by Greg Iles
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 on-line, 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 tow-truck 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 “high-tech-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. Dorner, 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 t
his.”
“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.
“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 Lutece. 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 sublabialtranssphenoidal 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-p
articularly 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.
