by Greg Iles
I watch Lenz from the corner of my eye.
“Killers are monotonous, as a rule,” he goes on. “Variations on a theme. I testify at their trials, seal their fates, then recede back into the shadows. It’s just… rote. The whole goddamned profession is being corrupted. By greed, ambition. Men I’ve trained peddle my ideas to the masses in the form of sensational books, lectures, and Hollywood consulting. None of which I ever had a taste for. I’m a scientist, do you understand? A physician.”
The integrity in Lenz’s voice is almost embarrassing. “I understand, Doctor.”
“The only thing that kept me working was that the prospect of retirement seemed even less appealing.”
“You just spoke in the past tense. What changed it?”
“You.” Lenz turns to me with new light in his eyes. “The EROS killer has already murdered seven women we know of, with the corpses found in every case. Yet he staged each crime but two in such a way that they were not linked. And homicide detectives look for staging, believe me. Were it not for your coming forward-courageously, against the wishes of your company-he would still be killing without any risk of being caught.”
Lenz may be manipulating me, but it feels pretty good to finally hear someone recognize my effort.
“Serial murderers normally operate on an emotional cycle,” he explains. “They kill, cool off, kill again. Generally, the period between kills gets shorter and shorter until the murderer begins to decompensate, or come unstrung, in layman’s terms. This is generally what allows him to be caught. You with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“The EROS killer is different. He operates with utter calm and deliberation. He’s not even close to decompensating. Serial offenders frequently communicate with police. He has not done so.”
“What about the Henry Miller quote?”
“That was more staging, not real communication. In the stakes-through-the-eye-sockets case, he smeared the words ‘Now she can see’ on the bedroom mirror with feces. Pure theater. This man has harnessed computer technology not only to select his victims but also to probe their minds and emotions before he strikes. Miles Turner is a computer genius, yet he cannot or will not explain how Strobekker got hold of the EROS master client list-”
“That’s why you suspect Miles,” I cut in. “This guy is like Miles would be if he decided to start killing people.”
“Exactly. And now he has kidnapped a woman.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Something to do with the pineal gland?”
“Almost certainly.”
“This may sound crazy, Doctor, but could he be killing these women for some perfectly logical reason? Something we can’t understand because we lack the information?”
“Crimes of this type are always eminently logical to the man who commits them, Cole. Keep one thing in mind. In serial murder, selection is everything. How does the killer choose his victims? What fantasy do they fulfill? If you can parse that out, you have your man. Or at least his profile.”
“He uses EROS to select them.”
“That’s merely method. What are his criteria? The printouts you gave me are interesting, but they’re basically seductions. They reveal no critical similarities among victims. Neither do studies of the victims’ bodies or daily lives.”
“They all had pineal glands.”
“Yes. But of what sexual importance is the pineal?”
“I don’t know. Does it have to be sexual?”
“Ultimately, yes. All murders of this type are sexually motivated. It’s just that the sexual component may be deeply repressed. The taking of the pineal conjures images of cults or mad scientists, but in the end, all this will resolve into some variant of old-fashioned lust. Mr. Strobekker is what we called in the bad old days a lust killer, Cole. A sex killer.”
“That’s why you asked so much about my sex life.”
He nods distractedly, his head swaying slightly from side to side as he drives. When he speaks again, his voice carries startling certitude. “I’m the only man alive who can stop him, Cole.” He glances over as if to reassure me. “No, I haven’t lost my head. All my life I’ve been training for this moment. You should see some of the profiles the junior men in the Unit have turned in. Not even close. Strobekker has them all chasing their tails. Why? Because he’s a new species, Cole. They don’t have little crib sheets that fit him.”
“And you do?”
“I don’t need any.” Lenz taps his fingers excitedly on the wheel. “I wrote the books. The police won’t stop Strobekker because he won’t make a conventional mistake. He’s not some traumatized human robot composted from the dregs of society. He has a brain. And he’s using it.” Lenz falls silent, apparently lost in a reverie. “This time,” he says almost to himself, “I’m going to do something no one in the Unit has ever done. That no psychiatrist has ever done. I’m going to catch this one myself.”
