Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 45

From the cemetery I drove straight to Sheriff Buckner’s office in Yazoo City. I answered Drewe’s questions about Berkmann as best I could without revealing the existence of the videotape. I told her who he was, that the FBI had identified him with Miles’s help, and that Miles had sent me a picture of him via computer. The fact that Drewe’s early theories about the case had proved to be so accurate gave her little solace. She seemed bent on convincing herself—and me—that Berkmann had died in the plane crash.

Sheriff Buckner had attended Erin’s burial, but when Drewe and I were ushered into his office we found him eating a shrimp po’boy with his feet propped on his desk. He started shaking his head the moment he saw me. Before I said anything, he wiped tartar sauce off his mouth, put down his sandwich, stood, and paid Drewe his respects. Then he looked at me and said, “I don’t know whether to arrest you or give you a medal.”

Buckner had just heard from the Yazoo City police chief how Bob Anderson’s son-in-law had gone crazy out at the cemetery and assaulted an FBI agent named Wes Killen. The agent had called 911 on a cellular phone and was now on his way to the emergency room at Kings Daughters Hospital.

While Drewe and I gaped, Buckner explained that the FBI had insisted on sending an observer to Erin’s funeral on the chance that her killer might show up. He got a big charge out of the fact that I’d brained the FBI man before he could get to his gun, and pointed out that Erin’s murderer, had he been there, would probably have killed Special Agent Killen long before he was “observed.”

I wasn’t amused by the story, but at last I understood why—if Edward Berkmann had been at the cemetery—he did not kill Drewe and me. Special Agent Wes Killen didn’t pull a gun on me because he knew me—probably from pictures—but he would have shot Berkmann in a heartbeat.

Sheriff Buckner listened to my sunglasses story with the sincerity of a doctor humoring a schizophrenic. He promised to look into the three “out-of-towners” I’d noticed at the funeral, but we were clearly wasting our time. As we left, Buckner told me not to worry about the FBI agent pressing assault charges. The Bureau would never stand for the embarrassment of a public trial.

We are almost to Drewe’s parents’ house now, and I’m doubting myself more with each passing mile. Who’s to say someone didn’t accidentally drop their sunglasses into the grave, then decide that retrieving them would be too embarrassing? Maybe it’s Berkmann’s video that’s got me paranoid. The shocking intensity of his personality makes it hard to accept the idea that he’s dead.

When Bob’s mansion comes into sight, surrounded by a visiting fleet of automobiles, Drewe says, “I really do have to be there.”

“I know.”

Looking into her lap, she shakes her head. “All those damned casseroles.”

“I know. Erin would have hated it.”

She looks sharply at me. Then, slowly, she softens her gaze. “You’re right.”

I decide to take a desperate gamble for normalcy. “Think of the poor chickens who died to make all that tetrazzini.”

Drewe backhands my chest with a stinging pop, but the hint of a smile tugs at her mouth. She knows exactly what I’m feeling. A thousand sacred words and condolences are nothing compared to one throwaway line that captures something of Erin’s real life. We both know Erin would have hit me the same way for that joke, and Drewe acting as her surrogate brings her back to life for us, if only for an instant.

In the momentary escape from grief, I’m tempted to bring up the question that has tortured me ever since I told Drewe the truth about Holly. What about Patrick? Does she think he should be given the answer to the question that has haunted him so long? Has she already spoken to him? This is the final legacy of the secret, the last unexploded mine. But right now I don’t have the nerve to probe it.

“What does the house look like?” Drewe asks, her voice heavy.

“I scrubbed out the office. The deputies tore things up pretty bad, and it smells like tear gas, but I managed to sleep there last night.”

“Pull in,” she says, pointing out a path through the cars blocking Bob’s majestic drive.

I have to park thirty yards from the front entrance. Drewe opens the Explorer’s door but does not get out. Feeling a strange tingle in my chest, I reach for the ignition key and shut off the engine. She closes the door again and settles into her seat.

