Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “He killed a woman in New Orleans with impunity.”

  It’s my turn to chuckle. “New Orleans isn’t the South I’m talking about.”

  “I get the feeling you believe the killer is not from the South.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, he doesn’t write like a Southerner.”

  “He is remarkably literate.”

  “Fuck you, Doctor. Ever read Faulkner? Thomas Harris?”

  “I meant for a serial murderer, Mr. Cole. No need to get defensive.”

  A soft knock sounds at the door. I look over quickly, half expecting Miles. When the door opens, a slender woman with cinnamon skin enters soundlessly and places a silver tea service on Lenz’s desk. The sweating pink Tab can looks incongruous on the gleaming tray. Without meeting my eyes she offers me a glass of ice, but I take only the can, pop the top, and drink half the contents in a few long swallows. Her black eyes rise to mine with disapproval. I try for a moment to guess her race but find myself at a loss. Living in Mississippi doesn’t give you much practice for this. There it’s either black or white, with a smattering of Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese, and Hispanic.

  Lenz watches the dark woman pour his tea without comment. After she exits, he says, “Why don’t we leave sex and violence for a moment?”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you earn a lot of money?”

  “Making money’s not a crime yet, is it?”

  “Were your parents wealthy?”

  I lie back on the couch and focus on the stained ceiling tiles. “My mother grew up on a farm that didn’t have electricity until she was fourteen years old. She picked cotton with her own hands all the way through college. In case you don’t know, wealthy people don’t pick cotton.”

  “Is money important to you?”

  “Is that a serious question?”

  “Your friend Mr. Turner seems to think you place an inordinate value on it.”

  “He talked to you about me?”

  “A bit.”

  I lean up on one elbow. “Tell me one thing he told you.”

  “He told me you keep a cache of gold buried beneath your land.”

  “That lying son of a bitch.”

  “It’s not true?”

  “About the gold? Yeah, it’s true. My grandfather Grant put in a nuclear bomb shelter at the farm during the fifties. Some company was traveling through Mississippi selling plans. Big concrete bastard sunk into the ground. I keep some gold there.”

  “Why?”

  I lie back down and think for several moments. “I was raised by people who grew up during the Depression. I think the memory of that time stayed so real to my parents that it somehow entered me. Not the physical deprivation, but the knowledge that it could actually happen. That the whole social and financial structure of this country could implode and leave nothing but hungry and confused people.”

  “You feel anxiety about something similar happening again?”

  “I work in financial markets, Doctor. Most of the guys I know in Chicago have no real conception of the Depression. They know the word, but the only mental reference point they have is 1987, and that was over in a couple of days. They leverage positions to the moon, trade derivatives they don’t understand, tear apart companies in a day that took decades to build, and don’t see any farther than next week’s paycheck. You’re asking me if I think it could happen again? You should be asking when.”

  “This hoarded gold is insurance against some sort of final collapse?”

  “Laugh if you want. Ask the Russians how important gold is right this minute.”

  “Well, given these apocalyptic feelings, you seem like the last man in the world who’d be playing a game as risky as futures trading.”

  “I don’t mind risk. Because I’m not playing a game.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one who trades commodities has any intention of taking delivery of anything they buy or sell. It’s all a paper illusion, a numbers game. Until that fatal margin call, anyway. One day I decided I’d take delivery on something, just to find out if any of it was real. I’d heard of an old guy in Baton Rouge who took delivery of a truckload of soybeans for the same reason. I chose gold. They delivered it, too. And right now it’s locked in the bottom of that bomb shelter next to some forty-year-old cans of Spam.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “What does that tell you about me? Paranoia’s in my genes? I’ve always known that. I consider it a Darwinian advantage.”

  “Is paranoia the reason a man of your youth and wealth chooses to live in such an isolated place?”

  I raise my hands as if echoing his question.

  “Let’s try another tack. Why did you wait so long to go into the career for which you seem so singularly suited?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lenz’s voice swings back at me like a pendulum. “I’m sure you do.”

  “Does everybody with a green thumb run out and become a gardener?”

  He folds his notepad shut and leans back in his chair. “Let’s say a man is a gifted mathematician. He may not choose mathematics as his career, but he will likely choose a related field, such as architecture or engineering.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Of course you did. Music is fundamentally a mathematical art.”

  “That’s what I’ve always heard. Usually from people who don’t know diddly about music.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sure, you can break music down into mathematics. Classical music, especially. But Doctor, I’ve sat on the porches of tar-paper shacks with guys playing stuff… you wouldn’t believe it. Old arthritic black guys playing out-of-tune guitars and just effortlessly bending the notes into tune, playing with their eyes shut and it didn’t matter anyway ’cause they couldn’t read a note. They play between the numbers, man. And that’s just blues. Think about jazz. Music is math, what a load of crap.”

  “You’re a romantic, Cole.”

  “Music is romantic.”

  “Not all music.”

  “Mine is. The music of my generation, and the one before. Somebody-Oscar Wilde, I think-said that when trying to describe the act of love, humans have two choices, the language of science or the language of the gutter, both of which are inadequate. But rock and roll split the difference. That’s why it endures. It says the unsayable. Rage, angst, alienation, a dozen emotions. But the core of it is sex, Doctor. Sex, love, and obsession.”

