Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “Where have you been?” Drewe asks suddenly. “Harper, did you go see her like I asked you?”

  “Yes! She was fine when I left her. The police arrested me afterward! They took me back to Jackson!”

  As Drewe shakes her head, new panic seizes my heart. “Where’s Holly? Nothing happened to Holly!”

  “Mama’s,” she murmurs. “Erin dropped her off at Mama’s.”

  “Dropped her off? How do you know?”

  “First thing I thought of… called. I didn’t tell her about Erin, though. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t!”

  I pull her to my chest and wrap my arms around her.

  “What exactly went down here?” asks an authoritative voice from behind me. “Detective Mike Mayeux, New Orleans homicide.”

  “We’re not sure, mister,” growls Sheriff Buckner. “Got two dead women in an office room up front.”

  “Erin died here?” I gasp, trying to mesh my memory of our confrontation in Jackson with what Buckner is saying.

  “Where did you think she died?” he asks.

  “I saw her in Jackson this afternoon. I just assumed-”

  He stares at me with unveiled suspicion. Then he turns to Mayeux and says, “One deceased is Mrs. Cole’s sister. The other’s a Jane Doe. Foreigner, by the look of her.”

  A wave of unreasoning fear shunts through me. “What kind of foreigner?”

  “Who knows? Real dark woman. Asian, maybe. Indian. They all look the same, don’t they?”

  The information is coming too fast for me to absorb it. One thought dominates my mind: Get Drewe out of here. “Are you finished with my wife, Sheriff?”

  “For the moment,” he says slowly.

  “I want to take her into our bedroom, get her away from all this.”

  “Fine. But I want you to take a look at that foreign woman. You might recognize her.”

  “Right now?”

  “Next few minutes, anyhow. Before they load her out.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “I put in a call to the Memphis hotel where Dr. Anderson’s staying, but he was out. I left a message for him to call here, or my office if he can’t reach here.”

  The mention of Bob Anderson hits me like a belly punch. “Who else?”

  “As of now, nobody. Your wife said not to tell anybody. But this is a real small town, son. You know that. You or your wife better call Margaret Anderson before she hears it from somebody else. There’s a husband too, right? In Jackson?”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  “They been having any marital problems?”

  Drewe suddenly goes stiff, as if the possibility of Patrick being the killer has just occurred to her. I squeeze her reassuringly. “He’s not a killer, Sheriff. Please give me a few minutes with my wife. Then I’ll answer all your questions.”

  I push past Mayeux and a couple of strangers and shepherd Drewe into our bedroom. Turning on only the bathroom light, I sit her gently on the bed and kneel before her in the shadows. Her eyes are unfocused. I have never seen anything affect her like this. In our family, Drewe is famous for nerves of steel. Now she’s a rag doll.

  “Drewe? Honey?”

  No response.

  I have a thousand questions, but none can be asked without forcing her to relive whatever horror she just endured. “Can you hear me, Drewe?”

  Her face remains impassive. Taking advantage of her near catatonia, I quickly strip off the bloodstained blouse and toss it into a corner. She doesn’t resist. I lay her back on the bed and remove her shoes and khakis, then pull a crocheted comforter off a rocker and drape it carefully over her.

  “Erin!” she cries suddenly.

  Instantly Buckner is inside the bedroom, gun in hand. I wave him out angrily. “I’m right here,” I tell her, laying my hand on her cold forehead. “It’s Harper. Everything’s okay. I’m going to take care of everything.”

  After about a minute, I rise and pad into the bathroom to scan the contents of her medicine cabinet.

  Nothing.

  Opening the hall door a crack, I catch Mayeux’s eye as he talks with Buckner in the hall. He moves quickly to me.

  “There should be a black medical bag somewhere,” I tell him. “My wife uses it to stitch up local kids, stuff like that. Check the hall closet.”

  “It’s evidence,” he replies. “She apparently tried to resuscitate her sister.”

