Czytaj książkę: «Mortal Fear»
GREG ILES
Mortal Fear
For my wife
Dr. Carrie McGee Iles
The light at both ends of the tunnel.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books By Greg Iles
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Dear Father.
We landed in New Orleans yesterday evening.
A humid city.
Flat, low, dispersed. A single grouping of tall buildings in the distance.
The taxi driver was a Cajun, surprisingly. A thin brown wrinkled man. Rather like getting a Chinese cabbie in Chinatown. I expected an Eastern European, as I see everywhere else.
He kept glancing into the rearview mirror as we passed through a town he called “Metry”—a place where the whites once fled to escape “da niggas.” Now they flee across Lake Pontchartrain. I worked at the computer in my lap but kept an ear open to his words.
Night descended over a rising moon as we swept onto an elevated section of freeway and passed the Superdome. Kali must have been a black shadow to him, beside me in the backseat, a shadow with bright black eyes.
She wanted to kill the driver.
I could feel it.
In her handbag. The scarf—sacred weapon. I see an image in her mind: he stops at a traffic light as we descend the ramp to the lower world of surface streets. She slips the noose around his throat and silently steals his life …
I lay a hand lightly on her wrist and feel a twitch that verifies my sense. She is ready.
I know that if I slide my hand beneath her sari I will find her moist. She lives for these nights.
I hope the security is no tighter than I expect.
I slide my hand beneath her sari.
She is wet. Burning.
Time is fire.
So opposite we are, so perfectly opposite. I understand restraint. Control. The defiance of it.
Kali understands only being.
She lets her head loll back on the car seat, black eyes glittering beneath half-closed lids. I move my hand as we descend the ramp onto Poydras, possibly saving the driver’s life.
We move toward Canal and the French Quarter.
Kali climaxes soundlessly.
The driver smells her. Pungent, fierce. I see alertness in the back of his neck, the angle of his head. His eyes dart to the rearview mirror. A whore? he wonders.
Kali smiles at him in the mirror. There is death in her smile. Death that a man might walk willingly into. She is startlingly beautiful. And so she should be.
You paid her father good money for her.
We exited the taxi at Galatoire’s, entered the restaurant, then left and changed cabs twice again. Tiresome but effective.
Security was heavy at the mansion, but no worse than I had expected. A small army, as befits an American cult figure. Bodyguards hired from God-knows-what agency—probably some outfit run by an ex-policeman who swilled Jax on the job for twenty years.
The ironwork of the fence was exquisite. The French influence. I let my right hand graze the points as we moved along it. They would bruise me, I knew, but I felt fit. Almost reckless. The grillwork matched that on the second-story balconies.
Quaint.
The street was crowded with all manner of tourists. Gawkers, most of them. I inclined my head as we passed the gate guards. One nodded slightly, glanced at my briefcase. The other followed Kali with his eyes. Even the billowing sari could not hide the hard contours of her body.
“After we turn the corner?” she asked.
“If the crowd thins.”
When we turned the corner, the crowd melted away as though scattered by a stage manager. Kali bunched up her sari and was over the ironwork in seconds, into the palm fronds and banana trees. I was more careful. I passed the briefcase through the bars, then worked my way over.
We stood together in the dripping trees, looking at the floodlit face of the mansion. Solid stonework, like an outbuilding of Versailles. Kali’s hand dropped to my distended zipper. She lightly squeezed me, a nurse checking a pulse.
I shivered. “We must wait.”
A short intake of breath. “How long?”
I crouched in the tenebrous foliage, booted up the computer, and logged back onto EROS. “She’s still at her computer. She’s searching for me.”
“Then let her find you.”
I shut off the computer and put it back into the case. “The rightmost upper window,” I said, recalling the photocopied blueprints that the archives so dutifully sent me. “Now.”
Crossing the open ground between fence and mansion was daunting for me. For Kali nothing. She believes we are invisible in such moments. Less than shadows. We are our intent.
I opened my briefcase beneath the side balcony. Kali took out the rope and hurled the rubberized hook over the ironwork of the balcony rail. She climbs like a thief.
I tossed up the briefcase.
A rape kit, police would call it.
But it is so much more.
I came prepared for resistance, but the French doors on the balcony were open. So often it happens that way. Evil is an invited guest.
Kali pulled the rope up after us.
We moved up the hallway together. Thick carpeting. Conditioned air whispering out of the ceiling. Somewhere the regular groan of a ceiling fan slowly turning.
I followed the groan.
It led us to the master bedroom. Kali took up her post beside the door. I see it again and again, fate unraveling into chaos:
I open the door as softly as possible.
The patient is seated before her computer, her back to me. She wears a long, flowing garment, like something from one of her early novels. You should tape a penny to one of the blades to stop that noise, I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I say:
“I have come, Karin.”
The chair tips onto the carpet as she bounds out of it in voiceless terror. Her eyes mostly white behind her glasses. She is heavier than her publicity pictures. The eyes dart to my exposed hand, searching for a knife or a gun. But it is empty.
“How did you get in?” she whispers.
I do not dignify this.
“Wh–who are you?”
“Prometheus.”
Her eyes widen beyond the point I believe possible. “But I was just—” She looks back at her computer. “How …?”
“It is not important. I have come for you at last. To give you what you most desire.”
She stares, her brain obviously thrumming behind the glassy eyes. “How—Do you have a car for us?” she asks finally.
“I thought you might call for one of yours.”
“Yes,” she says much too quickly. “If you’ll just let me get some things—”
“No.”
She freezes near her bedside table. Her eyes dart downward, then back to my face. It is breaking down. Kali was right: fantasy and reality are alternate universes. I come to save, but who can grasp great purpose with vision clouded by terror? My hopes crash around me like shattered icons. I slip my right hand behind my back and grip the butt of the pistol.
“Karin?” I plead, offering one last chance.
Then her mask cracks, revealing her panic as she stabs a hand at the bedside table. I see a button there. An alarm.
I have no choice but to fire.
The feathers of the dart bloom in the midline, just above where her navel must be. The patient looks down with animal incomprehension and pulls out the dart, but it is much too late for that. Then she runs. The brave ones usually do.
She runs right at me. Not actually at me, but toward me, because I stand between her and the door.
I let her run past me.
She gasps.
I turn.
Kali stands in the doorway. Faithful Kali. Saffron sari, nut-brown skin, jet hair, blacker eyes. She holds a dagger, wickedly curved. A fearsome instrument. Simple. Effective in two dimensions, the physical and the psychological.
The patient turns to me for some explanation. How powerfully her heart must be beating
“Kali,” I say, regretting every moment.
The patient starts at the sound of Kali closing the door, watches the young woman move lithely across the floor with my briefcase, like a dark angel.
Kali sets the case on the floor, then stands and unfastens her sari. It falls to the carpet, leaving her utterly naked. I watch the patient trying to work out what is happening as the Ketamine cocktail courses through her system. Why is the Indian woman undressing? Just before she loses consciousness, she might work it out. That Kali is undressing to keep her clothes free of blood.
I must disrobe as well, but first I walk to the computer, log off, type a few commands, and shut off the machine. Then I return to the patient, kneel, and open my briefcase.
“What’s in there?” she asks dully, sitting down on the floor.
“My instruments.” I lift a stainless steel rongeur from the case and try to smile, but my heart is a black hole.
The patient has done enough research for her novels to recognize the rongeur. In blind panic she breaks once more for the door, scrambling on all fours like an infant, but Kali channels her flat onto her stomach. I watch silently until I see the dagger flash and press against the patient’s throat.
“Don’t dare,” I say, alarmed by the blood lust in her eyes. Command rises into my throat. “Strip her.”
We took our time with the patient. We could afford to, as Karin allowed no guards inside the mansion. But our options were limited. How I longed to spend myself within that still body. But of course it was impossible.
This time I forced Kali to be careful to get no blood on her feet. After she finished and I had collected my specimen, we retired to the shower. Genuine marble. We wear rubber caps to keep as many hairs as possible out of the drain trap. The blood slipped off our shaved skin and swirled on the white stone. At last I could allow myself release.
Self-control is so important.
Kali knelt before me in the hot spray. I had held back so long that neither her expertise nor her diligence were required. She swallowed every drop of evidence, as she must. She may have left traces of her own arousal, but what will the police make of that? They will be confused enough as it is.
As we stole out of the estate, carrying not only the briefcase but also the rubber bag, now filled, I recalled the patient. So much potential there. For my work. For public relations. All lost, and for what? More homogenate? But I must not dwell on failure. Great souls rejoice in adversity.
Tomorrow is another day.
ONE
Life is simple.
The more complicated you believe yours is, the less you know of your true condition.
For a long time I did not understand this.
Now I do.
You are hungry or you are full. You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you are not. You are alive or you are dead.
I am alive.
We complain about complexity, about moral shades of gray, but we take refuge in these things. Complexity offers refuge from choice, and thus from action. In most situations, most of us would prefer to do nothing.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Something is wrong.
I stare at the phone number of the New Orleans police department, which I have just taken down from directory assistance.
I have known something is wrong for some time, at some level, but it took what happened today to make me face it squarely. To override the opposition.
“I have information about the Karin Wheat murder,” I say when the call goes through.
“I’ll connect you to Homicide,” says a female voice.
I glance up from my desk to the small color television I keep tuned to CNN sixteen hours a day. They’re into the International Hour. It was CNN that brought me news of the murder.
“Detective Mozingo,” says a male voice.
“I have information relevant to the Karin Wheat case.”
“What’s your name?”
“Harper Cole.”
“Address?”
“I’m calling from Rain, Mississippi.”
A pause. “Where?”
“It’s a farming area in the Delta.”
“How do you know anything about the Wheat case? The body was just discovered six hours ago.”
“I saw it on CNN. They cut into a regular newscast to show Wheat’s estate. I guess she was more famous than I thought.”
I hear the detective sigh and mutter something that sounds like “… freakin’ high profile …” away from the phone.
“Are you working on that case?” I ask him.
“No, thank God. Mayeux’s got it. But I’ll take the information. What do you think you know?”
“I think I know how she was killed.”
“We know how she was killed, sir.”
Nowadays I don’t trust anyone who calls me sir. “I’m sorry. I mean how the killer got to her. How he chose her.”
Another silence. A suspicious one.
“It’s sort of complicated,” I tell him. “I work as a sysop—I’m sorry, a system operator—for an online computer service. Are you familiar with what that is?”
“Not really,” the detective says warily.
“You’ve heard of America Online? CompuServe?”
“Yeah. The Internet, right?”
“Close enough. The online service I work for is called EROS. It deals exclusively with sex.”
“You mean like phone sex?”
Jesus. “Maybe I should wait and talk to Detective—Mayeux, was it?
“Yeah. He’s still at the scene, though. Just give me what you’ve got and …”
Mozingo is still talking, but I am no longer listening. I am staring astonished into the face of a man that the CNN caption line identifies as NOPD detective Michael Mayeux. His shirt drenched with sweat, he stands beside the tall black wrought-iron gate of the mansion that belonged to Karin Wheat. I recognize it from the earlier broadcast. The sidewalk before the gate is cordoned off with bright yellow police tapes, but against the tapes stand at least a hundred people ranging in age from fifteen to fifty. More women than men.
Fans.
