by Greg Iles
Malik was right. The Thibodeaux Motel is a dump. A low strip of rooms with a sagging roof and a row of bright orange doors. Three vehicles in the parking lot, all wrecks. I park four doors down from room eighteen and get out. The air stinks of aviation fuel and fast food. There’s plenty of traffic on Williams, but if I hold the Walther along my right leg, it’s almost invisible.
A 727 roars low overhead as I walk toward the door. Raising my left hand to knock, I hear the sound of rain sweeping toward me. It can rain without a moment’s notice in New Orleans, but today the asphalt is baking in bright sunlight. It’s my hallucination again…rain on a tin roof. The rattling sound is louder than the cars passing on the road thirty yards away.
Screw it. The end of that hallucination is on the other side of this door.
I chamber a round in the Walther, then knock hard on the orange door. It moves inward a few inches with the force of my blow.
“Dr. Malik?”
No reply.
Now I wish I’d called Sean. This is where pride gets you. Bringing my gun to chest level, I kick open the door and rush into the room, checking the corners for threats.
The room looks just as I imagined it: ratty green carpet, two double beds, a TV on a stand, a lavatory beneath a mirror on the far wall.
No Malik.
I cross the room and kick open the bathroom door, the Walther extended in front of me.
Malik is lying in the bathtub. He’s fully clothed—all in black, of course—and the white tiles above his bald head are spattered with blood and brain matter.
My initial shock balloons into terror when I realize the blood is still running down the tile. Whoever killed Malik could still be close by. As I whirl back toward the room, the gun in Malik’s right hand registers in my mind.
Suicide?
I can’t believe that.
But then I see the skull in his lap. It’s a human skull, entirely stripped of flesh, boiled clean like the skulls used to teach orthopedics. Malik is cradling it in his hands as he might an infant. Springs and screws hold the mandible to the maxilla, and the arteries and veins have been painted in red and blue across the white plates of bone. The skull wears the slightly ironic grin of all its kind, but this particular skull, I sense, is trying to tell me something. There’s a reason it’s here, and it wants me to know it.
I look at Malik’s face for some clue, but he can’t even help himself now. The psychiatrist’s once piercing eyes are as dead as those in a stuffed deer head. As I stare, searching in vain for some explanation, Malik’s chest heaves violently, and his head flies forward as if pulled on a string.
The Walther jerks in my hand.
The bathroom booms like a bomb-testing chamber.
Everything goes white.
Chapter
42
I’m snow-blind.
Lost in a sea of white, my head pounds incessantly from the cold. Far in the distance, someone calls my name.
“Dr. Ferry…? Catherine!”
The voice is familiar, but I can’t see anyone.
The wind stings my face.
A flash of darkness spears through the white, and then dirty-yellow light frames a blurry face. “Dr. Ferry? Can you hear me?”
Yes…over here.
“Cat? It’s John Kaiser. Special Agent John Kaiser.”
It is. It’s John Kaiser. His hazel eyes hover only inches over mine.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I don’t know. We’re hoping you can tell us.”
Blinking rapidly against the yellow light, I try to see who “we” is, and where I am. I seem to be propped against a bathtub, my hips beneath a commode, my legs splayed out in an open doorway. There’s a paramedic behind Kaiser, and behind him I see the dark face of Carmen Piazza, commander of the NOPD Homicide Division. Piazza looks angry.
“Are you wounded?” Kaiser asks. “They can’t find any injuries, but you were unconscious.”
“My head hurts. How did you get here?”
“Don’t worry about that. How did you get here?”
I turn to make sure Malik’s corpse is still lying in the tub behind me. It is. “Dr. Malik wanted me to meet him here. I came.”
“Jesus,” mutters Captain Piazza. “Did you hear that? Did you fucking hear that?”
Kaiser shakes his head. “Did Malik try to kill you, Cat?”
No, I almost say aloud. But fortunately my common sense has survived whatever happened to me. “I want a lawyer.”
Kaiser looks disappointed. “Do you need a lawyer?”
“I don’t know. Can you promise not to arrest me?”
He glances back at Piazza, then looks at me again. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Then I want a lawyer.”
He stands and tells the paramedic to check me out. While that happens, I hear someone clearing people from the murder scene. Then I hear Captain Piazza’s voice, low and furious, while Kaiser tries to mollify her with a sonorous baritone.
“Can you walk?” asks Kaiser. He’s standing in the door again.
“I think so.”
“Then walk with me.”
I get to my feet and, after a last look at Malik and the skull in his lap, follow Agent Kaiser into the parking lot. That skull is bothering me, but I don’t have time to ponder it now. The parking lot that was empty before is nearly full, with NOPD squad cars, an ambulance, a coroner’s wagon, and unmarked detectives’ cars. Kaiser walks me about twenty yards along the row of rooms, far enough so that no one will hear us.
“Listen to me, Cat. I came to this scene directly from another one. Our UNSUB hit his sixth victim.”
“Who was it?”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“We haven’t caught our killer yet. Why should he stop?”
