Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  Miles drums his long fingers on the table and scans a new sheet of paper. “Possibilities range from eating it to burning it to selling it to Asians who render certain hormones from it.”

  Drewe stops again. “Melatonin.”

  “That’s right,” says Miles.

  “Do you know what melatonin does?”

  “It regulates the sleep cycle. There’s apparently a craze right now where people use it as a natural sleeping pill. Some think it’s a magic anti-aging pill. I know a few computer people who take it, along with a hundred other vitamins and herbs.”

  Drewe finally comes to the table and takes a seat. “After Harper got back from New Orleans,” she says, “he told me about the pineals being taken. The next day, I punched a few queries into the Medline computer at University Hospital. It told me more than I knew before, but not a lot. Just enough to lead me in the right direction. There’s a neurobiologist on staff at University; he hasn’t been there long, but he’s good. You should have seen him come to life when I asked about the pineal gland. He was still jabbering when I left forty-five minutes later.

  “Melatonin is hot right now because research teams in different parts of the world have recently come up with some startling new findings on it. But before I tell you what they’re doing, I’m going to tell you why these women are being killed.”

  Miles stares at Drewe with the wonder of a kid watching a magic show.

  “Let me ask one question first,” she says. “What were the ages of each of the victims?”

  Miles’s eidetic memory spits out the digits like bingo numbers. “26, 23, 24, 25, 26, 25, 47.”

  “Is that in order? By date of death?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old is the kidnapped woman? Rosalind whatever?”

  “Fifty.”

  Drewe smiles. “There it is. Someone is trying to transplant pineal glands between human beings.”

  “What?”Miles cries.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “To add fifteen to twenty vital years to the human life span. Perhaps ultimately to his own life.”

  Miles and I are silent.

  “According to the neurobiologist,” Drewe says, “foreign researchers working on the pineal began by focusing on melatonin as a dietary supplement, just the way people are taking it now. They found that mice ingesting a regular regimen of the hormone were not only healthier but also lived longer than the control mice. This prompted them to try a more radical approach. They had micro-surgeons transplant pineal glands between mice-the pineals of young mice into old mice and vice versa. The results were astounding. Far more dramatic than oral dosages. The coats of the old mice regained their luster, the animals regained their sexual appetite and ability, T-cell counts went up, certain tumors disappeared, and a dozen other results, all positive.”

  “And the young mice?” Miles asks.

  “They immediately began to age rapidly. But the most fascinating thing is that the old mice with transplanted pineals maintained their reinvigorated state almost up to the point of death. To put it simply, they never got old. They just died.”

  The kitchen is so quiet that the cheeep of crickets outside sounds like a roar.

  “If that were true,” I say finally, “American pharmaceutical companies would be researching melatonin twenty-four hours a day.”

  “How do you know they’re not? They may be duplicating these experiments right now. It just might be that a gland thought vestigial until 1963 is the engine that controls the human aging process. The number of people taking melatonin nationwide is staggering. It’s also frightening, because no one knows what its effects are over time. The pineal gland basically rules the endocrine system, Harper. It controls sexual development by regulating other hormones. It affects body temperature, kidney function, immunity. It controls hibernation in mammals, migration in birds, it changes skin color in chameleons. All this was new to me. When the neurobiologist started asking why I was so interested, I made excuses and got out of there. But by then it was clear to me.”

  Miles is tapping his fingertips together. “You’re saying the age disparity between the first six victims and Karin Wheat is explained by the fact that the killer was taking-”

  “Harvesting,” Drewe corrects him.

  “ Harvestingthe pineal glands of young women for transplant? You’re saying he put these first few glands in the freezer until he got ready to start kidnapping older women to test his theory on?”

