Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “Thanks. Long night?”

  “Worse.”

  “What happened?”

  I take another scalding sip of coffee and tell her about the tragedy in Virginia. I can’t tell if she’s stunned or furious or both. After a long silence, she says, “Is Miles in there trying to track this nut down?”

  I shrug. “He’s got a few ideas.”

  Unable to read her eyes, I twirl the spoon in my cereal bowl. The flakes are already soggy.

  “Did Miles tell the FBI to start checking tissue donor networks?” she asks.

  “Yes. And it looks like you were right. There’s probably another missing woman.”

  Drewe puts down her spoon. “Then it’s time to tell the FBI everything.”

  I have no answer but the truth. “I can’t do it with Miles here.”

  She gives me a pointed look that I have no trouble translating: Maybe that’s our real problem.

  “Maybe I should call them,” she says. “From my office. Tell them I came up with the whole transplant theory.”

  “Drewe….”

  She wraps both hands around her coffee cup and stares into it. “I know Miles is our friend, Harper. But it’s not fair to us.” She looks up. “Jail is not my idea of a future.”

  I reach across the table and close my right hand around her left. “Nor mine. Miles knows what’s going on. I just don’t think he knows where to go. I’ll talk to him.”

  She squeezes my hand, then stands. Drewe enjoyed theorizing about the murders when they were a technical abstraction, but she does not share Miles’s moral ambivalence about duty. Taking a last swallow of coffee, she smooths her slacks, then bends and kisses me on the forehead. “If he tells the FBI everything, he can stay as long as he wants to. If not, tell him I enjoyed seeing him. I’ve got to go. See you tonight.”

  She hurries out of the kitchen, car keys jingling, Coach purse swinging from her shoulder. When the front door bangs shut, I put down my coffee and check my watch. Seven thirty-two.

  I take my time with the orange slices.

  Miles is sitting on the edge of the bed, typing on his laptop. He doesn’t look up or speak, so I take the initiative.

  “You’re not going to try to talk me into answering Brahma?”

  “I answered for you.” His eyes never leave the screen. “I told him your husband hadn’t left for work yet, but you’d be in the Blue Room at nine.”

  “What?”

  He keeps typing. I had thought he was coding, but he’s typing too rapidly for that. “You logged on as ‘Erin’?”

  “Brahma didn’t know the difference. He’s desperate to talk to you.”

  “Goddamn it, Miles, this is dangerous!”

  “It’s been dangerous ever since you called the police. I always knew that. It was you and Drewe who saw it as some kind of McMillan and Wife episode.”

  I start to cuss him from hell to breakfast, but I stop myself. “Miles, I’ve got to tell you something. You-”

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” he cuts in, looking up from the computer at last. “I finished the Trojan Horse.”

  My mind goes blank. “You did?”

  “After what happened last night, I thought it was too late. But once I saw Brahma’s message, I knew what to do. The hard part was-”

  A roar of motors and flying gravel drowns his voice. Before he resumes typing, his fingers flying across the keyboard, I leap to a window and peek around the blinds. Four Yazoo County sheriff’s cruisers have blocked my drive. Their doors are open, and at least six uniformed men are rushing toward the porch.

  “It’s the cops!”

  Miles is still typing like a madman when five fast knocks boom through the house.

  “Get your ass into the bomb shelter!” I tell him.

  “Keep your voice down,” he says calmly. “I need thirty seconds. Stall them.”

  “They’ll break the door down!”

  “No they won’t. I’ll hide the disk where you can find it. Go on.”

  With a lump the size of a cue ball in my throat, I walk slowly toward the front door in my sock feet.

  “Sheriff’s department!”shouts a voice. “Open up!”

  “I’m coming! Hang on a second!”

  Thanking God for the Scottish fortress mentality that kept my grandfather from putting windows in or around our front door, I reach for the chain lock and jiggle it loudly.

  “Gimme a sec! Chain’s stuck!”

  “Open up or we break it down!”

  As I jiggle the chain again, I have a fleeting impression of something passing across the hall behind me. Praying it was Miles, I count slowly to five, then unlatch the chain and open the door.

