Mortal Fear (45 page)

 “Green, this is Alpha. I’m en route now. Get inside that house. One of you follow Dr. Lenz, the other tell the locals what’s what. Move it.”

 “Understood.”

 “Green, make SURE the locals know Lenz is a white hat. Whoever goes in the house, give me play-by-play. I’ll take over when I get there.”

 “Alpha, this is Green. I’m in the garage. I’m ahead of the police. It’s dark . . . my weapon is out. I’m moving through a slightly open door. It’s a laundry room. No sign of anybody. Wait . . . Alpha, somebody’s yelling. Screaming. I think it’s a man. I have a man screaming—howling really. He . . . oh sweet Jesus . . . oh my God, we got a body here, sir. We have a female down. She’s—Jesus, she’s on a kitchen table. She’s naked. The doctor’s giving her CPR, but . . . I think she’s dead, Dan. She’s got to be dead because her—her head. Jesus, I’ve never seen one this bad—”

 “Terminate contact,”
snaps a rigidly composed voice.
“I’ll be at the scene in less than a minute. Is that understood? IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?”

 “Understood, sir. Sorry I lost my head . . . Green out.”

 There’s another long burst of static. Then Sid Moroney’s voice drifts through my office in a hushed interrogative:

 “You guys heard that?”

 Miles doesn’t answer.

 “Guys? Hey. Somebody just got wasted. A lady just got wasted. I, uh . . . wasn’t expecting that. I think maybe you guys better tell me what’s going on, huh?”

 Miles shakes his head and puts his mouth to the telephone. “We didn’t expect it either, Sid. We knew it was serious, but nothing like this. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.”

 “The hell I’m not. I’ve already broken about fifteen statutes that I know of. Now what the hell is this about? You guys really working for a newspaper or what?”

 “Yes, Sid. The
Times Picayune,
out of New Orleans. You can call the office and check us out. But please tell me first what’s happening on the radio.”

 After a moment, Moroney says, “Nothing on the FBI channel. I got some McLean P.D. stuff. They’re reporting a one-eighty-seven—a homicide—at Six-fifteen Whitehall.”

 “Did they mention a name?”

 “They don’t do that on the radio. Female Caucasian is all. They’ve alerted paramedics. Some patrolman’s asking for brass on the scene, complaining about the FBI. And um . . . uh . . . I think that’s about it for me, guys. Next time call somebody else, okay?”

 “Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Moroney,” Miles says with overdone formality. Then he hangs up.

 “This is bad,” he says.

 Only now do I realize that Miles was consciously disguising his voice on the phone, adding the drawled Southern rhythms he worked so hard to eradicate during the past few years. “Bad?” I echo. “It’s a goddamn nightmare.”

 “I meant the telephone call. It won’t be long before Baxter finds out we were monitoring what happened.”

 “You mean that
I
was. We were using my phone.”

 “I may have to split,” he says, rocking in place like a nervous sprinter. “We’ve got to accelerate the plan.”

 “What? We’re out of this shit, Miles! As of now.”

 “What do you mean?”

 “I mean no more games. No more ‘Erin’ and ‘Maxwell.’ You saw Brahma’s note to Lenz. He’s knows exactly what’s up.”

 “Just because he caught on to Lenz doesn’t mean he suspects you. Have you sensed a single false note in his communications with you?”

 I pause. “No, but—”

 “Any subtle humor at your expense?”

 “Not yet, but—”

 “It’s totally different! He believes in Erin. Why is anybody’s guess. But he does.”

 “Miles, you’re missing the main point here, and that scares me.”

 “What main point?”

 “How did Brahma find Lenz?”

 His mouth remains half open.

 “Through the telephone system, right?”

 Miles’s brain is operating at a speed I cannot begin to comprehend. I say nothing while he works out the possibilities. Finally, he says, “Unless new information on Lenz’s decoy plan was entered into FBI computers in the last thirty-six hours, I’d have to say yes.”

 “So he can trace us too.”

 Miles stares at me without speaking, his face masklike in its lack of humanity. “No,” he says at length. “If Brahma checks the phone company’s computers, he’ll find the Vicksburg address coupled with your line. Any other digital data he can turn up will verify that. He can’t check actual land ownership because in Mississippi nothing like that is on computer, and probably won’t be for another fifty years.”

 Something in Miles’s tone makes me work through his answer step by step, but it checks out.

