Mortal Fear

  “I thought telephone switching stations had gotten practically impenetrable.”

  “Some have. But I’ll bet Mississippi’s had the fewest attempted penetrations of any state in the U.S.” He smiles. “And they definitely aren’t ready for me, Grasshopper.”

  “I’m asking for one promise, Miles.”

  “What?”

  “Drewe knows nothing about what we’re trying to do. Nothing. I don’t care what we tell her, but it’s not going to be this.”

  He holds up his hands. “You think I’m nuts?”

  “This is illegal and we both know it.”

  “Yeah. But we’ve got to do it.” Wicked blue light flashes in his eyes. “And it’s going to be the motherfucking rush of all time. Wow.”

  A surge of adrenaline pushes me over to the left front window. I have to fight the urge to peek around the blinds to see whether there are any deputies standing in the dark yard.

  “Can I ask you one thing?” Miles says. “One thing, then I shut up for good.”

  “One thing,” I say to the window blind.

  “This Erin thing. We’re talking about something in the past, right? You and her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  I turn from the window to ask how far back in time his suspicions began, but he is already hunched over the keyboard at my desk. By tomorrow morning a digital human being that backs up my “Erin” will exist in the bureaucratic agar that forms the basis of legal existence in America. Miles’s groundwork will accomplish Brahma’s initial suspension of disbelief. But far more important than a Social Security number or address will be the woman I carry in my mind and heart. A carnal phantom called Erin still wanders unbidden through my dreams, and though I am not sure how or why, I know that through me, she can haunt the ruthless killer we have christened Brahma to his grave.

  Chapter 28

  My chief fascination in the days following Miles’s appearance was listening to the baroque mating ritual between “Maxwell” and “Lilith.” From the worldly wise but bitter woman who endured a college gang bang, Lenz quickly expanded his creation into a multidimensional character worthy of a Christmas appearance on Oprah. Sometimes “Lilith” taunted “Maxwell,” other times she passively answered whatever questions he put to her, however personal. I decided Lenz must be drawing his emotional raw material from actual case histories; much of it had the outrageous ring of truth that only reality can provide, incidents that would get any decent fiction writer drummed out of his profession. Through it all, “Maxwell” probed “Lilith’s” past with lapidary precision, a twist here, a light tap there, gradually forming a picture of the “woman” who lay behind the alias.

  Miles spent most of the first day building the digital skeleton that would support my fictional “Erin.” We chose the “legal” name Cynthia Griffin and decided to place her address in Vicksburg, which lies forty miles southwest of Rain. We discussed the chance that a Mississippi address might give Brahma’s intuition a tickle, but word of mouth among my old friends had brought the number of Mississippi EROS clients to more than thirty. Miles thought that was more than enough to make one new addition quite natural.

  Once “Cynthia’s” personal information had been hacked into the proper government computers—and an EROS account opened in her name—Miles began coding away at his Trojan Horse program, consuming massive amounts of Mountain Dew and granola bars ferried by Drewe from the Yazoo City K-Mart. He rarely sat in front of his computer to do his coding. After Drewe left for work each morning, he would commandeer an easy chair in the darkened den and, fortified by junk food, sit glassy-eyed through three or four old movies on the satellite channels. His favorites seemed to be disaster movies from the nineteen-seventies, à la Airport and The Towering Inferno, melodramatic extravaganzas featuring faded Hollywood legends. Now and then he would jump up and hurry into my office, sit down before his laptop, and punch in a few keystrokes, cocking his head at odd angles and murmuring to himself.

  Drewe worked every day, but she called frequently to see how the check on the female blind-draft account holders was going. About midnight on the second night, Jan Krislov e-mailed us, saying that the fifty-two blind-draft women showing low account activity in the past months had all been verified as alive and well. So had more than three hundred of the remaining blind-draft women. This punched a gaping hole in Drewe’s theory of another missing woman, and by extension her pineal transplant theory. Or so we thought.

