They had a corpse in a car and, on a telephone voice-mail tape, what sounded to all intents and purposes like a confession. There was no need to take any further trouble. All that had to be done was to link the sales rep to the other victims. And then come up with a motive. But perhaps there already was one…
The victims aren’t the children. They are the families…
It was Goran who had given her this explanation as they studied the little girls’ families from behind the glass in the morgue. Parents who, for various reasons, had had only one child. A mother long past forty and hence no longer biologically capable of hoping for another pregnancy…They are his true victims. He studied them, he chose them. And then: An only daughter. He wanted to strip them of all hope of getting over their grief, of trying to forget their loss. They will have to remember what he did to them for the rest of their days…
Alexander Bermann had no children. He had tried to have them, but it hadn’t worked. Perhaps that was why he had wanted to unleash his rage on those poor families. Perhaps he had used them to take his revenge on his fate of infertility.
No, it wasn’t revenge, Mila thought. There’s something else…She wasn’t giving up, but she didn’t know where that feeling came from.
The car arrived near the motel and Mila got out, saying good-bye to the officer who had been her driver. He exchanged a nod with her and turned his car before heading back, leaving her alone in the middle of the big gravel yard, a strip of forest behind her with bungalows poking out of it here and there. It was cold, and the only light came from the neon sign announcing vacancies and pay TV. Mila headed towards her room. All the windows were in darkness.
She was the only guest.
She walked past the porter’s office, which was plunged in the bluish darkness of a flickering television set. The sound was turned off and the man wasn’t there. Perhaps he had gone to the toilet, Mila thought, and continued on her way. Luckily she had kept the key, or else she would have had to wait for the porter to come back.
She had a paper bag containing a fizzy drink and two cheese toasted sandwiches—her dinner for the evening—and a tub of ointment that she would later spread on the little burns on her hands. Her breath condensed in the cold air. Mila quickened her pace; she was starving. Her footsteps on the gravel were the only sound that filled the night. Her bungalow was the last in the row.
Priscilla, she thought as she walked. And she remembered the words spoken by Chang, the medical examiner: that it had been even worse for the sixth one…
That phrase was what had obsessed Mila.
But not just because of the idea that the sixth girl had had to pay a higher price than the others—He slowed down the bleeding to make her die more slowly…He wanted to enjoy the show…—No, there was something else. Why had the murderer changed his modus operandi? As she had during her meeting with Chang, Mila felt a tickle at the base of her neck.
By now her room was only a few meters away, and she was concentrating on that sensation, sure this time that she would be able to grasp its cause. A little dip in the ground nearly made her trip.
It was then that she heard it.
The brief sound behind her swept her thoughts away in an instant. Steps on the gravel. Someone was “copying” her walk. He was coordinating his footsteps with hers to get close to her without her noticing. When she had tripped, her pursuer had lost the rhythm, thus revealing his presence.
Mila didn’t get flustered, she didn’t slow down. Her pursuer’s footsteps were lost once more in hers. She calculated that he was about ten meters behind her. Meanwhile she started trying to come up with possible solutions. No point drawing the gun she wore behind her back—if the person behind her was armed they would have plenty of time to shoot first. The porter, she thought. The television left on in the empty office. He’s killed him already. Now it’s my turn. By now it wasn’t far to the door of the bungalow. She had to make her mind up. And she did. She had no other choice.
She rummaged in her pocket for her key, and quickly climbed the three steps leading to the porch. She opened the door after turning the key a couple of times, her heart thumping in her chest, and slipped into the room. She drew her gun and reached her other hand towards the light switch. Her bedside light came on. Mila didn’t move from her position, frozen, her back flattened against the door and her ears pricked. He hasn’t attacked me, she thought. Then she heard footsteps moving on the planks of the porch.
Boris had told her the keys of the motel were all skeleton keys, since the owner had got fed up replacing them because guests took them with them when they left without paying. Does the person who’s following me know that? He’s probably got a key like mine. And she thought that if he tried to get in she could take him by surprise from behind.
She fell onto her knees and slid along the stained carpet until she reached the window. She flattened herself against the wall and raised her hand to open it. It was so cold that the hinges stuck. With a bit of effort she opened one of the panels. She got to her feet, took a jump and found herself outside, back in the dark.
In front of her was the forest. The high treetops swayed rhythmically together. To the rear of the motel there was a concrete platform connecting all the bungalows. Mila crept over to it, keeping low to the ground and trying to catch every movement, every sound around her. She quickly reached the bungalow next to hers, and the one next to that. Then she stopped and entered the narrow gap that separated one from the other.
At that point she could have leaned out to get a glimpse of the porch of the bungalow. But it would have been a risk. She wrapped the fingers of both hands around her pistol to improve her grip, forgetting the pain of her burns. She quickly counted to three, taking three big breaths as well, and sprang around the corner with her weapon raised. No one. It couldn’t have been her imagination. She was convinced that someone had been following her. Someone perfectly capable of moving behind his target, concealing the acoustic shadow of his footsteps.
