Mortal Fear

“I didn’t go to the FBI,” I snap. “I called the New Orleans police. The FBI was already on the case. Damn it, Miles, we’re talking about murder.”

“So?”

“So?”

“EROS is like an organic system, Harper. Constantly evolving. Powerful emotions flow through it every day. Sexual emotions. We’re accustomed to monitoring massive levels of input, or throughput, if you will. But output has always been a possibility. And sex has always been integrally bound up with death. Why anyone should be surprised by all this is beyond me.”

“Miles, put aside your bullshit philosophizing for a minute. Don’t you realize that EROS’s primary obligation is to protect the security of its clients?”

“You’re the one who trivialized that obligation by revealing the names of subscribers to the police.”

I shake my head. “You’ve finally flipped out, man.”

“You realize,” he says coolly, “that you’ve exposed yourself to litigation by your action. Your employment contract is quite specific about that. I would feel derelict as a friend if I didn’t warn you that you will almost certainly be hearing from Elaine Abrams in the next few days. I would speak to my attorney.”

It suddenly strikes me that Miles Turner—who grew up in Rain, Mississippi—is speaking without a trace of Southern accent. He has finally succeeded in his lifelong goal of erasing his roots.

“Listen to me, Miles,” I implore, reaching for some vestige of the boy I once knew so well. “Innocent women are being killed and mutilated. I’m trying to stop that. If you and Krislov don’t understand that, you’re going to get steamrollered by the FBI. I’ve met the guys running this investigation. They’re from the Investigative Support Unit—the serial killer guys—and they are serious people.”

“I gather they are,” he says, finally showing a touch of pique. “And you and I are their prime targets.”

I am silent.

“Surely you see that, Harper? You and I are the only two men—apart from my technical staff—who have access to the real names of the subscribers. Obviously the master client list is the map the killer is using to choose his victims.”

Obviously. “So how did he get access to it?”

“I’m looking into that.”

“You told me those files were protected like nuclear launch codes.”

“My system architecture is ironclad,” he snaps. “Still, even the best operating systems sometimes have flaws no one knows about. They come that way from the factory.”

“How many technicians are there, Miles?”

“Six.”

More than I’d thought. “If the killer isn’t hacking his way through your security, and you or I didn’t do the killings, that means one of those six guys did.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

This stops me. When Miles Turner sounds this certain, he is always right. The police would never accept that, of course, but I do. But how can he know? Trying not to slide too far down that neural pathway, I say, “Look, am I fired or what?”

“Fired?” he echoes as if the notion has never crossed his mind.

“You just said Krislov was pissed at me. It’s not like I’m essential to the running of the network.”

“Of course you are. You and I are the only two full-duty sysops.”

“What about Raquel Hirsch?”

“She’s licking her lesbian lips off on Montserrat. Not due back for another week. Besides, she’s only part-time and doesn’t know enough about technical matters to defrag a hard drive.”

“What if I quit?”

“You can’t.”

“My contract says I can. I made sure of that. This was only going to be a trial thing anyway, remember? A goof.”

Miles’s voice lowers to its snake-charming register. “But you’ve stayed at it all these months, haven’t you? You like it. Besides, if you quit, you’ll lose your fifty-yard-line seat.”

Jesus. “I don’t need the aggravation, Miles.”

“No? What about your online friends, then? Or should I say lovers? Are you ready to tell them good-bye forever? Your employment contract does forbid you from ever trying to contact them in person. If you quit, I’ll probably have to remind Elaine Abrams about that clause.”

“Fuck you. I quit.”

“What about Eleanor Rigby?”

I exhale slowly, my grip tightening on the phone. “What do you know about Eleanor?”

“I know she’d be positively despondent if you dropped off of EROS without explanation.”

Miles knows he has me. The truth is, I don’t really want to quit. After summoning the nerve to “go public” with my suspicions—and being proved correct—I want resolution. Miles just pisses me off. “I’ll stay until Raquel gets back,” I tell him, my voice tight.

