Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

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СКАЧАТЬ table and telephone to remotely dictate the past few days’ accumulation of medical charts. For some reason, patient charts are the one duty my super-organized spouse cannot or will not deal with in a timely manner. The color-coded stacks she brings home from her office are often covered with threatening Post-it notes penned by the hospital records administrator, warning in Draconian tones that Drewe’s staff privileges are about to be revoked.

      As her monotonic dictation voice drifts through the house, I retreat to my office and pick up one of the five guitars hanging on the wall above the twin bed I crash on when I’m in manic trading mode. I choose a Martin D-28S, with a classical-width neck but steel strings. I slip through some chord changes without thought, letting my mind and fingers run where they will. The music would surprise a casual listener. I am a good guitar player. Not quite a natural, but smooth enough to make a living at it. This is my old job.

      I am a failed musician.

      The memories of that career still sting. I pick up the instrument more often now, but three years ago I did not touch a guitar or sing for twelve straight months. Even now, I never play my own songs. I just do what I’m doing now, letting whatever part of my brain that controls this function have free rein, and set my mood on automatic pilot.

      Sometimes I surprise myself.

      Like now. I have somehow wound a soft jazz thing full of arpeggios and chord extensions into the intro of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” I realize I love the sneaky seventh at the end of that line: “I met my o-old lover on the street last night”—whang. What the hell, I think, singing on through the song and ending up quite unintentionally with potential murder. “Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars. And I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers …” As I finish to a nonexistent ovation, I realize Drewe is standing inside the door of my office. It’s her first time in six weeks.

      “Sounds good,” she says. “Really good.”

      “It feels good.”

      “Thinking about an old lover?”

      “No. A jury of my peers. Where do you think they all went?”

      She smiles ruefully. “They grew up, got married, and had kids.”

      Like most men, I have blindly blundered back into our running argument. Having a baby. I suppose a lot of couples our age are in the midst of this debate. Up north and out west anyway. Down South most couples still tend to have their kids in their twenties.

      Not us.

      Our careers are partly to blame. Itinerant musicians and exhausted medical students are rarely in an ideal position to start a family, even if they are married, which Drewe and I weren’t until I gave up music. But that’s not all of it. For the past three years—our total married life—we have led a fairly settled existence, and our combined incomes are almost embarrassingly large. My parents are dead, but Drewe’s recently crossed the line from gentle jibes to outright questioning of my reproductive capabilities.

      If only my sperm count were the problem. Like a lot of people, I have my secrets. Some are small, born in moments when I could have been painfully frank but chose not to be. Others are more serious and invariably involve women other than my wife.

      Don’t jump to conclusions. From the moment Drewe and I took our marriage vows, I have not touched another woman’s naked flesh. But somehow that is small comfort. For the secret that haunts me now is more dangerous than adultery, more shameful. If I were Catholic, I suppose I would call it a mortal sin.

      No, I’m not gay.

      But I am afraid.

      When the telephone finally rings, Drewe and I have been asleep for hours. I spring awake in a sitting position like one of my Scottish ancestors groping for his sword but find a cordless phone in my hand instead.

      “Hello?”

      “Mr. Cole?”

      I blink, trying to clear my eyes and brain simultaneously. “Um … what?”

      “This is Detective Michael Mayeux. NOPD. We spoke this afternoon?”

      Drewe’s sleeping body blocks my line of sight to the clock radio. “What time is it?”

      “Three-twenty in the morning. Sorry, but I just got around to checking those names you gave me. Those six women?”

      “Sure.” I sense a strange gravity in Mayeux’s voice.

      “Harper?” Drewe sits up in bed and points at the window. “There’s someone outside. Look.”

      Prickly flesh rises on my shoulders as I realize that our curtains are being backlit by what must be car headlights. We never have visitors at this hour. We rarely have visitors at all.

      “Stay here,” I tell her. “I’ll get a gun.”

      “Please don’t do that, Mr. Cole.” Mayeux’s voice startles me. “If you’ll look out your window, I think you’ll see a patrol car.”

      “Cairo County doesn’t have a police department,” I say, moving warily toward the window.

      “Part of your farm is in Yazoo County,” Mayeux replies. “That should be Sheriff Buckner from Yazoo City. Know him?”

      “I know who he is.” Parting the curtains slightly, I see a white Chevrolet Caprice cruiser sitting in the gravel drive before our house. “What the hell is he doing in my driveway at three in the morning?”

      “Calm down, Mr. Cole. Sheriff Buckner is there to ensure your safety.”

      Right. “Why don’t I believe that, Detective?”

      He is silent too long. I signal Drewe not to speak. “What the hell is going on, Mayeux?”

      “Those women you told me about. They’re all dead.”

      There is sweat on my face. An instant ago it was not there. I feel it in my hair, on my forearms, behind my knees. That small intuitive part of me that always suspected the worst has taken possession of my body. I was right. I was right, and I should have acted sooner. “All six of them?” I ask, my voice barely audible.

      “Every one was murdered in the last nine months, Mr. Cole. And I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot of people around the country right now—police officers—who want to talk to you about those women.”

      I do not even try to convert the chemical cyclone in my brain into coherent words.

      “Only two of those murders had been connected before tonight, Mr. Cole. They were both in California.”

      I close my eyes. Juliet Nicholson. Tara Morgan.

      “What we’d like you to do,” Mayeux says in a friendly voice, “if you’re not busy tomorrow, that is—is drive down to the main station here in New Orleans and talk to us. What do you say to that?”

      I look back through the window. Sheriff Buckner’s cruiser is still there, idling low and catlike in the humid darkness.

      “You think I killed СКАЧАТЬ