Blood Memory

My hands are shaking. Were they shaking when I woke up? I grip the steering wheel and force myself to breathe deeply. As my pulse steadies and my heart finds its rhythm, I pull down the vanity mirror and check my face. I’m not usually compulsive about my appearance, but Sean has made me nervous. And when I get nervous, crazy thoughts flood into my head. Disembodied voices, old nightmares, ancient slights and mistakes, things therapists have said …

I consider putting on some eyeliner to strengthen my gaze in case I have to stare somebody down inside. I don’t really need it. Men often tell me I’m beautiful, but men will tell any woman that. My face is actually masculine in structure, a vertical series of V’s, simple and to the point. The V of my chin slants up into a strong jaw. My mouth, too, curves upward. Then comes the angular bottom of my nose; my prominent, upward-slanting cheekbones; my tilted brown eyes and sloping eyebrows; and finally the dark widow’s peak of my hairline. I see my father in all of this, twenty years dead now but alive in every angle of my face. I keep a picture of him in my wallet. Luke Ferry, 1969. Smiling in his army uniform, somewhere in Vietnam. I don’t like the uniform—not after what the war did to him—but I like his eyes in the picture. Still compassionate, still human. It’s how I like to remember him. A little girl’s idea of a father. He once told me that I almost got his face, but at the last minute an angel swooped down and put enough softness in mine to make me pretty.

Sean sees the hardness in my face. He’s told me I look like a predator myself, a hawk or an eagle. Tonight I’m glad for that hardness. Because as I get out of the Audi and shoulder my cases and tripod, something tells me that maybe Sean is right to be worried about my nerves. I’m going in naked tonight, without benefit of anesthesia. And without the familiar chemical barrier that shields me from the sharp edges of reality, I feel more vulnerable to whatever it was that panicked me last time.

Walking down the dusky street lined with wrought-iron fences and second-floor galleries, I sense a human gaze on my skin. I stop and turn but see no one. Only a dog lifting its leg beside a lamppost. I scan the galleries overhead, but the heat has driven their owners inside. Christ. I feel as if I’ve been waiting all my thirty-one years to see the corpse in the house ahead of me. Or maybe it’s been waiting for me. Something is waiting for me, that’s for sure.

A crystal image rises into my mind as I resume walking, a sweating blue Dasani bottle with three inches of Grey Goose sloshing in its bottom, like meltwater from a divine glacier. If I had that, I could brazen my way through anything.

“You’ve done this a hundred times,” I tell myself. “You did Bosnia when you were twenty-five and didn’t know shit.”

“Hey! You Dr. Ferry?”

A cop in uniform is calling to me from a high porch on my right. The victim’s house. Arthur LeGendre lived in a large Victorian typical of the Garden District, but the vehicles parked in the cross street around the corner are more commonly found in the Desire and St. Thomas housing projects—the coroner’s wagon, an ambulance, NOPD squad cars, and the FBI Suburban that carries the Bureau’s forensic team. I see a couple of unmarked NOPD cars, too, one of them Sean’s. Climbing the steps, I think I’m fine.

Ten feet inside, I know I’m in trouble.

TWO (#ulink_daf259cf-383c-5564-bf99-2405c94ce45d)

A brittle air of expectancy fills the broad central hallway of the victim’s house, and curious eyes track my movements. A forensic tech moves through with an alternate-light source, searching for latent fingerprints. I don’t know where the body is, but before I have to ask the patrolman standing inside the door, Sean steps into the rear of the hall and beckons me toward him.

I go, taking care to keep myself balanced with my cases. I wish Sean would squeeze my arm as I reach him, but I know he can’t. And then he does. And I remember why I fell in love with him. Sean always knows what I need, sometimes even before I do.

“How you doin’?” he murmurs.

“A little shaky.”

“Body’s in the kitchen.” He takes the heavy case from my right hand. “This one’s a little bloodier than the last, but it’s just another stiff. The Bureau forensic team has done its thing, all but the bite marks. Kaiser says those are your show. That ought to make you feel pretty good.”

“Kaiser” is John Kaiser, a former FBI profiler who helped solve New Orleans’s biggest serial murder case, in which eleven women disappeared while paintings of their corpses turned up in art galleries around the world. Kaiser is the Bureau’s point man on the NOMURS task force.

“The scene’s more crowded than it should be,” Sean says softly. “Piazza’s in there. Plenty of tension, if you’re looking. But that’s not your problem. You’re a consultant. That’s it.”

“I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

He opens the door to a gleaming world of granite, travertine, shining enamel, and pickled wood. Kitchens like this always feel like operating rooms to me, and this one actually has a patient in it somewhere. A dead one. I sweep my eyes over a blur of faces and nod a greeting. Captain Carmen Piazza nods back. Then I look down and see a blood trail on the floor. Someone has crawled or been dragged across the marble floor to a spot behind the island at the center of the kitchen. Dragged, I decide.