“Good man. Oh, you’d better start getting your alibis organized. Your FBI friends will be asking, and it can be difficult to remember where one was on so many different nights so many months ago.”

“I have nothing to hide,” I say firmly. “I’m innocent.”

There is a long silence, then a strange, muffled sigh. When Miles finally answers, his voice seems burdened by age beyond his years. “Harper, have you learned so little during your time with EROS? You speak of innocence with such conviction. Are any of us?”

Then he hangs up the phone.

I look around the office at the familiar landmarks of my existence, the EROS computer (custom built by Miles), the Gateway 2000 I use to make my futures trades, two laser printers, the antique laboratory table that functions as my desk, the twin bed I crash on during marathon trading sessions, the guitars hanging over the bed. Lifting my feet from the floor, I spin the swivel chair in a circle. The window flashes past again and again, merging with reflections from framed prints, antique maps, the unsheathed Civil War sword carried by one of my maternal ancestors at Brice’s Cross Roads. When I stop spinning I am facing a sport coat.

My father’s coat.

It droops from a wire hanger on a nail driven straight into the wall. The jacket appears to be cashmere, with thin vertical stripes of black and wine. It is absolutely motionless. There is a reason for this. The coat is made of wood.

I commissioned this piece from a sculptor I discovered one summer in Florida. He is a big blond guy named Fraser Smith, and he sculpts nothing but clothes, quilts, and old suitcases. The day I met him, I compulsively bought two of his pieces and in the after-sale chatter learned that he was originally from Mississippi. I don’t know why his work affects me so strongly, but I don’t question it. Things actually worth buying are rare.

My father’s taste in clothes was exceptionally bad as a rule—mostly synthetic fabrics in loud colors—but he bought this jacket while serving as an army doctor in Germany in 1960, the year I was born. All I can figure is that the store was out of electric plaids, leaving him no choice but to buy this jewel for warmth. Twenty years later, he gave it to me after I remarked on its quality, and I wore it often. Ten years after that—a year after he died—I carefully boxed it up and sent it UPS to Tampa, Florida, where Smith kept it four months, then shipped both the jacket and the sculpture back to me with a bill for fifteen thousand dollars.

It was worth every cent.

Why, I don’t know. Maybe because the jacket says something to me about the permanence of the apparently transitory. For what is that jacket but an articulated memory? As surely as the jacket is here with me, my father is here with me. And for all his failings, which were many, he was a man of principle when it came to the big things. And I know, as I sit here worrying about the consequences of my recent actions, that I am doing only and exactly what my father would have done—the consequences be damned.

Maybe that’s Miles’s problem. He had no such anchor. Miles’s father left him and his mother to fend for themselves when Miles was five. People said Miles was his spitting image, but since Mrs. Turner kept no pictures of “that no-count SOB” in the house, we could never confirm or deny this. He certainly didn’t look like his mother, a petite, harried woman. He was tall even as a child, all bones and tendons, which in a small town usually leads to school sports. But Miles was apathy personified. When one coach tried to talk him into playing basketball, he just stared until the man walked away. That was a common adult reaction. Miles’s eyes are grayish blue, and you can’t see anything in them if he doesn’t want you to. They’re like background pieces in a stained-glass window. Nothing there but space. Yet, like the sky, they can come alive with everything from thunderheads to blazing blue light.

According to local legend, Miles’s father was a mean drunk and a gifted engineer who helped the Army Corps of Engineers figure out how to stop a bad sand boil in the levee west of Mayersville in 1973. Because of that, people said Miles got his brains from his father. Miles hated them for that. He hated anybody who ever said it. I think he took it as some sort of insult to his mother, who was no rocket scientist, to be fair to the gossips. Yet Annie Turner was clever in her own way. She never remarried (or even divorced, for all the town knew) but she did manage to become involved with certain solvent gentlemen (railroad men, for example) who happened to be passing through Rain during times of financial distress.

