Mortal Fear (53 page)

Ease up, ace! Deputy Daniels says from the front seat.

Ive got to talk to her! I yell, yanking the handle again and again.

Looks like the lady dont want to talk to you.

I smash my fists against the wire mesh in blind rage.

Break em if you want, champ, Daniels says lazily. I seen it lots of times.

Outside, Drewe has paused in the rain-beaded brilliance of the floodlights. She stands like a refugee, looking back at the car with her bag in her left hand and her right raised to shield her eyes. I press my hands to the window as if to bridge the gulf between us by force of will. Her face is a ghostly decoupage of fragmented emotion: trust shattered, love blasted into confusion, unity into terrible apartness. She waits a moment longer, then backs slowly away from the car, away from me, toward the house of her parents, and of her childhood. The cruiser is moving now, backing quickly down the drive. I fight to keep her in sight. With my fingers locked in the wire screen, I watch her melt through the silver wall of rain.

In the past twenty-six hours, revelations have detonated like artillery shells being marched across a trench position. I havent slept at all. When Deputy Daniels and I got back to my house last night, we found Sheriff Buckner and his demoralized posse standing around their cruisers. Theyd stormed the house and found no killer. They did find a rat blown to pieces by Billy Jacksons shotgun. Billys second shot had fractured an electrical conduit pipe, blowing out the lights in the tunnel. A surgeon in Jackson soon confirmed that the bullet in Billys thigh had probably come from his partners gun. The consensus was that Brahma had never been in the tunnel at all.

Buckner put me in his car and questioned me all the way to Yazoo City. After we got there he questioned me some more. In between questions he bawled me out for scrubbing the blood from my office and contaminating his crime scene. I was still in his office when a tugboat captain discovered the wreckage of a downed Beechcraft Baron in the Mississippi River.

The captain believed the plane had crashed in the river, sunk, skated along the bottom for a while, then ridden up his anchor cable after hanging up on it. At dawn I rode with Buckner out to the levee west of Lamont to look at the wreck. The damage was serious, but less extensive than wed been led to believe. Buckner figured the pilot had tried an emergency landing on the spur levee near Scott and accidentally gone into the water, or else had attempted to ditch in the river.

The cockpit was empty.

We all knew the missing body meant nothing. I once saw a New York college kid leap into the Mississippi
River from a paddle wheeler in New Orleans, as a prank. He thought he could easily swim the half mile to shore. He drowned screaming for help in front of three thousand people, Southerners who knew the river far too well to try to swim out to the fool who was dying to set the price of ignorance. A search began immediately, but the boys body was never found. It would probably be the same with Brahma, unless he happened to wash up somewhere like Vicksburg or Baton Rouge before he was shunted out into the Gulf along with the other refuse of the river.

Still, I knew something Buckner didnt. If Brahma had told me the truth on-line, he was an accomplished swimmer. And that gave me a serious dilemma. If I told Buckner about the swimming, he would demand to know how I knew. And if I confessed that Id been in direct contact with the killer and had kept it to myself, he would undoubtedly arrest me as an accessory to murder.

I told him nothing.

Sometime during this Kafkaesque marathon, a tow-truck driver discovered a heavy leather case containing surgical instruments wedged behind the Beechcrafts pilots seat. It contained several scalpelssome of which had blood on thema video camera, and a long high-tech-looking instrument that the driver didnt recognize. From the description, I knew it could only be the neuroendoscope Miles had described the night before.

Buckner thought the abandoned instrument case bolstered the crash theory. He believed Brahmas body and any light gear had been flushed out of the cockpit during or after the crash, leaving only the heavy case inside. When I argued that Brahma might conceivably have left the case behind to create just that impressionand then demanded round-the-clock security on Bob Andersons house and my ownthe sheriff released me, on the understanding that I would return home and remain there, or else at the Andersons. I didnt say so, but I suspected it would be a long time before Id be welcome in the Anderson house again.

