Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 25

Miles has already drunk two cups of coffee, Drewe and I one each. It took me that long to recount my experiences with the FBI, even with heavy editing. I dwelt mostly on the tragic raid in Dallas and played down Lenz’s plan of luring the killer to the Virginia safe house. Miles seems more concerned with the psychiatrist’s suspicion that he might be the killer. I admit that Lenz still suspects him, but before I can qualify my words, Drewe starts asking questions about the murder victims.

In answer, Miles opens his briefcase on our kitchen table. Inside are neatly banded stacks of laser-printed paper covered with the hieroglyphics of command-line communications between computers. In short, Drewe and I are looking at a cornucopia of the fruits of virtuoso computer hacking.

“I have a lot of information here,” he says, squeezing back into the narrow space between the table and the wall. “I started as soon as the deaths were confirmed. It’s not nearly everything, but what I have is color coded. Green for city police reports. Orange for crime lab findings. Blue for witness interviews. Red for general FBI stuff-”

“You’ve been into the FBI’s computer?” I interrupt.

“Computers, plural. Their acronym for the case is ERMURS-for EROS murders.”

“No wonder they want to arrest you. Have you broken into their personal e-mail system?”

“I’ve seen it. Got some printouts here. I’ve also been in the National Crime Information Center computer, and some new thing called NEMESIS. Stands for Nonlinear Evaluation/Manipulation of Evidence System. That’s the only system they have that’s really elegant, and it’s not officially on-line. The rest are crufty as hell.”

“But why take these risks?” Drewe asks. “Can’t you just keep your head down until this is all over?”

“No. Because Baxter and Lenz aren’t going to catch Brahma any time soon. And in the absence of real leads, the great god Momentum will cause them to cast around for the most likely suspect. In their book that’s me.”

“But-”

“The only way for me to get these guys off my back is to catch Brahma myself.”

Something ripples through my chest, like a pebble dropping into a still pool miles from anywhere.

“Besides,” he goes on, “Brahma is fucking with my network. My system. I set it up, created it ex nihilo, and he’s treating it like his personal sandbox. Not acceptable.”

“Have you figured out yet how he got in?” I ask. “How he got the master client list?”

Miles stares furiously at the table. “No.”

I find this almost impossible to believe, but I don’t want to press him in front of Drewe. “What about alibis? You must have alibis for at least some of the nights the killings took place. Hell, I can’t remember a night when you weren’t sysoping the network.”

He gives me a sidelong glance. “I don’t have to be at the office to sysop. You know that. All I need is a laptop and a phone connection. Beyond that, I don’t care to discuss it.”

Drewe and I share a look. She takes a sip of coffee and says, “Couldn’t you just turn yourself in and put up with whatever hassle they give you until the murderer kills again? That would prove you’re innocent.”

“It’s not that simple. If I’m arrested, Brahma could decide not to kill again for a while. Or if he kept killing, the FBI could say a copycat had joined the game. They could claim I was part of a group, and try to prosecute me on that basis.”

“But surely they can’t have enough evidence to prosecute you?”

Miles shrugs. “There are some lab findings that are consistent with my blood. There’s other stuff as well.”

“Not DNA?”

“They can’t have that,” he says sharply. “Not legitimately. But Brahma has successfully planted misleading physical evidence at every murder. I have to assume he knows who I am from EROS. Who’s to say he hasn’t planted something of mine that could give them a DNA sample?”

“That’s impossible,” Drewe says.

“Nothing’s impossible. And don’t think the FBI is above juggling samples to create DNA evidence against me, given enough pressure to close this case.”

He slides some dark sheets from beneath his pile of paper and spreads them faceup across the table like playing cards. “These are the victims.”

None of us speak. The sheets are laser-printed gray-scale photographs. All six show side-by-side photographs of young women: two blondes, three brunettes, one Indian. In the left-hand photos, the eyes are open and glowing with life, the lips smiling, the hair well fixed; in the right-hand ones the faces-those that are there-are gray and shapeless, the eyes open but blank with glassy stares. One of the right-hand photos shows a decapitated torso, another a head that looks as though it was put through an airplane propeller. One shows a face like something from a vampire film, with wooden stakes protruding from bloody eye sockets. Before we take in too much, Miles sweeps the pages out of sight and says, “I got these out of NEMESIS. I’ve got crime scene photos too, but you don’t want to see them.”

