Читать книгу Mortal Fear - Greg Iles - Страница 17

I come awake expecting to see fine blue lines of daylight around my heavy window blinds, but there is only darkness.

My telephone is ringing.

I have to get up to answer it. Sweat cools on my skin as I feel my way across the air-conditioned office to the phone.

“Hello?”

“Is this hopper school?” asks a whisper of a voice.

“What?”

The whisper gets louder. “Is this Harper Cole?”

“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 was in French.”

“French? You’re sure the UNSUB left it?”

“You tell me. The translation’s about a paragraph long, but the end of it reads: ‘The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.’ Mean anything to you?”

The skin on the back of my neck is tingling. “Yes. I mean, I recognize the passage. It’s Henry Miller.”

“The porn author?”

“Miller wasn’t really a porn author. Not as you think of it. But that’s not important. The passage is from Tropic of Cancer.”

“How do you know that? Nobody here did.”

“Dr. Lenz must not be there. He would have known it.”

“You’re right. He’s out of pocket just now.”

“Tropic of Cancer is a classic of erotic literature. I’m sure it’s still in print.”

“Which means anybody could walk into a bookstore and buy one?”

“Probably not any bookstore. Not the chains. You’d probably find it in stores that cater to a literary crowd, or else in erotic bookstores.”

“Thanks. That helps.”

“What kind of killer leaves notes in French, Mr. Baxter? You ever see that before?”

“Never. The translator in Michigan said it was probably written by a highly educated French native. Very elegant, he said. I’ve sent it to a psycholinguistics specialist at Syracuse. He won’t be able to look at it before morning, though. The Mill Creek police aren’t telling the Press about the note, by the way. They’re using it to screen false confessions.”

“Hey, I’m not talking to a soul.”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this one,” he says, almost to himself.

“Why?” I ask, not admitting that I have the same feeling.

“The UNSUB has killed all the other victims at the scenes. Now he takes one away, no signs of violence. If this is our guy—and my gut tells me it is—he’s varying his behavior more than any killer I’ve ever seen. He could be starting to come apart, to lose control of what’s driving him. But I don’t think so. He seems able to choose whatever crime signature he wants, which means he’s not driven beyond the point of control. If you hadn’t called with Rosalind May’s name, we never would have connected this crime to the others. You understand?”

“Too well.”

“I appreciate the help, Cole. It’s nice to know someone at EROS realizes we’re the good guys.”

I say nothing.

“Talked to your friend Turner lately?”

“No. I mean, not directly. He sent me some email. Nothing important.”

Baxter waits. “Right.”

“What will you do now?”

“Pray he makes a mistake.”