The morning sun was high when I got home. The interior of the house reeked of tear gas, my office of Clorox. The deputies had torn the place to pieces during their raid
and the subsequent search. Armed with my .38, I went out to the utility shed and got a stout two-by-six plank, which I sawed in half and hammered across the pantry door with the heaviest nails I could find. Satisfied that no one could enter the house by that route without my hearing them, I walked back into the office.

My answering machine showed nineteen messages. I hit the button and collapsed into my swivel chair to listen. The first nine were from TV reporters, some from Mississippi stations, others from Louisiana, even one from CNN. The tenth was from Daniel Baxter. He cussed me for about a minute, telling me hed intended to send an FBI evidence team down to go over my house, until Sheriff Buckner informed him that Id effectively destroyed the crime scene. I fast-forwarded through more messages from reporters, then stopped as Miless voice crackled from the speaker.

His message said to call him immediately at a New York number I didnt recognize. His voice sounded strange, like a loud whisper. Too tired to rise from the chair, I rolled over to the answering machine, picked up its cordless receiver, and dialed the number. After two rings, the same whisper said:

Yeah?

Miles?

Harper? Still the whisper.

Yeah, where are you?

You wont believe me.

Goddamn it, Miles.

Im in Brahmas house.

My heart thudded in my chest. What?

Im in his
house
. In his bedroom.

What the hells happening?

Remember the serial number from Brahmas Microsoft program? The beta version? The FBI was talking to Microsoft, but its the weekend and they were going through channels. I have a friend in Redmond who was on the development team. He bypassed the red tape. Turns out this particular disk was given to the Columbia University School of Medicine in 1992 for beta testing.

I heard only my own breathing as my mind made
the connection. Drewes theory again. Columbia and neurosurgeons.

As soon as I got that, he went on, I hacked into the med school computers and got a list of departments that participated in the beta test. I narrowed that to specialties dealing with the brain. That gave me twenty-three doctors. On the chance that the family history Brahma gave you was true, I selected the obvious German surnames. There were eight, and five of those were Jewish. I culled those because Brahmas German uncle definitely didnt sound Jewish. That left three names. Drner, Thiele, and Berkmann. Before I checked their personnel files, I took a chance that the Christian names Brahma gave you might be real. Rudolf, remember? Son Richard? A psychiatrist? Miles waited a beat. Well, it hit.

Youre kidding.

Rudolf Edward Berkmann, age forty-seven. Neurobiologist and neurosurgeon. Father Richard, a psychiatrist and another Columbia alum. Berkmanns on the
faculty
, Harper. His curriculum vitae even noted that his grandfather was Rudolf Berkmann, a distinguished New York surgeon.

Good God.

He goes by Edward. You want to guess what Edwards subspecialty is?

The pineal gland?

No. Berkmann is world renowned for building a 3-D computer model of the brain. Hes been working on it since the seventies. I accessed the Columbia library and found dozens of articles and abstracts from medical journals. In the last twenty years this guy has sliced up over four hundred human brains, all to establish the base values for his model. Fifteen hundred slices per brain, frozen like chicken livers. Now Berkmann collates all brain research around the world and integrates it into the model, which is constantly updated. The thing can be used to map neurochemical reactions, project the progress of tumors, practice surgery, train medical students. Theyre even using it with prototype telesurgery systems.

Miles was speaking almost too fast for me to absorb his words.

Dont you see? Berkmann would have been one of the first to learn about the foreign pineal research Drewe told us about. Melatonin, the transplants affecting aging, all that. Think of the deal he could do with those doctors. In exchange for early access to their findings, he could offer to integrate them into his model, thus giving the work legitimacy in the U.S. Of course, once he got hold of their data, he simply initiated his own transplant program, using humans instead of animals.

Miles, tell me Daniel Baxter knows all this.

Hes upstairs right now, going through Berkmanns stuff.

A gasp of relief escaped my lips. Id had visions of Miles sitting alone with a flashlight in the chamber of horrors that must be Brahmas house.

I found the place myself, Miles explained. But Brahma wasnt here. You should see this house, Harper. Its the brownstone from the story he told you, but its a
palace
now. Its not four blocks from Lutece. Ive seen some stunning New York homes, but this place... the art alone is worth a fortune. Most of its Indian, sculpture he and his father must have smuggled out of the country. Anyway, it was a choice between physically breaking in or getting Baxters help. I was worried they had agents tailing me anyway, so I called him.