He’s right. Drewe is still staring at the blank spot where the images lay. After a few moments, she blinks, then rises and pours Miles a third cup of coffee.

In a remote voice, she asks, “What do the police think drives this man to murder these women?”

Miles drinks deeply from his steaming cup, finishing with an audible swallow. “The case has been running for five days. Ever since Harper called the New Orleans police and linked Karin Wheat’s murder to six unsolved cases in other parts of the country.”

“What parts?”

“Portland, Oregon. New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, and San Francisco. Of course the first killing was David Strobekker, the man who was murdered for his identity. That was Minnesota.”

“The first one we know about,” I correct him.

He nods. “Rosalind May, the kidnapped attorney, was taken from Mill Creek, Michigan. She’s still missing, and there’s been no ransom note.”

“I think she’s dead,” I tell him.

“Ditto.”

“I don’t,” Drewe says, firmly enough to draw looks from both of us. “At least she might not be.”

“Why do you say that?” asks Miles.

“A theory I’d prefer to keep to myself right now. How was each of the women killed? I mean, I saw the photos, but what did the autopsies say?”

Miles watches her from the corner of his eye. Brilliant as he is, he remembers being aced by my wife many times in school. “The first-near Portland-was initially ruled an accidental death. She was a rock climber. Took a fall climbing solo, fractured her skull.”

“Was she missing her pineal gland?”

Miles’s eyes narrow. “She was exposed for a couple of days before they found her. Coyotes got to her. She was missing a lot more than her pineal gland.”

“And the other murders?”

“Shotgun blast to the face in New York. Strangulation and beheading in Houston. Claw hammer in Los Angeles. Pistol shot in Nashville. Strangulation in San Francisco, with the eyes removed and stakes driven through the sockets.”

“The pistol shot was also to the head?”

“Right.”

“And every woman was missing her pineal gland or her entire head?”

“It isn’t certain. With the shotgun victim it was impossible to tell. Some victims were missing only part of the gland. But the FBI consensus says yes.”

“And they assume Karin Wheat was also.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Karin’s head was found this morning.”

“What?” I cry. “Where?”

“Some Cajun fishermen found it wedged in a cypress stump in the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The police figure the killer tossed it out his window while driving across the causeway toward La Place. That means he drove past the airport going out of town. And her pineal gland was missing.”

“How was it removed?” Drewe asks, her eyes bright.

“Does that matter?” I ask as the reality of Karin’s death hits me all over again.

“Of course. Did someone just reach in with a dull spoon and dig it out, or did he know what he was doing?”

“I don’t know what tool was used,” Miles says. “I didn’t see an actual autopsy report, just an FBI memo. It said the gland was removed through a hole under Wheat’s upper lip. Like Brahma punched through the sinuses and up into the brain.”

“Jesus,” I mutter.

“How big was the hole?” Drewe asks.

Miles checks his papers. “Seven millimeters wide. Damn. That’s pretty small, isn’t it?”

Drewe is smiling with satisfaction. “That’s it,” she says.

“That’s what?” asks Miles.

“All those traumatic head wounds were meant to mask the killer’s real intent. But Karin Wheat’s head was never meant to be found. Her wound gives us the truth.”

“What do you mean? What truth?”

“Tell me the angle of the pistol shot that killed the woman in Nashville.”

Miles consults his papers. “It was fired into the back of her neck at an upward angle, near the first cervical vertebra.”

Drewe nods and smiles again. “Have you ever seen anyone who was attacked with a claw hammer, Miles?”

He grimaces. “Have you?”

“Yes. During my residency. It puts big holes through the skull, and the brain squeezes out through the holes like toothpaste from a tube.”

Miles and I look at each other in bewildered horror.

