Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

      “Yes. Who the hell is this? If you’re a cop, call me in the morning.”

      “I’m not a cop.”

      The voice sounds nervous. Nervous and young. “I’m sleeping. What do you want?”

      “This is David Charles. Do you remember me?”

      “No.”

      “You talked to me a couple of times on the phone. I’m one of the techs at EROS.”

      My eyes click open. “Yeah, I remember you.”

      “No, you don’t. That’s okay. I’m one of Miles’s assistants.”

      “What can I do for you … David?”

      “I’m not sure. I just thought I’d better talk to you. You know the FBI is up here, right?”

      “Yes. Trying to do phone traces?”

      “Yeah. The atmosphere is really tense. They’ve got agents guarding the file vault, and Miles is acting really weird. He’s pretty paranoid about the government.”

      “I’m listening.”

      “Well … the thing is … your access to the accounting database was cut off, right?”

      “Yes. Jan Krislov ordered that, if I’m not mistaken.”

      “You are. Miles did it. I mean, he told me to do it.”

      I feel a strange giddiness. “What are you trying to tell me, David?”

      “Well, I just thought you should know. About two hours ago, I realized that another blind-draft account had been terminated for insufficient funds. It happened this morning. It belonged to a woman—”

      I feel my mouth go dry.

      “—named Rosalind May. She’s from Mill Creek, Michigan. At first I didn’t think anything about it. But then I realized she was on a list I saw in Miles’s office.”

      Shit.

      “It was a list of blind-draft women who haven’t been logging on but are still paying their fees. There are about fifty of them. Anyway, I decided to check and see whether May had logged on at all in the last few months. She seemed to lose interest about three months ago. But then I saw that she’d logged on every night for five nights, starting last week. She dropped off again two nights ago. And then today her secret account was overdrawn. Like she needed to make a deposit but wasn’t around to do it. You know?”

      Yes, I know—

      “And the thing is … Miles hasn’t told the FBI yet.”

      “Jesus.”

      “And since he hasn’t told them,” Charles says hesitantly, “I don’t feel too good about walking up to these suits and volunteering the information. You know? I figured since you first reported the murders, you might know how to handle it.”

      The weight of this information is too great to absorb quickly.

      “Harper?”

      “You were right to call me, David. I’ll take care of it.”

      “You will? Wow. Okay, man.” The relief in the tech’s voice is palpable. “Look, I gotta go. Miles is all over the office right now. I don’t think he’s been to sleep in like fifty hours.”

      “Try to get him to rest,” I say uselessly.

      “Yeah, okay. I will. And, uh … try to keep me out of this, okay?”

      He hangs up.

      I switch on my halogen desk lamp and dig through my wallet for Daniel Baxter’s card. I dial the number before I have time to second-guess myself.

      “Investigative Support Unit, Quantico,” says a crisp female voice.

      “I need to speak to Daniel Baxter immediately.”

      “Your name?”

      “Harper Cole. It’s about the EROS case.”

      “Hold, please.”

      A Muzak confection of old Carpenters tunes assaults my ears for nearly two minutes before Baxter comes on the line. An out-of-tune violin is still ringing in my head when he says, “Cole? What you got?”

      “It’s five A.M.,” I say, looking at my desk clock. “You work all night?”

      “It’s six A.M. here. What you got? I’m pretty busy.”

      “You’re about to be a lot busier.”

      Baxter catches his breath. “Spit it out, son.”

      “I just learned that another blind-draft account went to zero. It was terminated today. It belonged to a woman.”

      “Jesus Christ. Not this soon. You got a name?”

      “Rosalind May. Mill Creek, Michigan.”

      “Rosalind like in Shakespeare, or Rosalynn like Rosalynn Carter?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “How’d you find out about it?”

      I remember David Charles’s plea for protection. “Worry about that later. Can’t you just check the name?”

      “I’ll do it right now. Anything else I should know?”

      “No. As soon as you find out anything, please give me a call. I mean immediately. You owe me that much.”

      “I’ll buzz you. I’m going to call the Mill Creek P.D. right now.”

      I get up from the halogen glow and walk down the hall to check on Drewe. She left the bedroom door open when she went to bed, a good sign. As she snores softly, I discern her face in the moonlight trickling through the window. Her mouth is slightly open, her skin luminous in the shadows. I don’t know how long I stand there, but the muted chirping of my office phone snaps me out of my trance and I slip quickly back up the hall to get it.

      “This is Harper.”

      “It’s bad, Cole.”

      My blood pressure drops so rapidly I grab the desk to steady myself. “She’s dead?”

      “Worse.”

      “What? What’s worse than dead?”

      “Rosalind May has been missing for fifty to sixty hours. That’s Rosalind with a D. Two nights ago she was dropped off at her home by a date at eleven P.M. Sometime during the night, she apparently let someone into her house or else voluntarily left to meet them. She hasn’t been seen since. In my experience that’s worse than dead. It means very painful things.”

      “Oh, God. You think it was our guy? Strobekker?”

      Baxter hesitates. “I don’t know. I’d say yes, but there’s one thing that doesn’t fit. One very big thing.”

      “What?”

      “Rosalind May is fifty years old. She has two grown sons. All the other victims were twenty-six or under.”

      “Except Karin Wheat,” I remind him. “She was forty-seven.”

      “Yeah. And one other thing.”

      “What?”

      “This UNSUB left a note. The police didn’t find it until last night. One of their detectives decided to poke through her computer—”

      “There was EROS software on the drive?” I cut in.

      “No. Just like the other cases. Anyway, this Michigan detective was poking through her computer, and he found a WordPerfect file he couldn’t read.”

      “It was encrypted?”

      “Not digitally. It