A predator.
Mila searched for some sign of the enemy in the square. He seemed to have vanished into the wind, to the repetitive concert of the yielding trees surrounding the motel.
“Excuse me…”
Mila leapt back and looked at the man without raising her pistol, paralyzed by those two simple words. It took her a few seconds to work out that it was the porter. He realized that he had frightened her and repeated, “Excuse me,” this time only by way of apology.
“What’s going on?” asked Mila, who still hadn’t managed to get her heart rate back to normal.
“There’s a call for you…”
The man pointed to his booth and Mila set off in that direction without waiting for him to show her the way.
“Mila Vasquez,” she said into the receiver.
“Hi, Stern here…Dr. Gavila wants to see you.”
“Me?” she asked, surprised but with a hint of pride.
“Yes. We called the officer who drove you there, he’s coming back to pick you up.”
“Fine.” Mila was puzzled Stern said nothing more, so she ventured to ask, “Has anything turned up?”
“Alexander Bermann was hiding something from us.”
Boris tried to set the SatNav without taking his eyes off the road. Mila stared straight ahead without saying anything. Gavila was in the backseat, huddled in his crumpled coat, eyes closed. They had been sent to the house of Veronica Bermann’s sister, where Veronica had sought refuge from the journalists.
Goran had reached the conclusion that Bermann had been trying to cover something up. Everything on the basis of that message on the answering machine: Erm…It’s me…Erm…I haven’t much time…But I wanted to tell you I’m sorry…I’m sorry, for everything…I should have done it before, but I didn’t…Try to forgive me. It was all my fault…
They had established from the phone records that Bermann had made the call when they were at the traffic police station, more or less at the same time as the corp
se of little Debby Gordon had been found.
Goran wondered why a man in Alexander Bermann’s situation—with a corpse in the boot and the intention of getting away as quickly as possible—should have made a call to his wife.
Serial killers don’t apologize. If they do, it’s because they want to create a different image of themselves, it’s part of their mystifying nature. Their purpose is to muddy the truth, to feed the curtain of smoke that surrounds them. But with Bermann it seemed different. There was an urgency in his voice. There was something he had to finish before it was too late.
What did Alexander Bermann want to be forgiven for?
Goran was convinced that it had something to do with his wife, with their relationship as a couple.
“Could you repeat that for me, please, Dr. Gavila…?”
Goran opened his eyes and saw Mila turned in her seat, staring at him as she waited for a reply.
“Veronica Bermann may have discovered something. That probably caused arguments between her and her husband. I reckon he wanted to ask her forgiveness for that.”
“And what makes that information so important for us?”
“I don’t know if it really is…but a man in his situation doesn’t waste time resolving a simple marital row if he doesn’t have an ulterior motive.”
“And what might that be?”
“Perhaps his wife isn’t entirely aware of what she knows.”
“And with that phone call he wanted to damp down the situation, to stop her getting to the bottom of it. Or telling us…”
“Yes, that’s what I think…Veronica Bermann has been very cooperative until now, there would be no point in her hiding anything from us if she thought the information had nothing to do with the crimes, but concerned only the two of them.”
Now Mila was quite clear about everything. Dr. Gavila’s hunch would inevitably lead to a change of direction for the investigation. But first it had to be checked. That was why Goran hadn’t yet spoken to Roche.
They hoped to extract significant clues from the meeting with Veronica Bermann. Boris, as an expert in the interrogation of witnesses and people with information about particular crimes, would have had to have a kind of informal chat with her. But Goran had decided that only he and Mila would meet with Bermann’s wife. Boris had agreed as if the order had come from a superior and not a civilian adviser. But his hostility towards Mila had grown. He didn’t see why she had to be present.
Mila was aware of the tension and, in reality, she herself didn’t fully understand what it was that had led Gavila to prefer her. Boris had been left only with the task of instructing her in how to guide the conversation. And that was exactly what he had done, before fiddling with the SatNav in search of their destination.
Mila remembered Boris’s comment as Stern and Rosa drew a portrait of Alexander Bermann: I feel as if I’ve been dazzled. He’s too clean.
That perfection was hardly credible. It seemed to have been prepared for someone.
We all have a secret, Mila repeated to herself. Even me.
There’s always something to hide. Her father had said to her when she was young: “We all stick our fingers in our noses. We might do it when no one else is watching, but we do do it.”
So what was Alexander Bermann’s secret?
What did his wife know?
What was the name of child number six?
It was almost dawn when they got there. The village lay behind a church, on the curve of an embankment overlooking the river.
Veronica Bermann’s sister lived in a flat over a pub. Sarah Rosa had phoned Veronica to tell her about the visit she was about to receive. Predictably enough, she hadn’t objected, and had shown no unwillingness to talk. The fact that she had been given notice was intended to make it clear to her that she wasn’t going to face an interrogation. But Veronica Bermann wasn’t interested in Special Agent Rosa’s precautions, she would probably have agreed to a grilling.
