“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 on- line.”
“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 lightheaded. 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
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
