Blood Memory

Chapter 44

The FBI field office is a four-story brick fortress on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, between Lakefront Airport and the University of New Orleans. We stop at the heavy-iron gate topped with fleur-de-lis, so Kaiser can show an armed guard his credentials. Once inside, we park and hurry through an entrance adorned with flags, black marble, and the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

There’s red tape to be handled in the vestibule, where a woman waits behind bulletproof polycarbonate glass. Afterward, Kaiser ushers me through a metal detector, and we’re on our way to the fourth floor, where the special agent in charge runs the field office and the 150 FBI agents spread across Louisiana.

When we get out of the elevator, Kaiser leads me down a hallway like those in every other corporate headquarters in America. Muted decor, more doors, more hallways. Kaiser knocks on a closed door, then enters and beckons me inside. Beyond the door is an empty office with four cots in it. Two are bare, but two are made up with sheets, blankets, and pillows.

“Best I can do, I’m afraid.”

“It’s better than a cell in the parish prison.”

Kaiser gives me an obligatory chuckle. “I need to go straighten this mess out with the SAC. He may want to talk to you.”

“I’m good. Whatever.”

“Good or not, I’m going to send up a nurse. Her name is Sandy.”

“I’ll be asleep before she gets here.”

He nods, then starts to leave.

“May I have my cell phone back?”

“Can’t do that. Sorry.”

“Nobody’s read me my rights.”

Kaiser’s patience is straining at the seams. “Cat, you’ve obstructed justice and maybe acted as an accessory to multiple murder. If I let you interfere in this case anymore-which your cell phone would make it very easy for you to do-the SAC will throw you out the front gate and give you to the NOPD. And there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it. Okay?”

“Fair enough. But you’ll tell me if Ann calls?”

“Absolutely. I’ll bring your phone in here and have you call her back.”

He looks at me as if he’s sure I have another question, but I don’t. I do, however, have an idea. “I’ve been thinking about the skull, John.”

“What about it?”

“From the very beginning, I figured the bite marks could be staged. Did Sean tell you my theory about the killer using dentures or an articulated model to make the marks?”

A smile touches Kaiser’s lips. “Let’s say he took partial credit for that.”

“Par for the course. Well, my theory proved out. The killer was using the teeth from that skull to make the marks. Next question: Whose DNA have we been testing? Where does the saliva come from? We know it’s not Malik’s.”

Kaiser nods. “Sure, but until we have a suspect, we have nothing to compare our samples to.”

“Yeah, but I was thinkingsaliva contains more than DNA, you know. We need to know everything we can about that saliva.”

“Like what? What do you want to do?”

“Some basic nineteenth-century science. Everybody treats DNA analysis as the be-all and end-all of forensics. Fine, great. But the average mouth contains strep bacteria and all kinds of other bugs. Let’s take the fresh saliva out of Quentin Baptiste’s wounds, put it in a petri dish, and see what grows out. Maybe we’ll get a strange germ that can tell us something. Sort of like the way we track where a corpse ate dinner by looking at its stomach contents. Impurities and things, you know?”

Kaiser looks skeptical. “What could we really learn?”

“I don’t know. We might find our suspect suffers from a certain disease. We should give it a shot, right? Like Sean calling that bail bondsman back and figuring out that Ann paid Malik’s bail.”

“You’re right. I’ll tell the forensic team to do it.”

“Tell them quick. Baptiste has the only viable saliva for this, and cultures take time.”

“Done.” He goes to the door, then turns back to me and speaks in an apologetic voice. “Hey. Are you really pregnant?”

I nod silently.

“Sean’s?”

“Yes.”

He closes his eyes for a moment, then looks at me again. “Are you going to have it?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t blink. “Good for you.”

I never saw or heard a nurse come into my room. The Valium carried me away from the waking world like a gentle river of Grey Goose. Maybe my alcohol withdrawal has made me hypersensitive to drugs. Whatever the reason, I slid down the bright coral wall into my dream ocean without interference, and the myriad images of my subconscious surrounded me like children penned up in a house all day.

Time flows forward and backward in my dreams. Not at my whim, of course. If intruders are chasing me and about to grab me from behind with clawed fingers, I can’t reverse time and save myself. But events in my dreams don’t always unroll in a forward sequence. Sometimes I’m getting younger as my dream life progresses-or re gresses, I suppose-turning from nine to eight at a birthday party, for example. I’ve never gone back beyond eight, though. The age I was when my father died is like an obsidian wall, an immutable fact of physics laid down by Newton or Einstein or even God. The sign on that wall doesn’t read BEYOND THIS POINT LIE MONSTERS, like the legend on ancient maps. It reads BEYOND THIS POINT LIES NOTHING.

