Blood Memory (6 page)

Pearlie sits on the edge of my old bed and looks at the wall, her eyes cloudy with remembrance. “The truth is, I didn’t see much. If I’d been sleeping in my house, I might have, but I was in the big house tending to your grandmother.”

She stops talking, and for a moment I fear she means not to continue. But she swallows and goes on.

“Mrs. Kirkland was having pains that turned out be her gallbladder. She had to have it cut out the next night. Your granddaddy wanted to do it, but she wouldn’t let him. Anyway, I heard a gunshot.”

“What time?”

“About ten-thirty, I guess. Rifle, I thought. That cracking sound, you know? It woke up your grandmother. I said Dr. Kirkland probably just shot a buck that wandered up out of the woods, but Mrs. Kirkland told me to call the police.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“How long did it take them to get here?”

“Ten minutes. Maybe a little longer.”

“And you only went down to the garden after the police got here?”

She nods slowly. “But I phoned down here to make sure you and your mama was okay.”

“Who answered?”

“Dr. Kirkland. He told me everything
wasn’t
okay, but that I should stay with Mrs. Kirkland. I panicked and made him tell me you was all right. That’s when I figured out something had happened to Mr. Luke.”

Mr. Luke
…Pearlie’s term of address for my father.

“He was supposed to have left for the island about nine, but I just had a feeling. I went out to the back gallery of the big house and looked down. When I saw Mr. Luke lying under that tree, it broke my heart. Lord, let’s don’t talk about that.”

“Did you speak to Mom when you phoned down?”

“No.”

I close my eyes. Blue police lights flash behind them, illuminating the great U created by the rear of Malmasion and the two slave quarters, painting the streaking rain with a sapphire glow. Tall men wearing uniforms and caps stand talking to my grandfather amid the roses, deferring to him like soldiers to a senior officer. I open my eyes before the memory can go any further.

“This is what I remember being told,” I murmur. “Daddy and Grandpapa both heard someone prowling the grounds. Daddy was in here, Grandpapa in the main house. They met outside, talked a few seconds, then started checking the grounds separately. Both had guns, but Daddy was surprised by the prowler. They fought in the dark, and Daddy was shot with his own rifle.”

Pearlie nods sadly. “That’s what Dr. Kirkland told me.”

“Is that what he told the police?”

“Course it is, child. That’s what happened. Why you ask me that?”

Without realizing it, I’ve already formulated an answer to her question. “Because I think that bare footprint on the carpet is mine. And I think I put it there on that night.”

Pearlie shakes her head. “That’s nonsense, child. You ain’t never got over losing your daddy, that’s all. You been trying to make sense of it for twenty years, but there
ain’t
no sense to things like that. Not unless you God hisself. Then you understand everything. But that’s the only sense there is. Ain’t none for you and me.”

I ignore Pearlie’s simplistic philosophy, however accurate it might be. “Talking to Mom about that night was like pulling teeth. When she did talk, she told me conflicting stories. She heard the shot, she didn’t hear it. She saw one thing, then she didn’t see it. What do you think about that?”

Pearlie gives me a rare unguarded look. “You say you’re grown up now…and I guess you are. Old enough to hear this, anyway. Your mama didn’t see anything that night, baby. She was taking your father’s sleeping pills back then. Or his pain pills. Whatever he took for his war wound and his nerves.”

Nerves
…Pearlie’s euphemism for post-traumatic stress disorder. “You’re saying that was a habit?”

“Girl, your mama swallowed most everything Mr. Luke got from the doctor back then. She had nerve problems herself. Your daddy went to Dr. Tom Cage back then, and I think Dr. Cage prescribed enough for the both of them. Your mama wouldn’t hardly go see a doctor.”

I make a mental note to find out if Dr. Cage is still alive. “So Mama was unconscious when Daddy was shot?” I close my eyes and try to visualize something—anything—before the blue lights appeared, but nothing will come. “So it was only when you came down to the garden that you saw me walk up to the body?”

“That’s right.”

“Where did I come from?”

Pearlie hesitates. “From this house, I think. Or behind it, maybe. I’m not sure.”

I try again to recall something fresh from that night, but the impassable gate that guards that information from my conscious mind remains locked. “Pearlie, who do you think that prowler was? What was he doing here?”

The maid sighs with bone-deep fatalism, and then her dark eyes settle on mine. “You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I think he was a friend of your daddy’s. Either that, or somebody who came here to kill Dr. Kirkland.”

For a moment I can’t speak. In all the years since my father’s death, I’ve never heard anyone voice either of these theories. “Kill Grandpapa? Why would someone do that?”

