Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “This situation is more complex than that.”

  “No. It’s exactly the same. Everything must happen in the quarry’s head. Your UNSUB is biologically programmed to want to kill the bait. Your job-your only job-is to be what the killer wants. Forget about Baxter and his geeks, forget about trying to manipulate the killer into doing anything. He knows what to do. You just sit here and be that woman. Talk to other users, not him. Build your personality. And then he’ll come. In his own time maybe, but he’ll come. And you’d better be ready.”

  Lenz stands up from the chair and stretches with nonchalance so elaborate that it must be feigned. He tears off the stream of paper where it meets the printer and lets it fall to the floor. “I’m sure you’re ready to get back home, Cole. If we hurry, you’ll just have time to make the Quantico plane. Unless you want to spend the night at a hotel and fly commercial in the morning.”

  He frowns at me like a flight attendant who’s decided he made a mistake by inviting me to sit in the first-class cabin. “Which is it, Cole? A hotel or Ms. Krislov’s jet?”

  Part of me hates to walk out of this room, to withdraw from a game with stakes so high. Even at the most rarefied level, trading futures risks only money, not human lives.

  “The plane,” I say, standing up from the Toshiba and walking past him without another look.

  He follows me down the stairs. Near the bottom, I ask, “Why did you decide to use a young decoy? I thought you’d decided that Strobekker changed his pattern. That he wanted older women like Karin Wheat.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I pause at the floor. “But Margie Ressler’s only, what, twenty-eight?”

  “You should have more faith in me, Cole.”

  As we move across the den toward the kitchen, I look over the Corian counter and see a full head of brunette hair. Sherry, I presume. She’s looking at something through the top window of an electric range. “Pretty soft setup,” I say to Lenz. “Cook and everything.”

  Then the cook turns around and I am looking into the green eyes of Special Agent Margie Ressler. Her eyes are all I recognize. In the past two hours she has aged twenty years. Lines around her eyes and mouth, gray in her hair, a suddenly sagging bosom, and dowdy hips.

  “It really works, doesn’t it?” she says, her eyes sparkling. “I can tell by your face. Sherry’s a wizard at this stuff. She told me some of the actors she’s worked on, and now I believe her.”

  “Say farewell to Mr. Cole, Agent Ressler,” Lenz says.

  “Oh. Hey, I really enjoyed meeting you.”

  “You too, Margie. Thanks for the pizza. Be careful.”

  “No sweat. I warmed up some pizza for you, Doctor.”

  Lenz takes my arm and leads me out to the garage. The Acura Margie mentioned earlier has appeared. Special Agent Schmidt, the ever chipper factotum, steps silently from the door behind us. I turn back as he walks past me and climbs into Lenz’s Mercedes.

  “I’m going to say it one more time, Doctor. Don’t push this guy. If you spook him, you’ll never get him. Or worse-he might get you.”

  “I heard you the first time, Cole.” He leads me around to the passenger door and opens it. “The Quantico airstrip, Schmidt. You might have to put some lead in your foot.”

  I climb into the car, lean back in the seat, and address Lenz through the window. “I don’t think Agent Ressler understands how much danger she’s in.”

  He smiles. “Your Southern sexism is creeping in. Ressler is a trained agent.”

  “How do you train for something like this?”

  The psychiatrist straightens up and walks away. He is edging through the narrow margin between the Mercedes’ hood and the front wall when a thought hits me. I reach over and beep the horn, startling him into the air like a cartoon character.

  “What is it?” he shouts.

  I lean out of the passenger window. “Remember the smiling young lady from Niger, Doctor.”

  He stares at me as if I’m insane.

  “She went for a ride on a tiger. After the ride, she wound up inside, with the smile on the face of the tiger.”

  I tap Special Agent Schmidt on the arm, and he obediently backs the Mercedes out of the garage, leaving Dr. Lenz staring at us from the blue-white glare of the headlights. He does not squint into the beams, as most people would, but simply watches us pull away, the halogen light on his retinas giving him the burning red eyes of a night creature.