 “Lenz’s problem was that he was at the physical address that went with his phone line. Not so with us.” Miles pauses. “What I don’t understand is how Brahma knew Lenz
personally
was behind ‘Lilith.’ I mean, he attacked Lenz’s wife, not the safe house. So maybe he did get his information from some FBI computer. Maybe somebody got careless.”

 “We’re still out of it, Miles. Until tonight we were fooling around in a bad situation. Now it’s a Force-Ten clusterfuck. Fate just tapped us on the shoulder.”

 “You want to leave it to the so-called experts now?” he asks angrily. “You just saw their incompetence tragically demonstrated. How many women are we going to watch die because we’re scared to take Brahma to the wall?”

 “It’s not our fight.”

 “The hell it isn’t! You think tonight changed my situation for the better?”

 “You couldn’t have killed Mrs. Lenz. I can swear you were right beside me. Let’s just come clean with them.”

 “Come clean? A minute ago you threw the team-offender theory up at me. Don’t you see it’s going to be more popular than ever now?”

 “Why?”

 “Because unless Brahma was transmitting his first message from Lenz’s home, someone else killed his wife. Brahma knew the safe house was a trap. He knew they’d be following his cellular, so he drove around typing messages to Lenz while someone else did his wife. Then he logged off, swung back, picked up the killer, and was already out of town when he transmitted that final message.”

 As much as I want to argue, the scenario makes sense.

 Miles rubs his eyes and walks over to my minifridge for a Mountain Dew. “Do you realize what just happened? A serial killer murdered the wife of an FBI agent.”

 “Lenz was a shrink, not an agent.”

 “You think that matters? He was one of the stars of the Investigative Support Unit. And Brahma already took out a Hostage Rescue Team member. We’re about to see one of the biggest manhunts in American history.”

 I feel a sudden urge to set the air conditioner at sixty-five degrees, climb into bed, and sleep for twenty hours.

 Miles drains the Mountain Dew like a man dying of thirst. “If I turned myself in now, I’d be asking for a legal reaming the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Sacco and Vanzetti.”

 While I marshal my arguments, he drops the empty can, picks up the TV remote control, aims it over my shoulder and switches on my office television.

 “What are you doing?”

 “Seeing what’s on TV.”

 “What?”

 “My time’s almost up, Harper.” He gazes past me, surfing through channels at superhuman speed. “I’m going to find a movie that’ll induce deep hack mode, then lie down and finish my stupid Trojan Horse. The e-mail thing isn’t going to work. Too short a time frame now.”

 “I meant what I said, Miles. I’m through with Brahma.”

 “I heard you.”

 Suddenly a wide and placid smile soothes the lines from his face. His eyes glaze with almost religious receptivity.

 “What is it?” I ask, looking over my shoulder.

 “
This Gun for Hire
. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Ladd’s first big break, and he was playing a killer. It’s only been on a few minutes. This is like the fourth scene.”

 “Film noir? I thought you liked seventies trash.”

 “I’m eclectic. This is perfect. We’re living noir right this second. Digital noir.”

 He gives me a buck-toothed imitation of Humphrey Bogart, and for a moment I actually doubt his sanity. But then he clicks off the halogen lamp, sits on my bed with his back against the headboard, and props his laptop on his thighs. The black-and-white light of the television flickers over his features like shadows of clouds on the face of a cliff. Whatever anyone may think of Miles Turner, he is a man doing what he was born to do. Not many of us can say that.

 “I’ll sleep on the couch in the den,” I tell him.

 He nods slightly, or perhaps not at all. In Miles’s universe, I am already running in a minimized format.

 CHAPTER 31

 “Harper! Wake up!”

 “Huh?”

 “Wake up!”

 My eyelids are sealed shut with epoxy.

 I rub my fists into them. The first image that materializes is Miles’s face hovering inches from my own in the dark. I remember now. I’m lying on the couch in the den. Miles shakes me again.

 “Wake
up
!”

 A bolus of adrenaline sprays through my system, bringing me into a sitting position. “Are the cops here?”

 “No. Come to the office.”

 “I had a nightmare . . . Jesus. What’s going on?”

 Miles is no longer there. I rise and stumble toward the office, noticing faint blue lines around the edges of the blinds. I must have slept through the night. The muted cyclone of Drewe’s electric hair dryer whirs from the end of the hall as I pass across it and through the office door.

