Blood Memory

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

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.

THREE

A female EMT is kneeling over me, reading from a blood pressure cuff strapped to my arm. The deflating cuff awakened me. Sean Regan and Special Agent Kaiser are standing over the EMT, looking worried.

“A little low,” says the tech. “I think she fainted. Her EKG is normal. Sugar’s a little low, but she’s not hypoglycemic.” The tech notices that my eyes are open. “When was the last time you ate, Dr. Ferry?”

“I don’t remember.”

“We should get some orange juice into you. Fix you right up.”

I look to my left. The stockinged feet of Arthur LeGendre’s corpse lie beside my head. Its legs and torso extend away from me at a right angle, down a different side of the kitchen island. I glance in that direction and see the bloody message again: MY WORK IS NEVER DONE.

“Any OJ in that fridge?” asks the EMT.

“Crime scene,” says Agent Kaiser. “Can’t disturb that. Anybody got a candy bar?”

A reluctant male voice says, “I got a Snickers. It’s my supper.”

“You on Atkins again?” Sean quips, and nervous laughter follows. “Cough it up.”

Everybody laughs now, grateful for the release of tension.

As I get to my feet, Sean reaches out to steady me. A paunchy detective steps forward and hands me his Snickers bar. I make a show of gratitude and accept it, though I know I have no blood sugar problem. This charade is witnessed by a rapt audience that includes Carmen Piazza, commander of the Homicide Division.

“I’m sorry,” I say in her direction. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Same thing as last time, looks like,” Piazza observes.

“I guess so. I’m okay now, though. I’m ready.”

Captain Piazza leans toward me and speaks softly. “Step out here with me for a moment, Dr. Ferry. You, too, Detective Regan.”

Piazza walks into the hallway. Sean gives me a warning glance, then turns and follows her.

The captain leads us into a study off the central hall, where she leans back against a desk and faces us, arms folded, jaw set tight. I can easily imagine this olive-skinned woman facing down armed street punks during her years in uniform.

“This isn’t the place to talk about complications,” she says, “so I’m not going to. I don’t know what’s going on between you two, and I don’t want to know. What I do know is that it’s jeopardizing this investigation. So here’s what we’re going to do. Dr. Ferry is going to go home. The FBI will handle the bite marks tonight. And unless the Bureau objects, I’m going to request that a new forensic odontologist be assigned to the task force.”

I want to argue, but Piazza has said nothing about my episode in the kitchen. She’s talking about something for which I have no defense. Something about which Sean told me not to worry. But why am I angry? Adulterers think they’re discreet, but people always find out.

A patrolman steps into the study and sets my tripod and dental cases on the floor. When did Piazza tell him to pack them? While I was unconscious? After he leaves, Piazza says, “Sean, walk Dr. Ferry back to her car. Be back here in two minutes. And be in my office tomorrow morning at eight sharp. Clear?”

Sean’s eyes lock with his superior’s. “Yes, ma’am.”

Captain Piazza looks at me, her face not without compassion. “Dr. Ferry, you’ve done some remarkable work for us in the past. I hope you get to the bottom of whatever this problem is. I suggest you see a doctor, if you haven’t already. I don’t think a vacation’s going to do it for you.”

She walks out, leaving me alone with my married lover and the latest mess I seem to have made of my life. Sean picks up my cases and starts for the front door. We can’t risk talking here.

Warm water drips from the oak leaves as we walk down the block in silence. It rained while I was inside, a typical New Orleans shower that did nothing to cool or cleanse the city, only added more water vapor to the smothering humidity and washed more filth into Lake Pontchartrain. The air smells of banana trees, though, and in the darkness the street has a deceptively romantic look.

“What happened in there?” Sean asks, not looking at me. “Another panic attack?”

My hands are shaking, but whether from my episode inside, alcohol withdrawal, or the confrontation with Captain Piazza, I don’t know. “I guess. I don’t know.”

“Is it these particular murders? It started with the third victim, Nolan.”

I can tell by Sean’s voice that he’s worried. “I don’t think so.”

