GREG ILES
Mortal Fear

For my wife

Dr. Carrie McGee Iles

The light at both ends of the tunnel.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books By Greg Iles

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Dear Father.

We landed in New Orleans yesterday evening.

A humid city.

Flat, low, dispersed. A single grouping of tall buildings in the distance.

The taxi driver was a Cajun, surprisingly. A thin brown wrinkled man. Rather like getting a Chinese cabbie in Chinatown. I expected an Eastern European, as I see everywhere else.

He kept glancing into the rearview mirror as we passed through a town he called “Metry”—a place where the whites once fled to escape “da niggas.” Now they flee across Lake Pontchartrain. I worked at the computer in my lap but kept an ear open to his words.

Night descended over a rising moon as we swept onto an elevated section of freeway and passed the Superdome. Kali must have been a black shadow to him, beside me in the backseat, a shadow with bright black eyes.

She wanted to kill the driver.

I could feel it.

In her handbag. The scarf—sacred weapon. I see an image in her mind: he stops at a traffic light as we descend the ramp to the lower world of surface streets. She slips the noose around his throat and silently steals his life …

I lay a hand lightly on her wrist and feel a twitch that verifies my sense. She is ready.

I know that if I slide my hand beneath her sari I will find her moist. She lives for these nights.

I hope the security is no tighter than I expect.

I slide my hand beneath her sari.

She is wet. Burning.

Time is fire.

So opposite we are, so perfectly opposite. I understand restraint. Control. The defiance of it.

Kali understands only being.

She lets her head loll back on the car seat, black eyes glittering beneath half-closed lids. I move my hand as we descend the ramp onto Poydras, possibly saving the driver’s life.

We move toward Canal and the French Quarter.

Kali climaxes soundlessly.

The driver smells her. Pungent, fierce. I see alertness in the back of his neck, the angle of his head. His eyes dart to the rearview mirror. A whore? he wonders.

Kali smiles at him in the mirror. There is death in her smile. Death that a man might walk willingly into. She is startlingly beautiful. And so she should be.

You paid her father good money for her.

We exited the taxi at Galatoire’s, entered the restaurant, then left and changed cabs twice again. Tiresome but effective.

Security was heavy at the mansion, but no worse than I had expected. A small army, as befits an American cult figure. Bodyguards hired from God-knows-what agency—probably some outfit run by an ex-policeman who swilled Jax on the job for twenty years.

The ironwork of the fence was exquisite. The French influence. I let my right hand graze the points as we moved along it. They would bruise me, I knew, but I felt fit. Almost reckless. The grillwork matched that on the second-story balconies.

Quaint.

The street was crowded with all manner of tourists. Gawkers, most of them. I inclined my head as we passed the gate guards. One nodded slightly, glanced at my briefcase. The other followed Kali with his eyes. Even the billowing sari could not hide the hard contours of her body.

“After we turn the corner?” she asked.

“If the crowd thins.”

When we turned the corner, the crowd melted away as though scattered by a stage manager. Kali bunched up her sari and was over the ironwork in seconds, into the palm fronds and banana trees. I was more careful. I passed the briefcase through the bars, then worked my way over.

We stood together in the dripping trees, looking at the floodlit face of the mansion. Solid stonework, like an outbuilding of Versailles. Kali’s hand dropped to my distended zipper. She lightly squeezed me, a nurse checking a pulse.

I shivered. “We must wait.”

A short intake of breath. “How long?”

I crouched in the tenebrous foliage, booted up the computer, and logged back onto EROS. “She’s still at her computer. She’s searching for me.”

“Then let her find you.”

I shut off the computer and put it back into the case. “The rightmost upper window,” I said, recalling the photocopied blueprints that the archives so dutifully sent me. “Now.”

Crossing the open ground between fence and mansion was daunting for me. For Kali nothing. She believes we are invisible in such moments. Less than shadows. We are our intent.

I opened my briefcase beneath the side balcony. Kali took out the rope and hurled the rubberized hook over the ironwork of the balcony rail. She climbs like a thief.

I tossed up the briefcase.

A rape kit, police would call it.

But it is so much more.

I came prepared for resistance, but the French doors on the balcony were open. So often it happens that way. Evil is an invited guest.

Kali pulled the rope up after us.

We moved up the hallway together. Thick carpeting. Conditioned air whispering out of the ceiling. Somewhere the regular groan of a ceiling fan slowly turning.

I followed the groan.

It led us to the master bedroom. Kali took up her post beside the door. I see it again and again, fate unraveling into chaos:

I open the door as softly as possible.

The patient is seated before her computer, her back to me. She wears a long, flowing garment, like something from one of her early novels. You should tape a penny to one of the blades to stop that noise, I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I say:

“I have come, Karin.”

The chair tips onto the carpet as she bounds out of it in voiceless terror. Her eyes mostly white behind her glasses. She is heavier than her publicity pictures. The eyes dart to my exposed hand, searching for a knife or a gun. But it is empty.

“How did you get in?” she whispers.

I do not dignify this.

“Wh–who are you?”

“Prometheus.”

Her eyes widen beyond the point I believe possible. “But I was just—” She looks back at her computer. “How …?”

“It is not important. I have come for you at last. To give you what you most desire.”

She stares, her brain obviously thrumming behind the glassy eyes. “How—Do you have a car for us?” she asks finally.

“I thought you might call for one of yours.”

“Yes,” she says much too quickly. “If you’ll just let me get some things—”

“No.”

She freezes near her bedside table. Her eyes dart downward, then back to my face. It is breaking down. Kali was right: fantasy and reality are alternate universes. I come to save, but who can grasp great purpose with vision clouded by terror? My hopes crash around me like shattered icons. I slip my right hand behind my back and grip the butt of the pistol.

“Karin?” I plead, offering one last chance.

Then her mask cracks, revealing her panic as she stabs a hand at the bedside table. I see a button there. An alarm.

I have no choice but to fire.

The feathers of the dart bloom in the midline, just above where her navel must be. The patient looks down with animal incomprehension and pulls out the dart, but it is much too late for that. Then she runs. The brave ones usually do.

She runs right at me. Not actually at me, but toward me, because I stand between her and the door.

I let her run past me.

She gasps.

I turn.

Kali stands in the doorway. Faithful Kali. Saffron sari, nut-brown skin, jet hair, blacker eyes. She holds a dagger, wickedly curved. A fearsome instrument. Simple. Effective in two dimensions, the physical and the psychological.

The patient turns to me for some explanation. How powerfully her heart must be beating

“Kali,” I say, regretting every moment.

The patient starts at the sound of Kali closing the door, watches the young woman move lithely across the floor with my briefcase, like a dark angel.

Kali sets the case on the floor, then stands and unfastens her sari. It falls to the carpet, leaving her utterly naked. I watch the patient trying to work out what is happening as the Ketamine cocktail courses through her system. Why is the Indian woman undressing? Just before she loses consciousness, she might work it out. That Kali is undressing to keep her clothes free of blood.

I must disrobe as well, but first I walk to the computer, log off, type a few commands, and shut off the machine. Then I return to the patient, kneel, and open my briefcase.

“What’s in there?” she asks dully, sitting down on the floor.

“My instruments.” I lift a stainless steel rongeur from the case and try to smile, but my heart is a black hole.

The patient has done enough research for her novels to recognize the rongeur. In blind panic she breaks once more for the door, scrambling on all fours like an infant, but Kali channels her flat onto her stomach. I watch silently until I see the dagger flash and press against the patient’s throat.

“Don’t dare,” I say, alarmed by the blood lust in her eyes. Command rises into my throat. “Strip her.”

We took our time with the patient. We could afford to, as Karin allowed no guards inside the mansion. But our options were limited. How I longed to spend myself within that still body. But of course it was impossible.

This time I forced Kali to be careful to get no blood on her feet. After she finished and I had collected my specimen, we retired to the shower. Genuine marble. We wear rubber caps to keep as many hairs as possible out of the drain trap. The blood slipped off our shaved skin and swirled on the white stone. At last I could allow myself release.

Self-control is so important.

Kali knelt before me in the hot spray. I had held back so long that neither her expertise nor her diligence were required. She swallowed every drop of evidence, as she must. She may have left traces of her own arousal, but what will the police make of that? They will be confused enough as it is.

As we stole out of the estate, carrying not only the briefcase but also the rubber bag, now filled, I recalled the patient. So much potential there. For my work. For public relations. All lost, and for what? More homogenate? But I must not dwell on failure. Great souls rejoice in adversity.

Tomorrow is another day.

ONE

Life is simple.

The more complicated you believe yours is, the less you know of your true condition.

For a long time I did not understand this.

Now I do.

You are hungry or you are full. You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you are not. You are alive or you are dead.

I am alive.

We complain about complexity, about moral shades of gray, but we take refuge in these things. Complexity offers refuge from choice, and thus from action. In most situations, most of us would prefer to do nothing.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Something is wrong.

I stare at the phone number of the New Orleans police department, which I have just taken down from directory assistance.

I have known something is wrong for some time, at some level, but it took what happened today to make me face it squarely. To override the opposition.

“I have information about the Karin Wheat murder,” I say when the call goes through.

“I’ll connect you to Homicide,” says a female voice.

I glance up from my desk to the small color television I keep tuned to CNN sixteen hours a day. They’re into the International Hour. It was CNN that brought me news of the murder.

“Detective Mozingo,” says a male voice.

“I have information relevant to the Karin Wheat case.”

“What’s your name?”

“Harper Cole.”

“Address?”

“I’m calling from Rain, Mississippi.”

A pause. “Where?”

“It’s a farming area in the Delta.”

“How do you know anything about the Wheat case? The body was just discovered six hours ago.”

“I saw it on CNN. They cut into a regular newscast to show Wheat’s estate. I guess she was more famous than I thought.”

I hear the detective sigh and mutter something that sounds like “… freakin’ high profile …” away from the phone.

“Are you working on that case?” I ask him.

“No, thank God. Mayeux’s got it. But I’ll take the information. What do you think you know?”

“I think I know how she was killed.”

“We know how she was killed, sir.”

Nowadays I don’t trust anyone who calls me sir. “I’m sorry. I mean how the killer got to her. How he chose her.”

Another silence. A suspicious one.

“It’s sort of complicated,” I tell him. “I work as a sysop—I’m sorry, a system operator—for an online computer service. Are you familiar with what that is?”

“Not really,” the detective says warily.

“You’ve heard of America Online? CompuServe?”

“Yeah. The Internet, right?”

“Close enough. The online service I work for is called EROS. It deals exclusively with sex.”

“You mean like phone sex?”

Jesus. “Maybe I should wait and talk to Detective—Mayeux, was it?

“Yeah. He’s still at the scene, though. Just give me what you’ve got and …”

Mozingo is still talking, but I am no longer listening. I am staring astonished into the face of a man that the CNN caption line identifies as NOPD detective Michael Mayeux. His shirt drenched with sweat, he stands beside the tall black wrought-iron gate of the mansion that belonged to Karin Wheat. I recognize it from the earlier broadcast. The sidewalk before the gate is cordoned off with bright yellow police tapes, but against the tapes stand at least a hundred people ranging in age from fifteen to fifty. More women than men.

Fans.

Detective Mayeux looks irritably at a black female reporter and says, “I can’t comment on that at this time.” He is a tanned man of medium height, in his early forties, maybe ten pounds overweight. The reporter thrusts the mike into his face.

“What about the reports that Ms Wheat’s body was sexually mutilated?”

Mayeux looks pained. “I can categorically deny that, Charvel,” he says, seeming to brighten as disappointment flickers in her eyes.

“Are you there?” barks a voice in my ear.

“I’m here,” I murmur, watching Mayeux motion for a patrolwoman to keep the crowd back. “I’m watching the guy right now.”

“What guy?”

“Your guy. Mayeux. They’re showing him live on CNN. Right this second.”

“Christ, he gets all the face time.”

“Listen,” I say, deciding I like Mayeux’s looks better than Mozingo’s voice. “Does Detective Mayeux have voice mail?”

The detective covers the phone with his palm and then shouts something. “I’ll transfer you.”

A digital female voice tells me I can leave a message as long as ten minutes.

“My name is Harper Cole,” I say slowly. “I’m calling from Mississippi.” Then I stop. I can’t just leave my name and number. With a murder like this one on his hands, Mayeux might not get around to calling me for days. I say my phone number twice, then pause and gather my thoughts.

“I’m calling because I think this murder—the Karin Wheat murder—may be connected to some other … not murders, but … possible murders, I guess. I work as a system operator for an online computer service—a national service—called EROS. Over the past few months I’ve noticed that some women have left the network abruptly for unexplained reasons. They could have simply terminated service, but I don’t think they did. The company wouldn’t want me to call you like this, but I felt I had to. It’s too complicated to explain to a machine, but I’m afraid something may have happened to those other women as well. Something like what happened to Karin Wheat. I think maybe the same person could be involved. You see, Karin Wheat was a client of EROS. That’s confidential information, by the way. You won’t understand until you talk to me. I’d appreciate a call as soon as possible. I’m always home. I work from here, and I stay up pretty late. Thanks.”

On TV, Mayeux has disappeared from the wrought-iron gate. The crowd is larger than before. The camera pans across several male faces painted with eye shadow and eyeliner. Disciples of Karin Wheat’s esoteric prose. A black-and-white photo of the author appears, filling one-fourth of the screen. It’s the publicity shot from her latest book. I recognize it because I have that novel—Isis—on one of my bookshelves. I bought it after I began having online conversations with Karin. Very interesting conversations.

Karin Wheat was a twisted lady.

I get up from the desk and go to my minifridge for an ice-cold Tab. I use them to break the monotony of Diet Coke. Not only do they pack a more powerful fizz rush, but I actually like the stuff. I’ve drunk half the can by the time I sit down at my Gateway 2000.

Price quotes from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange scroll slowly down the screen. This is my real job. Trading futures. Bonds, indexes, even agriculturals. I do it from my house with only my own money. Keeps it simple. No suicidal clients to deal with. I’m holding a ten lot of S&P contracts right now, but nothing’s in crisis mode.

I swig some more Tab and glance across at the postmodern black table that supports the EROS computer and satellite video link. It’s late afternoon, and online traffic is light. Mostly housewives right now. Bodice-ripper stuff. The real freaks are on their way home from work.

My wife should be as well. Today she’s working in Jackson, the state capital, eighty minutes away from our farmhouse in the flat Delta cotton fields. Drewe is a doctor, three blessed years out of her residency, and the same age I am—thirty-three. I’m thinking I should start cooking us some supper when the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“This is Detective Michael Mayeux, NOPD.”

His voice has the radio tinniness that cell phones aren’t supposed to have but usually do. “Thanks for calling back so fast.”

“Just checked my voice mail,” he explains. “I’ve got twenty-eight nutcase calls already. Vampires killed her. Mummies. One guy claims he’s an incubus and that he killed her.”

“So why did you call me?”

“You sounded slightly less nutty than the rest. You said you were calling from Mississippi?”

“That’s right. EROS—the company I sysop for—is based in New York City, but I do my job from right here.”

“I’m listening, Mr. Cole.”

“You know what online services are?”

“Sure. AOL, CompuServe, Delphi. But your message didn’t give me the feeling we’re talking about people using MUDs or booking vacations by modem.”

“No, you’re right,” I tell him, relieved to have found someone who doesn’t need spoon-feeding.

“So what’s this EROS? Live chat, email, role-playing, all that stuff?”

“Exactly.”

“My kid’s a computer fiend. I log onto CompuServe every now and then. I’m no expert, though. Keep it at the idiot level.”

“That’s my natural level, Detective. I told your machine that Karin Wheat was a member of EROS.”

“And you said it was confidential information.”

“It is. I mean, according to the rules of the membership agreement. Legally, we’re forbidden to give out any client’s true identity. There are a lot of married people online with us who don’t want their spouses to know. Quite a few celebrities, too.”

“But you gave me Wheat’s name.”

“I wanted you to know how serious I am.”

“Hang on—cut over to Chartres, Harry. I’m back, Mr. Cole. You said you thought Wheat’s death might be connected to some other women? Disappearances or something?”

“Right. What I’d like to do—for now, at least—is give you the names of those women and see if you can check them out. On the sly, sort of. You can do that, right?”

Mayeux doesn’t answer for a moment. “You mean check and see if they’re alive?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, we can do that. But why haven’t you done that, if you’re so concerned? You have their phone numbers, don’t you?”

“Yes. And I thought about doing it. But frankly … I was told not to.”

“By who?”

“Someone in the company. Look, can you just take the names? Maybe I’m nuts, but I’d feel better, okay?”

“Shoot.”

I read the names and numbers from a notepad. Mayeux repeats them as I give them; I assume he is speaking into a pocket recorder. “That’s five different states,” he notes. “Six women, five states. Spread across the country.”

“Information Superhighway,” I remind him.

“No shit. Well, I’ll get back to you if anything comes of this. Gotta go, Mr. Cole. Time to talk to the fairies and the vampires.”

The conversation leaves me strangely excited.

After weeks of suspicion, I have finally done something. I am tempted to call Miles in Manhattan and tell him exactly what I’ve done, but I don’t. If Miles Turner turns out to be right—if all those women have slipped contentedly back into the roles of happy housewives or fulfilled career women—then I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But if I turn out to be right—if those women are less than healthy right now …

I’m not sure I want Miles to know I know that.

This realization shocks me a little. I have known Miles Turner for more than twenty years. Since grade school. He was eccentric then. And during the last fifteen years—since he left Mississippi for MIT in 1978—I have seen very little of him. It was Miles who got me working for EROS in the first place. But I can’t blame him.

I was a willing Faust.

Hearing the solid door-chunk of Drewe’s Acura outside, I hunch low over the keyboard of the Gateway, assuming the posture that announces to my wife that I have been manically trading commodities contracts for the last eight hours.

“Who were you talking to on the phone?” she calls from the hallway.

Busted. During her commute, she must have tried me on her cellular. She often does, as the sight of summer cotton fields lazing by the car windows gets monotonous after the first ten seconds or so.

Drewe leans into my office, pointedly refusing—as she has done for the last few weeks—to enter the domain of the EROS computer. My wife, like many wives, is jealous of my time. But there is more to this conflict than a wife and a computer. EROS is not merely a computer but the nexus of a network of five thousand people (half of them women) who spend quite a bit of their waking hours thinking about sex.

“I picked up some chicken breasts,” Drewe says, arching her eyebrows like a comic French chef.

“Great,” I say. “Give me a minute and I’ll get them going.”

It’s not that Drewe doesn’t think about sex. She does. And it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy sex. She does that too. It’s just that lately she has begun thinking about sex in a whole new way. As a means to an end. By that I mean its natural end.

Children.

She smiles. Childless at thirty-three, Drewe still possesses the tightness of skin and muscle of a woman in her twenties. Her breasts are still high, her face free of wrinkles save laugh lines. I love this about her. I know how selfish it is, wanting to preserve her physical youth. But part of me wants that. Her hair is auburn, her skin fair, her eyes green. Her beauty is not that of a fashion model (her younger sister, Erin, was the model) nor the pampered, aerobicized, overly made-up elegance of a young Junior Leaguer. Drewe’s distinctive allure emanates from her eyes. Not only the eyes themselves, which are deep set and clear, but from her brows, which are finely curved yet strong, like the ribs of a ship. What emanates from her eyes is pure intelligence. Cool, quantitative, uncommon sense.

Drewe Cole is smart.

Her smile widens to a pixie grin—something I haven’t seen much lately—and then she heads off for the kitchen. I take a last look at the Chicago figures and follow.

Our house would be something of a curiosity to anyone not born into a farm family. It began seventy-five years ago as a square, one-story structure just large enough to shelter my maternal grandfather and grandmother (who married at the ages of nineteen and sixteen, respectively) and the first children they expected. But as the farm prospered and more children arrived, my grandfather began adding on rooms—first with a doggedly logical symmetry, later, apparently, anywhere he could most easily tack them on. The result is something like a wooden house of cards built by an eight-year-old. Moving from room to room often involves a sudden stepping up or down to a slightly different elevation, though since I grew up in this house, I no longer sense these changes consciously.

The heart of the house is the kitchen. It is a long room, and too narrow. I once thought of tearing out a wall and expanding it, but a black carpenter friend told me that since the entire house seemed held to this core by some form of redneck magic, I’d do better to enjoy rubbing asses with my wife whenever we passed between the stove and the opposite counter at the same time. That turned out to be good advice.

“Are we richer or poorer today?” Drewe asks from the sink. She is already rinsing off the chicken.

“About even,” I say, taking a heavy cast-iron skillet out of the oven and laying it on a hot gas burner.

Her question is perfunctory. The truth is that with ten contracts in play, which is about average for me these days, I could only—in the absolute worst contingency—lose about fifty thousand dollars. This would not seriously affect us.

I am good at my real job.

“Save any lives today?” I ask. My question is not perfunctory. Drewe is an OB-GYN. She delivers the babies that my father (a family practitioner) would have delivered thirty years ago. She doesn’t usually deal with car accidents or shootings, but she often handles traumatic births.

She answers my question with a quick shake of her head and plops the chicken breasts into the sizzling skillet. I am peppering them liberally when she asks, “What about EROX?”

She has purposefully botched the acronym, pronouncing it as a disc jockey would: E-Rocks. EROS stands for Erotic Realtime Online Stimulation. Drewe substitutes the X to emphasize the prurient nature of the network. Nine months ago she did not do this. She was as fascinated by the forum as I was, and our sex life had blossomed with her fascination. Nine months ago she spoke of EROS in a tone befitting the Greek god of love and desire.

Now it ranks just above phone sex. Barely.

“Something really bad happened,” I tell her.

Drewe looks up from a can of LeSueur peas with apprehension in her eyes. Family, she is thinking. Who died?

“Karin Wheat was murdered last night.”

Her eyes widen. “The author? New Orleans Karin Wheat?”

I nod. “It was on CNN. You believe that?”

“Sure. Anybody who’s had movies made of their books—and has fans as weird as she does—is bound to rate some national airtime. I bet it’ll be on Hard Copy in an hour.”

She’s probably right. Should I watch? I know from experience that facts will be sparse and titillation rampant. On the other hand, Drewe can’t stand more than ten minutes of Crossfire.

“You sound really upset,” she says, eyeing me with genuine concern.

I look away for a moment, disguising my mental stock-taking with an appraising glance at the chicken. How much to tell? “She was on EROS,” I say, not wanting to sound guilty but knowing I do.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

I look up, some defiance in my eyes. “You haven’t wanted to hear anything about EROS for months, Drewe. Karin only joined a few weeks ago.”

She lifts her chin and studies me. “So it’s Karin,” she says finally. “You’ve talked to her online?”

“Sure. The usual sysop guidance.”

“Please.” She fits the pea can into the opener and drowns any reply with a grinding flourish. I go back to the chicken.

“Have you had sex with her online?” she asks, not looking at me.

I sigh angrily. “The woman is dead, Drewe.”

“Jesus,” she says, and dumps the peas into a pot. “I should be on Hard Copy. ‘My Husband Fucks Famous Females Electronically.’”

I surrender. Drewe is even angrier about EROS than I thought.

“Do they know who did it?” she asks in a deadpan voice.

“No.” I flip the chicken breasts. “But I think I might.”

TWO

Drewe and I watch Hard Copy with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Dramatic camera angles, sexual innuendo, and spooky black-and-white video of Karin Wheat’s New Orleans mansion (complete with artificially generated fog) give the broadcast a Victorian, Jack-the-Ripper feel. Drewe does not comment as the segment runs, and I find myself rehashing my dinner-table interrogation.

