Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “I found the place myself,” Miles explained. “But Brahma wasn’t here. You should see this house, Harper. It’s the brownstone from the story he told you, but it’s a palace now. It’s not four blocks from Lutèce. I’ve seen some stunning New York homes, but this place . . . the art alone is worth a fortune. Most of it’s Indian, sculpture he and his father must have smuggled out of the country. Anyway, it was a choice between physically breaking in or getting Baxter’s help. I was worried they had agents tailing me anyway, so I called him.”

  “I can’t believe he let you in the house.”

  “I made him promise to let me see the computers before I’d tell him anything.”

  “What did you find?”

  “This isn’t Berkmann’s main base. I know that, because there’s no voice-recognition stuff here.” There was a brief, pregnant silence. Then Miles said, “But I found the answers, Harper. The very bottom of the thing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The reason for the murders. Why they were committed the way they were. Drewe was right about pineal transplants being the object of the killings. But she was completely wrong about the resources it would take to perform one. The way Berkmann has it laid out, it’s practically a one-man procedure. I think he only used those Indian doctors for anesthesiology and tissue typing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s a Sun SparcStation here in the study. There’s a version of his brain model in it. The graphics are some of the best I’ve ever seen—”

  “Get to it, Miles.”

  “There’s a series of surgical procedures modeled here. I’m still learning the program, but the harvesting procedure is based around that instrument I told you about, the neuroendoscope. In some ways it’s pretty much like Drewe guessed. Berkmann’s mapped out four different approaches to the pineal gland. One is based on spinal fluid pathways. He makes one small incision in the back of the neck, then passes the scope through the cisterna magna, the foramen magnum, the fourth ventricle, the Aqueduct of Sylvius, and right into the third ventricle, home of the pineal gland. He can do the whole harvest in fifteen minutes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Hang with me now. Another route is the sublabial-transsphenoidal approach, which Drewe told us about. Another is through the soft palate in the roof of the mouth, then along the brain stem. The last is—”

  “Through the optic foramen,” I finish. “After removing the eyeball.”

  “Exactly. Drewe was right about that part. Berkmann used a different surgical route with each victim, and the only evidence he was ever there was the track of his scope. It was easy to mask it. The back-of-the-neck route was Nashville. He fired a nine-millimeter bullet right along his track. Sublabial route was New York, shotgun blast to the face. The optic foramen route was San Francisco—”

  “Stakes driven through the empty eye sockets.”

  “Right.”

  “But San Francisco and L.A. were linked by pathologists. They found pineal tissue in both cases. Did Brahma screw up those procedures?”

  “No! This is the beautiful part of it, Harper, the part Drewe missed. The pineal gland is endocrine tissue. It has what they call constant anatomy. That means you don’t need the whole gland for it to function. And once it’s inside the recipient, it doesn’t even need a direct blood supply!”

  “What?”

  “Once the scope was in the donor—who was already dead—Brahma used a biopsy forceps to pull out part of the pineal. It’s just grainy wet stuff. He calls it ‘pineal homogenate.’ To transplant it into the recipient, he anesthetizes the patient, then drills a small hole in the upper part of the breastbone, called the manubrium, which gives him access to the thymus—”

  “Just like the mouse transplants?”

  “Exactly. After he locates the thymus, he injects the pineal homogenate into it with a large-bore needle. The thymus has access to the circulatory system. So as long as the pineal tissue isn’t rejected, it begins to function normally. You see what I mean about simplicity?”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Drewe was wrong about tissue viability too. Berkmann has projections here about the viability of frozen homogenate. It’s patterned after the way they bank bone marrow for transplants.”

  Miles sounded almost out of breath. We both sat in silence, trying to integrate the new information with what we had theorized up to that point. In some ways his discoveries changed everything. But in others, nothing.

  “The cops down here think Berkmann’s dead,” I said. “What does Baxter think?”

  “He doesn’t accept a death until he sees the body. Do you think he’s dead?”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine it. What does Dr. Lenz think?”

