Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  Two minutes after Schmidt closes me inside, Lenz slides into the driver’s seat, holding a fresh Tab in one hand and an Evian in the other. He sets both in a plastic drink caddy, then cranks the engine and closes the door. While I wipe the top of the Tab can on my shirt, he lights a cigarette, then exhales into the Virginia night.

  “Very smooth,” he says. “Very smooth indeed.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Dear Father,

  The barbarians are at the gate.

  It was inevitable, of course. And I have no fear that they will locate me. But I shall have to exercise greater caution when procuring patients. I must assume that the Justice Department will shut down EROS, or that the company will shut itself down for legal reasons. Of course the list makes that academic. I must remember to thank Turner properly.

  Or will they shut it down? Perhaps Jan Krislov will resist. It could become quite a cause celebre. Another battle in her crusade for electronic privacy. Someday I’ll have to show her just how private her little universe really is.

  My God, such noise from the basement. I should never have let Levy catch sight of the O.R. He should quiet himself, or I’ll be forced to send Kali down to quiet him.

  But first things first. I need new patients, and I suppose my next move depends on the FBI. Will they enter the digital forests of the night? Or will they simply try to fence me out?

  No matter.

  I shall burn all the brighter now.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lenz’s Mercedes shunts us through the night like spores on a wind. He says we’re headed back to McLean, Virginia, to an FBI safe house from which his digital decoy operation will be run. In the Delta I can drive for miles at night and see no light but moon and stars, but tonight I’m thankful for the busy interstate. The glaring lights and motion help me to suppress the image of the exploding PC and the screams of wounded men in the Dallas apartment.

  “Are we somewhere near the Manassas battlefield?” I ask, recalling a golden summer years ago when my father and I climbed Henry Hill in the chill morning mist to see the spot where Stonewall Jackson earned his nom de guerre.

  “Ten or fifteen miles to the west,” Lenz replies.

  “Is it a Disney World now?”

  “No, they finally killed that, thank God.”

  The first uplifting news of a very long day. “Back there,” I say hesitantly. “At the trailer. I was thinking that Strobekker, or whoever he is, didn’t really mean to kill anybody.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the explosion was pretty much confined to the computer. He could have flattened that whole building if he’d wanted to.”

  Lenz ponders this for a few seconds. “That helps with the profile, but in the larger scheme it doesn’t make a bit of difference. When he killed that Hostage Rescue man, he practically signed his own death warrant. If he doesn’t surrender the instant we locate him, he’s a corpse.”

  Lenz lights a fresh cigarette. “Why don’t we talk about it?”

  “The case?”

  “No. This thing that’s eating you.”

  “Jesus, don’t you ever let up?”

  “Believe it or not, Cole, I’m trying to help you. You fear my knowing anything about you. Having leverage over you. But if you’d really listened to me earlier, you’d know this case means life to me. It’s my personal resurrection. Don’t you see the leverage that gives you? One anonymous e-mail message to Strobekker and he knows ‘Anne Bridges’ is me. I’d never be able to prove you did it.”

  “But I’d never do that.”

  “And I’d never betray a confidence from you.” He cracks his window slightly and blows a stream of smoke at the opening. “I respect you, Cole. You risked civil prosecution-maybe financial ruin-to come forward with the names of these women. Turner didn’t. Krislov didn’t. I don’t know that they ever would have, so long as they weren’t staring the corpses in the face.”

  I start to argue, but Lenz may be right.

  “Guilt is a funny thing,” he says. “A sense of guilt, I mean. It’s what separates you from Strobekker. Ironic, isn’t it? This cross you bear makes you a better man. I ask you to talk about it only because I know the pain of secrets so intimately. I’ve seen what it does to people. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t advocate unburdening yourself to your wife. That would make you feel better, but it would make her feel much worse. The noble thing is to bear the weight yourself. But that doesn’t mean you can’t share it a little. Even Christ did that.”

  I study Lenz’s face for any trace of cynicism, but he seems sincere. “I don’t think I could just tell you. You or anybody. The bare reality of it is… I don’t know… too simple.”

  “Just start talking. These things have their own rhythm. Anything else is just facts.”

  “You don’t want facts?”

  “Facts are for men like Daniel. I’m a truth man. And that’s altogether different.”

  After a slow breath, I push my hands back through my hair and say, “You know my wife is an OB-GYN.”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably don’t know we were high school sweethearts.”

  “You’ve been married that long?”

  “No. We were high school sweethearts who got married twelve years after high school. We’ve only been married three years.”

  “No other marriages before that?”

  “No.”

  I give Lenz a thumbnail sketch of Erin and Drewe’s family history, focusing on the opposite personalities of the sisters and the deceptions they used to hide them. The glow of Lenz’s cigarette bobs up and down as I try to describe Erin’s unique combination of beauty and sensuality, but I’m not sure he gets it. He seems more interested in Drewe.

  “She graduated first in her class at Tulane Medical School?”

  “Tied for first.”

  “No mean accomplishment. You never slept with her in high school?”

  “Plenty of times. A lot of making out, fooling around. But we only actually had intercourse once, and it was a disaster. I think she just wanted to get the whole virgin thing out of the way. It was a mistake.”