  When we told Drewe about Jan’s message, she was standing at my office door, about to leave for work. She looked blank for about thirty seconds; then her eyes flickered with knowledge.

  “I was so stupid,” she said. “The missing woman couldn’t be an EROS client. The EROS population isn’t large enough to allow selection of tissue-matched donors. You see? The killer could do all the surgical practice he wanted on EROS women, but when it came time to match a donor to a recipient, he had to search a much larger population.”

  “Why?” asked Miles.

  “Probability. Donor networks require pools of thousands—tens of thousands—of potential donors, so that exact matches can be found for those in need of organs or tissue. After the killer kidnapped Rosalind May—his intended recipient—he had to tissue-type her, then find a donor of the right age who was a match. The twenty-five hundred women on EROS aren’t nearly a large enough group to get a match. Actually, he would need a tissue donor registry. Like for bone marrow. Transplant networks list people who need organs, not people who want to donate them. And driver’s license computers might list organ donors, but not any of the medical information the killer needs.”

  “So where would he find a group like that?” Miles asked.

  Drewe shrugged. “A legitimate tissue donor network. Or directed donors listed with blood banks. Those are the only kinds of databases that would have the medical information he’d need.”

  While Miles pondered this, Drewe stared at me as if waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, she looked at Miles and said, “We’ve got to tell the FBI to start checking tissue donor registries.”

  He looked at me, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of contacting the FBI.

  “Can we do it anonymously?” I asked her.

  She sighed deeply, then pulled her keys from her pocket and walked away. She slammed the front door on her way out.

  At my request, Miles agreed to compose a summary of Drewe’s theory and sneak it into the Quantico computer. I suggested using an anonymous remailing service to send the message, but Miles thought the FBI could get at us through the operator if they tried hard enough.

  Later that day, a running argument developed between us as to whether Brahma was actually being taken in by Lenz, or whether he was making a fool of him. I’d begun to notice what I thought was dry humor in “Maxwell’s” conversations with “Lilith.” Most of it was double entendre so subtle as to be arguable, yet I believed it significant. Ever since Miles pointed out the “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Levon” connections, I’d felt Brahma was toying with us. Not just Lenz, but everyone who had committed the hubris of stepping up to the plate against him.

  Miles, on the other hand, thought Lenz was doing very well, considering the time pressure he was under, and pointed out that I had yet to draw Brahma into a single online conversation. To speed up this process, he carried his laptop to the easy chair in the front room and, during an encore showing of The Thomas Crown Affair on A&E, hammered out a search program based on Brahma’s most common figures of speech. He claimed it would locate Brahma online regardless of the alias he was using, and it did. However, it could not draw him into conversation with me.

  The police surveillance of our house continued, and by the third day cabin fever had set in. Miles insisted that my phones were tapped. And it wasn’t enough that he remain indoors. He demanded that I check one window on each side of the house every half hour and also that I leave the house occasionally to create the appeara
nce of normalcy. I understood the necessity, but it became a major pain to constantly jump up from my computer while he sat watching The Poseidon Adventure like some Arabian potentate.

  Yet it was tougher on him than on me. He’d promised Drewe that he would clear out at the first sign of trouble, and I knew he meant it. Like a fireman or a fighter pilot, he had to stay pumped enough to jump up from a dead sleep and race into the kitchen pantry for the trapdoor that led to the bomb shelter.

  So it was almost a divine deliverance when, at eleven p.m. on the third night, the long-awaited invitation from Brahma arrived. I’d been in the “lobby” of one of EROS’s conference areas, politely fending off not-so-polite advances from a man calling himself “Billy Pilgrim,” when a small window opened on my screen. The words inside it read:MAXWELL> Hello, Erin. I notice that your conversations have a particular type of error pattern. Are you using a voice-recognition unit?

  My heartbeat racing, I tried to think clearly. I’d debated whether or not to use the voice-recognition unit. Ultimately, I decided that being able to speak my thoughts into the computer rather than type them was worth arousing whatever suspicion Miles’s voice-rec program might cause in Brahma. Speaking as clearly as I could, I said, “Yes. How did you know?”