Pearlie sighs heavily. “Nice as your granddaddy can be, he’s a tough businessman. He’s ruined some people, and in a town this small, that can catch up with you.”

“Has anybody tried to hurt him since that night?”

“Not that I know about.” She gives a little shrug. “I’m probably wrong about that. But now he’s got that driver, that Billy Neal. I don’t like that boy at
all.
”

I’ve met my grandfather’s driver only once, and then briefly. Thin-faced and muscular, Billy Neal reminds me of the men who relentlessly hit on me in bars. Quiet men who assume too much. Their silence is not solicitous but threatening, almost belligerent. “Do you think Billy Neal is a kind of bodyguard?”

Pearlie snorts. “I know he is. He too mean to keep around for anything else. Specially just driving.”

The idea that my grandfather should need a bodyguard seems ridiculous, yet that was the impression I got when I saw him in New Orleans with his new driver. But it’s Pearlie’s first theory that has my heart thumping. “Why do you say the prowler might have been a friend of Daddy’s?”

“I think it would have had to be,” she says firmly. “To get close enough to your daddy to shoot him with his own gun like that?”

“Why?”

“I never saw a man so alert, child. Mr. Luke slept with both eyes open. Always looking for danger. I guess the war made him that way. Dr. Kirkland think he’s a big hunter, but your daddy…he could walk through the woods without bending a blade of grass. First couple of years he was back from the war, he walked this property all hours of the night. The island, too, I heard. ’Bout scared me to death sometimes. He’d just appear in front of you, like a ghost. Couldn’t nobody slip up on Mr. Luke without him knowing. No way, no how. That’s one thing I know.”

“A friend,” I murmur, trying to get my mind around the idea. “I don’t remember Daddy having friends.”

Pearlie smiles with regret. “They wasn’t friends, really. Just boys like he was. Boys who’d been in the war. Not
with
him, but like him. They was good boys, but a lot of good boys come back from Vietnam hooked on that dope. Black and white the same. My nephew was one. Anyway, them friends would’ve known your daddy had pills around. Plus, they probably figured Dr. Kirkland kept drugs here. Not hard to figure the rest, is it?”

I gaze around the forlorn bedroom. A child’s room without a child in it. I’m not claustrophobic, but sometimes certain places get to me, and in those times I have to move. Move or freak out. “Let’s go outside.”

Pearlie takes my hand. “What’s the matter, baby?”

“I need some air.”

“Well, let’s get you some then.”

I let Pearlie exit first, then close the door behind us. “Don’t go back in there anymore,” I tell her. “I still have work to do inside.”

“What kind of work?”

“The same work I do in New Orleans. There may be more blood in there.”

Anxiety tightens her shoulders.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

She stops in the kitchen and lays a hand on my forearm “Baby girl, it don’t do no good to dig up the past. Even simple folk know that. And you ain’t simple.”

“I wish I were sometimes.”

Pearlie clucks softly. “There’s one thing we can’t change in this world. Our natures. We come into the world with them, and they stay with us all the way through.”

“Do you really believe that?”

A terrible wisdom seeps from her eyes. “I believe it, all right. I’ve watched too many children from the cradle to the grave not to.”

I don’t agree, but neither do I argue. Pearlie Washington has lived a lot longer than I have. We walk out into the sunlight of the rose garden.

“I have one more question,” I tell her. “And I want you to tell me the truth.”

The maid’s eyes deepen again, like a stilling pool. “I’ll try, baby.”

“Do you think Daddy might have killed himself?”

She draws back. “What you talking ’bout, girl?”

“I’m asking you if there was really a prowler here that night, or whether everybody’s been lying to me all these years to protect my feelings. Whether what Daddy went through in the war was just too much for him. So bad that…that even Mom and me weren’t enough to keep him wanting to live.”

Pearlie lifts her long brown fingers to my cheek and wipes away tears. “Oh, baby, don’t you ever think that. Mr. Luke thought the sun rose and set in your eyes. That’s a fact.”

I try to blink away the wetness in my eyes. “Did he? I don’t remember.”

She smiles. “I know you don’t. He got took from you too early. But Mr. Luke didn’t go through all he did in that war just to shoot hisself when he got back home. He loved you more than you’ll ever know. So you get that foolishness right out of your mind. All right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I’m surprised by the childlike sound of my own voice.

“I better find Natriece,” Pearlie says, squaring her shoulders and looking toward Malmaison. “You holler if you need me.”