  “You didn’t have sex with other girls during this time?”

  “Too many.”

  “Did your wife know this?”

  “Eventually.”

  “And she knew some of the girls.”

  “Like I said, small school.”

  “Was her sister one of these girls?”

  “No. Erin and I were enemies then. Almost like brother and sister.”

  “What life path did Erin take?”

  “Four days after she graduated, she left Mississippi for Manhattan and never looked back. A guy saw her in a restaurant and wham, she was a model. She went through the usual celebrity arc-Who’s Erin Anderson? Get me Erin Anderson. Get me someone like Erin Anderson. Who’s Erin Anderson? — but at ten times the usual speed. A year after she left home, she was drying out in a clinic in New Hampshire with a very wealthy ‘friend’ footing the bill.

  “For the next few years she kicked around New York and L.A. on the arms of various actors, artists, musicians. I actually ran into her a couple of times on the road. But we just played the roles we’d played since childhood.”

  Lenz stubs out his cigarette and lights another. “How so?”

  “Friendly but sarcastic. She made fun of Drewe, the saintly sister pursuing her medical degree with the commitment of a nun. She joked about my waiting for Drewe.”

  “Were you?”

  “I don’t know. I had affairs during those years. Long, badly ended relationships.”

  “Did you have sex with Erin then?”

  “Hell no. I told you.”

  “Yes, but it’s obvious that there’s always been a strong attraction between you and your wife’s sister.”

  “Any man who sees my wife’s sister feels a strong attraction to her, okay?”

  “But Erin doesn’t feel reciprocal attraction to these masses of other men, does
she? Not the kind of attraction she felt for you.”

  “I didn’t know that at the time.”

  “Of course you did. Continue.”

  “No matter what relationships I was in during those years, I always stayed in contact with Drewe. Sometimes a year would go by without our seeing each other. Just a couple of late-night calls. But other times she’d call me in tears about something and I would drop whatever I was doing and drive ten or twelve hours to New Orleans to be with her.”

  “Still no sex between you?”

  “Not in the complete sense. She’s a different sort of girl. Very old-fashioned.”

  “Was she involved with other men during these years?”

  “She dated. But it never worked out. I don’t think she ever meant for it to. When Drewe didn’t put out after a few dates, the guys usually went elsewhere.”

  “But you weren’t holding to a similar code of abstinence.”

  “Didn’t even try. It was the classic dilemma. She wanted total commitment from me before giving up what she held precious. I wanted what she held precious as proof of her love.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “Okay, okay. Cut ahead a few years, to when my last band self-destructed. Where do you think I ran to lick my wounds when that happened?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Naturally. Drewe was entering her final year of residency at Tulane. My career was in flames. It was start over or get out for good. What do you think happened?”

  “She started sleeping with you.”

  “You’ve heard all this before, I guess.”

  “Not quite in this way. But I’m starting to feel as though I know your wife.” Lenz allows himself a smile. “I like her.”

  “I asked Drewe to marry me, but she said we had a year before real life started. She said we should use that time to make sure we were sure. What she really meant was, I had a year to make sure I was sure.”

  I reach down to the drink caddy and take a long swig of Tab. “I did a repeat of what I’d done after high school. Packed up my clothes, twenty grand I’d saved from gigging, and headed north to Chicago. I was going to relearn everything I ever forgot about the markets and earn our stake for the future. I took a tiny apartment near the Board of Trade. A bed and a TV. No guitar. Books stacked waist-high everywhere, even in the bathroom. Drewe and I had planned to see each other as often as possible, but we only managed it twice. The timing was too tough. But we talked on the phone constantly.”

  I feel a last flush of anxiety, but I force myself to go on. “And then it happened.”

  “Erin appeared magically in Chicago.”

  “Standing in my hallway in the dead of winter without even a coat. She was flying cross-country with some actor, had a layover in Chicago, and she just walked off the plane.”

  “As beautiful as ever?”

  “More so. White linen blouse buttoned to the throat, black jeans, plain silver earrings, sandals on her tanned feet.

  “You slept with her that night?”

  “No. We just talked. I lent her a ski jacket and gloves and took her out to dinner. We took a cab up and down Michigan Avenue, rode the elevator to the top of the Hancock like a couple of tourists. I was lonelier than I knew. I found myself holding Erin’s hand as she looked out over Lake Michigan. The intimacy of it was… I don’t know. Thirty seconds of connectedness in a winter when my only connections had been with greedy assholes and numbers. She didn’t look at me while we held hands, but she squeezed hard before she let go and walked back to the elevator.”

  I stop talking for a moment and watch the constellations of headlights around us, racing toward us, overtaking us from behind. “You want details, or just the Jack Webb version?”

  “Oh, details, please. But for the details, Mourning Becomes Electra would be no different than the Oresteia.”

  I grope for the allusions, but all I come up with is an absurd image of Jack Nicholson trying to get Diane Keaton to sleep with him in Reds. “We talked some more at the apartment. Sitting on the floor and drinking coffee laced with bourbon to keep warm. We talked about Erin’s time in New York, her getting clean, my giving up music. She seemed surprised Drewe and I had only seen each other twice. She had no grasp of the demands of medical school. When she fell asleep, I tucked her in my bed, then slept in an easy chair I’d bought thirdhand from another tenant.

