Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“More than I ever wanted to.”

“Apparently Ms. Butler was looking for you. Your grandfather’s search for you had been called off, but Louise was in the woods and never got the word. She found your aunt instead.”

Despite the horror of this thought, the face of my father’s mistress gives me a comforting feeling as it rises behind my eyes, brown and still beautiful at forty-six. I’m glad Louise found Ann, and not Jesse Billups. Thinking of my last afternoon on the island, a cold certainty comes to me.

“Did the building Ann was found in have a tin roof?”

Kaiser’s eyes narrow. “How did you know that?”

My hands suddenly feel clammy. “Was she found in the building they call the clinic?”

He nods slowly, waiting for an explanation.

“Tell me how she looked when they found her.”

Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman but answers anyway. “She was naked, lying on the floor by an examining table.”

A deep ache begins in my heart. A lot of suicides take off their clothes before killing themselves. But Ann’s nakedness wasn’t a matter of fastidiousness or infantile regression. “Did she leave a note?”

“No note.”

Doing it in the clinic was her note. Kaiser sneaks another glance at Hannah, and I know he’s holding something back.

“What is it?” I demand.

“She didn’t leave a note, but she did leave something. Before she died, she drew two skulls and crossbones on her lower abdomen, about where her ovaries would be. There was a Sharpie marker lying beside her body.”

For the first time, I feel the sting of tears.

“That means something to you?” Kaiser asks.

“Ann was obsessed with having a baby. She never could get pregnant.”

“At fifty-six she was obsessed with having a baby?”

“No, but she never got over the failure. My grandfather performed an emergency appendectomy on her in that clinic when she was ten years old. He always said the infection she had then was what made her infertile. That it blocked her fallopian tubes. I think a dye test may have later proved that correct. Anyway, when she finally gave up on having a baby, she died inside.”

Kaiser doesn’t know what to make of this. I turn to Hannah. “I’ve been wondering if that appendectomy might really have been an abortion.”

Hannah sits in silence, her mind clicking through what she knows of my family. “Ten is too young for pregnancy,” she says finally. “I’m sure it’s impossible.”

“Sexual abuse again,” says Kaiser. “That’s why Ann was a patient of Malik’s, right?”

“We don’t know that for sure,” I point out. “She could have been seeing him for her manic-depressive disorder.”

“Well, we need to know which. I want an autopsy done on her as fast as we can get one. Would a botched abortion be detectable all these years later?”

“Possibly,” Hannah says. “That depends on what kind of mistake was made. After forty years, scarring from infection would be difficult to attribute to therapeutic abortion based on pathological findings alone. There’s also the complication of possible later abortions. But this is an academic question. If Ann was ten years old, she wasn’t pregnant.”

“You need to talk to my mother,” I say softly. “When it comes to Ann, she’s the only one who knows the private details.”

Hannah looks puzzled by something. “ Why, ” she says deliberately, “was there enough morphine to kill someone in a one-room clinic on a rural island?”

“I asked the same thing,” says Kaiser.

“You ever see a chain saw accident?” I ask. “They’re as bad as war wounds sometimes. A chain saw can take off an arm or a leg in two seconds.”

This seems to satisfy Kaiser, who served in combat in Vietnam.

“What’s your next move?” I ask him, wondering how I can get out of here.

“Rush your aunt’s autopsy, if I can. Her body is already at the morgue in Jackson, Mississippi. I need to rule out murder. She was too close to Malik to discount that possibility.”

“I want to see her autopsy report.”

“I’m sure you’ll be here when I get it. Carmen Piazza still wants you locked in a cell downtown.”

This probably isn’t the best time to ask if I can leave.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” Kaiser intones. “I want that film Malik was making. If we find that, we’ll find our killer.”

“Film?” Hannah asks. “Nathan Malik was making a film?”

“A documentary about sexual abuse and repressed memory,” I answer. “It shows a group of female patients reliving sexual abuse, and some other things he wouldn’t tell me about. He said it would galvanize the nation on the issue of sexual abuse.”

“That’s one film I’d like to see.”

“Cat thinks the killer is a member of that group of women,” says Kaiser. “Malik called them Group X. I think Ann Hilgard may have been part of it.”

“Group X?” echoes Hannah. “Strange.”

“With Ann and Dr. Malik dead, only that film or surviving members of Group X can tell us who the members are.”

Hannah looks oddly at Kaiser. “I sense you have something to ask me.”

“I do. Is there any possibility that Cat could have been a member of that group without being aware of it? Dr. Malik suggested that she might suffer from multiple personality disorder.”

Hannah looks briefly at me, then back at Kaiser. “Ridiculous. Cat has certainly experienced dissociated states. But the idea that she suffers from full-blown dissociative identity disorder is preposterous. Put that nonsense out of your mind, Agent Kaiser. Nathan Malik had flashes of genius, but he was also a flake.”

That’s a fucking relief, I say silently.

Kaiser and Hannah are lost in their own musings, but something won’t let me focus. It’s not grief over Ann. I’m too numb to feel anything about that now. It’s a sense of something missing.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, John.”

He looks up and shakes his head. “Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. Have you told me everything about Ann’s death? The scene? Did you leave anything out?”

His brows wrinkle. He looks like he’s making an honest effort. “She injected the morphine into veins in both arms. That tell you anything?”

“Only that she was serious. What else? Do you have photos from the scene?”

He nods cautiously. “I had the West Feliciana Parish sheriff’s department e-mail me their crime-scene stuff. That’s how I knew the building had a tin roof. Are you sure you want to see them?”

“Yes.”

He glances at Dr. Goldman again. Hannah studies me for a few moments, then says, “Cat’s already in shock. If it will help solve the murders, I don’t see any point in keeping them from her.”

Kaiser promises to be right back with the photos, then leaves the room.

Hannah looks up at me from the cot where she’s sitting. “I’m worried about your affect, Cat. You do know you’re in shock?”

“I suppose so. I feel numb.”

“And you’re not drinking?”

“Not for days now.”

Her eyes probe me like a metal instrument. “You’re not taking your medication, are you?”

I hate to answer this. “No.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure. A week, maybe.”

She shakes her head. “I dislike mechanical analogies, but today that’s the only thing I can use. Watching you now is exactly like watching a machine. All the biology is working, but you’re not present. You’ve described yourself as being that way when you have sex.”

“I know, but this isn’t that. I’m like this when I work.”

“Always?”

“Yes.”

Hannah looks over at the door, as though she hears Kaiser returning. “I was that way at times during medical school. But something about you seems different. And this isn’t a normal case, no matter what you tell yourself. You can’t pretend you weren’t related to Ann. You were. You are. In the Faulknerian sense of the past never really being past. Faulkner said that if the past were truly past, there would be no grief or sorrow. Ann was your blood relation, Cat, and she took her own life. Something you’ve thought of doing yourself many times.”