Greg Iles - Blood Memory

Like a child about to show me a tape of her ballet recital, Angie Pitre pushes the tape into the VCR and waits expectantly.

Sean motions for me to walk over to him, his face taut with anxiety. By any legal standard, it’s time to arrest Evangeline Pitre. But I’m not here as an agent of the law. I’m here to understand. Only then will I know what to do. It can only be my threat to tell Sean’s wife about our affair that’s keeping him from calling John Kaiser.

The TV screen goes blue. Then some numbers start turning quickly in the bottom left corner of the screen. I go to the box in the corner of the room and look down. Three rows of mini-DV tapes lie at the bottom of the box. The tapes are labeled with women’s names in red Magic Marker. One reads, Ann Hilgard. I reach down and pluck it from the box, then slip it into my pocket.

“Look,” says Sean.

A dark, jerky image has filled the TV screen: an exterior door. Someone is breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. A hand inside a clear plastic sleeve reaches out and inserts a key into the knob, turns it.

“What’s that plastic?” I whisper.

“A hazmat suit,” Angie says, her eyes locked on the screen. “Weird, huh?”

The door opens, and light floods into the lens.

The camera moves so quickly through the house that I feel like I’m watching an episode of Cops. A drug raid, maybe. But there’s something familiar about it. I’ve seen this house before . It’s one of the NOMURS crime scenes. The second one.

“Holy shit,” says Sean. “Holy shit. ”

“Is that the Riviere house?” I ask in a stunned voice.

“Yeah,” says Angie.

The camera stops at an open bedroom door. A paunchy, gray-haired man wearing white boxer shorts looks over from his dresser. Andrus Riviere, retired pharmacist, age sixty-six. Whatever he sees in the door terrifies him.

“Turn around!” orders a muffled voice. It sounds female.

“They can’t hear you good in the suit,” Angie says. “But it keeps you from leaving hair and stuff in the house.”

“Cat?” says Sean. “Cat, we-”

“Face the wall!” shouts the voice. “Put up your hands!”

Andrus Riviere turns his back to the camera and lifts his flabby arms into the air. “Take whatever you want,” he says in a shaky voice. “Money…you want money?”

A bright red flower blooms in the back of his undershirt.

“Shit!” cries Sean.

Riviere crumples to the floor like a spine-shot deer.

My heart pounds as the camera moves jerkily across the bedroom. For a moment I see only the ceiling. Then I see Riviere again. He’s lying on his back, his face almost bloodless from fear. He tries to move, screams in agony.

“What did you do to Carol?” asks the muffled voice.

“I can’t move my legs!” Riviere wails. “Oh, God …”

“Say what you did to Carol!”

“What?”

“Your daughter! Carol Lantana! Did you have sex with Carol when she was a little girl?”

Riviere’s eyes bulge until I fear they’ll burst from their sockets. For Andrus Riviere, the women in the hazmat suits are hell incarnate. “Carol?” he echoes. “No! No… no. ”

“Did you rape Carol?” insists the voice.

“No! That’s crazy! I never did anything like that.”

The camera backs off. Then a plastic-encased hand holds the barrel of a revolver to Riviere’s forehead. “Make peace with God. Admit what you did.”

The old pharmacist is blubbering, saliva running down his chin. “Carol? Is that you in there?”

“Admit what you did!” screams the voice. Definitely female.

Riviere shakes his head violently.

On the screen, a second figure wearing a hazmat kneels beside Riviere and opens the jaws of the skull I found in Dr. Malik’s lap at the motel. The hand presses the open mouth to Riviere’s chest and clamps the teeth down on pale flesh.

Riviere shrieks in pain.

“Jesus,” breathes Sean.

The figure is obviously using all its strength to drive the teeth together. Riviere screams again, and then the skull is withdrawn.

Riviere’s weeping now, and panting as if he can’t breathe.

“Bite him again!” shouts the voice.

“No! All right…all right! I couldn’t help it…couldn’t stop. You already know that, don’t you?” Riviere’s face contorts in pain. “I need a doctor! Please!”

“How old was Carol when you did it?”

Riviere closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I don’t know…don’t know.”

The gun barrel cracks the bridge of his nose.

“Three?” he wails. “Four? I don’t know!”

“Do you repent?”

The eyes bulge again, the fear in them absolute.

The muffled voice is relentless. “Do-you-re-pent?”

Riviere nods with sudden penitence, a desperate sinner seeing a way to redemption. “Yes! I repent…I do. I know it was wrong. I need help! Please help me!”

“I’m here to help you.”

The hand presses the gun barrel flush against Andrus Riviere’s forehead and blows his brains out the back of his head.

I jerk in shock, unable to comprehend that I’m witnessing the actual events I tried to reconstruct from evidence at the crime scene. No reconstruction could ever capture the brutality of this execution. And I know, suddenly and beyond doubt, that my idea of forcing these women to stop but not giving their names to the FBI was a fantasy born of my own pain and naivete. It’s true that Andrus Riviere will never molest another child. But what guarantee do I have that the woman who pulled that trigger won’t decide tomorrow that someone less guilty than Riviere deserves a death sentence? Margaret Lavigne’s stepfather already became an innocent victim.

“Cat, it’s time to make some calls,” Sean says quietly.

He’s right.

“Cat? I have to-”

A muted thud cuts off Sean in midsentence.

When I turn, I see a naked woman with blonde hair holding a green plastic barbell in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Half an hour ago, I was studying her picture on my kitchen table. She’s Stacey Lorio, age thirty-six, registered nurse and the daughter of Colonel Frank Moreland, our first victim. She’s knocked Sean unconscious with a single blow from a barbell. As I stare in shock, she kneels and yanks his Glock from his shoulder holster, then points it at my chest.

“I hid under the dirty clothes in the closet,” she says to Angie, panting from excitement. “For a minute, I thought he saw me.”

“Why did you hit him?” I ask, trying not to glance at my purse beside the love seat.

“Shut up!” Lorio snaps, straightening up. She’s not much taller than Angie Pitre, but her rawboned body is mostly muscle. She has stretch marks and sagging breasts, but beyond that, she looks as hard as a frozen ham.

“We didn’t come here to arrest anybody, Stacey.”

She laughs, then glances at Angie. “I know better than that, you rich cunt.”

Her face is bright red, her chest blotchy with scarlet marks. “Do you know me, Stacey?”

“What do you think? Your aunt was the bitch who screwed up my life.”

“What?”

“Yeah, she came along with her perfect teeth, her thousand-dollar shoes, and her Southern belle voice, and he didn’t know which way was up anymore.”

“Who?”

“Christ. Who do you think?”

Suddenly everything is clear. This woman was romantically involved with Nathan Malik until my aunt took him away from her. Why should I be surprised? Ann had been seduced by one of her shrinks before. And when I spoke to her on the telephone about paying Malik’s bail, she’d acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.