Mortal Fear

“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.