  On the screen appeared:ERIN> Yes. How did you know?

  There was a brief silence. Then three new lines of text appeared, and the voice I’d selected for Brahma said:MAXWELL> I’m quite familiar with such systems. You’re the first person I’ve seen using one on EROS. Where did you come by it? Quality systems are prohibitively expensive.

  Miles had given me good ammunition for this question.

  ERIN> My husband is a physician. He’s using a new system that was designed for medical dictation. A friend of his works for the company that designed it. He put a version on our computer so we could try it out. I like it. I like having my hands free.

  MAXWELL> Yes. What company does this friend work for?

  ERIN> Sorry. It’s proprietary technology, still in the testing stage. He’d go ballistic if I talked about it. Mostly because of the company’s stock price.

  MAXWELL> I see. Would you like to join me in the Blue Room?

  My heart thudded against my breastbone. After saying yes, I sent a rude kiss-off to “Billy Pilgrim,” then clicked my way into digital privacy with a man who had killed at least eight people, and probably more.

  Brahma was waiting when I arrived.

  MAXWELL> I’ve been watching you. You spurn attention as though it burns you. What are you looking for?

  I paused to compose myself. During the long days of waiting, I’d given much thought to how I would approach Brahma. In the end, I knew, I would have to fly purely on instinct. But as with any new relationship, my opening was critical.

  ERIN> Something that doesn’t exist.

  MAXWELL> What could that be?

  ERIN> A man with the soul of a woman.

  MAXWELL> There are many of those.

  ERIN> A man who has the soul of a woman but remains a man.

  MAXWELL> Ah. This is rarer. Why do you seek this?

  ERIN> I’m unfulfilled, obviously.

  MAXWELL> Man desires all things, thus he is eternally unfulfilled.

  ERIN> But woman can be fulfilled.

  MAXWELL> I speak of Man in the collective sense.

  ERIN> There is no collective sense that includes both man and woman. They are poles of existence.

  MAXWELL> You speak wisely. You have much experience?

  ERIN> Is that a nice way of asking how old I am?

  MAXWELL> Take it as you will.

  ERIN> I just passed my thirtieth birthday.

  MAXWELL> You are married?

  ERIN> Yes.

  MAXWELL> Your only marriage?

  ERIN> Yes.

  MAXWELL> You have children?

  ERIN> A son.

  MAXWELL> There are problems?

  ERIN> Not the usual sort.

  MAXWELL> You are sexually content?

  ERIN> No. I’ve lost my passion for the physical.

  MAXWELL> But you once enjoyed it?

  ERIN> I lived by it.

  The speakers fell silent. Then Maxwell resumed his questioning.

  MAXWELL> Why do you seek a man with the soul of a woman?

  ERIN> Men don’t understand me.

  MAXWELL> A common female complaint.

  ERIN> My problem is different from most. Men can’t see me as I am.

  MAXWELL> How so?

  ERIN> I have the curse for which no one feels sympathy.

  MAXWELL> You are rich.

  ERIN> I’m not speaking of that. I was speaking of beauty.

  MAXWELL> You are beautiful?

  ERIN> Yes.

  MAXWELL> Many say that here, in this faceless environment. They rub balm into their insecurities by playing at characters they are not.

  ERIN> My fantasies have nothing to do with appearance.

  MAXWELL> Then perhaps you are what you say you are.

  ERIN> You don’t believe me. You resist the idea that a physically beautiful woman has the intelligence to step outside herself long enough to analyze herself.

  MAXWELL> You assume too much. I can accept that. But it seems to me you share the problem of the wealthy woman—no one ever looks past her money.

  ERIN> It’s not the same at all.

  MAXWELL> Why not?

  ERIN> Because physically beautiful people can become rich, but most rich people can never become beautiful. Not with all the plastic surgery in the world.

  MAXWELL> I appreciate that distinction. I understand it too well.