  Christ, I think, shutting out another bloody rush of images. “Just get me the bag, Mike. All I need is one bottle and a syringe.”

  His eyes narrow. “What you gonna do? You ain’t no doctor, are you?”

  “My father was. Look, I’ve done everything from shooting X rays to stitching people up. Just get me the bag!”

  Mayeux speaks quietly to Buckner, who looks at me, then nods. Satisfied, I go back into the bedroom and kneel beside Drewe. She is still shivering beneath the comforter, her eyes wide and glassy.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m here. It’s okay. Don’t think … don’t think. I’m going to make everything all right. Just get warm… warm.”

  A crack of light falls across the bed.

  “Here you go,” whispers Mayeux.

  I quickly scan the contents of the bag and select a vial of Vistaril and a 2.5-cc syringe. I hate to shoot her, but I doubt I could make Drewe swallow pills, and pills might not even dent the psychological trauma she’s sustained.

  Mayeux watches as I load 2 cc’s of Vistaril into the syringe, invert it, thump the barrel, and nudge the plunger to evacuate the air bubbles. If Drewe were fully aware, she would never allow this, but she doesn’t even flinch when I slip the needle into the muscle of her arm and empty the contents of the syringe. The crack of light disappears from the bed.

  With Drewe held tight in my arms, I murmur incessantly. Half of what I say makes no sense. It’s the same maternal mantra I’ve heard Erin use when she’s trying to put Holly to sleep. Constant reassurance, the tone more important than the words, an orally generated security blanket that lulls the senses almost as effectively as narcotics.

  At last she is under, her breathing deep and sonorous. Tucking the comforter under her bare feet, I move to the door and step quickly outside. Buckner and Mayeux are waiting.

  “You ready?” asks the sheriff.

  This is my first good look at Buckner. He’s a big, stolid man of fifty, who wears a white shirt and brown tie to set him apart from his deputies. By reputation he is tough and honest, though not necessarily smart.

  “I want you to put someone by this door,” I tell him. “In case my wife wakes up.”

  He snaps his fingers and a deputy scrambles into the hall. It’s Billy, who manned the stakeout at the highway curve last week. He listens to Buckner, then takes up his post before the bedroom door like a guard at Buckingham Palace.

  “Real sorry, Harp,” he says. “I’ll holler if she wakes up.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Buckner says, watching me closely.

  I follow him up the hall with Mayeux at my heels. The sheriff pauses before my office door and turns to me. I hear the voices of men on the porch. Someone laughs, then cuts it off.

  “Ever see anything like this before?” Buckner asks.

  “I worked in an emergency room one summer.”

  “Good.”

  “How bad is it?”

  Mayeux takes my arm from behind, squeezes it, and says, “Hang tough, cher. It ain’t good.”

  And Sheriff Buckner opens the door to hell.

  CHAPTER 38

  The instant Buckner opened the door I saw blood. You couldn’t enter the room without walking through it. Not unless you used a window, which I saw evidence technicians doing. From the doorway to about five feet into the room the floor was a sticky puddle, with five or six pairs of shoeprints tracked through it.

  “Your wife’s,” Buckner said, pointing to the smallest prints. “Couple of deputies and fire department people walked through here, trying to see wheth
er anything could be done, but they were too late.”

  There was more blood deeper in the office, splashed high on the walls, but before I could focus on it I saw the “foreign” woman Buckner had talked about. She was lying on her side about six feet inside the door, facing away from me. A zippered black body bag lay unrolled at her feet. A gleaming sword blade protruded from her back. Walking forward, I saw that it had been stuck through her abdomen. With horror I recognized the brass hilt of the Civil War sword that usually hung on my wall beside my far window. The dead woman wore a yellow sari, but one of her arms was exposed. It had been slashed several times, to the bone.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You know her?” asked Buckner.

