Mortal Fear (59 page)

 “She called around three-thirty and asked if I could keep Holly while she talked to Drewe about something.”

 My heartbeat skips, then starts to race.

 “You know me,” Margaret goes on, “I didn’t want to butt in, so I didn’t ask any questions.”

 “You’ve got Holly?”

 “Lord, yes. She got so hungry I finally fed her supper. I know Erin’s finicky about what this girl eats, but I didn’t have anything healthy so I gave her frozen pizza. Erin will just have to get over it.”

 For the first time tonight, tears well in my eyes. “I’m sure it’s okay, Mrs. Anderson.”

 This time Margaret says nothing. Just as I am about to speak, she blurts, “Harper, is Erin going to leave Patrick?”

 She’s already left him,
says a manic voice in my head. “I don’t know, Mrs. Anderson. They’ve been having some problems, I think.”

 “She can’t leave him, Harper. She
can’t
. That boy worships the ground she walks on. I want you to talk to her. She might listen to you.”

 I’m squeezing the phone so hard that the skin on the back of my hand feels like it might split. “I’ll do what I can, Mrs. Anderson. I think you’re doing the best thing you can just by keeping Holly. In fact, if she gets sleepy, why don’t you just put her to bed over there?”

 Another silence. “I hear you. All right, I’ll do that. And you do what you can to straighten this mess out.”

 “Yes, ma’am. Bye.”

 “Bye-bye.”

 My heart is still racing, but my hands are steadier. Holly is safe. At least there’s that. As silently as possible, I slip back into the bedroom. Drewe’s chest rises and falls with comforting regularity beneath the coverlet. Not wanting to wake her, I sit in a hard wooden rocker in one corner and resume my vigil.

 Why in God’s name did Erin come to our house? If she called her mother at three-thirty, she did it right after I left her house. She told Margaret she had to talk to Drewe about something. What? Did she decide I didn’t have the guts to tell Drewe the truth about Holly after all? Maybe. But even if she did, she would have given me a chance to do it. Maybe she decided that telling the truth would be a mistake after all. Did she rush after me to stop me? Unlikely. Her resolve to finally be rid of the lie was ironclad. So why did she come?

 Then I see it. She must have decided that telling Drewe the truth was not my obligation, but hers. Drewe and I are husband and wife now; we weren’t at the time of the affair. But Drewe and Erin were sisters. And by that logic, Erin’s was the greater betrayal. Of all the alternatives, this is the noblest, and nobility was Erin’s predominant state of mind when I last saw her. Alive, I mean.

 Rocking quietly in the dark, I recall the unalloyed panic that jolted me when I believed Holly unaccounted for. If she really had been missing, I would have been the one that required sedation. Children are stolen from parents every day in this country, by monsters as brutal as Brahma. I met two such parents in Chicago. And though Erin is lost to me now, to us all, I thank whatever god or fate exists that I am not now thrashing through the fields in search of my daughter, that Holly is safe and warm in the loving arms of her grandmother.

 Is she?
whispers a voice in my head.
Are you sure?

 The squeak of the rocker stops. Rising quickly, I go to the kitchen and look up the number of the Yazoo County sheriff’s department, which I memorize.

 “Sheriff Buckner, please,” I tell the dispatcher. “This is Harper Cole, from Rain. About the double homicide.”

 After about a minute, Buckner comes on the line. “What is it, Cole?”

 “I talked to Dr. Anderson.”

 “So did I. Just got off the phone with him.”

 “I think you should get some men over to his house and watch until he gets home. Maybe all night.”

 Buckner spits, probably into a cup, and takes his time about answering. “Doc told me he was going to have a friend of his take care of things.”

 “We’re not talking about the same thing, Sheriff. Erin’s three-year-old daughter is over there. I think she might be in danger. Especially if Bob’s friend cuts off communication with the house. You hear what I’m saying?”

 I can almost see Buckner snapping to attention in his chair. “You telling me this serial killer might go after Bob Anderson’s grandchild?”

 “I’m saying there’s no telling what he might do.”

 “Christ! You’ve stirred up some kind of shitstorm around here!”

 “Will you do it?”

 “Hell yes I’ll do it! I’m tempted to cordon off the place with a SWAT team.”

