Blood Memory

by Greg Iles

  “Why do you ask that?”

  Malik is watching me with compassion in his face. “I sense needs in certain people. I sense pain. It’s an empathic ability I’ve always had. More a burden than a gift, really.”

  “I don’t remember you as particularly empathetic. Or insightful, for that matter. Mostly I remember you as an arrogant smart-ass.”

  An understanding smile from the doctor. “You’re still an alcoholic, aren’t you? But you’re not an annoying drunk. No…a secret drinker.” His face wears the sad familiarity of a man for whom life holds no surprises. “Yes, that’s you. Publicly an overachiever, privately a mess.”

  I want to pull the microphone from the transmitter on my thigh. John Kaiser and the FBI wire team are the only ones hearing this now, but God only knows how many people will listen to the tape later.

  “I mentioned EMDR therapy earlier,” Malik says. “Have you heard of it?”

  I shake my head.

  “It stands for ‘eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.’ It’s a relatively new therapy that’s worked wonders for PTSD patients. It allows you safely to reexperience your trauma without becoming too distraught to handle the information. You might derive great benefit from that.”

  I’m not sure I’ve heard correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve obviously suffered severe trauma in your life, Catherine. You showed clear signs of PTSD when I knew you in Jackson. Similar to the Vietnam vets I was working with at the time. That’s another reason I noticed you.”

  I don’t want to let Malik know how close to the bone he’s come, but he has gotten me curious. “What kind of trauma do you think I suffered?”

  “The murder of your father, for a start. Beyond that, I have no idea. Merely living with him in the years prior to his death might have constituted severe stress.”

  I feel a rush of anxiety, as though my innermost thoughts have suddenly become visible to the man sitting in front of me. “What do you know about my father?”

  “I know he was wounded in Vietnam, and that he suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “How do you know that? Did Chris Omartian tell you that?”

  Another careworn smile. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  Malik leans back and sighs. “Well…perhaps we can go into more detail at another time.”

  “Why not now?”

  “We’re not exactly alone here.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” I say with bravado I don’t feel.

  “We all hide things, Catherine. Sometimes from ourselves.”

  His voice feels like a stiff finger probing the spongy tissue of my brain. “Look, if we’re ever going to talk about this, now’s the only chance we’re going to get.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I thought you might consider coming to me as a patient.”

  My scalp is tingling again. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m quite serious.”

  I cross my legs and try to keep my face impassive. “This is a joke, right? I don’t even know what I’m doing here, except that you used to hit on me when I was a stupid kid dating a man twenty-five years older than I was.”

  “And married,” Malik observes.

  “And married. So?”

  “You’re over that now, are you? Dating married men?”

  I don’t want to lie, but Sean is already in enough trouble. “Yes, I’m over it.”

  “A peccadillo of your student days? All behind you now?”

  “Go to hell. What is this?”

  “A frank conversation. Exchanging confidences is the basis of trust, Catherine.”

  “Exchanging? You haven’t told me a damn thing.”

  Malik gives me an expansive smile. “What would you like to know? We can trade stories. I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”

  “Is that something you do commonly with patients? Trade horror stories?”

  “I do whatever is required. I’m not afraid to experiment.”

  “Do you consider that ethical?”

  “In the benighted times in which we live, I consider it essential.”

  “All right, then. Let’s do some sharing. Your spiel about being the ferryman to the underworld sounded a little shopworn to me. The stuff about the holocaust was from the heart. You’re not just a bystander to sexual abuse, are you?”

  Malik looks more intrigued than angry. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I think you have some personal experience.”

  “You’re very perceptive.”

  “You were sexually abused as a child?”

  “Yes.”

  I feel a strange quivering in my limbs, as though from a mild electric shock. This is the stuff Kaiser wants and needs. “By whom?”

  “My father.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you repress the memory?”

  “No. But it destroyed me anyway.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  Malik gives another dismissive wave of his hand. “The actual abuse…what’s the point? It’s not the crimes against us that make us unique, but our responses. When I was sixteen, I talked to my older sister about what had happened to me. Tried to, anyway. I was very drunk. She didn’t believe me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sarah was married by then. She’d married at seventeen. To get out of the house, of course, the fastest way she could. I asked if our father had done anything like that to her. She was flabbergasted. Didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “Maybe she was just pretending she didn’t.”

  “No. Her eyes were blank as a doll’s. Two years later, I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. I did well there. I had a lot of rage inside, but also a desire to help people. A quite common paradox among abuse victims. They made me a medical corpsman, but I still managed to kill some Vietnamese.”

  “Vietcong?”

  Malik raises one eyebrow. “Dead Vietnamese were by definition Vietcong. Surely you know that.”

  “Why would I know that?”

  Another cryptic smile.

  My sense of emotional nakedness has returned. “Look, if you have something to say about my father, why don’t you get it out? You knew him, didn’t you?”