He looks over at me. “Is it us, Cat?”

Of course it’s us. “I don’t know.”

“I told you Karen and I are talking about seeing a lawyer now. It’s just the kids, you know? We—”

“Don’t start, okay? Not tonight.” My throat tightens, and a sour taste fills my mouth. “I’m in this situation because I put myself in it.”

“I know, but—”

“Please.” I make a fist to stop my right hand from shaking. “Okay?”

This time Sean heeds the hysteria in my voice. When we reach the Audi, he takes my keys, unlocks the door, and loads my cases into the backseat. Then he looks back up the block, toward the LeGendre house, probably to make sure Piazza isn’t watching us. That he has to do this, even now, is like a knife in my belly.

“Tell me what’s really going on,” he says, turning back to me. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Yes. But I’m not going to play that particular scene here. Not now. Not like this. Even I cling to some fairy-tale dreams, and this wet street after a murder isn’t part of them. “I can’t do this,” I tell him. It’s all I can manage.

His green eyes widen in a silent plea. They have a remarkable intensity sometimes. “We have to talk, Cat. Tonight.”

I don’t reply.

“I’ll get away as soon as I can,” he promises.

“All right,” I say, knowing it’s the only way to get out of here. “There’s Captain Piazza.”

Sean’s head whips to the left. “Where?”

Another knife thrust. “I thought I saw her. You’d better get back in there.”

He squeezes my upper arms, then opens the door of the Audi and helps me inside. “Be careful driving home.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Instead of leaving, he kneels in the open door, clasps my left wrist, and speaks with genuine urgency. “I am worried about you. What is it? I know you, damn it. Tell me!”

I crank the engine and pull slowly away from the curb, leaving Sean no choice but to let go of my wrist.

“Cat!” he yells, but I close the door and drive on, leaving him standing in the wet street staring after my taillights.

“I’m pregnant,” I tell him, far too late.

Two miles from my house on Lake Pontchartrain, I realize I can’t go home. If I do, the walls will close around me like suffocating pillows, and I’ll pace the shrinking rooms like a madwoman until Sean pulls into the garage and lets down the door with his remote control. Every word he says after that I will hear against a ticking clock that marks the time remaining before he has to go home to his wife and kids. And I absolutely cannot endure that tonight.

Normally, after working a crime scene, I stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle of vodka. But not tonight. The little agglomeration of cells growing inside me is the only pure thing in my life right now, and I will not do it injury. Even if it means the screaming heebie-jeebies and a rubber room. That’s the only thing I’m sure of this minute.

I tried to go cold turkey in the beginning, thinking it was best for the baby. Twenty hours into that particular mistake, I got the shakes so bad I couldn’t unzip my jeans to pee. A couple of hours later, I started seeing snakes in the house. A small rattler in a corner of the kitchen, curled into a deadly spiral. A fat cottonmouth moccasin hanging from a fern planter in the living room. A brilliantly hued coral snake sunning itself in the painful glare by the glass doors in the den. All lethal, all planning to slither up to me, bury their fangs in my flesh, and not let go until every drop of poison in their venom sacs had been injected into me.

Hello delirium tremens …

Cold turkey wasn’t going to cut it. I hit my medical books, which told me that the first forty-eight hours of withdrawal would be the worst. Addiction specialists prescribe Valium to blunt the physical symptoms while the psychological addiction is cured, but Valium can cause cleft palate in a developing fetus, the risk depending on dosage and duration of use. The full-blown d.t.’s, on the other hand, can cause seizure, stroke, and death in the mother. This choice of evils was ultimately no choice at all. I know a dozen oral surgeons who can repair a cleft palate; I know no one who can bring back the dead. When the coral snake began slithering toward me, I climbed onto a table, called the Rite Aid pharmacy, and self-prescribed enough Valium to get me through forty-eight hours.