I keep my eyes averted, surprised by the emotion he has invested in this case. “Unless Hostage Rescue gets him in-” I glance at my watch-“sixty minutes, you mean.”
“Of course,” he says, looking at me. “I’ve been speaking in terms of a single person, but the evidence points to a team-offender situation. That’s what underlies the police interest in you and Turner. And that’s what makes Dallas such an interesting development. Think about it. Who is inside that apartment?”
“I just don’t see what you want from me.”
“You will. I’ve been studying the printouts you gave me, and I’m convinced I can trap Strobekker.”
“How?”
“By creating a fictional woman, then becoming that woman on EROS. To be frank, I’m almost done with her.”
I am trying to digest Lenz’s words, but the implications are too complex to take in at once.
“She fits the new victim profile almost exactly,” he adds.
“New profile? You mean you’re making her like Karin Wheat instead of the younger victims?”
“Yes. It’s rare for a killer to establish so clear a pattern and then break it. If Wheat were merely a crime of opportunity, I’d discard her from the group. But she wasn’t. Wheat represents a new paradigm.”
“And my function?”
“Smoothing my entry into the EROS community.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into, Doctor. God only knows what databases this guy can access to check out people who approach him on-line.”
Lenz chuckles. “Don’t worry about that. Daniel’s men are very good at paperwork. My personal Eliza Doolittle is in the process of coming to official life as we speak. Social Security number, DMV, voter registration, credit cards, credit history, a house, and a car. In a matter of hours she’ll be as real as your wife.”
“What’s this fictitious woman’s name?”
“Anne Bridges. But that’s irrelevant. It’s the alias that matters, correct?”
He’s right. “What’s the alias?”
“Something primal,” Lenz says, obviously pleased with himself. “Archetypal. Biblical.”
“What the hell is it?”
“You’re interested now? Don’t worry, you’ll know soon enough. If you cooperate.”
I could care less about the alias, but I do want to know who is in that Dallas apartment. After all, it was I who first detected Strobekker’s deadly passage through the digital universe. “But you don’t know anything about how EROS really works,” I point out. “There are all kinds of esoteric abbreviations, informal practices, things that are understood only by the members.”
Lenz smiles. “You just argued yourself into the job.”
“You really think you can fool people-not just people, but him — into thinking you’re a woman?”
“That’s what makes it worthwhile. How much insight do I truly have into the female mind? This will be the acid test.”
He blinks his headlights twice and roars past a semitruck. “We’re over halfway to Quanti
co, Cole. Let’s hear your secret. If I decide it’s unrelated to the case, you get me started on EROS, then you go home with no more police problems.”
I turn and look out the passenger window. Halfway to Quantico. Halfway to the Hostage Rescue Team knocking down Brahma’s door in Dallas. Lenz wants answers to his little questions, snapshots of my soul before I’m allowed into the inner circle of the investigation. What am I proudest of? Most ashamed of? The answer to the first question is private but not really secret, and it will get me to Quantico. The other answer can wait until that door goes down in Dallas. It can wait forever.
“I played music professionally for eight years,” I say evenly.
Lenz settles back in his seat. “Were you successful?”
“Depends on your definition. I made a living. But as far as reaching my dreams, no. I’m a good songwriter and guitar player, but only a fair singer. Some people thought I was better than I did, but I always felt I needed someone else up front as lead vocalist.”
“And this dependence led to conflict? Resentment?”
“Yeah. I’ll skip five years of wasted time. The last band I was in had major-label interest. But by the time we’d gotten that far, the group was ready to self-destruct. I was writing the best material, and the singer-a good friend of mine-couldn’t stand my getting that part of the glory. Forget that he got all the spotlight time. He wanted it to be him singing his stuff or nothing.”