I answered her incisive questions between bites of chicken and dirty rice, taking care not to set her off by revealing more than necessary. She wanted to know why I would even notice six women terminating service among five thousand subscribers. I focused on the technical side of it, explaining that these six women had been active users who suddenly disappeared from the forums yet continued paying their EROS fees, which are expensive by anyone’s standard. I mentioned nothing about blind-draft accounts or my close relationships with some of the women.

Thankfully Drewe focused on Miles Turner and his successful attempt to prevent me from initiating an internal investigation by EROS itself. She too has known Miles since our childhood. He based his objections to an investigation on the issue of privacy—“client confidentiality” in his words—and his argument holds water. The female CEO of EROS is serious enough about privacy to insure the secrecy of each subscriber’s identity to one million dollars. This unique step in the world of online services went a long way to ensure the exponential growth of her small and costly corner of the digital world. I can only guess what kind of explosion my decision to involve the police will cause at EROS headquarters in New York.

When Hard Copy cuts to commercial, Drewe commandeers the kitchen table and telephone to remotely dictate the past few days’ accumulation of medical charts. For some reason, patient charts are the one duty my super-organized spouse cannot or will not deal with in a timely manner. The color-coded stacks she brings home from her office are often covered with threatening Post-it notes penned by the hospital records administrator, warning in Draconian tones that Drewe’s staff privileges are about to be revoked.

As her monotonic dictation voice drifts through the house, I retreat to my office and pick up one of the five guitars hanging on the wall above the twin bed I crash on when I’m in manic trading mode. I choose a Martin D-28S, with a classical-width neck but steel strings. I slip through some chord changes without thought, letting my mind and fingers run where they will. The music would surprise a casual listener. I am a good guitar player. Not quite a natural, but smooth enough to make a living at it. This is my old job.

I am a failed musician.

The memories of that career still sting. I pick up the instrument more often now, but three years ago I did not touch a guitar or sing for twelve straight months. Even now, I never play my own songs. I just do what I’m doing now, letting whatever part of my brain that controls this function have free rein, and set my mood on automatic pilot.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

Like now. I have somehow wound a soft jazz thing full of arpeggios and chord extensions into the intro of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” I realize I love the sneaky seventh at the end of that line: “I met my o-old lover on the street last night”—whang. What the hell, I think, singing on through the song and ending up quite unintentionally with potential murder. “Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars. And I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers …” As I finish to a nonexistent ovation, I realize Drewe is standing inside the door of my office. It’s her first time in six weeks.

“Sounds good,” she says. “Really good.”

“It feels good.”

“Thinking about an old lover?”

“No. A jury of my peers. Where do you think they all went?”

She smiles ruefully. “They grew up, got married, and had kids.”

Like most men, I have blindly blundered back into our running argument. Having a baby. I suppose a lot of couples our age are in the midst of this debate. Up north and out west anyway. Down South most couples still tend to have their kids in their twenties.

Not us.

Our careers are partly to blame. Itinerant musicians and exhausted medical students are rarely in an ideal position to start a family, even if they are married, which Drewe and I weren’t until I gave up music. But that’s not all of it. For the past three years—our total married life—we have led a fairly settled existence, and our combined incomes are almost embarrassingly large. My parents are dead, but Drewe’s recently crossed the line from gentle jibes to outright questioning of my reproductive capabilities.

If only my sperm count were the problem. Like a lot of people, I have my secrets. Some are small, born in moments when I could have been painfully frank but chose not to be. Others are more serious and invariably involve women other than my wife.

Don’t jump to conclusions. From the moment Drewe and I took our marriage vows, I have not touched another woman’s naked flesh. But somehow that is small comfort. For the secret that haunts me now is more dangerous than adultery, more shameful. If I were Catholic, I suppose I would call it a mortal sin.

No, I’m not gay.

But I am afraid.

When the telephone finally rings, Drewe and I have been asleep for hours. I spring awake in a sitting position like one of my Scottish ancestors groping for his sword but find a cordless phone in my hand instead.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Cole?”

I blink, trying to clear my eyes and brain simultaneously. “Um … what?”

“This is Detective Michael Mayeux. NOPD. We spoke this afternoon?”

Drewe’s sleeping body blocks my line of sight to the clock radio. “What time is it?”

“Three-twenty in the morning. Sorry, but I just got around to checking those names you gave me. Those six women?”

“Sure.” I sense a strange gravity in Mayeux’s voice.

“Harper?” Drewe sits up in bed and points at the window. “There’s someone outside. Look.”

Prickly flesh rises on my shoulders as I realize that our curtains are being backlit by what must be car headlights. We never have visitors at this hour. We rarely have visitors at all.

“Stay here,” I tell her. “I’ll get a gun.”

“Please don’t do that, Mr. Cole.” Mayeux’s voice startles me. “If you’ll look out your window, I think you’ll see a patrol car.”

“Cairo County doesn’t have a police department,” I say, moving warily toward the window.

“Part of your farm is in Yazoo County,” Mayeux replies. “That should be Sheriff Buckner from Yazoo City. Know him?”

“I know who he is.” Parting the curtains slightly, I see a white Chevrolet Caprice cruiser sitting in the gravel drive before our house. “What the hell is he doing in my driveway at three in the morning?”

“Calm down, Mr. Cole. Sheriff Buckner is there to ensure your safety.”

Right. “Why don’t I believe that, Detective?”

He is silent too long. I signal Drewe not to speak. “What the hell is going on, Mayeux?”

“Those women you told me about. They’re all dead.”

There is sweat on my face. An instant ago it was not there. I feel it in my hair, on my forearms, behind my knees. That small intuitive part of me that always suspected the worst has taken possession of my body. I was right. I was right, and I should have acted sooner. “All six of them?” I ask, my voice barely audible.

“Every one was murdered in the last nine months, Mr. Cole. And I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot of people around the country right now—police officers—who want to talk to you about those women.”

I do not even try to convert the chemical cyclone in my brain into coherent words.

“Only two of those murders had been connected before tonight, Mr. Cole. They were both in California.”

I close my eyes. Juliet Nicholson. Tara Morgan.

“What we’d like you to do,” Mayeux says in a friendly voice, “if you’re not busy tomorrow, that is—is drive down to the main station here in New Orleans and talk to us. What do you say to that?”

I look back through the window. Sheriff Buckner’s cruiser is still there, idling low and catlike in the humid darkness.

“You think I killed them,” I say in a monotone.

Again Mayeux pauses too long. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Cole, we don’t know what to think. I’ve been telling people that you called me with this information, and that if you’re the one who murdered them, you’d be the last one to do that.”

“Damn right.”

“On the other hand, some people tell me that things like that have happened before. A lot more than you’d think. Is this one of those strange cases, Mr. Cole?”

“I was stupid to call you,” I say, meaning it. “Miles was right.”

“Miles who?” Mayeux’s tone telegraphs an image of him holding a pen over a notebook.

“Do I need a lawyer, Detective?”

“What?” Drewe gets out of bed and hurries to the closet for a housecoat.

“Take it easy,” Mayeux says. “My gut tells me you’re just Joe Citizen in this thing, trying to do what’s right and getting tangled up in the process. That happens more often than it should, I’ll tell you right now. If you want a lawyer, you bring one along with you.” He pauses a beat. “But if you want my advice, I’d save the money. We just want to know what you know, Mr. Cole. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t need a lawyer.” Mayeux’s voice drops in volume. “Besides, first impressions are important. You’ll look a lot more innocent to certain people if you don’t have a lawyer from the get-go.”

One thing’s for sure. Detective Michael Mayeux didn’t just float into New Orleans on a shrimp boat. He is very good at getting people to do what he wants them to do. This is a talent that I share, and I note the fact like a fighter noting the strength of a potential opponent.

“I suppose you expect me to ride down with Sheriff Buckner?”

“No, sir. Bring your own car, fly a crop duster, whatever you want. Just try to make it before noon. You’ve got a very anxious audience down here.”

I make a rapid decision. “Listen, Detective, no way am I going to fall back asleep after this call. I’m going to talk to my wife, then get dressed and drive straight down there. The sooner I’m out of all this, the better I’ll feel.”

“Good answer, Mr. Cole.”

“See you in about five hours.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

By the time I finish explaining the situation to Drewe, Sheriff Buckner’s cruiser has quietly disappeared. My wife wants to accompany me to New Orleans, but I talk her out of it. For one thing, she has patients scheduled. For another, I am not sure how deeply the questions of the police will probe. I doubt any man would want his life examined microscopically in the presence of his wife, but lately one of my secrets, like the old shotgun pellet in my calf, has worked its way nearer and nearer the surface. One question with the right edge could slice right through.

I consider calling Miles in New York to tell him what is afoot, then discard the idea. On this point Drewe and I agree. By revealing the name of an EROS client to the police, I have almost certainly exposed myself to a lawsuit. I reassure myself that my perception of lethal danger to other EROS clients justified this breach, but in 1990s America, who is to say? Jan Krislov, the fifty-six-year-old widow who owns EROS, is a nationally known advocate for the right to privacy. She also has more money than God. Better lawyers, anyway.

Yet beneath this anxiety flows a deeper sense of reservation. Drewe feels it as well. Early in our lives, Miles Turner and I were almost like brothers. Then for many years we hardly saw each other. Not quite a year ago he came back into my life, brought me into EROS. Expand your horizons, said my own personal Mephistopheles. Aren’t you tired of making money yet? Challenge yourself. It’s more fun than you’ve had since we talked our baby-sitter into taking off her bra.

I am not having fun now.

THREE

Dear Father,

We landed in Michigan in the afternoon. So gray after the decadent green of New Orleans. As gray as our fatigue. My joints ached constantly: we had to fly through the black heart of a storm.

I varied the transport this time, and the technique. I learned from my mistake with Karin. How disconcerting to recognize naïveté in oneself, even after years of cynicism.

I was drunk with anticipation. Our seduction had been a long and baroque one, a progression from the sacred to the profane. I sat on the patient’s patio with the notebook and the cell phone, knowing she believed she was interacting with a man thousands of miles distant, a faceless lover, and me sitting less than twenty feet away.

I crept to her window and watched her typing her responses. Kali stroked me as I watched, spilling my seed in the flower bed. Will the FBI look there I wonder? For footprints, yes. For semen, no. They will find that where they expect to find it, but of course it will not be mine.

I could not resist telling Rosalind I was there. There was no risk; she could not call the police while linked to EROS, and Kali was already inside. Terror was absolute. Paralyzing. Kali demonstrated exemplary control, reassuring after the blood lust of New Orleans. And this time I left a note, a passage you read me long ago:

I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. I have found God but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

I know, I know. But I’m tired of leaving biological refuse. Why not mislead with a little flair? You of all people should appreciate that. This is just the kind of rot they salivate over at Quantico. It will be the only file written in French, but nevertheless I signed it “Henri.” Subtlety is wasted on the police. By the time they translate it, the procedure will be complete. The lab work tonight. A day to collect the next patient. Another to rest my joints, to steady my fingers.

Then I cut my way into Valhalla.

FOUR

Three hours of hard driving put me over the Louisiana state line with dawn breaking over my left shoulder and New Orleans seventy miles ahead. The last two hundred miles were a slow-motion strobe of darkness and glaring truck-stop light. On any other night I would have taken Highway 61. Not many people do these days. They choose speed over scenery, as I was forced to do tonight.

I-55 runs straight as a pipeline, and most travelers on it never give a thought to the older, more indirect arteries that lie just to the west: Highway 61, a blacktop track of history lined with scorched chimneys like sentinels guarding unquiet land; and beyond the levee, the aorta of the continent, the mile-wide tide of river that ran before man set foot here and will run long after he is gone.

But in this breaking dawn I can afford only the straightest distance between two points. On the passenger seat beside me sits a briefcase full of laser-printed paper—transcripts of the killer seducing his victims—and my best hope of absolution in the matter of the six dead women.

Seven, I think, remembering Karin Wheat.

At La Place I jump down onto I-10 for the final twenty-minute run into New Orleans. The August sun is fully up now, past eight o’clock, and the shallow soupy water of the Bonnet Carré spillway simmers under its lidless gaze. Cranking down the Explorer’s windows, I catch an airborne wave of decaying water plants and fish from Lake Pontchartrain.

During the past four hours, I have recalled every step on the mental path that led me to this physical journey. What the police hope to learn from me I am not sure. But the most sensitive question for me is this: why didn’t I report my suspicions sooner? I am not quite sure myself. I can only hope that what I have to say will shock the police sufficiently to divert them from that question, at least for a while.

Locating the main New Orleans police station is easy. It’s near Drewe’s alma mater, the Tulane Medical School, just behind the Orleans Parish criminal court building. Locating Detective Michael Mayeux is easier still. Homicide is on the third floor. The moment I mention my name to the desk sergeant—who sits behind a window of armored glass—I am whisked through a heavy door, through a squad room, down a corridor, and into a small office. Mayeux is seated at a scarred and cluttered metal desk, speaking urgently into a wire telephone. The office has no windows. It does have a computer, an overcrowded bookshelf, and, enshrined in the single clearing amid the chaos, a coffeemaker. A torn red sack of Community dark roast with chicory sits on top of it.

“Help you?” Mayeux asks, hanging up the phone and taking a bite from a sugar-dusted beignet I hadn’t noticed.

“I’m Harper Cole.”

He freezes in midbite, then sets down the beignet, stands, and begins chewing quickly as he ushers me back into the hall and to another door. He is five eight or so, with good shoulders, noticeable love handles, and a bald spot on the back of his head. At the door he stops and turns back to me, his dark brown eyes reassuring like those of a coach before an important game.

“Just tell these people what you know, Mr. Cole. Take your time and don’t leave anything out. If you get hungry or you need to take a leak, nod your head at me and we’ll break. It might get pretty intense. All of a sudden there’s a lot riding on what you have to say about these women.”

“Hold on,” I say, raising my hands. “I thought I was coming down to talk to you. Who’s in there?”

He gives me a crooked smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll be beside you the whole time. So will my partner, so will the chief.”

Mayeux meant to reassure me, but he’s accomplished the opposite. “And …?”

His eyes move off my face. “The other guys will be feds. FBI.”

“FBI? What for?”

“These guys are from the Investigative Support Unit. What used to be called Behavioral Science. One special agent and a shrink. Plus two Fibbies from the local office. Remember what I told you. Two of the dead women were killed in California—one in L.A., one in San Francisco. Because their bodies were mutilated in a specific way, and for other reasons, the police out there decided they might be looking at some type of cult murders. They called in the Investigative Support Unit to assist them in coming up with a profile of their UNSUB.”

“Their what?”

“UNSUB. Unknown subject. Anyway, soon as I queried the names of those two dead California women, the Unit was on us like you know what. When they heard about you and the other women, they started foaming at the mouth. They think we’re looking at a serial murderer here. Maybe a whole new kind of killer. We got detectives flying in from all over the country right now. This is major-league stuff.”

“So much for our friendly little chat.”

Mayeux starts to turn the doorknob, then hesitates. A spark of Cajun mischief twinkles in his eyes. “Don’t take the shitty vibes personally. Chief Tobin officially requested the Unit’s assistance—he knows their chief—but NOPD and the local Bureau office have bad blood from way back. Not your problem. Just tell your story.” Mayeux winks. “Show time, cher.”

FIVE

Detective Mayeux’s warning understated the tension level. The bare police conference room reminds me of nothing so much as a room full of lead vocalists. Egos bumping against each other like tethered balloons as their owners strike practiced poses, unaware of any agenda but their own. Four men in business suits sit in a protective phalanx at the far end of a rectangular table. They might as well be wearing lapel tags that read “FBI.” The New Orleans police chief, an enormous black man, sports a starched white duty shirt that strains under his bulk. Four stars adorn the blue boards on each hamlike shoulder.

To the right of the chief sits a rail of a guy who has to be Mayeux’s partner. He looks like lukewarm hell. Eyes like quarter slots on a Coke machine, hands quivering with the irregular tremor that signals serious sleep deprivation. I know the symptoms well. There is a busty Hispanic secretary beside him. Her left ear is cocked toward the chief, but her eyes stay on the young FBI agents.

“Gentlemen,” says Detective Mayeux, “Mr. Harper Cole.”

Mayeux is telling me names, but they don’t find a permanent memory address. Three of the FBI agents wear blue suits, the fourth charcoal gray. Does this mean he’s in charge? He’s clearly the oldest, yet he wears his graying hair longer than the others. Mayeux speaks his name softly, giving it unintended emphasis.

Arthur Lenz. Doctor Arthur Lenz.

Of course. Lenz is the shrink.

Whenever I meet interesting strangers, I find myself casting them as stand-ins for the stars of my memory. Sometimes I meet an Edmond O’Brien or a George Sanders, maybe a Robert Ryan. I remember those guys from when I was a kid staying up late with my dad, watching Channel 4 out of New Orleans. So it’s a habit, trying to slot strangers into the celluloid templates in my head. Some people are just extras, like Mayeux’s partner and the secretary. But every once in a while I meet the genuine article. Someone who doesn’t just remind me of, say, Fredric March, he could be the man.

Doctor Lenz might be the genuine article. He is physically tall—this is obvious even though he is seated—and yet … he is limited. Like an actor who never made the jump to the big screen. Perpetually middle-aged, WASP or WASP wannabe, expensive suit, heavy on control. His charisma is undeniable, but somehow he finishes out more TV than film.

In the uncomfortable silence that follows the introductions, one of the blue-suited FBI men—Baxter, I think—gives the police chief an annoyed glance. Then he looks me in the eye and says, “Good morning, Mr. Cole,” giving the “mister” that special and contemptuous stress that military men reserve for civilians. “I’m Special Agent Daniel Baxter.”

I didn’t notice Baxter at first because sizewise he blends with the other two blue-suits. But I see him now. And I get the feeling he’s hiding. In the Biblical sense, as in hiding his light under a bushel. He’s got weight behind his dark eyes, but he’s not a leading man. He’s a tough-as-nails sergeant from a black-and-white war movie, thrust into command by the death of his lieutenant.

As if summoned to life by Agent Baxter’s words, the police chief greets me in a startling James Earl Jones basso. “Mr. Cole, I’m Chief Sidney Tobin. I thank you for coming down so early today. Needless to say, we’re all very interested in whatever you might have to say about these murders. You have our undivided attention.”

Detective Mayeux sits, offering me the chair at the head of the table as he does, but I remain standing. I am six feet and one inch tall, 195 pounds, and I know my size gives me a psychological edge when I choose to use it. Today I figure I need any edge I can get.

“Before I say anything,” I begin, “there is one very important thing I didn’t tell Detective Mayeux on the phone.”

“What’s that?” rumbles the chief.

“I’m pretty sure I know who killed those women.”

Astonished silence blankets the room. Dr. Lenz breaks the impasse. “You have a name, Mr. Cole?”

“And an address.”

“Christ!” cries Mayeux. “Give it to me.”

I open my briefcase and remove a single sheet of paper. From it I read: “David M. Strobekker. That’s S-T-R-O-B-E-K-K-E-R. 1402 Moorland Avenue, Edina, Minnesota. It’s a suburb of Minneapolis.”

“What else you know about this guy?” barks Mayeux’s partner.

“He has a checking account at the Norwest Bank in Minneapolis. That’s all I know for sure.”

“Run it through the computer, Mike,” commands the chief. “Right now.”

“I can access the Bureau computers by phone,” one of the younger FBI men tells Mayeux, who shoots me a furious glance on his way out.

“I could be sued for giving you that name,” I tell them.

“Let us worry about that,” says Baxter.

“The FBI will provide lawyers to defend me in a civil case?”

Arthur Lenz’s face shows a trace of bemusement.

“Let’s stick to these murders,” says the police chief. “Tell us how you came to know those six names and why you suspected the women might be in trouble.”

The door opens and closes behind me. Mayeux reclaims his chair on the right side of the table. “Kiesha’s checking on Strobekker, Chief.”

“Stop me if I say something you don’t understand,” I tell them.

The two younger FBI agents smirk at this, but I’m fairly certain they’ll soon be strafing me with stupid questions.

“I work for a company called EROS,” I say slowly. “That’s an acronym—E-R-O-S—which stands for Erotic Realtime Online Stimulation.” Seeing a couple of leers, I ignore the mythological connection and push on. “We’re an online service that caters to a wide range of clients interested in human sexuality. EROS is a New York–based corporation legally chartered in the State of Delaware—”

“Who owns it?” interrupts Baxter.

“A widow named Jan Krislov.”

“What?”

From the sick look on Daniel Baxter’s face, I can see that he’s familiar with Jan Krislov in some capacity. A flash of instinct tells me it’s her fierce championship of electronic privacy rights.

“Please continue, Mr. Cole,” instructs Chief Tobin.

“Anyone in the continental US can have full online access to EROS twenty-four hours a day. We also have European subscribers who reach us through the Internet. There are three levels of forum traffic, which people access under aliases—code names—that insure complete anonymity. Level One is the most diverse. Clients use it to discuss all sorts of sexual topics, from psychology to medical problems to privacy issues.”

“Jan fucking Krislov,” mutters Baxter.

I take a breath. Hearing no questions, I focus on Mayeux and continue. “Level Two is the first of the two fantasy forums. In Level Two clients write about their fantasies, correspond with each other through forum messages and email, or sometimes just eavesdrop on the fantasies of other subscribers. The exchanges can be group or, if a client prefers, he or she can switch down to one-on-one contact, completely private. We call that a private room. There are also files available at all times from the online library. Popular exchanges from past sessions, stuff like that.”

“Stroke files,” says Mayeux’s partner, opening his red eyes in a glare of challenge. “Right? They’re not talking to anybody realtime, so their hands are free. Jack-off time, right?”

The man is crude, but not far off the mark. “That’s probably a fair assessment.”

“What about Level Three?” asks Doctor Lenz, his eyes alight with fascination.

“Level Three …” I often stumble here when explaining EROS to anyone outside the company. I never know quite how to describe Level Three. To be honest, I don’t monitor it that much. At least I didn’t until I began to have my suspicions about the “missing” women. Most Level Three traffic is nocturnal, and thus Miles’s gig. That’s another reason I allowed him to persuade me to put off acting for as long as I did.

“Level Three,” I say again, “is what you might call the major league of sexual forums. The dialogues are pretty heavy, basically no-holds-barred. Don’t get the wrong idea—it’s not kiddy porn or anything, but—”

“It’s hot,” Dr. Lenz finishes.

“Pretty hot, yeah. Until three weeks ago we didn’t even allow transmission of graphic images, but believe me, words alone are powerful enough. We’re talking bondage, S and M, homoerotic sex, you name it. Straight sex too, of course.”

“How much does it cost to join EROS?” asks Baxter.

“A thousand dollars to join—”

Mayeux whistles long and low.

“—plus five hundred a month flat fee after that, with various payment arrangements. For women it’s three hundred a month. EROS has 1–800 access numbers, so nobody has any long-distance charges to worry about.”

“All the women but Wheat were in their twenties,” says Baxter. “Where did they get that kind of money?”

“Inherited it,” I reply. “A lot of rich girls on EROS. We get a lot of trophy wives too. They marry money—old money—fake orgasms at night, and log onto EROS during the day. It’s safer than adultery, especially in the age of AIDS.”

“Karin Wheat was a member of this EROS thing?” Chief Tobin interrupts.

“Yes. For about three months now.”

“And those other women? All of them were members?”

“Right. Most of them had been subscribing for more than a year at the time they dropped off the net.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘dropped off?’” Lenz asks.

“Just a minute, Doctor,” says Chief Tobin, reasserting the temporary supremacy he enjoys in his headquarters. “Mr. Cole, you mean to tell me all these murder victims were members of this super-expensive computer club or whatever it is, and no homicide cop in L.A. or San Francisco or Houston or Portland or the other places managed to link these crimes with billing receipts from your company?”

