Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  He bites one side of his distended lower lip and looks down at my front tire. “Waitin’ for Turner to show up, ain’t I?”

  “You remember him from school?”

  Billy shrugs. “Saw him around. Never cared much for the sumbitch myself. Acted half queer.”

  This is about what I expected. “You really think he’d come back?”

  “Can’t ever tell. Folks do strange things on the run. Sometimes they get the homing instinct, like a sick dog.”

  “Not Miles. He hated this place.”

  Billy nods distractedly, then fiddles with the laser speed gun mounted on his door panel.

  “Let me ask you something, Billy. Straight, okay?”

  He looks up a little suspiciously. “Okay.”

  “Are you here just to watch for Miles, or are you supposed to keep tabs on me too?”

  He takes a while with this one, his beardless chin working around the snuff. “Can’t really say. Sheriff ain’t talkin’ much. Somebody wants Turner’s ass bad, though. You, I don’t know. But they’re talkin’ ’bout you some. Talking to people who know you.”

  “Like you?”

  He smiles again. “I told ’em you was all right. Had a hell of a forearm on you back in seventy-seven.”

  “Not enough to handle you, though, was it?”

  He grins wide at this.

  “Look, do you have orders to follow me or not?”

  Billy’s answer is the eternally inscrutable smile of the Southern law enforcement officer. I guess there’s only one way to find out. I stomp the accelerator of the Explorer and leave six feet of smoking rubber beside the door of his cruiser. When the speedometer pegs seventy, I look in my rearview mirror. Billy’s Caprice is still sitting where it was. He’s probably still grinning like Junior Samples. But at least he’s not following me.

  Driving back from a long and pissed-off run through the cotton fields, it occurs to me that Deputy Billy-if he hasn’t handed off his stakeout position and headed home for supper-might stop me and demand to look in the cargo area of my Explorer. He wouldn’t have to open the vehicle to do this, so I don’t suppose he’d need a warrant. But if I took Drewe’s Acura out for a drive one night, the only way anyone could be sure I didn’t have Miles stuffed in the trunk would be to stop me and check. Would that be legal? Would I resist? It’s academic now, of course. But will it remain that way?

  Earlier this afternoon, I shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive and fought my way across three hundred yards of grassed-over tractor ruts that ended at a wide flat bump in the fields. This was the Indian mound where Miles was bullied down into the fort with the rattlesnake. I could still see a low pile of deadfall and undergrowth where the fort had been. I got out and walked around the mound, half looking for arrowheads, and tried to remember what it felt like to be that young and have a friend I trusted like I trusted Miles Turner. I couldn’t quite do it. I’m a different person now, and Miles is too. We’re grown men. Yet somewhere inside, he must carry the tough little boy I knew back then, just as I carry my own. And while he is running for his freedom in New York or Tenerife or God-knows-where, what that little boy sees in the FBI, I am sure, is another gang of stupid bullies who want to scare him or hurt him or worse. And that makes me afraid of what he might do if they corner him.

  As hard as the murders hit me, my experiences with the FBI disturb me more. Even with their vast material resources, they seem powerless to locate Brahma using technical or conventional methods. Daniel Baxter as much as admitted to me that they are waiting for the killer to make a mistake. But after several months of observing Brahma on EROS, I have no reason to think he will make one. Dr. Lenz seems to recognize this. Yet his response seems more than a little naive. His reasoning is sound: the surest way to stop a man who cannot be hunted down is to lure him from concealment. But is Lenz the man to do it? Could any man do it? Brahma is the most intuitive person I have ever seen on EROS. The odds that a man could trick him into believing he was talking to a woman for any length of time are probably nil. Worse, Lenz is a neophyte when it comes to EROS. He knows little about its social customs and nothing about its system architecture.

  If anyone can trap Brahma using EROS, it’s those who know the system best. Miles and me. I’ve spent the better part of nine months exploring the digital world that is EROS, interacting with women, lurking over supposedly private conversations, learning secrets that caused magnitudinal shifts in my perception of human nature, shepherding the evolution of a shadow community built on anonymity and desire. Miles has done this and more: he built the system from the test bench up.