Miles never talked about any of those men. When they were around, we knew to stay away from his house from noontime on. Once, shooting squirrels out of season, we ran into the Turner kitchen to grab some .22 bullets from the drawer and saw a man standing in the kitchen with his shirt off, drinking milk from a half-gallon carton. He looked old as the hills to us (at twelve) and had milk dribbling down his chin. When we got outside and Miles fumbled the bullets into the .22, his eyes sort of glazed over and he took a couple of steps back toward the house and before I could spit he put two bullets through the top pane of the kitchen window. When I crashed into his back and pulled him down, I felt his shoulders shaking like the flanks of a horse run almost to death. I had to hit him in the face to get the gun away, and then we ran like hell until we couldn’t hear anyone screaming behind us. Miles didn’t say anything for about two hours after that. We just walked along the weedy turnrows dividing the cotton fields, rapping the hard, knobbed stalks everybody called nigger knockers against the rusty barbed wire. I went home at dark. I don’t know if Miles went home at all.

But they made out okay. Annie even managed to pay Miles’s way through private school until she realized that the school would pay to have him. Because Miles Turner was a genius. I say that because, though I did well in school without much effort, Miles did not try at all. In the ninth grade he could answer “reading” problems in algebra after scanning them once. He never put anything on paper. After we all took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, some army major from Washington telephoned down to the school, talked to the principal, and asked to speak to Miles. He said something about Miles having a home in the army just as soon as he came of age. Miles told the major he wouldn’t join the army unless Russian paratroopers landed in his mother’s yard. The major said that might not be such a remote possibility. He also told Miles that Greenville was a confirmed Russian nuclear target because of its bridge over the Mississippi River. Miles said if the Russians wanted to nuke Greenville, he might consider joining the army after all. The Russian army.

Okay, he was a smart-ass. But that doesn’t make him a killer. He was just born in the wrong town. And he knew it. We both graduated high school as National Merit scholars, and could have gone to college anywhere in the United States for next to nothing. But there our paths diverged. I was so into girls that summer that I hardly gave college a thought, and since my parents were having their own problems at the time—financial and marital—they ignored the issue as well. I’d always done well in school, thus I always would. In the end I went to Ole Miss sight unseen, and because I had waited so long to decide, my father even had to pay for the privilege.

Miles applied for and was awarded a full academic scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While I farted around Oxford, Mississippi, with scatterbrained, Venus-shaped sorority girls and drunken Young Republicans, Miles Turner was fanatically programming, tearing apart, and rebuilding big clumsy metal boxes that I would not even have recognized in 1978.

Computers.

It seems natural now, but at the time it was odd. He spoke the language of bits and drives and floating memory at a time when those words were as foreign to the general public as Attic Greek. The really odd thing is that Miles thinks I’m smarter than he is. I have no idea why. This is not false modesty. I will frankly admit that I have above-average intelligence, just as I will admit I have a poor sense of direction. I can look at a problem, analyze it—for patterns, usually—and given enough time, solve it. Miles doesn’t analyze anything. He looks at something, and he just knows. He grasps physics and numbers the way I do people and music—wholly by intuition. It’s as though his asocial childhood allowed him to tune into some subrational channel of information that is beyond the rest of us.

When I took the sysop job, I was looking forward to getting to know him again. I’d only seen him a handful of times in the past fifteen years. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out that way. We occasionally exchange email—sometimes using the satellite video link that his techs installed here when I took the job-slash-hobby—but on balance, I know him no better now than I did when we were kids. Maybe my hopes were misplaced. Maybe you can never know anyone more deeply than you know them in childhood.

By the time Drewe arrives, I’ve put together a bastardized stir-fry of broccoli and pork and lemon. We eat it on the front porch, which is thick with heat despite the falling darkness, but mercifully free of mosquitoes. As soon as we sit, Drewe asks for a play-by-play of the meeting in New Orleans. I give it to her, glad not to have to keep anything back. She takes in every word with the machinelike precision that carried her through medical school with honors, and when I am done she says nothing. I have held one detail until the end, hoping for a silence like this one.

