Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “Let’s say a surgeon is the brains behind this,” I cut in. “He trolls EROS himself, but he needs a hacker to get at our master client list, plus medical information from health insurance computers, God knows what else. Then he hires muscle to do the actual killings-”

  “That explains the rapes!” cries Drewe. “It’s not the surgeon, it’s his hired thugs. Some sleazeballs are raping the women, and the surgeon doesn’t care so long as he gets his pineal glands. He’s probably glad his thugs are confusing the crime scenes!”

  Miles is nodding. “Division of labor. A surgeon could easily afford a cracker and some hired muscle.”

  “Gross income for a neurosurgeon is nearly half a million,” Drewe says. “And that’s an average.”

  “I’m definitely in the wrong business,” Miles mutters.

  “But that theory works only if Brahma’s a flake,” I point out. “If we postulate a man with a real chance of success, he needs a team of medical specialists to help with the operation.”

  “And they’d realize what he was up to,” says Drewe. “Eventually. I don’t think money would be enough motivation for medical people to take part in murder.”

  Miles laughs bitterly. “Money is always enough motivation for some people. You two have so much of it now you’ve forgotten what it’s like to really need it.”

  “Whether it’s a nut or a serious surgeon,” I say irritably, “it’s clear why you and I are suspects. You could easily be the paid hacker. You’d be guilty of murder even though you were never at a single crime scene.”

  He nods soberly.

  I shove back my chair, climb onto its wooden back, and perch there with my feet on the seat. “I’d say we’ve come up with some significant reasoning here. The question is, do we tell the FBI?”

  “Fuck no,” Miles says savagely. “They’ve got me cast for the remake of Midnight Express.”

  I look to Drewe, but she is gazing at the kitchen curtains drawn shut against prying eyes. “They know most of this already,” she says softly. “They must. If they don’t, I don’t have much faith in them.”

  “What do you think?” I ask Miles. “Do they?”

  He averts his eyes. “The groundwork is there.”

  “They don’t suspect there’s an unknown victim,” I press him.

  He shakes his head.

  “We’ve got to tell them about the fifty blind-draft women,” Drewe says flatly. “That’s nonnegotiable. One of them is dead or missing right now.”

  “Drewe,” Miles says carefully, “women set up blind-draft accounts precisely because their use of EROS might cause problems or even physical danger in their homes. I can’t sic the FBI on them without any warning.”

  She is clearly upset by this. “Privacy means more to you than a human life? You think those women value it over their lives?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. You just came up with this unknown-victim idea. And if we accept our own logic, she’s already dead. Right? I mean, we’re pegging her as a donor.”

  “Not necessarily dead. She could be lying on an operating table right now.”

  Miles is thinking. “What if I call Jan Krislov and tell her to order my techs to start contacting those fifty women? To verify that they’re alive and okay?”

  “ Everywoman with a blind-draft account,” Drewe insists.

  “That’s over five hundred women,” I tell her.

  “Closer to six,” Miles says. “It might cause a panic, but we could do it.” He pauses again, weighing the risks. “Okay. I’ll tell Jan to put four techs on it. They’ll start with the fifty women who aren’t active but are still paying their fees. Good enough?”

  Drewe bites her bottom lip.

  I feel a strange fluttering below my diaphragm. “Miles, maybe it’s time to come clean with Baxter and Lenz. You talked me out of pursuing this thing once, and the result was very bad.”

  He lets out a frustrated sigh. “Harper, the three of us are buying into a scenario we came up with off-the-cuff, and a pretty damned wild one at that. The FBI has twice the raw data we do, but they’re not buying the doctor theory yet. Because they can’t afford to. It’s their responsibility to catch this guy. We’re just three people talking. You see?”

  At my core I know this is a lie. We are not “just three people talking.” We are bright people with specialized knowledge and personal stakes in the case. Even Drewe seems to have attacked the problem with proprietary intensity.

