Mortal Fear

He just sits, letting the engine tick. “Even if the trail leads to Miles Turner?”

“Yes. But it won’t. Miles could kill, maybe. But not like that. I don’t think it’s in him. Do you?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t ruled it out.”

Lenz gets out of the car, and I do the same. But as I follow him around to a side door I see nothing of the house or grounds. I merely track his shoes, using the same trancelike vision that keeps my car on the road when my mind is a million miles from reality. Can Lenz count on me if the trail leads to Miles? I answered yes, but it was a reflex response. Because what I was thinking at that moment was how, after that Delta State guy was bitten by the cottonmouths, the state police showed up in Rain to question Annie Turner about her son. They’d heard some strange things about the kid and wanted to know his whereabouts on the day the guy was bitten.

Annie Turner didn’t know. But I did. And I did what any friend would do under the circumstances.

I lied.

CHAPTER 21

When Lenz opens the door to the FBI safe house, what I see in the glow of the porch light bears little resemblance to the mental picture I had. But then I suppose that picture was generated by trash fiction and bad films.

“Pretty swank,” I comment. “This is the safe house?”

“No, no,” he says in a strangely soft voice. “This is my home. I need some files from my desk, some clothes. I intended to have an agent pick them up, but I left it until too late. My wife’s probably sleeping.”

“I can wait out here, no problem.”

“No… no. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“Afraid I’ll call a cab from your car phone?”

“Nonsense. Come along.”

Lenz creeps through his own house with the stealth of a burglar. I realize I’m doing the same as we pass through a laundry room and into a dark kitchen with copper pots and utensils hanging like ancient weapons above our heads. At the far end of the kitchen stands a wide arch that leads into a breakfast area. A dim bulb in the stove hood throws a yellow pool of light on the floor.

Lenz points to a chair. “I’ll only be a minute. Make yourself at home.” Then he disappears through the arch.

A low beating sound tells me he is going upstairs.

“Yes, please do,” says a woman’s voice, sending a cold shock up between my shoulder blades.

All my senses on full power, I focus on the table beyond the arch. Against a wall-high curtain, I see the silhouette of a woman sitting in a straight-backed chair. A bar glass glints on the table in front of her. Lenz must have walked right past her.

“Janet?” he calls, and I hear his feet coming back down the stairs. “Janet? Are you awake?”

“No, I’m sleepwalking. Thank God I can still taste my drink. Where the hell have you been for three days?”

I can see the stairwell now. Lenz’s face drops below the level of the ceiling. “I’m working a case for Daniel. An important case.”

He comes down two more steps and looks at his wife. He seems caught between not wanting to invite me up to his office and not wanting to leave me down here with her. Why the hell didn’t he just leave me in the car?

“I’ll be right down,” he says finally. “Please take care of Mr. Cole.” And then he scurries back up the stairwell.

“Oh, I will, ” says the woman in a slurred voice.

As she stands up and moves toward me, light from the stove falls across her. The light is not flattering. Several years older than her husband, Janet Lenz is wearing some kind of sheer wrap over a filmy undergarment. I suppose it’s meant to be sexy, but with the smudged mascara and the smell of stale gin and cigarettes wafting across the kitchen, the effect is pathos. She is a thin, waspish woman with a fading dye job and a spiderwork of wrinkles around her mouth that marks her as a lifelong smoker. Yet her eyes hold a gimlet glow of cleverness, as if her mind retains just enough clarity to be momentarily observant, or cruel. Her voice has an edge reminiscent of schoolteachers who enjoy dispensing discipline a little too much.

“Your accent,” she says. “It reminds me of North Carolina. My people are from Philadelphia, but I attended Greensboro, an all-female institution. They used to bus in boys from Duke, though. The most charming boys.”

“That’s nice.”

“Oh, it was, ” she says in a lilting drawl about as authentic as Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois. “They knew how to be gentlemen, those boys. But they also knew when to stop being gentlemen. You know what I mean? Mister Cole?”

My noncommittal “Mmmm” trails off into an averted gaze. Mrs. Lenz demands my attention by tinkling the ice in her glass and clucking her tongue.

“That’s something Arthur never learned,” she goes on. “He’s always such a gentleman. But the New England version can be so dull.”

“Dr. Lenz doesn’t seem like the dull type to me, ma’am.”

“Give him time, darling. He makes a terrific first impression. He’s blindingly analytical. But he’s also numbingly predictable.”

The uncomfortable silence grows more so as she moves closer and smiles with the yellow brilliance of a cheap diamond. I have the feeling she is circling me, like a scavenger.

“You’d think a man who knows Freud like the back of his hand would know his way around a bedroom, wouldn’t you?”

“Uh… I don’t think that’s any of my business.”

Still closer. “I must have gotten to know a hundred psychiatrists over the past twenty years,” she says. “The coldest bunch of jellyfish you ever shared pate with. Half of them impotent, the other half queer.”

Deliverance arrives at last in the form of Dr. Lenz, who bounds into the kitchen carrying a suit bag and a briefcase. He’s probably well aware of what I’ve been enduring down here. I nearly stumble over my shoes making my escape.

Janet Lenz trails us to the laundry room. As her husband opens the door, she says, “Go play your little mind games. We can’t let any of those wicked boys out there have any fun, can we?”

I turn back in time to see Lenz slam the door.

As the Mercedes swallows the driveway with a low-throated growl, Lenz says, “As you can see, we all have our problems. Did she make a nuisance of herself?”

“Not at all. Just idle chitchat.”

He makes a curious sound in his throat. “She didn’t bring up the relative sizes of Caucasian versus Negroid sex organs?”

“I don’t recall it coming up.”

“You’re lucky.”

“What’s her problem?”

“Depression. Alcohol. An emotionally distant husband who is frequently an asshole. Not necessarily in that order.”

“None of my business.”

“Sorry to put you through it, nonetheless.”

Lenz is driving well over the speed limit now, fast enough that I grip the seat between my thighs. “We’re only a short distance from the safe house,” he says. “Makes it easy for me to commute. You can see why I need to be close.”