  ERIN> Are you rich and unattractive?

  MAXWELL> You don’t use much tact, do you?

  ERIN> I don’t have time for games.

  MAXWELL> Nor do I. I am rich in material things, but I’m not at all unattractive.

  ERIN> Is that your opinion?

  MAXWELL> One long confirmed by others. But I understand your problem better than you might think.

  ERIN> How so?

  MAXWELL> I was born a genius.

  ERIN> Really.

  MAXWELL> Yes.

  ERIN> Can you prove it?

  MAXWELL> Can you prove you are beautiful?

  ERIN> I see what you mean.

  MAXWELL> Actually, I could prove my genius in this environment much easier than you could prove your beauty. But what would be the point? Anything I wrote at that level, you would not understand.

  ERIN> All right, all right, I believe you.

  MAXWELL> Would you mind telling me whether you are fair-skinned or dark?

  ERIN> I guess not. In winter I’m fair. In summer I’m brown.

  MAXWELL> Your ancestry?

  ERIN> My _ancestry_? French and English. Why?

  MAXWELL> Mixed on both sides?

  ERIN> Father Scots-English blood, mother Cajun French.

  MAXWELL> Ah. An interesting roux.

  ERIN> Interesting home life, anyway.

  MAXWELL> What appeals to you about the female soul, as you called it?

  ERIN> Women understand that the past can be left behind. Men don’t. Men are haunted by the past.

  MAXWELL> Are you speaking of one’s own past or the past of a mate?

  ERIN> Either.

  MAXWELL> Your husband does not allow you to forget your past?

  ERIN> Correct.

  MAXWELL> You had many adventures?

  ERIN> Many lovers.

  MAXWELL> From a young age?

  ERIN> Fourteen.

  MAXWELL> The first was a man or a woman?

  ERIN> A man. I’ve never felt drawn to women’s bodies, regrettably.

  MAXWELL> You enjoyed these many lovers? Or merely allowed them to take pleasure from you?

  ERIN> I learned to take my own pleasure early. And to give it. I felt no inhibition. I shocked men, made them afraid. Men fantasize about wanton women, but when they meet one, they’re paralyzed by fear.

  MAXWELL> Can you elaborate?


  ERIN> Men like easy women so long as they can mentally classify them as sluts or whores. But a highly sexual woman who is beautiful, who has her pick of males, doesn’t fit that puritanical equation. And if she has intelligence as well, she is feared, and thus hated.

  MAXWELL> Your point of view intrigues me.

  ERIN> The bitter fruit of experience.

  MAXWELL> You never found a man who gave you the understanding you needed?

  ERIN> I thought I had, once. But I was wrong.

  MAXWELL> Who was he?

  ERIN> I don’t have time to tell that story now. In fact, it’s later than I thought. I need to log off. I enjoyed our conversation. Good-bye.

  MAXWELL> Please wait. Would you answer one question before you go?

  ERIN> If it’s quick.

  MAXWELL> You said you descended from French and English blood. Also that you tan in the summer. From this I deduce that you are more dark than fair. Does the English trait show up elsewhere in your family? Very fair skin, I mean?

  Brahma’s interest in skin was starting to sound pathological. I was about to answer based on Erin’s dark complexion when something stopped me. All of Brahma’s victims but one—the Indian woman—were Caucasian.

  ERIN> What an odd question. As a matter of fact, I’m not more dark than fair. I have a sister with a peaches and cream complexion, and I’m only a shade darker. It’s just that I tan in the summer rather than burn. It’s a nice bonus.

  MAXWELL> Thank you.

  ERIN> Good-bye.

  MAXWELL> Au revoir.

  “You played that just right,” Miles said from behind me. The synthesized voices had drawn him from his throne in the den. “Make an impression, then vanish like the Cheshire cat. You should give Lenz lessons.”

  “Time will tell.”

  “Where did you get that ‘female soul’ stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to put myself inside Erin’s head. When he asked what I was looking for, that seemed right.”