“Behind the island,” Sean says from my shoulder.

Someone has set up a floodlight. When I round the island, I see a stunning Technicolor image of a naked corpse lying on its back. The details of the upper body hit me in a surreal rush: livid bite marks on the chest, bloody ones on the face, one bullet hole in the center of the abdomen, a contact gunshot wound to the forehead. The superfine blood spatter of a high-speed-impact wound has dotted the marble tiles like a monochrome Pollock painting behind the victim’s head. Arthur LeGendre’s face is a frozen shriek of horror and pain, shocked into permanence when part of his brain was blown out through the back of his skull.

I force my eyes away from the bite marks on the chest. The lower body has its own tale to tell. Arthur LeGendre isn’t nude after all. He wears black nylon socks, like a man in a 1940s porno loop. His penis is a pale acorn in a nest of gray pubic hair, but I can see blood and bruising there. I take a step forward, and my breath catches in my throat. Scrawled in blood across two cabinet doors on the wall of the island opposite the sink are five words:

MY WORK IS NEVER DONE

Rivulets of blood have dripped down the cabinet doors, giving the message an almost comical Halloween look. But there’s nothing comical about the pool of separated blood and serum under the elbow of the dead man. LeGendre’s antecubital vein was sliced to provide the blood for this macabre message. The tip of his right forefinger was obviously dipped in blood. Did the killer write the words with his victim’s dead finger to avoid leaving his own fingerprint in the blood? Or did he force LeGendre to write the message prior to death? Free-histamine tests will answer that question.

I need to start working, but I can’t take my eyes off the message. My work is never done. It’s a common phrase, so common I can hear my mother’s voice saying it in my head—

“You need any help, Dr. Ferry?”

“What?”

“John Kaiser,” says the same voice.

I look over at a tall, lanky man of about fifty. He has a friendly face with hazel eyes that miss nothing. He’s left off his title. Special Agent John Kaiser.

“You need help with your lights or anything? For the UV photography?”

Feeling oddly detached, I shake my head.

“He’s getting more savage,” Kaiser observes. “Losing control, maybe? The face is actually torn this time.”

I nod again. “There’s subcutaneous fat showing through the cheek.”

The floor shudders as Sean sets my heavy dental case beside me. Too late I try to conceal that I jerked when the vibration went through me. I tell myself to breathe deeply, but my throat is already closing, and a film of sweat has coated my skin.

One step at a time … Shoot the bites with the 105-millimeter quartz lens. Standard color film first, then get out the filters and start on the UV. After that, take your alginate impressions …

As I bend and flip the latches on my case, I feel like I’m moving at half speed. A dozen pairs of eyes are watching me, and their gazes seem to be interfering with my nerve impulses. Sean will notice my awkwardness, but maybe no one else will. “It’s the same mouth,” I say softly.

“What?” asks Agent Kaiser.

“Same killer. He’s got slightly pegged lateral incisors. I see it on the chest bites. That’s not conclusive. I’m just saying … my preliminary assessment.”

“Right. Of course. You sure you don’t need some help?”

What the hell am I saying? Of course it’s the same guy. Everybody in this room knows that. I’m just here to document and preserve the evidence to the highest possible degree of accuracy—

I’m opening the wrong case. I need my camera, not my impression kit. Jesus, keep it together. But I can’t. As I bend farther down to open my camera case, a wave of dizziness nearly tips me onto the floor. I retrieve the camera, straighten up, switch it on, then realize I’ve forgotten to set up my tripod.

And then it happens.

In three seconds I go from mild anxiety to hyperventilation, like an old lady about to faint in church. Which is unbelievable. I can breathe more efficiently than 99 percent of the human population. When I’m not working as an odontologist, I’m a free diver, a world-class competitor in a sport whose participants commonly dive to three hundred feet using only the air trapped in their lungs. Some people call free diving competitive suicide, and there’s some truth to that. I can lie on the bottom of a swimming pool with a weight belt for over six minutes without air, a feat that would kill most people. Yet now—standing at sea level in the kitchen of a ritzy town house—I can’t even drink from the ocean of oxygen that surrounds me.

“Dr. Ferry?” says Agent Kaiser. “Are you all right?”

Panic attack, I tell myself. Vicious circle … the anxiety worsens the symptoms, and the symptoms rev up the anxiety. You have to break the cycle …

Arthur LeGendre’s corpse wavers in my vision, as though it’s lying on the bottom of a shallow river.

“Sean?” asks Kaiser. “Is she all right?”

Don’t let this happen, I beg silently. Please.

But no one hears my prayer. Whatever is happening to me has been waiting a long time to happen. A slow black train has been coming toward me for a very long time, from very far away, and now that it’s finally reached me, it plows over me without pain or sound.

And everything goes black.