  “Lenz is out of the loop. The shrink they’re using now is studying your printouts like a lost book of the Bible. He’s full of shit. He thinks Berkmann’s ultimate plan is to resurrect a corpse by transplanting a healthy pineal into it. His mother’s, for example.”

  “What?”

  “Baxter actually has people watching Catherine Berkmann’s grave right now. It’s right here in New York.”

  “Christ, that’s not Brahma’s thing.”

  “I know that. This guy’s locked into known paradigms, man. Believe it or not, they’ve caught serial killers before by staking out graves.”

  “What about Peter Levy? What are they doing to find him? Can’t they contact people who knew Berkmann for help now that they know who he is?”

  “Berkmann has no relatives in the U.S. His colleagues say he’s an eccentric genius, terrific at attracting large donations to Columbia. Other than that they know zip about him. His house is essentially empty of evidence. No hostages, no body parts, no nasty crawl space full of surprises. Baxter says there has to be a killing house somewhere, rented or owned under a false name. That’s where Levy would be. He’s going to concentrate in Connecticut. They finally located the airstrip where Berkmann stored his plane. It’s outside Darien.”

  As our discussion moved away from Berkmann’s technical plans and closer to Berkmann the man, I began to sense a strange undercurrent in Miles’s voice. It felt like anger, anger bordering on rage. When I asked him about it, he fell silent. Then, as I was about to speak again, he said: “Harper, I finally understand how Brahma—how Berkmann, I mean—got the master client list.”

  After going so long without an answer to this question, I had almost forgotten it. But Miles obviously had not. “How?” I asked.

  “From my apartment.”

  “But I thought you hadn’t had any burglaries.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I don’t get it. He hacked into your home workstation?”

  “He didn’t hack into anything. When I first got Berkmann’s name from the Columbia computers, I searched every database I could get into. I got a mountain of stuff back, including pictures.”

  “And?”

  “As soon as I saw the first photo, I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That he’d been in my apartment.” Miles paused, letting it sink in. “That I’d let him into my apartment.”

  A hot numbness swept over my face. I tried to swallow, but my throat muscles didn’t seem to be working properly. “Uh . . . when was this?”

  “About a year ago. He wasn’t calling himself Berkmann then. I met him at a party in the Village.”

  “But how did he . . . I mean, how did he use your computer without your knowing?”

  “I was sleeping. He must have gotten up without me realizing it. That was the only time I ever saw him. But one night was enough for him to get the master client list.”

  In spite of my past suspicions, I still couldn’t imagine Miles involved with a man in this way—particularly Brahma. “Miles, I—”

  “I’d rather not discuss it,” he said curtly. “I felt I owed you the truth, after prying into your relationship with Erin. Holly and everything.”

  �
�Miles, you sound pretty upset.”

  “Edward Berkmann killed Erin, Harper. She was a special person. And he violated my trust—violated me—just to—”

  “Miles!” I broke in, afraid to hear more. “If Brahma is alive, my family could be in danger. Tell me what he looks like. How dangerous would he be one-on-one?”

  I heard shallow breathing and thought of the agony Miles must be going through. “His description of himself was accurate,” he said in a flat voice. “Cellini’s Perseus would give you the body. Very muscular, very strong. Byronic face. Black hair, blue eyes, light skin. Beautiful in the classical sense. A very intense aura. That’s what drew me to him.”

  The tortured tone in Miles’s voice made listening to him almost unbearable. I said, “Can I reach you at this number if I need to?”

  “Yes. It’s a rented cellular. There’s one other thing.”

  “What?” I asked, having no choice.

  “He had a scar across his upper abdomen. It was huge. I didn’t ask what caused it, but it must have been a serious operation.”

  The hissing silence bound us like a chain.

  “Miles?”

  In a choked voice he said, “I’ve got to go, Harper.”