Detective Mayeux looks irritably at a black female reporter and says, “I can’t comment on that at this time.” He is a tanned man of medium height, in his early forties, maybe ten pounds overweight. The reporter thrusts the mike into his face.
“What about the reports that Ms Wheat’s body was sexually mutilated?”
Mayeux looks pained. “I can categorically deny that, Charvel,” he says, seeming to brighten as disappointment flickers in her eyes.
“Are you there?” barks a voice in my ear.
“I’m here,” I murmur, watching Mayeux motion for a patrolwoman to keep the crowd back. “I’m watching the guy right now.”
“What guy?”
“Your guy. Mayeux. They’re showing him live on CNN. Right this second.”
“Christ, he gets all the face time.”
“Listen,” I say, deciding I like Mayeux’s looks better than Mozingo’s voice. “Does Detective Mayeux have voice mail?”
The detective covers the phone with his palm and then shouts something. “I’ll transfer you.”
A digital female voice tells me I can leave a message as long as ten minutes.
“My name is Harper Cole,” I say slowly. “I’m calling from Mississippi.” Then I stop. I can’t just leave my name and number. With a murder like this one on his hands, Mayeux might not get around to calling me for days. I say my phone number twice, then pause and gather my thoughts.
“I’m calling because I think this murder—the Karin Wheat murder—may be connected to some other … not murders, but … possible murders, I guess. I work as a system operator for an online computer service—a national service—called EROS. Over the past few months I’ve noticed that some women have left the network abruptly for unexplained reasons. They could have simply terminated service, but I don’t think they did. The company wouldn’t want me to call you like this, but I felt I had to. It’s too complicated to explain to a machine, but I’m afraid something may have happened to those other women as well. Something like what happened to Karin Wheat. I think maybe the same person could be involved. You see, Karin Wheat was a client of EROS. That’s confidential information, by the way. You won’t understand until you talk to me. I’d appreciate a call as soon as possible. I’m always home. I work from here, and I stay up pretty late. Thanks.”
On TV, Mayeux has disappeared from the wrought-iron gate. The crowd is larger than before. The camera pans across several male faces painted with eye shadow and eyeliner. Disciples of Karin Wheat’s esoteric prose. A black-and-white photo of the author appears, filling one-fourth of the screen. It’s the publicity shot from her latest book. I recognize it because I have that novel—Isis—on one of my bookshelves. I bought it after I began having online conversations with Karin. Very interesting conversations.
Karin Wheat was a twisted lady.
I get up from the desk and go to my minifridge for an ice-cold Tab. I use them to break the monotony of Diet Coke. Not only do they pack a more powerful fizz rush, but I actually like the stuff. I’ve drunk half the can by the time I sit down at my Gateway 2000.
Price quotes from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange scroll slowly down the screen. This is my real job. Trading futures. Bonds, indexes, even agriculturals. I do it from my house with only my own money. Keeps it simple. No suicidal clients to deal with. I’m holding a ten lot of S&P contracts right now, but nothing’s in crisis mode.
I swig some more Tab and glance across at the postmodern black table that supports the EROS computer and satellite video link. It’s late afternoon, and online traffic is light. Mostly housewives right now. Bodice-ripper stuff. The real freaks are on their way home from work.
My wife should be as well. Today she’s working in Jackson, the state capital, eighty minutes away from our farmhouse in the flat Delta cotton fields. Drewe is a doctor, three blessed years out of her residency, and the same age I am—thirty-three. I’m thinking I should start cooking us some supper when the phone rings.
“Hello?”
“This is Detective Michael Mayeux, NOPD.”
His voice has the radio tinniness that cell phones aren’t supposed to have but usually do. “Thanks for calling back so fast.”
“Just checked my voice mail,” he explains. “I’ve got twenty-eight nutcase calls already. Vampires killed her. Mummies. One guy claims he’s an incubus and that he killed her.”
“So why did you call me?”
“You sounded slightly less nutty than the rest. You said you were calling from Mississippi?”
“That’s right. EROS—the company I sysop for—is based in New York City, but I do my job from right here.”
“I’m listening, Mr. Cole.”
“You know what online services are?”
“Sure. AOL, CompuServe, Delphi. But your message didn’t give me the feeling we’re talking about people using MUDs or booking vacations by modem.”
“No, you’re right,” I tell him, relieved to have found someone who doesn’t need spoon-feeding.
“So what’s this EROS? Live chat, email, role-playing, all that stuff?”
“Exactly.”
“My kid’s a computer fiend. I log onto CompuServe every now and then. I’m no expert, though. Keep it at the idiot level.”
“That’s my natural level, Detective. I told your machine that Karin Wheat was a member of EROS.”
“And you said it was confidential information.”
“It is. I mean, according to the rules of the membership agreement. Legally, we’re forbidden to give out any client’s true identity. There are a lot of married people online with us who don’t want their spouses to know. Quite a few celebrities, too.”
“But you gave me Wheat’s name.”
“I wanted you to know how serious I am.”
“Hang on—cut over to Chartres, Harry. I’m back, Mr. Cole. You said you thought Wheat’s death might be connected to some other women? Disappearances or something?”
“Right. What I’d like to do—for now, at least—is give you the names of those women and see if you can check them out. On the sly, sort of. You can do that, right?”
Mayeux doesn’t answer for a moment. “You mean check and see if they’re alive?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, we can do that. But why haven’t you done that, if you’re so concerned? You have their phone numbers, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I thought about doing it. But frankly … I was told not to.”
“By who?”
“Someone in the company. Look, can you just take the names? Maybe I’m nuts, but I’d feel better, okay?”
“Shoot.”
I read the names and numbers from a notepad. Mayeux repeats them as I give them; I assume he is speaking into a pocket recorder. “That’s five different states,” he notes. “Six women, five states. Spread across the country.”
“Information Superhighway,” I remind him.
“No shit. Well, I’ll get back to you if anything comes of this. Gotta go, Mr. Cole. Time to talk to the fairies and the vampires.”
The conversation leaves me strangely excited.
After weeks of suspicion, I have finally done something. I am tempted to call Miles in Manhattan and tell him exactly what I’ve done, but I don’t. If Miles Turner turns out to be right—if all those women have slipped contentedly back into the roles of happy housewives or fulfilled career women—then I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But if I turn out to be right—if those women are less than healthy right now …
I’m not sure I want Miles to know I know that.
This realization shocks me a little. I have known Miles Turner for more than twenty years. Since grade school. He was eccentric then. And during the last fifteen years—since he left Mississippi for MIT in 1978—I have seen very little of him. It was Miles who got me working for EROS in the first place. But I can’t blame him.
I was a willing Faust.
Hearing the solid door-chunk of Drewe’s Acura outside, I hunch low over the keyboard of the Gateway, assuming the posture that announces to my wife that I have been manically trading commodities contracts for the last eight hours.
“Who were you talking to on the phone?” she calls from the hallway.
Busted. During her commute, she must have tried me on her cellular. She often does, as the sight of summer cotton fields lazing by the car windows gets monotonous after the first ten seconds or so.
Drewe leans into my office, pointedly refusing—as she has done for the last few weeks—to enter the domain of the EROS computer. My wife, like many wives, is jealous of my time. But there is more to this conflict than a wife and a computer. EROS is not merely a computer but the nexus of a network of five thousand people (half of them women) who spend quite a bit of their waking hours thinking about sex.
“I picked up some chicken breasts,” Drewe says, arching her eyebrows like a comic French chef.
“Great,” I say. “Give me a minute and I’ll get them going.”
It’s not that Drewe doesn’t think about sex. She does. And it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy sex. She does that too. It’s just that lately she has begun thinking about sex in a whole new way. As a means to an end. By that I mean its natural end.
Children.
She smiles. Childless at thirty-three, Drewe still possesses the tightness of skin and muscle of a woman in her twenties. Her breasts are still high, her face free of wrinkles save laugh lines. I love this about her. I know how selfish it is, wanting to preserve her physical youth. But part of me wants that. Her hair is auburn, her skin fair, her eyes green. Her beauty is not that of a fashion model (her younger sister, Erin, was the model) nor the pampered, aerobicized, overly made-up elegance of a young Junior Leaguer. Drewe’s distinctive allure emanates from her eyes. Not only the eyes themselves, which are deep set and clear, but from her brows, which are finely curved yet strong, like the ribs of a ship. What emanates from her eyes is pure intelligence. Cool, quantitative, uncommon sense.
Drewe Cole is smart.
Her smile widens to a pixie grin—something I haven’t seen much lately—and then she heads off for the kitchen. I take a last look at the Chicago figures and follow.
Our house would be something of a curiosity to anyone not born into a farm family. It began seventy-five years ago as a square, one-story structure just large enough to shelter my maternal grandfather and grandmother (who married at the ages of nineteen and sixteen, respectively) and the first children they expected. But as the farm prospered and more children arrived, my grandfather began adding on rooms—first with a doggedly logical symmetry, later, apparently, anywhere he could most easily tack them on. The result is something like a wooden house of cards built by an eight-year-old. Moving from room to room often involves a sudden stepping up or down to a slightly different elevation, though since I grew up in this house, I no longer sense these changes consciously.
The heart of the house is the kitchen. It is a long room, and too narrow. I once thought of tearing out a wall and expanding it, but a black carpenter friend told me that since the entire house seemed held to this core by some form of redneck magic, I’d do better to enjoy rubbing asses with my wife whenever we passed between the stove and the opposite counter at the same time. That turned out to be good advice.
“Are we richer or poorer today?” Drewe asks from the sink. She is already rinsing off the chicken.
“About even,” I say, taking a heavy cast-iron skillet out of the oven and laying it on a hot gas burner.
Her question is perfunctory. The truth is that with ten contracts in play, which is about average for me these days, I could only—in the absolute worst contingency—lose about fifty thousand dollars. This would not seriously affect us.
I am good at my real job.
“Save any lives today?” I ask. My question is not perfunctory. Drewe is an OB-GYN. She delivers the babies that my father (a family practitioner) would have delivered thirty years ago. She doesn’t usually deal with car accidents or shootings, but she often handles traumatic births.
She answers my question with a quick shake of her head and plops the chicken breasts into the sizzling skillet. I am peppering them liberally when she asks, “What about EROX?”
She has purposefully botched the acronym, pronouncing it as a disc jockey would: E-Rocks. EROS stands for Erotic Realtime Online Stimulation. Drewe substitutes the X to emphasize the prurient nature of the network. Nine months ago she did not do this. She was as fascinated by the forum as I was, and our sex life had blossomed with her fascination. Nine months ago she spoke of EROS in a tone befitting the Greek god of love and desire.
Now it ranks just above phone sex. Barely.
“Something really bad happened,” I tell her.
Drewe looks up from a can of LeSueur peas with apprehension in her eyes. Family, she is thinking. Who died?
“Karin Wheat was murdered last night.”
Her eyes widen. “The author? New Orleans Karin Wheat?”
I nod. “It was on CNN. You believe that?”
“Sure. Anybody who’s had movies made of their books—and has fans as weird as she does—is bound to rate some national airtime. I bet it’ll be on Hard Copy in an hour.”
She’s probably right. Should I watch? I know from experience that facts will be sparse and titillation rampant. On the other hand, Drewe can’t stand more than ten minutes of Crossfire.
“You sound really upset,” she says, eyeing me with genuine concern.