We sit in the muggy silence, the dead motor ticking like a half-sprung clock. I’m about to suggest that we get out and talk when she says, “As bad as this is, I still believe one thing. We were meant for each other. I’ve always known that, and so has anyone who ever knew us.”

She is looking at the windshield, not me. A hundred words pop into my head; all sound calculated and hollow.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, watching an elderly couple shuffle out of the entrance arch. “We’ve been here too long. Rain, I mean. It’s too safe. I know that sounds ridiculous, considering what happened to us here. But maybe that’swhy it happened. You know? We wanted too much to go backward. To this ground where we grew up, to our families, or their memories.” At last she turns to me, her eyes filled with conviction. “We won’t grow in this soil, Harper. We’ve got to find our own place.”

In these words I hear the door to my future opening. “You’re my love, Drewe. You always have been. Just tell me where you want to go.”

She smiles and lays a hand over mine. “Give me an hour and a half. Then come back for me.”

Excitement quickens my blood. “You’re coming home tonight?”

“Yes. To pack.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re moving, Harper. Tomorrow, if not today.”

“Where?”

“We’ll rent a house in Jackson to start. After that, we’ll work it out. Wherever we want. It’s time to go.”

I search her face for signs of doubt, but there are none. I start to get out and to walk her to the door, but she stops me by leaning over the console and kissing me on the cheek.

“Make it an hour,” she says.

Still flying from Drewe’s kiss, I pull into the parking lot of a convenience store and head for the pay phone. The Kings Daughters Hospital operator connects me with an ER nurse who eventually gets special agent Wes Killen to the phone.

I apologize before I tell Killen who I am, and again after. He listens to my explanation with professional detachment, then begins asking questions as I tell him the story of the sunglasses. He promises to have the Bureau check with the airlines for anyone resembling the “New York people” I saw at the funeral.

Unbelievably, Killen has to return to the cemetery and continue his vigil at Erin’s grave. He even criticizes himself for leaving his post long enough to get his nose patched up. After he gives me a cellular phone number I can use to reach him if I need to, I apologize once more and sign off.

Driving back to our farmhouse, I feel I’m traveling a road I’ve never seen before. Because it is no longer the road home. It’s the road away. The road that will lead Drewe and me out of the past and into our future. The events that brought us to this point are too painful even to focus on, yet they have delivered us from ourselves. For the first time, I allow myself to believe that the demented killer who pissed into my guitar for posterity might actually be bumping along the bottom of the Mississippi River, getting nested in by catfish or ripped to pieces by gar.

When I sight a sheriff’s department cruiser parked by our mailbox, it strikes me how paranoid I must seem to Sheriff Buckner. Yet as I park under the weeping willow by our porch, my anxiety returns. Heeding the old fear, I reach under the seat for my .38 and grip it tightly as I open the front door of the house.

The reek of tear gas and Clorox is still strong, and the house feels empty. In fact, it feels more like a place I once lived than the home that nurtured four generations of my family. This feeling embarrasses me, as though I’ve broken faith with my maternal ancestors. Yet if my great-grandfather were alive, he would probably forgive me. He came to Mississippi from Scotland, and despite his love for this land, he understood that most primitive of truths: sometimes people have to move to survive.

I open all the windows in the house, hoping to air out some of the stink for Drewe’s sake. Then I get out my address book and call every bank and brokerage company with which I have an account. Balances in hand, I go to my Gateway 2000, boot up Quicken—which I have neglected for weeks—and update each account. Then I total all the balances.

The result is pretty gratifying.

My watch tells me I’ll be ten minutes late picking up Drewe, given the usual twenty-minute drive to Bob’s house. Picking up the keys and the .38, I trot for the front door. My hand is on the knob when the phone rings. I pause, listening for the answering machine in case it’s Drewe. Instead I hear the voice of Arthur Lenz.

“Hello? Cole? Pick up if you’re there.”

“I’m here!” I yell, sprinting back to the machine. I hit the MEMO button so that Lenz’s words will be recorded, then pick up the cordless. “I’m listening, Doctor.”

