Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “Yes, Sid. The Times-Picayune, out of New Orleans. You can call the office and check us out. But please tell me first what’s happening on the radio.”

  After a moment, Moroney says, “Nothing on the FBI channel. I got some McLean P.D. stuff. They’re reporting a one-eighty-seven—a homicide—at Six-fifteen Whitehall.”

  “Did they mention a name?”

  “They don’t do that on the radio. Female Caucasian is all. They’ve alerted paramedics. Some patrolman’s asking for brass on the scene, complaining about the FBI. And um . . . uh . . . I think that’s about it for me, guys. Next time call somebody else, okay?”

  “Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Moroney,” Miles says with overdone formality. Then he hangs up.

  “This is bad,” he says.

  Only now do I realize that Miles was consciously disguising his voice on the phone, adding the drawled Southern rhythms he worked so hard to eradicate during the past few years. “Bad?” I echo. “It’s a goddamn nightmare.”

  “I meant the telephone call. It won’t be long before Baxter finds out we were monitoring what happened.”

  “You mean that I was. We were using my phone.”

  “I may have to split,” he says, rocking in place like a nervous sprinter. “We’ve got to accelerate the plan.”

  “What? We’re out of this shit, Miles! As of now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean no more games. No more ‘Erin’ and ‘Maxwell. ’ You saw Brahma’s note to Lenz. He’s knows exactly what’s up.”

  “Just because he caught on to Lenz doesn’t mean he suspects you. Have you sensed a single false note in his communications with you?”

  I pause. “No, but—”

  “Any subtle humor at your expense?”

  “Not yet, but—”

  “It’s totally different! He believes in Erin. Why is anybody’s guess. But he does.”

  “Miles, you’re missing the main point here, and that scares me.”

  “What main point?”

  “How did Brahma find Lenz?”

  His mouth remains half open.

  “Through the telephone system, right?”

  Miles’s brain is operating at a speed I cannot begin to comprehend. I say nothing while he works out the possibilities. Finally, he says, “Unless new information on Lenz’s decoy plan was entered into FBI computers in the last thirty-six hours, I’d have to say yes.”

  “So he can trace us too.”

  Miles stares at me without speaking, his face masklike in its lack of humanity. “No,” he says at length. “If Brahma checks the phone company’s computers, he’ll find the Vicksburg address coupled with your line. Any other digital data he can turn up will verify that. He can’t check actual land ownership because in Mississippi nothing like that is on computer, and probably won’t be for another fifty years.”

  Something in Miles’s tone makes me work through his answer step by step, but it checks out.

  “Lenz’s problem was that he was at the physical address that went with his phone line. Not so with us.” Miles pauses. “What I don’t understand is how Brahma knew Lenz personally was behind ‘Lilith.’ I mean, he attacked Lenz’s wife, not the safe house. So maybe he did get his information from some FBI computer. Maybe somebody got careless.”

  “We’re still out of it, Miles. Until tonight we were fooling around in a bad situation. Now it’s a Force-Ten clusterfuck. Fate just tapped us on the shoulder.”

  “You want to leave it to the so-called experts now?” he asks angrily. “You just saw their incompetence tragically demonstrated. How many women are we going to watch die because we’re scared to take Brahma to the wall?”

  “It’s not our fight.”

  “The hell it isn’t! You think tonight changed my situation for the better?”

  “You couldn’t have killed Mrs. Lenz. I can swear you were right beside me. Let’s just come clean with them.”

  “Come clean? A minute ago you threw the team-offender theory up at me. Don’t you see it’s going to be more popular than ever now?”

  “Why?”

  “Because unless Brahma was transmitting his first message from Lenz’s home, someone else killed his wife. Brahma knew the safe house was a trap. He knew they’d be following his cellular, so he drove around typing messages to Lenz while someone else did his wife. Then he logged off, swung back, picked up the killer, and was already out of town when he transmitted that final message.”

  As much as I want to argue, the scenario makes sense. Miles rubs his eyes and walks over to my minifridge for a Mountain Dew. “Do you realize what just happened? A serial killer murdered the wife of an FBI agent.”

  “Lenz was a shrink, not an agent.”

  “You think that matters? He was one of the stars of the Investigative Support Unit. And Brahma already took out a Hostage Rescue Team member. We’re about to see one of the biggest manhunts in American history.”

  I feel a sudden urge to set the air conditioner at sixtyfive degrees, climb into bed, and sleep for twenty hours.

  Miles drains the Mountain Dew like a man dying of thirst. “If I turned myself in now, I’d be asking for a legal reaming the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Sacco and Vanzetti.”

  While I marshal my arguments, he drops the empty can, picks up the TV remote control, aims it over my shoulder and switches on my office television.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing what’s on TV.”

  “What?”