“What’s the pineal gland?” I ask.

She finds my eyes in the gloom. “The pineal body?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“It’s a small glandular structure at the core of the brain. In the third ventricle, I think. It’s about the size of a pea.”

“What does it do?”

“Until about thirty years ago, nobody thought it did anything. It was considered a vestigial organ, like the appendix. Scientists knew the pineal made melatonin, but no one knew what melatonin did. What does the pineal have to do with anything?”

“The FBI says the killer cut off Karin Wheat’s head to get to her pineal gland.”

“What?”

“Sick, huh? The other victims might be missing theirs too, or else their whole heads.”

Drewe grimaces.

“Can you think of any reason why someone would want pineal glands? Do they have any medical use?”

“I don’t think so. There were some pineal experiments going on at Tulane when I was there, related to breast cancer I think. But I don’t remember what the findings were.” She pauses. “You can buy melatonin in health food stores, though. God, this reminds me of those PBS shows where they talk about Oriental medicine. You know, how Japanese men pay poachers hundreds of thousands of dollars for rhinoceros horns and tiger testicles and things. All to cure impotence or restore their lost youth or something.”

My opinion of my wife’s mental acuity has been reaffirmed yet again. She has already broached a theory that seems more logical than that of the police in California, who believe the EROS murders may be the work of a cult.

“So what is melatonin?” I ask. “What does it do?”

“It’s a hormone that regulates your sleep cycle. Your circadian rhythms. You know, what causes jet lag. Some people take it to prevent or relieve jet lag symptoms.”

“Can you remember anything else about it?”

Drewe touches her forefinger to the tip of her nose and fixes her gaze somewhere out in the darkness. I know this posture well: concentration mode. “I think it controls the release of serotonin, maybe some other hormones. I seem to recall something from one of the journals. Neurobiological stuff. Something to do with the pineal and the aging process. Weird how that fits with the Oriental thing, isn’t it? But that doesn’t mean anything. Murderers don’t read JAMA or Journal of Neuroscience.”

“Why not?”

“Well … I guess it’s possible.” Drewe grimaces and says, “Men are scum.” A routine comic line of hers that doesn’t sound so funny tonight.

“So what’s the plan?” I ask lightly, falling into our usual banter.

“More dictation.” She stretches both arms above her head. “My personal cross to bear.” She begins gathering up the plates. “Which reminds me. Tomorrow you face yours.”

I feel a sudden chill. “What are you talking about?”

“Take it easy,” she says, giving me an odd look. “I meant the biweekly burden. Sunday dinner with your in-laws”

She turns away and moves through the screen door, but my chill does not dissipate. Over her shoulder she says, “Lately you’ve acted like it’s a trip to the dentist or something.”

If only it were.

I rise from the porch and head for my office. Combined with the stress of the past weeks, the trip to New Orleans has exhausted me. After months of anxiety, I have finally done what I should have done long ago. For months I’ve stayed up far too many hours and slept too few, lurking in Level Three in the hope of recognizing the error-free transmissions of David Strobekker. But tonight I will sleep.

As I strip off my clothes, Drewe’s last comment echoes in my mind. Lately you’ve acted like it’s a trip to the dentist or something. In reality the trip to her parents’ house is a trip into a minefield. A place where one wrong word or too open glance could cause instant devastation. Drewe does not know this. Like the most dangerous mines, these were laid long ago by people who scarcely knew what they were doing. No maps exist, and disarming them is impossible. Once I thought it might be, but now I know the truth. When we seek to resurrect the past it eludes us; when we seek to elude the past, it reaches out with fingers that can destroy all we know and love.

Tonight I leave David Strobekker to the FBI.

I have my own demon.

SEVEN

Dear Father,

We landed near Virginia Beach at dusk, riding the scent of ocean to the earth.

We misdirected taxis to bring us within range of the patient’s house, then walked.

No EROS dalliances with this one. She’s a Navy girl, young and simple and tough. I was lucky to have Kali with me.

