Greg Iles - Blood Memory

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.

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?”