Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

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      I get up from the desk and go to my minifridge for an ice-cold Tab. I use them to break the monotony of Diet Coke. Not only do they pack a more powerful fizz rush, but I actually like the stuff. I’ve drunk half the can by the time I sit down at my Gateway 2000.

      Price quotes from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange scroll slowly down the screen. This is my real job. Trading futures. Bonds, indexes, even agriculturals. I do it from my house with only my own money. Keeps it simple. No suicidal clients to deal with. I’m holding a ten lot of S&P contracts right now, but nothing’s in crisis mode.

      I swig some more Tab and glance across at the postmodern black table that supports the EROS computer and satellite video link. It’s late afternoon, and online traffic is light. Mostly housewives right now. Bodice-ripper stuff. The real freaks are on their way home from work.

      My wife should be as well. Today she’s working in Jackson, the state capital, eighty minutes away from our farmhouse in the flat Delta cotton fields. Drewe is a doctor, three blessed years out of her residency, and the same age I am—thirty-three. I’m thinking I should start cooking us some supper when the phone rings.

      “Hello?”

      “This is Detective Michael Mayeux, NOPD.”

      His voice has the radio tinniness that cell phones aren’t supposed to have but usually do. “Thanks for calling back so fast.”

      “Just checked my voice mail,” he explains. “I’ve got twenty-eight nutcase calls already. Vampires killed her. Mummies. One guy claims he’s an incubus and that he killed her.”

      “So why did you call me?”

      “You sounded slightly less nutty than the rest. You said you were calling from Mississippi?”

      “That’s right. EROS—the company I sysop for—is based in New York City, but I do my job from right here.”

      “I’m listening, Mr. Cole.”

      “You know what online services are?”

      “Sure. AOL, CompuServe, Delphi. But your message didn’t give me the feeling we’re talking about people using MUDs or booking vacations by modem.”

      “No, you’re right,” I tell him, relieved to have found someone who doesn’t need spoon-feeding.

      “So what’s this EROS? Live chat, email, role-playing, all that stuff?”

      “Exactly.”

      “My kid’s a computer fiend. I log onto CompuServe every now and then. I’m no expert, though. Keep it at the idiot level.”

      “That’s my natural level, Detective. I told your machine that Karin Wheat was a member of EROS.”

      “And you said it was confidential information.”

      “It is. I mean, according to the rules of the membership agreement. Legally, we’re forbidden to give out any client’s true identity. There are a lot of married people online with us who don’t want their spouses to know. Quite a few celebrities, too.”

      “But you gave me Wheat’s name.”

      “I wanted you to know how serious I am.”

      “Hang on—cut over to Chartres, Harry. I’m back, Mr. Cole. You said you thought Wheat’s death might be connected to some other women? Disappearances or something?”

      “Right. What I’d like to do—for now, at least—is give you the names of those women and see if you can check them out. On the sly, sort of. You can do that, right?”

      Mayeux doesn’t answer for a moment. “You mean check and see if they’re alive?”

      “Right.”

      “Yeah, we can do that. But why haven’t you done that, if you’re so concerned? You have their phone numbers, don’t you?”

      “Yes. And I thought about doing it. But frankly … I was told not to.”

      “By who?”

      “Someone in the company. Look, can you just take the names? Maybe I’m nuts, but I’d feel better, okay?”

      “Shoot.”

      I read the names and numbers from a notepad. Mayeux repeats them as I give them; I assume he is speaking into a pocket recorder. “That’s five different states,” he notes. “Six women, five states. Spread across the country.”

      “Information Superhighway,” I remind him.

      “No shit. Well, I’ll get back to you if anything comes of this. Gotta go, Mr. Cole. Time to talk to the fairies and the vampires.”

      The conversation leaves me strangely excited.

      After weeks of suspicion, I have finally done something. I am tempted to call Miles in Manhattan and tell him exactly what I’ve done, but I don’t. If Miles Turner turns out to be right—if all those women have slipped contentedly back into the roles of happy housewives or fulfilled career women—then I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But if I turn out to be right—if those women are less than healthy right now …

      I’m not sure I want Miles to know I know that.

      This realization shocks me a little. I have known Miles Turner for more than twenty years. Since grade school. He was eccentric then. And during the last fifteen years—since he left Mississippi for MIT in 1978—I have seen very little of him. It was Miles who got me working for EROS in the first place. But I can’t blame him.

      I was a willing Faust.

      Hearing the solid door-chunk of Drewe’s Acura outside, I hunch low over the keyboard of the Gateway, assuming the posture that announces to my wife that I have been manically trading commodities contracts for the last eight hours.

      “Who were you talking to on the phone?” she calls from the hallway.

      Busted. During her commute, she must have tried me on her cellular. She often does, as the sight of summer cotton fields lazing by the car windows gets monotonous after the first ten seconds or so.

      Drewe leans into my office, pointedly refusing—as she has done for the last few weeks—to enter the domain of the EROS computer. My wife, like many wives, is jealous of my time. But there is more to this conflict than a wife and a computer. EROS is not merely a computer but the nexus of a network of five thousand people (half of them women) who spend quite a bit of their waking hours thinking about sex.

      “I picked up some chicken breasts,” Drewe says, arching her eyebrows like a comic French chef.

      “Great,” I say. “Give me a minute and I’ll get them going.”

      It’s not that Drewe doesn’t think about sex. She does. And it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy sex. She does that too. It’s just that lately she has begun thinking about sex in a whole new way. As a means to an end. By that I mean its natural end.

      Children.

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