  Someone in a white polyester shirt shoves a piece of paper in my face and starts reciting legalese while three tan and brown uniforms push past me and fan out into the house. Before the voice stops, another deputy goes by me. Then the plainclothes man who was reading shoves past, and Deputy Billy climbs the steps to the porch. He looks a little sheepish.

  “What the hell’s going on, Billy?”

  “FBI thinks Turner’s here.”

  “You’ve had the house staked out for a week. How could he be here?”

  “Hey, we waited till your wife left, okay? That’s better treatment than most people get.”

  This mollifies me a little, but then I realize that common decency isn’t what made them wait. “Sheriff Buckner’s scared of pissing off Drewe’s father, right?”

  Billy gives me his worldly look. “Bob Anderson pulls a lot of weight in this state.”

  “Who’s the guy who read the warrant?”

  “Sheriff’s detective.”

  Summoning as much indignation as possible, I stalk into my office and shout, “Well? Did you find him?”

  A stumpy red-faced deputy gives me an eat-shit look and continues tearing out the contents of my closet. A rumbling from overhead alarms me until I realize that somebody must be fighting his way through our attic with a flashlight, an invasion of privacy that is its own punishment.

  A muffled conference in the hall draws me to the door. Then sharp banging noises pull me across it to the den. I want to laugh. A gangly deputy is hammering his hand along the wall like a man searching for a stud in which to place a nail.

  “Looking for secret passages?” I ask.

  “Why don’t you wait outside?” he says coldly.

  “Because this is my property.”

  “Yeah? B.F. deal.”

  I can’t resist rattling his cage. “Why don’t you introduce yourself, so I can be sure to get your name right when Bob Anderson asks me who was here?”

  His hand stops in midstroke. He looks at me with naked hatred, then continues his pounding, albeit more softly.

  “Got something!” shouts a deep voice from the kitchen.

  A wolf’s grin spreads across the deputy’s face. I fight the insane urge to trip him as he bulls past me with one hand on the pistol grip of a nickel-plated revolver.

  In the kitchen, my heart jumps in my chest. Three deputies have crowded up to the pantry door. They have discovered either Miles or the trapdoor leading to the bomb shelter.

  “Whose is this?” asks the sheriff’s detective.

  Red-nosed and beagle-eyed, he steps out of the group holding a dark suit jacket. It takes only a second to recognize the cashmere coat my father brought back from Germany, the one reproduced perfectly as a sculpture in my office.

  “Well?” he says.

  “Mine,” I confess, still dazed. That jacket hasn’t been out of my closet in months.

  “Sorta hot for a jacket today, ain’t it?”

  As I meet his stare, something else rises slowly into my line of sight. Gripped between the detective’s tobacco-stained thumb and forefinger is a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Why or how this man zeroed in on this disk rather than the hundreds in my office, I don’t know. But I have no doubt that he is brandishing the results of Miles’s marathon of coding-the Trojan Horse.
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br />   “What about this?” he asks, shaking the disk in my face.

  I’ll hide the disk where you can find it…

  “What about it?” I ask, praying that he’s smeared Miles’s fingerprints beyond recognition.

  “What’s on it?”

  “I don’t know. Where’d you get it?”

  He looks at the deputies, then back at me. I feel more men squeezing in behind me, but I don’t break eye contact.

  “Your pantry’s a wreck,” he says. “Cans all over the floor. And the back door was open.” He nods through our laundry room, toward the exterior door. “The jacket was on the floor by the door. This disk was in the inside pocket.”

  “My wife was mending it,” I tell him. “It’s old. Nothing but mending thread keeping it together.”

  A quick examination of the coat confirms my answer. “You can’t buy nothing like this around here,” he says doggedly.

  “My Dad bought it overseas. When he was in the army.”

  Someone behind me grunts as though serving in the army constituted some kind of subversive activity.

  “What about the disk?”

  I shrug. “I’ve got a million of them. For all I know, that one’s been in that coat since last year.”

  “Says you, bud.” The beagle eyes do not waver. “We’ll find out soon enough what’s on it.”

