Mortal Fear

He slides some dark sheets from beneath his pile of paper and spreads them faceup across the table like playing cards. “These are the victims.”

None of us speak. The sheets are laser-printed gray-scale photographs. All six show side-by-side photographs of young women: two blondes, three brunettes, one Indian. In the left-hand photos, the eyes are open and glowing with life, the lips smiling, the hair well fixed; in the right-hand ones the faces-those that are there-are gray and shapeless, the eyes open but blank with glassy stares. One of the right-hand photos shows a decapitated torso, another a head that looks as though it was put through an airplane propeller. One shows a face like something from a vampire film, with wooden stakes protruding from bloody eye sockets. Before we take in too much, Miles sweeps the pages out of sight and says, “I got these out of NEMESIS. I’ve got crime scene photos too, but you don’t want to see them.”

He’s right. Drewe is still staring at the blank spot where the images lay. After a few moments, she blinks, then rises and pours Miles a third cup of coffee.

In a remote voice, she asks, “What do the police think drives this man to murder these women?”

Miles drinks deeply from his steaming cup, finishing with an audible swallow. “The case has been running for five days. Ever since Harper called the New Orleans police and linked Karin Wheat’s murder to six unsolved cases in other parts of the country.”

“What parts?”

“Portland, Oregon. New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, and San Francisco. Of course the first killing was David Strobekker, the man who was murdered for his identity. That was Minnesota.”

“The first one we know about,” I correct him.

He nods. “Rosalind May, the kidnapped attorney, was taken from Mill Creek, Michigan. She’s still missing, and there’s been no ransom note.”

“I think she’s dead,” I tell him.

“Ditto.”

“I don’t,” Drewe says, firmly enough to draw looks from both of us. “At least she might not be.”

“Why do you say that?” asks Miles.

“A theory I’d prefer to keep to myself right now. How was each of the women killed? I mean, I saw the photos, but what did the autopsies say?”

Miles watches her from the corner of his eye. Brilliant as he is, he remembers being aced by my wife many times in school. “The first-near Portland-was initially ruled an accidental death. She was a rock climber. Took a fall climbing solo, fractured her skull.”

“Was she missing her pineal gland?”

Miles’s eyes narrow. “She was exposed for a couple of days before they found her. Coyotes got to her. She was missing a lot more than her pineal gland.”

“And the other murders?”

“Shotgun blast to the face in New York. Strangulation and beheading in Houston. Claw hammer in Los Angeles. Pistol shot in Nashville. Strangulation in San Francisco, with the eyes removed and stakes driven through the sockets.”

“The pistol shot was also to the head?”

“Right.”

“And every woman was missing her pineal gland or her entire head?”

“It isn’t certain. With the shotgun victim it was impossible to tell. Some victims were missing only part of the gland. But the FBI consensus says yes.”

“And they assume Karin Wheat was also.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Karin’s head was found this morning.”

“What?” I cry. “Where?”

“Some Cajun fishermen found it wedged in a cypress stump in the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The police figure the killer tossed it out his window while driving across the causeway toward La Place. That means he drove past the airport going out of town. And her pineal gland was missing.”

“How was it removed?” Drewe asks, her eyes bright.

“Does that matter?” I ask as the reality of Karin’s death hits me all over again.

“Of course. Did someone just reach in with a dull spoon and dig it out, or did he know what he was doing?”

“I don’t know what tool was used,” Miles says. “I didn’t see an actual autopsy report, just an FBI memo. It said the gland was removed through a hole under Wheat’s upper lip. Like Brahma punched through the sinuses and up into the brain.”

“Jesus,” I mutter.

“How big was the hole?” Drewe asks.

Miles checks his papers. “Seven millimeters wide. Damn. That’s pretty small, isn’t it?”

Drewe is smiling with satisfaction. “That’s it,” she says.

“That’s what?” asks Miles.

“All those traumatic head wounds were meant to mask the killer’s real intent. But Karin Wheat’s head was never meant to be found. Her wound gives us the truth.”

“What do you mean? What truth?”

“Tell me the angle of the pistol shot that killed the woman in Nashville.”

Miles consults his papers. “It was fired into the back of her neck at an upward angle, near the first cervical vertebra.”

Drewe nods and smiles again. “Have you ever seen anyone who was attacked with a claw hammer, Miles?”

He grimaces. “Have you?”

“Yes. During my residency. It puts big holes through the skull, and the brain squeezes out through the holes like toothpaste from a tube.”

Miles and I look at each other in bewildered horror.

“That seven-millimeter hole beneath Karin Wheat’s upper lip,” Drewe says. “The one that went all the way up into her brain? A neurosurgeon would call that the sublabial transsphenoidal route.”

“What?” Miles asks.

“It’s a standard method of removing pituitary tumors. The pituitary gland isn’t that close to the pineal in neurological terms, but in a dead person you could probably punch right through the pituitary and get where you wanted to go.”

“You’re saying a doctor could be doing this?” I ask.

“I’m saying a doctor is doing it. The stakes through the eyes? A surgeon could go through the optic foramen-where the optic nerve passes through the skull into the brain-veer to the midline, and go straight for the pineal. With the claw hammer and the rock fall, he could practically reach in and pull the gland out. The gunshot wound in Nashville? He goes up through the foramen magnum, the big opening in the bottom of your skull, and into the brain. The traumatic wounds cover up his tracks.”

“The track in Wheat was pretty small,” Miles says. “How do you pull out the gland through such a small hole? Would that be the reason he only got part of it sometimes?”

“The pineal is about the size of a pea,” Drewe explains. “The problem wouldn’t be getting it out but seeing it at all.”

“What about a flexible probe with a fiber-optic camera and a cutting tool?” asks Miles.

“You’re talking about an endoscope. I don’t think they have those for neurosurgery. But I guess you could use any endoscope if the patient was dead. I assume the FBI is looking at doctors as suspects?”

Miles nods. “But doctors are only part of a much wider suspect group. Every police department has a different theory. The California police are working a cult angle. They’ve seen cult murders in the past where certain body parts were taken. No pineal glands, but adrenals, ovaries, testicles, all kinds of things.”

“Dr. Lenz pretty much dismisses cult murders,” I tell them. “Almost all of them are committed for some conventional motive.”