  The blaring ring of the kitchen telephone freezes us all in place. Drewe looks to me for a sign.

  “I’m here,” I tell her. “Miles definitely isn’t.”

  She takes a deep breath, then picks up the receiver and says, “Dr. Cole.”

  She listens intently for about ten seconds, then cuts her eyes at us and smiles tightly. “Hang on,” she says, and puts her palm over the mouthpiece. “It’s Mom. It’s about Erin. This is going to be a long one. You want me to go to the bedroom phone?”

  “We’ll get out.” I spring off the chairback and land on my feet. “What about telling the FBI?”

  She gives me a searching look, and while it lasts Miles does not exist. After some mental process I cannot divine, she says, “They have the same facts we do. As long as you start checking the blind-draft women, I see no point in calling attention to ourselves tonight.”

  A sigh of relief escapes Miles’s lips.

  “But if one turns up missing,” Drewe adds, “we go straight to the FBI.”

  Miles nods, then quickly gathers his papers into his briefcase. I kiss Drewe on the cheek and lead him down the hall to my office-the domain of secrets, and of the EROS computer.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sitting in a half-lotus position on a stool before the EROS computer, his hands flying across the keyboard, Miles says, “I’d forgotten how quick Drewe is.”

  “You really think there’s another blind-draft woman missing?” I ask, staring over his shoulder. The cover is off the computer, and its electronic guts look very different than they did thirty minutes ago.

  “We’ll know soon,” he says.

  Typical Miles. He’s already e-mailed his techs and instructed them to begin a discreet check on the safety of all female blind-draft account holders; thus, predictions are pointless.

  He stares at the monitor, his hands suspended over the keys. “I can’t believe you never installed this card, man. I sent it to you two months ago.”

  He’s referring to a large rectangular circuit board designed for voice synthesis and recognition. The voice-rec/synth card is the most densely packed PC card I’ve ever seen.

  “I don’t use the voice much,” I tell him.

  “That’s because the one you have sucks. The new one has unbelievable inflection control. It really sounds human.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  He drops his hands to his sides. “Put the cover on, Bwana. You just entered the twenty-first century.”

  With a hard shove, I press the metal cover back onto the chassis. “You got a demo for it?”

  Miles shakes his head. “Call up a file. An EROS file. These cards only work properly with the EROS format.”

  I lean over his shoulder, click the mouse, and retrieve the top file in my electronic filing cabinet. The text of a typical exchange between myself and Eleanor Rigby fills the screen. Miles hits ALT-V-a key combination called a macro that simultaneously carries out several functions-and a rectangular window appears in the lower left corner of the screen.

  MALE FEMALE

  VOICE ONE: Hz

  VOICE TWO: Hz

  Using the mouse, Miles clicks on the first HARPER› prompt, drags the mouse over to VOICE ONE, and clicks again. Then he selects a frequency under the male range. He does the same with ELEANOR RIGBY› but selects a frequency in the female range. Beneath the frequency range display is a group of controls much like those on a tape recorder. Miles uses the mouse to select PLAY.

  “Your turn tonight,”says a voice not so diffe
rent from mine, but without any accent. The voice came from my computer’s multimedia speakers, but it sounded as natural as a third person in the room. I squeeze Miles’s shoulder in disbelief. He just laughs.

  “I’m ready,”answers a female voice, its timbre not exactly sensual, but definitely feminine. “We are standing naked on cool black rock, volcanic rock, staring across a vast expanse of primeval ocean. An orange explosion of sunset burns itself out beneath a purple horizon, leaving us stranded beneath white points of stars. Our blood pulses in sidereal time as our eyes dilate to adapt to the newly dark world, pupils expanding to expose underused receptors, until the very glow of our skins massages the nerve pathways leading to our brains, the first touch not a touch, and yet as real as any language in this-”

  “Unbelievable,” I say over the hypnotic canticle. “All the subscribers will get this?”