  “I know every man who served in Vietnam, more or less. We’re brothers under the skin.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Malik sighs. “I never knew your father.”

  “Are you speaking literally or figuratively?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Jesus. You were the same age, from the same state, and you both went to Vietnam—”

  “How much do you remember about the night your father died, Catherine?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I’d like to make it my business. I think I could help you with it. If you would trust me—”

  “I’m not here for therapy, Doctor.”

  “Are you sure? You look like you could use a drink. I have some Isojiman sake here. No vodka, I’m afraid.”

  How the hell does he know I drink vodka? Does he remember that from ten years ago? “Finish your story,” I tell him, trying to steer the conversation onto safe ground.

  “Did I not?”

  “Your sister had been abused, too, right? But she blocked out the memory?”

  Malik studies me for perhaps half a minute. Then he begins speaking softly. “During my tour in-country, I got a letter from Sarah. She’d been having nightmares for some time. But now she was having what she thought were hallucinations. While she was awake. Images of our father removing her clothes, touching her. Those were flashbacks, of course, not hallucinations. At the end of her letter, she told me she’d been thinking of harming herself. Of ending her life.”

  “What triggered all that? Your talking to her?”

  “No. She had a daughter by then, and the daughter had just turned three—probably the age at which my father began abusing Sarah. That’
s a very common trigger for delayed memory recall in young adult women.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to get compassionate leave to go back to the States. The army wasn’t having any. I wrote her letters every day, trying to keep up her spirits, pointing out all she had to live for. Some of it must have rung hollow, because I had my suicidal moments, too. I’d run to wounded men in the middle of firefights, when I was almost certain to catch a bullet. I ran through mortar fire, machine-gun fire, everything. They gave me a medal for my death wish. A Bronze Star. Anyway…my letters weren’t enough. The flashbacks got worse, and Sarah came to realize that she was seeing something that had really happened to her. She couldn’t bear that. She hanged herself while her husband and daughter were at the zoo.”

  Malik is no longer looking at me. His eyes have focused somewhere in the middle distance, and the glaze over them tells me his mind is far away. I don’t even presume to express my sympathy.

  “I want to know what I’m doing here,” I say quietly.

  The thinnest of smiles touches his lips, and then his eyes focus on mine at last. “So do I, Catherine.”

  It’s time to end any semblance of a charade. “I’m here because I think you killed those five men.”

  Malik’s eyes flicker above the smile. “Do you really?”

  “If you didn’t kill them, you know who did. And you’re protecting them.”

  “Them?”

  “Him, whatever. You get my point.”

  “Oh, Catherine. I expected so much more from you.”

  His condescension is finally too much for me to bear. “I think our murder victims are male relatives of your patients—sexual abusers—and that by killing them you see yourself as some kind of crusader against an evil you know only too well.”

  The psychiatrist watches me in silence. “What would you think of me if that were true? Pedophilia has the highest rate of recidivism of any crime. Abusers never stop, Catherine. They just move on to new victims. They cannot be rehabilitated.”

  “Are you saying that murdering them is justified?”

  “I’m saying that death or infirmity are the only things that will stop them.”

  I pray that the transmitter is relaying all this to Kaiser and the others.

  “Are you an expert shot, Doctor?”

  “I can hit what I aim at.”

  “Do you practice martial arts?”

  He glances at the samurai sword on the wall. “I could decapitate you with that before the SWAT team outside could get in here, if that’s what you mean.”

  A shudder goes through me. I glance at the closed door behind me, praying there’s a SWAT officer on the other side of it. I’ve forgotten the safety phrase. Something about football—

  I almost jump out of my chair when Malik stands, but he only folds his arms across his chest and looks at me with something like pity. “When you leave, remember that we’ve barely scratched the surface of this subject. We haven’t even discussed the guilty ones.”

  “The guilty ones?”

  He nods. “How can a holocaust happen in our midst without the community rising up to stop it?”

  “Well…”

  “Think about that, Catherine. I have things to do now. You can tell me your thoughts at our next meeting.”

  “There won’t be another meeting.”

  Malik smiles. “Of course there will. Much is going to come to you over the next few days. That’s the way it works.” He reaches back and takes something off a low table. Then he leans across the table that serves as his desk and holds it out.

  It’s a business card.

  Out of curiosity, I stand and take it. On it is printed Malik’s name, and beneath that two phone numbers.

  “Call me,” he says. “If they decide to jail me, don’t worry. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”

  The meeting is over. I walk to the door, then turn back one last time. Malik looks odd standing there, clad in black from head to toe, so still that he could be carved in stone. I’m not sure he blinked once during the entire interview.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” he says.

  Chapter

  18

  I’m sitting in the backseat of an FBI Crown Victoria, leaning against Sean as the car roars down West Esplanade, skirting Lake Pontchartrain on its way to the FBI field office. John Kaiser sits up front with a Bureau driver, speaking on a large cellular phone that encrypts every word spoken over it.

