Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“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.

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?”

Sean glances at me, then nods slowly.