I look away for a moment, disguising my mental stock-taking with an appraising glance at the chicken. How much to tell? “She was on EROS,” I say, not wanting to sound guilty but knowing I do.
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I look up, some defiance in my eyes. “You haven’t wanted to hear anything about EROS for months, Drewe. Karin only joined a few weeks ago.”
She lifts her chin and studies me. “So it’s Karin,” she says finally. “You’ve talked to her online?”
“Sure. The usual sysop guidance.”
“Please.” She fits the pea can into the opener and drowns any reply with a grinding flourish. I go back to the chicken.
“Have you had sex with her online?” she asks, not looking at me.
I sigh angrily. “The woman is dead, Drewe.”
“Jesus,” she says, and dumps the peas into a pot. “I should be on Hard Copy. ‘My Husband Fucks Famous Females Electronically.’”
I surrender. Drewe is even angrier about EROS than I thought.
“Do they know who did it?” she asks in a deadpan voice.
“No.” I flip the chicken breasts. “But I think I might.”
TWO
Drewe and I watch Hard Copy with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Dramatic camera angles, sexual innuendo, and spooky black-and-white video of Karin Wheat’s New Orleans mansion (complete with artificially generated fog) give the broadcast a Victorian, Jack-the-Ripper feel. Drewe does not comment as the segment runs, and I find myself rehashing my dinner-table interrogation.
I answered her incisive questions between bites of chicken and dirty rice, taking care not to set her off by revealing more than necessary. She wanted to know why I would even notice six women terminating service among five thousand subscribers. I focused on the technical side of it, explaining that these six women had been active users who suddenly disappeared from the forums yet continued paying their EROS fees, which are expensive by anyone’s standard. I mentioned nothing about blind-draft accounts or my close relationships with some of the women.
Thankfully Drewe focused on Miles Turner and his successful attempt to prevent me from initiating an internal investigation by EROS itself. She too has known Miles since our childhood. He based his objections to an investigation on the issue of privacy—“client confidentiality” in his words—and his argument holds water. The female CEO of EROS is serious enough about privacy to insure the secrecy of each subscriber’s identity to one million dollars. This unique step in the world of online services went a long way to ensure the exponential growth of her small and costly corner of the digital world. I can only guess what kind of explosion my decision to involve the police will cause at EROS headquarters in New York.
When Hard Copy cuts to commercial, Drewe commandeers the kitchen table and telephone to remotely dictate the past few days’ accumulation of medical charts. For some reason, patient charts are the one duty my super-organized spouse cannot or will not deal with in a timely manner. The color-coded stacks she brings home from her office are often covered with threatening Post-it notes penned by the hospital records administrator, warning in Draconian tones that Drewe’s staff privileges are about to be revoked.
As her monotonic dictation voice drifts through the house, I retreat to my office and pick up one of the five guitars hanging on the wall above the twin bed I crash on when I’m in manic trading mode. I choose a Martin D-28S, with a classical-width neck but steel strings. I slip through some chord changes without thought, letting my mind and fingers run where they will. The music would surprise a casual listener. I am a good guitar player. Not quite a natural, but smooth enough to make a living at it. This is my old job.
I am a failed musician.
The memories of that career still sting. I pick up the instrument more often now, but three years ago I did not touch a guitar or sing for twelve straight months. Even now, I never play my own songs. I just do what I’m doing now, letting whatever part of my brain that controls this function have free rein, and set my mood on automatic pilot.
Sometimes I surprise myself.
Like now. I have somehow wound a soft jazz thing full of arpeggios and chord extensions into the intro of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” I realize I love the sneaky seventh at the end of that line: “I met my o-old lover on the street last night”—whang. What the hell, I think, singing on through the song and ending up quite unintentionally with potential murder. “Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars. And I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers …” As I finish to a nonexistent ovation, I realize Drewe is standing inside the door of my office. It’s her first time in six weeks.
“Sounds good,” she says. “Really good.”
“It feels good.”
“Thinking about an old lover?”
“No. A jury of my peers. Where do you think they all went?”
She smiles ruefully. “They grew up, got married, and had kids.”
Like most men, I have blindly blundered back into our running argument. Having a baby. I suppose a lot of couples our age are in the midst of this debate. Up north and out west anyway. Down South most couples still tend to have their kids in their twenties.
Not us.
Our careers are partly to blame. Itinerant musicians and exhausted medical students are rarely in an ideal position to start a family, even if they are married, which Drewe and I weren’t until I gave up music. But that’s not all of it. For the past three years—our total married life—we have led a fairly settled existence, and our combined incomes are almost embarrassingly large. My parents are dead, but Drewe’s recently crossed the line from gentle jibes to outright questioning of my reproductive capabilities.
If only my sperm count were the problem. Like a lot of people, I have my secrets. Some are small, born in moments when I could have been painfully frank but chose not to be. Others are more serious and invariably involve women other than my wife.
Don’t jump to conclusions. From the moment Drewe and I took our marriage vows, I have not touched another woman’s naked flesh. But somehow that is small comfort. For the secret that haunts me now is more dangerous than adultery, more shameful. If I were Catholic, I suppose I would call it a mortal sin.
No, I’m not gay.
But I am afraid.
When the telephone finally rings, Drewe and I have been asleep for hours. I spring awake in a sitting position like one of my Scottish ancestors groping for his sword but find a cordless phone in my hand instead.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Cole?”
I blink, trying to clear my eyes and brain simultaneously. “Um … what?”
“This is Detective Michael Mayeux. NOPD. We spoke this afternoon?”
Drewe’s sleeping body blocks my line of sight to the clock radio. “What time is it?”
“Three-twenty in the morning. Sorry, but I just got around to checking those names you gave me. Those six women?”
“Sure.” I sense a strange gravity in Mayeux’s voice.
“Harper?” Drewe sits up in bed and points at the window. “There’s someone outside. Look.”
Prickly flesh rises on my shoulders as I realize that our curtains are being backlit by what must be car headlights. We never have visitors at this hour. We rarely have visitors at all.
“Stay here,” I tell her. “I’ll get a gun.”
“Please don’t do that, Mr. Cole.” Mayeux’s voice startles me. “If you’ll look out your window, I think you’ll see a patrol car.”
“Cairo County doesn’t have a police department,” I say, moving warily toward the window.
“Part of your farm is in Yazoo County,” Mayeux replies. “That should be Sheriff Buckner from Yazoo City. Know him?”
“I know who he is.” Parting the curtains slightly, I see a white Chevrolet Caprice cruiser sitting in the gravel drive before our house. “What the hell is he doing in my driveway at three in the morning?”
“Calm down, Mr. Cole. Sheriff Buckner is there to ensure your safety.”
Right. “Why don’t I believe that, Detective?”
He is silent too long. I signal Drewe not to speak. “What the hell is going on, Mayeux?”
“Those women you told me about. They’re all dead.”
There is sweat on my face. An instant ago it was not there. I feel it in my hair, on my forearms, behind my knees. That small intuitive part of me that always suspected the worst has taken possession of my body. I was right. I was right, and I should have acted sooner. “All six of them?” I ask, my voice barely audible.
“Every one was murdered in the last nine months, Mr. Cole. And I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot of people around the country right now—police officers—who want to talk to you about those women.”
I do not even try to convert the chemical cyclone in my brain into coherent words.
“Only two of those murders had been connected before tonight, Mr. Cole. They were both in California.”
I close my eyes. Juliet Nicholson. Tara Morgan.
“What we’d like you to do,” Mayeux says in a friendly voice, “if you’re not busy tomorrow, that is—is drive down to the main station here in New Orleans and talk to us. What do you say to that?”
I look back through the window. Sheriff Buckner’s cruiser is still there, idling low and catlike in the humid darkness.
“You think I killed them,” I say in a monotone.
Again Mayeux pauses too long. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Cole, we don’t know what to think. I’ve been telling people that you called me with this information, and that if you’re the one who murdered them, you’d be the last one to do that.”
“Damn right.”
“On the other hand, some people tell me that things like that have happened before. A lot more than you’d think. Is this one of those strange cases, Mr. Cole?”
“I was stupid to call you,” I say, meaning it. “Miles was right.”
“Miles who?” Mayeux’s tone telegraphs an image of him holding a pen over a notebook.
“Do I need a lawyer, Detective?”
“What?” Drewe gets out of bed and hurries to the closet for a housecoat.
“Take it easy,” Mayeux says. “My gut tells me you’re just Joe Citizen in this thing, trying to do what’s right and getting tangled up in the process. That happens more often than it should, I’ll tell you right now. If you want a lawyer, you bring one along with you.” He pauses a beat. “But if you want my advice, I’d save the money. We just want to know what you know, Mr. Cole. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t need a lawyer.” Mayeux’s voice drops in volume. “Besides, first impressions are important. You’ll look a lot more innocent to certain people if you don’t have a lawyer from the get-go.”
One thing’s for sure. Detective Michael Mayeux didn’t just float into New Orleans on a shrimp boat. He is very good at getting people to do what he wants them to do. This is a talent that I share, and I note the fact like a fighter noting the strength of a potential opponent.
“I suppose you expect me to ride down with Sheriff Buckner?”
“No, sir. Bring your own car, fly a crop duster, whatever you want. Just try to make it before noon. You’ve got a very anxious audience down here.”
I make a rapid decision. “Listen, Detective, no way am I going to fall back asleep after this call. I’m going to talk to my wife, then get dressed and drive straight down there. The sooner I’m out of all this, the better I’ll feel.”
“Good answer, Mr. Cole.”
“See you in about five hours.”
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
By the time I finish explaining the situation to Drewe, Sheriff Buckner’s cruiser has quietly disappeared. My wife wants to accompany me to New Orleans, but I talk her out of it. For one thing, she has patients scheduled. For another, I am not sure how deeply the questions of the police will probe. I doubt any man would want his life examined microscopically in the presence of his wife, but lately one of my secrets, like the old shotgun pellet in my calf, has worked its way nearer and nearer the surface. One question with the right edge could slice right through.
I consider calling Miles in New York to tell him what is afoot, then discard the idea. On this point Drewe and I agree. By revealing the name of an EROS client to the police, I have almost certainly exposed myself to a lawsuit. I reassure myself that my perception of lethal danger to other EROS clients justified this breach, but in 1990s America, who is to say? Jan Krislov, the fifty-six-year-old widow who owns EROS, is a nationally known advocate for the right to privacy. She also has more money than God. Better lawyers, anyway.
Yet beneath this anxiety flows a deeper sense of reservation. Drewe feels it as well. Early in our lives, Miles Turner and I were almost like brothers. Then for many years we hardly saw each other. Not quite a year ago he came back into my life, brought me into EROS. Expand your horizons, said my own personal Mephistopheles. Aren’t you tired of making money yet? Challenge yourself. It’s more fun than you’ve had since we talked our baby-sitter into taking off her bra.
I am not having fun now.
THREE
Dear Father,
We landed in Michigan in the afternoon. So gray after the decadent green of New Orleans. As gray as our fatigue. My joints ached constantly: we had to fly through the black heart of a storm.
I varied the transport this time, and the technique. I learned from my mistake with Karin. How disconcerting to recognize naïveté in oneself, even after years of cynicism.
I was drunk with anticipation. Our seduction had been a long and baroque one, a progression from the sacred to the profane. I sat on the patient’s patio with the notebook and the cell phone, knowing she believed she was interacting with a man thousands of miles distant, a faceless lover, and me sitting less than twenty feet away.
I crept to her window and watched her typing her responses. Kali stroked me as I watched, spilling my seed in the flower bed. Will the FBI look there I wonder? For footprints, yes. For semen, no. They will find that where they expect to find it, but of course it will not be mine.
I could not resist telling Rosalind I was there. There was no risk; she could not call the police while linked to EROS, and Kali was already inside. Terror was absolute. Paralyzing. Kali demonstrated exemplary control, reassuring after the blood lust of New Orleans. And this time I left a note, a passage you read me long ago:
I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. I have found God but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.
I know, I know. But I’m tired of leaving biological refuse. Why not mislead with a little flair? You of all people should appreciate that. This is just the kind of rot they salivate over at Quantico. It will be the only file written in French, but nevertheless I signed it “Henri.” Subtlety is wasted on the police. By the time they translate it, the procedure will be complete. The lab work tonight. A day to collect the next patient. Another to rest my joints, to steady my fingers.
Then I cut my way into Valhalla.
FOUR
Three hours of hard driving put me over the Louisiana state line with dawn breaking over my left shoulder and New Orleans seventy miles ahead. The last two hundred miles were a slow-motion strobe of darkness and glaring truck-stop light. On any other night I would have taken Highway 61. Not many people do these days. They choose speed over scenery, as I was forced to do tonight.
I-55 runs straight as a pipeline, and most travelers on it never give a thought to the older, more indirect arteries that lie just to the west: Highway 61, a blacktop track of history lined with scorched chimneys like sentinels guarding unquiet land; and beyond the levee, the aorta of the continent, the mile-wide tide of river that ran before man set foot here and will run long after he is gone.
But in this breaking dawn I can afford only the straightest distance between two points. On the passenger seat beside me sits a briefcase full of laser-printed paper—transcripts of the killer seducing his victims—and my best hope of absolution in the matter of the six dead women.
Seven, I think, remembering Karin Wheat.
At La Place I jump down onto I-10 for the final twenty-minute run into New Orleans. The August sun is fully up now, past eight o’clock, and the shallow soupy water of the Bonnet Carré spillway simmers under its lidless gaze. Cranking down the Explorer’s windows, I catch an airborne wave of decaying water plants and fish from Lake Pontchartrain.
During the past four hours, I have recalled every step on the mental path that led me to this physical journey. What the police hope to learn from me I am not sure. But the most sensitive question for me is this: why didn’t I report my suspicions sooner? I am not quite sure myself. I can only hope that what I have to say will shock the police sufficiently to divert them from that question, at least for a while.
Locating the main New Orleans police station is easy. It’s near Drewe’s alma mater, the Tulane Medical School, just behind the Orleans Parish criminal court building. Locating Detective Michael Mayeux is easier still. Homicide is on the third floor. The moment I mention my name to the desk sergeant—who sits behind a window of armored glass—I am whisked through a heavy door, through a squad room, down a corridor, and into a small office. Mayeux is seated at a scarred and cluttered metal desk, speaking urgently into a wire telephone. The office has no windows. It does have a computer, an overcrowded bookshelf, and, enshrined in the single clearing amid the chaos, a coffeemaker. A torn red sack of Community dark roast with chicory sits on top of it.
“Help you?” Mayeux asks, hanging up the phone and taking a bite from a sugar-dusted beignet I hadn’t noticed.
“I’m Harper Cole.”
He freezes in midbite, then sets down the beignet, stands, and begins chewing quickly as he ushers me back into the hall and to another door. He is five eight or so, with good shoulders, noticeable love handles, and a bald spot on the back of his head. At the door he stops and turns back to me, his dark brown eyes reassuring like those of a coach before an important game.
“Just tell these people what you know, Mr. Cole. Take your time and don’t leave anything out. If you get hungry or you need to take a leak, nod your head at me and we’ll break. It might get pretty intense. All of a sudden there’s a lot riding on what you have to say about these women.”
“Hold on,” I say, raising my hands. “I thought I was coming down to talk to you. Who’s in there?”
He gives me a crooked smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll be beside you the whole time. So will my partner, so will the chief.”
Mayeux meant to reassure me, but he’s accomplished the opposite. “And …?”
His eyes move off my face. “The other guys will be feds. FBI.”
“FBI? What for?”
“These guys are from the Investigative Support Unit. What used to be called Behavioral Science. One special agent and a shrink. Plus two Fibbies from the local office. Remember what I told you. Two of the dead women were killed in California—one in L.A., one in San Francisco. Because their bodies were mutilated in a specific way, and for other reasons, the police out there decided they might be looking at some type of cult murders. They called in the Investigative Support Unit to assist them in coming up with a profile of their UNSUB.”
“Their what?”
“UNSUB. Unknown subject. Anyway, soon as I queried the names of those two dead California women, the Unit was on us like you know what. When they heard about you and the other women, they started foaming at the mouth. They think we’re looking at a serial murderer here. Maybe a whole new kind of killer. We got detectives flying in from all over the country right now. This is major-league stuff.”
“So much for our friendly little chat.”
Mayeux starts to turn the doorknob, then hesitates. A spark of Cajun mischief twinkles in his eyes. “Don’t take the shitty vibes personally. Chief Tobin officially requested the Unit’s assistance—he knows their chief—but NOPD and the local Bureau office have bad blood from way back. Not your problem. Just tell your story.” Mayeux winks. “Show time, cher.”
FIVE
Detective Mayeux’s warning understated the tension level. The bare police conference room reminds me of nothing so much as a room full of lead vocalists. Egos bumping against each other like tethered balloons as their owners strike practiced poses, unaware of any agenda but their own. Four men in business suits sit in a protective phalanx at the far end of a rectangular table. They might as well be wearing lapel tags that read “FBI.” The New Orleans police chief, an enormous black man, sports a starched white duty shirt that strains under his bulk. Four stars adorn the blue boards on each hamlike shoulder.
To the right of the chief sits a rail of a guy who has to be Mayeux’s partner. He looks like lukewarm hell. Eyes like quarter slots on a Coke machine, hands quivering with the irregular tremor that signals serious sleep deprivation. I know the symptoms well. There is a busty Hispanic secretary beside him. Her left ear is cocked toward the chief, but her eyes stay on the young FBI agents.
“Gentlemen,” says Detective Mayeux, “Mr. Harper Cole.”
Mayeux is telling me names, but they don’t find a permanent memory address. Three of the FBI agents wear blue suits, the fourth charcoal gray. Does this mean he’s in charge? He’s clearly the oldest, yet he wears his graying hair longer than the others. Mayeux speaks his name softly, giving it unintended emphasis.
Arthur Lenz. Doctor Arthur Lenz.
Of course. Lenz is the shrink.
Whenever I meet interesting strangers, I find myself casting them as stand-ins for the stars of my memory. Sometimes I meet an Edmond O’Brien or a George Sanders, maybe a Robert Ryan. I remember those guys from when I was a kid staying up late with my dad, watching Channel 4 out of New Orleans. So it’s a habit, trying to slot strangers into the celluloid templates in my head. Some people are just extras, like Mayeux’s partner and the secretary. But every once in a while I meet the genuine article. Someone who doesn’t just remind me of, say, Fredric March, he could be the man.
Doctor Lenz might be the genuine article. He is physically tall—this is obvious even though he is seated—and yet … he is limited. Like an actor who never made the jump to the big screen. Perpetually middle-aged, WASP or WASP wannabe, expensive suit, heavy on control. His charisma is undeniable, but somehow he finishes out more TV than film.
In the uncomfortable silence that follows the introductions, one of the blue-suited FBI men—Baxter, I think—gives the police chief an annoyed glance. Then he looks me in the eye and says, “Good morning, Mr. Cole,” giving the “mister” that special and contemptuous stress that military men reserve for civilians. “I’m Special Agent Daniel Baxter.”
I didn’t notice Baxter at first because sizewise he blends with the other two blue-suits. But I see him now. And I get the feeling he’s hiding. In the Biblical sense, as in hiding his light under a bushel. He’s got weight behind his dark eyes, but he’s not a leading man. He’s a tough-as-nails sergeant from a black-and-white war movie, thrust into command by the death of his lieutenant.
As if summoned to life by Agent Baxter’s words, the police chief greets me in a startling James Earl Jones basso. “Mr. Cole, I’m Chief Sidney Tobin. I thank you for coming down so early today. Needless to say, we’re all very interested in whatever you might have to say about these murders. You have our undivided attention.”
Detective Mayeux sits, offering me the chair at the head of the table as he does, but I remain standing. I am six feet and one inch tall, 195 pounds, and I know my size gives me a psychological edge when I choose to use it. Today I figure I need any edge I can get.
“Before I say anything,” I begin, “there is one very important thing I didn’t tell Detective Mayeux on the phone.”
“What’s that?” rumbles the chief.
“I’m pretty sure I know who killed those women.”
Astonished silence blankets the room. Dr. Lenz breaks the impasse. “You have a name, Mr. Cole?”
“And an address.”
“Christ!” cries Mayeux. “Give it to me.”
I open my briefcase and remove a single sheet of paper. From it I read: “David M. Strobekker. That’s S-T-R-O-B-E-K-K-E-R. 1402 Moorland Avenue, Edina, Minnesota. It’s a suburb of Minneapolis.”
“What else you know about this guy?” barks Mayeux’s partner.
“He has a checking account at the Norwest Bank in Minneapolis. That’s all I know for sure.”
“Run it through the computer, Mike,” commands the chief. “Right now.”
“I can access the Bureau computers by phone,” one of the younger FBI men tells Mayeux, who shoots me a furious glance on his way out.
“I could be sued for giving you that name,” I tell them.
“Let us worry about that,” says Baxter.
“The FBI will provide lawyers to defend me in a civil case?”
Arthur Lenz’s face shows a trace of bemusement.
“Let’s stick to these murders,” says the police chief. “Tell us how you came to know those six names and why you suspected the women might be in trouble.”
The door opens and closes behind me. Mayeux reclaims his chair on the right side of the table. “Kiesha’s checking on Strobekker, Chief.”
“Stop me if I say something you don’t understand,” I tell them.
The two younger FBI agents smirk at this, but I’m fairly certain they’ll soon be strafing me with stupid questions.
“I work for a company called EROS,” I say slowly. “That’s an acronym—E-R-O-S—which stands for Erotic Realtime Online Stimulation.” Seeing a couple of leers, I ignore the mythological connection and push on. “We’re an online service that caters to a wide range of clients interested in human sexuality. EROS is a New York–based corporation legally chartered in the State of Delaware—”
“Who owns it?” interrupts Baxter.
“A widow named Jan Krislov.”
“What?”
From the sick look on Daniel Baxter’s face, I can see that he’s familiar with Jan Krislov in some capacity. A flash of instinct tells me it’s her fierce championship of electronic privacy rights.
“Please continue, Mr. Cole,” instructs Chief Tobin.
“Anyone in the continental US can have full online access to EROS twenty-four hours a day. We also have European subscribers who reach us through the Internet. There are three levels of forum traffic, which people access under aliases—code names—that insure complete anonymity. Level One is the most diverse. Clients use it to discuss all sorts of sexual topics, from psychology to medical problems to privacy issues.”
