Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “I saw it. Not bad, Doctor.”

  “I had him going, didn’t I?”

  Has Lenz called merely to rehash his triumph? Like a high school kid talking about his football game? Maybe he thinks I’m the only person who truly understands the parameters of his strange quest.

  “You saw his age?” he asks. “Forty-seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “And admitting that he’s in the medical field! Cole, it’s working.”

  Miles leans over the answering machine.

  “What about the bit at the end?” Lenz asks, suddenly penitent. “Did I go too far?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “I know I pushed him, but I’m fighting time here.”

  Miles punches me in the side.

  “I guess Baxter’s pressing you to nail him before he kills again, huh?”

  “I’m speaking of the phone traces.”

  Miles punches me again; this time I punch back. “You mean they’re close to tracing him?”

  “No. They’re no longer trying to trace him.”

  “What?”

  “Before we put the decoy plan into action, we realized we were facing an either-or situation. If they tried to trace the UNSUB every time we conversed on-line, it would be obvious I was helping the FBI. You see?”

  “Oh, I see. But I can’t believe Baxter stopped the traces.”

  “It’s not indefinite. He’s given me seven days.”

  “Then they start the traces again?”

  “Now you see why I’m having to push harder than I’d like.”

  “Is there anything else you needed?”

  “Yes,” Lenz says in a strange voice. “I’m wondering why you haven’t asked me about Turner.”

  I look at Miles. “I figure you’d be crowing about it already if you’d caught him.”

  “If you know where he is, Cole, do yourself and your wife a favor. Turner wouldn’t hang his ass out to protect yours.”

  I sense the heat of Miles’s rage from a foot away. “Yeah, well, opinions are like assholes.”

  “Everybody’s got one,” Lenz finishes. “Only a lot of people pay a lot of money for mine.”

  “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

  “Good night, Cole.”

  I carry the cordless back across the room and set it in its cradle. “Nice guy, huh?”

  “He’s better than some,” says Miles. He points at the red 21 in the LED window of my answering machine. “Have you listened to all those messages?”

  “I didn’t want them banging around in my head.”

  He raises his eyebrows and, getting no objection from me, hits the rewind button. A minute later the tape begins playing back the messages. Most are from various police departments. A couple are from old friends, warning me that they’ve been questioned about me by police. One is a sales pitch from a credit card company. And six are from Detective Michael Mayeux of the New Orleans Police Department. Miles and I listen to his final message in rapt silence.

  “Mr. Cole, I don’t know where you are, but you’d better start checking your messages. You may not believe this, but I’m worried about you. If the FBI has pressured you into some kind of cooperation, you better be damn careful. This case got weird fast. There’s a lot of bad feeling in all the P.D.s involved. These days the Bureau’s pretty good about sharing information, but right now they’re acting like they did back in the seventies. Some people are saying they’ve already screwed up the investigation. That isn’t your problem, I know. All I’m saying is things could reach a point where the departments involved just get fed up and decide to do what they’ve been wanting to do all along, which is blow the whistle, shut down EROS, and arrest you and Turner. You gotta admit I treated you okay when you came to us. If you need help-and brother you do-I’m your man. Now give me a call.”

  Miles has wandered away from me. “What do you think about that?” I ask.

  “Never happen,” he says distantly. “Going public and shutting down EROS, I mean. City cops aren’t going to risk pissing off the feds to that degree.”

  “Could we use Mayeux to our advantage?”

  “Things haven’t progressed that far yet. Just ignore him.”

  “I’m glad he’s not a Mississippi cop. He’d be sitting on my doorstep right now.”

  Miles plunks himself down on the edge of my bed and sighs.

  “You said they found Karin Wheat’s head near the Bonnet Carre causeway,” I remind him. “Headed toward La Place. That means he passed the New Orleans airport. But from the distances between the previous murder cities, I always assumed Brahma was flying.”

  “He could have flown out of Baton Rouge,” Miles points out. “It’s only an hour away, and you go through La Place to get there. Or he could have driven to La Place just to toss out the head, then turned around and driven back to the airport. The FBI doesn’t know how he’s getting around. Common sense says flying, but there’s enough elapsed time between the murders for him to have ridden a goddamn Trailways bus.”

  “Except the one-night interval between Karin’s death and Rosalind May’s abduction.”

  He nods. “They’re searching airline records, trying to match passenger manifests for the murder cities on given dates, but all matches so far have been legitimate.”

  “He could have taken a private plane,” I suggest, “like you did to get here.”

  “They’re checking that.” He looks up and searches my face. “You got something you want to say?”

  “Take it easy. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  He runs both hands over his freshly skinned scalp and focuses somewhere beyond me. “You been thinking about what we talked about? The Trojan Horse?”

  “Some.”

  “And?”

  “I’m up for it.”

  A broad smile lights his face. “All right. Now we’re cooking with gas.”

  Miles’s occasional regressions to Southern idiom surprise me, but I guess every refugee carries cultural baggage.

  “Have you decided which way you want to go?” he asks. “I mean, a real EROS client or totally from scratch?”

  “Not a real client,” I tell him. “I don’t want to put anybody at risk like that. But I don’t want to start totally from scratch, either.”