  “The next morning I forced myself out of the chair, brushed my teeth, and got in the shower. I felt like hell. I turned the water as hot as I could stand it. Then I felt a quick draft of cold air. The bathroom door had opened and closed. I heard Erin say, ‘I couldn’t wait.’

  “I pulled the shower curtain away from the wall and saw her sitting stark naked on the commode with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her hands. She shooed me away with one hand when she realized I was watching. I let go of the curtain and started washing my hair.

  “A few seconds later she stepped into the shower. I’d seen her naked once before, in high school, skinny-dipping, and her body looked no older than that in Chicago. Her skin was much darker than mine, her hair almost black. Long and thick falling over those shoulders, and the same… you know. Lots of it. She looked up and smiled, then hugged me and laid her cheek against my chest, as if she meant to go back to sleep standing there in the spray. I didn’t hug her back, but I wanted to. I’m sure it all sounds calculated now, but then it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Unavoidable.”

  Lenz makes no comment.

  “She was so casual about it. Like walking in to pee as if I wasn’t there. Like we’d been married for years. She just didn’t worry about things like that. Propriety. That affected me. Seeing her on the commode like that affected me. Weird maybe, but it’s the truth. And she… she just wasn’t like other women. She kissed my nipples before she ever kissed my mouth. She seemed to sense it had been a long time since I’d had a woman, long enough that any serious lovemaking would have to wait until she’d gotten that first release out of the way. She used her mouth for that, and her hands. She knew before I did where I was, you know? And when I started to finish, she didn’t pull away. She just…” I trail off, unable to find words to communicate the experience.

  “Afterward, she stood up and hugged me again. She didn’t speak, but I saw she somehow knew her sister didn’t complete that act in the way she just had. I thought of Drewe then, but she seemed removed from all this, wholly apart from it. It was as though Erin and I were meeting in some place where Drewe didn’t exist. The way it might be if Erin found herself in grand rounds at the hospital with Drewe. In that environment, Erin simply would not exist. The analogy isn’t perfect. Drewe certainly has a sexual identity of her own, but-”

  “I understand.”

  “You want me to skip ahead?”

  “It’s you or the radio,” Lenz says in a strangely thick voice. “Just keep going. From the shower.”

  A bleak image from Fahrenheit 451 suddenly passes behind my eyes: I see myself driving through its wooded film location, a living book spouting my soft-core text for Lenz’s strange pleasure.

  “Look, I can’t explain what made Erin so unique. What I said before about exploration, crossing thresholds… even that fails with her. I doubt there’s any erotic space she’s never been. Except maybe pure love. But her sexual presence, her magnetism… Jesus. Bottomless eyes, scalloped collarbones, small dark-nippled breasts that made a mockery of all the surgically enhanced architecture I saw every day at the Board of Trade. I think she realized I was being overcome by her beauty for the first time, and she was determined to give me access to all of it. She must have seen a lot of men get lost in her like that, but I could tell this meant more to her.”

  “For more reasons than you could imagine, Cole.”

  “The first time we made love in the bed, she came about ten seconds before I did. Then she cradled my face in her hands and-I still remember what she said.”

  Lenz turns to me, his eyes tiny point
s of light. “I love you?”

  “No. She said, ‘It’s so easy, isn’t it?’ And then she smiled when I emptied into her. A Mona Lisa smile. No other way to describe it. Like she knew all the secrets of creation.”

  “How long did she stay in Chicago?”

  “Four days. We hardly left the apartment. The most she ever wore was one of my shirts. She watched movies without comment, unless laughter or tears is comment. Once we saw an eyeliner commercial that had used her eyes. I never once looked up to find her watching me. Yet when I caught myself staring at her, she would turn to me with a half smile that told me she knew I was watching. It was like living with a wild creature. She never once put on a spot of makeup. She seemed to stay perpetually wet. I mean she never got-”

  “She was a fantasy lover,” Lenz says softly.

  “No. She was real.”

  “I meant in the sense that the erotic activity was directed toward your satisfaction rather than hers.”

  I consider this for a few moments. “I don’t think that’s true. She got her share of surprises as well.”

  The car seat groans slightly as Lenz repositions himself. “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes-at the moment of orgasm-she passed out. I mean out. We weren’t drinking at all, but she would literally lose consciousness. It only happened three times, but the first time I was actually dialing nine-one-one when she woke up.”

  Lenz chuckles softly. “Your reaction isn’t unique.”

  “It happened to you?”

  “Alas, no. I’ve never seen it personally. Le petite mort.”

  “Does that mean ‘little death’?”

  “Thelittle death. Yes. It’s a phrase from French poetry.”

  “That’s what Erin said. She told me it had never happened to her before, but I didn’t believe her. I mean, how would she have known about it otherwise? She’s not the type to read French poetry.”

  Lenz makes a noncommittal sound. “In her circle she might have heard it described. Did you enjoy le petite mort after that first time?”