Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  Just let it go, would you? “I don’t know. Maybe . . .” Suddenly, without any thought at all, damning and damnable words flow effortlessly out of my mouth. “Maybe Erin didn’t know herself. Who the father was, I mean. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that to Patrick.”

  While I sit shocked at my own words, some part of me gauges their effect. It is profound. Drewe believes. She can accept the idea that Erin slept with so many men in New York that she lost count. She can accept that Erin—in her convert’s zeal to get married—would keep this from Patrick. And, most important, she can accept—without imputing treacherous motives to me—that I would want to keep this from her.

  “Why didn’t she just lie?” she asks. “Make up some fictitious father?”

  The truth comes to my rescue. “A lie wouldn’t have worked in the end. Patrick would have tried to make sure. I think he was bent on some dramatic gesture.”

  Drewe’s eyes probe mine as though she were peering through the barrels of a binocular microscope. “She told you all of this today?”

  No, three months ago. She told me I’m the father of the three-year-old angel Patrick puts to bed every night, who calls me Uncle Harp and begs me to sing Barney and play old Beatles songs to her on the guitar like I’m some friendly pied piper and not the very source of her existence—

  “Yes.”

  “I told you she would.” Drewe folds her arms over her chest. “Why couldn’t she tell me, damn it? Why?”

  The deputy slows the cruiser for a curve and switches off the siren. Yazoo City is a bluish cloud of light high in the distance. Soon we will swing onto Highway 3, which leads to Bob’s estate.

  “Harper?”

  “What?”

  “Where is Erin right now?”

  “I don’t know. You want me to ask the deputy?”

  She shakes her head. In Drewe’s family, you don’t ask a stranger such a question. You don’t let anyone outside the clan know you need them for anything.

  As the lights of town drift closer, a wave of self-disgust washes through me. I just slandered a woman who can’t defend herself because she is dead—

  “What did Daddy sound like when you talked to him?” Drewe asks, her voice like a shout in my ear.

  “Calm. I know that sounds stupid.”

  “No, it sounds just like him. This will kill him, though. He worshiped Erin.”

  “He’s still got you.”

  She closes her eyes.

  We’re passing outlying homes now, lighted by the moon and by the odd window or Mercury-vapor lamp. Ranch-style houses set far back from the road, and in the distance, the green and white flash of the new airport beacon. Bob’s mansion isn’t far from here, and yet it’s a world away. It may be a world away from me now too. The lies I told a few moments ago may save my marriage, but they will do nothing to assuage Bob’s anger. Even if Drewe finds a way to forgive me, Bob will expel me from the family. Not in any official way, but his disapproval will have the effect of a papal bull.

  Will Drewe forgive me? She’s in shock now, of course. But she’ll recover quickly, particularly once she is called upon to steady the rest of the family. Will she accept what I’ve said tonight as easily then? Already I sense an emotional distance that seems unrelated to the trauma of Erin’s death. Could she, as I have often wondered, know more than she allows herself to admit? Of course, says a voice so clear I perceive it as a whisper beside me. She’s known for weeks. Months even. That’s why she asked if you were sleeping with Erin. She doesn’t know specifics, but she knows what women always know. That something isn’t right. I’ve been like a junkie, I realize, thinking I could live with my habit, that it wasn’t really affecting my life. But it is.

  It’s destroying me.

  “It’s just up ahead,” Drewe says to the deputy. “Third driveway up.”

  “I got it,” Daniels replies.

  Why do I lie? Did I inherit the tendency from my father, a man scrupulously honest in every area of his life but one? Even entering our marriage I had secrets. They seem trivial now, but if they were, why didn’t I confess them before I married Drewe? Like a child unwilling to endure the pain of vaccination to gain immunity from a disease, I was afraid to watch her carefully tended trust waver yet again, or possibly even shatter.

  As the deputy pulls into Bob’s long, curving drive, I feel dislocated in time, as though Erin and Drewe might step arm in arm from beneath the brick entrance arch as I saw them do hundreds of times in my life. Two wet little girls in bathing suits. Teenagers wearing prom dresses and million-dollar smiles. Bride and bridesmaid before Erin’s rehearsal dinner—

  The cruiser stops with a harsh squeal of brakes.