I cant believe he let you in the house.

I made him promise to let me see the computers before Id tell him anything.

What did you find?

This isnt Berkmanns main base. I know that, because theres no voice-recognition stuff here. There was a brief, pregnant silence. Then Miles said, But I found the answers, Harper. The very bottom of the thing.

What are you talking about?

The reason for the murders. Why they were committed the way they were. Drewe was right about pineal transplants being the object of the killings. But she was completely wrong about the resources it would take to perform one. The way Berkmann has it laid out, its practically a one-man procedure. I think he only used those Indian doctors for anesthesiology and tissue typing.

How do you know that?

Theres a Sun SparcStation here in the study. Theres a version of his brain model in it. The graphics are some of the best Ive ever seen

Get to it, Miles.

Theres a series of surgical procedures modeled here. Im still learning the program, but the harvesting procedure is based around that instrument I told you about, the neuroendoscope. In some ways its pretty much like Drewe guessed. Berkmanns mapped out four different approaches to the pineal gland. One is based on spinal fluid pathways. He makes one small incision in the back of the neck, then passes the scope through the cisterna magna, the foramen magnum, the fourth ventricle, the Aqueduct of Sylvius, and right into the third ventricle, home of the pineal gland. He can do the whole harvest in
fifteen minutes
.

Jesus.

Hang with me now. Another route is the sublabialtranssphenoidal approach, which Drewe told us about. Another is through the soft palate in the roof of the mouth, then along the brain stem. The last is

Through the optic foramen, I finish. After removing the eyeball.

Exactly. Drewe was right about that part. Berkmann used a different surgical route with each victim, and the only evidence he was ever there was the track of his scope. It was
easy
to mask it. The back-of-the-neck route was Nashville. He fired a nine-millimeter bullet right along his track. Sublabial route was New York, shotgun blast to the face. The optic foramen route was San Francisco

Stakes driven through the empty eye sockets.

Right.

But San Francisco and L.A. were linked by pathologists. They found pineal tissue in both cases. Did Brahma screw up those procedures?

No! This is the beautiful part of it, Harper, the part Drewe missed. The pineal gland is endocrine tissue. It has what they call constant anatomy. That means you dont need the whole gland for it to function. And once its
inside the recipient, it doesnt even need a direct blood supply!

What?

Once the scope was in the donorwho was already deadBrahma used a biopsy forceps to pull out
part
of the pineal. Its just grainy wet stuff. He calls it pineal homogenate. To transplant it into the recipient, he anesthetizes the patient, then drills a small hole in the upper part of the breastbone, called the manubrium, which gives him access to the thymus

Just like the mouse transplants?

Exactly. After he locates the thymus, he injects the pineal homogenate into it with a large-bore needle. The thymus has access to the circulatory system. So as long as the pineal tissue isnt rejected, it begins to function normally. You see what I mean about simplicity?

I cant believe it.

Drewe was wrong about tissue viability too. Berkmann has projections here about the viability of frozen homogenate. Its patterned after the way they bank bone marrow for transplants.

Miles sounded almost out of breath. We both sat in silence, trying to integrate the new information with what we had theorized up to that point. In some ways his discoveries changed everything. But in others, nothing.

The cops down here think Berkmanns dead, I said. What does Baxter think?

He doesnt accept a death until he sees the body. Do you think hes dead?

Its hard for me to imagine it. What does Dr. Lenz think?

Lenz is out of the loop. The shrink theyre using now is studying your printouts like a lost book of the Bible. Hes full of shit. He thinks Berkmanns ultimate plan is to resurrect a corpse by transplanting a healthy pineal into it. His mothers, for example.

What?

Baxter actually has people watching Catherine Berkmanns grave right now. Its right here in New York.

Christ, thats not Brahmas thing.

I know that. This guys locked into known paradigms,
man. Believe it or not, theyve caught serial killers before by staking out graves.