Nothing. Does such a thing exist? I’ve heard children ask this question: Isn’t even “nothing” something? Space is something, isn’t it? Time exists there. And gravity. Invisible things, perhaps, but they’re real enough to kill you. I existed before I was eight, even though I don’t remember it. I know that I existed then the way I know that doctors took out my tonsils while I was under anesthetic. Something happened, even if I wasn’t mentally present.

I have the scars to prove it.

My scars aren’t visible to the naked eye, but they’re there. If a child stops speaking for a year, there’s a reason. Something hurt me, even if it was only something I saw. What did I see? Eight years of lost images. Did they vanish down a well? Not all of them. I’ve always had fragments of that history. Images of animals, particularly, have stuck with me. A dog we had when I was very young. A red fox that Pearlie pointed out to me, running low and fast under the trees at Malmaison. Horses on the island, galloping across the sand as if they meant to swim the river to freedom.

And I remember my father. Those images I’ve hoarded, like gold smuggled out of a war-torn city. My fatherLuke Ferry. Dancing to the sound of a car radio while he washed his beat-up white Volkswagen. Walking down the driveway of Malmaison with his head down and his hands stuck in his pockets, thinking hard about something. Screaming at my mother to stay out of the barn, even as he pulled me inside with one hand. Watching him from the loft of the barn while he sculpted with a cutting torch, bending the white-hot steel to his will. From where I sat, the fire from that torch looked brighter than the sun, and the roar of it filled my ears. The smell of hay closed around me in the loft, a smell no amount of cleaning could get out of that building. How many afternoons did I spend in that loft, watching him wrestle beauty out of a pile of bars on the floor?

More than he wanted me to.

Daddy didn’t always know I was there. Sometimes I crawled up the ladder on the back side of the barn and slipped into the loft that way. It reminded me of black-and-white movies I’d seen about a little Arab boy in the bazaar, spying on people and having glorious adventures. Most times Daddy heard me-his eardrums must have been like butterfly wings-but other times he didn’t. When he knew I was there, his head had a different tilt to it, as though he were making sure I could see what he was doing with the torch. I felt so privileged. He’d chosen me as his secret sharer, the only one allowed to see how the magician did his tricks. But some nights his head was hard down over his work, and I saw only the sweat running down his neck and back, soaking his white undershirt. On those nights he worked with a fervor I couldn’t begin to understand. He worked like a man who hated the linear chunks of metal and was trying to destroy their essence by making them something abstract-something without function, yet meaningful.

I am back there now.

The loft.

With the hay smell and the wasp nests and the mosquitoes that buzzed in during the day to lie in wait for me at night. I don’t slap them, because Daddy will hear me. I let them fasten to my skin and begin to fatten with blood, and then I slowly mash them into a paste of black and red.

When the cutting torch dies, the silence in the barn is absolute. In the silence, I hear the rain for the first time. I forgot it was raining. That’s why he didn’t hear me sneak in. The drops rattle against the tin roof like a barrage of hail, but the hypnotic roar of the torch was enough to drown them out.

Daddy is walking around on the floor, but I can’t see him. Craning my neck, I find him squatting on the floor beneath the loft. He’s beside one of the timbers that hold up the roof, working some kind of tool under a floorboard. After a moment, he looks around, then pulls the board up from the floor. Then another. And another. He pulls a bag from underneath the floor. It’s dark green, like the jeeps I’ve seen parked behind the National Guard armory when I go to the flea market there.

I’ve never seen the bag before.

He takes something out of the bag, but I can’t see what. A magazine maybe, or a big picture. Then he stands and walks to one of his worktables. His back is to me. He lays the object on the table and reaches down to his middle like he needs to undo his pants to pee. My face feels hot. He’s not peeing, because there’s no commode or even grass, just the table on the wooden floor.

His right shoulder is flexing the way it does when he’s working on metal. Like it will never stop. The rain keeps hitting the roof close over my head, and the sweat keeps running down his back. Then his head goes back like he’s staring at the ceiling, but somehow I know his eyes are closed.

I’m scared. I want to run, but my hands and feet are numb.

He turns sideways, and then I see what he’s doing, and my heart swells into my throat. I can’t breathe. His mouth is hanging slack, and the way it looks makes my stomach flip. When he groans and thrashes his head, something breaks the chains holding my limbs, and I’m suddenly running back to the ladder, running to save my life. My head slams into a board, and I lose my footing, and then I’m falling past the rungs of the ladder, throwing out my arms but catching only raindrops-

“Look, Cat,” says Grandpapa, pointing at some trees. “Look at that fawn over there.”