“You didn’t think Malik was the killer?”
“I wouldn’t have come here if I did.”
Kaiser studies me for some time. I glance back at the room and see Piazza talking to two detectives. She gestures at me, and the detectives both stare in my direction. They look like a pair of pit bulls awaiting a command from their master.
“Same crime signature on victim six?” I ask.
“Yes. Two gunshots, bite marks, the same message on the wall. ‘My work is never done.’ But while we were working the scene, task force headquarters got a call telling us Malik was hiding out here.”
“Anonymous again?”
“Yes.”
“Your caller is your killer, John.”
Kaiser looks at me like a stern father. “Tell me about Group X.”
“You didn’t learn anything from the two patients you have?”
“We don’t have them anymore. Both women disappeared this morning. Maybe last night, I don’t know. What I don’t get is how they knew to run. I checked their phone records; no one suspicious called them.”
“Talk to everyone who called them,” I say, realizing that Ann may now be the only person who can tell us who the members of Group X are—other than the women themselves. Unless Malik’s documentary can be found. Could he have had it in the motel room with him?
“We’re checking everybody,” Kaiser says. “But you know more than you’ve told me.”
“You keep me out of jail, we’ll talk.”
“That might not be possible.”
“You need me to solve this case. Who’s victim number six, John?”
He seems to debate whether to answer. Then he says, “A police officer. That’s all I’m going to tell you right now, and I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“So why did you?”
“Because I need to know what you know about what happened here. If you lawyer up because you’re paranoid, we’re going to lose time we’ll never get back. If you have nothing to hide—nothing relevant to this case, anyway—then you don’t have anything to lose by talking to me.”
I want to talk to him, but I know that an FBI agent, despite his best intentions, can’t prevent
the NOPD from arresting me for murder if they decide to do it. On the other hand, I can only benefit from Kaiser’s support.
“What did you want from Malik?” he asks.
“I came to find out what my aunt’s connection to Malik was. And also some things about my past.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He was dead when I got here.”
“Why were you unconscious?”
“My head feels like somebody hit me.”
“Your gun’s been fired. The bullet went into Malik’s chest.”
An icy spark shoots through me. Could I have killed Malik by accident? No…His death spasm in the tub comes back to me in a sickening rush. “If that’s true, he was already dead when I shot him. Or close to dead. The autopsy should prove that. He had a nerve spasm, and it scared the shit out of me. I fired by accident.”
Kaiser watches Piazza over my shoulder for several seconds. Then he takes my arm and says, “Listen to me. Listen like you never listened in your life, and tell me the goddamned truth. Okay?”
“I’m listening.”
“If you had killed Nathan Malik, would you know it?”
A gauzelike film drops over my eyes, a sense that I’m separated from Kaiser by a distortion of perception. His or mine, I’m not sure.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you in the past few days. Your panic attacks at the crime scenes. Your psychiatric history—what I know of it, anyway. The crime signature, which primarily consists of bite marks that could be staged. Something you would know how to do better than anyone else. And the fact that you were sexually abused—”
“Who told you that?” I cut in, my voice quavering. “Did Sean tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry, Cat. But I think your PTSD and past sexual abuse is what drew you to Malik and may have made you his patient, even without you knowing it.”
“Holy God. Do you really believe I could be killing these men without knowing it?”
Kaiser shrugs. “I’m raising a possibility. One that others might raise. Carmen Piazza, for example. She doesn’t know everything I know, but she doesn’t like what she does. I’ve listened to the tapes of your meeting with Malik several times. He told you about dissociative identity disorder, and that’s just multiple personality disorder under another name. Given the situation in which I just found you, it would be irresponsible of me not to suspect it.”
Under the pressure of Piazza and her pit bulls staring at me, I can hardly summon the resources to defend myself. “John, I didn’t kill Nathan Malik. Nor did I kill or help him kill any of the six victims in your case. Now, if I suffer from dissociative identity disorder, I grant you, I would not know I had done any of that. I’d believe I was innocent. But do you have any idea how rare that disorder is? Even among sexually abused people? It’s one of those fascinating myths, like amnesia. There’ve been more cases of it in Hollywood movies in the past twenty years than in all of recorded human history.”
Kaiser is watching me like a bomber pilot deciding whether to flatten a suspected enemy village. The slightest sign could tilt him either way.
“If you let them put me in jail,” I tell him, “you’ll be losing your best chance to solve this case.”
“Why?”
“Dr. Malik told me I already know the truth about what happened to me, that I just have to find a way to pull it out of my head. I think the same is true about this case. They’re connected, somehow.”
“Maybe Malik was talking about some alternate identity inside you.”
“Jesus, would you get real? You’re talking to a woman who’s pregnant by a married man. I’m trying to quit drinking, and I just found out I was sexually abused by someone in my family. I don’t have time to run around killing people for fun or profit. Okay?”
There’s a flash of something in Kaiser’s eyes, humanity, maybe. Then he looks over my shoulder at Piazza again. Kaiser is my only hope of staying free.