“That seven-millimeter hole beneath Karin Wheat’s upper lip,” Drewe says. “The one that went all the way up into her brain? A neurosurgeon would call that the sublabial transsphenoidal route.”

“What?” Miles asks.

“It’s a standard method of removing pituitary tumors. The pituitary gland isn’t that close to the pineal in neurological terms, but in a dead person you could probably punch right through the pituitary and get where you wanted to go.”

“You’re saying a doctor could be doing this?” I ask.

“I’m saying a doctor is doing it. The stakes through the eyes? A surgeon could go through the optic foramen-where the optic nerve passes through the skull into the brain-veer to the midline, and go straight for the pineal. With the claw hammer and the rock fall, he could practically reach in and pull the gland out. The gunshot wound in Nashville? He goes up through the foramen magnum, the big opening in the bottom of your skull, and into the brain. The traumatic wounds cover up his tracks.”

“The track in Wheat was pretty small,” Miles says. “How do you pull out the gland through such a small hole? Would that be the reason he only got part of it sometimes?”

“The pineal is about the size of a pea,” Drewe explains. “The problem wouldn’t be getting it out but seeing it at all.”

“What about a flexible probe with a fiber-optic camera and a cutting tool?” asks Miles.

“You’re talking about an endoscope. I don’t think they have those for neurosurgery. But I guess you could use any endoscope if the patient was dead. I assume the FBI is looking at doctors as suspects?”

Miles nods. “But doctors are only part of a much wider suspect group. Every police department has a different theory. The California police are working a cult angle. They’ve seen cult murders in the past where certain body parts were taken. No pineal glands, but adrenals, ovaries, testicles, all kinds of things.”

“Dr. Lenz pretty much dismisses cult murders,” I tell them. “Almost all of them are committed for some conventional motive.”

“Baxter has officially classified these murders as normal sexual homicides,” Miles says, “if there is such a thing. All the murdered women were raped after they were dead.”

A short intake of breath from Drewe.

“There’s a ton of forensic evidence,” he goes on, consulting his printouts. “Bite marks in some cases, not others. The marks don’t match. In one case they may have been made by a woman. With a couple of victims there was severe skin mutilation. The weird thing is that semen samples were found and analyzed in every case, and with seven victims they’ve found semen from at least four different men. Sometimes near the victim, other times inside the vagina. They’re waiting on DNA tests now. To compare to mine, no doubt.”

The hair on my forearms is standing. “You mean four men raped each victim?”

“No, no. Four men spread over all seven cases. Though in two victims there were two different semen samples found.” Miles shakes his head at Drewe. “I know what you’re thinking-one sample from a boyfriend or husband, the other from the killer, right? Wrong. Both samples in each woman were the result of postmortem sex.”

“Good God,” I whisper.

Miles takes a sip of coffee. “The problem with physical evidence is that the Behavioral Science people basically use a connect-the-dots approach to murder. They have checklists for cops to fill out. Condition of the body. Restraints, no restraints. Type of weapon. Cause of death. Post-offense behavior. Antemortem rape or postmortem rape? Penetration or just masturbation? All these things produce vastly differing profiles.” Miles sounds almost saddened by the imperfection of the system. “A guy who knows the system can put a few extra dots at each crime scene and distort the picture. If he puts in enough dots-or takes them away-there’s no picture at all.”

“Like the radically different head wounds,” Drewe says. She pulls at the corner of her mouth with her forefinger. “What about the physician angle?”

Miles shuffles his papers. “The current Unit profile includes butchers, dentists, doctors, male nurses, taxidermists, veterinarians, even people who’ve worked in slaughterhouses. They figure somebody’s expanding his horizons in new and exciting ways-with help, of course.”

Drewe wrinkles her mouth in distaste. “Does anyone think just one man might be responsible for the crimes?”

“Yes, but that presupposes an individual of staggering abilities. He’d not only have to have medical skill and access to things like blood and semen, but also detailed knowledge of law enforcement methods, forensics, locks, security systems, not to mention psychology and computers. It’s hard to picture one man-particularly a serial killer-having that kind of ability.”