“Oh. Good. I’ve spoken to one of the profilers Daniel has working the EROS case. A man I trained. I’m conversant with the new data on Berkmann.”

“And?”

“I’ve put together my own profile.”

“Go.”

“I believe our usual classification system—organized versus disorganized behavior—is inadequate to describe Edward Berkmann. Until recently, he did not kill from uncontrollable impulse. Nor did he develop better technique with each murder, as most killers do. He was like Mozart. From the very first crime he demonstrated genius. He not only staged murder scenes, he seemed to know our specific classification criteria and manipulated evidence accordingly, to prevent computer matches. Effectively, he had no crime signature. ‘Super-organized’ would be my term of choice.”

“Okay.”

“No serial killer has functioned in society to the degree that Berkmann did. The only possible analogy would be the royal physician suspected in the Whitechapel murders—the Jack the Ripper case—but his guilt was never proved. In terms of raw intelligence and education, Berkmann was—or is—probably superior to ninety-nine percent of the people hunting him.”

“That’s painfully obvious.”

“You actually hit on the truth that night in my car, Cole. Until recently, Berkmann was killing for a perfectly rational reason. Transplantation of human pineal tissue is theoretically possible and may have significant therapeutic effects. As a neurosurgeon, Berkmann understood that this procedure would never be developed under current experimental guidelines. He simply decided it was worth sacrificing a few lives to make the attempt. Not so long ago, mainstream American medicine made similar decisions about research using convicts.”

“You sound like you’re defending his actions.”

“I merely make the point that their moral character is a separate question from their scientific defensibility. It’s immaterial so far as analyzing motive, and especially in trying to predict his future behavior.”

“Where’s all this leading?”

“Berkmann saw himself as a sort of modern-day Prometheus. Defying God’s law to steal fire for mankind. Fire symbolizes freedom. Given Berkmann’s background, particularly his disease, he sought the only fire modern man is still denied: freedom from death. He committed the gravest mortal sin—premeditated murder—in pursuit of immortality. He undoubtedly believed that others would eventually see him in a heroic context as well. That’s what he meant in his note, when he told us to be patient. That he would ‘come to us’ when his work was done. He eventually meant to go public.”

“That doesn’t tell me what I want to know.”

“I’m getting to that,” Lenz says, obviously annoyed at being rushed. “Despite all I’ve said, I now believe that Berkmann is in fact decompensating—coming apart—just as other serial killers do. Our murderous Mozart is finally joining the ranks of the Salieris.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if he weren’t, he would not have made a single tactical mistake. As it stands, he’s made several. When he learned we were hunting him, he could have gone underground, stopped his pineal work indefinitely. But he didn’t. Like all egomaniacs, he took offense, became indignant, then furious. And eventually he committed a murder simply to chastise us.”

“Your wife.”

A brief pause. “Yes. You see, even though there was a ‘rational’ reason for Berkmann’s early murders, an underlying sexual psychosis was always at work. Like two minds working in parallel. We were both right, Cole. With the stressor of FBI pursuit, Berkmann’s subconscious drive began its ascendancy.”

“And?”

“That’s the key to his future behavior. If he’s still alive, of course.”

“How so? What’s he going to do?”

“It all comes down to the mother.”

“Catherine Berkmann?”

“Yes. From his oral family history, you might think the flamboyant father—Richard—was the dominant force in Edward’s life. But he wasn’t. It was Catherine who seduced her brother in order to prevent the extrafamilial marriage. It was Catherine who gave birth to Edward amid shot and shell, shepherded him through hunger and privation to reach America.She was the anima behind his subconscious sexual urges. And she made herself felt at every EROS crime scene, even though the murders were technically committed to harvest pineal glands.”

“The postmortem rapes?”

“Exactly. Tell me, did you notice that the name ‘Erin’ is fully contained within ‘Catherine’? That undoubtedly contributed to your success in drawing Berkmann, even though you knew nothing about it.”

“My God. I never saw it.”