“I can explain that.” I pause, realizing I’m more interested in asking questions than answering them. “Honestly, I’m more surprised by the fact that the murders weren’t linked before now by physical evidence. No offense, but isn’t that what you guys do?”

“Goddamn,” growls Mayeux’s partner.

“Plenty of reasons for that,” injects one of the FBI agents.

“Different weapon in every case,” says his blue-suited cousin. “Forensic evidence indicating multiple perps.”

“Multiple perps at the same scene,” adds the first agent.

“Which is rare,” says Baxter, glaring at the younger men. “Highly unusual.”

“We’re still getting in evidence reports, Chief,” says Mayeux, “but the M.O. does seem to have varied a great deal in almost every case.”

“As did the signature,” says Baxter.

“The killer left notes?” I ask.

Baxter shakes his head. “‘Signature’ is the offender’s behavior at the crime scene.” He looks at me closely, as if judging whether to continue. “Behavior beyond that strictly necessary to commit the crime. Individualized behavior.”

“Oh.”

“There is no signature in these cases,” Dr. Lenz says imperiously. “It’s all staging. But the trophies in California varied not an iota.”

“Trophies?” I echo. “What kind of trophies?”

“Why don’t you tell us?” Mayeux’s partner asks, pointing an index finger at my chest.

The room goes silent, and in that instant I feel the first ripple of real fear in my chest. “Am I a suspect in this case?”

Several looks are exchanged, none directed at me.

“Do I need to call an attorney?”

Finally Baxter breaks the silence. “Mr. Cole, I’m going to go out on a limb here. I am not merely a special agent. I’m the chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit. We profile and help the police hunt violent serial offenders, whether they’re killers, rapists, arsonists, bombers, or kidnappers. When crimes of this nature are committed, the individual who reports any of them is always considered a suspect. Serial offenders frequently report their own crimes as part of an attempt to avoid being found out, or to gain enjoyment by assisting in an investigation of themselves. In this case you’ve reported all the crimes. When I was apprised of this situation last night, the Unit began an exhaustive check of your background, including all your movements during the past two years. It sounds drastic, but it’s standard procedure.”

Baxter glances at his watch, which he wears with the face inside the wrist, military style. “Dr. Lenz and I have spent the past few hours putting together a preliminary profile of the offender in these murders. And frankly, it’s one of the most difficult jobs we’ve ever undertaken. At this point I won’t say why, but Dr. Lenz believes that you are probably not the killer in this case. I concur. I’m not saying you couldn’t be involved in some way—it would be irresponsible of me to rule you out—but I’m willing to proceed today on the assumption that you are what you claim to be—a Good Samaritan coming forward in an attempt to see justice done. Obviously, other women’s lives are at risk as we speak. An atmosphere of cooperation is the best thing for all of us at this point. If you wish to consult an attorney, that is your right, but at this time no one here”—Baxter fires a sharp glance at the New Orleans police officers—“intends to charge you with any crime.”

When he finishes, no one speaks. Everyone but Baxter and Lenz seems to be looking at his shoes. I may be making the worst mistake of my life, but I decide to trust Baxter, at least to the extent of not calling an attorney.

“What kind of trophies?” I ask again.

“An unusual one,” Baxter says thoughtfully.

“Maybe he’s a taxidermist,” cracks Mayeux’s partner, winking at Mayeux.

“Make a note of that, Maria,” says Chief Tobin, and watches the brunette pounce on her notepad.

“Taxidermists do not mount glands,” Dr. Lenz says scornfully.

“Houston P.D. says he took the whole goddamn head,” snaps Mayeux, unwilling to tolerate the psychiatrist’s superior tone. “And that’s what he did here.”

I am looking for a place to sit down, but no one notices. I whisper, “Someone cut off Karin Wheat’s head?”

“That’s classified information,” says Baxter.

Mayeux snorts at the spook-speak.

“That is not accurate, Mr. Cole,” corrects Chief Tobin. “Someone did cut off Ms Wheat’s head, but that information is not classified. Still, I would strongly suggest that you keep the knowledge to yourself.” The chief shoots me a very clear look: If you fuck up my investigation in any way, I will hound you to a pauper’s grave. “Now,” he says, his gentle bass voice filling the conference room like soft light. “What about my question? Credit card receipts from EROS, canceled checks, phone bills, and suchlike? Why didn’t this link the crimes?”

“Chief,” says Baxter, “despite our best efforts to familiarize city police departments with our VICAP program, we still have a pretty poor compliance rate. Not nearly enough officers take the time to fill out their violent offender profiles and send them in. This EROS connection is exactly the kind of thing that slips through the cracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if homicide detectives in one or more of the involved departments have just such a receipt in an evidence drawer somewhere, but have no idea that detectives in any other cities have the same thing.”

“All our fault, as usual,” grumbles Mayeux’s partner.

“Five of these six cases were sent in to VICAP,” says Mayeux, giving his partner covering fire. “But they weren’t linked. No EROS connection showed up. All had computers in their homes, but nothing related to EROS on their drives. Why not?”

“Well,” I say, finally regaining sufficient composure to rejoin the conversation. “As long as the killer wasn’t rushed, he could erase the EROS software from the victims’ computers and take away any manuals they had. Although it would take a real wizard to wipe every trace from the hard disks. You might have one of your people look into that.”

Baxter gives me a wry smile. “No traces so far.”

“Karin Wheat paid EROS with her Visa card,” says Mayeux. “I checked as soon as you told me she was a member.”

“She’ll be the only one that did,” I tell him.

“How do you know that?” asks Dr. Lenz, his heavy-lidded eyes probing mine.

“Because every other woman—victim, I mean—had set up her account on the blind-draft account system.”

“What’s that?” asks the chief. “A direct bank draft?”

“Yes, but not the kind you imagine. A lot of EROS subscribers—particularly women—are married, and don’t want their spouses to know they’re online with us. Some log on only from their workplace. Others from home, but only when their husbands are away. Ms Krislov makes every effort to ensure that any woman who wants to connect with us has the ability to do so without stigma. To facilitate this, she came up with the ‘blind draft’ policy. If a woman doesn’t want her husband to know she’s online—or vice versa—we advise the user to set up a checking account at a bank not used by the spouse—an out-of-town bank, if possible—and use a PO box as her address. We then arrange to draft this secret account directly for payment of the monthly fee.”

“Son of a bitch,” says Mayeux’s partner.

“Every one of the murdered women was on a secret account?” Mayeux asks.

“Except Karin Wheat.”

“But three of them weren’t married,” Mayeux points out. “Who were they hiding from? Boyfriends?”

“Or girlfriends,” says Dr. Lenz.

“What about phone bills?” asks Mayeux. “Wouldn’t connect-time show up on the phone bills of all the victims?”

“It’s an 800 number, remember?”

“Shit. So after they were killed, their secret accounts eventually dropped to zero?”

“Eventually is exactly why I got suspicious. EROS isn’t like CompuServe or America Online, where you might lose interest but keep paying the nine ninety-five per month, thinking you’ll get back into it. We’re talking three to five hundred bucks a month. EROS users may be wealthy, but when they get bored they close those direct-draft accounts.”

“And the murdered women didn’t,” says Mayeux.

“Right. And two particular women—the third and fourth victims—were very active online. Then poof, one day they were gone. But their bank drafts kept coming in. That didn’t fit the pattern. I’m not saying it had never happened before—it had. That’s why I didn’t call the police immediately. But the longer the accounts stayed active without the women showing up online, the more uncomfortable I got. I started probing the accounting program to see how many blind-draft clients were paying regularly but not logging onto the system. There were about fifty, enough to make me think I might be paranoid. And enough for the company to decide not to investigate. But then I remembered that victims three and four had talked to this Strobekker guy a lot. So I started watching for him. Then I started printing out his exchanges. I also asked about him in private email. That’s how I came up with the names of the first and second victims. And while I was doing that, he was setting up and killing five and six. He was also talking to at least twenty other women during this period as well.”

“Doesn’t the company try to contact people when their accounts drop to zero?” Mayeux asks. “In case it was just an oversight?”

“No. It’s understood by both parties that if a blind-draft account has insufficient funds for even a single payment, the company assumes the client no longer desires its services, and access is immediately terminated.”

“I don’t buy that,” says Mayeux’s partner. “I don’t believe any company would kiss off that kind of bread without making sure the client wanted to quit.”

How can I explain this to them? “Jan Krislov is the sole owner of EROS. And whether you believe it or not, she’s not in it for the money.”

“Oh, I believe it,” mutters Baxter.

“Then why does she charge so damn much for the service?” Mayeux’s partner asks doggedly.

A faint smile crosses Arthur Lenz’s patrician face. This alone draws all eyes to him. “The high fee functions as a crude screening system,” he says softly. “Correct, Mr. Cole?”

“What kind of screening system?” asks Mayeux’s partner.

Lenz answers for me. “By charging an exorbitant rate, Ms Krislov ensures that her online environment is accessible only to those who have attained a certain position in life.”

“Flawed system,” says Mayeux. “It assumes rich people aren’t assholes.”

“I said it was crude,” Lenz admits. “But I imagine it works fairly well.”

“It works perfectly,” I say, unable to keep the admiration out of my voice. “Because there are other constraints on membership.”

Curiosity flares in Lenz’s eyes. “Such as?”

“EROS is open to any woman who can pay the fee, but any man who wants to join has to submit a writing sample for evaluation.”

“Who evaluates the sample?”

“Jan Krislov.”

“What are the criteria?”

Unable to resist, I point at Mayeux’s partner. “He wouldn’t make the cut.”

Mayeux lays an arm across his partner’s chest and asks, “How many people belong to this thing?”

“Five thousand. Half of them male, half female. The numerical relation is strictly maintained.”

“Gays allowed?” Lenz asks.

“Encouraged. And contained within that ratio.”

Mayeux shakes his head. “You’re telling us this Krislov woman has personally evaluated twenty-five hundred writing samples from men writing about sex?”

“Personally approved twenty-five hundred samples. She’s evaluated a lot more than that. There’s a waiting list of twenty-eight hundred men at this moment.”

“So Jan Krislov sits up at night reading her own personal Penthouse letters,” Baxter says in a gloating voice. “I know some senators who’ll eat that up.”

“Probably beats watching Leno,” pipes up the local FBI agent. “For a woman, I mean,” he adds hastily.

Dr. Lenz leans forward in his chair. “I doubt these samples are as crude as you assume. Are they, Mr. Cole?”

“No. There are some gifted people on EROS.”

Mayeux’s partner snorts.

“To wit, Karin Wheat,” says Lenz.

“One more thing,” I add. “Not all the men on EROS are wealthy. Certain men have submitted writing samples that impressed Ms Krislov so much that she gives them access free of charge. Sort of a scholarship program. She says it improves the overall experience for the women.”

The secretary nods her head in a gesture I read as Right on, girl.

“I’d be very interested in studying some of these online exchanges,” Lenz says. “You have some in that briefcase?”

“Yes.”

Baxter asks, “Does anything stand out in your mind that these women had in common?”

I pause for a moment. “Most of them spent a lot of time in Level Two—my level. Their fantasies were fairly conventional, by which I mean they involved more romance than sex. They could get kinky, but they weren’t sickos. No torture or revolting bodily substances. The truth is, I don’t know anything about these women in real life. Only their fantasies.”

“Their fantasies may be the most important thing about them,” says Lenz.

“Maybe,” I allow, “but that’s not the sense I got. I’m not sure why. What did they have in common in real life?”

“None of your goddamn business,” snaps Mayeux’s partner.

“I see. Well, I guess that’s my position too.”

Dr. Lenz inclines his head toward Baxter, who says, “All the victims were under twenty-six years old except Karin Wheat, who was forty-seven. All were college educated, all Caucasian except one, who was Indian.”

“Native American?” asks Chief Tobin.

“Indian Indian,” says Mayeux’s partner, tapping a file on the table. “Dot on the fucking forehead.”

“I don’t recall an Indian name,” I say, almost to myself.

“Pinky Millstein,” says Baxter. “Maiden name Jathar. Married to a litigation attorney who traveled a lot. There was also an Indian hair found at one of the other crime scenes. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Well … one of Strobekker’s aliases is Shiva. That’s Indian, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Dr. Lenz says softly. “Shiva the Destroyer. What are his other aliases?”

“Prometheus. Hermes.”

The psychiatrist remains impassive. “What about the victims? Does anything come to mind that links their online code names?”

“Not that I could see.”

“What else stands out in your mind?” asks Baxter.

“Strobekker himself. No matter what alias he uses, his style is unmistakable.”

“How so?”

“He’s very literate, for one thing. Intuitive, as well. One minute he’s writing extemporaneous poetry, the next he cuts right to the bone with some insight into a woman’s character, almost as though he can answer whatever question is in her mind before she asks it. But the strangest thing is this: he must be the best damned typist in the world. Lightning fast, and he never makes a mistake.”

“Never?” Lenz asks, leaning forward.

“Not in the first eighty-five percent of contact.”

“What do you mean?”

“With the sixth victim, and with Karin Wheat, I realized that Strobekker began making typographic errors—just like anyone else—a few days before each woman dropped offline. When I went back and studied my printouts of the killer-victim exchanges, I saw that the typos began at about the eighty-five percent point in each relationship. Of course, I didn’t know anyone was being killed.”

“You sound like you’ve distilled this thing down to a science,” says Baxter.

“I work with numbers.”

“Running this sex thing?” asks Mayeux.

I chuckle bitterly. “No, I got into EROS for fun. You believe that? I earn my living trading futures.”

My audience stares as if I’ve announced that I am an alchemist.

“In a dink farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta?” asks one of the young FBI agents. “Who are your clients? Farmers hedging their crops?”

“I only have one client.”

“Who?” Mayeux asks suspiciously.

“Himself,” says Arthur Lenz.

Dr. Lenz is obviously the alchemist here. “That’s right. I only trade my own account.”

“You some kind of millionaire?” asks Mayeux’s partner. “A goddamn gentleman farmer or something?”

“Keep a civil tongue, Poché,” snaps the chief.

“I do all right.”

“What about the final fifteen percent of contact?” Lenz asks, plainly irritated by the squabbling.

“He makes mistakes. About as many as anyone else. And his typing gets slower. A lot slower.”

“Maybe he starts jacking off with one hand as he gets closer to the time of the hit,” suggests Poché.

The chief frowns but lets that pass.

Dr. Lenz strikes a pose of intense meditation as the door behind me opens swiftly. I turn and see a black woman in her twenties holding a computer printout in her hand. There is handwriting scrawled across it in blue ink.

“What is it, Kiesha?” asks the chief.

“We traced Strobekker, David M.”

A cumulative catching of breath in the conference room. “Rap sheet?” Mayeux asks tentatively.

“No.”

“Minnesota DMV?”

“No citations. Had one car—a Mercedes—but the plate expired last year.”

“So who is the guy?”

“An accountant for a glitzy firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

I realize that Kiesha is trying to communicate something to Chief Tobin through eye contact alone. Despite her telepathic urgency, she is unsuccessful.

“What is it, dear?” asks Arthur Lenz, as though he has known the woman since childhood.

“He’s dead,” she says, almost as if against her will. “David M. Strobekker was beaten to death in an alley in Minneapolis eleven months ago.”

A hot tingle races across my forearms.

“Holy shit,” says Mayeux. “What are we dealing with here?”

Daniel Baxter points a finger as thick as a Colt Python barrel at Kiesha. “Details?”

“Minneapolis homicide says it looked like a mugging gone bad. Strobekker was single, probably homosexual. He was slumming on a bad stretch of Hennepin Avenue. His skull was so pulped his boss couldn’t recognize his face.”

Dr. Lenz emits a small sound of what I can only interpret as pleasure.

“Positive ID?” asks Mayeux.

“Dental records and a thumbprint,” Kiesha replies. “His company kept thumbprint files; don’t ask me why. But it was Strobekker for sure.”

“Not for sure,” I say, surprised to hear my own voice.

“Why not?” Baxter asks sharply.

“Well … say Strobekker is the killer. Say he decided to fake his own death so that he’d never be suspected in later crimes. He takes a thumbprint from a wino, puts that in his own personnel file, then kills the wino and pulps his face.”

“What about the dental records?” asks Baxter.

I shrug. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

“You watch too many movies.”

“I must see the body immediately,” Lenz says to Baxter, his eyes still on me.

“Jeff, call the Minneapolis field office,” orders Baxter. “We want a judge who’ll give us an exhumation order ASAP. Then call the airport and book the first flight up there.”

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“A pineal gland, among other things,” says Lenz, watching me closely. “Ever heard of it?”

I shake my head while I memorize the term. My knowledge of anatomy is limited, but my wife’s is encyclopedic.

“The two women who died in California were linked because a pathologist from San Francisco happened to mention an unsolved homicide case to a colleague at a convention. A woman had been murdered by strangulation, then had both eyes removed and wooden stakes driven through the sockets. When the pathologist sectioned the brain, he found that the points of both stakes terminated in the third ventricle of the brain—a little too perfectly for him. Stranger still, he found that part of the pineal gland was missing, which the stakes would not account for. The colleague who heard this—a pathologist from Los Angeles—had an unsolved homicide that was completely different in almost every respect. A woman had been beaten to death with a claw hammer, probably by someone she knew. Her brain sustained horrific damage. But this did not explain why much of her pineal gland was gone. This chance conversation ultimately linked the crimes. Then the police promptly charged down the wrong track and decided they were dealing with cult murders.”

Lenz’s tone of voice when he says “police” earns him few friends in this room. He points his index finger at me.

“You tied those two victims to four others, through EROS. All four of those women also died from severe head wounds, or sustained postmortem head trauma. Pistol shot, shotgun blast, lethal fall. One was decapitated, as was Karin Wheat. We’re exhuming the first three and conducting repeat autopsies on the heads. If the condition of the brains permits it, I strongly suspect we will find that these women are missing all or part of their pineal glands.”

The psychiatrist is staring at me as though he expects me to start filling in gaps for him.

“What the hell does the pineal gland do?” I ask.

As Lenz and Baxter stare silently at me, my survival instinct tells me it’s time to test the bars on this cage. “Look,” I say, directing my words to Chief Tobin, “I think you guys have definitely stepped out of my area of expertise. Can I go home now?”

“Not just yet,” Tobin says. “Do people ever use their real names on this sex network?”

I try to suppress the feeling that I’m going to be spending the night in a New Orleans hotel, if not jail. “Almost never. The code names are what allow them the freedom to say and be whatever they wish. They might exchange phone numbers to facilitate an f2f meeting, but—”

“What’s f2f?” asks the chief.

“Face-to-face.”

“Oh. So did the victims give him their numbers?”

“Not in the conversations I’ve printed out.”

“So how do you think he’s learning their names?”

“I think he’s somehow gained access to our accounting files. There’s a master client list in the company’s administrative computer, with account numbers, addresses, everything. That’s where I got Strobekker’s name.”

“Who has access to that list?” asks Baxter.

“Myself, Miles Turner, Jan Krislov. Maybe a few techs. That’s it. The computer handles the billing automatically. It’s a pretty sophisticated system.”

“Who is Miles Turner?” asks Lenz.

“He’s the primary sysop. We grew up together in Mississippi, but he lives in New York now. He’s the one who got me into this job.”

“So you think the killer is hacking into the accounting database,” says Baxter.

“I don’t know. Miles tells me it’s impossible, that the list is protected like nuclear launch codes, but as far as I can see it’s the only way the killer could get the names. He must have seen that master list at least once. Maybe printed it out.”

“Not the only way,” interrupts Mayeux’s partner. “You or this Miles character could have given the list to someone. Or sold it to them.”

I’m on the verge of telling this guy to fuck himself when Baxter asks, “Who does security for EROS?”

“Miles,” I reply, still watching Mayeux’s scowling partner.

“This Miles Turner is highly proficient with computers?” asks Baxter.

“‘Highly’ doesn’t come close.”

“He has a degree?”

“MIT.”

“Serious program,” says one of the younger FBI agents.

“Graduate degree?” Baxter presses.

“Degrees, plural. I don’t know the exact names, but his specialty is computational physics.”

“If he’s so damned smart,” asks Mayeux’s partner, “how did Strobekker break through his security?”

It’s clear that everyone detests this little rat as much as I do, but his question is a good one. “I don’t know. And he refuses to believe anyone has.”

“How many techs are there?” asks Baxter.

“Four, five. I’m not positive they have access to the master list, but I think if they wanted to see it, they could figure a way. They’re good. Miles handpicked every one.”

The two younger FBI agents are murmuring between themselves. From the lips of the one with whippet eyes I catch, “… nail that fuck with a phone trace … subcontract some NSA geeks … next log-on … no time—” before Baxter silences them with a glare.

“Mr. Cole,” he says gently, “if you don’t mind, we’d like you to draw us a floor plan of the EROS offices before you go.”

This startles me. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve never been there.”

“Never?”

“They’re obsessively private about the place. Why do you need that anyway?”

No one answers.

“You’re not gearing up for some kind of Waco thing, are you? This is nothing like that. There’s a reason for all the secrecy. We have very famous clients.”

“Relax,” Baxter says. “We’re not the ATF.”

“You’re all initials to me, Mr. Baxter.”

“We can arrest your ass right now!” yells Mayeux’s partner, finally losing control. “I don’t know why the hell we haven’t already!”

“Go ahead!” I shout back, my anger boiling over. “You want to arrest me for linking these homicides for you? The Press might be real interested to hear a story like that. In fact, my wife knows one of the TV news anchors here from her school days. Maybe I should give her a call.”

“Let’s everybody just calm down,” Chief Tobin booms. With his department under fire from all quarters for corruption, the last thing he needs is more press scrutiny.

“Now can I go home?” I ask again.

The chief looks hard at Baxter, who in turn looks to Lenz. Lenz finally gives a reserved nod. Baxter reaches into his inside jacket pocket and passes me a card. “This is the number of our headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. I want you to check in once a day for the next few days. Obviously we’ll need to speak with you again. Possibly at some length.”

Mayeux’s partner looks like he just swallowed a cigarette butt with his coffee, but Chief Tobin’s hard gaze keeps him muzzled.

“I’d like to study your EROS printouts on the plane,” says Lenz. “You are going to leave them with me?”

I open my case, lift out the thick stack of pages, and drop it at the center of the table. “They’re all yours. But when Jan Krislov lands on me with both feet and a dozen lawyers, I’m going to expect some payback from you guys.”

“Leave Krislov to us,” says Baxter.

Measuring Daniel Baxter against my mental image of EROS’s cold-blooded CEO, I stifle a retort and turn to go. One foot is outside the doorway when Lenz says, “Mr. Cole?”

I turn back, expecting some Columbo trick just as I taste freedom. Lenz smiles oddly. “What instrument do you play?”

The question throws me off balance. Is this some bullshit Barbara Walters question? What kind of tree would I like to be? But of course it’s not. I do play an instrument, and somehow Lenz knows that. “Guitar,” I answer blankly.

The psychiatrist nods, a trace of disappointment in his eyes. “Do you sing?”

“Some people think so. I never did.”

The rest of the group looks from me to Lenz, then back again, trying to understand this odd coda to our meeting. My bewilderment holds me in place until the psychiatrist says, “Calluses, Mr. Cole. You have well-developed calluses on the fingertips of your left hand.”

The hand closes involuntarily. I squint at Lenz, imprinting his face in my memory, then turn and step into the hall.