 “Don’t do that! If Mrs. Anderson sees cops, she’ll know something’s up. She’ll start trying to call her neighbors. Can you keep your men out of sight?”

 “You ain’t got to tell me my job, boy. I’ll take care of it. By the way, Doc’s already got a plane lined up. He was talking to me from a car phone on the way to the Memphis airport.”

 I calculate quickly. “How soon will he be here? Hour and a half?”

 “More like thirty minutes. Bob Anderson don’t fool around. He called whatever high roller he was meeting up there and got hold of a King Air. One of my deputies’ll be waiting at the new airport for him.”

 God Almighty
. I look around the empty kitchen in a daze.

 “You there, Cole?”

 “Yes.”

 “Gotta go. I got a manhunt to run.”

 After hanging up the phone, I look in on Drewe again. She’s still out. But for how long? With Vistaril she could sleep eight more hours or wake up any minute. What am I going to do when she does? What can I tell her? Sooner or later the tough questions will be asked. Should we even stay here in the house? No. Drewe will want to stay at her parents’ house. But she’s still going to wake up here. Bob could show up too. In fact, I should probably expect him. He’ll take care of his wife first, but then he’ll want to see Erin’s body, wherever it is. After that, he’ll come here. To see where it happened. To convince himself that it
did
happen. And to find out who in holy hell is responsible.

 One thing I do know: I don’t want Drewe or Bob to have to face the abattoir that is my office. Drewe saw it once, and that was too much. I may not be able to wipe out the acts that led to Erin’s death, but I can damn sure scrub every last drop of blood out of that office. If I can’t, I can repaint the goddamn thing by morning. Buckner and the FBI will probably crucify me for destroying evidence, but evidence hasn’t led anyone to Brahma yet. From a cabinet in the laundry room I remove a gallon of Clorox, a bucket, some rubber gloves that are too small for my hands, and a mop, and carry them to my office door.

 The smell hits me with more intensity than it did the first time. This is the coppery stench of death, the rotten fruit of violence. Pouring the Clorox into the bucket, I step into the bathroom and dilute it just enough to be able to breathe, then slosh the pungent mixture across the drying slick by the door. The bleach barely cuts the coagulated blood.

 I bear down hard with the mop in the relatively clear place where Kali lay dead an hour ago. As the black-red mess swirls into scarlet spirals, the anesthetizing torrent of chemicals that must have insulated me up to now begins to slow, and the dark siblings of grief and guilt stir to wakefulness in my soul.

 The mother of my only child is dead.

 My complicity in her death grinds in my belly like slivers of glass. I probably know more about the man who killed her than anyone alive, now that Kali is dead. But I don’t know how he found his way here. I do know he could not and would not have done so had Miles and I not played at catching him. We were fools. Or worse. Somewhere, perhaps not far from here, Brahma is fleeing for his life. He might even be wounded, trying to stanch a river of blood that contains no natural clotting factor. But his fate seems strangely irrelevant now.

 The mother of my only child is dead.

 Erin’s blood yields slowly to the corrosive bleach. My throat works in vain against what feels like a lozenge of acid I cannot swallow, and glutinous tears burn my eyes. They are not healing tears, but tears of self-disgust. My part in drawing Brahma here is nothing beside my true offense. Somewhere in the dark chambers of my brain, the small and fearful animal that rules my subconscious has already computed times and distances, already realized that Erin did not have time to tell Patrick the truth about Holly before she died. If she had, he would have shown up here long before now. One day soon, Patrick and Drewe and Bob and Margaret—someday even Holly herself—will know that through stupidity I invited a depraved killer into our insular world. That knowledge will forever change their opinion of me, as it has my own. But they will never untie the final knot in the twisted skein of desire and consequence that led Erin to this house on this fateful night. The chilling thought that possessed me for an instant this afternoon—that only death could stop her from revealing our secret—has been fulfilled. And as I scrub fiercely at her blood, fighting to feel only honest grief at her passing, the pathetic rat voice of human instinct whispers in my heart:

 Thank God they’ll never know
.

 CHAPTER 39

 The high ring announcing a video link from EROS headquarters is more than enough to get me off my knees after two hours of scrubbing up blood with steel wool and Clorox. Hunched and aching, I shuffle from the far wall of the office toward the EROS computer.