  CHAPTER 23

  The jet I boarded at Quantico touched down in Jackson, Mississippi, at 3:00A.M. Central Standard Time. Jan Krislov would have broken into a nervous sweat had she seen her precious Gulfstream filled to its porthole windows with angry FBI Hostage Rescue commandos. I sweated a little myself. Three hours cooped up with those guys was like riding a bus full of Southern Baptist ministers on their way to picket a Bourbon Street strip club. Most were trying so hard to be professional that their grim frowns seemed on the verge of splitting into fierce grins of anticipation. I still don’t know whether anyone had told them of my status as a suspect, but I didn’t volunteer the information. Two agents watched me throughout the flight, their hostile eyes tracking me like those of snipers, which is exactly what they were. I was never told their destination, but by the time the pilot set me down I was damned glad it wasn’t my farmhouse.

  Two minutes after the jet taxied to a stop, I was standing at a pay phone calling Miles at EROS headquarters to warn him that he might soon be arrested. I feared that he might have been taken while I was airborne, but nighthawk Miles-awakened from a cat nap at his monitor-finally picked up the phone and began joking as if nothing more were happening than the usual bitflow of nocturnal erotica.

  He didn’t sound surprised by my warning, but he did thank me for it. He thinks he’s safe until EROS’s time-locked file vault opens at one p.m. tomorrow. Daniel Baxter apparently believes that Brahma might be a legitimate EROS client. If that’s true, the master client list now locked in the vault would allow the FBI to put “brute force” methods into the hunt, making the resolution of the case only a matter of time and manpower. Miles told me at least two agents have been guarding the vault since it slammed shut two days ago, but he seems to think they’re in for a big surprise.

  After we hung up, I tried again to warn Eleanor Rigby, but all I got was her answering machine. Knowing that her clingy paraplegic sister is the reason she keeps a blind-draft account, I felt I couldn’t leave a detailed message without screwing up her personal life. I resigned myself to warning her by snail mail and jogged for my truck.

  All that happened an hour ago, but I am still twenty minutes from home, driving a steady sixty-five miles per hour. It feels better than good to be rolling through the dark Delta cotton fields with at least the illusion that I am free from the clutches of Arthur Lenz and Daniel Baxter. Though it’s dead hot outside, I roll down the Explorer’s windows and let the air whip through the truck. Four-thirty in the morning is about as cool as it ever gets in August in Mississippi. The windshield fogs from the sudden temperature change, but the road is straight as a plumb line here, and I don’t even wipe the glass.

  There is enough moonlight to turn the cotton into a pale purple sea stretching away from the highway in all directions. I’m glad I won’t be picking that cotton. Glad no one will be, except a handful of people on the poorest farms. Twelve hours in the burning sun with bleeding hands and a hundred pounds of itchy sack dragging behind you isn’t fit work for man or beast. In the cotton field, if nowhere else, the machine has fulfilled its nineteenth-century billing as the savior of mankind.

  At last my headlights illuminate the battered green road sign that announces “RAIN, MS, Home of the 1963 State Basketball Champions” to an indifferent world. Dinged by flung beer bottles, pierced by bullets fired in boredom, drunkenness, or anger, rusted by the heaven-sent water the town was named for, the old double-sided sign still stirs a strange soup of emotions in my chest when I roar past it in either direction. It takes less t
han a minute to sight the first hints of human habitation, blow past the tiny post office and tinier Laundromat, and sweep back into the long, still fields on the other side of Rain. Somewhere out there children are sleeping. But the men and women are not. They are waking to fry eggs and boil grits and pull on overalls and boots to face the hottest sun in the United States with no more protection than a faded John Deere cap.

