Come on, Bertie. Take the bait.A covert narcissist should be chomping at the bit to have a book written about their supposed life experience. He can indulge me in every lie he’s been desperate to tell, make himself the innocent victim, and that’s when he’ll make a mistake. He’ll accidentally tell the truth. Yes, I’ll have to wade through thousands of pages of bullshit and lies, but I’ll find the pearl in that polluted sea.
He shakes his head, exasperated—but, I note, not entirely resistant to the idea. His body language suggests he’sbeen listening. “Why do you want to help me? Why are you so bloody persistent?”
“It isn’t about helping you,” I say coolly. “It’s about getting to the truth. That’s my line of business.”Truer than you realize.“And sure, there’s something in it for me. It could make my career.”
He stands and then strides across the living room with such gravity that I think he’ll shove me back out into the foyer. But instead, he sits beside me, leans in so closely that I can smell his aftershave, like breathing in cedarwood smoke on a cold winter night.
He opens his mouth, and my eyes go to his beard, the smoothness of his lips, the square jaw. It’s a shame that he chose sketchy business dealings as his bread and butter, I think, because he could have made a small fortune as a model. But a small fortune wasn’t enough, I suppose. He wanted it all.
When he touches my chin, I look up into his eyes, startled by their softness. Oh, he’s good. He’s done this countless times before. This is a manipulation tactic. These are the eyes Annie looked into as he killed her.
How did you do it, Bertram? Give me something I can work with.
“All right,” he says, almost as though he’s reading my thoughts. “I’ll tell you about Annie. But you can’t write it down.”
“What would be the point of that?” I ask. I have to clear my throat before the words come out.
“You’re a writer, Margaux,” he says. “Surely you know the importance of context.”
“If I don’t write it, there’s no story,” I say.
“I assure you there is.”
Christ, his voice is so smooth. All I do is nod. I sense that something important is about to be shared, and I don’t want to compromise it by saying the wrong thing.
“I was never very adventurous growing up,” he begins. “Polite, quiet. I’d never even been out of the country until I’d attended college and then started pitching my app to software developers. Not the successful one, but another idea I’d had that never went anywhere.”
Interesting. So, he tried to make it on his own before stealing from his sister. But he doesn’t mention his sister—I suppose he wouldn’t.
“Annie was studying at Oxford. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor. But she was far too restless to commit to any one area of study.”
He sits back, crossing one arm behind his head as he eases into the couch. His lean, muscular physique is captured by the morning sunlight through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“What she saw in me, I may never know. I hadn’t ever had time for romance before. I was barely twenty at the time, and I’d spent my whole life studying. I’d never even been kissed.”
This has to be a lie, I think. Bertram, for all his faults, is a natural beauty. There are no photos of him online before his thirties, and I try to picture him as an awkward, shy college freshman, to no avail.
Then again, apart from Annie and Skylar, nobody has come out claiming to have dated him, or to have any sort of past with him at all. No childhood friends, neighbors, ex-lovers. It could be that he existed in a loner’s vacuum allhis life—that certainly fits the profile of many notorious criminals. Or it could be that he’s gathered up a portion of his fortune to pay them all off. A few thousand dollars would barely be a drop in the bucket for him.
“With Annie and me, the attraction was instant,” he goes on. “I don’t mean romantic strolls through a garden or lovely picnics in a park.” He closes his eyes, remembering. “I mean wild, frantic, ridiculous passion. Something out of a tawdry romance novel.”
He stops speaking, and I try to read the expression on his face. Pained, yet fond. Longing with desperation and despair. He’s either a world-class actor or telling me the truth. As ever, I still can’t work out which one it is. I could swear he’s a bit embarrassed, too. Like recounting the details to me is baring his soul.
“I tried to resist her at first,” he says. “My parents wouldn’t have approved of me settling down so young. They wanted me to focus on work.”
“But you were an adult,” I say.
“That hardly mattered to them.” He opens his eyes and looks at me now, some of that long-ago memory still living there. A part of him will always be a young man in love—or so he wants me to think. I can’t reconcile my confusion. I want to believe him, which is rare in my line of work.
I lean in. “What made her so irresistible?” I ask.
He opens his mouth to speak. Then, from the kitchen, something begins to beep in a shrill, repetitive pattern. He sighs. “Excuse me,” he says, standing. “I’ve just backed this startup company, and they’ve sent me a prototype for their coffee machine. But it’s been firing off random alerts. I’ll unplug it.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “Mind if I use the restroom?”
“Of course. You remember where it is.”
As I walk down the hallway, I wonder how many others have been in his apartment enough times to know where the bathroom is. I pulled up all of his live streams online and never saw any indication of another person, no noises coming from another room. It doesn’t appear that he ever talks to his family or has any friends. His social media presence is clinical, business only. Although thousands of people post questions and replies, he never tags anyone socially. He only follows companies and public figures.