On my way out of the station, I pass a knot of middle-aged men in sweat-stained suits. They are obviously waiting for something. Their angry voices mark them as anything but Southerners, and before I am out of earshot I realize they are waiting for me.

I quicken my steps.

Once outside, I reflect on Dr. Lenz’s little performance. He’s an observant man. But is he smart? A smart man would simply have noted the calluses and bade me farewell. Unless he felt that quickly discovering what instrument I play was important. But even then, a smart man would have remained silent after I answered his question, leaving me mystified by his deductive skills. Yet Arthur Lenz insisted on doing a Sherlock Holmes impression for his captive audience of Lestrades. Why?

The doctor was showing off. I don’t know why, but this is somehow important. I cannot escape the feeling that the entire low-key meeting was a carefully orchestrated interrogation designed to look and feel like anything but that. Baxter and Lenz playing good cop while the NOPD played the heavy. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that. But if they really suspect me, why not arrest me and give me the third degree? Or throw me to the out-of-state wolves who were waiting for me?

One thing is certain. The FBI controlled that meeting. I am free because they want me free. Why do they want that? Could the FBI—like Chief Tobin—be afraid of the media? It’s possible. After seven murders—eight including Strobekker—the Bureau’s elite serial killer unit has managed to link exactly none of the crimes. Wrongly accusing the good citizen who connected the murders for them might make their precious Unit an object of ridicule on Nightline, not to mention Hard Copy, which is already feeding on the case.

I have only intuition to go on, but the voiceless voice in my head has rarely failed me. As I pull the inevitable parking ticket off the windshield of my Explorer and drop the crumpled ball into the gutter, that voice is saying one thing loud and clear: You have more problems today than you had yesterday.

SIX

One of my office telephones is ringing when I turn the key in the front door of the farmhouse. Thinking it’s Drewe, I race to catch it.

“Hello, snitch.”

This is not Drewe. The voice in the earpiece is at once strange and familiar. It belongs to Miles Turner.

“You’ve really shaken things up, haven’t you?” he says.

“What have you heard?” I ask, shocked at the sauna-level heat that has accumulated inside the house during the day.

“Jan is very upset with you.”

“I figured. Did the FBI call her?”

I hear a faint tsk. “Did they phone her? No, Harper. That would be much too easy for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. They showed up at the door of our offices with a search warrant.”

“What? At EROS? When?”

“Two hours ago. Special agents from the New York office.”

“What did they see?”

“Not much. Jan locked the master client list in the file room the minute Reception buzzed her and said the FBI was in the building. She refused to give them a key, and that room is like a vault. Actually, it is a vault. It reminds me of your grandfather’s bomb shelter—Eisenhower chic. It’s got a time lock. Seventy-two hours before that monster opens. I guess the FBI could blow it open or cut it with a blowtorch, but they haven’t tried. They just posted two men outside it. They didn’t even confiscate our servers. Jan thinks the raid was pure intimidation.”

“I don’t think so, Miles. All six of those women I told you about were murdered this year. Karin Wheat makes seven. And David Strobekker, the man I thought was the killer, makes eight.”

“So says the FBI.”

“Come on, man. Wake up and smell the fucking coffee! I overheard one guy whispering about phone traces, bringing in the NSA, George Orwell stuff.”

“As a matter of fact, Jan is about to give the FBI permission to set up tracing equipment right here in the office.”

This stops me. “But you just said she hid the master client list from them.”

“She did. But Jan’s no fool. She knows she’s walking a fine legal line. There is apparently some question of a duty to warn. Warn the subscribers, I mean. She feels that by cooperating with the FBI in tracing Strobekker—or whoever he is—she demonstrates that she’s not obstructing the FBI merely for the sake of doing it.”

“At least somebody up there is thinking straight. How long do they think it will take to trace Strobekker if he does log on again?”

“If he’s stupid, no time at all. Personally, I don’t believe they have a chance in hell.”

“You sound glad about it, damn it!”

Miles laughs softly. “I haven’t heard you this excited in a while. Did Karin’s death affect you so deeply?”

I swallow. “You knew her?”

“Of course. We exchanged quite a few messages during the wee hours. Karin was one of the pillars of Level Three. A thoroughly interesting woman.”

I think quickly. “I … I know that. But—”

“But you never saw any of my aliases in exchanges with her, right? That’s what you’re thinking?”

“Yes.”

“I have many names, Harper. Even you don’t know them all.” He pauses. “You don’t always tell women you’re a sysop, do you? That you know who they really are? That would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it? It’s amazing how the perceived anonymity of a code name lets them open up, isn’t it? Especially the actresses. There’s nothing quite like boffing a three-million-dollar thespian online while she thinks you think she’s someone else, is there? You can play them like your guitar then, can’t you?”

I say nothing.

“And how is Drewe Welby, M.D. taking all of this? Did she finally break the camel’s back and send you running to the FBI?”

“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.

“I took bids on my building,” he says, looking back over his shirtless shoulder at Drewe. “All the local boys made their plays, o’course, first-class job like that. And all their bids were close to even. Then I get a bid from this nigger out of Jackson, name of Boyte. His bid was eight thousand less than the lowest of the local boys.”

“Did you take it?” Patrick asks.

Erin Graham—Patrick’s wife—turns from her perch at poolside. She has been sitting with her tanned back to us, her long legs dangling in the water, watching her three-year-old daughter with an eagle eye. Erin’s dark eyes glower at her father, but Bob pretends not to notice.

“Not yet,” he says. “See, the local boys somehow got wind of what the nigger bid—”

“Somehow?” Drewe echoes, expressing her suspicion that her father told his cronies about their minority competition.

“Anyhow,” Bob plows on, “it turns out the reason this nigger can afford to bid so low is that he’s getting some kind of cheap money from the government. Some kind of incentive—read handout—which naturally ain’t available to your white contractors. Now I ask you, is that fair? I’m all for letting the nigger compete right alongside Jack and Nub, but for the government to use our tax money to help him undercut hardworking men like that—”

“Are you sure the black contractor’s getting government help?” Drewe asks.

“Hell yes, I’m sure. Nub told me himself.”

“So what are you going to do?” asks Patrick, as if he really cares, which I know he does not.

“What can I do?” Bob says haplessly. “I’ve got to give it to the nigger, don’t I?”

“DADDY, THAT IS ENOUGH!”

Patrick and I look up, startled by the shrill voice. Erin has stood up beside the pool and she is pointing a long finger at her father. “You may do and say as you wish at your house any time you wish—except when my daughter is present. Holly will not grow up handicapped by the prejudices of this state.”

Bob looks at Patrick and me and rolls his eyes, which from long experience we sons-in-law have no trouble translating as, What do you expect from a girl who ran off to New York City when she turned eighteen and lived among Yankees?

“Calm down, honey,” Bob says. “To you he’s an African American. Five years ago he was black, before that a Negro, before that colored. How am I supposed to keep up? To me he’s a nigger. His own friends call him nigger. What’s the difference? Holly won’t remember any of this in five minutes anyway.”

To be fair, Bob Anderson would never use this kind of language in mixed company—mixed racial company—or in front of whites he did not know and feel comfortable with. Unless, of course, someone made him mad. To Bob Anderson, “politically correct” means you salute the flag, work your butt off, pay your taxes, pray in school, and you by God go when Uncle Sam calls you, no questions asked. I could ridicule his views, but I won’t. Guys like Bob Anderson fought and died for this country years before I was born. Guys like Bob Anderson liberated Nordhausen and Buchenwald. Bob himself fought in Korea. So I keep my thirty-three-year-old mouth shut.

But Erin doesn’t. “Goddamn it, Daddy, I’m serious!” she snaps, her tanned cheeks quivering. “Holly’s like a sponge and you know it!”

Bob’s face glows pink. He half rises from his reclining lawn chair. “You hear that, Margaret? Your daughter just took the Lord’s name in vain, and she’s on me for calling a spade a spade! I think any civilized person would agree that blasphemy is far worse than saying nigger now and again!”

Margaret Anderson snores beneath her straw hat.

“No it’s not, Daddy,” Drewe says softly from the table. “But you’ll never understand why.”

I am enthralled by the continuing role reversal Erin and Drewe have been undergoing since they were kids. When they were teenagers, it was Drewe who almost daily pushed her father to the point that he locked her in her room or thrashed her with his belt. She constantly tested her limits, proving only that she was as stubborn as he was. Erin was a creature of equanimity, slipping through life with no resistance at all. Yet now that Erin is a mother, it is she who faces down Bob without fear or second thoughts.

As a child Drewe was a tomboy, curious, competitive, and tough. After puberty, she began to soften into a more feminine figure at the same time her intelligence put her at the top of her ninth-grade class. To prevent the inevitable taunts of being “too good” for everyone else, Drewe evolved a unique strategy. She became the wildest girl in the class. Or at least she seemed to. And one of her most convincing moves in this game of social survival was dating the wildest boy in her class—me. And so it was that I alone knew her secret. While the other girls were perpetually awed by the craziness of some of the things Drewe did, I knew, for example, that on those occasions when we managed to spend nearly all night together in bed, she stopped our passionate groping well short of “going all the way.” Yet she was perfectly content to let her friends think otherwise. And in the whirlwind of our relationship, no one seemed to notice that she maintained a 99.4 average in all subjects.

Erin was just as deceptive, but she took the opposite tack. A year behind Drewe, she effortlessly convinced every parent and teacher within thirty miles that she was a perfect angel while actually having sex with any guy who took her fancy, from clean-cut quarterbacks to pot-smoking cowboy rebels. Her grades were middling at best, but on the other hand, they were irrelevant.

Erin’s secret was her looks.

I gaze past Patrick and Bob: Erin has finally turned back toward the shimmering pool. I am now looking at what was once described as the finest ass in the state of Mississippi, and it still manages to make the one-piece bathing suit that covers it seem more revealing than a thong bikini. Even now, I am convinced that this thirty-two-year-old mother could give any high school senior a run for her money.

During 1979, Erin Anderson’s face appeared on the covers of six national magazines. Four days after she graduated from high school, she left Rain, Mississippi, for New York with five hundred dollars and the name of a modeling agent in her purse. Two months later she had signed a contract with the Ford agency. In quick succession came runway work, the six magazine covers, some TV spots. Then came a brief hiatus, and after that it was the inner pages of the magazines. Another hiatus, then mostly they used her hands, feet, breasts, and hair.

No tragic accident had disfigured her face. If looks alone were the criterion, Erin would still be gazing out from the racks at the supermarket checkout instead of gathering up her child from the shallow end of her parents’ swimming pool. Erin’s problems were inside her head, not outside.

But first the exterior. Where Drewe is fair, Erin is dark. I lay that at the feet of genetics. Bob Anderson came from Scots-English blood, Margaret Cajun French. Drewe got her father’s genes, Erin her mother’s. And the differences hold true right down the line. Drewe’s hair is thick, auburn, and slightly curly. Erin’s is fine and straight and so brown it is almost black. Drewe’s eyes are green and bright with quick intelligence; Erin’s are almond-shaped, as black and deep as smoldering Louisiana bottomland. Drew has a pert nose, while Erin’s is long and straight with catlike flared nostrils. And where Drewe’s lips are pink, like brush strokes on a Royal Doulton figurine, Erin’s are full and brown, her upper lip dusted with fine tawny down. Both girls are somewhere around five foot nine, but Erin is long.

I don’t mean to shortchange my wife. Any man with functioning retinas would call Drewe a beauty. She is also demure—except while working—and her strength and smarts give an edge to her elegance. She is a doctor, after all. Erin is a former model turned jet-set girlfriend turned housewife. But as I watch Erin leading her child by the hand to the wrought-iron table, the physical difference comes clear: Drewe is feminine; Erin is feline.

This is a difficult art, watching another woman without your wife noticing. You look with unrestricted freedom for the early part of your life, then suddenly you have to learn to conceal your interest. The battle is hopeless, like a physicist trying to train iron filings not to follow a magnet. But with Erin, I have had lots of practice.

Since I dated Drewe in high school, Erin and I were almost natural enemies. We constantly razzed each other, behaving as if related ourselves. I grew adept at ignoring her stunning legs as we hung around the pool in the summers. But sometimes ignoring her was impossible.

Once, at a high school lake party, some of the seniors got drunk enough to start skinny-dipping. Dusk was falling, and a few of the girls felt safe enough or bold enough to slip off their suits in the growing shadows and dive off the pier into the silver water.

When Drewe saw this, she silently stood up, threw her “wild” act to the winds, and started walking back toward the car. She obviously had no intention of stripping nude in front of strangers, no matter how drunk they might be. Besides, her coolness quotient was secure. She didn’t look back at me, but I knew she expected me to follow. And I meant to. But as I stood up, I heard a voice say softly: “Harper.”

I turned around to see Erin standing behind me. She wore the bottom half of a bikini, but her brown-nippled breasts were exposed. With her eyes locked on mine, she hooked a finger in the side of her suit and stepped lazily out of it.

She was glorious. And she knew it. I stood blinking in the dusk, trying to take in what I was seeing. Looking back now, I realize that trying to see—truly see—a naked woman in her entirety is like trying to take in the carnage at a traffic accident. Your brain simply cannot process all the input being channeled like floodwater through your eyes. I saw bits of her: collarbones like sculpted braces inside a guitar, her flat brown oiled belly, beaded with pearls of lake water descending to a stark tan line where a lighter brownness descended again to the rough black triangle blurring the wide cleft between her thighs. And always her eyes. How long did I stare? Five seconds? Ten? I heard a long, reverent whistle from the water below the pier. Then Erin’s gaze floated above my shoulder and she simply stepped off the pier and dropped into the lake. When I turned around and looked up to the house, I saw no one. But after I reached the car, Drewe remained silent all the way back to Rain.

“Uncle Harrrrp—”

Startled, I look away from Erin and into the face of Holly, her daughter. “What is it, punkin?”

“Where’s your git-tar?”

Bob chuckles.

“I didn’t bring it today.”

“Play me a sawng,” commands the three-year-old.

“I can’t. I guess I could sing one a cappella. What do you want to hear?”

“Blackbirdie!” she squeals, laughing. She means “Blackbird,” by Paul McCartney. Sometimes Patrick whistles birdcalls while I play the song, which drives Holly into fits of laughter.

“Sorry, Scooter,” I say. “I need the git-tar for that one. What’s your second choice?”

“BARNEY!” she screeches.

“Christ,” whispers Patrick. “I thought she got over Barney last year.”

“Uh, Marg?” Bob says softly. “Didn’t you tell me ol’ Barney got killed in a car wreck yesterday?”

“What?” Holly asks, her eyes round.

“Daddy!” Drewe snaps.

To prevent bloodshed, I begin the anthem adored by most humans under three and reviled by most above that age. Holly sits entranced. She actually resembles Drewe more than Erin. The Scots–English genes apparently overpowered the Cajun. I give the Barney theme a soul-gospel ending; Holly claps and giggles, and even Margaret lifts the brim of her hat and applauds.

“Did you hear about Karin Wheat?” my mother-in-law asks me softly.

While I consider my answer, she takes a sip of half-melted Bloody Mary, shivers, and says, “Gruesome.”

“I did hear about that,” I say noncommittally, feeling Drewe’s gaze on the back of my neck.

“I was just reading Isis,” Margaret goes on. “I’ll bet one of her crazy fans killed her. That book was chock full of perversion.”

“Didn’t stop you from reading, though, did it?” Bob snickers. “What’s happening on the porno box, Harper?”

“Porno box” is Bob’s nickname for the EROS computer. “Same old seven and six,” I say, though I would give a lot to know whether the Strobekker account has gone active in the last few hours and, if so, whether the FBI was able to trace the connection.

Bob shakes his head. “I still don’t get why anybody—even sex maniacs—would pay that much money for a box that won’t even transmit pictures.”

“Actually, it will now,” I tell him. “There was so much demand for it, Jan Krislov decided to give in.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Erin slips on a terry cloth robe and leads Holly away from this conversation onto the perfectly manicured lawn. Bob keeps all eight acres as immaculate as a golf green and does all the work himself.

“I heard on A Current Affair that the killer cut off her head,” Margaret adds.

I force myself to look disinterested.

“This is one time I’m gonna surprise you pinko-liberals,” Bob says with good humor. “I’ll guarantee you it was a white man killed that writer woman.”

Drewe raises her eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”

“’Cause a nigger don’t kill that way,” Bob replies seriously. “Oh, they’ll cut you, or shoot you. But it’s an impulse thing. A nigger gets mad quick, kills quick, gets over it quick. He’s likely to be feeling sorry about it five minutes after he did it. White man’s different. A white man can nurse a hate a long time. A white man likes to hate. Gives him a mission, a reason to live. And a murder like that thing in New Orleans—mutilation, I mean—it takes a long time to build up an anger like that.”

We are all staring intently at Bob Anderson.

“’Course, it was New Orleans,” he adds philosophically. “God knows anything can happen there.”

After a thoughtful silence, Margaret asks Drewe about some policy change at one of the Jackson hospitals. Drewe and Patrick both have staff privileges there, and strong opinions about the issue. Every now and then Bob chimes in with an unsolicited expert opinion. While they banter back and forth, my eyes wander back to Erin and Holly. They move like exotic animals over the dappled lawn, Erin graceful as a gazelle, Holly like a sprite risen from the grass. As I watch, I let my eyes take on the thoughtful cast I have practiced so often at this gathering. Everyone assumes I am thinking about bond trades or commodities. Before long, Bob will ask me if I made any killings this week.

But for now I am granted a dispensation.

I try to keep my mind clear, but the effort is vain. As always, my secret rises unbidden. It is always there, beating like a second heart within my brain. The ceaseless tattoo grows louder, pulsing in my ears, throbbing in my temples, causing little storms of numbness along my upper forearms. These are parasthesias; I looked up the symptom late one night in one of Drewe’s medical books. Parasthesias are caused by extraordinary levels of stress. Everyone has a different tolerance, I suppose. What would terrify an equestrienne would not faze a bull rider.

I have carried my secret for a long time, and consequently thought I had learned to live with it, like a benign growth of some sort. Then, three months ago, I discovered that my secret had far more frightful consequences than I ever imagined. That my guilt is far greater than my capacity for rationalization.

And my skill at deception is crumbling.

Beyond this, I have an irrational feeling that my secret has taken on a life of its own—that it is trying to get out. It flutters at the edge of Patrick’s consciousness, polishes the fine blade of Drewe’s mistrust. I sometimes wonder whether she knows already but lives in a denial based on fear even greater than mine. Is this possible? No. Drewe could not know this thing and not act. Look at her, sitting in the black iron lawn chair, speaking with calm authority, words precise, back straight, green eyes focused.

Erin joins hands with Holly as they dance across the grass, now closer, now farther away. They spin like dervishes in the August heat. The drone of medico-political conversation presses against my eardrums, blending with the sound of Bob’s bees in Bob’s bushes. Comparing Drewe and Erin now, I see beyond the physical. Their innermost differences are stark, essential. They can be divided by single words: Drewe is control, Erin chaos. Drewe is achievement, Erin accident. Erin’s eyes catch mine for the briefest instant. I try to blank my mind, to shake my preoccupation and smile.

But I cannot.

She spins more slowly, her eyes catching mine each time she turns. What is in those eyes? Compassion? I believe so. In these fleeting moments I sense an intimacy of such painful intensity that it seems almost in danger of arcing between us—of ionizing the air dividing our eyes and bodies and letting that which resides separately in both our souls unite, as someday it inevitably must. What is this power that burns so for unity? That threatens to declare itself without invitation? What is it but the truth? A knowledge that Erin and I alone possess, of things as they really are.

And what is the truth of things as they really are?

Holly Graham is my daughter.

NINE

“Did you sense something wrong with Patrick?” asks Drewe.

We are already five miles from her parents’ house, rolling down the two-lane blacktop toward our farm, which is still ten miles away. With every mile we cover, my anxiety lessens.

“No,” I answer. “He seemed like his usual weekend self. Glad to be away from the hospital, wishing he was playing golf instead of sitting at your parents” house.”

Drewe clicks her tongue. “I think he and Erin are having problems.”

“What?” I say a little too sharply. In fact, I know Erin and Patrick are having problems. “They seemed fine to me.”

Drewe looks at me, but thankfully her gaze is only on half power. “I guess you’re right. Sometimes I just get the feeling that Erin’s new life—her domesticity, I mean—is really just a front. That in her mind she never really left New York and all that other stuff behind.”

“New life? It’s been three years, Drewe. That’s a lot of commitment just for an act.”

She smiles. “You’re right. God, Holly gets more beautiful every week, doesn’t she?”

“She sure does.”

“And Erin’s so good with her. Did you hear her jump on Daddy about his racism? I think she really embarrassed him.”

“Impossible.”

She punches me on the shoulder. “I was pretty impressed with you, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“You had Holly wrapped around your finger.”

Here it comes.

“You know,” she says—and despite her effort to sound as casual as she did a moment ago, I detect the tonal change—“I’ve been off the pill over five months now.”

I know exactly how long she has been off the pill. I can trace the date by the fight we had when she made this unilateral decision. My wife is not one to equivocate. When she decides on a goal, she takes the shortest path to it. In her mind, the time has come for us to have children. If I am opposed, it must be because I’m nostalgically clinging to my irresponsible youth, which is pointless. Neither of us ever liked using a condom or anything else during sex; thus, she assumed that when she stopped taking the pill it would be only a matter of weeks until she conceived.

The first four months were the grace period required for the artificial hormones to be purged from her system. At that time she had a vested interest—genetic—in keeping our sexual contact to a minimum. But we are at the five-and-a-half-month mark now, and despite her confidence in my uncontrollable lust, Drewe has yet to conceive. This is not due to a flaw in her judgment of my character. It’s just that she forgot to reckon EROS into her calculations. The computer forums—and certain women on them—have proved to be a vicarious but satisfactory outlet for my sexual energy. I think Drewe suspects this, and it accounts for her bitter resentment of the time I spend sysoping the forum.

“You love Holly so much,” she says, and I feel her looking right at me. “I can see it. I don’t understand why you don’t want a child of your own.”

“I do want one,” I say truthfully. “I want two.”

“But what? Just not yet? Harper, I’m thirty-three. At thirty-five, the odds for Down’s syndrome and a hundred other things go up dramatically.”

As neutrally as possible, I say, “We’ve had this discussion before, Drewe.”

The temperature in the car drops ten degrees. “And now we’re having it again.”

When I don’t respond, she sighs and looks out at the dusty cotton fields drifting by. The ocean of white covers the land as far as the eye can see. “I know I’m pressuring you,” she says in measured tones, “but I just don’t understand your reasoning.”

And I hope you never will.

After a silent mile, she says, “Are we ever going to make love again?”

As if the situation isn’t complicated enough. Five minutes after discussing having children and being off the pill, she makes a sexual overture that by her tone I am supposed to interpret as passion?

“I do actually miss it, you know,” she says, looking straight through the windshield.

“Me too,” I murmur. What else can I say?

“Doubting my motives?”

I can tell by her voice that she has turned to face me again. Hearing a rustle of cloth, I look across the seat. Drewe has opened her blouse. Her bra attaches at the front, and she opens that too. Twice in the past month, advances like this have led to serious arguments. However, her nipples confirm her tone of voice. Maybe this is an honest approach.

She turns sideways in her seat, lifts one bare foot over the Explorer’s console, and lets it fall into my lap. She is very good with that foot. Giggling like a schoolgirl, she manages to unfasten the belt, snap, and zipper of my jeans.

“Obviously you miss it too,” she says.

“They teach you that in medical school? In case you have a hand injury?”

“Mmm-hm. We practiced on interns. The young, handsome ones.”

“Okay, okay.”