“So?”
“So it was nothing. He’s still out there singing his stuff. The clubs are bigger, but he’s on the same treadmill. When that group split, I decided I’d never again put myself into a situation where my destiny was controlled to any degree by another person.”
“Now I understand the commodities trading,” Lenz says. “No messy humans to deal with.”
“You got it.”
“And you got rich.”
“You’re damn right.”
“You sound angry.”
“Good assessment.”
Lenz drives silently for a half mile, and I’m glad for the delay. Finally, he says, “And?”
“Before all that, I went to college like most of my friends. Majored in finance, the whole thing. But I’d wanted to play music since I was a kid. I used to ride up to Leland and Clarksdale and play blues with the old black cats-Son Thomas, Sam Chatmon, those guys. When I got out of college, I went home and told my parents that before I got a job or went to graduate school, I was going to play music for a while.”
“How did they respond?”
“Not well. When I was a kid, they were really supportive of my music. But during my senior year of high school, things changed.”
“What happened?”
“The second act of a tragedy that started fifteen years before. Summer of sixty-four. The Freedom Summer. The year they killed those three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.”
Lenz nods. “Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.” He says the names softly, as if those long-dead kids were friends of his.
For the first time I suspect Lenz might be Jewish. “Right,” I tell him. “Buried them in that dam. Anyway, a New York college sent some civil rights workers down to Cairo County, where our farm is. My dad, being who he was, decided to invite a couple of them over-”
“Excuse me? ‘Being who he was?’ ”
“He wasn’t a native Mississippian. He was from Louisiana, down below the hard-shell Baptist parishes. He was raised strict, but not prejudiced, you know? He was a doctor, but he came from working class people. Grew up working right alongside blacks.”
“Go on.”
“These civil rights workers would come in from a day of running the back roads, teaching blacks how to answer the voting questionnaire or whatever, and my dad would feed them. He’d talk medicine, they’d talk politics. Or maybe they’d talk baseball. I got this from my mother, you understand, much later.”
“Keep going.”
“Anyway, the local yahoos, the Klan or whoever, didn’t like my dad having these guys over to the house. They warned him, but Dad didn’t pay any attention. Then this colored guy got killed at a church outside Itta Bena. They blew him up in his car. He was a patient of my father’s. He’d served in action in Korea. Dad put a lot of stock in a man serving his country in battle. He’d turned a blind eye to a lot that the Klan and the Citizens’ Council did in those days, like everybody else. But he couldn’t stomach the murder of this black vet. He sat down and wrote an editorial that would blister the hide off a rattlesnake. He told it like it was, and he named names. He sent that piece to the Greenville paper, the liberal paper owned by Hodding Carter, the paper printed it, and lo, there came a shitstorm.”
Lenz smiles in the dark. “I’ll be damned.”
“My mother just sat around the house waiting to be firebombed. But it didn’t happen. Dad had been so public with his accusations that the Klan was afraid to do anything too soon after the piece appeared. The fact that my mother was from an old Delta family helped. It wasn’t a wealthy family, but her people-the Grants-had been in the Delta about as long as anybody but the Indians. Quite a few white patients stopped coming to my father, but blacks took their places just as fast, so that didn’t matter much. After about a year, it was all forgotten. At least by my family.”
“But not by the Klan.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say the Klan. The Klan doesn’t even exist in Mississippi anymore. Not in any meaningful way. It’s just a bunch of bitter old drunks now. Anyway, a lot of time passed. And during that time, another facet of my dad’s character emerged, though we knew nothing about it.”
I wonder how far we are from Quantico, but I don’t dare break the flow to ask. “My dad was a doctor of the old school. All he cared about was treating people’s sickness. He never thought about money. Some years he didn’t collect fifty percent of what he was owed. And he’d accept anything as payment when he did collect. Green beans, catfish, peaches, venison, collard greens, whatever. He was still making house calls in 1987.”