  And there lies the problem.

  Miles is the digital sorcerer; I am not even an apprentice. And so far Miles has resisted helping the FBI. Brahma has already proved himself adept with computers; until the riddle of the stolen master client list is solved, I have to assume that he may be as proficient as-or more proficient than-Miles himself. The idea that I could attempt to deceive Brahma on-line without Miles’s help is ludicrous. It was this realization that finally brought me some peace on the Indian mound.

  Dusk is falling as I take the gentle curve going toward our house. Billy has indeed changed shifts with another deputy. Just to be an ass, I honk and wave as I pass the new guy. He replies with a sullen stare.

  Braking for the driveway turn, I see the low cross-section of Drewe’s Acura coming from the other direction like a cruise missile. She blinks her headlights European style, then cuts in front of my grille and into the drive. By the time I roll in behind her, she is standing on the porch holding her purse and a covered metal pot. She’s dressed in khakis tapered to the ankles and an embroidered white blouse. Silver loops dangle from her earlobes, an unusual accessory for her.

  “Where you been?” I call.

  “Mom’s.”

  I trot to the steps, hug her around the waist, and kiss her cheek. “Erin and Holly there too?” I ask, recalling Erin’s vow that she would not return home.

  “No, they left for Jackson a half hour ago. I hope Erin doesn’t get halfway home and then turn around.”

  I push open the door and follow Drewe to the kitchen. “What’s in the dish?”

  “Chicken and dumplings. Anna made them.”

  “Yes!” Anna is the maid who raised Drewe and Erin from infancy. Even at seventy-eight, her cooking beats damn near any woman’s in the county.

  “I’ve been thinking about your case,” Drewe says as she sets the pot on the stove.

  “My case?”

  “The EROS murders.”

  “Really? What about them?”

  “The pineal gland, remember?”

  “What about it?”

  She surveys me from head to toe. “Why don’t you jump in the shower while I heat this up? I’ll tell you when you get out.”

  I look down at my clothes. I took a shower earlier, but my walk in the cotton fields soaked me with sweat. “I definitely need one,” I admit. “I’ll see you in a minute.”

  In my office bathroom, I strip, then switch on the special exhaust fan I installed to keep steam from escaping around the door. Mississippi humidity is bad enough for computers, but with shower steam thrown in, mine would be a lost cause.

  I bang a switch on my waterproof ghetto blaster, sending the razor-clean guitar riffs of Steely Dan’s “My Old School” bouncing around the cubicle. With the water set as hot as I can stand it, I let the spray scald my back as I sway in time to the horn parts. The knowledge that Erin has returned home lifts my spirit as much as anything could today, except maybe Brahma being caught. I’ve almost succeeded in working myself into a good mood when I feel a cold draft of air around the shower curtain. Drewe’s voice rises above Donald Fagen’s.

  “You’d better get out here, Harper.”

  Her tone says trouble. I pull back the curtain and see something I rarely see on her face-alarm.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got company.”

  “Cops?”
/>   “Just hurry.”

  I snatch a towel off the rack and shut off the boom box. Pulling on some jeans, I get a quick premonition that our “company” is Michael Mayeux, the New Orleans police detective. But when I peek around my window curtains I see no strange car outside. Geared up for anything, I stalk barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen.

  There is a stranger waiting for me. He’s tall and thin and clad in Levi’s, western shirt, Red Wing work boots, and an oil-stained Treflan cap pulled over a sidewall crewcut. He stands with his back to me, facing Drewe, who watches him warily from the hot stove. Two seconds is all I need to place him as one of our lease farmers, probably coming to me with some preharvest catastrophe, a mutilated worker or some other nightmare that will bring endless years of lawsuits.

  “Here he is,” says Drewe, announcing my arrival.