  Drewe looks out at the floodlit mansion. The ivy that covers the entrance arch still glistens from the rain, more black than green in the artificial light. Leaning toward her, I smell her wet hair, as tangible as the touch of her hand. She turns and hugs me, then kisses me lightly on the cheek and grips the door handle.

  “Deputy,” I say, swallowing hard, “I need to talk to my wife in private for a minute. Can I get out with her?”

  Drewe looks at me, not sure what’s happening. I still feel the press of her lips upon mine, a phantom touch of Erin’s last kiss. With that sensation comes something more chilling, an echo of Erin’s final words: I know what the little death is now. It’s the way we’ve been living . . . pretending things are fine, every day having to pile one more lie on top of all the others to keep the house of cards from falling on top of us. That’s death. Dying a little each day—

  “I don’t think the sheriff would like it,” Daniels says.

  “Well, how about you getting out? Just for a minute.”

  His shaved neck stiffens. He turns in the seat and looks at Drewe. “That okay with you, ma’am?”

  Drewe watches me, still not understanding. “Yes . . . please.”

  “Okay. I’m gonna leave my door open, but I’ll step away and have me a smoke.”

  “Thanks.”

  When he’s gone, I take Drewe’s hands in mine. But when our eyes meet, she pulls her hands away and folds them in her lap. She doesn’t ask what I have to tell her. She watches me warily, her back braced against the door, chin turned slightly downward as if to ward off a blow. I remember this posture from high school, when I first admitted that rumors she had heard about me and a friend of hers were true. A thousand reasons not to speak constrict the muscles of my throat. I hear the voices of her girlfriends, of her mother, telling her that people don’t change, that betrayal is a habit, that I’m not the kind of man who can remain faithful to any woman.

  “Drewe, I have to tell you something.”

  Her eyes look away for an instant, then back, and in that brief slice of time much of their translucence dies, replaced by a protective opacity. I hear the metallic patter of the rain beginning again.

  “I know who Holly’s father is.”

  She presses harder against the door, and I realize my hesitancy is only making things worse. “Drewe—”

  “No,” she says, her lower lip quivering. “No.” One shaking hand rises to her mouth, pauses uncertainly, then covers her eyes.

  Even as my nerve fails I say, “Drewe, it’s me.”

  Like liquid diamonds, tears fall from behind her hand into her lap. My worst fear is that she will run, simply bolt from the car and leave me stuck with a trigger-happy deputy. I spit out my excuses in a panicked flood. “I didn’t know until three months ago, Drewe. I had no idea! Erin showed up in Chicago before you and I were married, before we were engaged really, she stayed for three days, that’s all it ever was. Drewe, she never told me a thing after that and she came straight back here and married Patrick! I never knew she was pregnant and I never touched her before or since! Drewe? Drewe! Say something!”

  When she takes her hand away from her eyes, a redness in the shape of butterfly wings stains her pale cheeks.

  “Drewe?”

  Nothing.

  I start t
o take her outstretched hand, then realize she is reaching for her clothes bag. As her fingers grasp it, her other hand gropes backward for the door handle.

  “Drewe, wait. Please . . . we need to talk.”

  The door opens with a screech, silhouetting the back of her head against the lighted entrance. “Drewe, wait!” I plead, taking hold of the arm that holds the bag.

  “Don’t touch me!” She jerks away as though my hand were on fire and scrambles out of the car.

  Lunging across the seat, I try to block the closing door, but Drewe throws her body against it with enough force to slam my arm and shoulder back into the car.

  “Drewe, wait! DREWE!”

  Just as I get my hand on the door handle, a decisive snick reverberates through the car. I jerk the handle hard but nothing happens.

  “Ease up, ace!” Deputy Daniels says from the front seat.

  “I’ve got to talk to her!” I yell, yanking the handle again and again.