  “An interesting thesis.”

  “That’s no thesis. It’s just life.”

  “I’d like to get back to your family for a moment.”

  “Did we ever leave?”

  “Your father was a physician. How did that affect you, growing up?”

  “I never had any anxiety about what my dad did for a living. ‘What does your dad do? He’s a doctor.’ End of conversation.”

  “Negatives?”

  I think a moment. “He wasn’t home a lot of the time. And when he was, it could be weird. I remember times I cut my legs, needed stitches, stuff like that. I’d run in the house yelling, he’d be watching the Saints play or something. He’d take a look through all the blood, then send me off with my mom to clean it up while he waited for the end of the first half. Then we’d finally go down to his office and sew it up. That bugged me when I was young. But I guess it taught me something too. A lot of injuries that look bad aren’t, really. No need to panic, you know?”

  “What else?”

  “Uh… speeding tickets.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “After I got my driver’s license, I’d get stopped by the sheriff or the Yazoo City cops, like every other kid. They’d be writing me a ticket, then they’d look up like they just realized something and say, ‘Are you Dr. Cole’s son?’ Most times they’d just tear up the ticket and let me go my way. At first I thought they were letting me go because they thought my dad was the greatest guy in the w
orld. And some of them did. The black ones, especially. But even the white ones let me go, guys that probably hated my dad. Then I figured out the deal. Dad had been the police doctor for a while. Back several years before. A lot of these guys owed him money. He never would have tried to collect, but they didn’t know that. They figured, I write this kid a twenty-dollar ticket, I get a bill for eight hundred bucks or whatever.”

  “Why did these white police officers hate your father?”

  I take a long, weary breath and exhale slowly. “You’ve arrived back at your second question, only you don’t know it.”

  “Which question?”

  “What am I proudest of.”

  “Ah. Will you answer it now?”

  “I don’t see the relevance.”

  “Please let me decide what’s relevant.”

  “You think I’m going to spill my guts to you in the naive belief that you’d honor doctor-patient confidentiality?”

  Lenz straightens at his desk. “I honor patient confidences absolutely.”

  “Yeah?” Propelled by some contrary impulse, I take out my wallet, withdraw a hundred-dollar bill, cross the room, and stuff the bill into Lenz’s breast pocket. “You’re hired.”

  “You’re testing my patience, Mr. Cole.”

  “And I give you a C-minus. You want to turn off the tape recorder now?”

  “I do not tape my sessions,” he says indignantly.

  “Thank you, Doctor Nixon.”

  Lenz looks genuinely indignant. “You’re making me angry, Cole.”

  I back over to the couch and lie down again. “I’m now officially your patient. What if I tell you I killed those seven women?”

  He catches his breath. “Did you?”

  “Answer my question first.”

  Lenz nervously pushes up the nosepiece of his glasses. “If you’re telling me that you did… well… my honest answer would be that I… I would try to find some other way of proving your guilt than violating doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “What if you couldn’t do that? And you knew I was going to kill again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could always kill me yourself. Then doctor-patient privilege would no longer be in effect, right?”

  “You’re as bad as your friend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The levels of deviousness. I don’t know whether to tell Daniel to arrest Turner or to hire him as a consultant. I think he’s already figured out more about the EROS killer than the Bureau has.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.” Again I wonder if the FBI arrested Miles right on this couch and hauled him off to jail. “On the other hand, maybe Miles knows so much because he is the killer.”

  Lenz doesn’t bite.

  A telephone on the desk emits a soft chirp and the psychiatrist answers, his eyes still focused on me. He listens, then covers the transmitter and says, “Would you mind leaving the room until I’m done?”

  I stand up and step into the hall. Lenz’s sonorous voice resumes behind me, muted by the heavy door. The dark-skinned receptionist is still AWOL from the billing office. I open the waiting-room door on the off chance that Miles may be there, but he isn’t. Thinking I might catch Drewe on her cellular, I step over to the receptionist’s desk. I am reaching for her phone when I notice an envelope with my name on it at the center of the desk. Without hesitation I pick it up and scan the few handwritten words on the paper inside.

  Harper,

  Brahma just logged back onto EROS under alias “Shiva.” With that Wyoming court order, Baxter now has the power he needs to trace the call. I’ll talk to you when I can.

  Ciao

  As I slip the note back into the envelope, the waiting-room door opens and a blond, square-jawed yuppie in a blue business suit steps inside. I crush the envelope into my pants pocket and head back toward Lenz’s office.

  The psychiatrist almost bowls me over as he hurries up the hallway, tugging on his jacket to the jingle of car keys.

  “Sorry, Cole,” he says, his voice clipped. “We’re going to have to talk on the move. This is Special Agent Peter Schmidt.”

  I ignore Agent Schmidt as he steps up behind me. “What are you talking about? Where are we going?”

  “That was Daniel Baxter on the phone. There’s been a new development. I’m needed at Quantico and he told me to bring you along.”