  When the guy turns around, it takes me a minute to understand what I am seeing. My skin heats with apprehension. Impossibly, incredibly, from beneath the bill of the Treflan cap beam the brilliant blue eyes of Miles Turner.

  “Like the haircut?” he asks.

  “You crazy son of a bitch.”

  His mouth breaks into a wide smile. I glance at the window to make sure the curtains are drawn, but Drewe has already taken care of it. “How the hell did you get here?”

  “He almost gave me a coronary,” Drewe snaps.

  Miles makes an effort to look contrite. “The place is surrounded. I had to use an unorthodox entry.”

  My puzzlement speaks for itself.

  “The bomb shelter,” Drewe explains. “He came through the tunnel in the backyard.”

  This I can’t believe. “You came through the old tunnel? In the dark? Mice and roaches and God knows what down there?”

  “No choice. I moved fast. You know how I feel about closed spaces.”

  With the initial shock wearing off, Drewe’s anger boils over. “My back was to the stove when he popped the latch on the trapdoor in the pantry. I almost dumped hot chicken broth all over myself.”

  “How did you get here so fast?” I ask, still not believing my eyes.

  Wisely directing his attention to Drewe, Miles points at our kitchen table and silently asks permission to sit.

  She nods grudgingly.

  He sits the way a man sits after ten hours’ plowing behind a mule. After taking a moment to collect himself, he says, “I rode the train to Newark Airport. Paid cash for a Delta ticket to Atlanta under a false name. In Atlanta I bought a ticket on a commuter flight to Mobile under another name. Then I gave a Mobile cabbie fifty bucks to take me to a juke joint where charter pilots hang out. It took about thirty minutes to find a guy who would fly me up here. Cost me fifteen hundred bucks. He thought I was running coke or something.”

  “Where did you land? Yazoo City?”

  “Hell no. We found a grass strip about two miles north of here.”

  “I saw you! A turboprop plane? Looked like a new crop duster?”

  He nods and laughs.

  “You landed at the old Thornhill place? That strip is still good?”

  “It’s not good, but it’s usable. I saw the sheriff’s cars from the air. There’s one parked to the east of you, another to the west, out of sight. From the strip I walked turnrows till I got within a half mile of your place. Then I went down on my hands and knees, below the cotton. I’m glad the bomb shelter wasn’t locked. They can see your front and back doors with field glasses.”

  “I don’t understand this,” says Drewe. “Who’s after you?”

  “The FBI put out a warrant for his arrest,” I explain.

  “But why?”

  “A lot of reasons,” says Miles. “All bullshit. The warrant probably says obstruction of justice.”

  “It does.”

  “You both have some explaining to do,” Drewe says.

  “Lenz called today,” I tell Miles. “He thought you’d run here. I told him he was crazy. I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “What happened when the vault opened at EROS?”

  His malicious delight shines through his fatigue. “I told you they were guarding that vault like the tomb of Christ, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you think I chose that simile?”

  “Because the time lock was set for seventy-two hours?”

  “You’re half right. What did they find after the stone was rolled away from Jesus’ tomb?”

  “Nothing?”

  Miles grins. “Nada.”

  “But you told me Jan sealed the vault when the FBI showed up with the search warrant.”

  “What did you think? She rolled a two-hundred-pound file cabinet in on a dolly? The files are on disk, man. Portable hard drive. Updated daily and then dumped to the master drive.”

  “Where’s the master drive?”

  “On the Sun workstation that sits in the file vault.”

  “Son of a bitch. She ran in there and plugged in the drive, then locked the vault?”

  “Uh-huh. And one hour later, after Agents Moe, Larry, and Curly took up station at the vault door, I downloaded every byte of information through the fiber-optic cables that run out of a discreet hole in the floor of the vault. I exported them to a computer off-site, then remotely wiped out everything on the Sun.”

  “Just like Brahma did in Dallas.”

  “I didn’t blow it up, but I definitely put that puppy into Helen Keller mode. Great minds think alike.”

  “Jesus, don’t say that.”

  “Who’s Brahma?” asks Drewe.