When I turn my head, I’m no longer falling out of the barn, but sitting in my grandfather’s orange pickup as it rumbles up the low hill toward the pond. I’m back on the island. Fear is still stuffing my heart into my throat, but the smells have changed. The hay is gone, replaced by motor oil, mildew, chewing-tobacco juice, and smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette. It hasn’t started to rain yet, but the sky is filled with leaden clouds as heavy as a pregnant cow’s belly.

As we trundle over the crest of the hill, Grandpapa turns his head and watches his prize bull mount a cow. Pleasure lights his face. Why is he happy? Is he thinking of the money he’ll make from the calf to be conceived? Or does he just like watching the bull thrusting and heaving over the cow? How many times must I watch this same movie?

Ahead, the cows by the pond watch us with dumb indifference. Beyond them the water lies smooth as glass, except where my father floats facedown in it, his arms outspread like Jesus on the cross. I squeeze my hands into fists. I want to close my eyes, but my eyelids don’t work. Mute with fear, I point with my finger. Grandpapa squints at the clouds and shakes his head.

“Goddamn rain,” he mutters.

As we roll down toward the pond, my father gets to his feet and starts walking across its surface. My heart pounds so loudly I can hear it above the sound of the truck. Daddy holds out his arms to me, then begins unbuttoning his shirt. There’s dark hair on his chest. I pull at my grandfather’s shirtsleeve, but he’s mesmerized by the bull straining over the cow.

“Daddy, don’t!” I shout.

He pulls his shirt open. In the middle of his chest is the big sutured Y-incision. To the right of that, the hole where the bullet went in. He puts two fingers into the bullet hole and pulls it open. Again I cover my eyes with my hands, then peer between my fingers. Something is pouring out of the wound like blood, only it’s not blood.

It’s gray.

“Look, Kitty Cat,” he commands. “I want you to look.”

This time I obey.

The gray stuff isn’t liquid. It’s a bunch of pellets, plastic pellets, a stream of them pouring out of my daddy’s chest the way they poured out of my stuffed animals whenever I tore one open by accident. Louisiana Rice Creatures were really stuffed with rice in the beginning, but later they switched to plastic pellets. Cheaper, I guess. Or maybe the rice rotted after a while. The pellets pour endlessly out of my father’s wound, a hissing river of them hitting the water.

When Daddy is sure I know what they are, he pulls his chest open still wider. Then he reaches into his wound and pulls out a Rice Creature, like a vet delivering a colt from a troubled mare. It’s not just any Rice Creature, though. It’s my favorite: Lena the Leopardess. The one I put in Daddy’s coffin before he was buried, to keep him company in heaven.

I want to run to him and take Lena from his hands, but my door won’t open. As I stare, Daddy holds Lena up so I can see her belly. It’s messed up somehow. As he nears the edge of the pond, I see that Lena’s belly has a stitched Y-incision in it, just like Daddy’s chest. With his eyes on mine, he digs his fingers into the thread, rips it apart, then tears open Lena’s stomach.

I scream.

Bright red blood pours out of Lena’s chest, more blood than any doll could hold. Somehow I know it’s my daddy’s blood. He turns pale as I stare, then gray, and then his feet begin sinking. The water can’t hold him up anymore.

“Daddy!” I shriek. “Wait! I’m coming!”

He keeps sinking, his face sadder than I’ve ever seen it.

“I can save you, Daddy!”

I jerk as hard as I can on the truck’s door handle, but it won’t open. I bang my fists on the window until my knuckles split, but it does no good. Then someone with soft hands takes me by the wrists.

“Catherine? Wake up, Cat. It’s time to wake up.”

I open my eyes.

Hannah Goldman is leaning over my cot, holding me by the wrists. Dr. Goldman has the kindest eyes in the world.

“It’s Hannah,” she says. “Can you hear me, Cat?”

“Yes.” I smile for her, my best smile so she’ll know I’m okay. It’s easy to be okay with Hannah here, even if it is only a dream.

“I’ve come to speak to you about something important,” she says.

I nod understanding. “Of course. What is it?”

“Agent Kaiser asked me to come. I think that was wise of him.”

“He’s a wise man,” I agree. “A very wise man.”

Dr. Goldman looks almost as sad as my father. “Cat, you know I believe in honesty and frankness, but life always finds a way to test our beliefs. There’s no easy way to tell you this.”

I smile encouragement and pat her hand. “It’s okay. I’m strong. You know I can take it.”

“You are strong.” She smiles back. “You may be my strongest patient. What I have to tell you is this. Your aunt Ann is dead.”

My smile broadens. “No, she’s not. I talked to her today.”

“I know you did, dear. But that was yesterday afternoon. You’ve been sleeping for quite a while. And sometime last night, your aunt drove to DeSalle Island and killed herself by taking an overdose of morphine.”

My smile freezes on my face. It’s not Dr. Goldman’s somber voice or sad eyes that convince me. It’s the morphine. And the island.