“Why? Wasn’t Ted Bundy a really smart guy?”

“Not really. I did a Nexis search on serial killers, and I learned a lot. Bundy looks clever compared to the mean of his group-serial killers-but put him on a scale with the general population and he was nothing special. We’re talking about a guy who dug up women he’d killed weeks before to have sex with their corpses. He got a lot of press because he looked halfway preppie and could convince women to trust him. The truth is, most serial killers are genetic debris.”

“Not Brahma,” I say. “You’ve read some of his stuff, haven’t you? He’s erudite as hell. And he can exploit insecurity like no one I’ve ever seen.”

Drewe looks at Miles. “You agree with that?”

“Yes. But I don’t think he’s a doctor. His computer skill level’s too high for that. Some doctors know computers, but not at the level I’m seeing.”

“So what do you think?” I ask. “You think he’s a hacker?”

“No. I think he might be a Real Programmer.”

This silences me.

“What’s that?” asks Drewe.

“What Miles used to be. At MIT. People the media call ‘hackers’ get to know operating systems like UNIX and DOS and VMS very well, their design quirks and flaws. But Real Programmers can build operating systems. They’re supercoders. They call it programming on bare metal. They’re the demigods of hackerdom.”

“The problem with that theory,” Miles interrupts, “is that a Real Programmer killing people doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about a dogmatically nonviolent personality type. His entire life is lived between silicon, metal, and bits. Someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings sixteen times and who’d be glad to spend an evening trying to conjugate Elvish verbs with you.”

“You’re generalizing,” I tell him. “If this is a sexual thing, it doesn’t matter what his career is. You should know that better than anybody. Brahma doesn’t have control over what’s driving him. He could be a priest, for God’s sake.”

“I think he does have control,” Drewe says quietly. “Most of the time anyway.”

I suddenly recall Lenz telling me the same thing.

“Why?” asks Miles.

“Because the murders have an ultimate object,” she says. “The pineal gland. And because the killer has expended great effort to conceal that fact.”

“Keep going.”

“The fact that the women were raped throws me. But drop that from the equation for a minute. The pineal gland is the primary object because the killer takes it away with him. I mean, if his goal were merely to rape dead women, he could kill just about anybody and do that.”

“So…?”

“So the killer is a doctor.”

Miles looks disappointed. “Proof?”

“Occam’s razor,” Drewe counters. “It’s the simplest answer, therefore the most likely. You’re resisting it because you’re biased against doctors.”

“I am not.”

Drewe laughs. “The killer broke into your computer system and you don’t know how. Therefore, you assume he must be a member of the secret fraternity of the world’s smartest people-those who do what you do. But you’re shortchanging doctors.”

Miles’s face is red. “I think you’re wrong.”

“Why else should the killer hide the fact that he’s taking pineal glands? Unless it could somehow lead to him? And who does the pineal lead to? You said there were no cults known for taking the pineal. And in the one victim where there was no major head wound, the gland was removed using a standard neurosurgical approach that, despite the fantasies of the FBI, would not be the likely one chosen by a butcher or dentist.”

Drewe begins walking around the kitchen, seemingly propelled by the tide of her reasoning. “Look at the areas of expertise you mentioned. Postulate a brilliant surgeon and medicine is taken care of. Law enforcement is a technical undertaking usually handled by men from… what? The fiftieth to eightieth percentile of intelligence?”

Miles and I watch her with fascination. The logical ruthlessness of a smart woman can be chilling.

“Who better than a doctor could plant false biological evidence at crime scenes? He could get blood, urine, semen, stool samples, hair. Locks and security systems are child’s play compared to microsurgery. Human psychology? Again, an experienced physician. That leaves-”

“Computers,” Miles finishes.

Drewe stops beside the stove. “Yes. Now please listen, Miles. If I were to drop all my personal prejudices, I’d have to admit that a person like you, a computer genius, could have been a brilliant surgeon had he chosen that path. And because I believe that, I must believe the reverse could be true.”

He looks unconvinced. “I understand your reasoning, but you just don’t see that in real life.”