  “We can find out right now,” says the lanky deputy I met in the den. “He’s got computers out the ass in his bedroom.”

  “Leave ’em be,” says the detective, his drooping eyes still on me. “Sure you don’t want to change your story?”

  The truth is, I’d like nothing better. But right now Miles is either crouched in the dark tunnel beneath our house or snaking through the cotton fields on his belly, dragging his briefcase and computer bag behind him. He needs time. “I suggest you be careful with that coat,” I say mildly. “It has a lot of sentimental value.”

  The detective blinks, then folds the coat over his arm and hands the disk to a deputy, who slips it into a transparent plastic bag. “Don’t you worry, sonny. We’ll take plenty good care of it.”

  He turns and walks through the laundry room and pulls open the back door. I see more brown uniforms in the sunlight beyond him.

  “Anybody make a break for it?” he calls.

  “Nossir,” answers a chorus of voices. “Windows or doors.”

  He sighs interminably. “Le’s go, boys.”

  He shoves roughly past me and plows through the deputies toward the hall. My eyes track the cashmere coat until it disappears through the kitchen door.

  When the front door finally bangs shut, I take a slow walk through the house. Every closet door is open, with shoes and boots and clothing strewn across the floors. The attic door hangs down on sprung hinges. Heavy Detroit engines rumble out front as I make my way back to the kitchen. After checking to be sure the back door is shut and its curtain pulled, I open the trapdoor in the pantry floor. The odor of mildew and insecticide hits me in a wave.

  “Miles?”

  No answer.

  “Miles! You down there?”

  Nothing.

  Leaving the trapdoor raised, I return to the back door and open it. Across our backyard stands the long open toolshed where my grandfather kept his tractor and plow and disc and hand tools. The rusted brick-and-tin structure has fallen into ruin and now serves mostly as a picturesque prop for the huge fig trees that surround it. Miles could be hiding there, but I doubt it. The exterior entrance of the bomb shelter opens twenty feet beyond the shed, in the field. If Miles came out there, he would have crawled deeper into the enveloping cotton.

  My gaze wanders across the dusty white sea, already shimmering with heat at eight in the morning. I half expect to see Miles rise up like a scarecrow from the middle of the field, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s still hunched over his briefcase in a corner of the bomb shelter. But at some level I know he is not. He promised Drewe that if the police came for him, he would leave and not come back. And Miles keeps his word.

  A movement at the far edge of the field catches my eye, but when I try to focus it disappears. Miles? It could just as easily have been a deer.

  After locking the door, I pour a cup of scorched coffee and sit at the kitchen table. I can just see the propped-up trapdoor in the open pantry closet. I’ll give Miles another half hour before I close it.

  As I sit drinking, I ponder the morning’s riddles. Why didn’t the police confiscate my computers? I can think of two answers. One: the FBI ordered the raid on my house, but instructed the sheriff’s department not to touch my computers. That would mean Baxter still wants me working as sysop, which suggests he might try a repeat of Lenz’s ill-advised EROS strategy. Two: last night’s debacle in Virginia convinced the nonfederal police agencies involved in the case that the FBI has lost control of the investigation. They told Sheriff Buckner to find out once and for all whether Miles was here or not. Leaving my computers alone suggests that while Buckner doesn’t mind thumbing his nose at federal authority, he won’t risk screwing up an FBI investigation by interrupting the running of EROS.

  This leaves me with the enigma of the cashmere jacket and the disk. Why in God’s name would Miles take my coat, hide the Trojan Horse disk in it, then leave both behind? Did he run to the back door thinking he could break for the fields and avoid the claustrophobic tunnel altogether? Did he nearly run smack into the deputies who must have been waiting in the backyard even as Drewe and I ate breakfast? Would that have frightened him enough to make him drop the jacket and dart down the tunnel without it? No. Would he take one of my treasured possessions without asking? I remember him admiring the coat sculpture in my office, but-

  I’ll hide the disk where you can find it.

  I stand suddenly. As though sleepwalking, I move up the hallway to my office. I can’t believe the deputies did so much damage in so little time. They dragged furniture away from the walls, pulled guitar cases out from under my bed, and generally trashed anything large enough to conceal a hamster.

