cabinet in the laundry room I remove a gallon of Clorox, a bucket, some rubber gloves that are too small for my hands, and a mop, and carry them to my office door.
The smell hits me with more intensity than it did the first time. This is the coppery stench of death, the rotten fruit of violence. Pouring the Clorox into the bucket, I step into the bathroom and dilute it just enough to be able to breathe, then slosh the pungent mixture across the drying slick by the door. The bleach barely cuts the coagulated blood.
I bear down hard with the mop in the relatively clear place where Kali lay dead an hour ago. As the black-red mess swirls into scarlet spirals, the anesthetizing torrent of chemicals that must have insulated me up to now begins to slow, and the dark siblings of grief and guilt stir to wakefulness in my soul.
The mother of my only child is dead.
My complicity in her death grinds in my belly like slivers of glass. I probably know more about the man who killed her than anyone alive, now that Kali is dead. But I don’t know how he found his way here. I do know he could not and would not have done so had Miles and I not played at catching him. We were fools. Or worse. Somewhere, perhaps not far from here, Brahma is fleeing for his life. He might even be wounded, trying to stanch a river of blood that contains no natural clotting factor. But his fate seems strangely irrelevant now.
The mother of my only child is dead.
Erin’s blood yields slowly to the corrosive bleach. My throat works in vain against what feels like a lozenge of acid I cannot swallow, and glutinous tears burn my eyes. They are not healing tears, but tears of self-disgust. My part in drawing Brahma here is nothing beside my true offense. Somewhere in the dark chambers of my brain, the small and fearful animal that rules my subconscious has already computed times and distances, already realized that Erin did not have time to tell Patrick the truth about Holly before she died. If she had, he would have shown up here long before now. One day soon, Patrick and Drewe and Bob and Margaret-someday even Holly herself-will know that through stupidity I invited a depraved killer into our insular world. That knowledge will forever change their opinion of me, as it has my own. But they will never untie the final knot in the twisted skein of desire and consequence that led Erin to this house on this fateful night. The chilling thought that possessed me for an instant this afternoon-that only death could stop her from revealing our secret-has been fulfilled. And as I scrub fiercely at her blood, fighting to feel only honest grief at her passing, the pathetic rat voice of human instinct whispers in my heart:
CHAPTER 39
The high ring announcing a video link from EROS headquarters is more than enough to get me off my knees after two hours of scrubbing up blood with steel wool and Clorox. Hunched and aching, I shuffle from the far wall of the office toward the EROS computer.
First there is only Nefertiti, revolving slowly on her black background. Then a window pops up on-screen, its top left corner flashing status numbers that precede the link. Pulling off the cramp-inducing dish gloves, I watch for Jan Krislov’s face to appear. Instead, like a human version of the Cheshire cat, Miles’s grinning visage materializes from the black void.
“You there, Harper?”
I sit down, look into the dime-size camera lens mounted atop my monitor, and pull on the headset. “No.”
“The Trojan Horse worked!”
“Miles-”
“I’m sitting here with a stack of stuff you wouldn’t believe!”
“What’s wrong? You look like your dog just got hit by a truck. Where’s my congratulations?”
“Erin’s dead.”
His smile does not disappear instantly. It seems to peel away, like old paint in a hard wind. He is too intelligent to ask for pointless repetition or to express disbelief. I know that behind his dazed eyes, his brain is already modeling all possible sequences of events that could have produced the result I so baldly stated.
“Tell me it was a car accident.”
“No.”
“Suicide.”
“Brahma got her, Miles.”
He touches his forehead with one hand. “Where?”
“Right here. My office.”
Both his hands cover his eyes in an almost childish parody of grief. Then one hand comes away, toward the camera, like the pleading hand of a heretic about to be burnt at the stake.
“Harper-”
“How did he know to come here, Miles?”
The millisecond he looks into his lap tells me the answer is very bad. “How?” I repeat.
“Oh my god.”
“Miles!”
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s our fault, okay?”
“No, it’s
The agony on his face stops me. “What do you mean?”
“The switching station.”
“The telephone company switching station? What are you talking about?”
He slowly shakes his head, the slow-speed video making his movements appear spastic. “When I hacked the false identity for ‘Erin,’ I did it just like I told you I would. DMV, Social Security, a few credit records. I made her name Cynthia Griffin.”
“And?”
“Before I could do any of that, I had to have a physical address. That meant hacking into the phone company’s switching station to match a fake address with your phone number. Everything had to work off of that. See?”
“Yes.”
“But I was wrong about the security level at the phone company. It was taking hours to break in. I needed a code or a password from someone inside. I tried to social-engineer it, but I couldn’t snow anybody. Then I got to thinking. Even if I succeeded in breaking in, Brahma might be able to cross-reference enough databases to figure out that the address was fake. You were ready to start up as ‘Erin’-”
“It was the only way to make the character bulletproof!”
“Bulletproof? You goddamn idiot!”
“I know, okay!” Miles’s voice is high and shaking. “Damn it, I thought we’d know if he made any kind of move! From the typos. That’s why I kept asking you if he was making any.”
“The errors didn’t matter! He just stopped communicating with me for the time it took him to fly down here. Just that stupid e-mail message about getting the JPEG picture of Erin! God, I should have tried to talk to him right then. Then I’d have known he was moving!”
Miles seems to be shaking, but I can’t tell from the grainy picture whether it’s him or the link. “Oh, God,” he croaks. “I killed her. Christ….”
“
He wipes his eyes again.
I am numb. The magnitude of our culpability in Erin’s death is impossible to face for long. “Tell me about the Trojan Horse, Miles.”