  His eyes narrow. “I don’t get you.”

  I move closer to the bed and look down at him. “I’m going to explain this to you once. After that you don’t ask me about it.”

  “Sure. You’ve got a name in mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Erin.”

  He blinks.

  “No questions?”

  “I don’t get it. You’re picking that name out of the blue, or you’re talking about our Erin?”

  “My wife’s sister.”

  He lets out a low whistle.

  “If this is going to work, Miles, it’s got to be authentic. That over-the-top stuff Lenz is doing won’t fool Brahma long. I mean, I think that gang rape stuff really happened to somebody, but not to Lenz. You know? Probably one of his patients. Brahma feeds on the pathos of real human beings. And Erin’s the one. I know things about her… things that could help me play her very well.”

  “Whatever you want,” Miles says quietly. “I trust your instincts.”

  “Lenz thinks Brahma is targeting older women now. That’s why he made ‘Lilith’ forty-eight. But I can’t play a forty-eight-year-old woman convincingly. We’ll just have to hope he’s still interested in donors as well as recipients.”

  He opens his hands. “Whatever you say. But I’ve got to ask. Are you saying you want ‘Erin’ as your on-line alias, or the real name behind the alias?”

  “On-line alias. You can make her legal name anything you want.”

  Miles digests this slowly. “I’m not even going to ask where this is coming from. You’re playing the role, you pick the costume. But aren’t you worried that using Erin might somehow lead Brahma to her?”r />
  “No. Because it won’t really be Erin. It’s going to be a blend of Erin’s personality and mine. A hybrid. And the fact that the alias is ‘Erin’ should make Brahma think her real name is anything but Erin.”

  “You’re right,” he says, looking impressed for once.

  “It’s your job to create a fake identity that’s untraceable. And the address worries me. I know you can do a lot by hacking, but you can’t change where we are. What if Brahma can actually trace the phone connections?”

  “I don’t think he can. Not easily, anyway. But even if he tries, I’ll have it covered.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to hack into AT amp;T’s Jackson switching station, change around some number and address data. Then I’ll make that data match the ‘Erin’ stuff I put into the DMV computer and everywhere else.”

  “I thought telephone switching stations had gotten practically impenetrable.”

  “Some have. But I’ll bet Mississippi’s had the fewest attempted penetrations of any state in the U.S.” He smiles. “And they definitely aren’t ready for me, Grasshopper.”

  “I’m asking for one promise, Miles.”

  “What?”

  “Drewe knows nothing about what we’re trying to do. Nothing. I don’t care what we tell her, but it’s not going to be this.”

  He holds up his hands. “You think I’m nuts?”

  “This is illegal and we both know it.”

  “Yeah. But we’ve got to do it.” Wicked blue light flashes in his eyes. “And it’s going to be the mother-fucking rush of all time. Wow.”

  A surge of adrenaline pushes me over to the left front window. I have to fight the urge to peek around the blinds to see whether there are any deputies standing in the dark yard.

  “Can I ask you one thing?” Miles says. “One thing, then I shut up for good.”

  “One thing,” I say to the window blind.

  “This Erin thing. We’re talking about something in the past, right? You and her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  I turn from the window to ask how far back in time his suspicions began, but he is already hunched over the keyboard at my desk. By tomorrow morning a digital human being that backs up my “Erin” will exist in the bureaucratic agar that forms the basis of legal existence in America. Miles’s groundwork will accomplish Brahma’s initial suspension of disbelief. But far more important than a Social Security number or address will be the woman I carry in my mind and heart. A carnal phantom called Erin still wanders unbidden through my dreams, and though I am not sure how or why, I know that through me, she can haunt the ruthless killer we have christened Brahma to his grave.

  CHAPTER 28

  My chief fascination in the days following Miles’s appearance was listening to the baroque mating ritual between “Maxwell” and “Lilith.” From the worldly wise but bitter woman who endured a college gang bang, Lenz quickly expanded his creation into a multidimensional character worthy of a Christmas appearance on Oprah. Sometimes “Lilith” taunted “Maxwell,” other times she passively answered whatever questions he put to her, however personal. I decided Lenz must be drawing his emotional raw material from actual case histories; much of it had the outrageous ring of truth that only reality can provide, incidents that would get any decent fiction writer drummed out of his profession. Through it all, “Maxwell” probed “Lilith’s” past with lapidary precision, a twist here, a light tap there, gradually forming a picture of the “woman” who lay behind the alias.

  Miles spent most of the first day building the digital skeleton that would support my fictional “Erin.” We chose the “legal” name Cynthia Griffin and decided to place her address in Vicksburg, which lies forty miles southwest of Rain. We discussed the chance that a Mississippi address might give Brahma’s intuition a tickle, but word-of-mouth among my old friends had brought the number of Mississippi EROS clients to more than thirty. Miles thought that was more than enough to make one new addition quite natural.