In one smooth motion she hitches up her sundress and climbs over the console. Then, facing me, she plants a foot on either side of my seat and lowers herself between my body and the steering wheel. I glance away from the road long enough to see her pull aside her white cotton panties and slide effortlessly down onto me.

The sudden grating of gravel under the right front tire tells me we are going off the road. I jerk the wheel left and look up, then floor the accelerator and whip around a mammoth green cotton picker. Drewe is laughing and kissing my neck and pressing down harder.

“Jesus, you’re ruthless,” I tell her.

“You can pull out,” she whispers.

Sure.

We have been home less than ten minutes when the telephone rings. It is Bob Anderson.

“Did we leave something over there?” I ask, feeling my back pocket for my wallet.

“Nothing like that.” Bob falls silent. After ten seconds or so, I ask him if anything’s wrong.

“I don’t know, Harp,” he drawls. “But fifteen minutes after you left the house, Bill Buckner called.”

“The Yazoo County Sheriff?”

“Right. He told me—strictly as a favor—that he got several long-distance calls last night and again today. Calls about you.”

Shit. “Me?”

Bob gives me more of the silent treatment. I blink first. “Look, Dr. Anderson, I can probably guess what this is about.”

He offers nothing.

“We’ve had a little trouble on the EROS network.”

“Trouble.”

“There’s been a murder.”

“More’n one, from what Bill says. Bad, too.”

Drewe is staring at me inquisitively. “Look Dr. Anderson, I met with the New Orleans police yesterday, and I’m pretty sure everything’s under control.”

“Bill said a couple of the calls were from the FBI.”

“I met with them too.”

Bob mulls this over. At length he says, “Harper, do you need help, son?”

“Thanks, Dr. Anderson, but I really think everything’s under control.”

“I know a lot of people,” he says in a voice that makes it clear he does not like talking this way. “In a lot of places.”

“I’m sure you do. And if there was real trouble, you’d be the first person I’d call.”

Bob waits some more, then says, “Well, I guess you know best,” in a tone that says he guesses anything but that. “You keep me posted, son.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And you take care of my little girl.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hang up.

“Your dad,” I tell Drewe.

“What is it?”

“He’s worried. The Yazoo County sheriff called him. Buckner’s been getting calls from the FBI, asking about me.”

Drewe shakes her head, her eyes locked on mine. “God. Harper, do they actually think you’re involved in these murders?”

“I don’t know. Miles and I are two of only nine people who have access to the real identities of EROS subscribers. Anybody who has that access is a suspect until they can prove they’re innocent.”

“That shouldn’t be hard for you.”

“For three of the murders, no. And with your help, I hope I can prove it for all of them.”

“What do you mean? You’re always here with me. When did these murders happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. They started about a year ago. Most happened within the last nine months. The problem is that for the past few months you and I haven’t been spending that much time together.”

Drewe looks away quickly. She is an intensely private person, and I know she is wondering what I told the police about our relationship. “Harper, damn you.” She closes her hand around my wrist. “No matter what’s going on between us, I’m your alibi. Don’t you know that?”

“Thank you. But the cops won’t necessarily believe you.”

“I’ll make them believe me.”

This from a woman who has told women her mother’s age that they have less than a year to live, friends that their newborn babies are deformed or dying. The certainty in her voice is powerful enough to resuscitate my flagging confidence, possibly even enough to sway a jury, if not the FBI.

“Thank you,” I say again, trying to distance my mind from the idea of police questioning Drewe. “Your dad offered to use his connections if we need them.”

“He must really be upset.”

“He’s just worried about you. Does he really have connections high enough to help in something like this?”

She shrugs. “He knows the governor. Can a state governor influence the FBI?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Let’s hope we never have to find out.”

She goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a lemon pie that a churchy Baptist neighbor brought over yesterday. Drewe was raised Methodist, but since she rarely attends church, her Baptist patients never cease trying to pull her into their fold. They know I’m a hopeless case. Drewe and I attack the pie for a couple of minutes in silence, more than making up for the calories we burned in the truck.

“This is sinful,” she mumbles through a huge bite of pale yellow filling. She always scoops out the filling and leaves the crust.

“Praise God,” I manage to reply in a mocking mushmouth.

She flicks her fork at me, plopping a piece of meringue onto my cheek. When she laughs, her eyes sparkle like stars, and in that moment I feel the weight of my secret lift from my shoulders just long enough to sense the lightness of peace.

Then something closes around my heart with suffocating power. It’s like a Chinese torture: the better things are, the worse they are.

“What’s the matter?” Drewe is studying me as she might a patient having a sudden stroke.

“Nothing. I just remembered something I need to take care of. A couple of long positions in Singapore. Boring but necessary.”

“Oh.”

The realization that tomorrow is a workday instantly manifests itself throughout her frame. Her shoulders hunch slightly, her eyelids fall, she sighs with resignation. But more dispiriting than work is the realization that our unusual moment of closeness is over.

“I’m whipped,” she says. “You coming to bed?”

I shake my head, averting my eyes. “I’d better check the Singapore Exchange.”

She looks long enough to let me know she knows I am at least partially lying. Then she turns and walks toward the bedroom.

I move quickly toward my office.

I’ve got to talk to Miles.

TEN

When I check my email, I find two messages from Miles. I click the mouse and open the first. Seeing the length of the text, I push ALT-V to activate the most unique feature on my EROS computer—its voice.

The first time I heard EROS speak I felt strange. Then I realized it was not the first time I had heard a computer talk. The telephone company’s computers had been talking to me for years. I had toyed with digital sampling keyboards that could exactly reproduce anything from a thundering bass to a contralto soprano. The voice chip inside the EROS computer is similar. However, it is not voice-recognition technology. Getting a computer to verbalize text displayed on its screen is relatively simple. Getting one to recognize millions of different voices speaking with hundreds of different accents—even in one language—is currently taxing the best brains in the R and D departments of the world’s top high-tech firms.

EROS cannot hear.

But it does talk. Its voice can take on any pitch between twenty and twenty thousand hertz, which is slightly superfluous since my multimedia speakers bottom out at around one hundred, and my rock-and-roll-damaged eardrums probably top out at ten thousand. Also, the pitch versatility is misleading. EROS’s voice is not unlike Drewe’s when she is dictating charts. Whether I select a baritone or tenor frequency, the words will be repeated at that single pitch—a perfect monotone—until the listener believes he is trapped inside the tin-can robot from Lost in Space. And vocal monotony is not conducive to sexual fantasy unless your idea of hot sex is having an interspecies relationship with a machine.

EROS’s voice program does have what’s called a “lexical stress” feature, but it sucks. It makes the voice sound like a saxophone played by a drunk who accents all the wrong notes. A couple of months ago Miles sent me a package containing circuit boards he claimed would give my computer not only a better voice, but also the Holy Grail: voice-recognition capability. Naturally, those circuit boards are still sealed inside their antistatic bags in the box they came in. For my purpose—listening to lengthy email messages—the droning digital voice EROS already has is good enough.

Scanning Miles’s messages, I set the frequency to a medium baritone—Miles’s register—and lie down on the twin bed to listen.

Hello, snitch. Here’s an update from Serial Killer Central. I’ve finally met the elusive Dr. Arthur Lenz, and I am impressed (though not as impressed as he is with himself).

If you don’t already know (and how could you?) there is a massive bureaucratic battle afoot between the FBI and the various police departments involved in what they are vulgarly calling the “EROS murders.” (Is “vulgarly” a word? I defer to the grammarians on that.) The instinct of the police (I use “police” collectively for Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Minneapolis, et al.) is to shut down EROS for the foreseeable future. This is obviously short-term thinking. They apparently believe that shutting us down will keep “Strobekker” (whoever he really is) off the playing field. The FBI (read Lenz) quite rightly understands that shutting down EROS will only send our predator to greener pastures—or at least different ones. I give Lenz credit for understanding that the digital fields of the Lord are quite expansive, and that our beast at play is well versed in traveling them.

Segue: while writing this I have recalled a bit of high school Emerson.

If the red slayer thinks he slays

Or if the slain thinks he is slain

They know not well the subtle paths

I keep, and pass, and turn again

From “Brahma,” I believe. Come to think of it, from now on, when I refer to the killer, I shall call him Brahma. “Strobekker” makes me picture a pasty-faced Minnesotan of Swedish descent, killing with the same knife he uses during the graveyard shift at the meat-packing plant.

I think Lenz plans to lure Brahma to his destruction by somehow manipulating our network. The police argue the obvious: that every minute EROS is up and running is another minute women are at risk. But Lenz has used your session printouts to good advantage. He points out that Brahma not only has a recognizable prose style online, but also that his messages, which are error-free for eighty-five percent of the exchanges with his victims, become full of errors as the dates of the murders approach. Lenz didn’t know why that might be, so I decided to throw him a bone. I think Brahma is using an advanced voice-recognition unit, which allows him to simply speak his words rather than type them. Maybe he works for a computer company and has access to prototype equipment. A unit like that might not be easily portable, and he probably couldn’t use it remotely because of cellular dropouts. So when he takes his show on the road, he’s got to type like everybody else.

Anyway, Lenz realized that the FBI can use this “error-rate flag” as an early-warning system to know when Brahma is on the move and women are in imminent danger. He also points out that except for Karin Wheat, only women on the blind-draft billing system have been killed so far. This group represents a significant but minority number of total female subscribers, approximately twenty-three percent. Five hundred seventy-eight women.

Lenz also argues that allowing Brahma to continue on EROS will give the FBI time to track him through the phone lines, which Agent Baxter assures both Jan and myself will be but a matter of a day or two. The local police departments seem to have a lot of faith in this argument and will probably relent. Bureaucratic panic always gives weight to the quick-fix solution. But I don’t share Baxter’s faith in the phone-trace strategy. Brahma has been killing women for some time. He had enough forethought to murder a man for his online identity. Surely he realized that the day would come when the police would attempt to trace him to his lair by phone. N’est-ce pas?

I have my own theories about Brahma’s modus operandi, but I choose not to share them with Lenz at this point. The time may come when I need bargaining chips with this man.

Ciao.

Hearing Miles’s flamboyant email style repeated by a mindless android voice is singularly unsettling. Yet even through the insectile drone, I heard one thing distinctly: Miles Turner is having fun.

His second message is much briefer.

The Strobekker account went active under the alias “Shiva” at 7:42 P.M. Baxter’s techs traced the call from our office through a couple of Internet nodes in the Midwest to New Jersey, through a transatlantic satellite to London, then back into New Jersey. By that time he’d dropped off. They’re pulling out the stops, and they’re faster at it than I thought possible, but they don’t know much more than they did before they started. The atmosphere is like Mission Impossible—a bunch of guys in suits and ties playing with gadgets. Do you think Brahma wears a tie?

Ciao.

I roll off the bed and sit down at the EROS computer. Feeling more than a little paranoid, I print out hard copies of Miles’s messages, then delete them from the computer’s memory. Part of me wants to log onto Level Three and lurk in the background, searching for traces of Strobekker or Shiva or Brahma or whoever he is. But something has been itching at the back of my brain since I talked to the FBI. Ever since I realized Baxter and Lenz might leave EROS up and running despite the fact that women are in danger. I have friends on EROS. More than friends. And no matter what Miles or Jan or the FBI think is prudent, I have a duty to warn those people.

My closest friend on EROS is a woman who calls herself Eleanor Rigby. Her choice of alias was probably influenced by one of the stranger informal customs that has developed on EROS. For some reason, wild or obscure code names like “Electric Blue” or “Leather Bitch” or “Phiber Phreak”—so common on other networks—were absent on EROS from the beginning. It wasn’t company policy to discourage them, but somehow a loose convention evolved and was enforced by community consensus, more a matter of style than anything else. Apparently EROS subscribers prefer their correspondents to possess actual names for aliases, rather than surreal quasi-identities. All in all I think this has benefited the network; it has kept things more human.

The interesting thing is that while outlandish noms de plume are discouraged, the practice of assuming names made famous by literary, musical, or film works is very popular. I frequently see messages addressed from Holden Caulfield to Smilla Jaspersen, from the Marquis de Sade to Oscar Wilde, or from Elvis Presley to Polythene Pam. Moreover, it seems that at least some of the subscribers choose their famous (or infamous) pseudonyms to fit their own personalities. In the case of “Eleanor Rigby”—an alias that belongs to a woman named Eleanor Caine Markham—I’m positive the name was chosen out of a deep affinity for the character in the Beatles song. Eleanor Markham is a moderately successful mystery writer from Los Angeles who, except for a second job, rarely leaves her house. The same melancholy sense of loneliness that pervades the Lennon-McCartney tune shadows more than a few of her messages.

Yet Eleanor’s second job seems wholly out of character with this first image. To supplement her income, she sometimes works as a body double for major actresses who have reached that exalted status where they do not have to agree to remove their clothes on-screen to win roles. I know it’s sexist, but I always imagined women who had these jobs as airheaded blondes with exquisite bodies but common faces who spent their days at the spa working on their legs and abs or at their plastic surgeon’s getting their boobs reinflated. I have never seen Eleanor Markham’s face—her mystery novels carry no jacket photos—but everything I have learned about her confirms an opposite truth. When Eleanor is not exposing her derriere or breasts or whatever for the camera, she is sitting in her Santa Monica beach house writing very literate, wry whodunits or talking to anonymous friends via her computer.

Her explanation for these seemingly contradictory lifestyles is that she has a sister who was confined to a wheelchair for life by spinal injuries received in a traffic accident. Eleanor feels her sacred duty is to take care of this sister as her parents would have, were they still alive. I cannot fault her reasoning.

All that said, let me confess the obvious: Eleanor Rigby is my online lover. My digital squeeze. What do I know about her other than what I’ve already revealed? She is thirty years old. She has never had plastic surgery. She describes her face not as plain but as “real”—more Audrey Hepburn than Michelle Pfeiffer, but not as ethereal as Audrey. She has a wit like a razor and she is uniquely gifted at describing sex in words.

She is also generous. Eleanor knows that two-way conversations are fine for foreplay but that typing requires the use of at least one hand. Thus, when she is getting me off, she is quite willing to type endless lines of charged erotica until the moment that I signal her with a relieved and heartfelt banality such as: Wow.

I return the favor in a different way.

Eleanor does not usually stimulate herself while online. She prefers that I compose lengthy email messages that she can print out and peruse free from any constraints on time or dexterity. I’m sure the proximity of her disabled sister has something to do with this. This is also why Eleanor is registered to EROS on a blind-draft account. She apparently reads many of my printed messages while locked in the bath.

Tonight I query her the moment I log on. Eleanor frequently lurks in silence, eavesdropping on the conversations of others (searching for material for her novels, she tells me) and so is often present when I send out my usual query. I type:

HARPER> Father MacKenzie calling.

Eleanor is the only EROS client with whom I use my real name. There is a delay of thirty seconds or so, then:

ELEANOR RIGBY> Hello, Harper dear. What are you in the mood for?

HARPER> I need to talk to you.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Talk as in _talk_? <g>

(The <g> symbol stands for “grin.” The lines preceding and following a word indicate emphasis, in place of italics.)

HARPER> Yes, just talk. Meet me in Room 64.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Hmm. I guess the little woman talked you into it this week, eh?

Yes, like a corporeal mistress, Eleanor knows my marital situation. Some of it, anyway. With a twinge of guilt I mouse into the private room designated Room 64 and type:

HARPER> No present erection, thank you.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Too bad. Should I sharpen up my pencil?

HARPER> No. This is serious.

ELEANOR RIGBY> How ominous. Is this a Dear John letter?

HARPER> No.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Well, then?

HARPER> You must keep what I am about to tell you absolutely between us.

ELEANOR RIGBY> My lips are sealed. And if you make a horrid male pun I shall disconnect.

HARPER> You’re in danger, Eleanor.

She doesn’t respond for several beats.

ELEANOR RIGBY> What kind of danger?

HARPER> Physical danger. There’s been

I am typing, but suddenly nothing is going through to Eleanor. I stare at the screen in puzzlement until this message appears in large block letters:

SHAME ON YOU, SNITCH

My puzzlement turns to fury. This message can only be from Miles, and its sudden insertion into my private chat with Eleanor tells me something that makes my blood boil. Miles has the ability to read my private communications whenever he pleases. I blink as further characters appear.

SORRY TO INTRUDE

BUT WE CAN’T HAVE YOU

SCARING THE PAYING CUSTOMERS

LOOSE CANNON AND ALL THAT

PLEASE FIND SOME OTHER WAY TO GET ELEANOR

OFF THE NET

IF YOU MUST

CIAO

The next words that appear are:

ELEANOR RIGBY> What just happened?

She must not have seen Miles’s message. I type:

HARPER> A glitch in my modem.

What now? Do I ignore Miles? Go ahead and warn Eleanor and a few others? My anger says yes. But what will be the result? A network-wide panic, probably. Eleanor and I are very close, but she has a writer’s imagination and love of drama. Could she really keep secret the possibility that there is a murderer stalking the female clients of EROS?

ELEANOR RIGBY> You said I was in danger. Physical danger. What were you talking about?

HARPER> You misunderstood. That was the start of a fantasy file I wrote for you this morning. It was sort of a Mata Hari thing, spies and sex, with you in the lead role.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Well, if that’s the case, send it through!

HARPER> My modem’s on the blink. Pretty embarrassing for the sysop, isn’t it? I’ll have it fixed by tomorrow. I’ll put the file through then. Sorry to interrupt you for nothing.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Wait, Harper. I hate to confess this, but knowing you don’t need me right now makes me need you. Could you possibly conjure up some stimulating prose for a lonely 30-year-old spinster with an itch?

HARPER> You mean realtime?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Yes.

HARPER> Unusual for you. How stimulating?

ELEANOR RIGBY> My sister is at a film with her one friend. I have the house all to my selfish self. Please make it hot enough for an online conclusion; i.e. once we get to the good stuff, please don’t stop until I signal with a shriek of ecstasy.

I pause, trying to rein in my thoughts. I honestly don’t feel like this tonight. Especially after Drewe and I had our actual-reality interlude in the Explorer. But Eleanor has done me this favor many nights.

HARPER> Romantic or dangerous?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Romantic _and_ dangerous.

HARPER> All right. We are finally meeting face to face. Seeing each other for the first time.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Where?

HARPER> The Peabody Hotel. Memphis, Tennessee. We’re in the lobby, a huge open room with a bar and a grand piano and ducks and tons of atmosphere.

ELEANOR RIGBY> _Ducks_?

HARPER> Symbol of the hotel. Trust me.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Oh, I do.

HARPER> I’m not as handsome as you have imagined me, but you aren’t disappointed. I have a certain power over you that you didn’t expect. You want to please me, and this makes you a little angry. You understand?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Perfectly. What do you think of me?

HARPER> Mercy fuck.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Harper!

HARPER> Sorry. ;) You’re more beautiful than I imagined. Your body-double’s body was a given, but your symmetry still surprises me. Petite, and your face more feminine than I could envision.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Feminine how?

HARPER> The blend of curve and angle. Softs and hards. Cheek and jaw. Defined brows, nebulous eyes. Dusk is falling on the Memphis streets, over the river. Yellow lamps come up inside and light you like a painter’s hand.

ELEANOR RIGBY> What am I wearing?

HARPER> White linen. Appropriate for a deflowering.

ELEANOR RIGBY> You give me far too much credit. <g>

HARPER> I intend to boldly go where no man has gone before.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Dare I ask?

HARPER> No.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Yummy.

HARPER> I see shadows of your nipples through the linen. They look more brown than pink.

ELEANOR RIGBY> How do you like my breasts?

HARPER> Champagne-glass size, exquisitely shaped.

ELEANOR RIGBY> What do we talk about?

HARPER> Inanities.

ELEANOR RIGBY> How long do we talk?

HARPER> Not very. We’ve said all we have to say on EROS, haven’t we?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Do we diddle under the table? Victorian teasing?

HARPER> No. I sign the suite number on the bill and lead you by the hand across the high-ceilinged lobby to the bank of elevators. In the elevator we kiss for the first time.

ELEANOR RIGBY> A long kiss?

HARPER> When the door opens, we’re still kissing. An older couple is staring at us like we are crazy.

ELEANOR RIGBY> I’m already wet.

HARPER> Not yet.

ELEANOR RIGBY> I’m speaking in the present tense, dear. Offline.

HARPER> Fine, but we’re not going to rush. When the stupid credit card key finally works, I pull you inside the room but do not turn on the light.

ELEANOR RIGBY> We haven’t been in the suite until now?

HARPER> No. Before you can say anything, I close the door and slip past you in the darkness, pulling my shoes off as I walk. You call out to me, but I don’t answer. I hear you bang your foot into a chair. You curse. We’re going to play a game, I say. What kind of game? you ask.

I stop typing for a few moments, letting the images flow freely in my head.

HARPER> A hunting game, I reply. I’m going to hunt you in the dark suite. And the first rule is: we can’t talk to each other. Even when I find you, we cannot speak. And there’s another catch. I should have mentioned it earlier, but … well … there’s another person in the room.

What? you ask nervously. Who?

Don’t be frightened. He—or she—is standing silently—or sitting—somewhere in the room, but only watching. How, you ask? Simple. He’s wearing a night-vision headset I brought to the hotel during the afternoon. You giggle nervously, but I’m not joking. This person can see us right now and will watch us when I finally find you.

You don’t believe me? Let down the top of your dress.

A few seconds later, a whispered voice from across the room says, Beautiful.

I can almost feel your heart stutter from the shock. Stay calm, I say reassuringly. This person is merely an observer.

All right, you stammer, far from your normally confident self. But who is it? you wonder. Who _is_ it?

Maybe it’s your sister, I say.

You bastard, you hiss.

Maybe it’s a bellboy I paid a hundred bucks to come upstairs and watch a beautiful woman having sex. Do you want to go on? I ask.

Yes, you say softly.

Even if you are seen?

I can do anything in the dark, you say. Even if the whole city is watching.

And so we begin the hunt. How do you feel now?

ELEANOR RIGBY> >toi bbusy otype<

HARPER> Please do your best to evade me, I tell you. But you should know that I’ll be getting a bit of direction from our guest. He/she will whisper “warmer” or “colder” ever so often.

You do not answer.

And so I begin the hunt.

The first thing I hear is silence. Blood beating in my ears. The suite is large. I move deeper into the bedroom to give you room to move. Then I wait motionless for two minutes. I sense you becoming more tense with each passing second. You cannot hear me. Very softly I remove my clothes. I feel the air along my body, especially on the places usually covered. I go down on all fours, allowing my body to cover more floor space, increasing my odds of touching you if you try to slip past me. I move slowly at first.

Colder, whispers our guest.

I change direction. Where _are_ you? I ask in a singsong voice.

Warmer, says our guest.

Instinct tells me my back is a few feet from the far corner of the room. You are not behind me. Slowly and soundlessly I work my way across the carpet, pausing occasionally to listen and to try to feel any movement of air against my skin.

Nothing.

There’s not much floor space left to cover. Could you have climbed onto one of the beds? No. I’d have heard you.

Wait. A rustle of cloth ahead of me. A few feet away.

Is she naked? I ask.

No reply.

I freeze. There is water running in the bathroom, the sound like a distant cataract in the silence. I rise and move quickly toward the sound—too quickly—and bash my head against the door frame. I’m in the bathroom now, but you aren’t. Steam coats my face and body like jungle humidity. When I reach to shut off the tap, I scald my hand. Yet even as I curse, I realize I smell you. In the blackness. The female smell. Strongly enough that I suspect you have left this as a calling card.

This is not turning out the way I’d planned.

As I move out of the bathroom, something swishes past me in the dark. Strangely, it seemed larger than me. Then I hear the bathroom door close. I try the handle but it’s locked. Are you really inside? Or is this a diversion?

