Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “Not personally, but I know his work. My God. Neurobiological modeling of the brain using computers. His father was an innovative analyst. Richard Berkmann. Discredited now, of course. My God.”

  “What would you say if I told you Edward Berkmann was the child of an incestuous relationship?”

  “What type? Father-daughter?”

  “Brother-sister.”

  “I’ll look at what you have. What exactly do you want from me?”

  “The police think Berkmann’s dead. I don’t.”

  “Does Daniel think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t tell you whether he’s alive or dead, Cole.”

  “I know that. I just want you to look at everything and, on the assumption that he’s still alive, try to predict what he’ll do.”

  “That could be very difficult.”

  “I only care about one thing. Will he run, or will he come back for me and my family?”

  “Ah. I might be able to do that. Edward Berkmann. I could never have imagined it.”

  “Wait till you see the video.”

  Lenz’s voice recedes to a blurry distance. “Tell me, Cole, are you experiencing strong urges for revenge?”

  “You know the answer to that. What about you?”

  “I’d like to shave off his skin an ounce at a time.”

  “You don’t sound that angry.”

  “I’m not a demonstrative man. But contrary to what you saw when you met her, my wife was once a beautiful and gracious woman.”

  “I believe you.”

  “The man who killed her so brutally should pay for what he did.”

  “If he’s still alive.”

  “Fax your pages through. Overnight a copy of the video. It may take some time. Some of my case materials were stolen the night my wife died. I’ll call you when I have something.”

  “One second, Doctor. What are the mills of the gods?”

  “The mills of the gods?”

  “It must be a quote or something. He told me to remember the mills of the gods.”

  “Ah. It is a quote. ‘The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind to powder.’ ”

  “Meaning?”

  “It may take a while, but we all get what’s coming to us.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  Lenz hung up without a word.

  I rewound Berkmann’s video, plugged a blank VHS tape into my VCR, and started dubbing a copy. Then I called Sheriff Buckner’s office and again demanded that he provide round-the-clock security for the Anderson family, and also for me. He told me he already had people on Bob’s house (for political reasons, I knew) and that he would assign one deputy to watch my house after dark.

  The last shell of the afternoon exploded thirty minutes later. I was lying on the sofa in the front room, trying to stay awake, when the phone rang in my office. I heaved myself up and went in to screen the call, sure it would be another reporter trying to worm his way into the story.

  When Drewe’s voice came from the answering machine, gooseflesh rose on my arms. “It’s me” was all she said, but those two words affected me more deeply than Berkmann’s whole twisted tirade. I reached for the receiver, then froze as her next words tumbled out of the machine.

  “Please don’t pick up if you’re there. Please, I mean it. I’m calling to ask you—to tell you—that you shouldn’t come to the funeral tomorrow. Daddy’s gone to pieces. He’s at the funeral home right now, sitting a vigil over Erin’s body like they did in the old days. He won’t let anyone else do it. It’s almost like he’s trying to protect her, even though it’s too late. I shouldn’t care what happens to you, but for your sake, and for his, please don’t go to the funeral. Please. Daddy needs to blame someone for what happened, and you’re the most convenient target.”

  She paused, and I stood like a condemned man in the hiss of blank tape. “As far as what you told me . . . I can’t even think about it. But I know it’s true. Maybe I’ve always known it. Don’t call me, Harper. I mean that. Don’t try to see me, and don’t come to the funeral. If you have any respect left for me, don’t come. Good-bye.”

  I snatched up the phone then, yelling, “Drewe! Wait!” but she clicked off even before I got the words out. Blinking like a punch-drunk fighter, I heard a horn honk outside.

  From the window I watched a white sheriff’s cruiser pull into our drive. Its driver executed a three-point turn and parked nose-out toward the highway. Buckner must have decided I rated daylight security as well.

  Now I lie on Drewe’s bed, my face buried in her pillow, trying to catch the scent of her like some lovesick teenager. But I’m no teenager. I’m a heartsick man who broke his own rule and told the truth, only to find out he was a fool for doing it or else did it too late.