“I’ll tell you why you don’t see computer experts becoming surgeons. Because it requires a minimum of nine, sometimes eleven years of postgraduate training. The learning curve on computers is much shorter. You can jump in and begin working almost immediately, because if you screw up, you’ve only killed a machine or a program, not a person.”

Miles stares stubbornly at the table.

“But once you’re really seduced by computers,” she continues, “it’s too late for medicine. You’re into hardware and software, not wetware.”

Her accurate use of this computer term for the human brain, and by extension human beings, surprises us both.

“But surgeon as computer expert?” she asks, moving across the floor again. “The stereotype of no spare time in medical school is false. People do get married, have hobbies. If we posit a medical student who had little or no social life but an obsession with computers, I can easily see him attaining the skill level you’re talking about. Especially if he has the aptitude. And a practicing surgeon would have whatever spare time he wanted, plus the money to pursue his obsessions.”

Miles looks up in defeat.

“The question,” Drewe concludes, “is what is he taking the pineal gland for? What does he do with it? What does the FBI think?”

Miles drums his long fingers on the table and scans a new sheet of paper. “Possibilities range from eating it to burning it to selling it to Asians who render certain hormones from it.”

Drewe stops again. “Melatonin.”

“That’s right,” says Miles.

“Do you know what melatonin does?”

“It regulates the sleep cycle. There’s apparently a craze right now where people use it as a natural sleeping pill. Some think it’s a magic anti-aging pill. I know a few computer people who take it, along with a hundred other vitamins and herbs.”

Drewe finally comes to the table and takes a seat. “After Harper got back from New Orleans,” she says, “he told me about the pineals being taken. The next day, I punched a few queries into the Medline computer at University Hospital. It told me more than I knew before, but not a lot. Just enough to lead me in the right direction. There’s a neurobiologist on staff at University; he hasn’t been there long, but he’s good. You should have seen him come to life when I asked about the pineal gland. He was still jabbering when I left forty-five minutes later.

“Melatonin is hot right now because research teams in different parts of the world have recently come up with some startling new findings on it. But before I tell you what they’re doing, I’m going to tell you why these women are being killed.”

Miles stares at Drewe with the wonder of a kid watching a magic show.

“Let me ask one question first,” she says. “What were the ages of each of the victims?”

Miles’s eidetic memory spits out the digits like bingo numbers. “26, 23, 24, 25, 26, 25, 47.”

“Is that in order? By date of death?”

“Yes.”

“How old is the kidnapped woman? Rosalind whatever?”

“Fifty.”

Drewe smiles. “There it is. Someone is trying to transplant pineal glands between human beings.”

“What?”Miles cries.

“Why?” I ask.

“To add fifteen to twenty vital years to the human life span. Perhaps ultimately to his own life.”

Miles and I are silent.

“According to the neurobiologist,” Drewe says, “foreign researchers working on the pineal began by focusing on melatonin as a dietary supplement, just the way people are taking it now. They found that mice ingesting a regular regimen of the hormone were not only healthier but also lived longer than the control mice. This prompted them to try a more radical approach. They had micro-surgeons transplant pineal glands between mice-the pineals of young mice into old mice and vice versa. The results were astounding. Far more dramatic than oral dosages. The coats of the old mice regained their luster, the animals regained their sexual appetite and ability, T-cell counts went up, certain tumors disappeared, and a dozen other results, all positive.”

“And the young mice?” Miles asks.

“They immediately began to age rapidly. But the most fascinating thing is that the old mice with transplanted pineals maintained their reinvigorated state almost up to the point of death. To put it simply, they never got old. They just died.”

The kitchen is so quiet that the cheeep of crickets outside sounds like a roar.

“If that were true,” I say finally, “American pharmaceutical companies would be researching melatonin twenty-four hours a day.”

“How do you know they’re not? They may be duplicating these experiments right now. It just might be that a gland thought vestigial until 1963 is the engine that controls the human aging process. The number of people taking melatonin nationwide is staggering. It’s also frightening, because no one knows what its effects are over time. The pineal gland basically rules the endocrine system, Harper. It controls sexual development by regulating other hormones. It affects body temperature, kidney function, immunity. It controls hibernation in mammals, migration in birds, it changes skin color in chameleons. All this was new to me. When the neurobiologist started asking why I was so interested, I made excuses and got out of there. But by then it was clear to me.”