  Kali’s face was beautiful even in death. A perfect oval, with strong planes and sculpted ridges covered by nutmeg skin. Her eyes were open, the sclera like old ivory framing fixed onyx irises. There were lines in the skin at the corners of her eyes and lips, some wrinkles gathered at her throat, but few other signs of age. As I studied her face, I noticed something small and bright against the skin just below the jawline. I started to crouch and look, then realized that I was looking at the feathers of a tranquilizer dart.

  “Well?” grunted Buckner.

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  “Ever talk to her on EROS?” asked Mayeux.

  “How would I know that?”

  “Take a look at the rest,” said Buckner.

  “You don’t have to,” Mayeux said. “Your wife ID’ed the other body.”

  I moved forward anyway, propelled by something deeper than thought. The center of the room was a circus of small red footprints, as though a dance had been held for bleeding women. The walls and everything hanging on them were spattered with blood. Flung drops on a framed print. A large splash near the baseboard. A fine spray across the faces of two guitars.

  “Where is she?”

  “Behind the headboard of the bed,” Buckner said.

  I took the required steps and stopped near the head of my twin bed. There, propped low against the wall, sat Erin’s nude body. If her eyes had been open, I probably could not have stood to look, so heavily did the responsibility for her death crash down upon me in that moment. Her dark hair hung mercifully over her breasts, but her legs were splayed grotesquely apart, as though she were a mannequin laid out for an anatomy lesson. I wanted to shout at Buckner to cover up her nakedness, but something caught my attention and held it with paralyzing power.

  Cut into Erin’s tanned abdomen, just above her pubic hair, was a vertical incision about three inches long. There was very little blood, just enough to define the wound. “Is that what killed her?”

  “No,” said Buckner from just behind me. “She’s got a big knife wound in her back, above her kidneys. Probably hit the heart. See the blood?”

  Then I did see. Erin was propped in a black pool of blood. I hadn’t noticed because the headboard made a shadow there. As I stared, one question filled my mind. “Does she have any head wounds?”

  “No,” Mayeux answered. “I checked.”

  I looked back at him. Both of us were asking the same silent question. Why not?

  “We found the murder weapon,” said Buckner. “Under the bed. It’s some kind of curved dagger. Looks like a movie prop.”

  For the Thugs, murder was a holy sacrament…. I gazed around the room, looking at the overturned furniture and scattered papers and drying blood, trying to fathom what had happened, what could possibly have brought Erin here so soon after our confrontation at her house.

  “Best we can figure,” Buckner said, “is one or more persons surprised your sister-in-law here in the house. She may have been in this room, she may not. Maybe she fled here. Your telephone lines were cut….”

  Maybe she fled here-

  “… got a deputy out back fixing them up for you. He’s handy with that stuff. Take it easy, Detective, he’s saving the cut ends for the crime-lab boys. Anyway, I’d say Mrs. Graham did something very unexpected in here. She snatched that sword off the wall-that is your sword, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she defended her life as best she could. She did a pretty good job of it, too. She hit that foreign woman at least five times on the arms, then ran her through like a pig on a spit. Of course by doing that she lost her weapon. At that point, I figure a second assailant got her.”

  “What makes you think there was another person here?”

  “Footprints. We found a pair of size-nine Reeboks that didn’t match the shoes of anybody working the scene.”

  Brahma wears Reeboks? “Oh.”

  “Found the actual shoes right in the middle of the floor. The perp obviously knew we could track him that way, so he walked through the puddle at the door, then tossed the shoes back in. He’s running barefoot now. That’s tough going in fields and woods, especially at night.”

  “How do you know he didn’t take a pair of shoes from my closet and put them on in the hall?”

  Buckner stared blankly at me for a moment. Then anger clouded his eyes. “Would you know if a pair was missing?”

  “Let me look.”

  One glance into the closet told me a pair of Nikes were gone. “Air Jordans. White with blue trim.”

  “Shit,” Buckner muttered, writing on a pad he produced from his khaki shirt pocket. “What size?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Well, that should slow him down a little.”

