Mortal Fear

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— tensof 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 on-line 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 on-line 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 appearance 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.”

“It was. Perfect.”

Miles picked up the printouts and scanned them. “What’s this? You’re ripping off hair color ads now?” In a terrible French accent he cooed, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

“Think about Erin. One thing overrides everything else. Her beauty. It’s the central fact of her life. It shaped her whole character. But to her—inside—it must be nothing, you know? I mean, nothing and yet everything. At the same time. Just like you being smart.”

Miles ran a hand over his flattop. “I was right about one thing, anyway.”

“What?”

“You can do this. You’ve got him going.”

“One conversation is nothing, and you know it.”

“Oh, it’s something. He likes you.”

“You mean he likes Erin.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “If you say so.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can think what you want, but Erin Anderson—I mean Graham—couldn’t have written that conversation if her life depended on it. I mean, she might feel those things, but she could never express them. Just like you said. She couldn’t step outside herself and analyze her own feelings.”

“You don’t know her that well, Miles. She’s a lot brighter than anyone ever gave her credit for.”

“I know her better than you think.”

“What does that mean?”

He put down the printouts and looked away. “Nothing. I’m talking out of my ass.”

I grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t try to crawfish on that line. You said you saw her in New York. Is this something to do with that?”

He studied the floor for several moments. Then he looked up, his blue eyes flat with defiance. “Look, I fucked her, okay?”

My train of thought momentarily derailed. I knew Erin had been promiscuous, but this was a shock. “When was this? In New York?”

“Yeah. Let go of my arm.”

He tried to pull away, but I squeezed tighter, at the same time recalling what Lenz said about Miles battering some guy outside a gay bar with martial arts. But the rigidity went out of him, and he broke eye contact again.

“It was just one time, okay? Erin showed up at this party I was at in the Village. She was with this singer, a real asshole. She was high, but he was almost comatose. She said hello to me, then walked away. About an hour later she came back and asked if I could give her a ride. She didn’t want to go back to their hotel. We ended up at my place.”

“And?”

“And what, man? You want gory details?”

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath, then blew it out in one hard rush. “We talked for a long time. She told me she’d always thought I was gay.”

I was sorry I’d asked the question, but too late. Miles was reliving the moment.

“If anyone else from home had suggested that, I’d have flipped out, brained them. But not her. She was so frank about it. She wasn’t judgmental at all, just interested. We talked about it for a while, and then... she made love to me. It was unbelievable. Harper, she was everything I’d ever longed for in a woman and had never found.”

“Miles—”

“No, let me finish. I think... she sensed the pain I was in at that time, and she was trying to heal me. Isn’t that funny? Because she was twice as screwed up as I was. Her whole life has been a tragedy, if you ask me. But that was her nature, I could tell. She was whatever people needed. As if through her, they could move to some better place. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“God knows what kind of degrading crap she put up with from assholes like that singer.”

“And she just left you after that?”

“The next morning she woke up looking like an angel that had crash-landed in my apartment by mistake. She called a cab, kissed me on the forehead, and disappeared from my life forever.”

I shook my head in wonder.

“That’s why I knew that female soul stuff was right on. That’s her, man. That’s what she needs.”

“She told you that?”

“Not in those words. Like I said, she was... I don’t know, emotionally farsighted, maybe. She could see other people’s problems clearly but couldn’t focus on her own.”

“That’s her, all right.”

He smiled with compassion. “I won’t ask where you got your insights.”

“It was different with us, but not too different. It’s like a dream sequence in the middle of my life.”

“And it never goes away.”

“Not completely, no.”

“That’s why you picked her, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because she’s haunting. Tragic. She has this unresolvable tension. She pulls men like a force of gravity.”

After this strange moment of communion, Miles picked up the transcripts and shuffled through them. “Printer’s low on toner,” he said, holding up a sheet with letters so faint I could barely read them. “Got another cartridge?”

“No.”

“We can take the cartridge from the printer on your Gateway. Good thing they’re both LaserJets.”

“We don’t have to,” I told him, glad to be able to hide my awkwardness in a mechanical task. I walked to a shelf and took down a tall white plastic bottle.

“What’s that?” he asked. “Toner?”

“Yep.”

“You refill your own cartridges?”

“Out here in the boonies, it’s the only way to fly.”

“Isn’t it a pain?”

I shook my head. With Miles staring in rapt attention, I removed and partially disassembled the wedge-shaped toner cartridge from the Hewlett-Packard printer with a tool called a screw-starter. Then, so as not to end up looking like a coal miner after a cave-in, I very carefully removed the plug from the toner reservoir and refilled the empty space with the ultrafine black powder that constitutes the “ink” of a laser printer.

“That’s it?” Miles asked.

I replugged the reservoir and replaced the cartridge cover. “Ready to go.”

As I reloaded the cartridge into the printer, he pretended to write a note on his palm and said, “A new job for my assistants.”

But the fallout from his earlier revelation still hung in the air, like ozone after a lightning strike. I walked over to my minifridge and took out a Tab.

“Why don’t you scan for Brahma?” he suggested.

“I doubt he’s still on.”

“You’re the one who broke contact. No reason to think he’s closed up shop.”

Using Miles’s search program, it took less than a minute to locate “Maxwell” in another private room. There, true to his habits of the past three days, he was conversing with “Lilith.” Again the voices confirmed my suspicion: there was a lot more information flowing from Dr. Lenz to Brahma than the other way around.

“Lenz’s plan isn’t working,” I said over my shoulder.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s not learning a damn thing about Brahma.”

“He’s not supposed to, is he? He’s just laying out bait, hoping to provoke Brahma to come after him.”

“But he is trying to find out things. In between his neo-Gothic revelations, anyway. Listen to him. The stuff he spews out makes Deliverance look like a Disney film.”

Miles shrugged as if to say, “What can I do about it?”

I half listened to “Lilith” for a minute, but my mind was elsewhere. “How’s your Trojan Horse coming?”

“It’s got tendinitis,” Miles said sullenly.

“What?”

“I’ll get there.”

“You going to tell me how it works?”

“Until you get Brahma heated up, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

I was about to tell him to kiss off when he sighed an apology. “Look, it’ll work or it won’t, okay? Let’s take a break.”

I held up my hands for a truce. In the background, Lilith’s voice droned on, dredging up dark sexual secrets from “her” past and clumsily—to my ear, at least—pressing “Maxwell” to respond in kind. Brahma tolerated the probes with uncharacteristic docility, but he refused to be drawn out. As the conversation progressed, I could not escape the feeling that Dr. Lenz was greedily reeling in not valuable information but rope.

Just enough to hang himself.