He scans the printouts again. “Lenz had the son of a bitch and he blew it.”
“I thought he’d try to mimic Karin Wheat’s personality more. Get into immortality and the occult and all that.”
Miles shakes his head. “Lenz is in a hurry. He’s trying to cover all the bases at once. He’s giving Brahma a woman who’s both strong and weak. But if we go with Drewe’s scenario, Lenz’s approach is useless. It’s designed to provoke by being overtly sexual, whereas Brahma’s criteria may be medical.”
“What choice does Lenz have? He can’t log on and say ‘Forty-seven-year-old female seeks succulent twenty- three-year-old pineal gland. Please send photo.’ ”
Miles’s laugh is terminated by the ring of the phone. The impulse to flight flashes in his eyes.
“We’ll screen it,” I tell him.
After two rings the machine answers, my outgoing message plays, and a beep prompts the caller.
“Cole, pick up the phone,” says a deep voice.
“Lenz,” says Miles. He crosses the room, picks up the cordless, trots back to me, and hands me the phone.
“I’m here.”
“Did you see?” the psychiatrist asks, his voice brimming with excitement.
“I saw it. Not bad, Doctor.”
“I had him going, didn’t I?”
Has Lenz called merely to rehash his triumph? Like a high school kid talking about his football game? Maybe he thinks I’m the only person who truly understands the parameters of his strange quest.
“You saw his age?” he asks. “Forty-seven?”
“Yes.”
“And admitting that he’s in the medical field! Cole, it’s working.”
Miles leans over the answering machine.
“What about the bit at the end?” Lenz asks, suddenly penitent. “Did I go too far?”
“Hard to say.”
“I know I pushed him, but I’m fighting time here.”
Miles punches me in the side.
“I guess Baxter’s pressing you to nail him before he kills again, huh?”
“I’m speaking of the phone traces.”
Miles punches me again; this time I punch back. “You mean they’re close to tracing him?”
“No. They’re no longer trying to trace him.”
“What?”
“Before we put the decoy plan into action, we realized we were facing an either-or situation. If they tried to trace the UNSUB every time we conversed on-line, it would be obvious I was helping the FBI. You see?”
“Oh, I see. But I can’t believe Baxter stopped the traces.”
“It’s not indefinite. He’s given me seven days.”
“Then they start the traces again?”
“Now you see why I’m having to push harder than I’d like.”
“Is there anything else you needed?”
“Yes,” Lenz says in a strange voice. “I’m wondering why you haven’t asked me about Turner.”
I look at Miles. “I figure you’d be crowing about it already if you’d caught him.”
“If you know where he is, Cole, do yourself and your wife a favor. Turner wouldn’t hang his ass out to protect yours.”
I sense the heat of Miles’s rage from a foot away. “Yeah, well, opinions are like assholes.”
“Everybody’s got one,” Lenz finishes. “Only a lot of people pay a lot of money for mine.”
“There’s a sucker born every minute.”
“Good night, Cole.”
I carry the cordless back across the room and set it in its cradle. “Nice guy, huh?”
“He’s better than some,” says Miles. He points at the red
“I didn’t want them banging around in my head.”
He raises his eyebrows and, getting no objection from me, hits the rewind button. A minute later the tape begins playing back the messages. Most are from various police departments. A couple are from old friends, warning me that they’ve been questioned about me by police. One is a sales pitch from a credit card company. And six are from Detective Michael Mayeux of the New Orleans Police Department. Miles and I listen to his final message in rapt silence.
“Mr. Cole, I don’t know where you are, but you’d better start checking your messages. You may not believe this, but I’m worried about you. If the FBI has pressured you into some kind of cooperation, you better be damn careful. This case got weird fast. There’s a lot of bad feeling in all the P.D.s involved. These days the Bureau’s pretty good about sharing information, but right now they’re acting like they did back in the seventies. Some people are saying they’ve already screwed up the investigation. That isn’t your problem, I know. All I’m saying is things could reach a point where the departments involved just get fed up and decide to do what they’ve been wanting to do all along, which is blow the whistle, shut down EROS, and arrest you and Turner. You gotta admit I treated you okay when you came to us. If you need help-and brother you do-I’m your man. Now give me a call.”
Miles has wandered away from me. “What do you think about that?” I ask.
“Never happen,” he says distantly. “Going public and shutting down EROS, I mean. City cops aren’t going to risk pissing off the feds to that degree.”
“Could we use Mayeux to our advantage?”
“Things haven’t progressed that far yet. Just ignore him.”
“I’m glad he’s not a Mississippi cop. He’d be sitting on my doorstep right now.”
Miles plunks himself down on the edge of my bed and sighs.
“You said they found Karin Wheat’s head near the Bonnet Carre causeway,” I remind him. “Headed toward La Place. That means he passed the New Orleans airport. But from the distances between the previous murder cities, I always assumed Brahma was flying.”
“He could have flown out of Baton Rouge,” Miles points out. “It’s only an hour away, and you go through La Place to get there. Or he could have driven to La Place just to toss out the head, then turned around and driven back to the airport. The FBI doesn’t know how he’s getting around. Common sense says flying, but there’s enough elapsed time between the murders for him to have ridden a goddamn Trailways bus.”
“Except the one-night interval between Karin’s death and Rosalind May’s abduction.”
He nods. “They’re searching airline records, trying to match passenger manifests for the murder cities on given dates, but all matches so far have been legitimate.”
“He could have taken a private plane,” I suggest, “like you did to get here.”
“They’re checking that.” He looks up and searches my face. “You got something you want to say?”
“Take it easy. I’m just thinking out loud.”
He runs both hands over his freshly skinned scalp and focuses somewhere beyond me. “You been thinking about what we talked about? The Trojan Horse?”
“Some.”
“And?”
“I’m up for it.”
A broad smile lights his face. “All
Miles’s occasional regressions to Southern idiom surprise me, but I guess every refugee carries cultural baggage.
“Have you decided which way you want to go?” he asks. “I mean, a real EROS client or totally from scratch?”
“Not a real client,” I tell him. “I don’t want to put anybody at risk like that. But I don’t want to start totally from scratch, either.”
His eyes narrow. “I don’t get you.”
I move closer to the bed and look down at him. “I’m going to explain this to you once. After that you don’t