It was almost seven o’clock in the morning when the woman welcomed Mila and Goran, perfectly at ease in dressing gown and slippers. She invited them into the living room, with visible beams in the ceiling and carved furniture, and offered them some freshly made coffee. Mila took time to savor her coffee. She was in no hurry, she wanted the woman to lower her defenses completely before she began. Boris had warned her: in some cases it only takes a word out of place for the other person to close up and refuse to go on cooperating.
“Mrs. Bermann, all this must be very hard, and we’re sorry to descend on you so early.”
“Don’t worry, I always get up early.”
“We need to find out more about your husband, not least because it’s only by knowing him better that we’ll be able to establish how deeply involved he really was. And believe me, there are still plenty of dark sides to this business. Could you tell us about him…?”
Veronica’s face didn’t move a muscle, but her eyes grew more intense. Then she began: “Alexander and I had known each other since high school. He was two years older than me, he was on the hockey team. He wasn’t a great player, but they were all very fond of him. We started going out together, but in a group, just friends; nothing was going on yet, and it didn’t even occur to us that something else might bring us together. To tell the truth, I don’t think he ever ‘saw’ me like that…as a possible girlfriend, I mean. And neither did I.”
“It happened later…”
“Yes, isn’t that strange? After high school I lost track of him and we didn’t see each other for many years. Mutual friends told me he’d gone to university. Then one day he reappeared in my life: he called me, saying he’d found my number in the phone book. Then I found out from friends that in fact, when he’d come back after graduating, he’d asked around about me and wanted to know what had become of me…”
Listening to her, Goran had a sense that Veronica Bermann wasn’t just abandoning herself to nostalgia, but that in some way her story had a precise purpose. As if she was deliberately guiding him somewhere, far away in time, where they would find what they had come looking for.
“It was then that you started seeing each other again…” said Mila. And Goran noticed with satisfaction that the officer, following Boris’s advice, had decided not to ask Veronica Bermann any questions, but to suggest sentences that she would then complete, so that it seemed more like a conversation than an interrogation.
“It was then that we started seeing each other again,” repeated Mrs. Bermann. “Alexander started pressing me to marry him. And in the end I accepted.”
Goran concentrated on that last sentence. It sounded wrong, like a proud lie hastily added to the discussion in the hope that it might pass unobserved. And he remembered what he had noticed the first time he saw the woman: Veronica wasn’t pretty, she probably never had been. A mediocre, undramatic kind of femininity. While Alexander Bermann was a handsome man. Pale blue eyes, the dark smile of someone who knows he can exert a certain fascination. It was hard for the criminologist to believe that it had taken such persistence to persuade her to marry him.
Mila resumed control of the conversation: “But lately your relationship hadn’t been going very well…”
Veronica paused. For quite a long time, thought Goran. Maybe Mila had cast her bait too soon.
“We had problems,” she admitted at last.
“You tried to have children in the past…”
“I took some hormonal treatment for a while. Then we tried insemination as well.”
“I imagine you both really wanted a baby…”
“It was Alexander who was keenest on the idea…”
She said it defensively, a sign that that might have been the reason for the greater friction between the couple.
They were getting close to their goal. Goran was satisfied. He had wanted Mila there to talk to Mrs. Bermann because he was sure a female presence would be the ideal way of striking a sympathetic bond, and break down any possible resistance on the woman’s part. He coul
d, of course, have chosen Sarah Rosa, and perhaps that wouldn’t have upset Boris’s susceptibilities. But Mila had struck him as more suitable, and he hadn’t been wrong.
The policewoman leaned over the little table that separated the sofa from the place where Veronica Bermann was sitting, to set down her coffee cup. It was a way of meeting Goran’s eye without letting the woman see. Goran nodded slightly: it was a sign that the time had come to stop beating about the bush and try for the all-out attack.
“Mrs. Bermann, why, in your husband’s answering machine message, did he ask you to forgive him?”
Veronica turned her head away to hide a tear that was threatening to break through the barrier she had created for her emotion.
“Mrs. Bermann, your confidences are safe with us. I’m going to be frank with you: no policeman or lawyer or judge will ever be able to force you to answer this question, because the fact is that it has no relevance to the investigation. But it’s important that we know, because it’s quite possible that your husband is innocent…”
Hearing those last words, Veronica Bermann turned to face her.
“Innocent? Alexander didn’t kill anyone…but that doesn’t mean he was faultless!”
She said this with a dark rage that had appeared without warning and distorted her voice. Goran had the confirmation he had been waiting for. Mila understood it too: Veronica Bermann had wanted this. She had been waiting for their visit, their questions camouflaged by innocuous phrases scattered here and there in the conversation. They had imagined that they were leading the dialogue, but this woman had prepared her story to bring them to this precise result. She had to tell someone.
“I suspected that Alexander had a lover. A wife always takes this kind of eventuality into account, and at that moment she also decides whether or not she’ll be able to forgive. But sooner or later a wife also wants to know. And that’s why one day I started going through his things. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, and I couldn’t predict how I would react if I found any proof.”
The Whisperer Page 9