  “The guy who’s killing these women,” I answer. “That’s what Miles calls him. The FBI calls him UNSUB, for ‘unknown subject.’ ”

  She gives Miles a look of distaste. “You name a serial killer after a god? I guess he’s your hero or something.”

  “No. But I do admire his skill.”

  “You look wiped out,” I cut in, stating the obvious in an attempt to head off useless squabbling.

  Miles rubs both hands through his new flattop and sighs. “I’m as tired as a pair of jumper cables at a nigger funeral.”

  Drewe and I gape at each other: this slur from the most liberal white boy who ever left Mississippi. But Miles is grinning under the Treflan cap. “Just practicing my cover,” he says. “I guess being a redneck is like riding a bicycle.”

  “You were never a redneck.”

  “My dad was.”

  This easy reference to his father surprises me. “How long have you been awake?”

  “Three, four days.”

  “How did you get out of the EROS offices? Weren’t Baxter’s people all over the place?”

  “It wasn’t hard. Just before the vault opened, I switched shirts with one of my longhaired assistants. Then I went into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and a Ziploc and lopped off most of my hair. When the vault opened and the shit hit the fan, my assistant made a break for the front door, just as I’d told him to. While they chased the longhaired guy wearing black, I slipped out through Jan’s private exit, got into a service elevator and hasta la vista, baby.”

  “You’re whacked, man. You’re nuts.”

  “You want some chicken and dumplings?” Drewe asks with her usual practicality.

  Miles laughs again. “Since I haven’t had any for at least ten years, I might as well. What I really need is some coffee, though. A whole pot. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  His eyes wander toward the pantry. There are two cases standing by the door. One is an expensive briefcase, the other a large leather computer bag with multiple compartments.

  “What’s all that?” I ask.

  Drewe sloshes water into the coffeemaker.

  “The whole stinking thing,” Miles says softly. “The whole case. As much as I could get, anyway. Police reports, FBI interview transcripts, e-mail, lab findings, you name it.”

  “Don’t even tell me where you got that shit.”

  “I’v
e got to.” His eyes glaze with sudden desperation. “I need your help.”

  “To do what?”

  “To save myself.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Miles has already drunk two cups of coffee, Drewe and I one each. It took me that long to recount my experiences with the FBI, even with heavy editing. I dwelt mostly on the tragic raid in Dallas and played down Lenz’s plan of luring the killer to the Virginia safe house. Miles seems more concerned with the psychiatrist’s suspicion that he might be the killer. I admit that Lenz still suspects him, but before I can qualify my words, Drewe starts asking questions about the murder victims.

  In answer, Miles opens his briefcase on our kitchen table. Inside are neatly banded stacks of laser-printed paper covered with the hieroglyphics of command-line communications between computers. In short, Drewe and I are looking at a cornucopia of the fruits of virtuoso computer hacking.

  “I have a lot of information here,” he says, squeezing back into the narrow space between the table and the wall. “I started as soon as the deaths were confirmed. It’s not nearly everything, but what I have is color coded. Green for city police reports. Orange for crime lab findings. Blue for witness interviews. Red for general FBI stuff-”

  “You’ve been into the FBI’s computer?” I interrupt.

  “Computers, plural. Their acronym for the case is ERMURS-for EROS murders.”

  “No wonder they want to arrest you. Have you broken into their personal e-mail system?”

  “I’ve seen it. Got some printouts here. I’ve also been in the National Crime Information Center computer, and some new thing called NEMESIS. Stands for Nonlinear Evaluation/Manipulation of Evidence System. That’s the only system they have that’s really elegant, and it’s not officially on-line. The rest are crufty as hell.”

  “But why take these risks?” Drewe asks. “Can’t you just keep your head down until this is all over?”

  “No. Because Baxter and Lenz aren’t going to catch Brahma any time soon. And in the absence of real leads, the great god Momentum will cause them to cast around for the most likely suspect. In their book that’s me.”

  “But-”

  “The only way for me to get these guys off my back is to catch Brahma myself.”