Blood Memory

“Because I did. A lot. We all did. But not Malik. He was the observer type. Superior and aloof. Sat back and judged everybody, you know? Sniped. It was when I was drunk that he came on to me. Which surprised me, because until he did, I thought he was gay.”

“Really?” There’s a pause. I picture Kaiser making notes on a pad. “And you’ve never seen him in New Orleans? Not in the supermarket? The mall? Nothing like that?”

“No. And I’d remember.”

“Do you have any idea why he changed his name?”

“No. Where did he get the name Malik?”

“It was his mother’s maiden name.”

“Huh. That’s pretty common, I guess?”

“Not so much with men,” Kaiser replies. “But it happens.”

The FBI agent is silent for a brief period. “So basically, Nathan Malik—then called Gentry—was a friend of this doctor you were having an affair with. So it’s the doctor I need to talk to.”

“Definitely.”

“Can you spell his name for me?”

“Christopher Omartian, MD. He’s an EENT. I think he practices in Alabama now. Mobile.”

“How do you know that?”

“He sent me a letter a couple of years ago.”

“Did you respond?”

“I threw it in the trash.”

Kaiser thanks me for my time, says he might need to call back, then starts to say good-bye.

“Agent Kaiser?”

“Yes?”

“What about the two female relatives of the victims? The ones you used to link Dr. Malik to the murders?”

“What about them?”

“Have you talked to them yet?”

“We’ve tried with one, but she’s very suspicious. Bordering on paranoid. Won’t tell us a thing about Malik. Look, I really need to run, Dr. Ferry. Thank you for your help.”

Kaiser signs off.

I figure Sean will call back immediately, but my phone doesn’t ring. Suppressing the urge to call him, I slow the Audi along the curving road to St. Francisville, where John James Audubon painted many of his famous birds.

The ANGOLA PENITENTIARY sign flashes past on my right, and my stomach does a little flip. Angola means many things to me. As a child I attended the prison rodeo and marveled at the cavalier way the convicts risked their lives with the bulls and broncos. But what Angola means most to me is the island. The prison road is the one we traveled to reach DeSalle Island from the eastern bank of the Mississippi. The old river channel that guards the island’s eastern shore had to be crossed by boat for most of the year, but during the summer, an oil company maintained a low-water bridge to service its wells on the island. That bridge led to an exotic world of shadows and light, of joy and terror, of memory and forgetting. I made childhood friends on the island—black friends mostly—then lost them to the realities of a social order I didn’t even know I was part of. I worked the ground only to see what I’d planted washed away by floods. I cared for animals only to see them slaughtered for food. I learned to hunt and to kill, and then to hate the killing.

Death and the island are inextricably bound in my mind. When I was ten years old, four hardened killers escaped from Angola by floating out into the river on a log. The prison chase team radioed my grandfather that the river’s current might drive the escapees ashore on DeSalle Island. They sent men with dogs to comb the island for a solid day. They found nothing. The next night, Grandpapa, his white foreman, and two handpicked black men rode off on horseback with four prize hounds. At dawn the next day, two escapees were locked in the dog run behind the barn, their hands and feet bound with bailing wire. The other two lay dead on the barn floor, their bodies ravaged by dog bites and bullets.

Last year my grandmother drowned during a picnic on the sandbar. One minute she was laughing, the next she was gone. Sluffed into the current with thirty feet of sand, her body never found. I wasn’t there that day, and it was probably best. I would have killed myself trying to save her. I know the Mississippi River in a way most people never will. Where most fear the great muddy tide, I respect it. When I was sixteen, I swam across it on a dare, to prove that I feared nothing. My reckless courage almost killed me that day. The island and the river have claimed many more lives than those convicts and my grandmother, but I don’t want to dwell on that now. Don’t borrow trouble, my grandmother used to say.

South of St. Francisville, the road broadens to four lanes. I open up the throttle and go flat out on the straightaway to Baton Rouge. I’m passing the main exit for LSU when Sean finally calls back.

“I’m in Baton Rouge now,” I tell him. “One hour away.”

“You can slow down, Cat.”

My chest tightens. I can tell from his voice that the news is bad. “What happened?”

“Malik’s teeth don’t match the bite marks on the victims.”

I blink in bewilderment. “Are you sure? Who did the comparison?”

“An FBI guy named Abrams. Says it wasn’t even close.”

“Shit. He knows his business.”

“Looks like the Malik connection wasn’t the break we thought it was.”

I whip into the left lane and pass a rattling Winnebago. “Sean, there’s no way Malik’s connection to the victims could be coincidence. It’s the key to the whole case. We just haven’t figured out how it all fits together yet.”

“You got any ideas?”

I think furiously. “Malik’s DNA may still match the saliva in the bite marks.”

“But his teeth don’t match the marks.”

“He might have used someone else’s teeth.”

“What?”

“It happened in that book, Red Dragon. The Tooth Fairy used his grandmother’s false teeth to bite victims. With him it was part of the murder fantasy, but with Malik it could simply be staging.”

“Where would Malik get false teeth?”

“Anywhere! He could have stolen an articulated model from Dr. Shubb’s office. Just veer into the lab on his way out to the front desk, and boom, he’d have a working set of teeth.”

“And the saliva could still be his? Like he licked the wounds or something?”

“Just like that. Or it could be someone else’s. To throw us off.”

“I’ll check this, but it seems far out. The FBI has given the DNA test on Malik top priority, but you know what that means.”

“Damn.” I gun the Audi around a tractor-trailer. “Does Malik have alibis for the murder nights?”