Mortal Fear - Greg Iles

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      “I’ll make them believe me.”

      This from a woman who has told women her mother’s age that they have less than a year to live, friends that their newborn babies are deformed or dying. The certainty in her voice is powerful enough to resuscitate my flagging confidence, possibly even enough to sway a jury, if not the FBI.

      “Thank you,” I say again, trying to distance my mind from the idea of police questioning Drewe. “Your dad offered to use his connections if we need them.”

      “He must really be upset.”

      “He’s just worried about you. Does he really have connections high enough to help in something like this?”

      She shrugs. “He knows the governor. Can a state governor influence the FBI?”

      I shake my head. “I don’t know. Let’s hope we never have to find out.”

      She goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a lemon pie that a churchy Baptist neighbor brought over yesterday. Drewe was raised Methodist, but since she rarely attends church, her Baptist patients never cease trying to pull her into their fold. They know I’m a hopeless case. Drewe and I attack the pie for a couple of minutes in silence, more than making up for the calories we burned in the truck.

      “This is sinful,” she mumbles through a huge bite of pale yellow filling. She always scoops out the filling and leaves the crust.

      “Praise God,” I manage to reply in a mocking mushmouth.

      She flicks her fork at me, plopping a piece of meringue onto my cheek. When she laughs, her eyes sparkle like stars, and in that moment I feel the weight of my secret lift from my shoulders just long enough to sense the lightness of peace.

      Then something closes around my heart with suffocating power. It’s like a Chinese torture: the better things are, the worse they are.

      “What’s the matter?” Drewe is studying me as she might a patient having a sudden stroke.

      “Nothing. I just remembered something I need to take care of. A couple of long positions in Singapore. Boring but necessary.”

      “Oh.”

      The realization that tomorrow is a workday instantly manifests itself throughout her frame. Her shoulders hunch slightly, her eyelids fall, she sighs with resignation. But more dispiriting than work is the realization that our unusual moment of closeness is over.

      “I’m whipped,” she says. “You coming to bed?”

      I shake my head, averting my eyes. “I’d better check the Singapore Exchange.”

      She looks long enough to let me know she knows I am at least partially lying. Then she turns and walks toward the bedroom.

      I move quickly toward my office.

      I’ve got to talk to Miles.

       TEN

      When I check my email, I find two messages from Miles. I click the mouse and open the first. Seeing the length of the text, I push ALT-V to activate the most unique feature on my EROS computer—its voice.

      The first time I heard EROS speak I felt strange. Then I realized it was not the first time I had heard a computer talk. The telephone company’s computers had been talking to me for years. I had toyed with digital sampling keyboards that could exactly reproduce anything from a thundering bass to a contralto soprano. The voice chip inside the EROS computer is similar. However, it is not voice-recognition technology. Getting a computer to verbalize text displayed on its screen is relatively simple. Getting one to recognize millions of different voices speaking with hundreds of different accents—even in one language—is currently taxing the best brains in the R and D departments of the world’s top high-tech firms.

      EROS cannot hear.

      But it does talk. Its voice can take on any pitch between twenty and twenty thousand hertz, which is slightly superfluous since my multimedia speakers bottom out at around one hundred, and my rock-and-roll-damaged eardrums probably top out at ten thousand. Also, the pitch versatility is misleading. EROS’s voice is not unlike Drewe’s when she is dictating charts. Whether I select a baritone or tenor frequency, the words will be repeated at that single pitch—a perfect monotone—until the listener believes he is trapped inside the tin-can robot from Lost in Space. And vocal monotony is not conducive to sexual fantasy unless your idea of hot sex is having an interspecies relationship with a machine.

      EROS’s voice program does have what’s called a “lexical stress” feature, but it sucks. It makes the voice sound like a saxophone played by a drunk who accents all the wrong notes. A couple of months ago Miles sent me a package containing circuit boards he claimed would give my computer not only a better voice, but also the Holy Grail: voice-recognition capability. Naturally, those circuit boards are still sealed inside their antistatic bags in the box they came in. For my purpose—listening to lengthy email messages—the droning digital voice EROS already has is good enough.

      Scanning Miles’s messages, I set the frequency to a medium baritone—Miles’s register—and lie down on the twin bed to listen.

      Hello, snitch. Here’s an update from Serial Killer Central. I’ve finally met the elusive Dr. Arthur Lenz, and I am impressed (though not as impressed as he is with himself).

      If you don’t already know (and how could you?) there is a massive bureaucratic battle afoot between the FBI and the various police departments involved in what they are vulgarly calling the “EROS murders.” (Is “vulgarly” a word? I defer to the grammarians on that.) The instinct of the police (I use “police” collectively for Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Minneapolis, et al.) is to shut down EROS for the foreseeable future. This is obviously short-term thinking. They apparently believe that shutting us down will keep “Strobekker” (whoever he really is) off the playing field. The FBI (read Lenz) quite rightly understands that shutting down EROS will only send our predator to greener pastures—or at least different ones. I give Lenz credit for understanding that the digital fields of the Lord are quite expansive, and that our beast at play is well versed in traveling them.

      Segue: while writing this I have recalled a bit of high school Emerson.

       If the red slayer thinks he slays

       Or if the slain thinks he is slain

       They know not well the subtle paths

       I keep, and pass, and turn again

      From “Brahma,” I believe. Come to think of it, from now on, when I refer to the killer, I shall call him Brahma. “Strobekker” makes me picture a pasty-faced Minnesotan of Swedish descent, killing with the same knife he uses during the graveyard shift at the meat-packing plant.

      I think Lenz plans to lure Brahma to his destruction by somehow manipulating our network. The police argue the obvious: that every minute EROS is up and running is another minute women are at risk. But Lenz has used your session printouts to good advantage. He points out that Brahma not only has a recognizable prose style online, but also that his messages, which are error-free for eighty-five percent of the exchanges with his victims, become full of errors as the dates of the murders approach. Lenz didn’t know why that might be, so I decided to throw him a bone. I think Brahma is using an advanced voice-recognition unit, which allows him to simply speak his words rather than type them. Maybe he works for a computer company and has access to prototype equipment. A unit like that might not be easily portable, and he probably couldn’t use it remotely because of cellular dropouts. So when he takes his show on the road, he’s got to type like everybody else.

      Anyway, Lenz realized that the FBI can use this “error-rate flag” as an early-warning system to know when Brahma is on the move and women are in imminent danger. He also points out that

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