  “My time’s almost up, Harper.” He gazes past me, surfing through channels at superhuman speed. “I’m going to find a movie that’ll induce deep hack mode, then lie down and finish my stupid Trojan Horse. The e-mail thing isn’t going to work. Too short a time frame now.”

  “I meant what I said, Miles. I’m through with Brahma.”

  “I heard you.”

  Suddenly a wide and placid smile soothes the lines from his face. His eyes glaze with almost religious receptivity.

  “What is it?” I ask, looking over my shoulder.

  “This Gun for Hire. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Ladd’s first big break, and he was playing a killer. It’s only been on a few minutes. This is like the fourth scene.”

  “Film noir? I thought you liked seventies trash.”

  “I’m eclectic. This is perfect. We’re living noir right this second. Digital noir.”

  He gives me a buck-toothed imitation of Humphrey Bogart, and for a moment I actually doubt his sanity. But then he clicks off the halogen lamp, sits on my bed with his back against the headboard, and props his laptop on his thighs. The black-and-white light of the television flickers over his features like shadows of clouds on the face of a cliff. Whatever anyone may think of Miles Turner, he is a man doing what he was born to do. Not many of us can say that.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch in the den,” I tell him.

  He nods slightly, or perhaps not at all. In Miles’s universe, I am already running in a minimized format.

  Chapter 31

  “Harper! Wake up!”

  “Huh?”

  “Wake up!”

  My eyelids are sealed shut with epoxy.

  I rub my fists into them. The first image that materializes is Miles’s face hovering inches from my own in the dark. I remember now. I’m lying on the couch in the den. Miles shakes me again.

  “Wake up!”

  A bolus of adrenaline sprays through my system, bringing me into a sitting position. “Are the cops here?”

  “No. Come to the office.”

  “I had a nightmare . . . Jesus. What’s going on?” Miles is no longer there. I rise and stumble toward the office, noticing faint blue lines around the edges of the blinds. I must have slept through the night. The muted cyclone of Drewe’s electric hair dryer whirs from the end of the hall as I pass across it and through the office door.

  Miles is seated before the EROS computer. “You’ve got e-mail,” he says.

 
“From who?”

  “Look.”

  I rub my eyes again and peer at the screen.

  TO: ERIN

  SENDER: UNAVAILABLE

  I must talk to you. You know who I am. I shall check the Blue Room every half hour by the clock.

  “It came in about two hours ago,” Miles informs me.

  “I let you sleep as long as I could. Notice anything interesting?”

  “No.”

  “The momentum of the relationship has shifted. Brahma’s desperate to talk to you.”

  “So?”

  “You’ve got to answer him.”

  A knock at the door lifts Miles an inch off his seat.

  “We’re awake!” I call.

  Drewe opens the door and smiles. She’s dressed for work, in dark slacks and a white Liz Claiborne blouse. “I’m having cereal for breakfast,” she says. “Best I can do this morning. You guys want any?”

  “No thanks,” says Miles, trying to look nonchalant.

  “Harper?”

  “Sounds good. I’m starved.”

  I ignore Miles’s angry expulsion of breath and follow Drewe into the kitchen, glancing at my watch as I go. Seven-twenty a.m. Miles must have figured it would take ten minutes to convince me to answer Brahma’s message. I’m definitely not going back into the office before seven-thirty.

  Drewe pours two bowls of raisin bran and slices a navel orange into bright crescents. I go straight for the coffeepot. It’s Community dark roast with chicory, and I savor the kick.

  “You look rough,” Drewe says.

  “You look like an ad for Ivory Snow.”

  “Thanks. Long night?”

  “Worse.”

  “What happened?”

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

  I shrug. “He’s got a few ideas.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Drewe . . .”

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

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

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

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

  I take my time with the orange slices.

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

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

  “I answered for you.” His eyes never leave the screen.

  “I told him your husband hadn’t left for work yet, but you’d be in the Blue Room at nine.”

  “What?”

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

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

  “Goddamn it, Miles, this is dangerous!”

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

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

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

  My mind goes blank. “You did?”

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

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

  “It’s the cops!”

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

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

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

  “They’ll break the door down!”

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

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

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

  “I’m coming! Hang on a second!”

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

  “Gimme a sec! Chain’s stuck!”

  “Open up or we break it down!”

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

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

  “What the hell’s going on, Billy?”

  “FBI thinks Turner’s here.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sheriff’s detective.”

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

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

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

  “Looking for secret passages?” I ask.

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

  “Because this is my property.”

  “Yeah? B.F. deal.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Whose is this?” asks the sheriff’s detective. Red-nosed and beagle-eyed, he steps out of the group holding a dark suit jacket. It takes only a second to recognize the cashmere coat my father brought back from Germany, the one reproduced perfectly as a sculpture in my office.

  “Well?” he says.

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

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

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

  “What about this?” he asks, shaking the disk in my face.

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

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

  “What’s on it?”

  “I don’t know. Where’d you get it?”

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

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