  “Wait! Miles, whatever you did . . . however you are . . . you don’t have to hide it, okay? Not from me. Not from Drewe. I just want you to know that.”

  He said nothing.

  “You watch your back up there, okay?”

  I heard more shallow breathing, almost like panting. Then he said, “If Berkmann’s alive, I’m going to kill him.”

  Before I could speak again, he was gone.

  I started to redial his cellular, then hung up. The implications of what he’d said were impossible for me to fathom. I’m not even sure I wanted to. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. The silence enfolded me like a shroud of thick cotton. Yet even as I slipped down into sleep, some part of me refused to yield to unconsciousness.

  I stood up blinking and went into the bathroom, thinking I would take a hot shower. Then, remembering Brahma, I decided I didn’t want to put myself in quite so vulnerable a position. Instead I threaded my belt through the slits in the holster pouch of my .38, put on the gun, and shaved at the bathroom sink like a cowboy. I washed my face and neck with a steaming rag, then sat on the commode with the pistol in my hand.

  I put down the gun to use the toilet paper. At the fourth pull, a flash of color caught my eye. Blinking with fatigue, I unfolded the wad of tissue in my hand. There was something pink on the paper, something other than pale flowered print. When I turned the tissue over, I saw letters. Written with a light touch in pink highlighter were the words:SORRY

  I MISSED

  YOU.

  LEFT A

  PRESENT

  IN THE

  FRIDGE

  ;)

  CHECK

  THE

  LETTUCE

  B.

  My mouth went dry as sawdust. I snatched up the .38 but fell over as I tried to jerk up my pants. Finally zipped up, I eased through the bathroom door holding the pistol in front of me. Then I realized how stupid it was to be frightened. Brahma—Berkmann—had written that message sometime yesterday. That was why he left it where he did, in a place where police would be unlikely to search but where I was sure to find it eventually.

  Still, I kept the .38 in my right hand while I opened the refrigerator and lifted the head of lettuce out of the vegetable drawer. Turning it over, I saw a knife-thin seam of dark green running around the white stem in a diamond shape. I set down the pistol and twisted the stem out of the cold leafy head.

  Inside a hollowed-out space in the lettuce was something that looked like a gray strip of plastic. For a second I worried that it might be a bomb. Then I realized I was looking side-on at an eight-millimeter videotape cartridge.

  Chapter 43

  I attached my video camera to my office television with a coaxial patch cable, then inserted the tape. It had been rewound and was ready to be viewed. I scrambled through my camera bag for the remote control, then sat down in my swivel chair about six feet from the screen and hit PLAY.

  The first image on the tape was identical to what I’d seen when Sheriff Buckner opened my office door last night, except that Erin was lying faceup in the center of the floor rather than behind the headboard of the bed. She was nude, and her eyes were closed. As I focused on her face, a man stepped into the frame as silently as a deer.

  He had the physical symmetry of a gymnast. Beneath a tan jacket that looked like Egyptian cotton, he wore black clothes that fit tight against him. But it was his face that arrested my attention. The skin was unnaturally pale, the hair deep black with a few fine strands of silver. It fell in ringlets around his high forehead. His brow lines looked cut from marble but met and descended to a surprisingly gentle and well-formed nose. The lips were full and might have looked too feminine were they not balanced by a prominent chin. From the point of the chin his jaw swept back and upward in a V, giving him an almost avian aspect. But what anchored the remarkable face, what unified its disparate features, was the eyes. Pure cobalt blue, they pierced the camera lens with unnerving power.

  “Did I not tell you I was beautiful?” he said.

  His voice was low and resonant, his cadence almost archaic. Only when he moved did I realize how profound was his stillness. He cocked his head to one side, as if waiting for an answer. Then he resumed his former attitude, standing centered in the frame as immutably as a marble David.

  “Since this must needs be a one-sided conversation,” he said, “I shall begin. Isn’t this a fine kettle of fish, as the common folk used to say? I don’t think either of us expected to find ourselves in this situation, did we, Mr. Cole? Mr. Harper Cole?”