  She shakes her head. “I think the first murders were part of a training program. Transplantation of a human pineal has never been tried. The pineal gland has the highest blood flow by weight of any organ other than the kidneys. A transplant would be fantastically difficult, probably impossible. Lots of microvascular stuff, severing and reattaching minute blood vessels. We’re talking groundbreaking neurosurgery. I think whoever’s doing this knew he would need practice in the vasculature surrounding a pineal gland-probably a pineal as close to the living state as he could get it.”

  “So according to your theory,” says Miles, “just prior to the murder of Karin Wheat, this mad doctor decided he was ready to make a transplant attempt?”

  “Karin Wheat is the flaw in my reasoning,” Drewe says quickly. “To make a transplant attempt, the surgeon would obviously need his recipient alive in an operating room, not dead in New Orleans. But I still think the last young woman killed prior to Wheat was meant to be a transplant donor. What was the elapsed time between her death and Karin Wheat’s murder?”

  “Six weeks,” I reply.

  She sighs in frustration. “That’s too long. No way a gland would remain viable that long.”

  “Oh no,” I nearly moan.

  “What?” Miles asks.

  “Brahma’s primary topic of conversation with Karin Wheat was immortality. That was the subject of her last novel. They both seemed obsessed with it.”

  “Score one for my theory,” says Drewe.

  “But he didn’t kidnap Karin Wheat,” Miles reminds her. “He murdered her.”

  “But he did kidnap Rosalind May,” she counters. “And May was almost the same age as Wheat, right? Fifty is definitely the downhill side of the hormonal roller coaster. Perfect candidate for what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe the killer wanted to kidnap Wheat,” I suggest. “But something went wrong.”

  “Maybe,” Miles allows. “She was the only victim who died with a drug in her system. Ketamine. It’s an animal tranquilizer.”

  “Your tech called me two nights ago. Baxter said May had been missing for two days. That means she was kidnapped-”

  “The night after Wheat was murdered.”

  I nod. “They wanted to kidnap Wheat, somehow bungled it, and decided to go for May as a substitute.”

  “A preplanned backup,” Miles suggests.

  “But what went wrong with the Wheat scenario? Why kill her?”

  Drewe slaps the tabletop, stunning us both. “There’s another victim,” she says.

  “What?”Miles asks.

  “There has to be. Wheat was the intended transplant recipient. Something went wrong, so they took Rosalind May the next night. But who’s the donor? The last murder of a young girl-that we know about-was six weeks before Wheat’s death. That’s too long for a harvested pineal to remain medically viable. That means another young woman was kidnapped in the interval, or is about to be. She’s the donor.”

  “My God,” I whisper, starting to believe for the first time.

  Drewe looks at me. “How long does it take you to find out an EROS woman is dead or missing?”

  “Weeks, usually. I only found out about Karin so fast because she was a celebrity.”

  “What about Rosalind May? She was only taken days ago.”

  “It’s complicated, but it comes down to coincidence. She was a blind-draft account holder who hadn’t been active for a while but was still paying her fees. When her account went to zero, one of Miles’s techs started poking around. A we
ek ago, her account went active again. It looks like she was talking to Brahma right up until the second he took her.”

  “My God. Are there more accounts like that?”

  “About fifty.”

  Drewe goes still. “The donor is one of those fifty. Only her account hasn’t dropped to zero yet, so nobody but the killer knows she’s part of this. Both she and May could be lying on an operating table right now, waiting for-”

  “Wait a minute,” says Miles, holding up his hands. “We’re going off the deep end here. If your surgeon is a he-like almost all serial killers-and he wants to prolong his own life, wouldn’t he be kidnapping men?”

  “Sex doesn’t matter in organ transplants.”

  “But why is he raping them, for God’s sake? After they’re dead, no less? According to your theory, this surgeon would be motivated by a semblance of rationality. Is raping corpses the act of a rational man? On EROS I once saw a quote about necrophilia taken from a psychiatric textbook. ‘In necrophilia, the diagnosis of psychosis is considered justified in all cases.’ I laughed about that for two days. Talk about understatement. I’m no missionary, but bonking corpses is definitely off the reservation.”

