“Bureaucracy. Social Security card, driver’s license, motor vehicle records, address. I’m sure the FBI faked credit cards and everything else for Lenz’s decoy.”
“They did,” I confirm, recalling Lenz’s boasts in his car. “Can you do that?”
Miles yawns heroically. “Sure. Only I don’t have the help they do. If we go that way, I’ll keep it simple. No medical records at
Despite anxiety about the risks, I’m fascinated by Miles’s proposal. Rather than trying to lure a predator toward us in the hopes of trapping him-which is basically Lenz’s plan-Miles means to trick him into swallowing a hand grenade. As his eyes close, I say, “Those goals you mentioned? Contacting Brahma, keeping the relationship going long enough for him to switch to e-mail, all that?”
“Yeah?” He opens one eye.
“You forgot one.”
Both eyes are open now. “What?”
“Catching the son of a bitch before he decides to kill me.”
He smiles, then both eyes close.
Miles is snoring softly-with three cups of coffee in him, no less-while I sit at my desk with the contents of his briefcase spread in front of me. Drewe is still on the phone with her mother. Occasionally her voice rises above the hum of air conditioner and computer.
There’s enough stolen information on my desk to fill twelve hours with steady reading. Not merely Nexis newspaper stories, but lab results and detectives’ case notes, things that would put Miles under a jail were they ever entered as evidence in a court of law. Yet all of it pales into insignificance beside the photographs of the victims.
Confucius was right about pictures and words. All the words on the paper in this pile add up to mere statistics, but the faces are real. The faces are
Drewe has that capacity for distance. It may well be what allowed her to make logical leaps about Brahma while Miles and I plodded along like boys following bread crumbs. Strange that emotional distance would be a requirement for those who heal, whereas I, who feel others’ pain more keenly than most, have hurt far more people than I have helped.
What can I do for these poor women? What do they need? Someone to avenge them? They’re certainly past hurting now. As this thought dies, I realize what holds my gaze to their haunted faces. They are eternally unattainable. Like Keats’s Grecian figures, they will possess their mystery, and thus their beauty, forever. I can never touch them. And if I can never touch them, I can never hurt them. Granting myself that reprieve, I am able to admit that I do know what they need. They need justice.
But justice cannot be served until their killer has been hounded to his lair, chained, and brought to a place of judgment. It may be that Miles and I can assist with the first task. Yet my logic remains sound enough to comprehend the scale of the problem. For almost a year Brahma has gone about his business without hindrance. In all the world, I alone-because of a few ripples in the EROS net-perceived the foul wake of his passing. I reacted late, but I reacted, and by so doing created a window of opportunity. And then in Dallas the FBI squandered forever the only advantage it would ever have-surprise.
Now Brahma is hiding. And he has an infinite matrix in which to conceal himself. I once thought the vastness of America was geographic, that miles of space or denseness of wood made massive measure. Then, on an icy Chicago street, I met a man and woman searching for their stolen child. After a single conversation, a couple of long looks into their hollow eyes, I saw that every mountain Lewis and Clark traversed, every steaming swamp De Soto pushed through, every plain the pioneers crossed has been transected by the compass, riven by the surveyor’s level, scarred by roads, photographed by satellites, and reduced to a thing you can fold into your glove compartment. But those lost parents stared across an uncharted sea of people, praying in vain for the phosphorous glow of a long-vanished trail, each town an eddy, each city a whirlpool that could swallow a hundred children without trace. And across that sea float the millions of milk cartons carrying photographs of the missing like messages in bottles, bound for garbage cans as surely as the ruins of last night’s dinner.
Looking at Miles’s stolen photographs, I know that somewhere in that same sea moves a man who saw final agony twist the faces of these women, who heard the last word or plea or wail that passed their lips. He moves comfortably, in the knowledge that maps do not exist to lead men to him. That he can do his grisly work in peace. That he can taunt his hunters. That only an accident will raise his head above the mob and mark him as a son of Cain.
CHAPTER 27
I found Brahma at 11:30 P.M.
To my surprise, he was deep in conversation with “Lilith”-Dr. Lenz’s personal Eliza Doolittle.
I’d been looking for him for about an hour, stopping occasionally to run a global search of EROS, checking for “Anne Bridges,” the account name that backed up Lenz’s “Lilith.” I also searched a few chat lobbies for “Shiva” and “Levon” and “Prometheus” and “Kali.” As I searched, I wondered whether Brahma, like me, could roam behind the digital walls that appear solid to EROS’s subscribers but yield like curtains to its system operators. If so, he could see me searching. Yet I had no choice if I wanted to find him. After a while, Drewe leaned in, saw Miles sleeping, said good night, and padded away without offering a summation of Erin’s problems. I wasn’t about to ask for one.
And then I got the hit.
At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The alias interacting onscreen with “Lilith” was not “Shiva” or any of the other familiar noms de plume. It was “Maxwell.” Yet after reading less than twenty lines of text, I knew “Maxwell” was Brahma. My excitement made me clumsy when I tried to activate the new voice-synthesis program, but I finally got it going.
Now my LaserJet printer hums and whispers as it records the conversation, while the digital voices of “Lilith” and “Maxwell” spar and weave and intertwine like mating serpents. They seem to be discussing a sexual incident that sounds like a cross between a group sex encounter and a gang rape.
LILITH› It _was_ my decision.
MAXWELL› I don’t accept that. Why did you let nine men have their way with you?
LILITH› It’s not easy to explain.
MAXWELL› Was it you who suggested it?
LILITH› It wasn’t that clear-cut.
MAXWELL› Wasn’t it suggested by the first man? The one who took you upstairs?
LILITH› Why do you think it was upstairs?
MAXWELL› It always is. Or else in a basement.
LILITH› It was upstairs. At a fraternity house. And I don’t remember exactly. It was like… we were doing it, my date and I, on this bottom bunk. And then this other guy walks in. A boy really. He said, “Hey, I’m really drunk, I need to crash.” And then he climbed up on the top bunk to sleep.
MAXWELL› But he didn’t sleep.
LILITH› No. In a minute or so I opened my eyes and saw his head leaning off the edge of the top bunk, looking down, watching us. Looking into my eyes. He looked like he was watching God or something. Wide- eyed like a kid. And then his head disappeared and I noticed the top bunk was moving too. And like I knew what he was doing up there. He couldn’t help himself. And when my date finished a second later, I said, I think your friend is frustrated. He looked at me funny-he was pretty drunk, too-and he said, you wanna help him out or something? And I just laughed and said I felt sorry for him. Why not? I swear to God I’ll never know why I did that. So my date got