  I look out to my left and try to sight the crumbling superstructure of the old Edinburgh plantation. At one time this antebellum monolith dominated the land like a feudal castle. All activity for miles around was subordinate to its workings, its long shadow falling across slave and master, mammy and overseer, then sharecropper and bossman, and finally the not-so-slow decay of the gene line. In a burning dry year in the 1890s-a year not unlike this one-a sober gambler won the entire plantation from a dissolute heir in a midnight poker game. The way the story’s most often told, the gambler raised the stakes beyond the heir’s liquid resources, the heir used the plantation deed to call the bet, and signed a marker in front of a dozen witnesses. When the gambler laid down a flush, the heir fainted. By the time he staggered out of the old slave quarters, the divine deliverance of rain was beating dust devils on the drive, and the tin roof roared as though a hail of Yankee grapeshot had been loosed against the building. The heir went home, tried twice to shoot himself in the head, missed both times, and passed out. He woke up in time to see the gambler nail a board sign to a horse post out front. Painted on the sign was the word “RAIN,” which from that day forward became the new name of the plantation and of the indolent crossroads of commerce that passed for a town.

  My tin mailbox glints at the left margin of my high beams, which suddenly fluoresce the legend COLE. I slow the Explorer and sigh in exhaustion, knowing I could probably cover the last fifty yards and make the turn with my eyes shut.

  The farmhouse stands about forty yards back from the road, shaded by oaks, pines, and a single weeping willow that hovers near the porch like a giant green mushroom. Just as I start to turn, my headlights flash on something farther up the road. Something that shouldn’t be there. It’s on the left shoulder, where there should be only cotton. I start to ignore it, but the landowner’s imperative steels my nerves. I brake, back out of the drive, and accelerate slowly toward the silver reflection.

  It’s a sport utility vehicle. A Jeep Grand Cherokee. I recognize the distinctive slope of the hood. It’s parked about sixty yards from the house. As I move closer, I realize something that chills me more deeply than the idea of poachers. The Jeep has a Hinds County license plate on its front bumper. That plate, and the Jeep, belong to my brother-in-law, Patrick Graham.

  Without hesitation I reach under the seat, take out my Smith and Wesson.38, and lay it on my lap. This act would have been unthinkable three months ago, but I know enough about human nature to know that in a domestic dispute, anyone can become a target of deranged fury.

  I pull the Explorer across the left lane and stop alongside Patrick’s Jeep. Our faces are less than three feet apart, separated only by two sheets of glass. Patrick is handsome, in the fraternity president mold. Short sandy hair parted on the side, scrubbed skin, great teeth. He’s one of the few doctors I know who always wears a suit to make evening rounds at the hospital. Even when he dresses casually, his clothes are either Ralph Lauren or something sent UPS from New England.

  But tonight he looks like a ghost of himself. He is wearing a Polo shirt, but it looks like he pulled it out of a dirty clothes hamper. His hair is longer than usual, and his eyes don’t seem able to focus. He faces forward when I roll down my window, studiously ignoring me. I tap on the glass.

  At last he rolls down his window.

  “What’s going on?” I ask in the calmest voice I can muster.

  Patrick says nothing.

  I tighten my hand around the wooden grip of the.38. “You waiting for somebody?”

  “Erin’s in there.”

  “Where? My house?”

  He nods.

  I say nothing, hoping he’ll volunteer information, but he doesn’t. “Holly too?”

  He nods again. This is like talking to Gary Cooper. “I guess things aren’t going so good, huh?”

  He keeps staring at the dashboard.

  “What’s the deal, Pat?”

  “I married a slut, that’s what.”

  I blink in disbelief. Hearing these words from Patrick is tantamount to hearing a priest shout “God is dead!” from the pulpit. “That doesn’t sound like you. Did something happen? You think she’s sleeping around or something?”

  He’s nodding steadily now, his eyes full of sullen anger. “She’s making a goddamn fool of me. She has been from the start.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s between her and me.”

  “I am worried about it. Does she know you’re out here?”

  He shrugs. I consider asking him to come into the house and sleep in my office, but I have no idea what’s transpired in the past few hours. “Well… is there anything you want me to tell Erin?”

  Suddenly he turns, and his eyes lock onto mine. “Where the fuck have you been all night?”

  “Trying to keep the FBI off my ass. This EROS thing is out of control. There’s a guy killing people out there. Cutting women’s heads off, blowing up FBI agents. You believe that shit?”