The Audi’s tires squeal as I wrench it into a U-turn and stop at the base of the Interstate 10 on-ramp. Cars and trucks roar by, angrily blasting their horns. An hour of driving west on I-10 would put me in Baton Rouge. From Baton Rouge, Highway 61 follows the Mississippi River northward for ninety miles to Natchez, Mississippi, my childhood home. I’ve begun that journey many times without completing it. Tonight, though …

Home, I say silently. The place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in. I can’t remember who said that, but it’s always seemed apt to me. On the face of things it shouldn’t. My family has always begged me to visit. My mother actually wants me to move back into the house where I grew up. (House isn’t exactly accurate. It’s an estate big enough to hold me and about twelve other families.) But I could never move back to that house. I can’t even move back to Natchez. And I don’t know why. It’s a beautiful city, more so than New Orleans in many ways. Certainly safer and more peaceful. And it’s drawn back many who’ve tried to leave it over the years.

But not me.

You leave a place young and you don’t know why, only that you have to get out. I graduated high school when I was sixteen, left for college, and never looked back. The one or two interesting boys I knew wanted out as badly as I did, and they made it, too. I returned for Christmases and Thanksgivings but little else, and this deeply wounded my family. They never understood, and they never let me forget it. Looking back across fifteen years, I think I fled my home because elsewhere—anywhere—Cat Ferry was only what I could make of her. In Natchez, she was heir to a suffocating matrix of expectations and obligations that I couldn’t bear to face.

But now I’ve wrecked my carefully constructed sanctuary. It was inevitable, of course. I’ve been warned by the best. As predicted, my troubles here now dwarf those I left behind me, and my options have dwindled to one. For a moment I consider going back to my house and packing a bag. But if I do that, I’ll never leave. The pregnancy scene with Sean will be played out, and then … maybe the end for us. Or perhaps only for me. I’m not going to walk myself up to that ledge tonight.

My cell phone rings out “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” again. The screen reads Det. Sean Regan. I’m tempted to answer, but Sean isn’t calling about the case. He wants to see me. To question me about my “episode” at the crime scene. He wants to hash out what Captain Piazza might or might not know about our affair. To decompress after the frustration of dealing with the task force.

He wants sex.

I switch the ringer to silent and drive up the ramp, joining the night traffic leaving the city.

FOUR

In the South you are never far from the wild. In less than ten minutes, I-10 leaps off terra firma and sweeps over a fetid marsh filled with alligators, pit vipers, wild hogs, and panthers. All through the night they will stalk and kill, enacting the ritual of death that preserves their lives. Predators and prey, an eternal dance. Which am I? Sean would say hunter, and he wouldn’t be wrong. But he wouldn’t be quite right, either. I’ve been prey in my life. I carry scars Sean has never seen. I’m neither predator nor prey now, but a hybrid creature who knows the minds of both. I track predators to protect the most endangered species of all—the innocent.

A naive term these days, perhaps. The innocent. No one who reaches adulthood with his sanity intact is innocent. But none of us deserves to be prey for the truly damned. The older men dying back in New Orleans did something to draw their killer to them. Something innocuous, perhaps—or maybe something terrible. I’m concerned with that only insofar as it helps me find the killer who took their lives. But of course, I shouldn’t be concerned with it at all. Because Captain Piazza has excluded me from that hunt.

No, you excluded yourself, chides the censor in my head.

My cell phone lights up green on the passenger seat. Sean again. I turn over the phone so I won’t have to see the glow.

For the past year, when anxiety or depression has become unbearable, I’ve run to Sean Regan. Tonight I’m running away from him. I’m running because I’m afraid. When Sean learns that I’m pregnant—and that I intend to keep the baby—he will either honor the promises he’s made to me or betray them. And I’m terrified that he won’t give up his family for me. This fear is so tangible that the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, something I’ve known all along and was foolish to ever lie to myself about.

Sean has never hidden his doubts. He worries about my drinking. My depression. My occasional manic states. He worries that I can’t be sexually faithful. Based on my history, these are legitimate concerns. But at some point, I believe, you just have to go for it, to risk everything for the other person regardless of your fears. Besides … can’t Sean see that if he doesn’t have faith in me after coming to know me so intimately, it’s so much harder for me to have faith in myself?