Greg Iles - Sleep No More

Waters hoped this was one of Mallory’s lies, but the sick feeling in his stomach told him it probably wasn’t. He choked back a response and cocked the pistol’s plowshare hammer.

“And neither one of them ever told you about it,” Cole said. “The whole time you were falling in love with her, showing her off, telling Cole how great she was, he was thinking about the times he did her. That’s friendship, isn’t it?”

A strange sense of relief rolled through Waters. By trying so hard to damn Lily and Cole, Mallory had made him realize that both were innocent of anything beyond a college fling. There was no scam, no conspiracy. Both were pawns in Mallory’s twisted plan. Lily probably wouldn’t even remember having sex with Cole. Unless…like Eve, she had “awakened” to find herself naked and under Cole-

“Where’s Lily?” he asked. “Right now? Did you hurt her?”

“Why would I hurt her?” Cole asked. “What happens to Lily later doesn’t interest me, but I don’t want you to feel any guiltier than you have to when you come to me.”

“You swear she’s all right?”

“I don’t want to talk about her!” Cole snapped. “You told me you’d leave her, but she’s all you care about! You lied. ”

“I wasn’t lying,” Waters replied calmly, trying to get his thoughts back on track. He let down the hammer and set the pistol on the desk. “What did you expect me to do? You’d blotted out my wife’s mind. You threatened my daughter’s life-”

“You threatened me first! You said you’d act like I was dead!”

You should be dead, Waters thought. “This is just like twenty years ago, Mallory. You don’t trust me to love you. You think you have to make me love you. But you can’t make anyone feel love. Love doesn’t work that way.”

“I know how love works!” Cole screamed. “I know how you felt with me when I was in Eve. You were lost inside me! You loved me then. And you will again.”

Waters wasn’t about to argue. If Mallory decided to hurt Lily and Annelise, he had no way to stop her. Certainly the police could do nothing to prevent it. He slid the.357 back in the drawer, closed his mind to the male face across the desk, and spoke as tenderly as he could.

“I always loved you, Mallory. And you always sabotaged us with your paranoia. But now…now I see that you’re doing what you promised. You left Lily alone, and you’re going to go into someone else. And I intend to keep my part of the bargain.”

Cole wiped his eyes and walked toward the desk. “But how long is it going to take? Who am I going to go into?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to find a woman I think I can live with.”

“What about Sybil?” Cole said, his eyes suddenly bright. “Cole already sleeps with her. Or he did until a month ago, anyway. She’s pretty, she’s only twenty-eight, she’s got a wonderful body…and no husband or kids to worry about. Nobody to ask questions. She’s perfect. I even know she’s fertile.”

“How do you know that?”

Cole’s face articulated pure sadness in a way that Waters had not seen since Cole was a child. “She got pregnant when she was in high school,” he said. “Her parents made her get rid of the baby.”

Waters didn’t want Mallory thinking about abortion. “Sybil could be the one,” he said. “But I don’t know yet.”

“I don’t want you to take too long. You know me, Johnny. I need intimacy.” Cole was coming around the desk now, and nothing about his bodily movement was familiar. He was like 250 pounds of graceful woman stuffed into khakis and a button-down shirt. “You know,” he said, “having experienced sex as both male and female, I have to say I like being the man better. I was always more of an aggressor in sex. But…I couldn’t ask that of you.”

Ask what? Waters wondered, realizing the answer even as he asked the question.

“Unless,” Cole said softly, “you don’t mind the idea.”

Cole took hold of his hand, and before Waters could overcome his shock, Cole kissed his wrist, then slid his tongue along Waters’s inner forearm.

Waters jerked his arm free with a cry.

Cole laughed. “I knew you’d be like that. Oh, well. Men can’t bear children, anyway.”

Waters’s stomach churned with fear and revulsion. “Tell me one thing before I go. When you told me how you moved from person to person, you said it took you a while to control people’s minds. How are you doing it now? To people you just entered?”

Cole smiled cagily. “I learned a lot in ten years, Johnny. And some people just aren’t very challenging. Lily is depressed. She still blames herself for her miscarriages. Basically, she’s just weak. Cole is a burnout case. Eaten up with guilt about his debts, insecure about sex with his young conquests. His mind is a nest of snakes drowning in scotch. He takes Viagra to cheat on his wife, for God’s sake. There’s not enough of the original Cole left to resist me.”

Waters shook his head. The parallels to virus transmission kept hitting him; when a person’s resistance was down, the virus gained a foothold and grew exponentially.

“The people in your life are empty,” Cole said. “They could never make you truly happy. But I can. You know I can.”

Cole pressed a button on his desk phone. After a moment, Sybil said, “Yes?”

“Could you come in for a minute, Sybil?”

“I’m pretty busy.” Her voice was clipped and cold.

Cole chuckled and whispered, “She’s pouting.” He raised his voice. “Come on, Syb. It’ll only take a sec.”

He turned off the intercom. “Take a good look, Johnny. I like her.”

Waters stood mute as Sybil walked in wearing a classy skirt suit. Her hair was pinned up, showing her long neck to advantage, and her smoldering Cajun eyes settled on Cole with open resentment.

“What is it?” she asked. “Hey, John.”

Waters only nodded, knowing he could never make his voice sound normal under such stress.

“Damn, I forgot what I called you in for,” Cole told her. “My mistake. I’ll remember what it was in a minute.”

Sybil expelled air from her lips with obvious anger, then turned and marched out. Cole’s eyes followed her tiny waist and shapely hips as she went through the door.

“What do you think about her?” he asked. “Cole may be a mess, but he does have an eye for beauty.”

“She’s beautiful,” Waters replied. “But I’m going now. Tell me, will Lily remember having sex with Cole?”

“Probably not. Of course, she’ll always remember the first times they did it. Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid.”

Waters bit off his reply and turned to go.

“What about Sybil?” Cole called after him.

Waters paused in the door but did not turn.

“Maybe. I have to think about it. Right now I have a date with the police.”

“A lot of clocks are ticking, Johnny. Don’t take too long.”

The police grilled Waters for sixty-four minutes. They would have gone on longer, but as the questions became aggressively repetitive, Penn protested that the interrogation was bordering on harassment of a model citizen who had cooperated from the beginning. If there were new questions, Penn told them, he would get the answers from Waters and relay them to police headquarters.

Tom Jackson handled the interrogation, flanked by a silent partner with a pockmarked face who glared at Waters as though he held some personal grudge against him. Waters decided it was class resentment. Both detectives seemed uncomfortable in the upscale law office of Penn Cage’s friend. Most of the questions were about Eve Sumner, the rest intended to uncover the current state of Waters’s marriage. Where Eve was concerned, Waters mostly lied. He denied ever having had sex with her. As for the videotape of his Land Cruiser by the Eola Hotel just prior to the murder, he explained that the EPA investigation of his company had been giving him sleep problems, and that he had recently done a lot of late-night driving. Tom Jackson was forced to admit that he’d stopped Waters late one night in the act of doing just that. On the night of the murder, Waters told them, he’d driven downtown with the idea of having a gin and tonic at one of the bars near the Eola, but the rainstorm made him reluctant to get out. He’d turned onto Pearl Street with the intent of going home via Franklin Street. At that point he saw the crowded accident scene, and decided to back up and take a different route home. He couldn’t tell what Jackson thought of his explanation, but it was clear that Jackson’s partner thought he was lying. Still, no one placed him under arrest.