Where is she? I ask the darkness.

No answer.

Warmer or colder? I ask.

Nothing.

Then, through the bathroom door, I hear new sounds. A woman, softly moaning. A man rhythmically groaning. First I think you are teasing me. Confused, I feel my way to the wall and break a rule. Switch on the light.

My assistant is gone.

The noises are louder. It sounds as though you are using my draftee in the bathroom and have locked me out. This isn’t what I had in mind at all, but you sound like you’re having the time of your life. I ask what you are doing but he answers insolently, She can’t talk with her mouth full. Suddenly I am angry. I kick the door twice near the knob and it splinters open, flooding the bathroom with light. At first glance I feel relief, seeing that you still have your linen dress on. But a millisecond later the positions register: you’re sitting on the edge of the tub and you have your hand around him and are working diligently (though your eyes are locked on mine) and he seems very close to release. It’s the least I could do for him, you say, but what you’re really saying is that you have no intention of letting me manipulate you with some kinky game like this, and I’m standing there with a stupid look on my face while you finish him and he groans and you look into my eyes with barefaced defiance while he squirts copiously and again and you run your hands under the bath tap while he slips out the door of the room but not before he gives me a look like, You must be an idiot to share this lady with _anybody_. And then you lift the linen dress over your head and say, Take me to the bed, please.

So I do. This is finally lovemaking, as you are.

ELEANOR RIGBY> :) Shriek of ecstasy. I’m done. I know that was quick, but I was reading some pretty steamy threads before you queried. At least your fingers won’t be too sore.

HARPER> I was just getting to the good part. The part I’ve really fantasized about.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Sorry. You shouldn’t have let me near that insolent voyeur/bellboy/stranger. He was huge in my hand, by the way. I don’t like that in intercourse, FYI, but since I was merely servicing him manually, I liked that my hand wouldn’t nearly go all the way around the thickest part of him.

HARPER> You’re embellishing my scenario.

ELEANOR RIGBY> Certainly, dear. Don’t feel threatened. He was huge, but dumb as a doorpost—as well as being hard as one <g>.

HARPER> Feeling better, I take it?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Lovely. Although I consider that subject sacred, to be honest.

HARPER> What?

ELEANOR RIGBY> Our first f2f meeting. I would never want a third person present for that.

HARPER> Sorry if I tainted your fantasy. I should have realized.

ELEANOR RIGBY> No, it’s fine. But you are my secret friend, Harper. That is sacred to me. You have no idea.

HARPER> I do have an idea, Eleanor. You know that.

ELEANOR> Well, don’t be a stranger. It was too long between rendezvous this time. Meet me tomorrow.

HARPER> We’ll talk soon. And alone this time.

ELEANOR> I like that better. Bye.

HARPER> Bye.

I thrust my chair away from the keyboard and focus on the sculpture of my father’s coat. Why would I thrust someone between myself and Eleanor like that? I suddenly want to warn her again, but I know Miles is looking over my virtual shoulder.

And then I realize something very disturbing.

The bellboy in the bathroom was Miles.

What the hell is going on in my brain? And how long has that son of a bitch been spying on my email? Everything’s under control, I hear myself saying to Bob Anderson.

Who do I think I’m kidding?

I’ve been lying in bed less than five minutes when it hits me: Miles has made a far more serious mistake than reading my email. And I’ve got to tell him about it. It’s an hour later in New York, but I don’t really give a damn. He’s usually awake all night anyway, monitoring Level Three.

After four rings, he answers “Turner” in a voice that makes it clear he does not like being bothered by mere human beings.

“How long have you been spying on my email, shithead?”

I hear a soft laugh. “Don’t worry. I hardly ever look. But since you started talking to the FBI, I figured you might be getting antsy about warning some of your online friends. Which you definitely do not need to do. They’re in no danger.”

“We’ll skip that argument for now. I want to know how you’ve been reading my mail. I’ve never been able to access yours.”

Another laugh. “But you tried, right? There are a couple of system privileges you don’t have, Harper. One is called super-postmaster. It’s like the postmaster privilege, but it gives you access to sysop mail as well. Even Jan’s mail.”

“What if Strobekker got the victims’ real names by hacking into a sysop account? Into super-postmaster?”

Miles hesitates. “I don’t think that’s possible. But I’m still assessing the system. It would have taken only one deep penetration to get the master client list, and it could have happened months ago. That makes forensic analysis of the disks very difficult.”

“But you don’t know it was only one penetration. If he’s in the system now, and he has the super-postmaster privilege, that means he could have read your messages to me, which would tell him the FBI was onto him.”

There is a long silence. “Brahma is not in the system now. But even if he were, he could only have read my messages during the interval between my posting them and your picking them up. Unless you saved them to a file. Did you do that?”

“No. I printed hard copies and deleted them.”

“What time did you do that?”

“Just before I talked to Eleanor.”

“So stop worrying. And get off my case. All it would take is basic postmaster for Brahma to read your warning to Eleanor.”

Miles is right. “You just stop looking over my shoulder, goddamn it.”

“I can’t guarantee that.”

At least he’s honest. “Miles, I want the super-postmaster privilege and any others I don’t know about.”

“I can’t give you that. Jan has already blocked your access to the accounting database.”

“What?”

“What did you expect, Harper?”

“Listen to me. If Strobekker or Brahma or whoever is still roaming our system, I’ve got to know I can see everything he can. If I can’t, I’m off EROS as of now.”

“Let me think about it. The FBI phone traces are going nowhere, but I’ve been going back over some of Brahma’s old email—”

“How did you get that?”

“I pulled it out of your computer.”

“What?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. It was necessary. I’ve got other sources too. The thing is, Brahma’s using an anonymous remailer for his email.”

“What does that mean in practical terms?”

“Regular email is traceable. You can look at the packet headers and get a user name, or at least take back-bearings and get a rough physical location. But Brahma doesn’t use the EROS-mail feature. He sends his email to our servers via the anonymous remailer, which is in Finland, and then through the Internet. The remailer strips off his address and adds a random one. I spoke to its operator about a half hour ago.”

“Have you told the FBI?”

“Oh sure, we’re like Boris and Natasha here, man.”

“Can they get info on Brahma from the remailing service?”

“There’s a precedent for getting cooperation from the police in some countries in extreme cases, but the guy who runs this service sounded like a wild man. A real anarchist. He’s probably destroying all his records right now.”

“That’s why Brahma chose him.”

“Obviously. Brahma’s a clever boy, Harper. Too clever for Baxter’s techs, I fear.” Miles is clearly enjoying himself. “We’ve still got FBI agents camped out up here. They’re guarding our file vault like it’s the tomb of Christ, waiting for the time lock to open and give them the master client list.”

“Great. Now we’re back to where we were when you changed the subject. Give me the super-postmaster privilege or I’m shutting down my EROS interface.”

He doesn’t answer for some time. Then he says, “Type S-I-D-D-H-A-R-T-H-A after your password at the sysop prompt. Got it?”

“Siddhartha as in the Herman Hesse novel?”

“As in the Buddha. But that’s close enough.”

“I think you’ve gone weird on me, man.”

“I always was, Harper. You know that. Ciao.”

And he is gone.

I sit thinking in the soft glow of the EROS screen.

Siddhartha? Brahma?

I don’t know or care much about Eastern religions, but Miles certainly seems to. And though I do not know the significance of this, or whether it has significance at all, I am suddenly reminded of Drewe’s speculation about Oriental medicine and the use of bizarre trophies to restore vitality. I always related such things to Japan, and Buddha fits with Japan, though the Buddha himself was Indian. Brahma and Shiva make me think of India too. I remember from my meeting in New Orleans that the only murder victim who was not Caucasian was Indian. Also that an Indian hair was found at one of the crime scenes. I see no tangible links between these facts, yet I know too well that my knowledge of such things does not even rate as sketchy. They could easily be connected just beyond my myopic mental vision.

Life would be much simpler if the FBI could follow a trail of digital bread crumbs back to the lair of the killer. But Miles has little faith that this will happen, and something tells me he is right. That we have yet to make out even the silhouette of the creature behind these murders.

I hunted when I was a boy. I gave it up the day my cousin put four Number 6 shotgun pellets into my right calf. It was a late February afternoon, and we’d gotten separated. I was following what I thought was a rabbit into a thicket. My cousin heard a noise and thought fate had handed him an out-of-season deer. I don’t blame him for shooting. Five seconds later and I might have shot him. Neither of us could see what we were after. That’s the way it goes sometimes. But I’ve often wondered what would have happened had it been something other than rabbits we were chasing. A bear, say. Something that would have seen me lying there bleeding on the ground and come over to finish the job. That’s the way it goes sometimes too. It all depends on the quarry you choose to hunt.

ELEVEN

Dear Father,

Panikkar telephoned early this morning, saying he had to see me. I feared the worst, and I was not far wrong. When he arrived I was in the basement, settling Jenny in. After I came up, I found him waiting in the study with Kali. Panikkar told me that he and Bhagat had “endured all they could”—his words. I expected next to hear him say that he had gone to the police, who would arrive at any minute.

How wrong I was. Instead of delivering a sermon of moral outrage, he demanded more money. He must have thought I was ripe for fleecing, with the procedure so close. The mendacity of man is his undoing. I was prepared to pay, but when Panikkar mentioned the amount it stunned me. As I tried to explain my position, I saw movement in the shadows behind him. Like a mantis Kali swung her thin brown arm over his shoulder and plunged her dagger into his belly.

There was nothing I could do. It was plain from the spray that the first stroke had pierced the abdominal descending aorta. Before I could utter three sentences she had eviscerated him, while Panikkar stared at his butchered belly in horror. True to her name-sake, Kali removed his head and hung it by the hair from her belt. I realized how dangerous this development was, of course, but it was oddly satisfying after all Panikkar’s grousing. Thank God it was him, rather than Bhagat. Anesthesia is a nice luxury, especially for the patient. In future I can do the typing myself.

I feared that when Panikkar did not contact Bhagat with news of our meeting, Bhagat would go to the police. But Kali knew what to do. She called Bhagat and told him the procedure would be performed tonight as planned. Bhagat asked to speak to Panikkar, but Kali told him Panikkar was busy with me in the basement. She said Bhagat could collect the bonus that Panikkar had negotiated, but only after the procedure was completed. When Bhagat expressed anxiety, Kali told him to park outside the rear door. Panikkar would assure him that all was well.

When Bhagat pulled up, Kali switched on the interior light and held Panikkar’s severed head up to our door window on a pole. From outside, all Bhagat saw was Panikkar’s face [which was never very animated anyway] and a beckoning hand. The fool parked his car and entered with a smile.

Kali sat him down and explained in their language what had transpired, all the while with Panikkar’s head hanging from her belt. The expression on Bhagat’s face defied description. Not a word passed his lips. When he rose to leave, Kali informed him that the procedure would proceed as scheduled. He had two hours to rest before getting into his scrubs.

Panikkar be damned. Tonight I go in.

TWELVE

I come awake expecting to see fine blue lines of daylight around my heavy window blinds, but there is only darkness.

My telephone is ringing.

I have to get up to answer it. Sweat cools on my skin as I feel my way across the air-conditioned office to the phone.

“Hello?”

“Is this hopper school?” asks a whisper of a voice.

“What?”

The whisper gets louder. “Is this Harper Cole?”

“Yes. Who the hell is this? If you’re a cop, call me in the morning.”

“I’m not a cop.”

The voice sounds nervous. Nervous and young. “I’m sleeping. What do you want?”

“This is David Charles. Do you remember me?”

“No.”

“You talked to me a couple of times on the phone. I’m one of the techs at EROS.”

My eyes click open. “Yeah, I remember you.”

“No, you don’t. That’s okay. I’m one of Miles’s assistants.”

“What can I do for you … David?”

“I’m not sure. I just thought I’d better talk to you. You know the FBI is up here, right?”

“Yes. Trying to do phone traces?”

“Yeah. The atmosphere is really tense. They’ve got agents guarding the file vault, and Miles is acting really weird. He’s pretty paranoid about the government.”

“I’m listening.”

“Well … the thing is … your access to the accounting database was cut off, right?”

“Yes. Jan Krislov ordered that, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You are. Miles did it. I mean, he told me to do it.”

I feel a strange giddiness. “What are you trying to tell me, David?”

“Well, I just thought you should know. About two hours ago, I realized that another blind-draft account had been terminated for insufficient funds. It happened this morning. It belonged to a woman—”

I feel my mouth go dry.

“—named Rosalind May. She’s from Mill Creek, Michigan. At first I didn’t think anything about it. But then I realized she was on a list I saw in Miles’s office.”

Shit.

“It was a list of blind-draft women who haven’t been logging on but are still paying their fees. There are about fifty of them. Anyway, I decided to check and see whether May had logged on at all in the last few months. She seemed to lose interest about three months ago. But then I saw that she’d logged on every night for five nights, starting last week. She dropped off again two nights ago. And then today her secret account was overdrawn. Like she needed to make a deposit but wasn’t around to do it. You know?”

Yes, I know—

“And the thing is … Miles hasn’t told the FBI yet.”

“Jesus.”

“And since he hasn’t told them,” Charles says hesitantly, “I don’t feel too good about walking up to these suits and volunteering the information. You know? I figured since you first reported the murders, you might know how to handle it.”

The weight of this information is too great to absorb quickly.

“Harper?”

“You were right to call me, David. I’ll take care of it.”

“You will? Wow. Okay, man.” The relief in the tech’s voice is palpable. “Look, I gotta go. Miles is all over the office right now. I don’t think he’s been to sleep in like fifty hours.”

“Try to get him to rest,” I say uselessly.

“Yeah, okay. I will. And, uh … try to keep me out of this, okay?”

He hangs up.

I switch on my halogen desk lamp and dig through my wallet for Daniel Baxter’s card. I dial the number before I have time to second-guess myself.

“Investigative Support Unit, Quantico,” says a crisp female voice.

“I need to speak to Daniel Baxter immediately.”

“Your name?”

“Harper Cole. It’s about the EROS case.”

“Hold, please.”

A Muzak confection of old Carpenters tunes assaults my ears for nearly two minutes before Baxter comes on the line. An out-of-tune violin is still ringing in my head when he says, “Cole? What you got?”

“It’s five A.M.,” I say, looking at my desk clock. “You work all night?”

“It’s six A.M. here. What you got? I’m pretty busy.”

“You’re about to be a lot busier.”

Baxter catches his breath. “Spit it out, son.”

“I just learned that another blind-draft account went to zero. It was terminated today. It belonged to a woman.”

“Jesus Christ. Not this soon. You got a name?”

“Rosalind May. Mill Creek, Michigan.”

“Rosalind like in Shakespeare, or Rosalynn like Rosalynn Carter?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’d you find out about it?”

I remember David Charles’s plea for protection. “Worry about that later. Can’t you just check the name?”

“I’ll do it right now. Anything else I should know?”

“No. As soon as you find out anything, please give me a call. I mean immediately. You owe me that much.”

“I’ll buzz you. I’m going to call the Mill Creek P.D. right now.”

I get up from the halogen glow and walk down the hall to check on Drewe. She left the bedroom door open when she went to bed, a good sign. As she snores softly, I discern her face in the moonlight trickling through the window. Her mouth is slightly open, her skin luminous in the shadows. I don’t know how long I stand there, but the muted chirping of my office phone snaps me out of my trance and I slip quickly back up the hall to get it.

“This is Harper.”

“It’s bad, Cole.”

My blood pressure drops so rapidly I grab the desk to steady myself. “She’s dead?”

“Worse.”

“What? What’s worse than dead?”

“Rosalind May has been missing for fifty to sixty hours. That’s Rosalind with a D. Two nights ago she was dropped off at her home by a date at eleven P.M. Sometime during the night, she apparently let someone into her house or else voluntarily left to meet them. She hasn’t been seen since. In my experience that’s worse than dead. It means very painful things.”

“Oh, God. You think it was our guy? Strobekker?”

Baxter hesitates. “I don’t know. I’d say yes, but there’s one thing that doesn’t fit. One very big thing.”

“What?”

“Rosalind May is fifty years old. She has two grown sons. All the other victims were twenty-six or under.”

“Except Karin Wheat,” I remind him. “She was forty-seven.”

“Yeah. And one other thing.”

“What?”

“This UNSUB left a note. The police didn’t find it until last night. One of their detectives decided to poke through her computer—”

“There was EROS software on the drive?” I cut in.

“No. Just like the other cases. Anyway, this Michigan detective was poking through her computer, and he found a WordPerfect file he couldn’t read.”

“It was encrypted?”

“Not digitally. It was in French.”

“French? You’re sure the UNSUB left it?”

“You tell me. The translation’s about a paragraph long, but the end of it reads: ‘The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.’ Mean anything to you?”

The skin on the back of my neck is tingling. “Yes. I mean, I recognize the passage. It’s Henry Miller.”

“The porn author?”

“Miller wasn’t really a porn author. Not as you think of it. But that’s not important. The passage is from Tropic of Cancer.”

“How do you know that? Nobody here did.”

“Dr. Lenz must not be there. He would have known it.”

“You’re right. He’s out of pocket just now.”

“Tropic of Cancer is a classic of erotic literature. I’m sure it’s still in print.”

“Which means anybody could walk into a bookstore and buy one?”

“Probably not any bookstore. Not the chains. You’d probably find it in stores that cater to a literary crowd, or else in erotic bookstores.”

“Thanks. That helps.”

“What kind of killer leaves notes in French, Mr. Baxter? You ever see that before?”

“Never. The translator in Michigan said it was probably written by a highly educated French native. Very elegant, he said. I’ve sent it to a psycholinguistics specialist at Syracuse. He won’t be able to look at it before morning, though. The Mill Creek police aren’t telling the Press about the note, by the way. They’re using it to screen false confessions.”

“Hey, I’m not talking to a soul.”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this one,” he says, almost to himself.

“Why?” I ask, not admitting that I have the same feeling.

“The UNSUB has killed all the other victims at the scenes. Now he takes one away, no signs of violence. If this is our guy—and my gut tells me it is—he’s varying his behavior more than any killer I’ve ever seen. He could be starting to come apart, to lose control of what’s driving him. But I don’t think so. He seems able to choose whatever crime signature he wants, which means he’s not driven beyond the point of control. If you hadn’t called with Rosalind May’s name, we never would have connected this crime to the others. You understand?”

“Too well.”

“I appreciate the help, Cole. It’s nice to know someone at EROS realizes we’re the good guys.”

I say nothing.

“Talked to your friend Turner lately?”

“No. I mean, not directly. He sent me some email. Nothing important.”

Baxter waits. “Right.”

“What will you do now?”

“Pray he makes a mistake.”

THIRTEEN

Dear Father,

The procedure failed.

That is not wholly accurate. I was prevented from finishing by an unrelated accident. As Kali brought out the patient, she showed signs of hysteria. Unlike the Navy girl, Jenny, who adapted quickly, this one seemed not to have settled her nerves since we took her. Kali told me privately that Jenny had attempted to calm and reassure May during the night (quite ironic, considering the respective fates that awaited them) but the older woman would not be comforted. I’d had to sedate her at gunpoint the first night to get her to sleep at all.

I took the precaution of using curare prior to Jenny’s euthanization, to prevent her screaming or making any other sounds that might alarm May. But it was no use. As Bhagat and Kali struggled to get May onto the table, she spied a few drops of blood that had resulted from Jenny’s procedure. She began to shriek and flail, using her bound hands like a club. Even Kali could not frighten her into submission.

It was then that I made my mistake. I imagined that if I explained the simplicity of the procedure, and the remarkable benefits that would likely accrue to her because of it, May would calm down. But my speech had the opposite effect. When she heard me explain the necessity of opening the sternum, her face went white and she gripped her left arm. Needless to say, I attempted to save her, but it was useless. In four minutes she was dead.

She died of a massive myocardial infarction, and no one could have been more surprised than I. There were no relevant risk factors in her history. As unscientific as it may sound, I believe the woman died of pure terror. When she flatlined, doubt assailed me like a shadow. Should I stop? Should I go on?

Then I thought of Ponce de Leon, thrashing through the bug-infested jungles of Florida, fighting the mosquitoes and the mud and the alligators and the natives and disease, searching, ever searching for the mystical mythical Fountain of Youth. How the image of it must have burned inside his brain, gushing with pure shining water, liquid with restorative power, holding out its promise to mankind, the possibility of revoking God’s harshest decree. And all the time that poor Spaniard was carrying the true fountain with him, inside his head, millimeters from the very space where his seductive vision burned.

We know that now.

Soon I shall stand alone at the pinnacle of the species, the only man with the courage to reach into the fountain.

Soon I shall spit in the face of God.

FOURTEEN

It’s 10.30 A.M. and I am tired of talking to cops. Houston cops. L.A. cops. Oregon cops. San Francisco cops. Mill Creek, Michigan, cops. I’ve repeated the same story I told the New Orleans police and the FBI so many times that I know it like the Lord’s Prayer, and to detectives who seemed to be writing each word with the slowness of fourth graders practicing penmanship.

“Stupid sons of bitches!” I shout to my empty office. “You never heard of tape recorders?”

I feel a little better. Some of the cops I talked to want to arrest me, I could tell. Me, Miles, and the other seven people who have access to the master client list. All of them asked why we haven’t shut down EROS, and some yelled while they asked me. The Michigan cops were the worst, probably because they’re dealing with a kidnapping rather than a murder. I referred them all to Daniel Baxter of the FBI. Let them take their complaints to the Great Stone Face.

When the phone rings again, I grab it as if to smash it against my desk, but I restrain myself and put it to my ear.

“Harper, it’s me.” Drewe’s voice is tight with pent-up emotion.

“What is it? What happened?”

“A lot of things.”

A wave of heat rolls up my back and neck as an image of Erin flashes in my mind. “Where are you?”

“Woman’s Hospital.”

“Can you talk? What is it?”

“The FBI,” she says quietly.

“What? They called you?”

“No. They called my bosses. They called my friends.”

“What?”

“And not just the FBI. A detective from New Orleans called the hospital administrator and asked permission to question colleagues about me.”

Mayeux. “What kind of questions are they asking?”

“Embarrassing ones. Do I drink heavily. Do I ever bring you around the hospital, or even to Jackson. How you and I get along. Why don’t we have any kids.” Her voice cracks slightly at that. “Harper, this is not acceptable.”

“I know, babe. Goddamn it. I’ll try to see if I can do something about it.”

“You’ve got to do something about it. My world isn’t isolated like yours. The good opinion of these people is a prerequisite for keeping my privileges.”

“I get the message, Drewe. Let me make some phone calls.”

“Please do that. I’m being paged.”

And she is gone.

Let me make some phone calls. I said it with such confidence. Who the hell was I kidding? Am I going to call a New Orleans homicide detective and say, “Listen, shrimphead, leave my wife alone or take the fucking consequences!”

No.

Am I going to call Bob Anderson and say, “Dr. Anderson, it turns out I actually can’t take care of your little girl so could you please call the governor and ask him to get the FBI off our backs?”

Hell no.

Am I going to call the FBI and say, “Could you please stop questioning my wife about this murder case? She doesn’t like it.”

Maybe.

I take Baxter’s card from my wallet, punch in the number of Quantico, and ask for Agent Baxter.

“Special Agent Baxter is in the field at this time,” says a robotic female voice. “Would you like to leave voice mail?”

I decide to wake her up. “My name is Harper Cole,” I say too loudly. “I met with Baxter and Dr. Lenz about the Karin Wheat murder, and they told me to call immediately if I remembered anything vital to the case. Well, I have.”

