by Greg Iles
I’ve had enough. The line about Miles rattled me, but not enough to give Berkmann the last word.
HARPER> You spout Nietzsche like a college sophomore. Fitting, since he died eating his own excrement.
BERKMANN> I shall be here when Drewe calls me.
I slam down the ESCAPE key and terminate the conversation. My hands are shaking with rage as I dial Miles’s cellular.
“Harper?”
“Not a single typo. Are you anywhere close to finding his place?”
“Maybe. I’m waiting for a guy now. A homeless guy named Leonardo. He’s a sidewalk artist. Leonardo. You believe that? He’s supposed to know something.”
“Like what?”
“I won’t know till I see him, will I?”
“What about Baxter? He found anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Damn! You’ve got to find him, Miles. He wants Drewe.”
“Drewe?”
“He’s fixated on her, obsessed. Like he thought he was with Erin. He bragged about you too. He laughed. He’s the most arrogant son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”
The silence on the other end of the phone is absolute. I know I’ve wounded Miles deeply, but maybe I wanted to. Maybe I want him in a state of fury when he finally faces Berkmann.
“Harper?”
Drewe’s voice sends a shock through my nervous system. I turn to my right and see her standing three feet inside my office—the room she has not entered for seven weeks—wearing nothing but a white terry bathrobe and a damp towel wrapped around her hair.
“What’s happening?” she asks. “Who wants me?”
“I’ve got to go, Miles.”
“Wait! I need you to keep him online.”
“I can’t do it. You be careful.” I break the connection with the finger button.
“Harper?” Drewe says again.
I consider lying, then crush the impulse. “Berkmann’s alive, Drewe.”
“How do you know?”
“I just talked to him on EROS.”
“Oh, God.”
“His text isn’t showing any errors, so at least he’s back in New York. Miles is trying to find him right now.”
She folds her arms across her chest as if suddenly cold. “I heard my name through the speakers. I heard him say my name.”
Jesus. “He’s just playing games. You don’t need to know this stuff.” I move toward her, but she takes a step back.
“Don’t patronize me like that. What did he say about me?”
“He’s obsessed with you. He’s nuts. Let’s get out of here.”
“What video were you talking about?”
“Drewe—”
“What video?”
I sigh wearily. “He left a video here after Erin’s murder.”
“Where is it?”
“I sent it to the FBI this morning.”
Her eyes never leave my face. “But you kept a copy. You don’t trust anyone enough not to keep a backup. I know you.”
“I didn’t, Drewe.” No one in the world could fault me for that lie.
“I know you’re trying to protect my feelings,” she says. “But we’re past that. I want to see this man.”
I take her hand and squeeze it hard. “No, you don’t. You don’t want those pictures knocking around in your head for the rest of your life.”
“Did he have sex with Erin’s body like he did with the other victims?”
“No. But he danced her around the room after she was dead. He showed me her ovaries. He pissed into one of my guitars and hung it back on the wall. I took it outside and burned it. You don’t want to see this tape.”
She closes her eyes. “Get it.”
“Drewe—”
“Get it! The man who butchered my sister is still free, he has some kind of obsession about me, and you think I’m not mature enough to watch his pathetic cruelty? I’m a doctor, Harper. Get the goddamned thing!”
I go silently to my desk, retrieve the eight-millimeter original, and hand it to her.
“I’ll see you when it’s over,” she says, her face resolute.
“Drewe, please.”
“I know how to work the camera. Please get out. This is something I have to do alone.”
Chapter 47
While Drewe watches Berkmann’s video in my office, I pace around the kitchen like a caged ape. When I can stand it no more, I call Miles from the kitchen telephone. He sounds relieved to hear my voice.
“I’m still waiting for Leonardo to show,” he says in a loud whisper. “It better be soon too. It’s getting dangerous up here. I just had to take down a couple of kids.”
“What do you mean?”
“Couple of brothers backed me up against a wall and told me I was the wrong color for the neighborhood. I thought they wanted to rob me—I’ve been handing out cash like Santa Claus up here—but they just wanted to fuck me up. They weren’t interested in how many black friends I have either. I had to kick them a few times.”
“Kick them?” I echo, in the same moment remembering Miles’s martial arts training, the assault charge Lenz told me about.
“Berkmann must be crazy to live up here. Maybe it’s like a warehouse, where he can just drive right into the building.”
“He looked to me like he could take care of himself, Miles.”
“We’ll find out, won’t we? I just hope I find the place soon. It’s nearly dark up here.”
Which means it will be dark here soon.
Miles is talking again, but I no longer hear him. Drewe is standing in the kitchen doorway. The towel is gone from her head. Her hair is a storm of copper tangles, her eyes blank circles shot with blood.
“I’ve got to go, Miles.”
“Again?”
I hang up the phone and pull Drewe into a tight embrace. Her arms hang limp at her sides. Her body seems without breath. The robe is wetter than before, with sweat now rather than shower water. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I tried to tell you.”
“I want to talk to him,” she says in a dead voice.