As Pearlie walks toward the rear of Malmaison, I take my cell phone from my pocket and check the screen. Eight more missed calls, all from Sean. He won’t give up.

I open my digital phone book and dial my mother’s cell phone. She answers through a crackle of static.

“Cat? What’s wrong?”

“Why do you think something’s wrong?”

“Why else would you call me?”

Good God
. “Where are you, Mom?”

“About thirty miles south of Natchez, coming back the Liberty Road way. I’ve been to see your aunt Ann.”

“How is she?”

“Not good. It’s too long a story to tell on a cell phone. Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Are you working on those murders down there? I saw the news.”

“Yes and no. I’m actually in Natchez right now.”

Static never sounded so empty. “What are you doing in Natchez?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Don’t you dare do that to me. Tell me now.”

“When you get here. Good-bye, Mom.”

I hang up and look back at our house. I want to work the rest of my bedroom for latent blood, but I don’t have the right chemicals. Luminol can damage the genetic markers used to identify the person who lost the blood. Some rapidly evaporating solvents neither dilute nor damage bloodstains. I have some in New Orleans, but not here.

My cell phone rings again. I answer by saying, “I’ll tell you when you get here, Mom.”

“This isn’t Mom,” says Sean. “But I guess I know why you finally answered.”

I feel a rush of guilt. “Hey, I’m sorry about the missed calls.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t have kept bugging you today if it weren’t important.”

“What is it?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Just tell me, damn it.”

“We’ve finally connected the NOMURS victims.”

My heart stutters. “How?”

“You won’t believe it. It’s the women.”

“Women? What women?”

“Female relatives of the victims.”

I look around the gardens of Malmaison, my mind too filled with thoughts of the past to make sense of what Sean is saying. “Tell me from the beginning. I’m not there with you, remember?”

“When a low-risk victim is murdered, you have to look at the family, right? And these were all low-risk victims. The task force has been taking apart the lives of every family member, moving out in concentric circles. Well, this morning we learned that female relatives of two of the victims go to the same psychiatrist.”

My skin feels hot. “Which victims?”

“Two and four. Riviere and LeGendre.”

“What’s their relation?”

“Riviere’s daughter, LeGendre’s niece.”

“Holy shit. What’s the shrink’s name?”

“Nathan Malik.”

I run the name through my memory. “Never heard of him.”

“I’m surprised. He’s pretty well known, and fairly controversial. He’s written a couple of books.”

“On what?”

“Repressed memories. Bringing back repressed memories, I guess.”

This pricks something in the back of my mind. “That’s usually related to sexual abuse.”

“I know. Are you thinking what I am?”

“Revenge killings. Our victims are child abusers being killed by their victims. Or by a male relative of the abuse victims. From that angle, the sex and advanced age of the victims suddenly makes all the sense in the world.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Sean. “We’re checking every relative of every victim for visits to Nathan Malik or any other therapist. It’s not easy, though. The two women we’ve linked to Malik were hiding the fact that they were seeing him. Paying in cash and lying to their families about where they went. The only reason we figured it out is because they were obsessive about keeping up with their money. They had amazingly detailed private records.

“The FBI psychiatrist at Quantico says there’s a strong possibility that Dr. Malik could be doing the murders himself. There’s something called countertransference, where a shrink vicariously experiences the pain of his patients. The FBI shrink says that could trigger Malik to commit revenge murder just as if he’d been abused himself. And Malik would have the knowledge to stage the scenes to look like garden-variety sexual homicide.”

“Has anyone talked to Dr. Malik yet?”

“No, but he’s under surveillance.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifty-three.”

This is outside the age range of the FBI’s standard serial-killer profile, but well within the bounds of possibility, based on the literature. I can’t believe the adrenaline flowing through my veins. “What happens next?”

“That’s what I’m calling you about. We want you to check Nathan Malik’s dental records. See if they match the bite marks on the bodies.”

“You already have them?”

“No.”

“When will you?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“I don’t get it. What’s going on, Sean?”

“We’ve got the name of Malik’s dentist. And since you know damn near every dentist in the New Orleans area, we were hoping you could have an informal chat with this one. Maybe get a look at some faxed dental records. Just enough to tell if Malik is the killer or not.”

A red flag goes up in my mind. “An ‘informal’ chat? You’re shitting me.”

“No.”

“Who wants this, Sean? The task force? Or you?”

The resulting pause is long enough for me to guess the answer. “Are you out of your mind? There’s no way a dentist is going to let me see his records without a court order. Not with all the new HIPAA regulations. When can you get a court order?”

