Mortal Fear (2 page)

 “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 look 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 on-line 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 on-line 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 post-modern black table that supports the EROS computer and satellite video link. It’s late afternoon, and on-line 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 on-line 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, e-mail, 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 on-line 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 On-line 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
.