“What?” I pull back far enough to look into her eyes.
“I want to talk to Berkmann on the computer.”
“I won’t let you do it.”
“I read your last conversation with him,” she says. “In the Blue Room. I want to talk to him.”
“If you read that crap, why do you want to talk to him?”
“You can’t figure it out?”
“No.”
“You will.”
I feel myself shaking her, as though I could somehow rattle sense into her, but she doesn’t flinch. “Drewe, that’s exactly what he wants! He told me you’d be talking to him by tonight!”
“I know.”
“So why do it?”
“Because it’s the only way to get him.”
As I stare, uncomprehending, my office phone rings. I ignore it, but Drewe says, “Answer it. It’s probably Miles.”
“Drewe—”
“Then I’ll answer it.” She pulls away and starts for the hall.
I push past her at the office door and pick up the cordless.
“Leonardo came through,” Miles says in a breathless voice. “I’ve got an address. It’s between Harlem and Washington Heights.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure yet. I don’t have a building number, but I’ve got a block and a description. It’s a warehouse, like I guessed. Leonardo has actually talked to Berkmann. People around here think he’s mob connected or else a heavy dealer. They leave him alone.”
“Have you called Baxter?”
Miles hesitates. “No.”
The implications of this are obvious, yet I feel no urge to argue. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not.”
I say nothing.
“It would help if you could keep Berkmann at his computer,” he says. “Leonardo’s taking me over there now.”
I grunt neutrally.
“If he’s at his computer, he’s occupied.”
“Dr. Lenz told me you had a certain item registered in your name in New Jersey. Are you carrying that item?”
“Could be.”
A screech of brakes from the receiver makes me pull the phone away from my ear. “Are you in a cab?”
“Are you kidding?” Miles says, breathing harder. “No cabs up here. We’re on foot, three blocks from the warehouse. What about it? Will you keep him busy?”
“I won’t have to,” I reply, my eyes following Drewe as she sits down at the EROS computer. “Drewe can’t wait to talk to him.”
“What?”
“She watched Berkmann’s video.”
“Oh, man.”
“She’s way ahead of you.”
“Let her at it, then.”
“Just get this asshole, Miles. Fast.”
“I’ll call you. I’m hanging up now. White guys with cell phones don’t exactly blend in up here.”
I hang up the cordless and walk over behind Drewe. She hasn’t used EROS for six months, but she is flying through its screens like a professional software evaluator.
“Looks like you remember it pretty well.”
“Mmm.”
“Miles has an address on Berkmann. He’s headed over there now. He wants you to keep the bastard online.”
“What about the FBI?” she asks, clicking the mouse through the live-chat area.
“He hasn’t called them.”
Her frenetic movements cease. “Good,” she says finally. “Good for him.”
“Drewe—”
“All I need to do is send a Quick Message telling Berkmann to meet me in the Blue Room, right?”
“Right.”
“What’s his User ID?”
“Send it to SYSOP 1.”
As she types, she says, “He thinks he’s going to destroy our marriage by telling me you’re Holly’s father.” She looks back over her shoulder. “Think what might be happening right now if you hadn’t told me the truth.”
This thought is enough to make me feel light-headed. Mercifully, she turns back to the screen. I start to read what she is typing but sense that I’m crowding her. I back up.
She stabs the ENTER key. “Message sent. Come to Mama, Edward.”
The unfamiliar coldness in her voice jars me.
“What about this headset thing?” she asks. “Will it recognize my voice?”
“It might. There’s a female sysop in New York. Miles’s voice-rec program is trained to know her. If we select her parameters and you tone down your Southern accent, it might accept you as her. It accepts me as Miles.”
I lean over her shoulder and punch up the program, select RACQUEL HIRSCH, then log her in.
“You logged me in as SYSOP 2?”
“It’s the only way you can get in. The system’s officially closed.”
“I want my name at the prompt,” she says. “My first name.”
I give her a questioning look, but her eyes reveal nothing. She pulls on the headset as I enter the necessary commands.
“How does this work?”
“Talk into the mike, listen through the multimedia speakers. Hit the space bar if you need to talk to me. It mutes the mike.”
She hits the space bar and says, “Give me a quick picture of Berkmann,” like she’s asking an intern for a patient’s medical history.
“There’s too much to tell. He’s a child of incest. His parents were brother and sister. He has—or had—hemophilia.”
“What do you mean ‘had’? Hemophilia’s incurable.”
“Not if you’re willing to steal a healthy liver.”
“Christ. What else?”
“Dr. Lenz says Berkmann’s coming apart. Decompensating. That an underlying sexual psychosis is taking over his conscious mind. There are a lot of factors, but it all comes down to his mother. Catherine Berkmann. The postmortem rapes were all because of her. God, I don’t remember it all. The Indian woman, Kali, was his lover for years, sort of a second-string wife. But he wants someone like Catherine. A substitute sister-mother to be the mother of his child.”
Drewe fixes me with a hard stare. “No matter what I say, Harper, ignore it. It doesn’t mean anything. Just don’t break my train of thought.”