  “Looks like the lady don’t want to talk to you.”

  I smash my fists against the wire mesh in blind rage.

  “Break’em if you want, champ,” Daniels says lazily. “I seen it lots of times.”

  Outside, Drewe has paused in the rain-beaded brilliance of the floodlights. She stands like a refugee, looking back at the car with her bag in her left hand and her right raised to shield her eyes. I press my hands to the window as if to bridge the gulf between us by force of will. Her face is a ghostly decoupage of fragmented emotion: trust shattered, love blasted into confusion, unity into terrible apartness. She waits a moment longer, then backs slowly away from the car, away from me, toward the house of her parents, and of her childhood. The cruiser is moving now, backing quickly down the drive. I fight to keep her in sight. With my fingers locked in the wire screen, I watch her melt through the silver wall of rain.

  Chapter 42

  In the past twenty-six hours, revelations have detonated like artillery shells being marched across a trench position. I haven’t slept at all. When Deputy Daniels and I got back to my house last night, we found Sheriff Buckner and his demoralized posse standing around their cruisers. They’d stormed the house and found no killer. They did find a rat blown to pieces by Billy Jackson’s shotgun. Billy’s second shot had fractured an electrical conduit pipe, blowing out the lights in the tunnel. A surgeon in Jackson soon confirmed that the bullet in Billy’s thigh had probably come from his partner’s gun. The consensus was that Brahma had never been in the tunnel at all.

  Buckner put me in his car and questioned me all the way to Yazoo City. After we got there he questioned me some more. In between questions he bawled me out for scrubbing the blood from my office and contaminating “his” crime scene. I was still in his office when a tugboat captain discovered the wreckage of a downed Beechcraft Baron in the Mississippi River.

  The captain believed the plane had crashed in the river, sunk, skated along the bottom for a while, then ridden up his anchor cable after hanging up on it. At dawn I rode with Buckner out to the levee west of Lamont to look at the wreck. The damage was serious, but less extensive than we’d been led to believe. Buckner figured the pilot had tried an emergency landing on the spur levee near Scott and accidentally gone into the water, or else had attempted to ditch in the river.

  The cockpit was empty.

  We all knew the missing body meant nothing. I once saw a New York college kid leap into the Mississippi River from a paddle wheeler in New Orleans, as a prank. He thought he could easily swim the half mile to shore. He drowned screaming for help in front of three thousand people, Southerners who knew the river far too well to try to swim out to the fool who was dying to set the price of ignorance. A search began immediately, but the boy’s body was never found. It would probably be the same with Brahma, unless he happened to wash up somewhere like Vicksburg or Baton Rouge before he was shunted out into the Gulf along with the other refuse of the river.

  Still, I knew something Buckner didn’t. If Brahma had told me the truth online, he was an accomplished swimmer. And that gave me a serious dilemma. If I told Buckner about the swimming, he would demand to know how I knew. And if I confessed that I’d been in direct contact with the killer and had kept it to myself, he would undoubtedly arrest me as an accessory to murder.

  I told him nothing.

  Sometime during this Kafkaesque marathon, a towtruck driver discovered a heavy leather case containing surgical instruments wedged behind the Beechcraft’s pilot’s seat. It contained several scalpels—some of which had blood on them—a video camera, and a long “hightech-looking” instrument that the driver didn’t recognize. From the description, I knew it could only be the neuroendoscope Miles had described the night before.

  Buckner thought the abandoned instrument case bolstered the crash theory. He believed Brahma’s body and any light gear had been flushed out of the cockpit during or after the crash, leaving only the heavy case inside. When I argued that Brahma might conceivably have left the case behind to create just that impression—and then demanded round-the-clock security on Bob Anderson’s house and my own—the sheriff released me, on the understanding that I would return home and remain there, or else at the Andersons’. I didn’t say so, but I suspected it would be a long time before I’d be welcome in the Anderson house again.

