Buckner gave him a scowl.
I said, “You do know this guy has been using a private plane to get to the crime scenes? And there’s an old crop dusting strip about two miles west of this house.”
“Deputies already found it,” Buckner said. “Tracks in the mud. Somebody used it tonight.”
“Mud? How long has it been raining here?”
“Sixty to eighty minutes. That plane probably took off less than an hour ago.”
“Something else,” said Buckner. “One of my men thinks the killer might have been wounded. Based on the amount of blood and the spatter patterns. Makes sense to me, with knives and swords flailing around.”
“He might be a hemophiliac.”
Buckner’s eyes came alive like a bird dog’s. “A what?”
“A bleeder. He might be a bleeder.”
“How in hell would you know that?”
I thought of telling Buckner the truth, but that would probably put me in a jail cell. “Something I overheard an FBI agent say in Washington.”
“I knew them sonsabitches was holding out on us!” Buckner said furiously. “I’m gonna burn some federal ass over this.” His right cheek twitched. “So maybe this asshole’s hurt bad enough to crash his plane?”
“Harper,” Mayeux said gently. “I can’t understand why this dark woman caught a tranquilizer dart like your sister-in-law did. You got any ideas on that?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Do I need to call a lawyer?”
Buckner turned on me then. “Son, you might need to call a
I covered my eyes with one hand. “What the hell am I going to tell her father?” I mumbled. “Her mother? Her husband?”
Mayeux pushed me down onto the bed and sat beside me. “I’ve done it a hundred times. And it ain’t ever easy. This’ll be worse, ’cause it’s family.”
“It’s not that. You realize what happened here? I killed her, Mike.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Miles Turner and I sat in this room for three days straight and tried our damnedest to stop that son of a bitch on our own. Only it didn’t work out the way we expected.”
“Holy Mary. That’s where you got that hemophilia stuff? You been talking to this freak on the computer?”
“Hell, yes. So has Dr. Lenz. That’s how his wife got killed. But Miles… he told me there was no way Brahma could trace-”
“Brahma? Who’s that?”
“That’s what we call the killer. Miles swore he’d rigged a way to keep him from tracing our location. Something at the phone company switching station-”
“Slow down, now.”
“No! No… something’s wrong. There weren’t any typos in any of his messages to me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember the meeting in New Orleans? I told you the killer never makes any typographical errors. His communications are always perfect, and fast. But just before each murder, he makes as many mistakes as anybody else. Miles said he had a voice-recognition unit at his home base, but when he traveled it wouldn’t function reliably, so he didn’t use it. Just a notebook computer and a cellular phone like everybody else. That’s how we could predict when he was moving. His typos would skyrocket. But they didn’t! Something’s wrong, Mike.”
“How long since you last talked to the guy? This Brahma?”
“Yesterday.”
“Well, there’s your answer. He could have flown here from anywhere since yesterday. As long as he didn’t contact you, you’d never have a chance to see any typos.”
The simplicity of Brahma’s tactic dazed me. “Goddamn it! You’re right!”
“But why should he kill your sister-in-law? Just because she was here? I don’t buy it. Not with that weird abdominal wound. He took something out of her, man. But it sure wasn’t her pineal gland.” Mayeux looked uncomfortably at me, then at the floor. “I think maybe it was her ovaries.”
“What kind of shit did you talk about with this nut, anyway?”
“He did most of the talking,” I said, trying to recall whether I said anything that could have led Brahma to this house. But I can’t. And even if he somehow traced the photo of Erin, that wouldn’t have led him here. Could he have been watching Erin’s house while I was there? Did he follow her from Jackson to here? Why the hell did she come out here anyway?
“You okay, Cole?”
“No. I want Erin’s body covered up. I want all these bastards out of my house. Right now!”
“Calm down, man. That sheriff wants to arrest you. I told him you were with me when the murder went down, but he could still bust you. Material witness, whatever. He’s pretty steamed, this happening on his watch. That juice you used in Jackson cuts two ways, remember. Bob Anderson’s a big man around here, and his daughter just got butchered, pardon my French. Buckner’s cranking up a manhunt that’ll make the John Wilkes Booth posse look like cub scouts, and if you make the wrong kind of noise, he’ll stomp on you with hobnail boots.”
I bent over, put my head beneath my knees, and breathed the way you’re supposed to when you take a kick in the groin. “An hour ago you wanted to arrest me, Mike. Why the change?”
Mayeux laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You didn’t have nothing to do with this. Other than being stupid. I seen a lot of killing. And this is some real weirdness we got here.” He looked around the office again. “I think maybe this bad boy’s started coming apart. Decompensating, or whatever they call it. And I think maybe you’re the reason. Some way.”
I straightened up and wiped the damp hair out of my eyes. “What are you going to do?”
“Tell Buckner to put some security on your house. Call Baxter at Quantico and tell him he better get his federal shit together before this freak single-handedly cuts Investigative Support from the national budget. After that, I’m not sure.”
“Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot.”
Mayeux pulled me up from the bed, led me to the window, helped me climb out of it, then followed. The last thing I remember him saying was, “Smells like a goddamned slaughterhouse in there, Troop. Somebody get those bodies into a wagon.”
With Drewe breathing deeply beside me, I sat listening to the bumps and curses and slamming doors and groaning engines of the uniformed battalion’s slow retreat. After the last vehicle pulled away, I realized I was avoiding looking at something. The telephone by the bed. Then I remembered it might not be working. As I reached out to check for a dial tone, it rang.
It was Bob Anderson, calling from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. I didn’t hesitate or even try to soften the blow. With a guy like Bob, a man who’s been in combat, you give him the truth and let him deal with it his own way. After a stunned silence, he asked a couple of questions in a voice that sounded colder than Brahma’s digital facsimile. One was “Did she suffer?” I lied and told him Erin had not. After that, his only concern was for the living.
Satisfied that Drewe was all right for the time being, he focused on his wife and Patrick and Holly. He wanted to tell Margaret in person, but he was almost three hours from home. Most men would have given up there, but Bob decided to send a friend over to his house-not to console his wife but to cut the telephone line and head off any busybody neighbors who might take it into their heads to drive over and tell her the bad news. Before the wire could be cut, I was to call Margaret and tell her that Drewe and Erin had gone to Jackson on an errand. The prospect of