Pulling the collar of the robe tight around her neck, she turns back to the screen, releases the space bar, and says, “This is Dr. Drewe Cole. I want to talk to you.”
On the screen, the echo function puts up:DREWE> This is Dr. Drewe Cole. I want to talk to you.
We wait without speaking, partly because we don’t want the microphone to pick up stray conversation, but mostly because there is nothing to say. Nefertiti materializes at the one-minute mark, revolving slowly, her inscrutable countenance unruffled by earthly cares. My tension grows with each revolution of her head, but Drewe sits as calmly as if she were attending a medical seminar.
The ringing telephone startles us both. I carry the cordless across the room before I answer. “Hello?”
“This is Miles,” says a strangled voice that makes me dizzy with fear.
“Miles? What’s the matter?”
“I’m under arrest.”
“What?”
“Baxter used me to find Berkmann. He had two agents tailing me. As soon as they saw me casing a building, they arrested me.”
“Where are you now?”
“Outside Berkmann’s warehouse. Baxter’s choppering over from Connecticut right now. I talked to him. He’s got guys on standby ready to take Berkmann down.”
My mind reels from the magnitudinal shift in circumstances. “The Hostage Rescue Team?”
“Baxter says New York City SWAT’s almost as good, and they’re closer. They’re on their way now. They’ll be in position by the time Baxter gets here.”
“Yes!” I cry, giving Drewe a relieved thumbs-up as she turns from the computer. She hits the space bar and says, “What’s happening?”
“The FBI’s going to raid Berkmann’s place!”
“We’re still looking at twenty to thirty minutes,” Miles says. “That’s why they let me call you. Baxter says you’ve got to keep Berkmann at his computer. If he’s at his computer, hopefully he won’t have a gun to the heads of any hostages.”
“We’re trying. Drewe just queried him, but he hasn’t answered.”
“Tell her to keep trying.”
Despite the good news, I hear defeat in Miles’s voice. “Listen,” I tell him, “it’s better this way. A lot better. If you’d gone in there alone, you might never have come out.”
“He wouldn’t have come out,” Miles says softly. “Now he will. All he has to do is surrender. And he may want to by now.”
As I open my mouth to argue, the digital baritone of Edward Berkmann speaks in my place. Rushing toward the EROS monitor, I see these words appear:BERKMANN> I’d like to believe that. However, trust must first be established.
“He bit!” I whisper. “Berkmann’s online!”
“Established how?” Drewe asks in a loud clear voice. On-screen these words appear:DREWE> Established how?
“They’re talking, Miles. Racquel’s voice parameters are working for Drewe.”
Disturbed by my volume, Drewe waves me away from the computer. As I hurry toward the Gateway, Berkmann says: “Can you prove that you are who you say you are, and not your husband?”
It’s disorienting to hear the digital voice without watching the accompanying text on the monitor. It makes Berkmann seem that much closer.
“I don’t know,” Drewe replies. “Since we don’t know each other. We have no common experience you can use to test me.”
“Of course we do. You’re an obstetrician, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Board certified?”
“Of course.”
“One never knows these days. If you wouldn’t mind answering a few simple questions, we can leave trivialities behind.”
“Fine.”
�
�What test would you use to rule out adrenal or ovarian tumors in a patient with hirsutism?”
“A serum DHEA-S for the adrenal,” Drewe says automatically. “Serum testosterone for the ovarian tumor.”
“He’s testing her, Miles. Checking to make sure it’s not me.”
Miles makes a choking noise that sounds like laughter. “Once burned, twice shy.”
“I’m going to hang up and listen. Call me when the SWAT team gets there.”
“Your voice-recognition program garbled some of your answer,” Berkmann says, “but I got the gist of it. What is Turner’s syndrome?”
“A genetic defect caused by a forty-five X-oh genotype, which prevents the ovaries from functioning. A classic Turner’s patient is a short fifteen-year-old girl with amenorrhea.”
“I’m glad you called, Drewe. I’ve been most anxious to speak with you.”
“And I with you. Probably for different reasons.”
I am pacing the office now, my whole body charged with anticipation.
“Perhaps not,” says Berkmann. “Are you at home?”
“Yes.”
“Using your husband’s computer?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“In and out. We’re arguing. I came home to pack.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my parents, for a start. After that, I don’t know.”
“Why are you leaving, Drewe?”
“I can’t stay here. You should know why.”
“Because your sister died there?”
“Because she was butchered here. By you.”
“No. I tried to save her.”
“Harper told me all about that.”
“Your husband is a liar. Nothing he says can be trusted.”
“He’s lied to me before. But I trust him in some things.”
“Harper killed Erin, Drewe.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“He set up a situation in which nothing else could happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know why my assistant and I came to your home?”
“To kill my sister.”
“No. Because I was lured by your husband.”
“He pretended to be a woman, right? To catch you.”
“Pretended to be a woman, yes, but not to catch me. Do you know what woman he pretended to be?”