void.

  “You there, Harper?”

  I sit down, look into the dime-size camera lens mounted atop my monitor, and pull on the headset.

  “No.”

  “The Trojan Horse worked!”

  “Miles—”

  “I’m sitting here with a stack of stuff you wouldn’t believe!”

  “Miles.”

  “What’s wrong? You look like your dog just got hit by a truck. Where’s my congratulations?”

  “Erin’s dead.”

  His smile does not disappear instantly. It seems to peel away, like old paint in a hard wind. He is too intelligent to ask for pointless repetition or to express disbelief. I know that behind his dazed eyes, his brain is already modeling all possible sequences of events that could have produced the result I so baldly stated.

  “Tell me it was a car accident.”

  “No.”

  “Suicide.”

  “Brahma got her, Miles.”

  He touches his forehead with one hand. “Where?” “Right here. My office.”

  Both his hands cover his eyes in an almost childish parody of grief. Then one hand comes away, toward the camera, like the pleading hand of a heretic about to be burnt at the stake.

  “Harper—”

  “How did he know to come here, Miles?”

  The millisecond he looks into his lap tells me the answer is very bad. “How?” I repeat.

  “Oh my god.”

  “Miles!”

  “It’s my f
ault.”

  “It’s our fault, okay?”

  “No, it’s my fucking fault!”

  The agony on his face stops me. “What do you mean?”

  “The switching station.”

  “The telephone company switching station? What are you talking about?”

  He slowly shakes his head, the slow-speed video making his movements appear spastic. “When I hacked the false identity for ‘Erin,’ I did it just like I told you I would. DMV, Social Security, a few credit records. I made her name Cynthia Griffin.”

  “And?”

  “Before I could do any of that, I had to have a physical address. That meant hacking into the phone company’s switching station to match a fake address with your phone number. Everything had to work off of that. See?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I was wrong about the security level at the phone company. It was taking hours to break in. I needed a code or a password from someone inside. I tried to social-engineer it, but I couldn’t snow anybody. Then I got to thinking. Even if I succeeded in breaking in, Brahma might be able to cross-reference enough databases to figure out that the address was fake. You were ready to start up as ‘Erin’—”

  “You used my real address?”

  “It was the only way to make the character bulletproof!”

  “Bulletproof? You goddamn idiot!”

  “I know, okay!” Miles’s voice is high and shaking.

  “Damn it, I thought we’d know if he made any kind of move! From the typos. That’s why I kept asking you if he was making any.”

  “The errors didn’t matter! He just stopped communicating with me for the time it took him to fly down here. Just that stupid e-mail message about getting the JPEG picture of Erin! God, I should have tried to talk to him right then. Then I’d have known he was moving!”

  Miles seems to be shaking, but I can’t tell from the grainy picture whether it’s him or the link. “Oh, God,” he croaks. “I killed her. Christ . . .”

  “We killed her,” I correct him. “You talked me into it, but I’m the one who lured him here. And now I’m scrubbing Erin’s blood off the walls.”

  He wipes his eyes again.

  I am numb. The magnitude of our culpability in Erin’s death is impossible to face for long. “Tell me about the Trojan Horse, Miles.”

  He nods distractedly and raises a sheaf of paper toward his camera lens.

  “What’s that?”

  “The contents of Brahma’s hard drive. The one he downloaded the Trojan Horse onto.”

  A remnant of cold reason revives somewhere in my brain. “Does it tell you who he is?”

  “No name. No ‘I’m Ted Bundy’ or anything like that.” In a curiously childlike gesture, Miles wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I got his EROS software serial number, but it’s registered under David Strobekker.”

  “Damn.”

  “But there are definite leads. He’s got to be working out of New York. He started out killing homeless women here. The first three victims were infected with HIV, so he stopped. That must be when he hit on the EROS idea. He killed Strobekker in Minneapolis for his EROS account—”

  “Where are you getting all this?”

  “I think he used this computer primarily as an interface for EROS. It’s mostly Windows-based applications. He must have his main stuff on a UNIX workstation somewhere. Jesus, I can’t believe this. God—”

  “What else do you have?” I ask, forcing my voice under control.

  “The explosive stuff is the WordPerfect files. He actually kept a record of most of the murders. They’re like descriptive letters. ‘Dear Father, We landed in New Orleans yesterday evening. A humid city, blah, blah.’ ” He shuffles pages. “ ‘Dear Father, We landed in Michigan in the afternoon.’ ‘Dear Father, We landed in Virginia Beach—’ ”

  “Brahma told me his father died in India.”

  Miles shrugs. “So he writes to his dead father. It’s like Psycho maybe. The problem is that the only names mentioned in the letters are those of the victims, or this woman Kali. According to the letters, she did the actual killings. Although Brahma helped with the staging. The mutilations and stuff. Kali must be that girl he picked up in India. The Thuggee girl.”