  I squeezed the arms of my chair, unreasonably shocked by his knowledge of my real identity.

  “And who am I, you wonder?” His eyebrows went up inquisitively. “You’ve known me by many names. But perhaps you know even my legal name by now. Thanks to this.”

  Reaching into his coat pocket, he brought out a flat piece of black plastic. It was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. He held it up to the lens so I could read the label:TROJAN HORSE

  “I think we both know who designed this,” he said. Then he tossed the disk across the room. “I am Rudolf Edward Berkmann. Of course I didn’t know your real name until a few minutes ago. But now that I do, everything is painfully clear.

  “You must be dying to know what happened. I certainly was. At first I feared the whole thing had been a trap laid on by Daniel Baxter. That he would begin braying at me through a bullhorn any minute. But it was something altogether different, wasn’t it? You’re smarter than Baxter and poor Doctor Lenz put together, aren’t you? Yet you produced the same result they did. A woman you loved is dead.”

  Berkmann gave a tight smile. “I know the feeling, Harper.”

  He licked his red lips and glided forward, out of the frame. I heard a soft groan; then he was back in front of the camera, holding up one hand, which I saw to my horror had been dipped in blood. He flourished the hand before the lens like a magician, then with a bloody forefinger daubed a scarlet spot on his forehead, like a caste mark.

  “Kali was the vessel of my corrupt longings,” he said. “My faithful concubine for twenty years. She was also my slave. Both are lost arts, requiring dedication and love. You attacked that love, Harper. With lies. And now she is dead.”

  Turning his profile to the camera, he threw back his head, flicked out his tongue, and brought his bloody palm down across the tip, tasting Kali’s blood. He shivered, then dropped the hand and turned back to face the camera, his cerulean eyes wide.

  “You tell slippery lies. Lies that are true. Poor Erin had no idea she was starring in an exclusive production put on by you and your friend Miles, did she?”

  I wanted to shut off the tape then, to spare myself. But I couldn’t. Berkmann made a quick turn away from the camera and gave a wistful wave to the
center of the floor, where Erin’s naked body lay. “Such a waste,” he said with what sounded like genuine regret. “Are you wondering whether I’ve fucked her yet? Whether she’s really even dead?” He nodded. “Rest assured that she is. And no, I haven’t given myself that pleasure. For one simple reason. Erin is your victim, Harper.”

  He smiled again, his eyes communicating almost paternal sadness. “I’ve learned a lot today. It’s a strange experience for me. I’m accustomed to being the teacher. And to be made a fool of twice in one day . . . it’s really too embarrassing.

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Of course not. Let me explain. As ‘Erin,’ you approached me at a vulnerable time. I’d been experiencing difficulties with my work. I was considering a sabbatical. And we seemed to have much in common. I saw through Lenz’s clumsy ruse from the start, of course, but yours . . . you were quite convincing. A gift, I suppose.

  “As our relationship deepened, Kali began to take an interest. She was quick as mercury at reading emotion, and she saw the effect ‘Erin’ was having on me. Her feelings for me had always run much deeper than I suspected. I realize that now. Her first response was to demand that I use Erin as the next pineal donor. Obviously, if I refused, I would betray my true interest. I had to proceed carefully. Kali could be very dangerous, as you know. I agreed that Erin would be our next donor.

  “Then came the resolution of the Lenz problem. On the night Kali killed the good doctor’s wife, she searched his study. She found certain things . . . which she kept to herself. She learned, for example, that ‘Erin’ was another trap, just like ‘Lilith.’ But she chose not to tell me this. She was wise, in principle. I was losing my perspective. Kali understood my vulnerability. But she also knew the futility of trying to convince a man that his affections are misplaced. How many wives have convinced husbands that they really don’t love the voluptuous secretary? Quite futile. Kali decided to let reality teach me the required lesson. A touch of Zen for the master, you see?