“Where are you, Mr. Cole?” says a slightly less controlled voice.

“Home. And I don’t have much time.”

The voice finally becomes human. “Could you give me your number, please? Mr. Cole?”

“Baxter has it,” I snap, and hang up the phone. That ought to light a fire under somebody.

I sit down at the EROS computer, log in as SYSOP, and begin scanning the Level Two messages as they are posted. EROS traffic is basically unmoderated, which means we sysops do not screen or censor the communications of clients. This freedom is what allows Miles and me to run the busy service without much help. Certain types of communication are prohibited on EROS, and they are filtered by a simple but efficient program designed by Miles: he calls it “Ward Cleaver.” As messages are posted to the various areas of our servers, “Ward” automatically searches out all binary graphic files and references to children and deposits them in a special file called the Dumpster. (Actually, “Ward” lost his graphic filter three weeks ago.) At his leisure, Miles then attempts—usually with success—to track down the originators of these forbidden files. He doesn’t turn them over to the cops or anything. He just likes letting them know he can find them.

Theoretically, I’m supposed to be monitoring the various areas of EROS on a round-robin basis, doing what I can to assist new clients and helping to foster a sense of online community. But in the past few weeks I have become rather casual about that duty. More than a few of this morning’s messages are about Karin Wheat’s death. The themes are consistent: shock, denial, anger. Of course, none of the authors of these messages has any idea that Karin was an EROS client. They knew her only through her novels, which would interest most EROS clients, as they dealt with the darker side of the human psyche.

When my phone rings, I pick it up prepared to give Daniel Baxter a piece of my mind, but instead I find myself listening to the flat vowels of Dr. Arthur Lenz.

“You’ve remembered something of value, Mr. Cole?” he says.

“Where’s Baxter?”

“He’s not available just now.”

“Where are you, Doctor?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Did you go to Minnesota to see Strobekker’s body exhumed?”

“Do you doubt that I did?”

“I think you went straight to New York to try to crack Jan Krislov. Didn’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I personally observed the postmortem on David Strobekker.”

“Was he missing his pineal gland?”

“Oddly enough, no. Now, what was the purpose of your call?”

“Am I a prime suspect in these murders, Doctor?”

Lenz pauses. “You’re a suspect, yes.”

“Why?”

“You have access to EROS’s master client list. That makes you a member of a very exclusive group.”

“Have you got access to the list yet?”

“No.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“How?”

“Maybe I have a copy of the list.”

“Do you or don’t you?”

It’s my turn to play coy.

“What do you want?” Lenz asks.

“I want the FBI to stop hassling my wife.”

“Ah. Daniel’s agents can be clumsy on occasion. They are causing you problems?”

“They’re bothering my wife at work.”

“I see.”

“And anybody who bothers my wife de facto pisses me off.”

“Yes.”

“What can you do about that?”

Lenz says nothing for a while.

“You realize I could go public with all this at any time,” I tell him.

“That would only aggravate the very situation you seek to alleviate. The disruption of your wife’s life would increase exponentially.”

He’s right, of course.

“But perhaps I can be of assistance,” he says. “It’s true that the various police departments involved in the case—particularly the Michigan department—are ready to have both you and Mr. Turner arrested. I, however, do not share their enthusiasm.”

“Get to it, Doctor.”

“I think perhaps we can help each other, Mr. Cole. If you will agree to help me in a limited capacity, I think I could have both Bureau and police pressure removed from your life.”

“What kind of capacity?”

“I want the master client list, of course. Can you get it?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Damn this guy. “Why take that as a no?”

“If you had a copy of your own, you would have destroyed it by now. And you no longer have access to the accounting database, which you would need to get a new copy.”

How does he know that?

“However, you still have something I want.”

“What’s that?”

“Your thoughts.”

“What?”

And then he tells me. How long he has been planning this, I don’t know. Maybe this was the whole point of putting pressure on Drewe. Of not throwing me to the Michigan police. Because Lenz wants exactly what they want. To fly me up to Washington so he can question me with no one else around. He says something about “an informal version of his standard criminal-profiling technique,” but I don’t really listen. We both know the bottom line. If I want the pressure taken off, I’ve got to play his game.

“How soon do you want to do this?”

“I’ll have a ticket for you waiting in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s 10.50. Can you get to the airport by noon?”

“Noon today?”

“Of course.”

If I drop everything and walk out the front door without a toothbrush. Then I remember Drewe’s voice, tight with anxiety. “Yeah, I can get there. You think there’s a flight?”

“If there isn’t a direct flight, you’ll find a connecting ticket. Ask for messages at the American Airlines desk.”

“Okay. I’d better get going.”

“Just a moment. At the meeting in New Orleans, you mentioned that EROS is patronized by many celebrities.”

“I can’t tell you any names.”

“Fine, fine. But what level of celebrities are we talking about?”

“Well … Karin Wheat was pretty famous.”

“Yes, but authors don’t get the kind of adulation that Hollywood stars or sports figures do.”

“Not many sports figures on EROS, Doctor. The IQ level tends to run a little higher than that.”

“So what level of star are we talking about?”

“The top of the business. And not just actors. Directors, producers, agents, the works.”

He digests this in silence.

“Aren’t you any different from the paparazzi, Doctor? I thought you were trying to solve these murders, not root up juicy tidbits about Hollywood.”

“In all honesty, I find the whole concept of EROS fascinating. However, there is a point to my questions. Jan Krislov refuses to reveal anything about her clients. Thanks to you, I realize she is not grandstanding but prudently shielding people who have a great vested interest in protecting their public images. People who would not hesitate to sue Ms Krislov and have the funds to pursue such a lawsuit to its bitter end.”

“No doubt about it. Hell, there are celebrity lawyers on that master client list. Jan Krislov is a lot of things, but she’s no fool.”

“Do you have any more EROS session printouts?” Lenz asks.

“No more of the murder victims or Strobekker.”

“I’ll take anything you have. I’m following a rather twisted trail, and I’d like all the signposts I can get.”

“I’ll bring you what I have.”

“Excellent.” Lenz says he’ll fax me directions to his office in case I miss the FBI agents he plans to have waiting at the Washington airport. Then he says, “May I give you some unsolicited advice, Mr. Cole?”

“People do it all the time.”

“You’re an experienced futures trader. However, if I were you, I’d clear my current positions. Dump all contracts until this mess is resolved.”

“You’re not me.”

“Quite. Well … I’ll see you this afternoon.”

While Lenz’s fax comes through, I call Drewe in Jackson and explain what I’m about to do and why. She warns me to be careful, then goes back to her patients.

I pack a briefcase with a toothbrush, five hundred dollars in cash, and a few EROS folders from my file cabinet. Before I leave the office, I almost pick up the phone and follow Lenz’s advice. Getting out of the market now would cost me money, but that’s not what keeps me from doing it. The truth is, I feel a simple bullheaded resistance to letting Arthur Lenz tell me what to do. If I lose a few thousand bucks because I’m in a daze, so be it. It’s happened before.

I am almost to the Explorer when I remember Lenz’s fax. Running back inside to get it, I hear the phone. It’s my office line. I debate whether or not to answer, then pick up.

“Hello?”

“Moneypenny? This is Bond. James Bond.”

“What is it, Miles? I’m in a hurry.”

“Brahma went back online five minutes ago.”

“Have they traced the call?”

“Yes and no. They took a chance and started at the second Jersey line they wound up at last time. AT&T long line. Anyway, the connection twisted all around the country, but they finally tracked it to Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?”

“Yeah. Place called Lake Champion. It’s a tiny little nothing of a town.”

I feel my heart pumping. “So? Are they going to arrest him or what?”

“Not that easy, I’m afraid. You’re not going to believe this. Lake Champion, Wyoming, is one of the last towns in America with electro-mechanical phone switching. It’s like the Dark Ages. They actually have these complicated metal gizmos that spin around making physical connections, and there are rows and rows of them stacked on top of each other, from floor to ceiling.”

“What does that mean as far as tracing Brahma?”

Miles chuckles softly. “It means it takes an actual human being running up and down the aisles between those switches to trace the connections. With digital tracing, you can move through twenty states in a couple of minutes without getting permission from anybody. But to authorize an actual human being to chase down mechanical connections in one of these little towns, you have to have a court order.”

“What?”

Miles is laughing harder. “Here’s the brilliant part. To get that court order, you have to prove that a crime is being committed in the state where that town is. It’s one hell of a buffer system, and Brahma knows it. Rather than going higher and higher tech—which is what most hackers do and which is ultimately a no-win game—he goes to the simplest possible solution. He goes analog. It’s exactly what I’d do, man.”

Exactly what I’d do … “So what happens now?”

“Baxter is strong-arming a Wyoming judge as we speak, trying to get permission for a local yokel phone guy to do the trace.”

“How long will that take?”

“Hel-lo.” Miles sighs with almost sexual satisfaction. “Your question just became academic. The Strobekker account just went dead. Brahma’s history.” Miles’s voice rises to the exaggerated bellow of a game show announcer: “The switches in Wyoming are no longer connec-ted!”

I picture blue-suited FBI agents in the EROS office staring at Miles with murder in their eyes. “What alias was he using?”

“Kali this time. I haven’t seen that one before.”

“C-A-L-I?”

“No. K-A-L-I.”

“Who’s Kali?”

“The Hindu mother goddess, consort of Shiva, which is one of his other aliases. Kali’s an ugly black bitch. Wears a belt of skulls, carries a severed head and a knife, has six arms. She’s the betrayer, the terrible one of many names. Weird that he’d log on with a female alias.”

“Severed head? Christ. Are you an expert in this Eastern stuff or what?”

“I’ve dabbled. Read the Vedas, the Upanishads, some other things. They make a lot more sense than the chickenshit dualism of Christianity. You know, you really should—”

“I don’t have time for it, Miles.”

“Neither do I. Someone just told me the Wise and Wonderful Oz wants me on another line.”

“Oz?”

“Arthur Lenz. He’s the man behind the curtain on this thing, isn’t he?”

“I guess. I’ve got to run, Miles. Keep me posted. But use my answering machine, not email.”

“Don’t sweat it. Nobody reads my email if I don’t want them to. Not even God.”

I tear off Lenz’s fax and run for the Explorer. I believe nobody reads Miles’s email if he doesn’t want them to, but what I’m thinking as I crank the engine is this:

Maybe somebody should.

FIFTEEN

I am crossing the Washington Beltway in a yellow taxi driven by a black lay preacher. Lenz told me I would be met at Dulles Airport by FBI agents, but none showed, so I took the cab. The driver tries to make conversation—he still knows a lot of people from “down home,” meaning the South—but I am too absorbed in the object of my journey to keep up my end of the exchange.

Lenz’s private office is supposed to be in McLean, Virginia. All I know is that my lay preacher is leading me deep into upscale suburbia. Old money suburbia. Colonial homes, Mercedeses, Beemers (700 series), matched Lexi, tasteful retail and office space. The driver pulls into the redbrick courtyard of a three-story building and stops. You could probably buy five acres of Delta farmland for the monthly rent on Lenz’s office.

The first floor of the building is deserted but for ferns, its walls covered with abstract paintings that look purchased by the square yard. A bronze-lettered notice board directs me to the third floor. When the elevator door opens on three, I am facing a short corridor with a door at the end. No letters on the door.

Beyond the door I find a small, well-appointed waiting room. There’s a lot of indirect light, but the only window faces the billing office. A dark-skinned receptionist sits behind the window. I am not looking at her. I’m looking at a pale, gangly, longhaired young man folded oddly across a wing chair and ottoman. He is snoring.

“Miles?” I say softly.

He does not stir. A Hewlett-Packard notebook computer and a cellular telephone lie on the floor beside him. The computer screen swirls with a psychedelic screen-saver program.

“Miles.”

The snoring stops. Miles Turner flips the hair out of his eyes and looks up at me without surprise. His eyes are the same distant blue they have always been.

“Hello, snitch,” he says. “What’s in the briefcase? The names of everybody who works at EROS?”

“Fresh underwear. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as you, I guess. The mad doctor wants to pry open my skull, see what he can find. I hope he’s in the mood for drama. I certainly am.”

“I can’t believe you agreed to come.”

A fleeting smile touches his lips. “Didn’t have any choice, did I? I’ve got an old drug charge hanging over my head. All Lenz has to do is tell his sidekick—Baxter—to push the button, and I go to jail. Do not pass GO, et cetera.”

“Jesus.”

Miles leans his angular head back with a theatrical flourish and tries to catch the eye of the receptionist. I take the opportunity to study him more closely. It’s been four years since I saw him in the flesh. Miles long ago vowed never to set foot in Mississippi again. When I saw him last, in New Orleans, he had short hair and wore fairly conservative clothes. No Polo or khakis, of course, but your basic Gap in basic black. He’s wearing black again today, but his hair hangs over his shoulders, his sweater is not only torn but looks cheap, and he is dirty. I don’t smell him—yet—but he plainly hasn’t bathed for at least a couple of days.

“Staring is rude,” he says, his eyes still on the window to my left. “Don’t you read your Amy Vanderbilt? Or is it Gloria Vanderbilt?”

“Miles, what the hell is going on? You look terrible. What’s happening with the case?”

He smiles conspiratorially and brings a warning finger to his lips. His eyebrows shimmy up and down as he says in a stage whisper: “Shhhh. The walls have ears.”

When I stare blankly, he adds, “But then their ears have walls, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.”

“Are you telling me you think this waiting room is bugged?”

“Why not? Lenz works for the FBI. They could bug this room in the time it took you to wake me up.”

“How do you know how long that took?”

“Touché.”

“What’s the computer for?”

“Keeping up with developments, of course. Baxter just got the court order to do the trace in Wyoming. He must have blackmailed the judge. I think it’s a standard FBI tactic.”

“Has Brahma logged on again?”

“Once, about an hour ago, but Baxter didn’t have the court order then. He was only on for a couple minutes. They did manage to trace digitally back to the Wyoming phone company again. Lake Champion.”

“How do you know that?”

Miles smiles with satisfaction, then replies in a vintage Hollywood Nazi accent: “I haf my sources, Herr Cole.”

“What about the kidnapping? Rosalind May. Anything on that?”

“Nada. By the way, I didn’t know you had a mole among my faithful.”

“What are you talking about?”

He smiles again. “How else could the FBI have found out about Rosalind May?”

“Don’t you care about these women, Miles?”

“I care about all women.” Suddenly he is whispering so that I can barely hear. I sit beside him.

“They’re going to call one of us in there soon,” he says. “Why don’t we make a little deal right now? I say nothing to Lenz about you, you say nothing about me.”

This shocks me more than anything I’ve seen or heard yet. “You think you have to spell it out like that? You think I’d tell these people anything about you?”

His lips narrow in a shadow of the smile Jesus must have given Peter when he prophesied the disciple’s betrayal. “Humans do strange things under stress, Harper. Why don’t we just shake hands on it?”

I look down at the proffered hand and surprise myself by taking it.

“You want to grab a bite to eat after this?” he asks lightly. “Tie on the old feed bag, as they say back home?”

“Sure. I want to find out what the hell’s going on with this manhunt.”

“Whoever goes first waits for the other. Cool?”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Turner?”

The receptionist has slid open her window, but she is seated, and I see only a tight black bun atop her head.

“Dr. Lenz will see you first,” she says in a husky, almost luminous voice. “Go through the door and down the corridor. The doctor is waiting.”

Miles stands slowly, looks through the billing window, and says, “You have spooky eyes.” Then he picks up his computer and his cellular phone and disappears through the door like a tall and undernourished White Rabbit.

SIXTEEN

When the receptionist finally calls my name, Miles has not yet reappeared. Perhaps Lenz wants to talk to us together. As I get up and move toward the door that bars the office proper, I turn to get a closer look at the receptionist.

She is no longer there.

The door leads into a short hallway carpeted in royal blue. To my left is the empty receptionist’s cubicle, at the end of the hall another door. I open it without knocking.

Arthur Lenz is seated behind a cherry desk in a worn leather chair much like the one my father used in his medical office. But Lenz smells of cigarettes, not cigars. And his office is spartan compared to the Dickensian clutter of my father’s sanctum sanctorum.

My first thought when Lenz looks up is that I pegged him wrong in New Orleans. There he seemed a handsomer version of William F. Buckley Jr. Now, seated silently behind the ornate desk with his iron-gray hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, he seems to have morphed into a more sinister character—Donald Sutherland in one of his heavier roles. Lenz gives me a perfunctory smile and motions me toward a sleek black couch that reminds me of an orthodontist’s chair.

“Did you transport Miles to an alternate dimension?” I ask.

He looks puzzled. “Here are your printouts,” I say quickly, dumping the contents of my briefcase on the center of his desk.

Lenz gives the laser-printed pages a quick scan, then slips them into a desk drawer. “I was about to have some tea sent in,” he says. “Care for some?”

So this is how he means to play it: two supercivilized males sitting here sipping tea. “Got any Tabs?”

“Tabs?”

“You know, the drink. Tab. Tasted shitty in the Seventies, now it’s just palatable. That’s what I drink.”

The psychiatrist’s mouth crinkles with distaste. “There’s a vending machine in the building next door. I suppose I could send my receptionist over for some.”

“Fine. Normally, I’d be gracious, but since you’re the one picking my brain, I insist. I need some caffeine.”

“Tea has caffeine.”

“But it ain’t got fizz.”

Lenz pushes a button on a desk intercom and makes the request. It reminds me of the old Bob Newhart Show. I almost laugh at the memory.

“What’s funny, Mr. Cole?”

“Nothing. Everything. You’re wasting time talking to me. Your UNSUB could be out there killing another woman right this second.”

“Yes, he could. But you don’t seem to grasp the fact that you and Mr. Turner are the only direct lines into this case. And as for wasting time, I frequently spend hours interviewing janitors or postmen whose only connection to a case may be that they walked past the crime scene.”

I don’t respond to this.

Lenz smiles like he’s my favorite uncle or something. “I know the couch seems camp. But it does tend to concentrate the mind.” He takes a pencil from the pocket of his pinpoint cotton shirt and taps the eraser on a blank notepad in front of him. “Lie back and relax, Mr. Cole.”

The soft leather couch wraps itself around my back like beach sand, which tells me it does anything but concentrate the mind. Lenz’s ceiling tiles tell me his roof has leaked before. He modulates his deep voice into a fatherly Masterpiece Theatre register, but behind it I sense an unblinking gaze.

“This is not a formal interview,” he says. “Psychological profiling is not an exact science. Any wet-nosed FBI trainee could question you about the homicidal triangle: bed-wetting, fire starting, cruelty to animals. I use a different approach. Despite the attempts of thousands to discredit Sigmund Freud, I still believe the old grouch was onto something regarding the importance of sexual experiences.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you familiar with Nietzsche’s epigram?”

“That tired old saw about monsters and the abyss?”

“No, this.” Suddenly Lenz is speaking harsh German that sounds like Erich von Stroheim in Five Graves to Cairo.

“I didn’t catch that, Doctor.”

“Forgive me. ‘The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.’”

“I’ve seen that on EROS.”

“I happen to believe it. I’m going to ask you some very personal questions. I hope you’ll answer frankly. You may feel a bit harried. I tend to jump from subject to subject, following my nose, as it were. Please try to remember that there is no personal motive behind my questions.”

Right. You just want to put me in line for a lethal injection. “Fine,” I say aloud. “Let’s do it.”

“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done, Mr. Cole?”

The question takes me off guard. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“What could be simpler? Please answer.”

“You don’t waste much time on foreplay, do you?”

“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“Next question.”

Lenz sighs in frustration, but I don’t really care. “Very well. What moment are you proudest of in your life?”

“What is this?” I ask, trying to get some idea of how to handle this guy.

“Mr. Cole, did you come here expecting to look at Rorschach blots? Perhaps to say the first thing that popped into your head when I said words like ‘breast’ or ‘hate’?”

“I guess I thought you were going to ask me about EROS.”

“EROS, you, Turner—it’s all one package, isn’t it? For the moment I’m concerned with you personally. Moments of shame and pride are frequently things people keep to themselves. The acts that cause these emotions often illuminate the extreme boundaries of the personality. If I know the extremes, I know the man. So please try to answer frankly. Yes?”

“Okay.”

“Would you consider yourself what laymen call a control freak?”

“Yes. I guess that makes two of us.”

“Do you masturbate regularly?”

“Don’t you?”

“Is that a yes?”

“I’m still waiting for your answer.”

Lenz gives a faint smile. “Do you masturbate while communicating on EROS?”

“Occasionally.”

“Would you say most subscribers use EROS as an aid to masturbation?”

“I’m sure most of them have. I wouldn’t say that’s their primary use for it. EROS is more for your head than your body.”

“What do you think about when you masturbate?”

“That’s my business.”

“Mr. Cole.”

“Women, of course.”

“Women doing what?”

“What do you think?”

“That you’re being evasive.”

“What the hell do you want to know?”

“Do you have violent fantasies?”

“Such as?”

“Women bound, for example.”

“No.”

“Women making sounds of supplication?”

“No.”

“Women in pain?”

“No.”

“Do you ever make mental connections between sex and blood?”

“Hell no.”

“This may be a sensitive question, but I must ask it. You grew up in a rural area. Have you ever had sex with an animal of any kind?”

“Have you ever had someone pound the living shit out of you? Jesus.”

Lenz marks on his notepad. “Would it surprise you to learn that over a third of all males raised in rural areas have had intercourse with some type of animal to the point of orgasm?”

“It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, okay? And I’d like to keep it that way.”

“I hope you can control your temper, Mr. Cole. There is a method to my madness, I assure you. Now … what is your first sexual memory?”

“What do you mean? Like as a kid?”

“Your first sexual memory of any kind.”

“Well … trying to peek under my mother’s nightgown while she was sleeping, I guess.”

“What did you see?”

“Not much. It was dark.”

“After that?”

“Playing doctor in a tree house.”

“With girls or boys?”

“Girls. One girl.”

“The same age as you?”

“Yes.”

“What age?”

“I don’t know. Definitely little kids. Innocent stuff.”

“Any genital touching?”

“Nah. Just show-and-tell.”

“What about same-sex play?”

I hesitate. “A little.”

“One boy, or several together?”

“Several. Just neighborhood buddies.”

“How old were you?”

“Older. Still young, though.”

“Any fear that you were a homosexual because of it?”

“We didn’t even know what a homosexual was. Discovering my dad’s stash of Playboys was like unearthing the Rosetta Stone.”

“Have you had online sex with other men?”

“Not knowingly.”

“What do you mean?”

“A lot of men pretend to be women online. On regular networks it’s because there’s a shortage of women. But on EROS that doesn’t apply. Some men still do it there, so I guess I could unknowingly have fantasized sex with a man.”

“But you’ve never pretended to be a woman online?”

“Once. My wife told me I should try it to see what it felt like. I did, and I didn’t like it.”

“Why?”

“It’s like you’re assaulted from every side. Even on EROS, which is the most civilized online service, being a woman means you’re constantly approached by men. It’s the loss of control, I guess.”

“How old were you when you first had sex with a woman?”

“All the way? Complete intercourse?”

“Serious foreplay. Touching of genitals.”

“Probably … thirteen. With a couple of curious girls the same age. When I was fourteen this other girl and I did pretty much everything but intercourse. We were in love, though. Jesus. Like holding hands and kissing and touching each other was some kind of new religion. An indescribable intensity of feeling. Your heart pounding like it would punch through your chest. She was a year older than me.”

“How did that relationship end?”

“She broke my heart after seven months. I still remember that. Funny, huh? Seven months. I was physically sick. I think that warped me. I was never willing to fall totally for a girl after that. I knew what could happen.”

