Mortal Fear

Her accurate use of this computer term for the human brain, and by extension human beings, surprises us both.

“But surgeon as computer expert?” she asks, moving across the floor again. “The stereotype of no spare time in medical school is false. People do get married, have hobbies. If we posit a medical student who had little or no social life but an obsession with computers, I can easily see him attaining the skill level you’re talking about. Especially if he has the aptitude. And a practicing surgeon would have whatever spare time he wanted, plus the money to pursue his obsessions.”

Miles looks up in defeat.

“The question,” Drewe concludes, “is what is he taking the pineal gland for? What does he do with it? What does the FBI think?”

Miles drums his long fingers on the table and scans a new sheet of paper. “Possibilities range from eating it to burning it to selling it to Asians who render certain hormones from it.”

Drewe stops again. “Melatonin.”

“That’s right,” says Miles.

“Do you know what melatonin does?”

“It regulates the sleep cycle. There’s apparently a craze right now where people use it as a natural sleeping pill. Some think it’s a magic anti-aging pill. I know a few computer people who take it, along with a hundred other vitamins and herbs.”

Drewe finally comes to the table and takes a seat. “After Harper got back from New Orleans,” she says, “he told me about the pineals being taken. The next day, I punched a few queries into the Medline computer at University Hospital. It told me more than I knew before, but not a lot. Just enough to lead me in the right direction. There’s a neurobiologist on staff at University; he hasn’t been there long, but he’s good. You should have seen him come to life when I asked about the pineal gland. He was still jabbering when I left forty-five minutes later.

“Melatonin is hot right now because research teams in different parts of the world have recently come up with some startling new findings on it. But before I tell you what they’re doing, I’m going to tell you why these women are being killed.”

Miles stares at Drewe with the wonder of a kid watching a magic show.

“Let me ask one question first,” she says. “What were the ages of each of the victims?”

Miles’s eidetic memory spits out the digits like bingo numbers. “26, 23, 24, 25, 26, 25, 47.”

“Is that in order? By date of death?”

“Yes.”

“How old is the kidnapped woman? Rosalind whatever?”

“Fifty.”

Drewe smiles. “There it is. Someone is trying to transplant pineal glands between human beings.”

“What?”Miles cries.

“Why?” I ask.

“To add fifteen to twenty vital years to the human life span. Perhaps ultimately to his own life.”

Miles and I are silent.

“According to the neurobiologist,” Drewe says, “foreign researchers working on the pineal began by focusing on melatonin as a dietary supplement, just the way people are taking it now. They found that mice ingesting a regular regimen of the hormone were not only healthier but also lived longer than the control mice. This prompted them to try a more radical approach. They had micro-surgeons transplant pineal glands between mice-the pineals of young mice into old mice and vice versa. The results were astounding. Far more dramatic than oral dosages. The coats of the old mice regained their luster, the animals regained their sexual appetite and ability, T-cell counts went up, certain tumors disappeared, and a dozen other results, all positive.”

“And the young mice?” Miles asks.

“They immediately began to age rapidly. But the most fascinating thing is that the old mice with transplanted pineals maintained their reinvigorated state almost up to the point of death. To put it simply, they never got old. They just died.”

The kitchen is so quiet that the cheeep of crickets outside sounds like a roar.

“If that were true,” I say finally, “American pharmaceutical companies would be researching melatonin twenty-four hours a day.”

“How do you know they’re not? They may be duplicating these experiments right now. It just might be that a gland thought vestigial until 1963 is the engine that controls the human aging process. The number of people taking melatonin nationwide is staggering. It’s also frightening, because no one knows what its effects are over time. The pineal gland basically rules the endocrine system, Harper. It controls sexual development by regulating other hormones. It affects body temperature, kidney function, immunity. It controls hibernation in mammals, migration in birds, it changes skin color in chameleons. All this was new to me. When the neurobiologist started asking why I was so interested, I made excuses and got out of there. But by then it was clear to me.”

Miles is tapping his fingertips together. “You’re saying the age disparity between the first six victims and Karin Wheat is explained by the fact that the killer was taking-”

“Harvesting,” Drewe corrects him.

“ Harvestingthe pineal glands of young women for transplant? You’re saying he put these first few glands in the freezer until he got ready to start kidnapping older women to test his theory on?”

She shakes her head. “I think the first murders were part of a training program. Transplantation of a human pineal has never been tried. The pineal gland has the highest blood flow by weight of any organ other than the kidneys. A transplant would be fantastically difficult, probably impossible. Lots of microvascular stuff, severing and reattaching minute blood vessels. We’re talking groundbreaking neurosurgery. I think whoever’s doing this knew he would need practice in the vasculature surrounding a pineal gland-probably a pineal as close to the living state as he could get it.”

“So according to your theory,” says Miles, “just prior to the murder of Karin Wheat, this mad doctor decided he was ready to make a transplant attempt?”

“Karin Wheat is the flaw in my reasoning,” Drewe says quickly. “To make a transplant attempt, the surgeon would obviously need his recipient alive in an operating room, not dead in New Orleans. But I still think the last young woman killed prior to Wheat was meant to be a transplant donor. What was the elapsed time between her death and Karin Wheat’s murder?”

“Six weeks,” I reply.

She sighs in frustration. “That’s too long. No way a gland would remain viable that long.”

“Oh no,” I nearly moan.

“What?” Miles asks.

“Brahma’s primary topic of conversation with Karin Wheat was immortality. That was the subject of her last novel. They both seemed obsessed with it.”

“Score one for my theory,” says Drewe.

“But he didn’t kidnap Karin Wheat,” Miles reminds her. “He murdered her.”

“But he did kidnap Rosalind May,” she counters. “And May was almost the same age as Wheat, right? Fifty is definitely the downhill side of the hormonal roller coaster. Perfect candidate for what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe the killer wanted to kidnap Wheat,” I suggest. “But something went wrong.”

“Maybe,” Miles allows. “She was the only victim who died with a drug in her system. Ketamine. It’s an animal tranquilizer.”

“Your tech called me two nights ago. Baxter said May had been missing for two days. That means she was kidnapped-”

“The night after Wheat was murdered.”

I nod. “They wanted to kidnap Wheat, somehow bungled it, and decided to go for May as a substitute.”

“A preplanned backup,” Miles suggests.

“But what went wrong with the Wheat scenario? Why kill her?”

Drewe slaps the tabletop, stunning us both. “There’s another victim,” she says.

“What?”Miles asks.