“This is the key, Cole. Did you notice his choice of words in describing Kali? He didn’t call her his wife, or his lover, but his concubine .”

“So?”

“The word has some very specific meanings. One refers to a secondary wife, one of inferior status. Yet we know from the transcripts that Berkmann legally married Kali.”

“So?”

“If she was of secondary status, who held the primary position?”

At last I see it.

“He’s been searching for that person his whole life,” Lenz says. “The substitute for his mother, the sister-lover he never had. Your ‘Erin’ came along at precisely the right moment. The similarities between the names, your own incestuous secret revealed to him through her eyes. He couldn’t resist it.”

“And his transplant plans?”

“Fate and the FBI had already interrupted them. His scientific search for immortality was on hold. But there was always another way.”

“Children,” I say softly, recalling Miles’s thesis.

“Exactly. The only true immortality we’ll ever have. At some level Berkmann always knew that. Even if he gained an extra twenty vital years from his pineal transplant, he would only be postponing the end. But DNA lives forever. As long as there are offspring, anyway.”

A single searing image fills my brain: the incision in Erin’s abdomen. “That’s why he....”

“The ovaries, Cole. That’s why he cut out Erin Graham’s ovaries.”

“He threw them away. When he found out Erin wasn’t who he thought she was, he threw them away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Goddamn it, what’s the final answer here? If he’s alive, will he run or will he come back here?”

“Tell me about the videotape. Did he threaten you?”

“Not beyond the ‘mills of the gods’ line.”

“Nothing else? You’ve got to realize that Berkmann’s mental decompensation wouldn’t prevent him from being as calculating or manipulative as he ever was. It’s conceivable that everything on that tape was meant to influence you in a certain way.”

Though my mind resists it, I force myself to replay the sickening tape in my mind. “He seemed to lose control about halfway through it. He said he was going into hiding. He also seemed to fixate on my wife at one point. He called her the alpha female of the family, talked about how perfect she was.”

“Did he say anything else about her?”

“He said I didn’t deserve her.”

“You should move her to a safe location as quickly as possible. Tell no one where you’re going.”

I swallow, my throat dry. “You really think—”

“Edward Berkmann is a profoundly disturbed man who has been cut loose from his moorings. His only trusted ally was killed before his eyes. You are responsible for that. If he’s alive, he might be looking for revenge. He might have transferred his subconscious anima projection onto your wife. Anything is possible at this point.”

“That’s what I wanted to know, Doctor. I appreciate it.”

“I hope he’s dead, Cole. I couldn’t have said that a week ago. But I mean it now.”

“I hope so too. Good-bye.”

As I set down the phone, the effect of Lenz’s words flows through me like electric current. Though it will make me even later, I find the Jackson yellow pages and open them to the realtors’ section. Picking the biggest ad for Ridgeland, I dial the number. It’s nearly seven-forty, but I doubt the place is completely empty. After about twenty rings, a curt female voice answers. When I tell her I’m looking for a house to rent, not buy, the coolness becomes frigidity. Then I say the magic words.

“Money is not a consideration.”

She adopts a guardedly warmer tone. “A lot of people say that until they hear the prices out there. There’s really nothing to rent.”

“There’s always something for the right price.”

“Well... there is one place for sale; the owners got tired of waiting and moved to Idaho. But they wouldn’t rent for less than... four thousand. A month. And you couldn’t have a lease.”

“You’ll have a check for twelve grand in your hand tomorrow. But you don’t tramp any buyers through there for the next three months. Deal?”

I can almost hear her cursing herself for not asking more. After she takes my name, I race out to the Explorer with my keys in one hand and my pistol in the other.

Drewe is waiting outside her parents’ house with her bag. She doesn’t seem angry that I’m late. As I get out to open her door, someone opens the great front door of the Anderson house. It’s Patrick. He’s standing inside with Holly in his arms.

“Uncle Harp!”

The three-year-old begins squirming, leaving Patrick no choice but to let her down. She flies off the steps like a brunette cannonball and races to me. My eyes still on Patrick, I kneel and stop her at arm’s length, trying to keep my smile natural. While she squeezes closer, I glance to my left, at Drewe, but she looks away quickly and walks over to Patrick.