  Feeling a strangely protective urge, I moved back toward Erin’s body.

  “Your buddy Turner wear a nine?” Buckner asked sharply.

  “I don’t know what size he wears. But bigger than a nine. He’s skinny, but he’s well over six feet. Probably a twelve.”

  “What I can’t figure,” said Buckner, “is why one of the perps didn’t just shoot Mrs. Graham.”

  “They shot her with the dart gun,” Mayeux said. “In the shoulder,” he added, looking at me.

  “I meant a real gun.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have one.”

  Buckner shook his head. “That’s a pretty risky way to break into a house. Especially in Mississippi.”

  “I told you they’re not from Mississippi,” Mayeux said.

  Buckner gave him a scowl.

  I said, “You do know this guy has been using a private plane to get to the crime scenes? And there’s an old crop dusting strip about two miles west of this house.”

  “Deputies already found it,” Buckner said. “Tracks in the mud. Somebody used it tonight.”

  “Mud? How long has it been raining here?”

  “Sixty to eighty minutes. That plane probably took off less than an hour ago.”

  Good God,I thought, realizing how close Drewe had come to dying with her sister.

  “Something else,” said Buckner. “One of my men thinks the killer might have been wounded. Based on the amount of blood and the spatter patterns. Makes sense to me, with knives and swords flailing around.”

  “He might be a hemophiliac.”

  Buckner’s eyes came alive like a bird dog’s. “A what?”

  “A bleeder. He might be a bleeder.”

  “How in hell would you know that?”

  I thought of telling Buckner the truth, but that would probably put me in a jail cell. “Something I overheard an FBI agent say in Washington.”

  “I knew them sonsabitches was holding out on us!” Buckner said furiously. “I’m gonna burn some federal ass over this.” His right cheek twitched. “So maybe this asshole’s hurt bad enough to crash his plane?”

  “Harper,” Mayeux said gently. “I can’t understand why this dark woman caught a tranquilizer dart like your sister-in-law did. You got any ideas on that?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Do I need to call a lawyer?”

  Buckner turned on me then. “Son, you might need to call a bodyguard when Bob Anderson finds out what happened to his little girl.” And
with that he marched out of the room, straight through the blood at the door.

  I covered my eyes with one hand. “What the hell am I going to tell her father?” I mumbled. “Her mother? Her husband?”

  Mayeux pushed me down onto the bed and sat beside me. “I’ve done it a hundred times. And it ain’t ever easy. This’ll be worse, ’cause it’s family.”

  “It’s not that. You realize what happened here? I killed her, Mike. I killed her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Miles Turner and I sat in this room for three days straight and tried our damnedest to stop that son of a bitch on our own. Only it didn’t work out the way we expected.”

  “Holy Mary. That’s where you got that hemophilia stuff? You been talking to this freak on the computer?”

  “Hell, yes. So has Dr. Lenz. That’s how his wife got killed. But Miles… he told me there was no way Brahma could trace-”

  “Brahma? Who’s that?”

  “That’s what we call the killer. Miles swore he’d rigged a way to keep him from tracing our location. Something at the phone company switching station-”

  “Slow down, now.”

  “No! No… something’s wrong. There weren’t any typos in any of his messages to me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember the meeting in New Orleans? I told you the killer never makes any typographical errors. His communications are always perfect, and fast. But just before each murder, he makes as many mistakes as anybody else. Miles said he had a voice-recognition unit at his home base, but when he traveled it wouldn’t function reliably, so he didn’t use it. Just a notebook computer and a cellular phone like everybody else. That’s how we could predict when he was moving. His typos would skyrocket. But they didn’t! Something’s wrong, Mike.”

  “How long since you last talked to the guy? This Brahma?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. He could have flown here from anywhere since yesterday. As long as he didn’t contact you, you’d never have a chance to see any typos.”

  The simplicity of Brahma’s tactic dazed me. “Goddamn it! You’re right!”