“How did that color your relationship with other girls? You were angry?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When did you first have sexual intercourse?

“Fifteen. The girl was eighteen.”

“A one-time experience?”

“Are you kidding? Once I got a taste of that, it was nonstop. Day and night, sneaking out of the house, anywhere we could find a place.”

“What kind of places did you usually find?”

“Outside, mostly. Or in the car, you know.”

“Not in her parents’ house?”

“No. We had a little respect.”

“What do you remember most about that relationship?”

I close my eyes. “Later, a couple of years later, I heard she’d become a slut. I’d really started to care for her after a while. She was country, but she read poetry, like that. She was a real person, just a little lost. She had feelings nobody knew about. It was sad.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well … I read her diary once.”

“She let you read her diary?”

“Not exactly. I went over to her house one time, and nobody answered the door. I went in anyway.”

“The door was open?”

“No. The few times I’d sneaked in to see her, I went though her window, so I did that. I looked around the house. Her room, especially. I found this little calendar where she’d written really small in the day spaces, like a diary.”

“What had she written?”

“All kinds of things. She had codes. Simple ones. There were Xs on the days when she had her periods, that was easy. Then there were some initials, which I figured out were guys she knew—guys her age. Then there was ‘M.L.’ on some days, which stood for ‘made love.’ I knew that because I’d been with her on those days.”

“All of them?”

“Not all.”

“How did you feel reading that diary?”

“Like a spy.”

“You put it back where you found it?”

“No. I took it.”

“Stole it?”

“Mm-hm. There were a few of them. I just took the one.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No.”

“When did you get rid of it?”

“Just after I got married. With a bunch of old letters and stuff. I didn’t want Drewe finding that kind of thing. Stuff from old girlfriends, you know? Some of it was pretty explicit. And she knew some of the girls.”

“Why did you keep those letters so long?”

“All is vanity, right?”

Lenz scribbles something on his notepad. “How many women have you slept with in your life?”

I pause. “Fifteen.”

“Approximately fifteen? Or fifteen exactly?”

“Exactly.”

“You could write down all their names? Here and now, I mean?”

“Yeah, but I won’t.”

“But you’ve written down their names before.”

“Yes.”

“Ever rated their performances? Their looks, what they did, things like that?”

“Any guy who says he hasn’t is probably lying.”

Lenz chuckles, a quick deep rumble. “Odd, isn’t it? This compulsion to prove what we have done? Were you in love with these women?”

“I thought I was, with some of them. Some not. I guess I just wanted to know they wanted me enough to do that.”

“One-night stands?”

“Not my thing.”

Lenz scribbles some more on his pad.

“What experience would you say constitutes the best sex you’ve ever had?”

“The best sex? Well … I guess the best sex—I mean the most uninhibited, unrestrained sex—I had with women who were a little crazy.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean very intense women. Very jealous, or if not jealous, then kind of haunted … driven. Doomed, maybe.”

“Doomed to what?”

“I don’t know. Unhappiness. Unfulfillment.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“I’m talking about purely physical sex, now. Not necessarily … loving sex. I don’t know if I can explain. I think once you start down the road toward pure pleasure, some things get left behind. I know the PC line, how the best sex can only happen in the context of love, all that. But from an existential point of view, I’d disagree. The most intense sex takes place where there is no psychological limit. No moral limit. The word ‘no’ has never been uttered, so possibility is infinite. And that covers a lot of territory, you know?”

“Please go on.”

“I’m talking about exploration, discovery, crossing thresholds. And once you cross some thresholds, I’m not sure you can get back. Sex engages the whole psyche, doesn’t it? Self-respect is involved, and your respect for the other person. Love, lust, obsession … it all blurs. Some women do things they might never ordinarily do because they want to be unique in your experience. They want to prove they love you more than anyone else ever did or could, and they do that by venturing into erotically scary territory. And you pretend they’re unique, because to tell them the truth would probably deny you the physical pleasure of the act, and also devalue their gift to you in their eyes. Yet … these acts, these roads you travel down, aren’t a place you want to be all your life. A sexual relationship has an organic curve. The more intense the experience, the shorter the curve.”

“You’re saying you don’t have or want these types of experiences with your wife?”

“I guess I am. Maybe a taste of it now and then. But you can’t push sexual limits for thirty or forty years with one person. Eventually you run into a wall. I think you have to come to an accommodation. A nice warm place where there is heat and light, though maybe a little less fire. It sounds provincial as hell, I know, but there’s a lot more to marriage than sex.”

Lenz taps the end of his pen against his lower lip, which is gray and bloodless. At length, he says, “What are you hiding from your wife?”

My cheeks burning, I try to hide my embarrassment in anger. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He looks at me like a state trooper watching a drunk driver claim he’s sober. After tapping the pen some more, he says, “You just described a problem of intimacy with your wife.”

“Bullshit.”

Another tired sigh. “The intense sexual experiences you described are essentially adolescent in character. The aggrandizement of the self and the depersonalization of the woman in pursuit of physical ecstasy. I’ve seen a photograph of your wife. She’s—”

“Where did you get a picture of my wife?”

“A beautiful woman,” he continues. “And obviously intelligent. You’ve been married only three years and have no children, yet you recall premarital sexual adventures with more than mere wistfulness. Furthermore, you spend a great deal of time pursuing relationships with other women through your computer, acting out virtual sexual fantasies with famous actresses who have no idea you know who they are—”

“Did Miles tell you that?” I heave myself up into a sitting position.

“Mr. Cole, I suggest that there is something preventing you from fully accepting the love of your wife, and thus from entering into a fully mature and satisfying sexual relationship with her. I doubt whether anything you could tell me would do more to exonerate you of these crimes, in my eyes, than what that is.”

“Look, Doctor, I’ve done just about anything sexual I ever wanted to in real life. Do I miss sex for its own sake? Sure. Married sex is different. It gets weighted down by everyday life. I don’t care how imaginative you are. Everybody thinks he’s an expert on sex, from the frigid old schoolteacher to the great Arthur Lenz, but everybody has the same problem. Men want more sex and women want more love. We’re hardwired differently. Do Drewe and I have a perfect relationship? No. Do we have a good one? Yes. Next question.”

Lenz seems about to argue further, then thinks better of it. “Have you ever struck a woman?” he asks.

“Once,” I reply, forcing myself to lie back down.

“What prompted it?”

“She tried to kill me.”

“Why?”

“Jealousy.”

“How did she try to kill you?”

“Once with a car. Another time with a rifle. I don’t think she really knew who she wanted to kill, me or her.”

“Where is this woman now?”

“Married with kids.”

“Do you consider yourself a handsome man?”

“Handsome? In a regular kind of way, I guess. I don’t think it was necessarily my looks that attracted women to me, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“What was it?”

“I knew how to talk to them.”

A sudden heightening of awareness. “What do you mean? You were smooth? You had a good line, as they say?”

“God, no. I understood them, is all. I could talk to them like their female friends did, but probably more honestly than their friends would. You know what I mean?”

“Tell me.”

“Most guys are into things I have no interest in. Sports, hunting, like that. I mean I played sports, but I could care less about watching them, you know? Vicarious thrills aren’t for me.”

“You like to participate.”

“Right.”

“Have you ever participated in a murder?”

“Is that your idea of a trick question?”

“Will you answer it, please?”

“Hell no, I’ve never committed murder.”

“Ever thought about it?”

“Sure. I’ve known a couple of dyed-in-the wool sons of bitches who deserved it. They never get it, though. It’s the good people that get it. Right, Doctor?”

“Define ‘good people.’”

“I mean regular folks. People who try to obey the rules. Little kids minding their own business and trying just to grow up. I think anybody that purposefully hurts a person like that has forfeited his right to much consideration. People say the world’s gone gray, but that’s bullshit. There’s still a line. And anybody who crosses that line deserves whatever they get.”

“How do you feel about capital punishment?”

“In first-degree murder cases? The murder of a child, like that?”

“Yes.”

“Fry the fuckers. Instant karma.”

Lenz writes on his notepad again.

“You think I sound like some reactionary Southern redneck, right? Let me tell you, Doctor, where I live I’m considered a liberal. If this nut kills a woman down my way, he’d better get clear in a hurry. There’s still a lot of Old Testament justice down South. And I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.”

“He killed a woman in New Orleans with impunity.”

It’s my turn to chuckle. “New Orleans isn’t the South I’m talking about.”

“I get the feeling you believe the killer is not from the South.”

“You’re right.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, he doesn’t write like a Southerner.”

“He is remarkably literate.”

“Fuck you, Doctor. Ever read Faulkner? Thomas Harris?”

“I meant for a serial murderer, Mr. Cole. No need to get defensive.”

A soft knock sounds at the door. I look over quickly, half expecting Miles. When the door opens, a slender woman with cinnamon skin enters soundlessly and places a silver tea service on Lenz’s desk. The sweating pink Tab can looks incongruous on the gleaming tray. Without meeting my eyes she offers me a glass of ice, but I take only the can, pop the top, and drink half the contents in a few long swallows. Her black eyes rise to mine with disapproval. I try for a moment to guess her race but find myself at a loss. Living in Mississippi doesn’t give you much practice for this. There it’s either black or white, with a smattering of Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese, and Hispanic.

Lenz watches the dark woman pour his tea without comment. After she exits, he says, “Why don’t we leave sex and violence for a moment?”

“Fine.”

“Do you earn a lot of money?”

“Making money’s not a crime yet, is it?”

“Were your parents wealthy?”

I lie back on the couch and focus on the stained ceiling tiles. “My mother grew up on a farm that didn’t have electricity until she was fourteen years old. She picked cotton with her own hands all the way through college. In case you don’t know, wealthy people don’t pick cotton.”

“Is money important to you?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Your friend Mr. Turner seems to think you place an inordinate value on it.”

“He talked to you about me?”

“A bit.”

I lean up on one elbow. “Tell me one thing he told you.”

“He told me you keep a cache of gold buried beneath your land.”

“That lying son of a bitch.”

“It’s not true?”

“About the gold? Yeah, it’s true. My grandfather Grant put in a nuclear bomb shelter at the farm during the Fifties. Some company was traveling through Mississippi selling plans. Big concrete bastard sunk into the ground. I keep some gold there.”

“Why?”

I lie back down and think for several moments. “I was raised by people who grew up during the Depression. I think the memory of that time stayed so real to my parents that it somehow entered me. Not the physical deprivation, but the knowledge that it could actually happen. That the whole social and financial structure of this country could implode and leave nothing but hungry and confused people.”

“You feel anxiety about something similar happening again?”

“I work in financial markets, Doctor. Most of the guys I know in Chicago have no real conception of the Depression. They know the word, but the only mental reference point they have is 1987, and that was over in a couple of days. They leverage positions to the moon, trade derivatives they don’t understand, tear apart companies in a day that took decades to build, and don’t see any farther than next week’s paycheck. You’re asking me if I think it could happen again? You should be asking when.”

“This hoarded gold is insurance against some sort of final collapse?”

“Laugh if you want. Ask the Russians how important gold is right this minute.”

“Well, given these apocalyptic feelings, you seem like the last man in the world who’d be playing a game as risky as futures trading.”

“I don’t mind risk. Because I’m not playing a game.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one who trades commodities has any intention of taking delivery of anything they buy or sell. It’s all a paper illusion, a numbers game. Until that fatal margin call, anyway. One day I decided I’d take delivery on something, just to find out if any of it was real. I’d heard of an old guy in Baton Rouge who took delivery of a truckload of soybeans for the same reason. I chose gold. They delivered it, too. And right now it’s locked in the bottom of that bomb shelter next to some forty-year-old cans of Spam.”

“Remarkable.”

“What does that tell you about me? Paranoia’s in my genes? I’ve always known that. I consider it a Darwinian advantage.”

“Is paranoia the reason a man of your youth and wealth chooses to live in such an isolated place?”

I raise my hands as if echoing his question.

“Let’s try another tack. Why did you wait so long to go into the career for which you seem so singularly suited?”

“I don’t know.”

Lenz’s voice swings back at me like a pendulum. “I’m sure you do.”

“Does everybody with a green thumb run out and become a gardener?”

He folds his notepad shut and leans back in his chair. “Let’s say a man is a gifted mathematician. He may not choose mathematics as his career, but he will likely choose a related field, such as architecture or engineering.”

“I didn’t.”

“Of course you did. Music is fundamentally a mathematical art.”

“That’s what I’ve always heard. Usually from people who don’t know diddly about music.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sure, you can break music down into mathematics. Classical music, especially. But Doctor, I’ve sat on the porches of tar-paper shacks with guys playing stuff … you wouldn’t believe it. Old arthritic black guys playing out-of-tune guitars and just effortlessly bending the notes into tune, playing with their eyes shut and it didn’t matter anyway ’cause they couldn’t read a note. They play between the numbers, man. And that’s just blues. Think about jazz. Music is math, what a load of crap.”

“You’re a romantic, Cole.”

“Music is romantic.”

“Not all music.”

“Mine is. The music of my generation, and the one before. Somebody—Oscar Wilde, I think—said that when trying to describe the act of love, humans have two choices, the language of science or the language of the gutter, both of which are inadequate. But rock and roll split the difference. That’s why it endures. It says the unsayable. Rage, angst, alienation, a dozen emotions. But the core of it is sex, Doctor. Sex, love, and obsession.”

“An interesting thesis.”

“That’s no thesis. It’s just life.”

“I’d like to get back to your family for a moment.”

“Did we ever leave?”

“Your father was a physician. How did that affect you, growing up?”

“I never had any anxiety about what my dad did for a living. ‘What does your dad do? He’s a doctor.’ End of conversation.”

“Negatives?”

I think a moment. “He wasn’t home a lot of the time. And when he was, it could be weird. I remember times I cut my legs, needed stitches, stuff like that. I’d run in the house yelling, he’d be watching the Saints play or something. He’d take a look through all the blood, then send me off with my mom to clean it up while he waited for the end of the first half. Then we’d finally go down to his office and sew it up. That bugged me when I was young. But I guess it taught me something too. A lot of injuries that look bad aren’t, really. No need to panic, you know?

“What else?”

“Uh … speeding tickets.”

“I’m sorry?”

“After I got my driver’s license, I’d get stopped by the sheriff or the Yazoo City cops, like every other kid. They’d be writing me a ticket, then they’d look up like they just realized something and say, ‘Are you Dr. Cole’s son?’ Most times they’d just tear up the ticket and let me go my way. At first I thought they were letting me go because they thought my dad was the greatest guy in the world. And some of them did. The black ones, especially. But even the white ones let me go, guys that probably hated my dad. Then I figured out the deal. Dad had been the police doctor for a while. Back several years before. A lot of these guys owed him money. He never would have tried to collect, but they didn’t know that. They figured, I write this kid a twenty-dollar ticket, I get a bill for eight hundred bucks or whatever.”

“Why did these white police officers hate your father?”

I take a long, weary breath and exhale slowly. “You’ve arrived back at your second question, only you don’t know it.”

“Which question?”

“What am I proudest of.”

“Ah. Will you answer it now?”

“I don’t see the relevance.”

“Please let me decide what’s relevant.”

“You think I’m going to spill my guts to you in the naive belief that you’d honor doctor-patient confidentiality?”

Lenz straightens at his desk. “I honor patient confidences absolutely.”

“Yeah?” Propelled by some contrary impulse, I take out my wallet, withdraw a hundred-dollar bill, cross the room, and stuff the bill into Lenz’s breast pocket. “You’re hired.”

“You’re testing my patience, Mr. Cole.”

“And I give you a C-minus. You want to turn off the tape recorder now?”

“I do not tape my sessions,” he says indignantly.

“Thank you, Doctor Nixon.”

Lenz looks genuinely indignant. “You’re making me angry, Cole.”

I back over to the couch and lie down again. “I’m now officially your patient. What if I tell you I killed those seven women?”

He catches his breath. “Did you?”

“Answer my question first.”

Lenz nervously pushes up the nosepiece of his glasses. “If you’re telling me that you did … well … my honest answer would be that I … I would try to find some other way of proving your guilt than violating doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“What if you couldn’t do that? And you knew I was going to kill again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could always kill me yourself. Then doctor-patient privilege would no longer be in effect, right?”

“You’re as bad as your friend.”

“What do you mean?”

“The levels of deviousness. I don’t know whether to tell Daniel to arrest Turner or to hire him as a consultant. I think he’s already figured out more about the EROS killer than the Bureau has.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me.” Again I wonder if the FBI arrested Miles right on this couch and hauled him off to jail. “On the other hand, maybe Miles knows so much because he is the killer.”

Lenz doesn’t bite.

A telephone on the desk emits a soft chirp and the psychiatrist answers, his eyes still focused on me. He listens, then covers the transmitter and says, “Would you mind leaving the room until I’m done?”

I stand up and step into the hall. Lenz’s sonorous voice resumes behind me, muted by the heavy door. The dark-skinned receptionist is still AWOL from the billing office. I open the waiting-room door on the off chance that Miles may be there, but he isn’t. Thinking I might catch Drewe on her cellular, I step over to the receptionist’s desk. I am reaching for her phone when I notice an envelope with my name on it at the center of the desk. Without hesitation I pick it up and scan the few handwritten words on the paper inside.

Harper,

Brahma just logged back onto EROS under alias “Shiva.” With that Wyoming court order, Baxter now has the power he needs to trace the call. I’ll talk to you when I can.

Ciao

As I slip the note back into the envelope, the waiting-room door opens and a blond, square-jawed yuppie in a blue business suit steps inside. I crush the envelope into my pants pocket and head back toward Lenz’s office.

The psychiatrist almost bowls me over as he hurries up the hallway, tugging on his jacket to the jingle of car keys.

“Sorry, Cole,” he says, his voice clipped. “We’re going to have to talk on the move. This is Special Agent Peter Schmidt.”

I ignore Agent Schmidt as he steps up behind me. “What are you talking about? Where are we going?”

“That was Daniel Baxter on the phone. There’s been a new development. I’m needed at Quantico and he told me to bring you along.”

“What kind of development?” I ask, thinking of Miles’s message.

“They may have found Rosalind May.”

My heart thumps. “Dead?”

“We don’t know.”

“Look, I’ve got a flight to catch tonight, remember?”

“Cole, need I remind you that you are currently a suspect in seven capital murders?”

“You know I didn’t kill those women.”

“What I think doesn’t matter at this point. A woman’s life is at stake.”

“You’re lying, Doctor. What you think is all that matters.”

Lenz looks at Agent Schmidt, then at the floor, then back at me. “Our UNSUB’s in Dallas, Texas. It’s your choice. Fly home and be out of it, or watch the killer you smoked out get what’s coming to him.”

In that moment all the hours I spent reading “David Strobekker’s” dark seductions alone in my office come back to me. Beyond that, the horror and guilt of watching the first CNN report of Karin Wheat’s murder twists in my gut like a strand of barbed wire. I have no choice.

“Let’s go.”

SEVENTEEN

Lenz leads Agent Schmidt and me across the parking lot to a midnight blue Mercedes 450SL. Schmidt starts to get in, but the psychiatrist pulls him aside and speaks softly, and he disappears.

Lenz drives with assurance, keeping just under the speed limit as he makes for a distant overpass bristling with green metal signs. Afternoon is wearing toward evening, the gray over our heads fading downward to a deep blue.

“We’re about thirty-five miles from Quantico,” he says, punching a button on his cellular phone, apparently to make sure it’s working.

“If everything’s happening in Dallas, why are we going to Quantico?”

“They have certain facilities there.” He threads the Mercedes through a thicket of cars. “You’ll know more soon.”

“Nice ride,” I comment.

“A gift from my wife,” he says in a taut voice.

At that moment Lenz’s cellular rings, and the speed with which he snatches it up betrays the tension he feels. He listens for twenty seconds, says yes twice, and then hangs up.

“Come on,” I say sharply. “They traced Strobekker’s call through Wyoming to Dallas, right? And they just got an exact address.”

He looks over in astonishment. “How …? Ah. Turner, of course.” He stares at me another few seconds. “They traced the call from the Lake Champion phone exchange to the WATS line of a mining company in that town. The WATS was connected to Dallas, Texas. To an apartment. Rented under the name of David M. Strobekker.”

“Holy shit. What’s going to happen?”

“Dallas FBI and police SWAT teams have already surrounded the complex and evacuated the nearby apartments. Strobekker’s still online. An FBI Hostage Rescue Team is en route from Kansas City via jet. They were waiting on alert there so that they could reach any US destination in the shortest possible time.”

“Don’t you need to be in Dallas? In case there’s a standoff or something? To try to talk the guy out?”

“Daniel has authorized explosive entry. Rosalind May could be inside, and Strobekker has already proved he’ll kill without mercy. Hostage Rescue blows down the doors as soon as they get there. ETA eighty minutes.”

“What if Strobekker tries to leave before they get there?”

“Dallas SWAT takes him down.”

“You mean they kill him?”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. Where we’re going, I’ll be able to speak directly to whoever’s in the apartment, if necessary.”

I sit back heavily in my seat. Ten minutes ago I was angry and tired; now I taste the euphoria of my name being cleared, of my life getting back to its normal anxiety level.

Lenz gooses the Mercedes up an on-ramp and joins the southbound stream of traffic on 495. “Cole, I need your help, and you need mine. The best way for you to avoid trouble in this case is to assist with the investigation. But before I can use you, I have to be sure you’re not involved.”

“But they’re about to nail the guy.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. The evidence in this case suggests a group of offenders working in concert. Is Strobekker himself in that apartment? Or is it the owner of that Indian hair found at one of the crime scenes?”

Great. “What do you want from me?”

“Answers. I think you’re a good man haunted by a bad thing. The question is, is that thing related to this case or not?”

“It’s not, okay? Isn’t my word enough?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Goddamn it, I reported the murders! And so far all I’ve gotten for my trouble is more trouble.”

The psychiatrist looks away from the darkening road long enough to fix me with a disquieting stare. His face looks like my father’s did the first time he confessed money problems to me. One minute I was looking at a man in his prime—responsible, circumspect, in charge—the next at a drawn visage haunted by failure and doubt. A face about to confide secrets that would change my life forever.

“I’ve been a forensic psychiatrist more than thirty years,” Lenz says in a voice stripped of all affect. “Thirty years of listening to men describe how they tortured and violated children. Watching videotapes of men tearing women into bloody pieces in vans and basements.” He lowers his head almost defensively. “My work is the benchmark by which others are measured. But not long ago, I reached a point where the compass that had led me thus far no longer functioned. I had problems at home. My work had become an endless round of tedium. Do you have any idea what the Investigative Support Unit actually does, Cole?”

“Catches serial killers, right?”

“Wrong. It does exactly what its title says. Gives support. The movie image of FBI agents single-handedly tracking down serial killers is pure fantasy. We advise. Local police do the physical work, make the arrest, and get the credit.”

I watch Lenz from the corner of my eye.

“Killers are monotonous, as a rule,” he goes on. “Variations on a theme. I testify at their trials, seal their fates, then recede back into the shadows. It’s just … rote. The whole goddamned profession is being corrupted. By greed, ambition. Men I’ve trained peddle my ideas to the masses in the form of sensational books, lectures, and Hollywood consulting. None of which I ever had a taste for. I’m a scientist, do you understand? A physician.”

The integrity in Lenz’s voice is almost embarrassing. “I understand, Doctor.”

“The only thing that kept me working was that the prospect of retirement seemed even less appealing.”

“You just spoke in the past tense. What changed it?”

“You.” Lenz turns to me with new light in his eyes. “The EROS killer has already murdered seven women we know of, with the corpses found in every case. Yet he staged each crime but two in such a way that they were not linked. And homicide detectives look

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