Mortal Fear

  “I don’t know.” The sky to the west, toward the Delta, is nearly black with piled cloud. I have a foreboding sense of things spinning out of control, like battlefield blindness, where you know only what is happening where you stand but are dimly aware that great wheels of action are whirling in the fog around you. “Just a bad feeling,” I tell him, trying to push it all away.

  “Hey, I been there. Something I might need to know about?”

  “It’s personal.”

  He nods gamely. Mayeux isn’t happy, but he can deal with it. Maybe his drive up from New Orleans won’t turn out to be a waste after all.

  “Bad weather,” he says, raising a forefinger off the wheel to point ahead. Heat lightning splashes through the sky, giving the cloudscape the massive scale of an Ansel Adams photograph.

  I ask him why he thinks the FBI messed up the investigation.

  “Baxter and Lenz kept us from sweating you in New Orleans. We’d have played the whole thing different. Woulda been better for you and better for us. And maybe we’d have that son of a bitch by now instead of the FBI running around embarrassing themselves and everybody else by arresting the wrong fuckin’ guy.”

  I doubt this, but I don’t say so.

  “I gotta tell you, for a while I was wondering if it wasn’t Lenz himself doing those ladies. I mean, classic case, you know? Shrink does the murders for his own kinky reasons, then takes the starring role in the hunt for himself.” Mayeux laughs. “Serial killers love that kind of shit. Making fools out of cops, staying involved in the crimes long after they’re done. This guy sure hit the doctor where it hurts, didn’t he?”

  “Lenz is smart, Detective. He just lost sight of the danger. I knew a lot of guys like him in Chicago. Trading futures. One day they were bulletproof, the next somebody was padlocking their houses and seizing their bank accounts.”

  After a couple of beats, Mayeux says in a confiding tone, “I play a little in the market myself. Nickel-and-dime stuff. Never tried commodities, but I’m open to it. Got any tips for an honest cop?”

  “You sound like Columbo. The Cajun Columbo.”

  He pulls a sour face.

  “Buy mutual funds and blue chips and forget them. Anything else is a losing game for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t beat the market from where you are. You haven’t got the money or the time.”

  He nods sagely, but he’ll drop a few thousand on some half-baked brother-in-law tip before six months are up.

  “What about Turner?” he asks. “That boy’s got alibi problems.”

  “I know. But he’s not the killer.” I pause. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I know now.”

  He cuts his eyes at me again. “Okay. But look, is he queer or what? It ain’t like I care or anything, but it’d clear up my thinking, you know?”

  I wonder where Mayeux is getting his information. “I don’t know if he is or isn’t. And I don’t care. I think he’s trying to protect a married lover by keeping quiet about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders. Whether that lover is a man or a woman is anybody’s guess.”

  Mercifully Mayeux speaks no more. I watch the dark sky and wonder if Drewe is on the road home yet. She’s probably done with the delivery by now, but you can never tell with babies.

  I jump in my seat the first time thunder shakes the car. This is no empty threat, booming hollow over the fields and dying into nothing. It rattles my eardrums, buffets the reservoir of dead air at the bottom of my lungs, hammers the car like a bass drum in a gymnasium. Mayeux feels it too. He’s from New Orleans, where rain is a constant companion, but even he hunches in his seat when a big blast rocks the car. Otherwise, he remains silent, eating up the miles with a determined stare. Perhaps some of my apprehension has seeped into him.

  Suddenly there is wind against the car where there was none before. It whines at the seam of the windshield, hisses at the windows. Then the rain is upon us. Big round drops splatter on the glass like pellets from a sawed-off shotgun; then a hail of water engulfs us like enfiladed musket fire.

  “Shit!” Mayeux curses, slowing the Cadillac to forty-five.

  “Try to keep your speed up,” I urge him.

  “Hey, I’m trying.”

  I tap my fingers nervously against the dashboard.

  “This Delta’s some fuckin’ flat,” he grumbles, leaning forward and squinting into the rain. “A minute ago I was gonna say it was like the Atchafalaya Swamp without the water, but I guess we got the water now. One of God’s little jokes, yeah.”

  The Caddy crawls through the downpour, Mayeux struggling to keep his eyes on the faded white line that marks the right margin of the highway. “What kind of shoulder we got?” he asks.

  “Flat dirt. About fifteen feet. But if you go into a cotton field, we won’t be getting out until somebody comes with a winch.”

  “Great. How much farther we got?”

  “We’re about four miles out.”

  “Hey, you see that?”