  “Find out everything you can about Malik’s sister and her death,” he orders someone at the field office. “Malik told Dr. Ferry she committed suicide. I want to know about his father, too, everything you can get. And get on the horn to the DOD. I want to know about Malik’s captivity in Cambodia, if he’s telling the truth about it. I didn’t see that mentioned in his record. It’s possible that he met one or more of the victims in a prison camp….”

  I tune out Kaiser’s voice and sit up straight on the seat. Throughout the meeting with Malik, I held up fine, but once outside, I began to shake like a soldier after his first battle.

  “You’ll be okay soon,” Sean assures me, squeezing my hand. “You did great.”

  “Did you hear it all?”

  “Every word. I think Malik could be the guy. No shit.”

  I close my eyes and grip the door handle. Every nerve feels as though there’s static electricity crackling along it. “I feel strange inside.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Shaky. I don’t really want to see anybody.”

  Sean grimaces. “They want to debrief you, babe. Can you handle that?”

  “I don’t know. Right now I feel like jumping out of this car.”

  He takes hold of my wrist, hard enough to restrain me if I try to jump. I’ve felt this compulsion before—during depressive episodes—and a couple of times I came close to doing it.

  “I’ll do anything you want, Cat. Just tell me.”

  Now Kaiser is talking to the chief of the NOPD. In about an hour, there’s going to be a hearing before a district judge, where the FBI will argue that Malik should be compelled to give up the names of his patients. Malik apparently intends to forgo legal representation and argue his own case. Kaiser seems confident that the judge will rule in the Bureau’s favor, but something tells me he may be underestimating his opponent. If not, I wonder if Malik will really go to jail rather than “betray” his patients.

  “Everything okay, Dr. Ferry?” Kaiser has hung up and turned in the seat so he can look back at me.

  “She can’t go to the field office right now,” Sean says.

  Kaiser’s eyes remain on me. “Why not?”

  “She’s too shaky. She’s needs some time to regroup.”

  The FBI agent nods, but his eyes are all business. “Look, it’s natural to lose it a little bit after something like that. We’ll take some time in my office, decompress before we talk to the SAC or anyone else.”

  I want to explain myself to him, but for some reason I can’t. Sean looks at me, then back at Kaiser. “You don’t understand, John. If she says she can’t go right now, she can’t.”

  Kaiser’s eyes probe me like a doctor’s hands. Again I’m reminded of the swimming coach I had as a girl. Hard eyes gauging my capacity to continue after sustaining an injury. “Are you saying you can’t do it?”

  “I wish the answer were different. I’m sorry. Maybe later on.”

  “Your office is only five minutes up the lakeshore from her house,” Sean says, as if Kaiser didn’t just leave my house an hour ago. “I’ll bring her over as soon as she’s feeling better.”

  Kaiser studies me a little longer, then glances at the driver. “Take us back to Dr. Ferry’s house.”

  I squeeze Sean’s hand in gratitude.

  “Do you mind answering a few questions for me now?” Kaiser asks, his eyes back on me.

  “No. Go ahead.”

  “Was your father ever captured while overseas?”

  “I don’t
think so. But I can’t be sure. He wouldn’t talk to us about what he went through. I mean, I was only eight when he died. But he never talked to my mother either. Or so she said.”

  “Maybe she was just trying to protect you from things she didn’t think you could handle.”

  A week ago I would have argued this, but after finding the bloodstains in my bedroom, I’m not sure of anything. For all I know, my mother, my grandfather, and Pearlie have been insulating me for years from realities I never suspected. Starting with the truth about my father’s death…

  “Malik still makes the distinction we all made in Nam,” Kaiser says to the agent driving the car. “You notice that?”

  “What distinction?” asks Sean.

  “Between where he is and the rest of the world. He says ‘back in the World,’ with a capital W, just like the grunts used to say it. Like he’s in a war now. A free-fire zone. A place where the normal rules are suspended.”

  “He was so calm,” I think aloud. “Most of the time, anyway. It was eerie.”

  “He wasn’t like that when you knew him before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The driver turns right, and Lake Pontchartrain appears on our left, steely blue and rolling with whitecaps. Not many sails today.

  “What’s your gut feeling about him?” Kaiser asks. “You looked him in the eyes, I didn’t. Did Malik kill those men?”

  A gull drops low over the road and dives toward the surface of the lake. “If you’re asking me whether I think he could do it, my answer is yes. I think he could kill without blinking an eye. But if you’re asking me whether he did—I can’t say. He seems above these murders somehow. He wouldn’t do it in anger. Not hot anger, anyway. If Malik is our killer, then everything we know about serials so far is going to be useless to us.”

  “I agree.”

  “What’s your gut feeling?” I ask.

  Kaiser looks thoughtful. “I used to be a profiler for the ISU at Quantico. I had a knack for it, but I had to quit. Either of you know that?”