We entered while she showered, and what a specimen she was. Firm pink skin shining in the spray. For a moment I wished we were there for the old protocol.

But—

After her scream died. I tried a little humor. “Hello, Jenny, we’re from DonorNet. I’ll bet you didn’t think we made house calls.”

She tried to fight us in the bedroom, making for a dresser (in which I later found a pistol). Kali brought her down with a knife slash to the thigh. Lots of blood, but essentially a superficial wound. It will have no effect on her role in the procedure.

Kali helped her dress, then forced her to give us her car keys. Jenny didn’t whine or beg, like some. She was trying to think of a way out.

I drove her car to the airstrip, Kali guarding her in the backseat. At the plane I’d planned to inject a mild sedative, but despite my reassurances the patient would not submit. I was forced to shoot her with a Ketamine dart. I also had to leave her car at the runway. Eventually it will be found. But there is no record of our landing. No note. No trace of our passing. Another question mark for the police.

Kali has the controls now. My dark Shakti shepherds me through the stars. We hurtle into history at two hundred miles per hour. The patient lies bound behind us, silent as death, as blissfully unaware of the contribution she will make as the monkey that gave Salk his poliomyelitis vaccine.

I’ve been thinking that I should present an edited version of these letters as an addendum to my official findings, or perhaps they belong with my curriculum vitae. Shocking to the unprepared mind. I suppose, but highly edifying for the medical historian.

But enough of that.

Things are where they are, and,

as fate has willed,

So shall they be fulfilled.

EIGHT

“It’s that damned nigger contractor,” says Bob Anderson.

“Robert, not in front of Holly,” scolds Margaret, his wife.

Bob Anderson is my father-in-law. He points across his Mexican tile patio toward a small girl child splashing in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

“She can’t hear me, Marg. And no matter how you cut it, it all comes back to that nigger contractor.”

Patrick Graham, my brother-in-law, rolls his eyes at me while carefully making sure I am the only one who can see him. Patrick and I went to school together and are exactly the same age. An oncologist in Jackson, Mississippi, he is married to Erin, my wife’s younger sister. His rolling eyes sum up a feeling too complex for words, one common to our generation of Southerners. They say, We may not like it but there’s nothing we can do about it except argue, and it’s not worth arguing about with our father-in-law because he won’t ever change no matter what.

“It” being racism, of course.

“What are you jabbering about, Daddy?” Drewe asks.

My wife is wearing a yellow sundress and standing over the wrought-iron table that holds the remains of the barbecued ribs we just devoured. Erin excluded, of course. My wife’s sister is a strict vegetarian, which in Mississippi still rates up there with being a Hare Krishna. This get-together is a biweekly family ritual, Sunday dinner at the inlaws’, who live twenty miles from Rain, on the outskirts of Yazoo City. We do it rain or shine, and today it’s shine: ninety-six degrees in the shade.

“Don’t get him started, honey,” my mother-in-law says wearily. Margaret Anderson has taken refuge from the heat beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“I’m talking about my new office, baby,” Bob tells Drewe, ignoring Margaret.

Bob Anderson is a veterinarian and an institution in this part of the Delta. His practice thrives, but that is not what pays for the columned Greek Revival house that towers over the patio we are sitting on. In the last twenty years, Bob has invested with unerring instinct in every scheme that made any money in the Delta, most notably catfish farming. Money from all over the world pours into Mississippi in exchange for farm-raised catfish—enough money to put the long-maligned catfish in the same league with cotton. A not insignificant portion of that money pours into Bob Anderson’s pockets. He is a short man but seems tall, even to those who have known him for years. Though he is balding, his forearms are thick and hairy. He walks with a self-assured, forward-leaning tilt, his chin cocked back with a military air. He is a natural hand with all things mechanical. Carpenter work, motors, welding, plumbing, a half dozen sports. It’s easy to imagine him with one strong arm buried up to the shoulder in the womb of a mare, a wide grin on his sweaty face. Bob Anderson is a racist; he is also a good father, a faithful husband, and a dead shot with a rifle.