Miles is tapping his fingertips together. “You’re saying the age disparity between the first six victims and Karin Wheat is explained by the fact that the killer was taking-”

“Harvesting,” Drewe corrects him.

“ Harvestingthe pineal glands of young women for transplant? You’re saying he put these first few glands in the freezer until he got ready to start kidnapping older women to test his theory on?”

She shakes her head. “I think the first murders were part of a training program. Transplantation of a human pineal has never been tried. The pineal gland has the highest blood flow by weight of any organ other than the kidneys. A transplant would be fantastically difficult, probably impossible. Lots of microvascular stuff, severing and reattaching minute blood vessels. We’re talking groundbreaking neurosurgery. I think whoever’s doing this knew he would need practice in the vasculature surrounding a pineal gland-probably a pineal as close to the living state as he could get it.”

“So according to your theory,” says Miles, “just prior to the murder of Karin Wheat, this mad doctor decided he was ready to make a transplant attempt?”

“Karin Wheat is the flaw in my reasoning,” Drewe says quickly. “To make a transplant attempt, the surgeon would obviously need his recipient alive in an operating room, not dead in New Orleans. But I still think the last young woman killed prior to Wheat was meant to be a transplant donor. What was the elapsed time between her death and Karin Wheat’s murder?”

“Six weeks,” I reply.

She sighs in frustration. “That’s too long. No way a gland would remain viable that long.”

“Oh no,” I nearly moan.

“What?” Miles asks.

“Brahma’s primary topic of conversation with Karin Wheat was immortality. That was the subject of her last novel. They both seemed obsessed with it.”

“Score one for my theory,” says Drewe.

“But he didn’t kidnap Karin Wheat,” Miles reminds her. “He murdered her.”

“But he did kidnap Rosalind May,” she counters. “And May was almost the same age as Wheat, right? Fifty is definitely the downhill side of the hormonal roller coaster. Perfect candidate for what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe the killer wanted to kidnap Wheat,” I suggest. “But something went wrong.”

“Maybe,” Miles allows. “She was the only victim who died with a drug in her system. Ketamine. It’s an animal tranquilizer.”

“Your tech called me two nights ago. Baxter said May had been missing for two days. That means she was kidnapped-”

“The night after Wheat was murdered.”

I nod. “They wanted to kidnap Wheat, somehow bungled it, and decided to go for May as a substitute.”

“A preplanned backup,” Miles suggests.

“But what went wrong with the Wheat scenario? Why kill her?”

Drewe slaps the tabletop, stunning us both. “There’s another victim,” she says.

“What?”Miles asks.

“There has to be. Wheat was the intended transplant recipient. Something went wrong, so they took Rosalind May the next night. But who’s the donor? The last murder of a young girl-that we know about-was six weeks before Wheat’s death. That’s too long for a harvested pineal to remain medically viable. That means another young woman was kidnapped in the interval, or is about to be. She’s the donor.”

“My God,” I whisper, starting to believe for the first time.

Drewe looks at me. “How long does it take you to find out an EROS woman is dead or missing?”

“Weeks, usually. I only found out about Karin so fast because she was a celebrity.”

“What about Rosalind May? She was only taken days ago.”

“It’s complicated, but it comes down to coincidence. She was a blind-draft account holder who hadn’t been active for a while but was still paying her fees. When her account went to zero, one of Miles’s techs started poking around. A week ago, her account went active again. It looks like she was talking to Brahma right up until the second he took her.”

“My God. Are there more accounts like that?”

“About fifty.”

Drewe goes still. “The donor is one of those fifty. Only her account hasn’t dropped to zero yet, so nobody but the killer knows she’s part of this. Both she and May could be lying on an operating table right now, waiting for-”

“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 on-line 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 multi-million-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?”

“ Everywoman 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.