  He just stares. As I sit clenching the.38, a thought rises unbidden. “You know anything about the pineal gland?”

  “The pineal gland?”

  “It has something to do with these murders.”

  Patrick straightens in his seat. “It’s a pretty uncommon tumor site. Not long ago pineal tumors were real problems, because they were often inaccessible to neurosurgeons. But with the new microsurgical techniques, that’s changed completely.”

  Typical Patrick. His personal life is going to hell, but one medical question puts him into android-M.D. mode.

  “There’s a craze right now over one of the hormones it makes,” he adds. “Melatonin. Crackpots all over the country are taking it for a dozen different reasons, but it hasn’t been approved by the FDA.”

  “What do you think about it?”

  “Homeopathic bullshit.”

  “That’s what I figured. You sure you’re okay out here?”

  He faces forward again and nods.

  I start to pull away, then stop. If Patrick is going to blow a gasket, I’d rather he do it out here while I’m holding a pistol than after I’m asleep inside. “Listen, you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you? I mean, Erin loves you. I know she does. You’re the best thing that ever happened to her.”

  His laugh is hollow and cold. “I’m just making sure of something. Don’t worry, I’m good at repressing anger. Go inside.”

  “Okay. Take it easy.”

  After staring into his eyes a moment longer, I execute a three-point turn and idle back down to the house. I park in the gravel turnaround and get out with my briefcase and my gun. I’m on the second step when I spy the rear end of Erin’s Toyota Land Cruiser jutting from behind the right side of the house.

  My watch reads five a.m. Drewe and Erin are almost certainly asleep. I slip through the front door and turn left into my office without turning on any lights. As I undress, I realize that Erin and Holly are probably sleeping in the guest room on the other side of my office wall. A hundred thoughts and images flood my brain, but I am too tired to analyze them. I slide the.38 under my mattress, then fall facedown onto my pillow and inhale the welcome scent of home.

  But sleep eludes me.

  Why is Erin in our house? What is fraying the bonds of her marriage? Not the normal frustration that accretes like rust and eats at every relationship. If it were, Patrick would not be parked outside. So what remains? Other than our secret?

  A faint creak causes me to turn over in bed and open my eyes. I sometimes hear this sound when the air conditioner kicks on, but I don’t hear the compressor
running. Then I realize my door is standing open. And silhouetted in it is a female form too slender and dark to belong to my wife. The white-gowned apparition glides across my floor and stops beside my bed.

  Erin.

  Without hesitation my wife’s sister sits beside me on the twin bed and looks down into my eyes. This is the ruthless directness of woman, to observe no artificial boundaries, to behave as though no time has passed between our coupling three years ago in Chicago and now. I am supremely conscious of my wife, who lies sleeping less than thirty feet away. Yet Erin seems oblivious. She scrunches her left flank into my side, making more room for herself. Her face slowly coalesces in the darkness, oval planes of sculpted bone and tanned skin, eyes a shade darker than her long fine hair. She smells just as she always did, irresistibly feminine.

  Then I see tears glinting in the dark. She lowers her head into her hands, stifling a sob. I want to wrap my arms around her and comfort her, but I do not trust myself. After three years of self-inflicted guilt, I should feel no impulse to anything crazy, but the drive that pushed me into Erin’s arms the first time had nothing to do with reason, and it remains true to itself.

  “What?” I ask softly. “What is it?”

  “Everything’s coming apart,” she says much too loudly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a mistake, Harper. It was all a mistake.”

  “You mean you and me? Keeping Holly? What?”

  No answer.

  “Have you left Patrick?”

  She doesn’t speak. I take her hand away from her eyes.

  “I’ve tried,” she whispers. “To be a good wife, a good mother. To leave everything I was behind.”

  I squeeze her wrist and force her to look into my eyes. “That’s the problem, Erin. You can’t leave your past behind. That’s Oprah bullshit. I’ve tried it. You have to come to terms with whatever you did, and then move forward.”

  Her eyes widen, boring into my soul. “Like you’ve come to terms with it? You’re living the same lie I am.”