Mortal Fear (11 page)

 “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.

 CHAPTER 10

 When I check my e-mail, 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 inter-species 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 e-mail 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 on-line, 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 on-line 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 e-mail 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 7:42P.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 is 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 on-line 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 on-line. She prefers that I compose lengthy e-mail 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: