Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“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.