Mortal Fear

“There has to be. Wheat was the intended transplant recipient. Something went wrong, so they took Rosalind May the next night. But who’s the donor? The last murder of a young girl-that we know about-was six weeks before Wheat’s death. That’s too long for a harvested pineal to remain medically viable. That means another young woman was kidnapped in the interval, or is about to be. She’s the donor.”

“My God,” I whisper, starting to believe for the first time.

Drewe looks at me. “How long does it take you to find out an EROS woman is dead or missing?”

“Weeks, usually. I only found out about Karin so fast because she was a celebrity.”

“What about Rosalind May? She was only taken days ago.”

“It’s complicated, but it comes down to coincidence. She was a blind-draft account holder who hadn’t been active for a while but was still paying her fees. When her account went to zero, one of Miles’s techs started poking around. A week ago, her account went active again. It looks like she was talking to Brahma right up until the second he took her.”

“My God. Are there more accounts like that?”

“About fifty.”

Drewe goes still. “The donor is one of those fifty. Only her account hasn’t dropped to zero yet, so nobody but the killer knows she’s part of this. Both she and May could be lying on an operating table right now, waiting for-”

“Wait a minute,” says Miles, holding up his hands. “We’re going off the deep end here. If your surgeon is a he-like almost all serial killers-and he wants to prolong his own life, wouldn’t he be kidnapping men?”

“Sex doesn’t matter in organ transplants.”

“But why is he raping them, for God’s sake? After they’re dead, no less? According to your theory, this surgeon would be motivated by a semblance of rationality. Is raping corpses the act of a rational man? On EROS I once saw a quote about necrophilia taken from a psychiatric textbook. ‘In necrophilia, the diagnosis of psychosis is considered justified in all cases.’ I laughed about that for two days. Talk about understatement. I’m no missionary, but bonking corpses is definitely off the reservation.”

“I can’t explain that part of it,” Drewe confesses. “But I stand by my theory. And I’ll tell you something else. One glance at those pictures you flashed tells me these murders weren’t committed for purely sexual reasons.”

“Why?”

“Every one of those women looked different from the others. Different hair, complexion, bone structure, and enough difference in cosmetics show different personalities. Men are visually motivated. The only connection between those girls was that they were young. And Karin Wheat and Rosalind May weren’t.”

Miles flattens his hands on his papers. “Okay, let’s look at your surgeon for a minute. If he intended to try this transplant, wouldn’t he need the victim’s blood type, tissue type, things like that?”

“I assume so,” Drewe says, “but I don’t know. I’m an obstetrician. I know virtually nothing about transplantation. There are very good antirejection agents now.”

“How would he do it? He’s got to remove a gland from the center of the brain, then put the new one right back in that spot? Or could it go somewhere else?”

“I would say reattachment in situ is impossible. Damaged central nervous system tissue will not grow-that’s axiomatic. The pineal is attached to a stalk through which all kinds of chemicals flow. Once you sever that stalk, it’s over. Maybe he could park it in a kidney or something.”

“A kidney?” I ask.

“In the early mouse transplants, the surgeons placed the new pineal inside the thymus, which is behind the sternum. They did that because both glands were connected to the same nerve center in the brain. And the transplanted gland functioned. But in the later mouse transplants, the new pineals were put right into the brain after the old glands were removed. How, I don’t know. And I don’t see how you could do that with humans.”

“How long would an operation like this take?” Miles asks.

Drewe opens her hands. “Removing a pituitary tumor takes two or three hours. But that’s simply an excision of tumor tissue. This would take much longer.”

“But you know for a fact that it worked on mice?”

“Yes. But you see the difference, don’t you? The doctors working on mice were studying only the aging process. Who knows how much brain function they destroyed in the process of transplanting the pineals?”

A horrifying thought hits me. “Who’s to say Brahma didn’t take the pineals from those first victims and transplant them into living recipients? There’s no reason to think we know about all his victims. He could be taking women from other on-line services. He could be taking homeless women off the street.”

“Shit,” mutters Miles.

“And if he is, he might not care any more than those mouse doctors about what mental functions he destroyed.”

“Oh God,” Drewe whispers. “God.”

“Maybe Rosalind May is alive,” Miles says, getting to his feet. “How many people would it take to do what you’re talking about? Bare minimum. Double up any functions that allow it.”

“Mmm… five. Two surgeons, two nurses, and an anesthetist.”

“That sounds high,” I tell her. “Think about battlefield surgery. The Civil War. Doctors have performed operations with almost nonexistent resources when they had no alternative.”

“Okay, ditch one nurse. But this isn’t some macho deal where they do without sedative and cut with a kitchen knife and someone calls it a miracle because they got muddy doing it. You’re talking about a transplant. A glandular transplant at the core of the brain. It has never been done. If anything, it would take more hands than usual. Plus a state-of-the-art operating room. You’d need an operating microscope, a C-arm fluoroscope, all kinds of stuff. It might take surgeons working in shifts. Some neurosurgical operations take more than twelve hours.”

“So even if he is a surgeon,” Miles says, “he needs serious help. Trained people. We’re talking a lot of money here. The ultimate object might even be money.”

I start to argue, but he holds up his hand. “I agree that Drewe’s estimate of five is high. We’re talking about someone who has access to state-of-the-art voice-recognition technology.” Miles quickly explains to Drewe the theory behind Strobekker’s zero typographical error rate. “So who’s to say he doesn’t have access to computer- assisted robotic surgery, or whatever else he needs? I’ve seen some prototype medical equipment that’s unbelievable. I mean, we don’t know who we’re dealing with. It could be the chief of neurosurgery at a major medical school.”

“No way,” Drewe objects.

“Where’s the best neurosurgery department in the world?” I ask.

“Columbia,” she replies without hesitation.

“Where else is good?”

“Not the places you’d think. The University of Washington, Michigan, the Barrow Institute in Arizona. But Columbia turns out the majority of academic neurosurgeons in the U.S.”

“I’m getting something from this,” Miles says.

“What? Columbia?”

“I don’t know. It might come to me in a second. Might take ten years. This is where the brain is truly inferior to the computer. I’ve lost a file in my own head, and I can’t retrieve it no matter how hard I try.”

Memories of Lenz’s verbal primer on the psychology of serial killers flash through my mind. “You really think the motive could just be money?”

“ Just money?” Miles barks. “Man, you must be even richer than I thought. My only question is how Brahma could ever make money off the procedure. Even if he succeeded at the transplant, he’d be guilty of murder.”

“True,” says Drewe. “But if it worked, legitimate surgeons might begin working on the procedure.”

“How?”

“Same as any transplant. Pineals could be harvested from recently deceased persons. Your Brahma can’t access legitimate donor networks because his research is illegal. That’s why he has to kidnap or kill to get donors. But if pineal transplants were proven to counter the aging process, the demand for the procedure would be