Mortal Fear

God.”

“What would you say if I told you Edward Berkmann was the child of an incestuous relationship?”

“What type? Father-daughter?”

“Brother-sister.”

“I’ll look at what you have. What exactly do you want from me?”

“The police think Berkmann’s dead. I don’t.”

“Does Daniel think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t tell you whether he’s alive or dead, Cole.”

“I know that. I just want you to look at everything and, on the assumption that he’s still alive, try to predict what he’ll do.”

“That could be very difficult.”

“I only care about one thing. Will he run, or will he come back for me and my family?”

“Ah. I might be able to do that. Edward Berkmann. I could never have imagined it.”

“Wait till you see the video.”

Lenz’s voice recedes to a blurry distance. “Tell me, Cole, are you experiencing strong urges for revenge?”

“You know the answer to that. What about you?”

“I’d like to shave off his skin an ounce at a time.”

“You don’t sound that angry.”

“I’m not a demonstrative man. But contrary to what you saw when you met her, my wife was once a beautiful and gracious woman.”

“I believe you.”

“The man who killed her so brutally should pay for what he did.”

“If he’s still alive.”

“Fax your pages through. Overnight a copy of the video. It may take some time. Some of my case materials were stolen the night my wife died. I’ll call you when I have something.”

“One second, Doctor. What are the mills of the gods?”

“The mills of the gods?”

“It must be a quote or something. He told me to remember the mills of the gods.”

“Ah. It is a quote. ‘The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind to powder.’ ”

“Meaning?”

“It may take a while, but we all get what’s coming to us.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Lenz hung up without a word.

I rewound Berkmann’s video, plugged a blank VHS tape into my VCR, and started dubbing a copy. Then I called Sheriff Buckner’s office and again demanded that he provide round-the-clock security for the Anderson family, and also for me. He told me he already had people on Bob’s house (for political reasons, I knew) and that he would assign one deputy to watch my house after dark.

The last shell of the afternoon exploded thirty minutes later. I was lying on the sofa in the front room, trying to stay awake, when the phone rang in my office. I heaved myself up and went in to screen the call, sure it would be another reporter trying to worm his way into the story.

When Drewe’s voice came from the answering machine, gooseflesh rose on my arms. “It’s me” was all she said, but those two words affected me more deeply than Berkmann’s whole twisted tirade. I reached for the receiver, then froze as her next words tumbled out of the machine.

“Please don’t pick up if you’re there. Please, I mean it. I’m calling to ask you-to tell you-that you shouldn’t come to the funeral tomorrow. Daddy’s gone to pieces. He’s at the funeral home right now, sitting a vigil over Erin’s body like they did in the old days. He won’t let anyone else do it. It’s almost like he’s trying to protect her, even though it’s too late. I shouldn’t care what happens to you, but for your sake, and for his, please don’t go to the funeral. Please. Daddy needs to blame someone for what happened, and you’re the most convenient target.”

She paused, and I stood like a condemned man in the hiss of blank tape. “As far as what you told me… I can’t even think about it. But I know it’s true. Maybe I’ve always known it. Don’t call me, Harper. I mean that. Don’t try to see me, and don’t come to the funeral. If you have any respect left for me, don’t come. Good- bye.”

I snatched up the phone then, yelling, “Drewe! Wait!” but she clicked off even before I got the words out. Blinking like a punch-drunk fighter, I heard a horn honk outside.

From the window I watched a white sheriff’s cruiser pull into our drive. Its driver executed a three-point turn and parked nose-out toward the highway. Buckner must have decided I rated daylight security as well.

Now I lie on Drewe’s bed, my face buried in her pillow, trying to catch the scent of her like some lovesick teenager. But I’m no teenager. I’m a heartsick man who broke his own rule and told the truth, only to find out he was a fool for doing it or else did it too late.

Fatigue conjures strange thoughts. I once believed that all men existed on a continuum of behavior, some leaning to the moral side, others the immoral or even amoral, yet all having the capacity through circumstance to end up at either extreme. It’s a common conceit, I suppose, the idea that but for the grace of God or fate or chance, any of us could be walking in anyone else’s shoes. But as the ticking of my brain slows, an onslaught of images from the Berkmann tape assails me, none more monstrous than the desecration of Erin’s corpse by the grotesque death waltz. Hovering in that half-waking state on the ledge of sleep, I realize that on this earth walk beings who inhabit the shells of men but are not men. They are Other. And somewhere deep within me, in the cells of my blood, pulses a cold current of preverbal knowledge, a tribal memory absorbed and distilled to savage instinct, needing no voice to speak with all-consuming power: That which is Other must be destroyed.

CHAPTER 44

Drewe told me not to go to Erin’s funeral, but she said nothing about the burial. The funeral service was at three p.m. It’s nearly four-thirty as I drive into the Cairo County cemetery through the back entrance, passing the long utility shed surrounded by yellow backhoes and a rusted fleet of lawn mowers. The cemetery superintendent’s office looks like a good place to conceal the Explorer from casual view.

As I make for the small building, I think of Miles. He called this morning to give me an update on the hunt for Berkmann’s hidden killing house. Baxter’s teams have been searching the area surrounding the Connecticut airstrip, but Miles, always the contrarian, has been combing the streets of Harlem and Washington Heights, moving in concentric semicircles away from the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, which backs against the Hudson River like an island of succor rising from the squalor of the upper Hundreds.

Parking the Explorer behind the superintendent’s office, I get my guitar case out of the back and begin walking slowly toward the Anderson family plot. It lies a hundred yards to the west. I’ve been there many times with Drewe. Five generations of Andersons rest in that ground, from infants who died of diphtheria to soldiers who survived whatever war fell to them and returned to the Delta to die of old age. Today it is marked by the green pavilion tent of Marsaw’s Funeral Home, which rises out of the ground like a general’s field headquarters amid an army of stones. From the west comes the invading force, the living, a seemingly endless line of slow-moving automobiles fronted by an advance guard of dark-suited infantry. I select a mausoleum for temporary cover, a thick-walled edifice of marble and stone about sixty yards from the funeral tent. Two stone vases adorn its wrought-iron door, and one of them makes a serviceable stool.

Erin’s burial is like most others I’ve seen, only larger. The entire town of Rain is present, a blue-brown blanket of polyester dotted by the dark silks of expensively clothed people from Vicksburg and Greenville and Clarksdale and Memphis. I see several doctors from Jackson-colleagues of Drewe’s or Patrick’s-and at the