“Look.”
I rub my eyes again and peer at the screen.
TO: ERIN
SENDER: UNAVAILABLE
I must talk to you. You know who I am. I shall check the Blue Room every half hour by the clock.
“It came in about two hours ago,” Miles informs me. “I let you sleep as long as I could. Notice anything interesting?”
“No.”
“The momentum of the relationship has shifted. Brahma’s desperate to talk to you.”
“So?”
“You’ve got to answer him.”
A knock at the door lifts Miles an inch off his seat.
“We’re awake!” I call.
Drewe opens the door and smiles. She’s dressed for work, in dark slacks and a white Liz Claiborne blouse. “I’m having cereal for breakfast,” she says. “Best I can do this morning. You guys want any?”
“No thanks,” says Miles, trying to look nonchalant.
“Harper?”
“Sounds good. I’m starved.”
I ignore Miles’s angry expulsion of breath and follow Drewe into the kitchen, glancing at my watch as I go. Seven-twenty a.m. Miles must have figured it would take ten minutes to convince me to answer Brahma’s message. I’m definitely not going back into the office before seven-thirty.
Drewe pours two bowls of raisin bran and slices a navel orange into bright crescents. I go straight for the coffeepot. It’s Community dark roast with chicory, and I savor the kick.
“You look rough,” Drewe says.
“You look like an ad for Ivory Snow.”
“Thanks. Long night?”
“Worse.”
“What happened?”
I take another scalding sip of coffee and tell her about the tragedy in Virginia. I can’t tell if she’s stunned or furious or both. After a long silence, she says, “Is Miles in there trying to track this nut down?”
I shrug. “He’s got a few ideas.”
Unable to read her eyes, I twirl the spoon in my cereal bowl. The flakes are already soggy.
“Did Miles tell the FBI to start checking tissue donor networks?” she asks.
“Yes. And it looks like you were right. There’s probably another missing woman.”
Drewe puts down her spoon. “Then it’s time to tell the FBI everything.”
I have no answer but the truth. “I can’t do it with Miles here.”
She gives me a pointed look that I have no trouble translating:
“Maybe I should call them,” she says. “From my office. Tell them I came up with the whole transplant theory.”
“Drewe….”
She wraps both hands around her coffee cup and stares into it. “I know Miles is our friend, Harper. But it’s not fair to us.” She looks up. “Jail is not my idea of a future.”
I reach across the table and close my right hand around her left. “Nor mine. Miles knows what’s going on. I just don’t think he knows where to go. I’ll talk to him.”
She squeezes my hand, then stands. Drewe enjoyed theorizing about the murders when they were a technical abstraction, but she does not share Miles’s moral ambivalence about duty. Taking a last swallow of coffee, she smooths her slacks, then bends and kisses me on the forehead. “If he tells the FBI everything, he can stay as long as he wants to. If not, tell him I enjoyed seeing him. I’ve got to go. See you tonight.”
She hurries out of the kitchen, car keys jingling, Coach purse swinging from her shoulder. When the front door bangs shut, I put down my coffee and check my watch. Seven thirty-two.
I take my time with the orange slices.
Miles is sitting on the edge of the bed, typing on his laptop. He doesn’t look up or speak, so I take the initiative.
“You’re not going to try to talk me into answering Brahma?”
“I answered for you.” His eyes never leave the screen. “I told him your husband hadn’t left for work yet, but you’d be in the Blue Room at nine.”
He keeps typing. I had thought he was coding, but he’s typing too rapidly for that. “You logged on as ‘Erin’?”
“Brahma didn’t know the difference. He’s desperate to talk to you.”
“Goddamn it, Miles, this is dangerous!”
“It’s been dangerous ever since you called the police. I always knew that. It was you and Drewe who saw it as some kind of
I start to cuss him from hell to breakfast, but I stop myself. “Miles, I’ve got to tell you something. You-”
“I’ve got to tell
My mind goes blank. “You did?”
“After what happened last night, I thought it was too late. But once I saw Brahma’s message, I knew what to do. The hard part was-”
A roar of motors and flying gravel drowns his voice. Before he resumes typing, his fingers flying across the keyboard, I leap to a window and peek around the blinds. Four Yazoo County sheriff’s cruisers have blocked my drive. Their doors are open, and at least six uniformed men are rushing toward the porch.
“It’s the cops!”
Miles is still typing like a madman when five fast knocks boom through the house.
“Get your ass into the bomb shelter!” I tell him.
“Keep your voice down,” he says calmly. “I need thirty seconds. Stall them.”
“They’ll break the door down!”
“No they won’t. I’ll hide the disk where you can find it.
With a lump the size of a cue ball in my throat, I walk slowly toward the front door in my sock feet.
“I’m coming! Hang on a second!”
Thanking God for the Scottish fortress mentality that kept my grandfather from putting windows in or around our front door, I reach for the chain lock and jiggle it loudly.
“Gimme a sec! Chain’s stuck!”
As I jiggle the chain again, I have a fleeting impression of something passing across the hall behind me. Praying it was Miles, I count slowly to five, then unlatch the chain and open the door.
Someone in a white polyester shirt shoves a piece of paper in my face and starts reciting legalese while three tan and brown uniforms push past me and fan out into the house. Before the voice stops, another deputy goes by me. Then the plainclothes man who was reading shoves past, and Deputy Billy climbs the steps to the porch. He looks a little sheepish.
“What the hell’s going on, Billy?”
“FBI thinks Turner’s here.”
“You’ve had the house staked out for a week. How could he be here?”
“Hey, we waited till your wife left, okay? That’s better treatment than most people get.”
This mollifies me a little, but then I realize that common decency isn’t what made them wait. “Sheriff Buckner’s scared of pissing off Drewe’s father, right?”
