“What? We’re out of this shit, Miles! As of now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean no more games. No more ‘Erin’ and ‘Maxwell.’ You saw Brahma’s note to Lenz. He’s knows exactly what’s up.”
“Just because he caught on to Lenz doesn’t mean he suspects you. Have you sensed a single false note in his communications with you?”
I pause. “No, but-”
“Any subtle humor at your expense?”
“Not yet, but-”
“It’s totally different! He believes in Erin. Why is anybody’s guess. But he does.”
“Miles, you’re missing the main point here, and that scares me.”
“What main point?”
“How did Brahma find Lenz?”
His mouth remains half open.
“Through the telephone system, right?”
Miles’s brain is operating at a speed I cannot begin to comprehend. I say nothing while he works out the possibilities. Finally, he says, “Unless new information on Lenz’s decoy plan was entered into FBI computers in the last thirty-six hours, I’d have to say yes.”
“So he can trace us too.”
Miles stares at me without speaking, his face masklike in its lack of humanity. “No,” he says at length. “If Brahma checks the phone company’s computers, he’ll find the Vicksburg address coupled with your line. Any other digital data he can turn up will verify that. He can’t check actual land ownership because in Mississippi nothing like that is on computer, and probably won’t be for another fifty years.”
Something in Miles’s tone makes me work through his answer step by step, but it checks out.
“Lenz’s problem was that he was at the physical address that went with his phone line. Not so with us.” Miles pauses. “What I don’t understand is how Brahma knew Lenz
“We’re still out of it, Miles. Until tonight we were fooling around in a bad situation. Now it’s a Force-Ten clusterfuck. Fate just tapped us on the shoulder.”
“You want to leave it to the so-called experts now?” he asks angrily. “You just saw their incompetence tragically demonstrated. How many women are we going to watch die because we’re scared to take Brahma to the wall?”
“It’s not our fight.”
“The hell it isn’t! You think tonight changed my situation for the better?”
“You couldn’t have killed Mrs. Lenz. I can swear you were right beside me. Let’s just come clean with them.”
“Come clean? A minute ago you threw the team-offender theory up at me. Don’t you see it’s going to be more popular than ever now?”
“Why?”
“Because unless Brahma was transmitting his first message from Lenz’s home, someone else killed his wife. Brahma knew the safe house was a trap. He knew they’d be following his cellular, so he drove around typing messages to Lenz while someone else did his wife. Then he logged off, swung back, picked up the killer, and was already out of town when he transmitted that final message.”
As much as I want to argue, the scenario makes sense.
Miles rubs his eyes and walks over to my minifridge for a Mountain Dew. “Do you realize what just happened? A serial killer murdered the wife of an FBI agent.”
“Lenz was a shrink, not an agent.”
“You think that matters? He was one of the stars of the Investigative Support Unit. And Brahma already took out a Hostage Rescue Team member. We’re about to see one of the biggest manhunts in American history.”
I feel a sudden urge to set the air conditioner at sixty-five degrees, climb into bed, and sleep for twenty hours.
Miles drains the Mountain Dew like a man dying of thirst. “If I turned myself in now, I’d be asking for a legal reaming the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Sacco and Vanzetti.”
While I marshal my arguments, he drops the empty can, picks up the TV remote control, aims it over my shoulder and switches on my office television.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing what’s on TV.”
“My time’s almost up, Harper.” He gazes past me, surfing through channels at superhuman speed. “I’m going to find a movie that’ll induce deep hack mode, then lie down and finish my stupid Trojan Horse. The e-mail thing isn’t going to work. Too short a time frame now.”
“I meant what I said, Miles. I’m through with Brahma.”
“I heard you.”
Suddenly a wide and placid smile soothes the lines from his face. His eyes glaze with almost religious receptivity.
“What is it?” I ask, looking over my shoulder.
“
“Film noir? I thought you liked seventies trash.”
“I’m eclectic. This is perfect. We’re living noir right this second. Digital noir.”
He gives me a buck-toothed imitation of Humphrey Bogart, and for a moment I actually doubt his sanity. But then he clicks off the halogen lamp, sits on my bed with his back against the headboard, and props his laptop on his thighs. The black-and-white light of the television flickers over his features like shadows of clouds on the face of a cliff. Whatever anyone may think of Miles Turner, he is a man doing what he was born to do. Not many of us can say that.
“I’ll sleep on the couch in the den,” I tell him.
He nods slightly, or perhaps not at all. In Miles’s universe, I am already running in a minimized format.
CHAPTER 31
“Harper! Wake up!”
“Huh?”
My eyelids are sealed shut with epoxy.
I rub my fists into them. The first image that materializes is Miles’s face hovering inches from my own in the dark. I remember now. I’m lying on the couch in the den. Miles shakes me again.
“Wake
A bolus of adrenaline sprays through my system, bringing me into a sitting position. “Are the cops here?”
“No. Come to the office.”
“I had a nightmare… Jesus. What’s going on?”
Miles is no longer there. I rise and stumble toward the office, noticing faint blue lines around the edges of the blinds. I must have slept through the night. The muted cyclone of Drewe’s electric hair dryer whirs from the end of the hall as I pass across it and through the office door.
Miles is seated before the EROS computer. “You’ve got e-mail,” he says.
“From who?”