  Fatigue conjures strange thoughts. I once believed that all men existed on a continuum of behavior, some leaning to the moral side, others the immoral or even amoral, yet all having the capacity through circumstance to end up at either extreme. It’s a common conceit, I suppose, the idea that but for the grace of God or fate or chance, any of us could be walking in anyone else’s shoes. But as the ticking of my brain slows, an onslaught of images from the Berkmann tape assails me, none more monstrous than the desecration of Erin’s corpse by the grotesque death waltz. Hovering in that half-waking state on the ledge of sleep, I realize that on this earth walk beings who inhabit the shells of men but are not men. They are Other. And somewhere deep within me, in the cells of my blood, pulses a cold current of preverbal knowledge, a tribal memory absorbed and distilled to savage instinct, needing no voice to speak with allconsuming power: That which is Other must be destroyed.

  Chapter 44

  Drewe told me not to go to Erin’s funeral, but she said nothing about the burial. The funeral service was at three p.m. It’s nearly four-thirty as I drive into the Cairo County cemetery through the back entrance, passing the long utility shed surrounded by yellow backhoes and a rusted fleet of lawn mowers. The cemetery superintendent’s office looks like a good place to conceal the Explorer from casual view.

  As I make for the small building, I think of Miles. He called this morning to give me an update on the hunt for Berkmann’s hidden killing house. Baxter’s teams have been searching the area surrounding the Connecticut airstrip, but Miles, always the contrarian, has been combing the streets of Harlem and Washington Heights, moving in concentric semicircles away from the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, which backs against the Hudson River like an island of succor rising from the squalor of the upper Hundreds.

  Parking the Explorer behind the superintendent’s office, I get my guitar case out of the back and begin walking slowly toward the Anderson family plot. It lies a hundred yards to the west. I’ve been there many times with Drewe. Five generations of Andersons rest in that ground, from infants who died of diphtheria to soldiers who survived whatever war fell to them and returned to the Delta to die of old age. Today it is marked by the green pavilion tent of Marsaw’s Funeral Home, which rises out of the ground like a general’s field headquarters amid an army of stones. From the west comes the invading force, the living, a seemingly endless line of slowmoving automobiles fronted by an advance guard of dark-suited infantry. I select a mausoleum for temporary cover, a thick-walled edifice of marble and stone about sixty yards from the funeral tent. Two stone vases adorn its wrought-iron door, and one of them makes a serviceable stool.

  Erin’s burial is like most others I’ve seen, only larger. The entire town of Rain is present, a blue-brown blanket of polyester dotted by the dark silks of expensively clothed people from Vicksburg and Greenville and Clarksdale and Memphis. I see several doctors from Jackson—colleagues of Drewe’s or Patrick’s—and at the periphery, standing apart from the rest, a couple of tall, stunningly dressed and coiffed young women accompanied by a gray-hatted man wearing dark sunglasses. Friends of Erin’s from her New York days. I’m surprised any of them showed.

/>   I can’t see Drewe, but she must be seated under the sun-bleached tent. She’ll be holding one parent’s hand in each of hers and quieting Holly when she gets too distracted. Anna, the black maid who has worked for the Andersons since before I was born, will be with them. I should be there too. But I am not wanted. I have forfeited my place.

  I hate the flatness of this sun-scorched boneyard. I once attended a funeral in Natchez; the burial took place on majestic bluffs high above the Mississippi River, in a white-stoned Athens of a cemetery shaded by mossdraped oaks. That’s how a cemetery should be. A place that can bring a little peace to the living.

  Erin’s graveside service is mercifully short. The crowd thins at the edges first, the impatient ones heading for cars they parked away from the cortege in order to facilitate a quick exit. A few people move in my direction, possibly to visit their own dead, but I stand my ground. To hell with them and whatever they think about why I’m not at Drewe’s side.