  “She’s dead too.”

  “She is? How do you know?”

  “Erin killed her. Right here in my office. Ran her through the stomach with the sword off my wall.”

  Miles is thunderstruck.

  “Come on, there must be something in the letters we can use.”

  “Drewe was right about the pineal transplant thing,” he says. “Brahma definitely kidnapped Peter Levy, the man the FBI got off the DonorNet list. Know why?”

  “Come on, Miles.”

  “Levy was a perfect tissue match with Brahma.”

  “Jesus. You mean . . . you think he could already have found a way to have this transplant done to himself?”

  “No. I think Levy’s on permanent standby. For when the procedure’s perfected. I’ll bet when Brahma turned up an exact match for himself, he decided he wasn’t going to take any chances that the guy would get run over by a truck. I guarantee you Levy is being held prisoner somewhere right now.”

  “Good God.”

  “The DonorNet woman’s dead, though. The Navy chick from Virginia Beach. She died on the operating table. Rosalind May did too. Heart attack. For some reason Brahma was going to open her chest—don’t ask me why—and he actually told her about it. The letter said he was trying to make it easier on her. She died of plain terror. It’s pretty sick stuff. But there’s one thing that doesn’t add up in it all.”

  “What?”

  “Why Brahma was fooling with Erin. I mean with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think he saw you as a potential donor. So why was he wasting time with you?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Everything was going fine for him until Karin Wheat’s death. She was meant to be the first live recipient. I think he thought she might voluntarily allow him to perform the transplant. Of course, when he and Kali showed up at her mansion, she freaked, and they had to kill her. After that he went to his backup plan, which was straight kidnapping. Rosalind May. And he got the Navy girl easily enough, the donor. But just before the big operation, his help got greedy on him. He was using unlicensed Indian doctors as assistants, probably recruited by Kali. They tried to extort more money, and Kali killed one of them.”

  “That’s a lead right there! The FBI can start checking Indian physicians who’ve been turned down for U.S. medical licenses. They can concentrate on New York.”

  “Listen to me, Harper. That same night, May died on the operating table. The next day the FBI breached his perimeter in Dallas. Notice a pattern here?”

  “Brahma’s having big problems.”

  “Exactly. But does he lie low and regroup? No. He decides to teach the FBI a lesson. He plays Lenz’s little game, then kills Lenz’s wife. Meanwhile, he’s playing kissy-kissy with you too.”

  “Maybe I was meant to be the next donor.”

  “For who? Who would the recipient have been?”

  “Kali, maybe?”

  This stops Miles. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I don’t think so. Too early. She’d want to know the procedure worked before she risked it.”

  “So why was he talking to me?”

  “Brahma wants immortality, Harper. Physical immortality. Listen to this: ‘Soon I shall stand alone at the pinnacle of the species, the only man with the courage to reach into the fountain. Soon I shall spit in the face of God.’ ”

  “The fountain of youth?”

  “Hell yes. He even talks about Ponce de León. Brahma’s fountain is the pineal transplant. Except just as he gets close, fate starts working against him. And the worse it gets, the more he tells you about himself. He gives you his whole life story, something we know he’s never done before. Why?”

  “Do you know?”

 
“There’s another kind of immortality, Harper.”

  “Just tell me, damn it!”

  “Kids.”

  The word detonates in my subconscious like a bomb. Even with the jerky video image, I can see the excitement on Miles’s face.

  “In the transcripts you faxed, Brahma says he sterilized Kali, remember?”

  “Yes. He said he couldn’t have children by her, so she allowed him to sterilize her.”

  “If he couldn’t have children by her, he wouldn’t need to sterilize her. I think he wouldn’t have children by her.”

  “Because she was Indian,” I say distantly. “Because she had dark skin.”

  “Exactly! All those early questions about skin color! All his life, Brahma’s been looking for someone like his mother for a mate.”

  “But my ‘Erin’ wasn’t that much like Catherine.”

  “Not so much physically, maybe. Although you did change her in that direction a little. Good instinct.”

  “Yeah, obviously.”

  “No, listen, Harper. The answer lies in the story you were telling him. That’s where ‘Erin’ was like his mother, and that’s what attracted him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You blacked out most of what you told Brahma,” Miles says, looking straight into the camera, “but now isn’t the time to be shy. It was all stuff about you and Erin, right? The real Erin.”

  I hesitate only a moment. “Yes.”

  “The big thing in Brahma’s past is incest. He’s a child of incest; he always longed for the sister he never had; Kali was a poor substitute. Right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I started thinking about Erin. And you. Your separate pasts, when things might have happened between you. And I realized that your marriage dates were pretty close together.”

  “Miles—”

  “So I called the Methodist Church down in Rain and found out exactly when Erin and Patrick were married. Then I checked the Social Security computer and got a birth date on Holly Graham—”