  Something in Mayeux’s voice brings me erect in my seat. “What?”

  “Blue lights. Way off there, to the left.”

  “Where?”

  “Look!” he says, pointing. “That’s a blue bar making that. Mississippi Highway Patrol. Guy must be pretty gung-ho to stop speeders in this rain.”

  I narrow my eyes to slits and probe the gray wall for blue light. There. A sapphire halo pulsing far to the left. As I stare, a terrible premonition tightens my gut.

  “Fire?” I ask, praying for a yes.

  “Wrong color. That’s police lights. Lots of ’em. Looks like Mississippi Highway Patrol, or some local sheriff’s department. Where you think that is?”

  “I think it’s my house, Mike. Punch it.”

  “Hey, I’m pushing now.”

  “Floor this motherfucker!”

  The sudden acceleration presses me back into my seat. Mayeux flicks on his blue flasher, and we hurtle through the wall of rain like teenage lovers with a death wish. Even with Mayeux tempting fate, I grip the Caddy’s padded armrest and will the car to go faster. The sapphire glow quickly blossoms into a flashing ball, like a miniature mushroom cloud. What the hell could have happened? Part of me knows the answer, but I fight that knowledge with all my soul, unwilling to believe that Brahma has somehow penetrated Miles’s digital shield, that I have exposed Drewe to the white-hot flame of his insanity. We blast through Rain proper like a blue monorail, leaving a howling vacuum for a wake.

  “Slow down! Half a mile to the turn!”

  Mayeux touches the brake gently, then begins pumping it as the riot of flashing blue and red differentiates into distinct images. Squad cars, sheriff’s cruisers, rescue and highway patrol vehicles. They surround our farmhouse like a motorized posse. Mayeux turns into the drive and pulls as far forward as he can. I’m out of the car and sprinting through the rain before he even shifts into park.

  “Wait up, Cole!”

  I run for the porch, dodging between cars, stunned by the amount of light pouring from our house. Two bluewhite flashes suddenly blank out my office windows.

  “Stop!” someone shouts.

  A knot of uniformed men blocks the front door. I charge them without pausing, triggering a metallic flurry of gun slides and hammers.

  “FREEZE!”

  “This is my house!” I shout, throwing up my arms in the face of a half dozen pistol barrels. “Where’s my wife?”

  “FREEZE, ASSHOLE!”

  I finally stop in an ankle-deep puddle at the foot of the porch steps, barely able to contain my panic.

  “Anybody know this guy?” asks a Mississippi state trooper with rain sluicing off his hat brim.

  “He’s okay!” shouts Mayeux from behind. The detective skids to a stop beside me with his wallet open. “Mike Mayeux, New Orleans homicide. This guy owns the house. What’s going on?”

  “One-eighty-seven,” says the trooper. “A double.”

  “Who got it?”

&nb
sp; “Is that a murder?” I shout. “Get out of my fucking way!”

  The cops start to restrain me, but Mayeux manages to get in front and by some combination of civility and intimidation clear a path through them.

  “Drewe!” I scream wildly. “Drewe, where are you?” Nothing.

  Another group of cops blocks the door of my office.

  “Harper?” A female voice.

  I careen up the hall, leaving Mayeux behind.

  “Harper? Is that you?”

  Drewe whirls from the kitchen sink, dwarfed by uniformed men at both shoulders. Her white blouse is covered with blood, her eyes blanker than I’ve ever seen them. I run to her and grab her by the arms, hearing the uniforms say my name but ignoring them, searching her body for wounds, feeling the reassuring tightness of her biceps.

  “Are you hurt?”

  She shakes her head violently. “No. But I couldn’t . . . couldn’t do anything.”

  “What happened?” I ask, touching her bloody blouse.

  “It won’t come out,” she says, her chest heaving.

  “Drewe! What happened?”

  Suddenly her face crumples, as if the supporting structures beneath have simply melted away. “Erin’s dead,” she whispers.

  I blink. “No. I just left her at . . .” The words die in my throat as one of the men beside her nods.

  “S-somebody,” she stutters. “Horrible . . . I was too late . . . couldn’t do anything.”

  An image of Patrick Graham flashes in my brain.

  “Mr. Cole,” says one of the uniforms, whom I finally recognize as Sheriff Buckner from Yazoo City. “We need to get your wife calmed down. She gave a statement already, but she can’t seem to stop shaking and she won’t let the paramedics near her.”

  “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. B
uckner 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 Bucking-ham 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 whether 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.