  As larger waves move toward the line of waiting cars, I know that one word is on the lips of everyone. Murder. More evil has probably been spoken of Erin on this day than on any during her life. Whispered rumors of drug addiction and promiscuity recalled in the glare of a sensational crime, savored as the most titillating gossip to touch this town in a decade. Most of the local citizens will have convinced themselves that she brought the murder on herself. The wages of sin, brother, amen. Yet somewhere beneath that summary judgment lies fear. A nameless dread that perhaps this daughter of Rain did nothing to bring her fate upon herself. That some faceless being has for unknown or unknowable reasons chosen this little enclave as his hunting ground. Or perhaps even—God forbid—that he was raised here. I am glad for that fear. They deserve it.

  When the muted rumble of engines rolls past me, I focus on the tent that shades Erin’s grave. My line of sight is clear now. The family is there, standing together. A much diminished group of mourners stands a respectful distance apart. Close friends.

  At last, with Drewe and Anna at their head, escorting Margaret, the family steps from beneath the tent and joins the waiting mourners. When I spy Patrick with Holly in his arms, anger ambushes me again. I should be there. That is my family, whatever may have happened, and Erin would want me there. But Drewe does not. She blamed my exclusion on her father, but I think she lied. This separation is punishment for my intimacy with Erin.

  Bob Anderson looks lost in the ritual of hugs and tears, like a soldier separated from his unit after a battle. He moves constantly, restlessly. I want to talk to him. Exactly why, I’m not sure. But in this patriarchal family, making peace with Bob is the first step toward reconciliation.

  The problem is how to approach him. Would Drewe cause a scene? Maybe I should wait and see him at his office. He’ll probably be working tomorrow morning, trying like all reticent men to grind away his grief with labor.

  But I don’t have to wait. Without a discernible glance in my direction, Bob detaches himself from the crowd and walks across the grass toward me. He has the hunter’s eye; he’s known I was here all along. He must be sixty, but he still moves with animal ease, his burly limbs churning around that low center of gravity like an organic machine. I feel myself tensing for the inevitable explosion of his rage. I doubt he would desecrate the ceremony by hitting me here, but there’s no knowing for sure.

  He stops two feet from me and looks into my face. Bob is shorter than I by a good six inches, but his presence has little to do with his physical mass. The windburned skin and blue-gray eyes seem to show first anger, then grief, then disgust. But perhaps I am merely reading my own feelings onto his face. Glancing past him for an instant, I see Drewe looking our way.

  “Look at me,” Bob says sharply.

  “Dr. Anderson—”

  He stops me by raising one hand to the level of his lapel. “I want to ask you one question.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do you know who killed my baby girl?”

  My baby girl. Words so far from the image I will always carry of Erin, the very archetype of sensual womanhood. But behind the eyes of her father, a combat veteran who watched friends die by the dozen in Korea, there is only ineffable love for a being he will always see as an infant, or perhaps a beautiful toddler.

  “I know his name,” I tell him. “But I don’t know where he is.”

  “You think he’s alive, then?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “The FBI says he’s probably dead.”

  “I know that. But I don’t believe it.”

  Bob nods almost imperceptibly. “I don’t either. I’ve known men who fell into that river and came out alive.”

  I wait.

  “I want you to promise me something, Harper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you find out this man is alive somewhere, you pick up the phone and call me. First thing. You understand? First thing.”

  The baldness of Bob’s intent reaches toward me like windblown flame. It’s the sort of intensity that makes even veteran cops nervous. “What do you have in mind to do?” I ask.

  His mouth twitches at one corner. “Put him down.”

  “Dr. Ander—”

  “In the ground.”

  A chill prickles the hair on my neck and shoulders. For the first time since this madness began, I feel I am looking at a man who is a match for Edward Berkmann. Unlike Lenz, Miles, or Baxter, Bob Anderson is terrifyingly simple. Clever rather than brilliant, he can handle any weapon from a deer-skinning knife to an automatic rifle, and he is possessed by a righteous anger that looks not to the law for guidance but to the Old Testament by which he was raised.

