Mortal Fear

“The husk falls away,” he said.

Then he lifted his left arm above his head as if holding something in his clenched fist, cocked his right arm at his side, and became utterly still. Every muscle in his body defined itself in bas-relief beneath his alabaster flesh. Without ever seeing the actual statue, I knew that I was looking at Cellini’s Perseus.

I was still trying to take in the enormity of Berkmann’s madness when he burst into fluid motion, whirling from one edge of the video frame to the other. It could have been a ritual dance or the mindless flailings of a lunatic. His voice, so resonant before, became an atonal blare, howling syllables that my mind could not form into any known language. I had the sense that I’d stumbled into a hillbilly Pentecostal church where men and women rolled on the floor with poisonous snakes and gibbered in tongues. But the man on my television screen was no hillbilly.

I started in the chair when he ducked down and came up with Erin’s body in his arms. Without missing a beat, he began twirling her corpse around the room in a grotesque parody of a waltz. Erin’s head hung limp on her chest, like the head of a broken bird. Berkmann held her in perfect ballroom position as he danced, and it struck me that he must possess demonic strength to hold a dead body suspended that way. Each time he wheeled toward the camera, he made sure his eyes met the lens, boring into mine as I gaped at the knife wound in Erin’s back. Finally- as though from boredom rather than fatigue-he danced Erin’s body over to the corner and gently laid it behind my bed, where Drewe would later discover it.

I thought I might have to run to the bathroom to be sick, but Berkmann stopped me by prancing up to the camera and aiming it toward my bed. Staying within the camera’s field of view, he walked to the bed, reached up over it, and took one of my guitars down from the wall. It was a Martin, a prewar model I’d bought with one of my first big trading checks. Berkmann looked back at the camera and said, “ You’re the singer, aren’t you?”

Then he pressed the instrument against his stomach as if coupling with it. It took me a second to realize what he was doing. He had slipped his uncircumcised penis to the side of the strings-into the sound hole-and begun urinating loudly, all the while watching me with rapture on his face.

“What a lovely sound,” he said. Then he cackled.

When he finished, he shook himself off and hung the guitar exactly where he’d found it. I glanced away from the TV screen long enough to verify that the Martin was still there. It was.

“Oh,” he said, as though he’d forgotten to leave a tip in a restaurant. He went to his discarded clothes and took something from a pocket. It looked like a long metal film canister. He straightened up and hefted it in his hand like a man feeling the weight of a cigar. “I harvested these before I realized Erin wasn’t who I thought she was. I saw she wasn’t menstruating, and took a chance she might be ovulating. No point in keeping them now, of course.”

He walked back to the bed and opened one end of the canister. A cloud of pale vapor swirled out. Then he leaned over the bed, slid the open end of the canister into the sound hole of the guitar he had urinated into, and shook the contents into it.

As rapidly as the manic phase had come over him, it ended, leaving only the demonic intensity and the frigid blue eyes. He stepped very close to the lens, so that his blurred face filled the frame, and said, “Save this tape, Harper. We’re forever joined now, we whose lovers killed each other. You can’t show it to anyone, though, can you? Not unless you want to acknowledge Holly.” His breath fogged the lens. “Do you want to do that?”

He pulled back then, and as his cruel smile faded he said with the gravity of a prophet: “Remember, Harper. We are all broken from within.”

Then he reached up to the camera and the screen went black.

After my heartbeat steadied, I stood up and took the treasured Martin down from the wall, walked out the back door, and laid it faceup in the yard. Then I went to the utility shed, got a gasoline can, and doused the guitar from head to strap peg. With newspaper and matches from the kitchen, I began tossing flaming balls of paper at the Martin from the back door. The third one hit the seasoned wooden face, and eighteen thousand dollars worth of handmade guitar and part of my sister-in-law exploded into fire. The sounds the Martin made as it died were like bones breaking and tendons snapping, and in ten minutes there was nothing left but tuning pegs and charred steel strings.

Miles and Daniel Baxter were standing outside Berkmann’s Manhattan brownstone when I called Miles’s rented cellular. Baxter was about to leave for Connecticut, to oversee the search for Berkmann’s killing house, which he thought might be in the area of the Darien airstrip. Baxter thought Berkmann’s frankness about his identity on the videotape indicated that he’d left my house with the intention of fleeing the country. I didn’t explain that Berkmann thought I would never mention the tape to the FBI. Instead, I pointed out that he had been flying north, not south, when his plane went down.

Baxter asked me to overnight the original tape to him at Quantico. I agreed, though I intended to send him a VHS copy, appropriately edited. Baxter also thought Berkmann’s knife wound lent some credence to the plane crash scenario.

Miles disagreed, but I couldn’t tell whether he’d used logic to form that opinion or whether he was merely hoping Berkmann had survived the crash so that he could kill him with his own hands.

After hanging up, I shuffled through my desk drawer until I found the number I wanted, then dialed McLean, Virginia. The phone rang ten times before Arthur Lenz answered.

“I have no interest in talking to you,” he said.

“I don’t believe you, Doctor.”

“Believe it. You’re speaking to a chastened man.”

“So are you. Are you up to date on the EROS case?”

“Daniel has cut off my information. He says it’s for my own good.”

“So you don’t know what happened last night?”

“I still have a few loyal friends in the Unit. You’re referring to the murder of a Mrs. Graham and an unknown female of Indian descent?”

“Yes. Did you know that Mrs. Graham was my wife’s sister? The ‘Erin’ I told you about in your car?”

A brief silence. “The mother of your child?”

“Right.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then you don’t know it was me who drew the killer straight to her.”

“Drew him how?”

“By doing exactly what you did.”

“Pretending to be a female EROS client?”

“Yes. Erin Graham, to be exact. I used my own guilty secret as bait, but I told it from her point of view.”

“And you succeeded where I failed.”

“All I succeeded in doing was getting someone I cared about killed.”

“No. You fooled Strobekker, didn’t you? He believed you were actually the woman he went to kill.”

I suddenly realized Lenz had no idea that Berkmann had been identified. “Look, I’m calling because I’ve got about twenty pages of conversation between myself and the killer. I’ve also got a video of him that looks like something from a Fellini film. I’d like you to look at it.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because his whole background is there. His entire family going back three generations. It’s got to be a gold mine in terms of forensic psychiatry.”

Lenz said nothing.

“He’s a third-generation physician, Doctor.”

A sharp intake of air.

“Nobody told you that? Baxter has a team of shrinks going over his house right now.”

“They know who he is?”

“Yep. No more UNSUB. His name is Edward Berkmann.”

“Edward Berkmann!”

“Know him?”

“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