  The morning sun was high when I got home. The interior of the house reeked of tear gas, my office of Clorox. The deputies had torn the place to pieces during their raid and the subsequent search. Armed with my .38, I went out to the utility shed and got a stout two-by-six plank, which I sawed in half and hammered across the pantry door with the heaviest nails I could find. Satisfied that no one could enter the house by that route without my hearing them, I walked back into the office.

  My answering machine showed nineteen messages. I hit the button and collapsed into my swivel chair to listen. The first nine were from TV reporters, some from Mississippi stations, others from Louisiana, even one from CNN. The tenth was from Daniel Baxter. He cussed me for about a minute, telling me he’d intended to send an FBI evidence team down to go over my house, until Sheriff Buckner informed him that I’d effectively destroyed the crime scene. I fast-forwarded through more messages from reporters, then stopped as Miles’s voice crackled from the speaker.

  His message said to call him immediately at a New York number I didn’t recognize. His voice sounded strange, like a loud whisper. Too tired to rise from the chair, I rolled over to the answering machine, picked up its cordless receiver, and dialed the number. After two rings, the same whisper said:

  “Yeah?”

  “Miles?”

  “Harper?” Still the whisper.

  “Yeah, where are you?”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Goddamn it, Miles.”

  “I’m in Brahma’s house.”

  My heart thudded in my chest. “What?”

  “I’m in his house. In his bedroom.”

  “What the hell’s happening?”

  “Remember the serial number from Brahma’s Microsoft program? The beta version? The FBI was talking to Microsoft, but it’s the weekend and they were going through channels. I have a friend in Redmond who was on the development team. He bypassed the red tape. Turns out this particular disk was given to the Columbia University School of Medicine in 1992 for beta testing.”

  I heard only my own breathing as my mind made the connection. “Drewe’s theory again. Columbia and neurosurgeons.”

  “As soon as I got that,” he went on, “I hacked into the med school computers and got a list of departments that participated in the beta test. I narrowed that to specialties dealing with the brain. That gave me twenty-three doctors. On the chance that the family history Brahma gave you was true, I selected the obvious German surnames. There were eight, and five of those were Jewish. I culled those because Brahma’s German uncle definitely didn’t sound Jewish. That left three names. Dörner, Thiele, and Berkmann. Before I checked their personnel files,
I took a chance that the Christian names Brahma gave you might be real. Rudolf, remember? Son Richard? A psychiatrist?” Miles waited a beat. “Well, it hit.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Rudolf Edward Berkmann, age forty-seven. Neurobiologist and neurosurgeon. Father Richard, a psychiatrist and another Columbia alum. Berkmann’s on the faculty, Harper. His curriculum vitae even noted that his grandfather was Rudolf Berkmann, a distinguished New York surgeon.”

  “Good God.”

  “He goes by Edward. You want to guess what Edward’s subspecialty is?”

  “The pineal gland?”

  “No. Berkmann is world renowned for building a 3-D computer model of the brain. He’s been working on it since the seventies. I accessed the Columbia library and found dozens of articles and abstracts from medical journals. In the last twenty years this guy has sliced up over four hundred human brains, all to establish the base values for his model. Fifteen hundred slices per brain, frozen like chicken livers. Now Berkmann collates all brain research around the world and integrates it into the model, which is constantly updated. The thing can be used to map neurochemical reactions, project the progress of tumors, practice surgery, train medical students. They’re even using it with prototype telesurgery systems.”

  Miles was speaking almost too fast for me to absorb his words.

  “Don’t you see? Berkmann would have been one of the first to learn about the foreign pineal research Drewe told us about. Melatonin, the transplants affecting aging, all that. Think of the deal he could do with those doctors. In exchange for early access to their findings, he could offer to integrate them into his model, thus giving the work legitimacy in the U.S. Of course, once he got hold of their data, he simply initiated his own transplant program, using humans instead of animals.”

  “Miles, tell me Daniel Baxter knows all this.”

  “He’s upstairs right now, going through Berkmann’s stuff.”

  A gasp of relief escaped my lips. I’d had visions of Miles sitting alone with a flashlight in the chamber of horrors that must be Brahma’s house.