Iles, Greg - Mortal Fear by Iles Greg

Author:Iles, Greg [Iles, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

My chief fascination in the days following Miles’s appearance was listening to the baroque mating ritual between “Maxwell” and “Lilith.” From the worldly wise but bitter woman who endured a college gang bang, Lenz quickly expanded his creation into a multidimensional character worthy of a Christmas appearance on Oprah. Sometimes “Lilith” taunted “Maxwell,” other times she passively answered whatever questions he put to her, however personal. I decided Lenz must be drawing his emotional raw material from actual case histories; much of it had the outrageous ring of truth that only reality can provide, incidents that would get any decent fiction writer drummed out of his profession. Through it all, “Maxwell” probed “Lilith’s” past with lapidary precision, a twist here, a light tap there, gradually forming a picture of the “woman” who lay behind the alias.

Miles spent most of the first day building the digital skeleton that would support my fictional “Erin.” We chose the “legal” name Cynthia Griffin and decided to place her address in Vicksburg, which lies forty miles southwest of Rain. We discussed the chance that a Mississippi address might give Brahma’s intuition a tickle, but word of mouth among my old friends had brought the number of Mississippi EROS clients to more than thirty. Miles thought that was more than enough to make one new addition quite natural.

Once “Cynthia’s” personal information had been hacked into the proper government computers—and an EROS account opened in her name—Miles began coding away at his Trojan Horse program, consuming massive amounts of Mountain Dew and granola bars ferried by Drewe from the Yazoo City K-Mart. He rarely sat in front of his computer to do his coding. After Drewe left for work each morning, he would commandeer an easy chair in the darkened den and, fortified by junk food, sit glassy-eyed through three or four old movies on the satellite channels. His favorites seemed to be disaster movies from the nineteen-seventies, à la Airport and The Towering Inferno, melodramatic extravaganzas featuring faded Hollywood legends. Now and then he would jump up and hurry into my office, sit down before his laptop, and punch in a few keystrokes, cocking his head at odd angles and murmuring to himself.

Drewe worked every day, but she called frequently to see how the check on the female blind-draft account holders was going. About midnight on the second night, Jan Krislov e-mailed us, saying that the fifty-two blind-draft women showing low account activity in the past months had all been verified as alive and well. So had more than three hundred of the remaining blind-draft women. This punched a gaping hole in Drewe’s theory of another missing woman, and by extension her pineal transplant theory. Or so we thought.

When we told Drewe about Jan’s message, she was standing at my office door, about to leave for work. She looked blank for about thirty seconds; then her eyes flickered with knowledge.

“I was so stupid,” she said. “The missing woman couldn’t be an EROS client. The EROS population isn’t large enough to allow selection of tissue-matched donors.

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