 Miles is seated before the EROS computer. “You’ve got e-mail,” he says.

 “From who?”

 “Look.”

 I rub my eyes again and peer at the screen.

 TO: ERIN

 SENDER: UNAVAILABLE

 I must talk to you. You know who I am. I shall check the Blue Room every half hour by the clock.

 “It came in about two hours ago,” Miles informs me. “I let you sleep as long as I could. Notice anything interesting?”

 “No.”

 “The momentum of the relationship has shifted. Brahma’s desperate to talk to you.”

 “So?”

 “You’ve got to answer him.”

 A knock at the door lifts Miles an inch off his seat.

 “We’re awake!” I call.

 Drewe opens the door and smiles. She’s dressed for work, in dark slacks and a white Liz Claiborne blouse. “I’m having cereal for breakfast,” she says. “Best I can do this morning. You guys want any?”

 “No thanks,” says Miles, trying to look nonchalant.

 “Harper?”

 “Sounds good. I’m starved.”

 I ignore Miles’s angry expulsion of breath and follow Drewe into the kitchen, glancing at my watch as I go. Seven-twenty a.m. Miles must have figured it would take ten minutes to convince me to answer Brahma’s message. I’m definitely not going back into the office before seven-thirty.

 Drewe pours two bowls of raisin bran and slices a navel orange into bright crescents. I go straight for the coffeepot. It’s Community dark roast with chicory, and I savor the kick.

 “You look rough,” Drewe says.

 “You look like an ad for Ivory Snow.”

 “Thanks. Long night?”

 “Worse.”

 “What happened?”

 I take another scalding sip of coffee and tell her about the tragedy in Virginia. I can’t tell if she’s stunned or furious or both. After a long silence, she says, “Is Miles in there trying to track this nut down?”

 I shrug. “He’s got a few ideas.”

 Unable to read her eyes, I twirl the spoon in my cereal bowl. The flakes are already soggy.

 “Did Miles tell the FBI to start checking tissue donor networks?” she asks.

 “Yes. And it looks like you were right. There’s probably another missing woman.”

 Drewe puts down her spoon. “Then it’s time to tell the FBI everything.”

 I have no answer but the truth. “I can’t do it with Miles here.”

 She gives me a pointed look that I have no trouble translating:
Maybe that’s our real problem
.

 “Maybe I should call them,” she says. “From my office. Tell them I came up with the whole transplant theory.”

 “Drewe. . . .”

 She wraps both hands around her coffee cup and stares into it. “I know Miles is our friend, Harper. But it’s not fair to us.” She looks up. “Jail is not my idea of a future.”

 I reach across the table and close my right hand around her left. “Nor mine. Miles knows what’s going on. I just don’t think he knows where to go. I’ll talk to him.”

 She squeezes my hand, then stands. Drewe enjoyed theorizing about the murders when they were a technical abstraction, but she does not share Miles’s moral ambivalence about duty. Taking a last swallow of coffee, she smooths her slacks, then bends and kisses me on the forehead. “If he tells the FBI everything, he can stay as long as he wants to. If not, tell him I enjoyed seeing him. I’ve got to go. See you tonight.”

 She hurries out of the kitchen, car keys jingling, Coach purse swinging from her shoulder. When the front door bangs shut, I put down my coffee and check my watch. Seven thirty-two.

 I take my time with the orange slices.

 Miles is sitting on the edge of the bed, typing on his laptop. He doesn’t look up or speak, so I take the initiative.

 “You’re not going to try to talk me into answering Brahma?”

 “I answered for you.” His eyes never leave the screen. “I told him your husband hadn’t left for work yet, but you’d be in the Blue Room at nine.”

 “What?”

 He keeps typing. I had thought he was coding, but he’s typing too rapidly for that. “You logged on as ‘Erin’?”

 “Brahma didn’t know the difference. He’s desperate to talk to you.”

 “Goddamn it, Miles, this is dangerous!”

 “It’s been dangerous ever since you called the police. I always knew that. It was you and Drewe who saw it as some kind of
McMillan and Wife
episode.”

 I start to cuss him from hell to breakfast, but I stop myself. “Miles, I’ve got to tell you something. You—”

 “I’ve got to tell
you
something,” he cuts in, looking up from the computer at last. “I finished the Trojan Horse.”