  “I can’t explain that part of it,” Drewe confesses. “But I stand by my theory. And I’ll tell you something else. One glance at those pictures you flashed tells me these murders weren’t committed for purely sexual reasons.”

  “Why?”

  “Every one of those women looked different from the others. Different hair, complexion, bone structure, and enough difference in cosmetics show different personalities. Men are visually motivated. The only connection between those girls was that they were young. And Karin Wheat and Rosalind May weren’t.”

  Miles flattens his hands on his papers. “Okay, let’s look at your surgeon for a minute. If he intended to try this transplant, wouldn’t he need the victim’s blood type, tissue type, things like that?”

  “I assume so,” Drewe says, “but I don’t know. I’m an obstetrician. I know virtually nothing about transplantation. There are very good antirejection agents now.”

  “How would he do it? He’s got to remove a gland from the center of the brain, then put the new one right back in that spot? Or could it go somewhere else?”

  “I would say reattachment in situ is impossible. Damaged central nervous system tissue will not grow-that’s axiomatic. The pineal is attached to a stalk through which all kinds of chemicals flow. Once you sever that stalk, it’s over. Maybe he could park it in a kidney or something.”

  “A kidney?” I ask.

  “In the early mouse transplants, the surgeons placed the new pineal inside the thymus, which is behind the sternum. They did that because both glands were connected to the same nerve center in the brain. And the transplanted gland functioned. But in the later mouse transplants, the new pineals were put right into the brain after the old glands were removed. How, I don’t know. And I don’t see how you could do that with humans.”

  “How long would an operation like this take?” Miles asks.

  Drewe opens her hands. “Removing a pituitary tumor takes two or three hours. But that’s simply an excision of tumor tissue. This would take much longer.”

  “But you know for a fact that it worked on mice?”

  “Yes. But you see the difference, don’t you? The doctors working on mice were studying only the aging process. Who knows how much brain function they destroyed in the process of transplanting the pineals?”

  A horrifying thought hits me. “Who’s to say Brahma didn’t take the pineals from those first victims and transplant them into living recipients? There’s no reason to think we know about all his victims. He could be taking women from other on-line services. He could be taking homeless women off the street.”

  “Shit,” mutters Miles.

  “And if he is, he might not care any more than those mouse doctors about what mental functions he destroyed.”

  “Oh God,” Drewe whispers. “God.”

  “Maybe Rosalind May is alive,” Miles says, getting to his feet. “How many people would it take to do what you’re talking about? Bare minimum. Double up any functions that allow it.”

  “Mmm… five. Two surgeons, two nurses, and an anesthetist.”

  “That sounds high,” I tell her. “Think about battlefield surgery. The Civil War. Doctors have performed operations with almost nonexistent resources when they had no alternative.”

  “Okay, ditch one nurse. But this isn’t some macho deal where they do without sedative and cut with a kitchen knife and someone calls it a miracle because they got muddy doing it. You’re talking about a transplant. A glandular transplant at the core of the brain. It has never been done. If anything, it would take more hands than usual. Plus a state-of-the-art operating room. You’d need an operating microscope, a C-arm fluoroscope, all kinds of stuff. It might take surgeons working in shifts. Some neurosurgical operations take more than twelve hours.”

  “So even if he is a surgeon,” Miles says, “he needs serious help. Trained people. We’re talking a lot of money here. The ultimate object might even be money.”

  I start to argue, but he holds up his hand. “I agree that Drewe’s estimate of five is high. We’re talking about someone who has access to state-of-the-art voice-recognition technology.” Miles quickly explains to Drewe the theory behind Strobekker’s zero typographical error rate. “So who’s to say he doesn’t have access to computer-assisted robotic surgery, or whatever else he needs? I’ve seen some prototype medical equipment that’s unbelievable. I mean, we don’t know who we’re dealing with. It could be the chief of neurosurgery at a major medical school.”