“Jan fucking Krislov,” mutters Baxter.
I take a breath. Hearing no questions, I focus on Mayeux and continue. “Level Two is the first of the two fantasy forums. In Level Two clients write about their fantasies, correspond with each other through forum messages and email, or sometimes just eavesdrop on the fantasies of other subscribers. The exchanges can be group or, if a client prefers, he or she can switch down to one-on-one contact, completely private. We call that a private room. There are also files available at all times from the online library. Popular exchanges from past sessions, stuff like that.”
“Stroke files,” says Mayeux’s partner, opening his red eyes in a glare of challenge. “Right? They’re not talking to anybody realtime, so their hands are free. Jack-off time, right?”
The man is crude, but not far off the mark. “That’s probably a fair assessment.”
“What about Level Three?” asks Doctor Lenz, his eyes alight with fascination.
“Level Three …” I often stumble here when explaining EROS to anyone outside the company. I never know quite how to describe Level Three. To be honest, I don’t monitor it that much. At least I didn’t until I began to have my suspicions about the “missing” women. Most Level Three traffic is nocturnal, and thus Miles’s gig. That’s another reason I allowed him to persuade me to put off acting for as long as I did.
“Level Three,” I say again, “is what you might call the major league of sexual forums. The dialogues are pretty heavy, basically no-holds-barred. Don’t get the wrong idea—it’s not kiddy porn or anything, but—”
“It’s hot,” Dr. Lenz finishes.
“Pretty hot, yeah. Until three weeks ago we didn’t even allow transmission of graphic images, but believe me, words alone are powerful enough. We’re talking bondage, S and M, homoerotic sex, you name it. Straight sex too, of course.”
“How much does it cost to join EROS?” asks Baxter.
“A thousand dollars to join—”
Mayeux whistles long and low.
“—plus five hundred a month flat fee after that, with various payment arrangements. For women it’s three hundred a month. EROS has 1–800 access numbers, so nobody has any long-distance charges to worry about.”
“All the women but Wheat were in their twenties,” says Baxter. “Where did they get that kind of money?”
“Inherited it,” I reply. “A lot of rich girls on EROS. We get a lot of trophy wives too. They marry money—old money—fake orgasms at night, and log onto EROS during the day. It’s safer than adultery, especially in the age of AIDS.”
“Karin Wheat was a member of this EROS thing?” Chief Tobin interrupts.
“Yes. For about three months now.”
“And those other women? All of them were members?”
“Right. Most of them had been subscribing for more than a year at the time they dropped off the net.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘dropped off?’” Lenz asks.
“Just a minute, Doctor,” says Chief Tobin, reasserting the temporary supremacy he enjoys in his headquarters. “Mr. Cole, you mean to tell me all these murder victims were members of this super-expensive computer club or whatever it is, and no homicide cop in L.A. or San Francisco or Houston or Portland or the other places managed to link these crimes with billing receipts from your company?”
“I can explain that.” I pause, realizing I’m more interested in asking questions than answering them. “Honestly, I’m more surprised by the fact that the murders weren’t linked before now by physical evidence. No offense, but isn’t that what you guys do?”
“Goddamn,” growls Mayeux’s partner.
“Plenty of reasons for that,” injects one of the FBI agents.
“Different weapon in every case,” says his blue-suited cousin. “Forensic evidence indicating multiple perps.”
“Multiple perps at the same scene,” adds the first agent.
“Which is rare,” says Baxter, glaring at the younger men. “Highly unusual.”
“We’re still getting in evidence reports, Chief,” says Mayeux, “but the M.O. does seem to have varied a great deal in almost every case.”
“As did the signature,” says Baxter.
“The killer left notes?” I ask.
Baxter shakes his head. “‘Signature’ is the offender’s behavior at the crime scene.” He looks at me closely, as if judging whether to continue. “Behavior beyond that strictly necessary to commit the crime. Individualized behavior.”
“Oh.”
“There is no signature in these cases,” Dr. Lenz says imperiously. “It’s all staging. But the trophies in California varied not an iota.”
“Trophies?” I echo. “What kind of trophies?”
“Why don’t you tell us?” Mayeux’s partner asks, pointing an index finger at my chest.
The room goes silent, and in that instant I feel the first ripple of real fear in my chest. “Am I a suspect in this case?”
Several looks are exchanged, none directed at me.
“Do I need to call an attorney?”
Finally Baxter breaks the silence. “Mr. Cole, I’m going to go out on a limb here. I am not merely a special agent. I’m the chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit. We profile and help the police hunt violent serial offenders, whether they’re killers, rapists, arsonists, bombers, or kidnappers. When crimes of this nature are committed, the individual who reports any of them is always considered a suspect. Serial offenders frequently report their own crimes as part of an attempt to avoid being found out, or to gain enjoyment by assisting in an investigation of themselves. In this case you’ve reported all the crimes. When I was apprised of this situation last night, the Unit began an exhaustive check of your background, including all your movements during the past two years. It sounds drastic, but it’s standard procedure.”
Baxter glances at his watch, which he wears with the face inside the wrist, military style. “Dr. Lenz and I have spent the past few hours putting together a preliminary profile of the offender in these murders. And frankly, it’s one of the most difficult jobs we’ve ever undertaken. At this point I won’t say why, but Dr. Lenz believes that you are probably not the killer in this case. I concur. I’m not saying you couldn’t be involved in some way—it would be irresponsible of me to rule you out—but I’m willing to proceed today on the assumption that you are what you claim to be—a Good Samaritan coming forward in an attempt to see justice done. Obviously, other women’s lives are at risk as we speak. An atmosphere of cooperation is the best thing for all of us at this point. If you wish to consult an attorney, that is your right, but at this time no one here”—Baxter fires a sharp glance at the New Orleans police officers—“intends to charge you with any crime.”
When he finishes, no one speaks. Everyone but Baxter and Lenz seems to be looking at his shoes. I may be making the worst mistake of my life, but I decide to trust Baxter, at least to the extent of not calling an attorney.
“What kind of trophies?” I ask again.
“An unusual one,” Baxter says thoughtfully.
“Maybe he’s a taxidermist,” cracks Mayeux’s partner, winking at Mayeux.
“Make a note of that, Maria,” says Chief Tobin, and watches the brunette pounce on her notepad.
“Taxidermists do not mount glands,” Dr. Lenz says scornfully.
“Houston P.D. says he took the whole goddamn head,” snaps Mayeux, unwilling to tolerate the psychiatrist’s superior tone. “And that’s what he did here.”
I am looking for a place to sit down, but no one notices. I whisper, “Someone cut off Karin Wheat’s head?”
“That’s classified information,” says Baxter.
Mayeux snorts at the spook-speak.
“That is not accurate, Mr. Cole,” corrects Chief Tobin. “Someone did cut off Ms Wheat’s head, but that information is not classified. Still, I would strongly suggest that you keep the knowledge to yourself.” The chief shoots me a very clear look: If you fuck up my investigation in any way, I will hound you to a pauper’s grave. “Now,” he says, his gentle bass voice filling the conference room like soft light. “What about my question? Credit card receipts from EROS, canceled checks, phone bills, and suchlike? Why didn’t this link the crimes?”
“Chief,” says Baxter, “despite our best efforts to familiarize city police departments with our VICAP program, we still have a pretty poor compliance rate. Not nearly enough officers take the time to fill out their violent offender profiles and send them in. This EROS connection is exactly the kind of thing that slips through the cracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if homicide detectives in one or more of the involved departments have just such a receipt in an evidence drawer somewhere, but have no idea that detectives in any other cities have the same thing.”
“All our fault, as usual,” grumbles Mayeux’s partner.
“Five of these six cases were sent in to VICAP,” says Mayeux, giving his partner covering fire. “But they weren’t linked. No EROS connection showed up. All had computers in their homes, but nothing related to EROS on their drives. Why not?”
“Well,” I say, finally regaining sufficient composure to rejoin the conversation. “As long as the killer wasn’t rushed, he could erase the EROS software from the victims’ computers and take away any manuals they had. Although it would take a real wizard to wipe every trace from the hard disks. You might have one of your people look into that.”
Baxter gives me a wry smile. “No traces so far.”
“Karin Wheat paid EROS with her Visa card,” says Mayeux. “I checked as soon as you told me she was a member.”
“She’ll be the only one that did,” I tell him.
“How do you know that?” asks Dr. Lenz, his heavy-lidded eyes probing mine.
“Because every other woman—victim, I mean—had set up her account on the blind-draft account system.”
“What’s that?” asks the chief. “A direct bank draft?”
“Yes, but not the kind you imagine. A lot of EROS subscribers—particularly women—are married, and don’t want their spouses to know they’re online with us. Some log on only from their workplace. Others from home, but only when their husbands are away. Ms Krislov makes every effort to ensure that any woman who wants to connect with us has the ability to do so without stigma. To facilitate this, she came up with the ‘blind draft’ policy. If a woman doesn’t want her husband to know she’s online—or vice versa—we advise the user to set up a checking account at a bank not used by the spouse—an out-of-town bank, if possible—and use a PO box as her address. We then arrange to draft this secret account directly for payment of the monthly fee.”
“Son of a bitch,” says Mayeux’s partner.
“Every one of the murdered women was on a secret account?” Mayeux asks.
“Except Karin Wheat.”
“But three of them weren’t married,” Mayeux points out. “Who were they hiding from? Boyfriends?”
“Or girlfriends,” says Dr. Lenz.
“What about phone bills?” asks Mayeux. “Wouldn’t connect-time show up on the phone bills of all the victims?”
“It’s an 800 number, remember?”
“Shit. So after they were killed, their secret accounts eventually dropped to zero?”
“Eventually is exactly why I got suspicious. EROS isn’t like CompuServe or America Online, where you might lose interest but keep paying the nine ninety-five per month, thinking you’ll get back into it. We’re talking three to five hundred bucks a month. EROS users may be wealthy, but when they get bored they close those direct-draft accounts.”
“And the murdered women didn’t,” says Mayeux.
“Right. And two particular women—the third and fourth victims—were very active online. Then poof, one day they were gone. But their bank drafts kept coming in. That didn’t fit the pattern. I’m not saying it had never happened before—it had. That’s why I didn’t call the police immediately. But the longer the accounts stayed active without the women showing up online, the more uncomfortable I got. I started probing the accounting program to see how many blind-draft clients were paying regularly but not logging onto the system. There were about fifty, enough to make me think I might be paranoid. And enough for the company to decide not to investigate. But then I remembered that victims three and four had talked to this Strobekker guy a lot. So I started watching for him. Then I started printing out his exchanges. I also asked about him in private email. That’s how I came up with the names of the first and second victims. And while I was doing that, he was setting up and killing five and six. He was also talking to at least twenty other women during this period as well.”
“Doesn’t the company try to contact people when their accounts drop to zero?” Mayeux asks. “In case it was just an oversight?”
“No. It’s understood by both parties that if a blind-draft account has insufficient funds for even a single payment, the company assumes the client no longer desires its services, and access is immediately terminated.”
“I don’t buy that,” says Mayeux’s partner. “I don’t believe any company would kiss off that kind of bread without making sure the client wanted to quit.”
How can I explain this to them? “Jan Krislov is the sole owner of EROS. And whether you believe it or not, she’s not in it for the money.”
“Oh, I believe it,” mutters Baxter.