Lenz leans his head back and flips on the Mercedes’s headlights. “A dying breed,” he says softly.
“A dead breed. And the country’s worse off for it. Anyway, his entire financial planning strategy was his belief that if a doctor worked hard in America, he’d make enough money to raise his family and pay for his whiskey and cigars, and send in the next patient please. Get the picture?”
“A common failing among practitioners of his generation.”
“Yeah? Well, it didn’t take long for that failing to get him into serious trouble. By 1968 he was a year behind on his income taxes. That meant that every April-every year-he had to go to the bank and borrow the full amount of his taxes to pay off the government-something like sixty or seventy thousand dollars at whatever the interest rate happened to be. And after he’d paid, he would still be a year behind. He did that for twenty years.”
“My God.”
“Talk about pressure. But he didn’t tell a soul about it. It was a secret between him and his banker, who was thrilled by the arrangement, of course. There was enough cash flow that nobody felt the pinch, but it was all an illusion.”
“What about an equity loan?” Lenz asks. “A home mortgage?”
“Not a chance. All he could have used as collateral was the farm or the house sitting on it, and both had been in my mother’s family for generations. She didn’t have any brothers, so hers was the first generation of Grants that hadn’t farmed the land. They leased it out. Anyway, Dad felt the debt was his cross to bear. He just worked harder and harder.
“My junior year of high school, things came to a head. The people we leased the farm to had had two bad harvests in a row. Dad’s income was stretched to the breaking point. And when he went into the bank and asked for his annual tax loan, they said no. They’d never demanded collateral before, because they knew he could cover the debt. But this time they did. He was stunned. He went to another bank and got the same story. After a while he figured it out.
The chickens from 1964 had come home to roost.”
Lenz is shaking his head.
“You can see the rest. Dad had to put up the farm as collateral. Carter was president; interest rates were twenty percent. When Dad finally told my mother how things stood, she didn’t hesitate to sign the papers. But it almost killed her. Her father had never believed in borrowing money, and she didn’t either. I mean never. Dad worked harder that year than he ever had in his life. He was nearly fifty then, and he was working hundred-hour weeks. Seventy-two-hour shifts in emergency rooms out of town. Seven months into it, he had a coronary. He survived, but the cash dried up. I worked, my mother worked, but it wasn’t any good. The people we leased to had their third bad year, and we lost the farm.”
“All of it?”
“We managed to keep the home place. Where my wife and I live now. Everything else the bank took. They put it up for auction, but somehow the bank president himself bought it for about half what it was worth. He was a smug, redneck son of a bitch named Crump. He loved taking that land. He was about sixty-five then.”
“How did this affect your mother?”
The memory of my mother in those years is something I would prefer to forget. “She became a ghost,” I say softly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A ghost of herself.”
Lenz nods silently.
“So you can imagine what happened when I arrived home from college four years later with my honors degree in finance and announced my intention to roam the country playing guitar. They weren’t exactly thrilled.”
“Yet you did it anyway.”
“Not immediately. For a couple of weeks I just moped around. Then I got mad. I saw that their whole view of the world had been warped and beaten down by bastards like Crump. And worse, that it was going to affect my whole life if I let it.”
“Did you confront Crump?”
“What good would that have done? I had no leverage, no power. I packed up my clothes, my textbooks, and my life savings-five grand-and took the Amtrak to Chicago. One of my professors wangled me a job at a company with seats on the Board of Trade. After a week of trading for the company, I started trading for myself. And I was fearless. I can’t explain it. I was trading like I played music, purely on instinct. Balls to the wall, sometimes risking everything on single trades. I’d have a stroke if I tried that now. I’m a system trader-I cover every conceivable angle before I make a move. But back then I was high on rage. Everything I’d ever learned had somehow been recalled and slaved to my anger. I was like Mr. Spock possessed by a pissed-off Captain Kirk. A fucking superman.”