I lift Holly into my arms and hug her tight. She digs her face into my neck and folds her arms between us, as if to go to sleep on my shoulder.

“How you doin’, punkin?” I ask softly.

She shakes her head.

“What is it?”

“I miss Mommy.”

I close my eyes against the sting of tears, but it’s no use. Holly leans back, round-eyed and concerned. She touches the drops on my cheek. “You miss her too?”

“I miss her too, punkin.”

Her lower lip puffs out in a mixture of sadness and strength that I saw on Erin’s face many times.

“I’m okay, punkin. Thanks to you.”

“PawPaw and Daddy say Mommy’s in heaven,” she whispers. “Watching over us. Is that right? I can’t see her up there.”

“You listen to your Daddy,” I whisper back, wishing I had Patrick’s blind faith in God and all the rest.

“We’ve got to go, sweetie,” Drewe says, suddenly beside us.

She pulls Holly away, walks to the steps, and deposits her in Patrick’s arms. The symbolic nature of this act is inescapable. Patrick gives me a blank wave, then turns and goes back into the house. Holly watches me over his shoulder as they go.

Taking a deep breath, I climb back into the Explorer. Drewe is already inside, facing sternly forward. The first fifteen minutes of the drive pass in awkward silence. The stripped cotton fields look barren as battlefields, and the hope I felt so recently wavers in the face of them.

“I got us a house,” I say finally, almost in defense.

“What?”

“I got us a house. In Ridgeland. We can move in this week. If it’s not ready by tomorrow, we can get a hotel.”

Her glance is brief, but I see gratitude in it.

“Drewe—”

“It’s okay to talk about it,” she says too loudly. “The worst thing we could do is keep it hidden, like a piece of broken crystal. The first time we had to touch it, we’d both get cut.”

“Does Patrick know anything yet?”

She faces forward again, as though watching for our driveway, which we could both find blindfolded if necessary. “No.”

“Erin wanted to tell him the truth, Drewe. That’s what she told me the day she died. She was planning to tell him that night. And she wanted me to tell you.”

She brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Don’t you think she was going to tell because she felt she had no option? That if she didn’t, Patrick would leave her?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Erin seemed different that day. Like she’d grown into a different person. It made me ashamed of myself, really. She was totally committed to her decision.”

“Don’t tell me this, Harper.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know the whole truth.”

She turns to me, her green eyes burning. “The truth? I’ll tell you what the truth is. Patrick is a good man. A good father. Even during the craziness of the past few weeks, he hasn’t let Holly see anything. With Erin gone, his obsession is going to fade. You should see him. He’s latched onto that child like a life raft. I think he realizes how stupid he was to have wasted time badgering Erin about the past. Because now she’s gone. I don’t think he’ll waste any more.”

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying Patrick will never know about you and Erin. Neither will Holly. It will be harder on you than anybody, watching her grow up without knowing what you really are to her. But it has to be that way. You understand?”

I nod silently.

“For a while they’ll be close to us, to my parents. But Patrick will eventually remarry and they’ll drift away. It will hurt you. It will even hurt me. But that’s the way life is. And somewhere out in the world, a little piece of Erin and you will be alive. Long after we’re dead even.” Drewe looks away abruptly, and I realize she is hiding tears. “She’ll be okay, though. She comes from good people. Don’t miss the damned drive.”

I hit the brakes and wheel onto the gravel. As I pull around Drewe’s Acura and park, she says, “It’s settled, then?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s pack the essentials and go.”

I am packing in my office when I notice the e-mail icon blinking beneath Nefertiti’s slowly turning head on the EROS computer. Dropping a can of shaving gel into my dopp kit, I stare at the icon. The sounds of Drewe packing in her bedroom echo up the hallway. Willing myself to be calm, I walk over and click the mouse on the icon. At the top of the message I see this:

SENDER:SYSOP/Edward Berkmann, M.D.