by Greg Iles
“What was that other stuff this Kaiser told you? Did they find another murder victim?”
I hesitate. “I can’t tell you about that. No offense, but the task force is obsessive about secrecy.”
Michael looks suspicious. Last night I clearly broke every possible rule of confidentiality in my discussions with him, so why am I being—
“Cat?”
Before I can answer, Michael’s phone rings. The ID reads Unknown Caller. I show it to him. “May I answer it?”
He nods.
“This is Dr. Ferry.”
“Hello, Catherine.”
I nod at Michael and silently mouth, Malik. “What kind of fucking game have you been playing with me, Doctor? You’ve been acting like you have ESP, diagnosing my problems and hinting things about my family. The truth is, you had the facts all along from Ann. Didn’t you?”
He takes his time before answering, “Yes and no.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Cut the shit, will you?”
“Such a potty mouth, Catherine. What does Dr. Goldman make of that?”
My heart stutters. Did I tell Ann the name of my therapist? “Where’s my aunt, Doctor?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is she with you?”
“No.”
“Why did she pay your bail?”
“I asked her to. I was short of cash, and I knew she could get the money.”
“You are one unethical son of a bitch. Were you treating Ann for problems related to sexual abuse or for bipolar disorder?”
“You know that’s confidential.”
“Bullshit! You break the rules when you want to and hide behind them when you don’t!”
“We need to talk, Catherine. I don’t have much time now. We need to meet face-to-face.”
I close my eyes. “Tell me about Margaret Lavigne.”
“Margaret…? But…What about her?”
“She tried to kill herself with a massive dose of insulin last night. She’s in a coma now, but she left a note implicating you in the murders.”
The silence on the line is absolute. “You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not.”
“What did the note say?”
“Something like, ‘God forgive me, an innocent man is dead. Please tell Dr. Malik to stop it.’”
“Oh, my God.” His voice is a ragged whisper.
“Margaret’s biological father was arrested yesterday on child abuse charges. Stranger still, her stepfather was one of our five victims in New Orleans. Does any of this ring a bell?”
Malik’s breathing fast and shallow.
“Do we still need to meet, Doctor? Or are you going to turn yourself in?”
“I can’t…this is beyond belief. We absolutely must meet.”
I could never have imagined Nathan Malik sounding this agitated. “Did you kill those men in New Orleans, Doctor?”
“No. I swear that to you.”
“But you know who did.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You have to tell someone.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Was my aunt in Group X, Doctor?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Is my grandfather’s life in danger?”
“I can’t talk to you about that. Not over the phone.”
“You expect me to meet you in person when you could be the killer?”
“You have nothing to fear from me, Catherine. You know that.”
For some reason, I believe him. But I’m not crazy. “Will you turn yourself in if I meet you?”
His breathing stops for several moments. I can picture him standing somewhere, utterly still. “If you promise to keep my film safe for me, I will.”
“Where do you want to meet?”
“It has to be New Orleans, I’m afraid. Are you in Natchez?”
“Yes. Where in New Orleans?”
“I can’t tell you this far ahead. Can you be here in four hours?”
“I could be.”
“Call the number I gave you when you’re five miles outside the city. I’ll tell you where to go.”
No matter what logic tells me, I can’t refuse him. “All right.”
“And, Cat?”
“Yes?”
“If you bring the FBI with you, you’ll regret it. I don’t want to threaten you, but I have to protect myself. I’m the only one who can tell you certain things about yourself, and if I don’t, you’ll never know the truth. Good-bye.”
“Wait!”
“I know you’re nervous about meeting me. But I’m not dangerous to you. Do you know why? Because I know the evil in myself. When we were talking about abuse the other day, I had to censor myself. The FBI was listening, after all. The main thing I left out was the pleasure of it.”
A cold tingle races along my back. “The pleasure?”
“Yes.” Malik’s voice takes on a snakelike sibilance. “What we call sexual abuse is a very intense experience for both offender and victim. The offender experiences absolute power over another human being, while the victim experiences absolute surrender. Absolute submission. The partners occupy the extremes of control and helplessness. These experiences are imprinted for life, Catherine. And the first thing a sexualized child wants to do when it grows in strength is to reverse those roles. To experience control. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
I don’t answer, but my mind has already filled with memories of my sexual past, things I wanted to do—sometimes did do—to men, and things I wanted done to me. So often my fantasies were about control, abandoning or possessing it. All my pleasure was tied up in that.
“Your silence is enough,” Malik says, his voice hypnotic. “All my life I’ve had to fight that urge. It took years to master. But I know my enemy now. It’s a poison that propagates through generations, like a bad gene. It lives within me, as it does in all the others who’ve survived those experiences. Eradicating that poison is my obsession now. My personal war. I’ve got to go now, Catherine. Call me when you’re five miles outside New Orleans.”