“The task force is debating that now. The problem is, as soon as we ask for those records, we tip Malik to our interest in him.”

“So? If his dental records match the bite marks on the victims, that won’t matter. But if I break the law to get an ‘informal’ look at those records—or Malik’s dentist breaks it—and that’s brought out at trial, couldn’t that get Malik off?”

“If it came out at trial, yes. But you’re part of the old boy network in this town. In dentistry anyway.”

“You’re wrong about that, Sean. I’m tolerated—maybe grudgingly respected. But if I—”

“Cat.”
His voice is filled with presumptuousness.

“Do you really want to stop this guy that badly? Or do you just want the glory of catching him?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Bullshit. This killer’s been hitting one victim a week. It’s only been twenty-four hours since his last strike. We have some time. The task force does, I mean.”

Sean doesn’t reply. In the silence, I try to divine his true motivation. He likes glory, but there’s something deeper at work here. He’s speaking again, but I don’t catch what he’s saying, because suddenly I understand.

“You’re trying to save your job.”

I know from the silence that I’m right. “Does Captain Piazza want to fire you because of us?”

“Piazza will never fire me,” he says with bravado. “I make her look too good.”

“Maybe. But she’d damn sure yank you off the task force. And bringing in a positive ID on the killer before the Bureau can would put you back into her good graces, wouldn’t it?”

More silence. “I need this, Cat.”

“Maybe so. But jailing this killer is more important than your job.”

“I know that. I’m just—”

“No way, Sean. I’ve broken a lot of rules for you, but I’ve never put a conviction in jeopardy. I won’t do it now.”

“Okay, okay. But look…at least tell me if you know the dentist. His name is Shubb. Harold Shubb.”

I feel a quick rush of excitement. Harold Shubb is part of the disaster identification unit made up of volunteer dentists across the state of Louisiana. I organized that unit. Shubb took one of my seminars in forensic odontology, and he would love a call from me.

“You know him. I can tell,” Sean says.

“I know him.”

“Is he an okay guy?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t change anything. Get your court order, and Shubb will do you right. You should also be trying to find out if this Malik had any orthodontic work done as an adolescent, or even later. Orthodontists keep their patient models for a very long time, as a defense against future lawsuits.”

Sean sighs heavily. “I’ll tell them that.”

“Kaiser probably knows already.” I picture the former FBI profiler in my mind. I can’t imagine much getting by him.

“I know you won’t make the call,” Sean says in a wheedling tone, “but at least let me fax you what I have on Malik. You want to see that, right?”

I don’t answer. My thoughts have wandered back to the bloody footprints in my bedroom.

“Cat? Are you there?”

“Send me what you’ve got.”

“Give me a fax number.”

I give him the number of my grandfather’s fax machine. I know it because we sometimes have to exchange documents dealing with my trust fund.

“I’ll get it to you as soon as I can,” Sean promises.

“Fine.”

There’s an awkward pause. Then he says, “Are you coming back tonight?”

I actually hear loneliness in his voice. “No.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“I don’t know, Sean.”

“Why not? You hardly ever go home, and when you do, you don’t like it.”

“Something’s happened up here.”

“What? Is somebody sick?”

“I can’t explain now. I have to go.”

“Call me later, then.”

“If I notice anything interesting in the stuff you fax me, I’ll call. Otherwise, it’ll be tomorrow at least before you hear from me.”

Sean is silent. Then, after a few moments, he says, “Good-bye, Cat.”

I hang up and look back at the slave quarters, then up at the rear of Malmaison. I want to talk to my mother, but she’s still twenty minutes away. Suddenly, from the roiling mass of thoughts that is my mind in this moment, a clear image rises. Breaking into a trot, I head into the trees on the east side of the vast lawn, following a path first beaten by my own feet fifteen years ago.

I need to be underwater.

As I jog through the trees, I spy a dark figure standing in the shadows about forty yards ahead. A black man in work clothes. I bear left so that I won’t pass him too closely, but as I near the figure, I recognize Mose, the yardman who has worked at Malmaison since before I was born. Once a strapping giant who could carry railroad ties on his back, Mose now has a bent spine and white stubble that grows almost up to his watery yellow eyes. He lives alone in a small house at the back of the property, but once a week he commands an army of younger men who groom the grounds like a crack army platoon. I wave as I pass to his left. The old man lifts his arm in a vague way. He doesn’t recognize me. Probably thinks I’m one of the suburban housewives from Brookwood. The scary thing is that I’m old enough to be one now. I quicken my pace, my mind racing ahead to a place I haven’t visited in far too long.

Years fall away as I run.