  “Not for a while.” Miles chuckles with the affection of a proud father. “This part of the package isn’t that complicated or expensive. It’s the other half that puts it out of reach.”

  “What? Video?”

  “No, quality voice recognition. It’s much more complex than real-time video. Which you should know, since you’ve had video by satellite uplink for six months.”

  “Which I hardly use either.”

  “Krislov thanks you. It’s too fucking expensive.”

  He stands up from the stool and hands me a black plastic headset exactly like those worn by telephone operators and receptionists. “I guess this will count as the first field test. The earphones don’t work. I picked up the wrong set when I split the office. The mike works fine, though.”

  “Just talk into it?”

  “Hang on.” He clicks RECORD/CHAT with the mouse, and the Harper-Eleanor Rigby file vanishes.

  “Okay. The real test is whether the program will recognize your voice. If it won’t, this thing is useless to you until we train it with your voice.”

  “How do you train it?”

  “By reading many long and boring passages into it, Grasshopper. I’ve modified the program to be as tolerant as I can make it. Out of six techs at EROS, it accepts four as me.”

  I sit before the computer and, rather tentatively, say, “Hello?”

  On the screen appears:

  MILES› Hello.

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “Hello is easy,” says Miles. “It displayed the ‘Miles’ prompt because I logged on as me. I’ll set it to read whatever screen name you’re using at the time. Try a sentence.”

  “Okay.” As clearly as I can, I recite, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

  On the screen we see:

  MILES› Okay. Now is the time four all good men to come two the aid of there country.

  “Shit,” says Miles, his voice weary. “Actually that’s not bad, considering you never trained with it. If you’ll consciously avoid your Southern accent, you’ll probably get better results.”

  “ Ihave an accent?” I ask, laughing.

  Now that he’s neutralized the stress he felt at being around a computer that was not quite state-of-the-art, Miles walks away from the EROS table and examines various objects around the room with distracted interest. My guitars, the Civil War sword, the sculpture of my father’s coat.

  “You glossed right over Lenz’s plan to lure Brahma by pretending to be a woman,” he says, leaning across the twin bed and rubbing the side pocket of the coat. “I let it slide because you sounded like you didn’t want to go into detail about EROS in front of Drewe.”

  “Good instinct.”

  “I can’t believe this is made of wood,” he says, running his fingertips over the sculpture. “I thought Drewe was into EROS.”

  “She was until about three months ago. Now she can’t stand it. She hasn’t stepped into this room in six weeks.”

  He sits down on the bed and peers at me with open curiosity. “Why the change? She find out about Eleanor Rigby?”

  “No. She’s ready to have kids, Miles. But that’s only part of it. I’d rather not go into it right now.”

  “And Erin? Problems with her husband?”

  “Same story. Skip it.” I get up from the stool and roll my swivel chair opposite him.

  “The last time I saw her was in New York,” he says as I sit down.

  “You saw Erin?”

  “Yeah. This was years ago. She looked seriously medicated.”

  “She finally kicked that.”

  He raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She got kids now?”

  “One.”

  His gaze is too direct for me to dissemble on that subject, so I push him straight to our mutual problem. “What do you think about Lenz’s plan?”

  “I think it might work.”

  “Really?”

  “The logic is sound. There wasn’t a word about it in any of the FBI or police computers. Not even on Baxter’s personal e-mail. If they’re keeping it that secret, Baxter must think Lenz is devious enough to pull it off.”

  “He may, but I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not that easy to pretend to be a sex other than the one you are. Especially for a man to pretend to be a woman. I see people try it all the time, and I can always tell. Can’t you?”

  Miles runs a finger down his aquiline nose. “Sometimes. But if I couldn’t tell-and I couldn’t peek at the master client list-how would I know I was being fooled?”

  “Granted. But what about the trip-up questions like ‘What does a speculum look like?’ Or ‘What brand of feminine protection do you use and why?’ ”

  “Lenz is a doctor. He can handle that stuff.”

  “Maybe. But when someone starts writing their innermost thoughts to you-live, on computer-you begin to form an emotional picture of who they are. And when something rings false, you get a little twinge somewhere, like hearing a dissonant voice in a choir.”

  Miles laughs softly. “Harper, you’re more perceptive than almost anyone I know. But even you can be fooled.”

  His tone stops me; he is not speaking in theoretical terms. “What do you mean?”

  “People are fooled about sexual identity every day on EROS, and I can prove it to you.”

  “How?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  Spider legs of apprehension creep along my shoulders. “Why?”

  “It involves someone you care about.”

  “What are you telling me, Miles?”

  “Eleanor Rigby.”

  I am utterly still. “No way she’s a man. I know who she is. She’s Eleanor Caine Markham, a mystery writer.”

  An odd smile narrows his lips. “Who also works as a body double in Hollywood? And has a crippled sister in a wheelchair who resents her personal life?”

  I am too stunned to respond immediately. Miles’s invasion of my privacy is momentarily forgotten as I try to guess what shocking revelation he is about to drop on me.

  “Harper,” he says, his tone like that of a teacher urging a child toward the answer to a simple question. “Eleanor Rigby is the sister in the wheelchair.”

  This statement hits me with physical force, as though my parents had sat me down and told me I was adopted.

  “You never considered that?” he asks gently. “A woman with the brains to be a successful mystery writer also has a body that major directors pay to put on film? Possible, but not likely.”

  It seems so obvious now. But sixty seconds ago I had no clue. “It just-everything she said seemed so heartfelt.”

  “It was. Each part of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is based in objective and emotional truth. She just shuffled the parts on you, mixed the roles. She lives vicariously, through her novels and through talking to people like you on EROS. You’re her sex life, Harper. You truly are her lover, maybe the greatest of her life. Sad, isn’t it?”

  A shapeless flood of anger courses through me, and for lack of a better target I direct it at Miles. “Who gave you the right t
o go prowling through my life, goddamn it? You’re the one who doesn’t have a life.”

  “We’re all voyeurs,” he says in a neutral tone. “It’s the new American pastime. Pretty pathetic, I guess, but that’s where we are.”

  “That’s a cop-out, Miles.”

  “Maybe. If you want to know the truth, I checked out Eleanor because I saw you getting tight with her. Maybe even risking your marriage, if Drewe happened to see the stuff you two were writing. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t some basket case. You know, the kind that shows up and starts boiling rabbits on your stove.”

  “How can I ever thank you.” Though I am spitting sarcasm, my inner voice tells me that Miles does care what happens to me. But still I feel the urge to strike back. Before I know it, I am asking him the one question I have spared him up until now.

  “Miles,” I say in my father’s voice, “are you involved in these murders in any way?”

  He blinks in surprise.

  “In any way.”

  He looks away, then back at me. “Anything else you want to ask while you’re at it? Am I queer? You’ve been wondering that too, haven’t you?”

  “You’re avoiding my question. That scares me.”

  “Fuck no! I am not now nor have I ever been a corpse-fucking killer, okay? Good enough?”

  I watch him impassively.

  “I can’t believe you asked me that.”

  I feel the peculiarly human satisfaction of knowing I have made him as angry as I am. “You’d better get used to it. I’m on your side, and I had to ask. What do you think the FBI will think?”

  “Hey, I know what they think. That’s why I have to catch this asshole.”

  I slowly roll my chair forward and back with my feet. “I agree. Do you have a plan?”

  “You think I came back to this cultural wasteland for the sights? Of course I have a plan.”

  My pulse quickens. “What is it? You’ve got a way to trace his phone connections?”

  He shakes his head. “I might be able to, if I had the help of AT amp;T and the major cellular companies. But I don’t, do I?”

  “So?”

  He slides off the bed and stands, his uncovered crewcut a mere shadow against his scalp. He runs a hand through it like a man feeling the stump of an amputated limb, then begins pacing out invisible patterns on the floor.