  “What kind of development?” I ask, thinking of Miles’s message.

  “They may have found Rosalind May.”

  My heart thumps. “Dead?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Look, I’ve got a flight to catch tonight, remember?”

  “Cole, need I remind you that you are currently a suspect in seven capital murders?”

  “You know I didn’t kill those women.”

  “What I think doesn’t matter at this point. A woman’s life is at stake.”

  “You’re lying, Doctor. What you think is all that matters.”

  Lenz looks at Agent Schmidt, then at the floor, then back at me. “Our UNSUB’s in Dallas, Texas. It’s your choice. Fly home and be out of it, or watch the killer you smoked out get what’s coming to him.”

  In that moment all the hours I spent reading “David Strobekker’s” dark seductions alone in my office come back to me. Beyond that, the horror and guilt of watching the first CNN report of Karin Wheat’s murder twists in my gut like a strand of barbed wire. I have no choice.

  “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Lenz leads Agent Schmidt and me across the parking lot to a midnight blue Mercedes 450SL. Schmidt starts to get in, but the psychiatrist pulls him aside and speaks softly, and he disappears.

  Lenz drives with assurance, keeping just under the speed limit as he makes for a distant overpass bristling with green metal signs. Afternoon is wearing toward evening, the gray over our heads fading downward to a deep blue.

  “We’re about thirty-five miles from Quantico,” he says, punching a button on his cellular phone, apparently to make sure it’s working.

  “If everything’s happening in Dallas, why are we going to Quantico?”

  “They have certain facilities there.” He threads the Mercedes through a thicket of cars. “You’ll know more soon.”

  “Nice ride,” I comment.

  “A gift from my wife,” he says in a taut voice.

  At that moment Lenz’s cellular rings, and the speed with which he snatches it up betrays the tension he feels. He listens for twenty seconds, says yes twice, and then hangs up.

  “Come on,” I say sharply. “They traced Strobekker’s call through Wyoming to Dallas, right? And they just got an exact address.”

  He looks over in astonishment. “How…? Ah. Turner, of course.” He stares at me another few seconds. “They traced the call from the Lake Champion phone exchange to the WATS line of a mining company in that town. The WATS was connected to Dallas, Texas. To an apartment. Rented under the name of David M. Strobekker.”

  “Holy shit. What’s going to happen?”

  “Dallas FBI and police SWAT teams have already surrounded the complex and evacuated the nearby apartments. Strobekker’s still on-line. An FBI Hostage Rescue Team is en route from Kansas City via jet. They were waiting on alert there so that they could reach any U.S. destination in the shortest possible time.”

  “Don’t you need to be in Dallas? In case there’s a standoff or something? To try to talk the guy out?”

  “Daniel has authorized explosive entry. Rosalind May could be inside, and Strobekker has already proved he’ll kill without mercy. Hostage Rescue blows down the doors as soon as they get there. ETA eighty minutes.”

  “What if Strobekker tries to leave before they get there?”

  “Dallas SWAT takes him down.”

  “You mean they kill him?”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that. Where we’re going, I’ll be able to speak directly to whoever’s in the apartment, if necessary.” />
  I sit back heavily in my seat. Ten minutes ago I was angry and tired; now I taste the euphoria of my name being cleared, of my life getting back to its normal anxiety level.

  Lenz gooses the Mercedes up an on-ramp and joins the southbound stream of traffic on 495. “Cole, I need your help, and you need mine. The best way for you to avoid trouble in this case is to assist with the investigation. But before I can use you, I have to be sure you’re not involved.”

  “But they’re about to nail the guy.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. The evidence in this case suggests a group of offenders working in concert. Is Strobekker himself in that apartment? Or is it the owner of that Indian hair found at one of the crime scenes?”

  Great. “What do you want from me?”

  “Answers. I think you’re a good man haunted by a bad thing. The question is, is that thing related to this case or not?”

  “It’s not, okay? Isn’t my word enough?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Goddamn it, I reported the murders! And so far all I’ve gotten for my trouble is more trouble.”

  The psychiatrist looks away from the darkening road long enough to fix me with a disquieting stare. His face looks like my father’s did the first time he confessed money problems to me. One minute I was looking at a man in his prime-responsible, circumspect, in charge-the next at a drawn visage haunted by failure and doubt. A face about to confide secrets that would change my life forever.

  “I’ve been a forensic psychiatrist more than thirty years,” Lenz says in a voice stripped of all affect. “Thirty years of listening to men describe how they tortured and violated children. Watching videotapes of men tearing women into bloody pieces in vans and basements.” He lowers his head almost defensively. “My work is the benchmark by which others are measured. But not long ago, I reached a point where the compass that had led me thus far no longer functioned. I had problems at home. My work had become an endless round of tedium. Do you have any idea what the Investigative Support Unit actually does, Cole?”

  “Catches serial killers, right?”

  “Wrong. It does exactly what its title says. Gives support. The movie image of FBI agents single-handedly tracking down serial killers is pure fantasy. We advise. Local police do the physical work, make the arrest, and get the credit.”