Mortal Fear

  “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 online 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 multimillion-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.”

  “Let’s say a surgeon is the brains behind this,” I cut in.

  “He trolls EROS himself, but he needs a hacker to get at our master client list, plus medical information from health insurance computers, God knows what else. Then he hires muscle to do the actual killings—”

  “That explains the rapes!” cries Drewe. “It’s not the surgeon, it’s his hired thugs. Some sleazeballs are raping the women, and the surgeon doesn’t care so long as he gets his pineal glands. He’s probably glad his thugs are confusing the crime scenes!”

  Miles is nodding. “Division of labor. A surgeon could easily afford a cracker and some hired muscle.”

  “Gross income for a neurosurgeon is nearly half a million,” Drewe says. “And that’s an average.”

  “I’m definitely in the wrong business,” Miles mutters.

  “But that theory works only if Brahma’s a flake,” I point out. “If we postulate a man with a real chance of success, he needs a team of medical specialists to help with the operation.”

  “And they’d realize what he was up to,” says Drewe. “Eventually. I don’t think money would be enough motivation for medical people to take part in murder.”

  Miles laughs bitterly. “Money is always enough motivation for some people. You two have so much of it now you’ve forgotten what it’s like to really need it.”

  “Whether it’s a nut or a serious surgeon,” I say irritably, “it’s clear why you and I are suspects. You could easily be the paid hacker. You’d be guilty of murder even though you were never at a single crime scene.”

  He nods soberly.

  I shove back my chair, climb onto its wooden back, and perch there with my feet on the seat. “I’d say we’ve come up with some significant reasoning here. The question is, do we tell the FBI?”

  “Fuck no,” Miles says savagely. “They’ve got me cast for the remake of Midnight Express.”

  I look to Drewe, but she is gazing at the kitchen curtains drawn shut against prying eyes. “They know most of this already,” she says softly. “They must. If they don’t, I don’t have much faith in them.”

  “What do you think?” I ask Miles. “Do they?”

  He averts his eyes. “The groundwork is there.” “They don’t suspect there’s an unknown victim,” I press him.

  He shakes his head.

  “We’ve got to tell them about the fifty blind-draft women,” Drewe says flatly. “That’s nonnegotiable. One of them is dead or missing right now.”

  “Drewe,” Miles says carefully, “women set up blind-draft accounts precisely because their use of EROS might cause problems or even physical danger in their homes. I can’t sic the FBI on them without any warning.”

  She is clearly upset by this. “Privacy means more to you than a human life? You think those women value it over their lives?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. You just came up with this unknown-victim idea. And if we accept our own logic, she’s already dead. Right? I mean, we’re pegging her as a donor.”

  “Not necessarily dead. She could be lying on an operating table right now.”

  Miles is thinking. “What if I call Jan Krislov and tell her to order my techs to start contacting those fifty women? To verify that they’re alive and okay?”

  “Every woman with a blind-draft account,” Drewe insists.

  “That’s over five hundred women,” I tell her.

  “Closer to six,” Miles says. “It might cause a panic, but we could do it.” He pauses again, weighing the risks. “Okay. I’ll tell Jan to put four techs on it. They’ll start with the fifty women who aren’t active but are still paying their fees. Good enough?”

  Drewe bites her bottom lip.

  I feel a strange fluttering below my diaphragm. “Miles, maybe it’s time to come clean with Baxter and Lenz. You talked me out of pursuing this thing once, and the result was very bad.”

  He lets out a frustrated sigh. “Harper, the three of us are buying into a scenario we came up with off-the-cuff, and a pretty damned wild one at that. The FBI has twice the raw data we do, but they’re not buying the doctor theory yet. Because they can’t afford to. It’s their responsibility to catch this guy. We’re just three people talking. You see?”

  At my core I know this is a lie. We are not “just three people talking.” We are bright people with specialized knowledge and personal stakes in the case. Even Drewe seems to have attacked the problem with proprietary intensity.

  The blaring ring of the kitchen telephone freezes us all in place. Drewe looks to me for a sign.

  “I’m here,” I tell her. “Miles definitely isn’t.”

  She takes a deep breath, then picks up the receiver and says, “Dr. Cole.”

  She listens intently for about ten seconds, then cuts her eyes at us and smiles tightly. “Hang on,” she says, and puts her palm over the mouthpiece. “It’s Mom. It’s about Erin. This is going to be a long one. You want me to go to the bedroom phone?”

  “We’ll get out.” I spring off the chairback and land on my feet. “What about telling the FBI?”

  She gives me a searching look, and while it lasts Miles does not exist. After some mental process I cannot divine, she says, “They have the same facts we do. As long as you start checking the blind-draft women, I see no point in calling attention to ourselves tonight.”

  A sigh of relief escapes Miles’s lips.

  “But if one turns up missing,” Drewe adds, “we go straight to the FBI.”

  Miles nods, then quickly gathers his papers into his briefcase. I kiss Drewe on the cheek and lead him down the hall to my office—the domain of secrets, and of the EROS computer.

  Chapter 26

  Sitting in a half-lotus position on a stool before the EROS computer, his hands flying across the keyboard, Miles says, “I’d forgotten how quick Drewe is.”

  “You really think there’s another blind-draft woman missing?” I ask, staring over his shoulder. The cover is off the computer, and its electronic guts look very different than they did thirty minutes ago.

  “We’ll know soon,” he says.

  Typical Miles. He’s already e-mailed his techs and instructed them to begin a discreet check on the safety of all female blind-draft account holder
s; thus, predictions are pointless.

  He stares at the monitor, his hands suspended over the keys. “I can’t believe you never installed this card, man. I sent it to you two months ago.”

  He’s referring to a large rectangular circuit board designed for voice synthesis and recognition. The voice-rec /synth card is the most densely packed PC card I’ve ever seen.

  “I don’t use the voice much,” I tell him.

  “That’s because the one you have sucks. The new one has unbelievable inflection control. It really sounds human.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  He drops his hands to his sides. “Put the cover on, Bwana. You just entered the twenty-first century.”

  With a hard shove, I press the metal cover back onto the chassis. “You got a demo for it?”

  Miles shakes his head. “Call up a file. An EROS file. These cards only work properly with the EROS format.”

  I lean over his shoulder, click the mouse, and retrieve the top file in my electronic filing cabinet. The text of a typical exchange between myself and Eleanor Rigby fills the screen. Miles hits ALT-V—a key combination called a macro that simultaneously carries out several functions—and a rectangular window appears in the lower left corner of the screen.

  Using the mouse, Miles clicks on the first HARPER> prompt, drags the mouse over to VOICE ONE, and clicks again. Then he selects a frequency under the male range. He does the same with ELEANOR RIGBY> but selects a frequency in the female range. Beneath the frequency range display is a group of controls much like those on a tape recorder. Miles uses the mouse to select PLAY.

  “Your turn tonight,” says a voice not so different from mine, but without any accent. The voice came from my computer’s multimedia speakers, but it sounded as natural as a third person in the room. I squeeze Miles’s shoulder in disbelief. He just laughs.

  “I’m ready,” answers a female voice, its timbre not exactly sensual, but definitely feminine. “We are standing naked on cool black rock, volcanic rock, staring across a vast expanse of primeval ocean. An orange explosion of sunset burns itself out beneath a purple horizon, leaving us stranded beneath white points of stars. Our blood pulses in sidereal time as our eyes dilate to adapt to the newly dark world, pupils expanding to expose underused receptors, until the very glow of our skins massages the nerve pathways leading to our brains, the first touch not a touch, and yet as real as any language in this—”