“I talked to Malik on the phone,” I admit. “He told me some things about the case. You arrest me, you’ll never find out what they are.”
“What things?” he asks, his eyes narrowed.
“Did you find a box inside that room?”
“No. What was in the box?”
I shake my head.
Kaiser grabs my wrist. “Come with me.”
As he pulls me toward the Crown Victoria I rode in the other day, I glance over my shoulder. The two NOPD detectives are coming after me. Kaiser puts me in the backseat and climbs in after me. Closed into this small space with him, I feel again the personal magnetism I felt in my house that afternoon with Sean.
“What’s about to happen?” I ask.
His face is taut. “I don’t know, but it should be interesting.”
One of the detectives knocks on the window.
“Don’t get out of this car unless I tell you to,” Kaiser says.
“I won’t.”
Kaiser gets out of the backseat and locks the door behind him. A heated discussion begins outside, but Kaiser moves the detectives steadily away from the car, so I only hear part of it. Words come to me out of an audio blur. Arrest. Conspiracy. Aiding and abetting. A woman’s voice joins the fray. Captain Piazza is talking about jurisdictional control and federal interference. The word “psycho” reaches my ears. Kaiser must be speaking quietly, because I can’t hear anything he’s saying. Yet after a couple of minutes, it’s Kaiser who returns to the car and gets inside with me.
“Are they going to arrest me?”
“They want to. Piazza thinks you’ve been lying to us from the start. That you’ve been feeding Malik information about the investigation. She’s suspending Sean, and she wants your hide nailed to the barn wall. She wants to interrogate you herself.”
“Great.”
Kaiser’s eyes bore into mine. “What was in the box you mentioned, Cat? At this point, that may be the only thing that could keep you out of jail.”
“A film.”
I see connections happening at light speed behind Kaiser’s eyes. “The video production equipment,” he says. “The stuff we found at Malik’s secret apartment. That’s what it was for?”
“Bravo.”
“What kind of film is it?”
“Malik’s making a documentary about sexual abuse. About an experimental therapy group he was working with. Group X.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Female patients only. He said it was radical stuff. It was his life’s work. No way would Malik have killed himself before he finished that film. And he seemed to think a lot of people didn’t want anyone to see it.”
Kaiser takes some time to process this. “Did he tell you who any of the patients in Group X were?”
“No.”
“Was your aunt one of them?”
“He didn’t tell me, and I don’t know.”
“Have you spoken to your aunt?”
“No.”
“Shit. With Malik dead, we may never find out who was in Group X. Not unless your aunt can tell us.”
That’s not all we’ll never know, I think with desolation. The secret of my life may have died with Malik. Unless Ann knows it. Knows it and will tell me…
“But the film shows the women in Group X?”
“Yes. They supposedly relive their abuse in front of the camera.”
“I guess Malik’s killer took it.”
I give Kaiser a thin smile. “I’d say so.”
He glances back toward the NOPD detectives, who are staring angrily at the car. “Goddamn it. Tell me about that motel room, Cat.”
“I didn’t know where Malik was until five minutes before I got here. He gave me a phone number to call. When I arrived, the door was open. I went in and found him in the bathroom. The blood on the wall was fresh. Then I saw the gun in his hand.”
“What if Malik was the killer, and he offed himself because h
is ‘work’ was done after all? After the sixth victim, I mean?”
I shake my head. “You know better, John. Malik’s work was his film, not murder. Tell me about the sixth victim.”
Kaiser looks back at the motel. Piazza is standing with her detectives again. “His name was Quentin Baptiste. He was an NOPD homicide detective.”
“What? Shit.”
“Yep. It was probably Baptiste who was feeding information to the killer, knowingly or not. That’s one reason Piazza would like to pin that on you.”
“How old was Baptiste?”
“Forty-one.”
“The youngest victim yet. Is Sean at that crime scene?”
“He was on his way there when I left. He’s probably heard about this by now. We need to get you out of here.”
“What about female relatives?”
“What?
“Have you checked out Quentin Baptiste’s female relatives? One of them could have been a patient of Malik’s. One of them could be in Group X. If he was only forty-one, I’d check daughters, step-daughters, and nieces. Also brothers or fathers of those women.”
“I was starting that when we got the tip to come here. Since Baptiste was a cop, it shouldn’t be hard to—” Kaiser’s face tightens. “Shit.”
A dark green Saab screeches to a stop a few yards away from us. As Sean leaps out and races toward the motel, Kaiser lifts a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Richard, get out here now. Don’t tell Detective Regan where Dr. Ferry is.”
“Is Sean living at home again?” I ask.
Kaiser meets my eyes. “I think so, yeah. Trying to reconcile with his wife.”
“Make sure he knows I’m not hurt.”
“I will.”
The front door of the Crown Vic opens, and a gray-suited FBI agent jumps behind the wheel. As he starts the engine, Sean bursts from room eighteen and scans the parking lot. Our eyes lock. He sprints toward the car, but Kaiser’s driver screeches onto Williams Boulevard before Sean can reach us.
