Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

He was just born in the wrong town. And he knew it. We both graduated high school as National Merit scholars, and could have gone to college anywhere in the United States for next to nothing. But there our paths diverged. I was so into girls that summer that I hardly gave college a thought, and since my parents were having their own problems at the time—financial and marital—they ignored the issue as well. I’d always done well in school, thus I always would. In the end I went to Ole Miss sight unseen, and because I had waited so long to decide, my father even had to pay for the privilege.

      Miles applied for and was awarded a full academic scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While I farted around Oxford, Mississippi, with scatterbrained, Venus-shaped sorority girls and drunken Young Republicans, Miles Turner was fanatically programming, tearing apart, and rebuilding big clumsy metal boxes that I would not even have recognized in 1978.

      Computers.

      It seems natural now, but at the time it was odd. He spoke the language of bits and drives and floating memory at a time when those words were as foreign to the general public as Attic Greek. The really odd thing is that Miles thinks I’m smarter than he is. I have no idea why. This is not false modesty. I will frankly admit that I have above-average intelligence, just as I will admit I have a poor sense of direction. I can look at a problem, analyze it—for patterns, usually—and given enough time, solve it. Miles doesn’t analyze anything. He looks at something, and he just knows. He grasps physics and numbers the way I do people and music—wholly by intuition. It’s as though his asocial childhood allowed him to tune into some subrational channel of information that is beyond the rest of us.

      When I took the sysop job, I was looking forward to getting to know him again. I’d only seen him a handful of times in the past fifteen years. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out that way. We occasionally exchange email—sometimes using the satellite video link that his techs installed here when I took the job-slash-hobby—but on balance, I know him no better now than I did when we were kids. Maybe my hopes were misplaced. Maybe you can never know anyone more deeply than you know them in childhood.

      By the time Drewe arrives, I’ve put together a bastardized stir-fry of broccoli and pork and lemon. We eat it on the front porch, which is thick with heat despite the falling darkness, but mercifully free of mosquitoes. As soon as we sit, Drewe asks for a play-by-play of the meeting in New Orleans. I give it to her, glad not to have to keep anything back. She takes in every word with the machinelike precision that carried her through medical school with honors, and when I am done she says nothing. I have held one detail until the end, hoping for a silence like this one.

      “What’s the pineal gland?” I ask.

      She finds my eyes in the gloom. “The pineal body?”

      “I guess, yeah.”

      “It’s a small glandular structure at the core of the brain. In the third ventricle, I think. It’s about the size of a pea.”

      “What does it do?”

      “Until about thirty years ago, nobody thought it did anything. It was considered a vestigial organ, like the appendix. Scientists knew the pineal made melatonin, but no one knew what melatonin did. What does the pineal have to do with anything?”

      “The FBI says the killer cut off Karin Wheat’s head to get to her pineal gland.”

      “What?”

      “Sick, huh? The other victims might be missing theirs too, or else their whole heads.”

      Drewe grimaces.

      “Can you think of any reason why someone would want pineal glands? Do they have any medical use?”

      “I don’t think so. There were some pineal experiments going on at Tulane when I was there, related to breast cancer I think. But I don’t remember what the findings were.” She pauses. “You can buy melatonin in health food stores, though. God, this reminds me of those PBS shows where they talk about Oriental medicine. You know, how Japanese men pay poachers hundreds of thousands of dollars for rhinoceros horns and tiger testicles and things. All to cure impotence or restore their lost youth or something.”

      My opinion of my wife’s mental acuity has been reaffirmed yet again. She has already broached a theory that seems more logical than that of the police in California, who believe the EROS murders may be the work of a cult.

      “So what is melatonin?” I ask. “What does it do?”

      “It’s a hormone that regulates your sleep cycle. Your circadian rhythms. You know, what causes jet lag. Some people take it to prevent or relieve jet lag symptoms.”

      “Can you remember anything else about it?”

      Drewe touches her forefinger to the tip of her nose and fixes her gaze somewhere out in the darkness. I know this posture well: concentration mode. “I think it controls the release of serotonin, maybe some other hormones. I seem to recall something from one of the journals. Neurobiological stuff. Something to do with the pineal and the aging process. Weird how that fits with the Oriental thing, isn’t it? But that doesn’t mean anything. Murderers don’t read JAMA or Journal of Neuroscience.”

      “Why not?”

      “Well … I guess it’s possible.” Drewe grimaces and says, “Men are scum.” A routine comic line of hers that doesn’t sound so funny tonight.

      “So what’s the plan?” I ask lightly, falling into our usual banter.

      “More dictation.” She stretches both arms above her head. “My personal cross to bear.” She begins gathering up the plates. “Which reminds me. Tomorrow you face yours.”

      I feel a sudden chill. “What are you talking about?”

      “Take it easy,” she says, giving me an odd look. “I meant the biweekly burden. Sunday dinner with your in-laws”

      She turns away and moves through the screen door, but my chill does not dissipate. Over her shoulder she says, “Lately you’ve acted like it’s a trip to the dentist or something.”

      If only it were.

      I rise from the porch and head for my office. Combined with the stress of the past weeks, the trip to New Orleans has exhausted me. After months of anxiety, I have finally done what I should have done long ago. For months I’ve stayed up far too many hours and slept too few, lurking in Level Three in the hope of recognizing the error-free transmissions of David Strobekker. But tonight I will sleep.

      As I strip off my clothes, Drewe’s last comment echoes in my mind. Lately you’ve acted like it’s a trip to the dentist or something. In reality the trip to her parents’ house is a trip into a minefield. A place where one wrong word or too open glance could cause instant devastation. Drewe does not know this. Like the most dangerous mines, these were laid long ago by people who scarcely knew what they were doing. No maps exist, and disarming them is impossible. Once I thought it might be, but now I know the truth. When we seek to resurrect the past it eludes us; when we seek to elude the past, it reaches out with fingers that can destroy all we know and love.

      Tonight I leave David Strobekker to the FBI.

      I have my own demon.

       SEVEN

      Dear Father,

      We landed near Virginia Beach at dusk, riding the scent of ocean to the earth.

      We misdirected taxis to bring us within range of the patient’s house, then walked.

      No EROS dalliances with this one. She’s a Navy girl, young and simple and tough. I was lucky to have Kali with me.

      We entered while she showered, and what a specimen she was. Firm pink skin shining in the spray. For a moment