  But the sculpture of my father’s coat-mounted on long bolts driven into wall studs-remains pristine and untouched, just as Miles must have guessed it would. I stand before it like a votary before an icon, wondering whether this inanimate object that has so long preserved my father’s memory could have provided the spark Miles sought during a desperate moment. The coat sculpture looks impossibly real, the wine-colored “cashmere” slightly wrinkled, as though the coat had just been slipped off after a night of music-making in a smoky club. Even the fine stitching is rendered in the wood. The outer pockets have flaps, but they do not open. One of the deputies probably bruised his knuckles trying to check them.

  But the inside breast pocket-thanks to the sculptor’s painstaking technique-is there, somehow cut into the black “silk” lining. With a steady-handed certainty unlike any I’ve ever known, I reach between the wooden lapels and slip two fingers down into that pocket. A thin edge of plastic slides perfectly between my fingertips. When I withdraw my hand, it holds a 3.5-inch floppy disk labeled “TROJAN HORSE.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I whisper.

  Without hesitation I take the disk over to my Gateway, push it into the floppy drive, and scan the contents of the disk. It contains only two files. One is a WordPerfect file of 10,432 bytes called “Harper.” The other is labeled “E.jpg”-the “.jpg” signifying a graphic file encoded by the standards of the Joint Photographic Experts Group. This must be the Trojan Horse. Hoping for an explanation, I boot up WordPerfect, hit SHIFT, F-10 and retrieve “Harper.” The page-long letter begins:

  Harpe, Thabk God i type the upload instructionsbeofr the cops giot here. Jsut get Brahma to downolad this JPEG and we;ve got him. You candoiit TIA!

  “Thanks in advance,” I mutter. “Thanks but no thanks.”

  The rest of the letter gives detailed instructions for transmitting the JPEG file via EROS. There are almost no typos in that section; Miles must have typed it as soon as he finishe
d the Trojan Horse. Though he doesn’t explain exactly what the Trojan Horse is designed to do, he does say that he based his plan around the likelihood that Brahma would use the new EROS UUEncoder-Decoder program to decode the image file. The Trojan Horse code will probably be visible as a small black line somewhere in the photo when Brahma views it, which I am to explain ahead of time by saying that the picture was digitized with an inexpensive hand scanner.

  The problem is that Miles omitted the most crucial fact from his letter: a description of the image contained in the JPEG file. My EROS program will decode JPEG images, but since the Trojan Horse is buried inside this particular file-and I have no idea what destructive function it is designed to carry out-I have no intention of disabling either of my computers by trying to view it.

  Since Miles didn’t tell me what the image was, he must have thought the answer would be self-evident. What image could Brahma want badly enough to download into his computer?

  E.jpg.

  A chill races across my shoulders. Would Miles really suggest that I send a photo of my sister-in-law to Brahma? He would. I was willing to use Erin’s personality-at least parts of it-to seduce Brahma, and Miles hasn’t half my moral scruples. But even if he wanted to use her photo, how could he? There are no digital photographs of Erin in this house.

  Then it hits me. He wouldn’t have to use the real Erin. Miles’s latest project was expanding EROS’s software interface to facilitate transmission of graphic images between subscribers. He probably had dozens of digital photos on his hard drive or on disks in his computer bag. As long as one showed a beautiful woman who looked something like I described “Erin,” he would have been set.

  Despite my assertions to Miles that our game with Brahma is through, I feel a quickening in my blood. It’s 8:50. Brahma will be checking the Blue Room for “Erin” in ten minutes. I shove my chair away from the Gateway and stand up. The closed-in feeling is on me again, and the disordered room only adds to my anxiety. The closets are the worst. Worthless guitar pedal effects and expensive rack-mount units have been spilled out with equal disregard. Even my video camera lies on the floor beneath a pile of old shoes and boots.

  As I pick up the camera, I wonder what it was doing in my closet. We usually keep it on the top shelf in the hall closet, within easy reach if we want to tape Holly during a visit. Drewe couldn’t have put it here; she doesn’t even put herself in my office. That leaves Buckner’s deputies.