“Then why does she charge so damn much for the service?” Mayeux’s partner asks doggedly.
A faint smile crosses Arthur Lenz’s patrician face. This alone draws all eyes to him. “The high fee functions as a crude screening system,” he says softly. “Correct, Mr. Cole?”
“What kind of screening system?” asks Mayeux’s partner.
Lenz answers for me. “By charging an exorbitant rate, Ms Krislov ensures that her online environment is accessible only to those who have attained a certain position in life.”
“Flawed system,” says Mayeux. “It assumes rich people aren’t assholes.”
“I said it was crude,” Lenz admits. “But I imagine it works fairly well.”
“It works perfectly,” I say, unable to keep the admiration out of my voice. “Because there are other constraints on membership.”
Curiosity flares in Lenz’s eyes. “Such as?”
“EROS is open to any woman who can pay the fee, but any man who wants to join has to submit a writing sample for evaluation.”
“Who evaluates the sample?”
“Jan Krislov.”
“What are the criteria?”
Unable to resist, I point at Mayeux’s partner. “He wouldn’t make the cut.”
Mayeux lays an arm across his partner’s chest and asks, “How many people belong to this thing?”
“Five thousand. Half of them male, half female. The numerical relation is strictly maintained.”
“Gays allowed?” Lenz asks.
“Encouraged. And contained within that ratio.”
Mayeux shakes his head. “You’re telling us this Krislov woman has personally evaluated twenty-five hundred writing samples from men writing about sex?”
“Personally approved twenty-five hundred samples. She’s evaluated a lot more than that. There’s a waiting list of twenty-eight hundred men at this moment.”
“So Jan Krislov sits up at night reading her own personal Penthouse letters,” Baxter says in a gloating voice. “I know some senators who’ll eat that up.”
“Probably beats watching Leno,” pipes up the local FBI agent. “For a woman, I mean,” he adds hastily.
Dr. Lenz leans forward in his chair. “I doubt these samples are as crude as you assume. Are they, Mr. Cole?”
“No. There are some gifted people on EROS.”
Mayeux’s partner snorts.
“To wit, Karin Wheat,” says Lenz.
“One more thing,” I add. “Not all the men on EROS are wealthy. Certain men have submitted writing samples that impressed Ms Krislov so much that she gives them access free of charge. Sort of a scholarship program. She says it improves the overall experience for the women.”
The secretary nods her head in a gesture I read as Right on, girl.
“I’d be very interested in studying some of these online exchanges,” Lenz says. “You have some in that briefcase?”
“Yes.”
Baxter asks, “Does anything stand out in your mind that these women had in common?”
I pause for a moment. “Most of them spent a lot of time in Level Two—my level. Their fantasies were fairly conventional, by which I mean they involved more romance than sex. They could get kinky, but they weren’t sickos. No torture or revolting bodily substances. The truth is, I don’t know anything about these women in real life. Only their fantasies.”
“Their fantasies may be the most important thing about them,” says Lenz.
“Maybe,” I allow, “but that’s not the sense I got. I’m not sure why. What did they have in common in real life?”
“None of your goddamn business,” snaps Mayeux’s partner.
“I see. Well, I guess that’s my position too.”
Dr. Lenz inclines his head toward Baxter, who says, “All the victims were under twenty-six years old except Karin Wheat, who was forty-seven. All were college educated, all Caucasian except one, who was Indian.”
“Native American?” asks Chief Tobin.
“Indian Indian,” says Mayeux’s partner, tapping a file on the table. “Dot on the fucking forehead.”
“I don’t recall an Indian name,” I say, almost to myself.
“Pinky Millstein,” says Baxter. “Maiden name Jathar. Married to a litigation attorney who traveled a lot. There was also an Indian hair found at one of the other crime scenes. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Well … one of Strobekker’s aliases is Shiva. That’s Indian, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Dr. Lenz says softly. “Shiva the Destroyer. What are his other aliases?”
“Prometheus. Hermes.”
The psychiatrist remains impassive. “What about the victims? Does anything come to mind that links their online code names?”
“Not that I could see.”
“What else stands out in your mind?” asks Baxter.
“Strobekker himself. No matter what alias he uses, his style is unmistakable.”
“How so?”
“He’s very literate, for one thing. Intuitive, as well. One minute he’s writing extemporaneous poetry, the next he cuts right to the bone with some insight into a woman’s character, almost as though he can answer whatever question is in her mind before she asks it. But the strangest thing is this: he must be the best damned typist in the world. Lightning fast, and he never makes a mistake.”
“Never?” Lenz asks, leaning forward.
“Not in the first eighty-five percent of contact.”
“What do you mean?”
“With the sixth victim, and with Karin Wheat, I realized that Strobekker began making typographic errors—just like anyone else—a few days before each woman dropped offline. When I went back and studied my printouts of the killer-victim exchanges, I saw that the typos began at about the eighty-five percent point in each relationship. Of course, I didn’t know anyone was being killed.”
“You sound like you’ve distilled this thing down to a science,” says Baxter.
“I work with numbers.”
“Running this sex thing?” asks Mayeux.
I chuckle bitterly. “No, I got into EROS for fun. You believe that? I earn my living trading futures.”
My audience stares as if I’ve announced that I am an alchemist.
“In a dink farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta?” asks one of the young FBI agents. “Who are your clients? Farmers hedging their crops?”
“I only have one client.”
“Who?” Mayeux asks suspiciously.
“Himself,” says Arthur Lenz.
Dr. Lenz is obviously the alchemist here. “That’s right. I only trade my own account.”
“You some kind of millionaire?” asks Mayeux’s partner. “A goddamn gentleman farmer or something?”
“Keep a civil tongue, Poché,” snaps the chief.
“I do all right.”
“What about the final fifteen percent of contact?” Lenz asks, plainly irritated by the squabbling.
“He makes mistakes. About as many as anyone else. And his typing gets slower. A lot slower.”
“Maybe he starts jacking off with one hand as he gets closer to the time of the hit,” suggests Poché.
The chief frowns but lets that pass.
Dr. Lenz strikes a pose of intense meditation as the door behind me opens swiftly. I turn and see a black woman in her twenties holding a computer printout in her hand. There is handwriting scrawled across it in blue ink.
“What is it, Kiesha?” asks the chief.
“We traced Strobekker, David M.”
A cumulative catching of breath in the conference room. “Rap sheet?” Mayeux asks tentatively.
“No.”
“Minnesota DMV?”
“No citations. Had one car—a Mercedes—but the plate expired last year.”
“So who is the guy?”
“An accountant for a glitzy firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
I realize that Kiesha is trying to communicate something to Chief Tobin through eye contact alone. Despite her telepathic urgency, she is unsuccessful.
“What is it, dear?” asks Arthur Lenz, as though he has known the woman since childhood.
“He’s dead,” she says, almost as if against her will. “David M. Strobekker was beaten to death in an alley in Minneapolis eleven months ago.”
A hot tingle races across my forearms.
“Holy shit,” says Mayeux. “What are we dealing with here?”
Daniel Baxter points a finger as thick as a Colt Python barrel at Kiesha. “Details?”
“Minneapolis homicide says it looked like a mugging gone bad. Strobekker was single, probably homosexual. He was slumming on a bad stretch of Hennepin Avenue. His skull was so pulped his boss couldn’t recognize his face.”
Dr. Lenz emits a small sound of what I can only interpret as pleasure.
“Positive ID?” asks Mayeux.
“Dental records and a thumbprint,” Kiesha replies. “His company kept thumbprint files; don’t ask me why. But it was Strobekker for sure.”
“Not for sure,” I say, surprised to hear my own voice.
“Why not?” Baxter asks sharply.
“Well … say Strobekker is the killer. Say he decided to fake his own death so that he’d never be suspected in later crimes. He takes a thumbprint from a wino, puts that in his own personnel file, then kills the wino and pulps his face.”
“What about the dental records?” asks Baxter.
I shrug. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
“You watch too many movies.”
“I must see the body immediately,” Lenz says to Baxter, his eyes still on me.
“Jeff, call the Minneapolis field office,” orders Baxter. “We want a judge who’ll give us an exhumation order ASAP. Then call the airport and book the first flight up there.”
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“A pineal gland, among other things,” says Lenz, watching me closely. “Ever heard of it?”
I shake my head while I memorize the term. My knowledge of anatomy is limited, but my wife’s is encyclopedic.
“The two women who died in California were linked because a pathologist from San Francisco happened to mention an unsolved homicide case to a colleague at a convention. A woman had been murdered by strangulation, then had both eyes removed and wooden stakes driven through the sockets. When the pathologist sectioned the brain, he found that the points of both stakes terminated in the third ventricle of the brain—a little too perfectly for him. Stranger still, he found that part of the pineal gland was missing, which the stakes would not account for. The colleague who heard this—a pathologist from Los Angeles—had an unsolved homicide that was completely different in almost every respect. A woman had been beaten to death with a claw hammer, probably by someone she knew. Her brain sustained horrific damage. But this did not explain why much of her pineal gland was gone. This chance conversation ultimately linked the crimes. Then the police promptly charged down the wrong track and decided they were dealing with cult murders.”
Lenz’s tone of voice when he says “police” earns him few friends in this room. He points his index finger at me.
“You tied those two victims to four others, through EROS. All four of those women also died from severe head wounds, or sustained postmortem head trauma. Pistol shot, shotgun blast, lethal fall. One was decapitated, as was Karin Wheat. We’re exhuming the first three and conducting repeat autopsies on the heads. If the condition of the brains permits it, I strongly suspect we will find that these women are missing all or part of their pineal glands.”
The psychiatrist is staring at me as though he expects me to start filling in gaps for him.
“What the hell does the pineal gland do?” I ask.
As Lenz and Baxter stare silently at me, my survival instinct tells me it’s time to test the bars on this cage. “Look,” I say, directing my words to Chief Tobin, “I think you guys have definitely stepped out of my area of expertise. Can I go home now?”
“Not just yet,” Tobin says. “Do people ever use their real names on this sex network?”
I try to suppress the feeling that I’m going to be spending the night in a New Orleans hotel, if not jail. “Almost never. The code names are what allow them the freedom to say and be whatever they wish. They might exchange phone numbers to facilitate an f2f meeting, but—”
“What’s f2f?” asks the chief.
“Face-to-face.”
“Oh. So did the victims give him their numbers?”
“Not in the conversations I’ve printed out.”
“So how do you think he’s learning their names?”
“I think he’s somehow gained access to our accounting files. There’s a master client list in the company’s administrative computer, with account numbers, addresses, everything. That’s where I got Strobekker’s name.”
“Who has access to that list?” asks Baxter.
“Myself, Miles Turner, Jan Krislov. Maybe a few techs. That’s it. The computer handles the billing automatically. It’s a pretty sophisticated system.”
“Who is Miles Turner?” asks Lenz.
“He’s the primary sysop. We grew up together in Mississippi, but he lives in New York now. He’s the one who got me into this job.”
“So you think the killer is hacking into the accounting database,” says Baxter.
“I don’t know. Miles tells me it’s impossible, that the list is protected like nuclear launch codes, but as far as I can see it’s the only way the killer could get the names. He must have seen that master list at least once. Maybe printed it out.”
“Not the only way,” interrupts Mayeux’s partner. “You or this Miles character could have given the list to someone. Or sold it to them.”
I’m on the verge of telling this guy to fuck himself when Baxter asks, “Who does security for EROS?”
“Miles,” I reply, still watching Mayeux’s scowling partner.
“This Miles Turner is highly proficient with computers?” asks Baxter.
“‘Highly’ doesn’t come close.”
“He has a degree?”
“MIT.”
“Serious program,” says one of the younger FBI agents.
“Graduate degree?” Baxter presses.
“Degrees, plural. I don’t know the exact names, but his specialty is computational physics.”
“If he’s so damned smart,” asks Mayeux’s partner, “how did Strobekker break through his security?”
It’s clear that everyone detests this little rat as much as I do, but his question is a good one. “I don’t know. And he refuses to believe anyone has.”
“How many techs are there?” asks Baxter.
“Four, five. I’m not positive they have access to the master list, but I think if they wanted to see it, they could figure a way. They’re good. Miles handpicked every one.”
The two younger FBI agents are murmuring between themselves. From the lips of the one with whippet eyes I catch, “… nail that fuck with a phone trace … subcontract some NSA geeks … next log-on … no time—” before Baxter silences them with a glare.
“Mr. Cole,” he says gently, “if you don’t mind, we’d like you to draw us a floor plan of the EROS offices before you go.”
This startles me. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Never?”
“They’re obsessively private about the place. Why do you need that anyway?”
No one answers.
“You’re not gearing up for some kind of Waco thing, are you? This is nothing like that. There’s a reason for all the secrecy. We have very famous clients.”
“Relax,” Baxter says. “We’re not the ATF.”
“You’re all initials to me, Mr. Baxter.”
“We can arrest your ass right now!” yells Mayeux’s partner, finally losing control. “I don’t know why the hell we haven’t already!”
“Go ahead!” I shout back, my anger boiling over. “You want to arrest me for linking these homicides for you? The Press might be real interested to hear a story like that. In fact, my wife knows one of the TV news anchors here from her school days. Maybe I should give her a call.”
“Let’s everybody just calm down,” Chief Tobin booms. With his department under fire from all quarters for corruption, the last thing he needs is more press scrutiny.
“Now can I go home?” I ask again.
The chief looks hard at Baxter, who in turn looks to Lenz. Lenz finally gives a reserved nod. Baxter reaches into his inside jacket pocket and passes me a card. “This is the number of our headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. I want you to check in once a day for the next few days. Obviously we’ll need to speak with you again. Possibly at some length.”
Mayeux’s partner looks like he just swallowed a cigarette butt with his coffee, but Chief Tobin’s hard gaze keeps him muzzled.
“I’d like to study your EROS printouts on the plane,” says Lenz. “You are going to leave them with me?”
I open my case, lift out the thick stack of pages, and drop it at the center of the table. “They’re all yours. But when Jan Krislov lands on me with both feet and a dozen lawyers, I’m going to expect some payback from you guys.”
“Leave Krislov to us,” says Baxter.
Measuring Daniel Baxter against my mental image of EROS’s cold-blooded CEO, I stifle a retort and turn to go. One foot is outside the doorway when Lenz says, “Mr. Cole?”
I turn back, expecting some Columbo trick just as I taste freedom. Lenz smiles oddly. “What instrument do you play?”
The question throws me off balance. Is this some bullshit Barbara Walters question? What kind of tree would I like to be? But of course it’s not. I do play an instrument, and somehow Lenz knows that. “Guitar,” I answer blankly.
The psychiatrist nods, a trace of disappointment in his eyes. “Do you sing?”
“Some people think so. I never did.”
The rest of the group looks from me to Lenz, then back again, trying to understand this odd coda to our meeting. My bewilderment holds me in place until the psychiatrist says, “Calluses, Mr. Cole. You have well-developed calluses on the fingertips of your left hand.”
The hand closes involuntarily. I squint at Lenz, imprinting his face in my memory, then turn and step into the hall.
On my way out of the station, I pass a knot of middle-aged men in sweat-stained suits. They are obviously waiting for something. Their angry voices mark them as anything but Southerners, and before I am out of earshot I realize they are waiting for me.
I quicken my steps.
Once outside, I reflect on Dr. Lenz’s little performance. He’s an observant man. But is he smart? A smart man would simply have noted the calluses and bade me farewell. Unless he felt that quickly discovering what instrument I play was important. But even then, a smart man would have remained silent after I answered his question, leaving me mystified by his deductive skills. Yet Arthur Lenz insisted on doing a Sherlock Holmes impression for his captive audience of Lestrades. Why?
The doctor was showing off. I don’t know why, but this is somehow important. I cannot escape the feeling that the entire low-key meeting was a carefully orchestrated interrogation designed to look and feel like anything but that. Baxter and Lenz playing good cop while the NOPD played the heavy. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that. But if they really suspect me, why not arrest me and give me the third degree? Or throw me to the out-of-state wolves who were waiting for me?
One thing is certain. The FBI controlled that meeting. I am free because they want me free. Why do they want that? Could the FBI—like Chief Tobin—be afraid of the media? It’s possible. After seven murders—eight including Strobekker—the Bureau’s elite serial killer unit has managed to link exactly none of the crimes. Wrongly accusing the good citizen who connected the murders for them might make their precious Unit an object of ridicule on Nightline, not to mention Hard Copy, which is already feeding on the case.
I have only intuition to go on, but the voiceless voice in my head has rarely failed me. As I pull the inevitable parking ticket off the windshield of my Explorer and drop the crumpled ball into the gutter, that voice is saying one thing loud and clear: You have more problems today than you had yesterday.
SIX
One of my office telephones is ringing when I turn the key in the front door of the farmhouse. Thinking it’s Drewe, I race to catch it.
“Hello, snitch.”
This is not Drewe. The voice in the earpiece is at once strange and familiar. It belongs to Miles Turner.
“You’ve really shaken things up, haven’t you?” he says.
“What have you heard?” I ask, shocked at the sauna-level heat that has accumulated inside the house during the day.
“Jan is very upset with you.”
“I figured. Did the FBI call her?”
I hear a faint tsk. “Did they phone her? No, Harper. That would be much too easy for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. They showed up at the door of our offices with a search warrant.”
“What? At EROS? When?”
“Two hours ago. Special agents from the New York office.”
“What did they see?”
“Not much. Jan locked the master client list in the file room the minute Reception buzzed her and said the FBI was in the building. She refused to give them a key, and that room is like a vault. Actually, it is a vault. It reminds me of your grandfather’s bomb shelter—Eisenhower chic. It’s got a time lock. Seventy-two hours before that monster opens. I guess the FBI could blow it open or cut it with a blowtorch, but they haven’t tried. They just posted two men outside it. They didn’t even confiscate our servers. Jan thinks the raid was pure intimidation.”
“I don’t think so, Miles. All six of those women I told you about were murdered this year. Karin Wheat makes seven. And David Strobekker, the man I thought was the killer, makes eight.”
“So says the FBI.”
“Come on, man. Wake up and smell the fucking coffee! I overheard one guy whispering about phone traces, bringing in the NSA, George Orwell stuff.”
“As a matter of fact, Jan is about to give the FBI permission to set up tracing equipment right here in the office.”
This stops me. “But you just said she hid the master client list from them.”
“She did. But Jan’s no fool. She knows she’s walking a fine legal line. There is apparently some question of a duty to warn. Warn the subscribers, I mean. She feels that by cooperating with the FBI in tracing Strobekker—or whoever he is—she demonstrates that she’s not obstructing the FBI merely for the sake of doing it.”
“At least somebody up there is thinking straight. How long do they think it will take to trace Strobekker if he does log on again?”
“If he’s stupid, no time at all. Personally, I don’t believe they have a chance in hell.”
“You sound glad about it, damn it!”
Miles laughs softly. “I haven’t heard you this excited in a while. Did Karin’s death affect you so deeply?”
I swallow. “You knew her?”
“Of course. We exchanged quite a few messages during the wee hours. Karin was one of the pillars of Level Three. A thoroughly interesting woman.”
I think quickly. “I … I know that. But—”
“But you never saw any of my aliases in exchanges with her, right? That’s what you’re thinking?”
“Yes.”
“I have many names, Harper. Even you don’t know them all.” He pauses. “You don’t always tell women you’re a sysop, do you? That you know who they really are? That would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it? It’s amazing how the perceived anonymity of a code name lets them open up, isn’t it? Especially the actresses. There’s nothing quite like boffing a three-million-dollar thespian online while she thinks you think she’s someone else, is there? You can play them like your guitar then, can’t you?”
I say nothing.
“And how is Drewe Welby, M.D. taking all of this? Did she finally break the camel’s back and send you running to the FBI?”
“I didn’t go to the FBI,” I snap. “I called the New Orleans police. The FBI was already on the case. Damn it, Miles, we’re talking about murder.”
“So?”
“So?”
“EROS is like an organic system, Harper. Constantly evolving. Powerful emotions flow through it every day. Sexual emotions. We’re accustomed to monitoring massive levels of input, or throughput, if you will. But output has always been a possibility. And sex has always been integrally bound up with death. Why anyone should be surprised by all this is beyond me.”
“Miles, put aside your bullshit philosophizing for a minute. Don’t you realize that EROS’s primary obligation is to protect the security of its clients?”
“You’re the one who trivialized that obligation by revealing the names of subscribers to the police.”
I shake my head. “You’ve finally flipped out, man.”
“You realize,” he says coolly, “that you’ve exposed yourself to litigation by your action. Your employment contract is quite specific about that. I would feel derelict as a friend if I didn’t warn you that you will almost certainly be hearing from Elaine Abrams in the next few days. I would speak to my attorney.”
It suddenly strikes me that Miles Turner—who grew up in Rain, Mississippi—is speaking without a trace of Southern accent. He has finally succeeded in his lifelong goal of erasing his roots.
“Listen to me, Miles,” I implore, reaching for some vestige of the boy I once knew so well. “Innocent women are being killed and mutilated. I’m trying to stop that. If you and Krislov don’t understand that, you’re going to get steamrollered by the FBI. I’ve met the guys running this investigation. They’re from the Investigative Support Unit—the serial killer guys—and they are serious people.”
“I gather they are,” he says, finally showing a touch of pique. “And you and I are their prime targets.”
I am silent.
“Surely you see that, Harper? You and I are the only two men—apart from my technical staff—who have access to the real names of the subscribers. Obviously the master client list is the map the killer is using to choose his victims.”
Obviously. “So how did he get access to it?”
“I’m looking into that.”
“You told me those files were protected like nuclear launch codes.”
“My system architecture is ironclad,” he snaps. “Still, even the best operating systems sometimes have flaws no one knows about. They come that way from the factory.”
“How many technicians are there, Miles?”
“Six.”
More than I’d thought. “If the killer isn’t hacking his way through your security, and you or I didn’t do the killings, that means one of those six guys did.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
This stops me. When Miles Turner sounds this certain, he is always right. The police would never accept that, of course, but I do. But how can he know? Trying not to slide too far down that neural pathway, I say, “Look, am I fired or what?”
“Fired?” he echoes as if the notion has never crossed his mind.
“You just said Krislov was pissed at me. It’s not like I’m essential to the running of the network.”
“Of course you are. You and I are the only two full-duty sysops.”
“What about Raquel Hirsch?”
“She’s licking her lesbian lips off on Montserrat. Not due back for another week. Besides, she’s only part-time and doesn’t know enough about technical matters to defrag a hard drive.”
“What if I quit?”
“You can’t.”
“My contract says I can. I made sure of that. This was only going to be a trial thing anyway, remember? A goof.”
Miles’s voice lowers to its snake-charming register. “But you’ve stayed at it all these months, haven’t you? You like it. Besides, if you quit, you’ll lose your fifty-yard-line seat.”
Jesus. “I don’t need the aggravation, Miles.”
“No? What about your online friends, then? Or should I say lovers? Are you ready to tell them good-bye forever? Your employment contract does forbid you from ever trying to contact them in person. If you quit, I’ll probably have to remind Elaine Abrams about that clause.”
“Fuck you. I quit.”
“What about Eleanor Rigby?”
I exhale slowly, my grip tightening on the phone. “What do you know about Eleanor?”
“I know she’d be positively despondent if you dropped off of EROS without explanation.”
Miles knows he has me. The truth is, I don’t really want to quit. After summoning the nerve to “go public” with my suspicions—and being proved correct—I want resolution. Miles just pisses me off. “I’ll stay until Raquel gets back,” I tell him, my voice tight.
“Good man. Oh, you’d better start getting your alibis organized. Your FBI friends will be asking, and it can be difficult to remember where one was on so many different nights so many months ago.”
“I have nothing to hide,” I say firmly. “I’m innocent.”
There is a long silence, then a strange, muffled sigh. When Miles finally answers, his voice seems burdened by age beyond his years. “Harper, have you learned so little during your time with EROS? You speak of innocence with such conviction. Are any of us?”
Then he hangs up the phone.
I look around the office at the familiar landmarks of my existence, the EROS computer (custom built by Miles), the Gateway 2000 I use to make my futures trades, two laser printers, the antique laboratory table that functions as my desk, the twin bed I crash on during marathon trading sessions, the guitars hanging over the bed. Lifting my feet from the floor, I spin the swivel chair in a circle. The window flashes past again and again, merging with reflections from framed prints, antique maps, the unsheathed Civil War sword carried by one of my maternal ancestors at Brice’s Cross Roads. When I stop spinning I am facing a sport coat.
My father’s coat.
It droops from a wire hanger on a nail driven straight into the wall. The jacket appears to be cashmere, with thin vertical stripes of black and wine. It is absolutely motionless. There is a reason for this. The coat is made of wood.
I commissioned this piece from a sculptor I discovered one summer in Florida. He is a big blond guy named Fraser Smith, and he sculpts nothing but clothes, quilts, and old suitcases. The day I met him, I compulsively bought two of his pieces and in the after-sale chatter learned that he was originally from Mississippi. I don’t know why his work affects me so strongly, but I don’t question it. Things actually worth buying are rare.
My father’s taste in clothes was exceptionally bad as a rule—mostly synthetic fabrics in loud colors—but he bought this jacket while serving as an army doctor in Germany in 1960, the year I was born. All I can figure is that the store was out of electric plaids, leaving him no choice but to buy this jewel for warmth. Twenty years later, he gave it to me after I remarked on its quality, and I wore it often. Ten years after that—a year after he died—I carefully boxed it up and sent it UPS to Tampa, Florida, where Smith kept it four months, then shipped both the jacket and the sculpture back to me with a bill for fifteen thousand dollars.
It was worth every cent.
Why, I don’t know. Maybe because the jacket says something to me about the permanence of the apparently transitory. For what is that jacket but an articulated memory? As surely as the jacket is here with me, my father is here with me. And for all his failings, which were many, he was a man of principle when it came to the big things. And I know, as I sit here worrying about the consequences of my recent actions, that I am doing only and exactly what my father would have done—the consequences be damned.
Maybe that’s Miles’s problem. He had no such anchor. Miles’s father left him and his mother to fend for themselves when Miles was five. People said Miles was his spitting image, but since Mrs. Turner kept no pictures of “that no-count SOB” in the house, we could never confirm or deny this. He certainly didn’t look like his mother, a petite, harried woman. He was tall even as a child, all bones and tendons, which in a small town usually leads to school sports. But Miles was apathy personified. When one coach tried to talk him into playing basketball, he just stared until the man walked away. That was a common adult reaction. Miles’s eyes are grayish blue, and you can’t see anything in them if he doesn’t want you to. They’re like background pieces in a stained-glass window. Nothing there but space. Yet, like the sky, they can come alive with everything from thunderheads to blazing blue light.
According to local legend, Miles’s father was a mean drunk and a gifted engineer who helped the Army Corps of Engineers figure out how to stop a bad sand boil in the levee west of Mayersville in 1973. Because of that, people said Miles got his brains from his father. Miles hated them for that. He hated anybody who ever said it. I think he took it as some sort of insult to his mother, who was no rocket scientist, to be fair to the gossips. Yet Annie Turner was clever in her own way. She never remarried (or even divorced, for all the town knew) but she did manage to become involved with certain solvent gentlemen (railroad men, for example) who happened to be passing through Rain during times of financial distress.
Miles never talked about any of those men. When they were around, we knew to stay away from his house from noontime on. Once, shooting squirrels out of season, we ran into the Turner kitchen to grab some .22 bullets from the drawer and saw a man standing in the kitchen with his shirt off, drinking milk from a half-gallon carton. He looked old as the hills to us (at twelve) and had milk dribbling down his chin. When we got outside and Miles fumbled the bullets into the .22, his eyes sort of glazed over and he took a couple of steps back toward the house and before I could spit he put two bullets through the top pane of the kitchen window. When I crashed into his back and pulled him down, I felt his shoulders shaking like the flanks of a horse run almost to death. I had to hit him in the face to get the gun away, and then we ran like hell until we couldn’t hear anyone screaming behind us. Miles didn’t say anything for about two hours after that. We just walked along the weedy turnrows dividing the cotton fields, rapping the hard, knobbed stalks everybody called nigger knockers against the rusty barbed wire. I went home at dark. I don’t know if Miles went home at all.
But they made out okay. Annie even managed to pay Miles’s way through private school until she realized that the school would pay to have him. Because Miles Turner was a genius. I say that because, though I did well in school without much effort, Miles did not try at all. In the ninth grade he could answer “reading” problems in algebra after scanning them once. He never put anything on paper. After we all took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, some army major from Washington telephoned down to the school, talked to the principal, and asked to speak to Miles. He said something about Miles having a home in the army just as soon as he came of age. Miles told the major he wouldn’t join the army unless Russian paratroopers landed in his mother’s yard. The major said that might not be such a remote possibility. He also told Miles that Greenville was a confirmed Russian nuclear target because of its bridge over the Mississippi River. Miles said if the Russians wanted to nuke Greenville, he might consider joining the army after all. The Russian army.
Okay, he was a smart-ass. But that doesn’t make him a killer. He was just born in the wrong town. And he knew it. We both graduated high school as National Merit scholars, and could have gone to college anywhere in the United States for next to nothing. But there our paths diverged. I was so into girls that summer that I hardly gave college a thought, and since my parents were having their own problems at the time—financial and marital—they ignored the issue as well. I’d always done well in school, thus I always would. In the end I went to Ole Miss sight unseen, and because I had waited so long to decide, my father even had to pay for the privilege.
Miles applied for and was awarded a full academic scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While I farted around Oxford, Mississippi, with scatterbrained, Venus-shaped sorority girls and drunken Young Republicans, Miles Turner was fanatically programming, tearing apart, and rebuilding big clumsy metal boxes that I would not even have recognized in 1978.
Computers.
It seems natural now, but at the time it was odd. He spoke the language of bits and drives and floating memory at a time when those words were as foreign to the general public as Attic Greek. The really odd thing is that Miles thinks I’m smarter than he is. I have no idea why. This is not false modesty. I will frankly admit that I have above-average intelligence, just as I will admit I have a poor sense of direction. I can look at a problem, analyze it—for patterns, usually—and given enough time, solve it. Miles doesn’t analyze anything. He looks at something, and he just knows. He grasps physics and numbers the way I do people and music—wholly by intuition. It’s as though his asocial childhood allowed him to tune into some subrational channel of information that is beyond the rest of us.
When I took the sysop job, I was looking forward to getting to know him again. I’d only seen him a handful of times in the past fifteen years. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out that way. We occasionally exchange email—sometimes using the satellite video link that his techs installed here when I took the job-slash-hobby—but on balance, I know him no better now than I did when we were kids. Maybe my hopes were misplaced. Maybe you can never know anyone more deeply than you know them in childhood.
By the time Drewe arrives, I’ve put together a bastardized stir-fry of broccoli and pork and lemon. We eat it on the front porch, which is thick with heat despite the falling darkness, but mercifully free of mosquitoes. As soon as we sit, Drewe asks for a play-by-play of the meeting in New Orleans. I give it to her, glad not to have to keep anything back. She takes in every word with the machinelike precision that carried her through medical school with honors, and when I am done she says nothing. I have held one detail until the end, hoping for a silence like this one.
“What’s the pineal gland?” I ask.
She finds my eyes in the gloom. “The pineal body?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“It’s a small glandular structure at the core of the brain. In the third ventricle, I think. It’s about the size of a pea.”
“What does it do?”
“Until about thirty years ago, nobody thought it did anything. It was considered a vestigial organ, like the appendix. Scientists knew the pineal made melatonin, but no one knew what melatonin did. What does the pineal have to do with anything?”
“The FBI says the killer cut off Karin Wheat’s head to get to her pineal gland.”
“What?”
“Sick, huh? The other victims might be missing theirs too, or else their whole heads.”
Drewe grimaces.
“Can you think of any reason why someone would want pineal glands? Do they have any medical use?”
“I don’t think so. There were some pineal experiments going on at Tulane when I was there, related to breast cancer I think. But I don’t remember what the findings were.” She pauses. “You can buy melatonin in health food stores, though. God, this reminds me of those PBS shows where they talk about Oriental medicine. You know, how Japanese men pay poachers hundreds of thousands of dollars for rhinoceros horns and tiger testicles and things. All to cure impotence or restore their lost youth or something.”
My opinion of my wife’s mental acuity has been reaffirmed yet again. She has already broached a theory that seems more logical than that of the police in California, who believe the EROS murders may be the work of a cult.
“So what is melatonin?” I ask. “What does it do?”
“It’s a hormone that regulates your sleep cycle. Your circadian rhythms. You know, what causes jet lag. Some people take it to prevent or relieve jet lag symptoms.”
“Can you remember anything else about it?”
Drewe touches her forefinger to the tip of her nose and fixes her gaze somewhere out in the darkness. I know this posture well: concentration mode. “I think it controls the release of serotonin, maybe some other hormones. I seem to recall something from one of the journals. Neurobiological stuff. Something to do with the pineal and the aging process. Weird how that fits with the Oriental thing, isn’t it? But that doesn’t mean anything. Murderers don’t read JAMA or Journal of Neuroscience.”
“Why not?”
“Well … I guess it’s possible.” Drewe grimaces and says, “Men are scum.” A routine comic line of hers that doesn’t sound so funny tonight.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask lightly, falling into our usual banter.
“More dictation.” She stretches both arms above her head. “My personal cross to bear.” She begins gathering up the plates. “Which reminds me. Tomorrow you face yours.”
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