  “No way,” Drewe objects.

  “Where’s the best neurosurgery department in the world?” I ask.

  “Columbia,” she replies without hesitation.

  “Where else is good?”

  “Not the places you’d think. The University of Washington, Michigan, the Barrow Institute in Arizona. But Columbia turns out the majority of academic neurosurgeons in the U.S.”

  “I’m getting something from this,” Miles says.

  “What? Columbia?”

  “I don’t know. It might come to me in a second. Might take ten years. This is where the brain is truly inferior to the computer. I’ve lost a file in my own head, and I can’t retrieve it no matter how hard I try.”

  Memories of Lenz’s verbal primer on the psychology of serial killers flash through my mind. “You really think the motive could just be money?”

  “ Just money?” Miles barks. “Man, you must be even richer than I thought. My only question is how Brahma could ever make money off the procedure. Even if he succeeded at the transplant, he’d be guilty of murder.”

  “True,” says Drewe. “But if it worked, legitimate surgeons might begin working on the procedure.”

  “How?”

  “Same as any transplant. Pineals could be harvested from recently deceased persons. Your Brahma can’t access legitimate donor networks because his research is illegal. That’s why he has to kidnap or kill to get donors. But if pineal transplants were proven to counter the aging process, the demand for the procedure would be unimaginable.”

  “But personally he’d never make a dime,” I point out.

  “He’d be famous, though,” says Miles. “And with the current legal climate, he might just get off and do a multi-million-dollar book deal.”

  “Money and fame,” murmurs Drewe. “The twin gods of our society. Pretty strong motivation for the right person.”

  “I just don’t buy it,” I insist.

  “Well, obviously there’s the metaphysical side,” says Miles. “I mean, whoever pulled this off would be accomplishing what no one in history ever has. If you forget morality, his quest is heroic. Even noble.”

  “Noble!”

  “Hell, yes! Melvillian in scope. Captain Ahab with a scalpel. Mary Shelley unbound. One of his aliases is Prometheus, remember? I’ll tell you
something else. The three of us are under thirty-five. But one day we’re going to look down at parchment skin, shriveled breasts, limp dicks, and swollen joints that creak like ratchets when we try to move. And on that day I think we’ll understand the fountain-of-youth motive much better than we do now.”

  Drewe wrinkles her nose. “I think you’re crude but also right. That tells us that the killer must be at least… what?”

  “Forty-five,” says Miles.

  “That’s the upper range limit for a serial killer,” I tell them. “And you’re using it as a lower limit. At least that’s what I got from my research.”

  “If we go with Drewe’s theory,” says Miles, “I don’t think Brahma is a serial killer, except by after-the-fact definition. He’s a doctor, period. A scientist. Lumping him in with Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy is like grouping Denton Cooley with Doc Adams from Gunsmoke.”

  “Forty-five sounds good,” Drewe agrees. “Surgery is an acquired skill. Even gifted cutters need to be tempered.”

  In that instant my mind skips off track, giving me a new perspective. “We’re missing the forest!” I declare, startling both of them. “If Drewe could find out all this about the pineal gland, surely the FBI has as well?”

  She looks put out at my devaluation of her detective work. “What do your papers say?” she asks Miles.

  “As of last night, they weren’t giving more weight to doctors than to any other group. That may have changed after Wheat’s head was autopsied.”

  “I doubt it,” I tell them. “Do you know why?”

  My oracles are silent.

  “We’ve created a single suspect brilliant enough to actually pull off this transplant thing. But that’s flawed logic. It isn’t necessary that he be capable of it, or that it even be possible. You see? All that’s necessary is that he know about the pineal research and that he believe he’s capable of doing a transplant. That’s what lets in the psychotic taxidermists and dentists and all the rest.”

  “But his computer skill proves he’s brilliant,” argues Miles.

  “Brilliant with computers,” says Drewe. “Not necessarily medicine.”