 First there is only Nefertiti, revolving slowly on her black background. Then a window pops up on-screen, its top left corner flashing status numbers that precede the link. Pulling off the cramp-inducing dish gloves, I watch for Jan Krislov’s face to appear. Instead, like a human version of the Cheshire cat, Miles’s grinning visage materializes from the black void.

 “You there, Harper?”

 I sit down, look into the dime-size camera lens mounted atop my monitor, and pull on the headset. “No.”

 “The Trojan Horse worked!”

 “Miles—”

 “I’m sitting here with a stack of stuff you wouldn’t believe!”

 “Miles.”

 “What’s wrong? You look like your dog just got hit by a truck. Where’s my congratulations?”

 “Erin’s dead.”

 His smile does not disappear instantly. It seems to peel away, like old paint in a hard wind. He is too intelligent to ask for pointless repetition or to express disbelief. I know that behind his dazed eyes, his brain is already modeling all possible sequences of events that could have produced the result I so baldly stated.

 “Tell me it was a car accident.”

 “No.”

 “Suicide.”

 “Brahma got her, Miles.”

 He touches his forehead with one hand. “Where?”

 “Right here. My office.”

 Both his hands cover his eyes in an almost childish parody of grief. Then one hand comes away, toward the camera, like the pleading hand of a heretic about to be burnt at the stake.

 “Harper—”

 “How did he know to come here, Miles?”

 The millisecond he looks into his lap tells me the answer is very bad. “How?” I repeat.

 “Oh my god.”

 “Miles!”

 “It’s my fault.”

 “It’s our fault, okay?”

 “No, it’s
my
fucking fault!”

 The agony on his face stops me. “What do you mean?”

 “The switching station.”

 “The telephone company switching station? What are you talking about?”

 He slowly shakes his head, the slow-speed video making his movements appear spastic. “When I hacked the false identity for ‘Erin,’ I did it just like I told you I would. DMV, Social Security, a few credit records. I made her name Cynthia Griffin.”

 “And?”

 “Before I could do any of that, I had to have a physical address. That meant hacking into the phone company’s switching station to match a fake address with your phone number. Everything had to work off of that. See?”

 “Yes.”

 “But I was wrong about the security level at the phone company. It was taking hours to break in. I needed a code or a password from someone inside. I tried to social-engineer it, but I couldn’t snow anybody. Then I got to thinking. Even if I succeeded in breaking in, Brahma might be able to cross-reference enough databases to figure out that the address was fake. You were ready to start up as ‘Erin’—”

 “You used my real address?”

 “It was the only way to make the character bulletproof!”

 “Bulletproof? You goddamn idiot!”

 “I know, okay!” Miles’s voice is high and shaking. “Damn it, I thought we’d know if he made any kind of move! From the typos. That’s why I kept asking you if he was making any.”

 “The errors didn’t matter! He just stopped communicating with me for the time it took him to fly down here. Just that stupid e-mail message about getting the JPEG picture of Erin! God, I should have tried to talk to him right then. Then I’d have known he was moving!”

 Miles seems to be shaking, but I can’t tell from the grainy picture whether it’s him or the link. “Oh, God,” he croaks. “I killed her. Christ. . . .”

 “
We
killed her,” I correct him. “You talked me into it, but I’m the one who lured him here. And now I’m scrubbing Erin’s blood off the walls.”

 He wipes his eyes again.

 I am numb. The magnitude of our culpability in Erin’s death is impossible to face for long. “Tell me about the Trojan Horse, Miles.”

 He nods distractedly and raises a sheaf of paper toward his camera lens.

 “What’s that?”

 “The contents of Brahma’s hard drive. The one he downloaded the Trojan Horse onto.”

 A remnant of cold reason revives somewhere in my brain. “Does it tell you who he is?”

 “No name. No ‘I’m Ted Bundy’ or anything like that.” In a curiously childlike gesture, Miles wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I got his EROS software serial number, but it’s registered under David Strobekker.”

 “Damn.”

 “But there are definite leads. He’s got to be working out of New York. He started out killing homeless women here. The first three victims were infected with HIV, so he stopped. That must be when he hit on the EROS idea. He killed Strobekker in Minneapolis for his EROS account—”