  “Promise me,” he says again.

  “I will.”

  Bob exhales deeply, a sound almost like a sigh, but heavier, a sound that carries the weight of a burden I cannot begin to comprehend. “Drewe is my pride and joy,” he says, looking over his shoulder to where his wife and surviving daughter stoically accept the condolences of the last stragglers. “She’s already accomplished more than I ever did. I’m so damned proud of her I can’t sit still with it. But Erin . . .”

  He looks back at me, allowing his shield of impassivity to drop a little. “Erin was always different. I knew from the start. She was a wayward girl, God knows, but it wasn’t her fault. It was her nature. She put us through the trials of Job, but I think we loved her all the more for it.”

  For a moment he seems unable to continue. Then he wipes both eyes and regains his voice. “I don’t know what went on between you and Erin, but I always sensed there was something.”

  Jesus—

  “No man’s immune to the temptations of the flesh, son. And God knows she was a temptation to every man who ever saw her. But this . . . When you told me she was dead, I thought I’d kill you the second I could get my hands on you. I knew that somehow that computer sex thing of yours had gotten her killed. But flying back from Memphis, I realized you were gonna punish yourself more than I ever could. And if you didn’t, God would.”

  Bob runs a hand over his balding scalp. “But this other . . . bastard. He’s my responsibility. Ain’t no father and mother no place gonna have to endure what Margaret and I have because of this man.”

  “Dr. Anderson . . .”

  “You listen to me, son. I got enough money to take care of Margaret if she lives to be a hundred and fifty. I’m gonna leave some to Patrick to take care of Holly, and some to Drewe for the kids you two will have one day. The rest is going to Margaret, and I’m naming you as trustee. Just be still, Harper. You know more about money than anybody I ever knew, and more important, I trust you.”

  I want to speak, but a lump the size of a golf ball is blocking my throat.

  “I never agreed with your daddy’s politics,” Bob says haltingly. “But I always respected his guts. For a long time now, I’ve looked at you like you was my own. Now you got to put the past behind you and do whatever you have to do to make up with Drewe and get on with the business of living
.” He inhales deeply, as though speaking so many words winded him. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  Bob sticks out his callused hand. I take it, and for the first time since my father died I feel a surge of filial devotion, an atavistic sense of belonging that blasts all words into the eternal irrelevance they embody. For the few seconds we clasp hands, I am plugged into a world where ambiguity does not exist.

  And I feel strong.

  Everyone is gone now. In the distance I see the yellow backhoe that will fill Erin’s grave, but no operator. The funeral-home tent gives surprisingly cool shade, or perhaps it’s the opened earth that cools the air here.

  Taking my surviving Martin from its case, I realize I forgot to bring a strap. I’ll have to sit to play. Using one foot, I prop the flight case up on its side and sit on the fat end, with my shoes at the foot of the grave. The polished metal casket has a bottomless sheen. A French vanilla sprinkling of Delta soil dropped by the family lies across the lid like the first fingers of the reclaiming earth.

  “I hope you can hear this,” I say, my voice sounding too offhand for what should be a solemn moment.

  Hitting the strings once to check the tuning, I begin the syncopated chords that lead into “All I Want Is Everything,” a song I wrote in a moment of crystallized indecision, a song Erin asked me to play anytime she saw me with a guitar. With a suspended chord hanging in the air, I begin singing softly.

  Being born in Babylon

  It’s so hard to get off on

  The half-life of every choice

  We love that serpent’s voice

  It takes a sure hand and a sharp knife

  To cut the fruit from the tree of life

  But once you taste that virgin drop

  How do you know when to stop?

  All I want is everything

  Girl you know it’s true

  All I want is everything

  But all I need is . . .

  Diamond cuff links on my sleeves

  Gold teeth in my mouth