Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

the first eighty-five percent of contact.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “With the sixth victim, and with Karin Wheat, I realized that Strobekker began making typographic errors—just like anyone else—a few days before each woman dropped offline. When I went back and studied my printouts of the killer-victim exchanges, I saw that the typos began at about the eighty-five percent point in each relationship. Of course, I didn’t know anyone was being killed.”

      “You sound like you’ve distilled this thing down to a science,” says Baxter.

      “I work with numbers.”

      “Running this sex thing?” asks Mayeux.

      I chuckle bitterly. “No, I got into EROS for fun. You believe that? I earn my living trading futures.”

      My audience stares as if I’ve announced that I am an alchemist.

      “In a dink farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta?” asks one of the young FBI agents. “Who are your clients? Farmers hedging their crops?”

      “I only have one client.”

      “Who?” Mayeux asks suspiciously.

      “Himself,” says Arthur Lenz.

      Dr. Lenz is obviously the alchemist here. “That’s right. I only trade my own account.”

      “You some kind of millionaire?” asks Mayeux’s partner. “A goddamn gentleman farmer or something?”

      “Keep a civil tongue, Poché,” snaps the chief.

      “I do all right.”

      “What about the final fifteen percent of contact?” Lenz asks, plainly irritated by the squabbling.

      “He makes mistakes. About as many as anyone else. And his typing gets slower. A lot slower.”

      “Maybe he starts jacking off with one hand as he gets closer to the time of the hit,” suggests Poché.

      The chief frowns but lets that pass.

      Dr. Lenz strikes a pose of intense meditation as the door behind me opens swiftly. I turn and see a black woman in her twenties holding a computer printout in her hand. There is handwriting scrawled across it in blue ink.

      “What is it, Kiesha?” asks the chief.

      “We traced Strobekker, David M.”

      A cumulative catching of breath in the conference room. “Rap sheet?” Mayeux asks tentatively.

      “No.”

      “Minnesota DMV?”

      “No citations. Had one car—a Mercedes—but the plate expired last year.”

      “So who is the guy?”

      “An accountant for a glitzy firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

      I realize that Kiesha is trying to communicate something to Chief Tobin through eye contact alone. Despite her telepathic urgency, she is unsuccessful.

      “What is it, dear?” asks Arthur Lenz, as though he has known the woman since childhood.

      “He’s dead,” she says, almost as if against her will. “David M. Strobekker was beaten to death in an alley in Minneapolis eleven months ago.”

      A hot tingle races across my forearms.

      “Holy shit,” says Mayeux. “What are we dealing with here?”

      Daniel Baxter points a finger as thick as a Colt Python barrel at Kiesha. “Details?”

      “Minneapolis homicide says it looked like a mugging gone bad. Strobekker was single, probably homosexual. He was slumming on a bad stretch of Hennepin Avenue. His skull was so pulped his boss couldn’t recognize his face.”

      Dr. Lenz emits a small sound of what I can only interpret as pleasure.

      “Positive ID?” asks Mayeux.

      “Dental records and a thumbprint,” Kiesha replies. “His company kept thumbprint files; don’t ask me why. But it was Strobekker for sure.”

      “Not for sure,” I say, surprised to hear my own voice.

      “Why not?” Baxter asks sharply.

      “Well … say Strobekker is the killer. Say he decided to fake his own death so that he’d never be suspected in later crimes. He takes a thumbprint from a wino, puts that in his own personnel file, then kills the wino and pulps his face.”

      “What about the dental records?” asks Baxter.

      I shrug. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

      “You watch too many movies.”

      “I must see the body immediately,” Lenz says to Baxter, his eyes still on me.

      “Jeff, call the Minneapolis field office,” orders Baxter. “We want a judge who’ll give us an exhumation order ASAP. Then call the airport and book the first flight up there.”

      “What are you looking for?” I ask.

      “A pineal gland, among other things,” says Lenz, watching me closely. “Ever heard of it?”

      I shake my head while I memorize the term. My knowledge of anatomy is limited, but my wife’s is encyclopedic.

      “The two women who died in California were linked because a pathologist from San Francisco happened to mention an unsolved homicide case to a colleague at a convention. A woman had been murdered by strangulation, then had both eyes removed and wooden stakes driven through the sockets. When the pathologist sectioned the brain, he found that the points of both stakes terminated in the third ventricle of the brain—a little too perfectly for him. Stranger still, he found that part of the pineal gland was missing, which the stakes would not account for. The colleague who heard this—a pathologist from Los Angeles—had an unsolved homicide that was completely different in almost every respect. A woman had been beaten to death with a claw hammer, probably by someone she knew. Her brain sustained horrific damage. But this did not explain why much of her pineal gland was gone. This chance conversation ultimately linked the crimes. Then the police promptly charged down the wrong track and decided they were dealing with cult murders.”

      Lenz’s tone of voice when he says “police” earns him few friends in this room. He points his index finger at me.

      “You tied those two victims to four others, through EROS. All four of those women also died from severe head wounds, or sustained postmortem head trauma. Pistol shot, shotgun blast, lethal fall. One was decapitated, as was Karin Wheat. We’re exhuming the first three and conducting repeat autopsies on the heads. If the condition of the brains permits it, I strongly suspect we will find that these women are missing all or part of their pineal glands.”

      The psychiatrist is staring at me as though he expects me to start filling in gaps for him.

      “What the hell does the pineal gland do?” I ask.

      As Lenz and Baxter stare silently at me, my survival instinct tells me it’s time to test the bars on this cage. “Look,” I say, directing my words to Chief Tobin, “I think you guys have definitely stepped out of my area of expertise. Can I go home now?”

      “Not just yet,” Tobin says. “Do people ever use their real names on this sex network?”

      I try to suppress the feeling that I’m going to be spending the night in a New Orleans hotel, if not jail. “Almost never. The code names are what allow them the freedom to say and be whatever they wish. They might exchange phone numbers to facilitate an f2f meeting, but—”

      “What’s f2f?” asks the chief.

      “Face-to-face.”

      “Oh. So did the victims give him their numbers?”

      “Not