  Once “Cynthia’s”personal information had been hacked into the proper government computers-and an EROS account opened in her name-Miles began coding away at his Trojan Horse program, consuming massive amounts of Mountain Dew and granola bars ferried by Drewe from the Yazoo City K-Mart. He rarely sat in front of his computer to do his coding. After Drewe left for work each morning, he would commandeer an easy chair in the darkened den and, fortified by junk food, sit glassy-eyed through three or four old movies on the satellite channels. His favorites seemed to be disaster movies from the nineteen-seventies, a la Airport and The Towering Inferno, melodramatic extravaganzas featuring faded Hollywood legends. Now and then he would jump up and hurry into my office, sit down before his laptop, and punch in a few keystrokes, cocking his head at odd angles and murmuring to himself.

  Drewe worked every day, but she called frequently to see how the check on the female blind-draft account holders was going. About midnight on the second night, Jan Krislov e-mailed us, saying that the fifty-two blind-draft women showing low account activity in the past months had all been verified as alive and well. So had more than three hundred of the remaining blind-draft women. This punched a gaping hole in Drewe’s theory of another missing woman, and by extension her pineal transplant theory. Or so we thought.

  When we told Drewe about Jan’s message, she was standing at my office door, about to leave for work. She looked blank for about thirty seconds; then her eyes flickered with knowledge.

  “I was so stupid, ” she said. “The missing woman couldn’t be an EROS client. The EROS population isn’t large enough to allow selection of tissue-matched donors. You see? The killer could do all the surgical practice he wanted on EROS women, but when it came time to match a donor to a recipient, he had to search a much larger population.”

  “Why?” asked Miles.

  “Probability. Donor networks require pools of thousands- tensof thousands-of potential donors, so that exact matches can be found for those in need of organs or tissue. After the killer kidnapped Rosalind May-his intended recipient-he had to tissue-type her, then find a donor of the right age who was a match. The twenty-five hundred women on EROS aren’t nearly a large enough group to get a match. Actually, he would need a tissue donor registry. Like for bone marrow. Transplant networks list people who need organs, not people who want to donate them. And driver’s license computers might list organ donors, but not any of the medical information the killer needs.”

  “So where would he find a group like that?” Miles asked.

  Drewe shrugged. “A legitimate tissue donor network. Or directed donors listed with blood banks. Those are the only kinds of databases that would have the medical information he’d need.”

  While Miles pondered this, Drewe stared at me as if waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, she looked at Miles and said, “We’ve got to tell the FBI to start checking tissue donor registries.”

  He looked at me, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of contacting the FBI.

  “Can we do it anonymously?” I asked her.

  She sighed deeply, then pulled her keys from her pocket and walked away. She slammed the front door on her way out.

  At my request, Miles agreed to compose a summary of Drewe’s theory and sneak it into the Quantico computer. I suggested using an anonymous remailing service to send the message, but Miles thought the FBI could get at us through the operator if they tried hard enough.

  Later that day, a running argument developed between us as to whether Brahma was actually being taken in by Lenz, or whether he was making a fool of him. I’d begun to notice what I thought was dry humor in “Maxwell’s” conversations with “Lilith.” Most of it was double entendre so subtle as to be arguable, yet I believed it significant. Ever since Miles pointed out the “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Levon” connections, I’d felt Brahma was toying with us. Not just Lenz, but everyone who had committed the hubris of stepping up to the plate against him
.

  Miles, on the other hand, thought Lenz was doing very well, considering the time pressure he was under, and pointed out that I had yet to draw Brahma into a single on-line conversation. To speed up this process, he carried his laptop to the easy chair in the front room and, during an encore showing of The Thomas Crown Affair on A amp;E, hammered out a search program based on Brahma’s most common figures of speech. He claimed it would locate Brahma on-line regardless of the alias he was using, and it did. However, it could not draw him into conversation with me.

  The police surveillance of our house continued, and by the third day cabin fever had set in. Miles insisted that my phones were tapped. And it wasn’t enough that he remain indoors. He demanded that I check one window on each side of the house every half hour and also that I leave the house occasionally to create the appearance of normalcy. I understood the necessity, but it became a major pain to constantly jump up from my computer while he sat watching The Poseidon Adventure like some Arabian potentate.

  Yet it was tougher on him than on me. He’d promised Drewe that he would clear out at the first sign of trouble, and I knew he meant it. Like a fireman or a fighter pilot, he had to stay pumped enough to jump up from a dead sleep and race into the kitchen pantry for the trapdoor that led to the bomb shelter.

  So it was almost a divine deliverance when, at eleven p.m. on the third night, the long-awaited invitation from Brahma arrived. I’d been in the “lobby” of one of EROS’s conference areas, politely fending off not-so-polite advances from a man calling himself “Billy Pilgrim,” when a small window opened on my screen. The words inside it read:

  MAXWELL› Hello, Erin. I notice that your conversations have a particular type of error pattern. Are you using a voice-recognition unit?

  My heartbeat racing, I tried to think clearly. I’d debated whether or not to use the voice-recognition unit. Ultimately, I decided that being able to speak my thoughts into the computer rather than type them was worth arousing whatever suspicion Miles’s voice-rec program might cause in Brahma. Speaking as clearly as I could, I said, “Yes. How did you know?”

  On the screen appeared: