The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  Lucas had kept in touch with the amiable scholar ever since Garrick’s cover story about Lucas for Emerge magazine ran in 1996—the cover itself had proclaimed “Dr. Voodoo?” in huge type above Lucas’s face. That had been a hellish year, when Lucas had ignited a debate after he’d tried to use his position as an administrator at the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine to legitimize the study of shamanism. A colorfully tongued senator from Missouri had railed against “throwing money at magic spells and Dr. Voodoo,” and Lucas had lost his job over the ensuing circus when he had told the truth about his unorthodox beliefs. Despite a controversy over the insulting use of the word voodoo directed at a black scientist, the nickname itself had stuck, much to Lucas’s chagrin.

  At least Garrick’s story, unlike the pieces in Time and Newsweek, had given Lucas a hell of a lot more credibility than any other mainstream report. At the time, Garrick’s fair-mindedness had felt like a lifeline. Now, Lucas needed Garrick again.

  “Who is she, Garrick?” Lucas prodded, feeling impatient. He wished Garrick had simply told him on the telephone when he’d called him that morning. After a full day of feeling fine, Jared had been vomiting when he woke up that morning, his temperature topping a hundred degrees. But instead of explaining the delicacy of his home life to Garrick, Lucas had called in Jared’s private nurse, Cleo, and told her he would be back home from FAMU within an hour and fifteen minutes. The beeper clipped to his belt had been silent so far, but Lucas expected it to sound off at any moment.

  “I can tell you one thing: Jessica Jacobs-Wolde was a hell of a story,” Garrick said, drawing out his words like a seasoned storyteller. “My arms are tingling now, just to talk about her. We knew people in common, so that brought it closer to home. I even know people who’d met him, back when he was teaching at the University of Miami.”

  “Him?”

  “Her husband.” As Garrick said the word husband, he lowered his chin so that his stare deepened. He pushed the folder in the center of the table toward Lucas, returning his attention to his plate of macaroni and cheese, fried chicken wings, green beans, and sliced ham. “Open it.”

  And so Lucas did. After unwinding the string that bound the folder, Lucas found a jumbled stack of newspaper and magazine clippings and computer printouts. “All this is about her?”

  Garrick settled against his chair with a long exhalation. “Yessir. This was a Florida story, and I’d toyed with the idea of writing a book about it myself. True crime. My wife and I were in the market for a bigger house that year, and I’ve never figured there was any crime in quick money. I wasn’t quick enough, though, as it turned out. Someone beat me, and then the movie was out before I could blink. I saw that blasted thing on cable again not even a month ago, starring that black guy, whatchamacallit, who used to play on L.A. Law. Underwood. They even called it Mr. Perfect, the same title I wanted to use. Well, they say great minds think alike. . . . I gave it up in the end. But I still say there’s more to it.”

  “More than what?” Lucas said, hopelessly lost.

  “More than your typical serial-killer-of-the-month.”

  Lucas’s spirits plummeted at the same moment he felt an unmistakable prickling at the back of his neck, as tangible as a breath. Whatever he’d stumbled onto wasn’t anything like he’d thought. He had a feeling his hopes were about to die a painful, humiliating death.

  “Garrick, why don’t you give me a thumbnail sketch?”

  “You really don’t know, do you? What blissful ignorance.” Garrick reached into the folder to pull out the uppermost newspaper, a front-page story from the Miami Sun-News. Two photographs were displayed as large as any Lucas had seen on a newspaper page, except after the moon walk, or Kennedy’s death, or the huge photo of the desperately pointing fingers on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel the instant after Martin Luther King was shot. In one photo, an attractive short-haired black woman posed with one arm hooked playfully around the neck of an unsmiling black man; the other was a school photograph of a young, pigtailed black girl who was grinning as if she’d been anticipating all day the chance to have her picture taken. Her face was pure joy.

  The block-style headline: “Serial Killer Ended Spree with Own Child.”

  Juxtaposed against the photographs, the weight of the headline made Lucas’s stomach tighten.

  “Yessir,” Garrick said, reading Lucas’s expression. “There’s your Jessica Jacobs-Wolde. A newspaper reporter down in Miami, real promising. I went to school with her boss, back in the day. She had the bad luck of being married to a serial killer. And let me tell you, she paid for it.”

  “Quite a price,” Lucas said, his eyes once again resting on the child’s face. The irony of the girl’s childlike smile felt cruel. This photograph of Kira Alexis Wolde, according to the caption, had been taken the fall before her father strangled her to death. She’d been five years old.

  “I have to tell you, I hate that it was a brother, you know?” Garrick said. “When a story like that hits, you just think to yourself, ‘Please don’t let him be one of us.’ And this guy distinguished himself even in the ranks of serial killers. The FBI is still scratching its head. Just no rhyme or reason to it. No distinguishable pattern. No criminal record. The guy is a music scholar. Supposed to be brilliant. Hell, his jazz text is still taught right here in our music school. Then, out of the blue, he ducks out of a lecture up at a college in Chicago to sneak into a nursing home and smother an eighty-year-old woman. No apparent connection, no motive. A little while later, he slashes the throat of another guy, his wife’s friend, in the parking lot of their newspaper building. Next, he bashes the brains out of an eighty-year-old stroke victim, his wife’s grandfather or something. They suspect him in a couple of other unsolved cases in Miami around the same time, too. Then, for his coup de grâce, he drugs and strangles his own daughter. Tries to do the same to the wife. By some miracle, she survives. But you know what? I bet there are days she wishes she hadn’t.”

  “No doubt,” Lucas said, riveted to the photograph of David Wolde. The man wasn’t smiling, but his youthful face had an unusual sweetness, his delicate features perfectly contoured. In light of his crimes, his good looks were offensive to Lucas, unsettling. With his benign gaze into the camera while his wife hugged him, the man looked like the consummate predator. Soulless.

  “Her nickname for him was Mr. Perfect, and he turns out to be a psychopath. Not only that, he’s a phantom. After the cops up in Louisiana finally shoot him, the FBI finds out his records were all falsified. No real records of him anywhere, so he might as well have never existed. Is that the woman you’re looking for? Good luck. I hear she left the country, and I don’t blame her.”

  “She went to South Africa. For a while, anyway,” Lucas said quietly.

  “That so? Doing what?”

  Lucas couldn’t help pausing before he answered. In the context of what he’d just heard, his tip on Jessica Jacobs-Wolde sounded all the more ridiculous, even to him. “Running a clinic for sick children. Healing people who shouldn’t be able to heal.”

  At this, Garrick grinned widely. He chortled and shook his head. “That figures.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I once lost a heap of cash after remarking to one of my colleagues—that woman in red over there pouring herself a cup of coffee, in fact—that this story could not possibly get any more strange. She’s found great delight, and great profit, in proving me wrong. So why don’t you start doing the talking now, Doc Shepard? And I’ll get to work on this food before it gets cold.”

  “Be my guest,” Lucas said, smiling. He folded the newspaper page and slowly replaced it in the bulging folder, debating how much he wanted to divulge. On the one hand, he might be about to destroy any slim credibility he might have in Garrick’s eyes; on the other, how much worse could his reputation really get?

  “There was another story about her, one I’m sure you never knew about,” Lucas began, and told him what he’d le
arned since receiving the Atlantic Monthly from Cal. Garrick sat and listened in silence. No comments. No questions. He just listened and ate.

  Lucas’s paltry plate of baked chicken and salad remained nearly untouched except for occasional stirring. It was harder and harder for him to eat, and when he wasn’t at home trying to set a good example for Jared, he rarely tried, even when he needed to. He’d easily lost fifteen pounds himself since Jared got sick. But by the time he finished his story, Garrick’s plate was nearly clean and he was sopping up the last of his gravy with his second roll.

  “So there you are,” Lucas finished. “Strange enough for you?”

  The two men shared the longest silence of their meeting. Finally, tasting the white icing of his red velvet cake with a dab of his pinkie, Garrick lowered his eyebrows and stared at Lucas thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s strange, all right,” he muttered.

  “May I borrow your file, Garrick? Just overnight?”

  Garrick nodded, grinning at him playfully. “Tell you what, Doc Shepard—throw in a couple bottles of HerbaVyte vitamins, and you can keep it as long as you want. I still take two of those twice a day. ‘The first step toward longer life,’ right? I’m counting on that label, you know.”

  Lucas forced a smile. HerbaVyte tablets, though they’d made Lucas a respectable profit, were the bane of his career. One of the banes, anyway. Fresh from his Lasker Prize in the 1980s, he’d been approached by herbalists who hoped his prize-winning name would bring their new product legitimacy, and Lucas had seen no reason to turn them away. For years, he’d been a strong believer in the Brazilian plant Pfaffia paniculata, which gave HerbaVyte its immune-system boosters. His colleagues told him endorsing such a fringe product was crass and damned near insane, and they warned him he might never be considered for another serious prize. Screw them, Lucas had decided. By fluke, his partnership with HerbaVyte’s manufacturers had been the smartest financial decision he’d ever made, giving him enough money for an early retirement. There were plenty of people like Garrick, who hoped they could use vitamins to compensate for the ways they were killing themselves. Lucas glanced once again at his friend’s paunch. “Right now, you’d be better off with a serious nutrition and exercise program,” he said, giving Garrick his most earnest gaze. “I mean that.”

  Garrick looked down, embarrassed. “Now you sound like my wife,” he muttered, glancing at his cleaned plate. “My diet starts tomorrow. That’s what I tell her, anyway.”

  Don’t count on tomorrow, Lucas thought, but he kept that to himself. As much as he’d love to give Garrick a lecture on obesity, he had his own problems. A cynical voice inside him was raging, My son is dying, so could we move on? Lucas loathed that voice, but it had come to rule his life.

  “Seriously, though, keep that file as long as you need it,” Garrick went on. “There isn’t any danger I’ll want to write a book until I know how the story ends. Like I said, I always thought there was more to it than just a serial killer, I just didn’t know what.”

  “What made you think so?”

  “How about this?” Garrick leaned forward. “The police shoot the guy three times while he’s strangling his daughter. Pronounced dead on the spot. Then, overnight, he manages to walk away from the morgue.”

  It might have been because of his still-empty stomach, but Lucas’s insides surged slightly. “What do you mean?” he said, thinking about the phrase that had struck him so profoundly from the magazine article: The clinic can bring the dead to life.

  “They misplaced the body. Or someone stole it. Can you believe it? I’m telling you, the whole case was like that, Doc Shepard, like The Twilight Zone. When I was still playing with that book idea, I called the police up there, talked to a couple of the cops who’d been on the scene. Off the record, they told me they not only lost the body, they lost some evidence, too. A needle.”

  “Needle?” Lucas whispered the word. He felt as if his heart had kicked him.

  “Two of the cops swear the guy was about to inject his daughter with a hypodermic with one hand while he was strangling her with the other. At first they thought it was the poison, but it turns out he’d given both the kid and his wife some pills to knock them out. The cops said whatever was in the needle didn’t look like poison anyway.”

  “Didn’t look like poison? What does that mean? What did they say it looked like?” Lucas’s voice was thinned by an anxiousness that sounded more like fledgling panic.

  “I talked to both of them, and they said the same thing: It looked like blood. Could have been the kid’s, I figure, and he took it from her for some twisted reason. But I guess we’ll never know, will we? Disappeared from the scene after they shot him. Nobody thought to wonder about it until later, and by then they couldn’t find it. Who knows? Tell you what, this whole case was so bizarre, it spooked everybody more than a little bit. That’s why I’ve never been able to get it out of my own mind. And he died over in Louisiana, remember, the cradle of voodoo—”

  Suddenly, Garrick stopped talking and stared at Lucas with eyes widening with concern. “Doc Shepard . . .? What did I say?”

  But Lucas didn’t hear him. Beyond blood, he had not heard a word.

  • • •

  Since his beeper had never sounded and he had a few minutes to spare after lunch without breaking his word to Cleo, Lucas stopped by the video store closest to his house—a modest independent store at a strip mall—and found a copy of the movie Mr. Perfect in the thriller section. On the video’s cover, a huge pair of coldly staring eyes with bloodred irises hovered menacingly above a black man and woman in a loving embrace. Studying it closely, he noticed the evil eyes had even been enhanced by tiny round pockets of red fluid glued to the box to make the irises gleam.

  Lucas rolled his eyes. Pure trash, the kind of video Rachel and Nita would have loved but Lucas would never have sought on his own. But he was eager to watch Mr. Perfect to see what he could learn. What in the world could a miracle clinic and a serial killer have in common, besides hypodermics filled with blood?

  • • •

  “Hey, Dad. Did you have a good lunch?” Jared said, not sitting up from where he lay in bed, when Lucas returned. Jared’s voice sounded parched, the way it always did when he had a high fever. Cleo had told him Jared’s temperature was still one hundred and a fraction, too high for comfort but not high enough to rush him to the hospital. Lucas poured some water from the cool pitcher Cleo had left on Jared’s nightstand. The stack of styrofoam cups stood tall in a collection of nearly a dozen prescription bottles of varying heights and sizes.

  “Great. I had a T-bone steak and a big baked potato and a whole apple pie for dessert. I think I gained ten pounds,” Lucas said, winking, as he offered Jared the water. “How about you?”

  Cleo made a clicking sound with her teeth from behind Lucas in the bedroom doorway. “We barely forced down a bowl of chicken broth, Doc Shepard. And had to fight for that.”

  “Why does she always say we? I’m the one who ate it,” Jared said, raising himself to his elbows so he could drink from the cup. “I told her it was too hot.”

  “Yes, and then it was too cold. We acted out the whole Three Bears routine today, except for the part where it’s just right.” Cleo’s scolding was good-natured. She was a broad-shouldered woman in her late sixties with fading orange hair, a semiretired nurse with the patience of a houseplant who had helped Lucas care for Rachel the last month of her life. Her accent was more refined than Cal’s, more belle than cracker. When Lucas had called her last year to ask if she could assist him with Jared from time to time, she’d tried as hard as she could to conceal her quiet sobs on the telephone. And even though Jared groused at her, Lucas knew his son cherished the pampering of Cleo’s motherly touch.

  “But I ate it all. Just ask her. And my fever’s going down, too.” Jared’s voice grew scratchier, as if to contradict his words.

  “Not according to the thermometer, champ,” Lucas said, smoothing back Jared’s hair. God
, the kid was burning up. Wet heat radiated through the thin hair on Jared’s scalp.

  Jared curled his lips with mock disgust, then settled back against his pillow. Almost immediately, his eyes fought to close. “Is Cleo going home?” His voice was fainter still.

  “Nope. Cleo’s going to stick around to help out while I do some research downstairs.”

  “Okay,” Jared said, satisfied. Lucas leaned over to kiss Jared’s too hot forehead.

  Downstairs, Lucas called Jared’s pediatric oncologist at Wheeler, whom all the patients called their “oncodoc,” and Dr. Reid agreed Lucas could continue to medicate him at home and monitor his temperature. He’d check Jared out tomorrow, Dr. Reid said. At least it bought Jared another night in his own bed. Once Jared went to the hospital, he might not be back for weeks.

  Or simply, he might just not be back.

  When the tears tried to come, Lucas refused to honor them. He had work to do.

  • • •

  The story of serial killer David Wolde had captured the attention of every major publication in the nation in the summer of 1997, with dozens of articles in everything from the New York Times to the National Enquirer. No wonder Garrick was so surprised Lucas had never heard of Jessica Jacobs-Wolde. Rachel’s illness must have kept him so preoccupied that he’d managed to miss one of that year’s biggest news stories.

  While the melodramatic Mr. Perfect played softly on the VCR, only occasionally intriguing Lucas enough to raise his head to watch, he culled through the pile of articles, fanning them across the living room floor. With eerie coincidence, he read passages he would soon hear reenacted on his television, or vice versa. Apparently, the producers had relied not only on scriptwriters, but accounts from the parties involved. Few facts seemed to have been changed.

  But why bother? In this case, fiction couldn’t outdo the truth.

  Jessica had been David Wolde’s student when he taught at the University of Miami. Her mother and sister had never trusted him because his background seemed vague, but Jessica had been young and naive, dazzled by his good looks and intelligence. He was a nationally recognized jazz scholar and spoke eight languages, after all. She never suspected her husband of any wrongdoing even as people she knew began turning up dead around her. When a reporter named Peter Donovitch was nearly decapitated in the parking lot of the newspaper where she worked, Jessica didn’t suspect David of killing her friend even after she’d learned he was probably the last person to see him alive.