The phone clicks. He’s gone.
“You’re not meeting that guy alone,” Michael says firmly.
Malik’s words and tone are still spinning in my head. “You’re not coming with me, Michael.”
“If I’m not, someone else is. You should call the FBI right now and tell them everything. And I mean everything.”
“That’s not an option. Not yet. Malik knows things I have to know, and if I bring in the FBI now, I never will. I’ll be this fucked-up for the rest of my life. Is that what you want?”
His eyes bore into mine with startling intensity. “I want you alive, not dead.”
I nod slowly. “Sean Regan.”
“Is that your married boyfriend?”
“Yes, but that has nothing to do with anything. Sean is trained for this kind of thing. He can protect me, and I can trust him to keep quiet about this.”
Michael looks sad, but I can’t take time to deal with his emotions now.
“Can I still use your Expedition?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. I need to go to Malmaison before I leave for New Orleans.”
Michael reaches out and takes me by the shoulders. His grip is amazingly strong. “Do you promise to take Sean with you to meet Malik?”
Even as I make the promise, I know it’s a lie. But I don’t need Michael freaking out and calling the FBI about this meeting. He could give them the plate number of his Expedition, and I’d never even reach New Orleans.
“What’s at Malmaison?” he asks.
“I need some clothes.” Another lie. What I need from Malmaison is something that’s always been there in abundance.
A gun.
Chapter
40
Dawn has only just broken, but the ground floor of Malmaison is lit up as though for a royal court party. I saw the yellow dome of light as I jogged through the trees from Michael’s hous
e in Brookwood, following the old trail I beat with my own feet so long ago. Pearlie’s lights are on, too.
My Audi is parked beside Pearlie’s Cadillac. Not far away stands a tall, white pickup truck like the ones used on the island—the kind that tried to run me over. Someone on the island must have found my car and brought it back. But if that’s the case, why doesn’t Grandpapa have the police scouring the countryside for me or my corpse? And why didn’t someone call my cell phone?
After circling around to the yellow-flooded front lawn, I stop and check the phone. The call log shows three calls from my grandfather’s number. With the phone set to vibrate only, I slept through them, and in my shock over the calls after I awakened, I failed to notice the misses. The last call probably came around the time I was having my nightmare. I press 1 and listen to the messages.
“Catherine, this is Grandpapa.” His voice is resonant, even in the tinny cell-phone speaker. “Henry found your car across the channel from the island. There was no sign of you. Louise Butler says you set out on a bike for the bridge, but no one knows whether you made it or not. Please call me if you get this. If you’re hurt or in trouble, don’t worry. I’ve got the sheriff’s departments on both sides of the river combing the banks and roads for you, and Jesse’s got a dozen men searching the island. If you’ve had an accident, help is coming quick. Call me, please.”
Hearing the concern in my grandfather’s voice almost brings tears to my eyes. His next message says, “It’s me again. If you’re in any other kind of trouble—that is, if there are other people involved—then let them hear this message. This is Dr. William Kirkland speaking. If you’re from anywhere around the part of the country where you found my granddaughter, then you know my name. And you know you’ve made a mistake. If you release her immediately, I’ll look no further into the matter. But if you hurt that girl…by God, you won’t live one day past the day I find you. And I will find you. You ask around. You’d rather have the hounds of hell on your trail than me, and that’s a fact.”
My skin is crawling. The voice that spoke to my unknown abductors was that of an avenging angel, deathly cold and crackling with violence, so certain of itself that nothing could stand against it. It’s the voice of the man who hunted down the escaped convicts on the island all those years ago.
On his third call, my grandfather left no message at all.
Looking up at the floodlit face of Malmaison, I’m more sure than ever that I don’t want to see anyone inside. Not Grandpapa. Not even Pearlie. That’s why I came on foot. If I pulled up in Michael’s Expedition, I’d be seen and questioned by everyone at home. My chances of discreetly getting a gun from my grandfather’s safe would be greatly reduced. But this way…
I trot to the far end of the mansion’s east wing, where there’s hardly any light. Most of these rooms are closed except during Spring Pilgrimage. I’ve known since the eighth grade that the lock on one window here can be slipped with a credit card. I used to sneak in this way to raid my grandfather’s liquor cabinet. Today I have no credit card—I left my purse in my car on the island—but Michael lent me an expired driver’s license to do the job. Judging by the picture on it, he was about seventy pounds heavier when the license was issued. I press the license steadily between the panels of the tall French windows. They part slightly, and the laminated license easily flips the lock.
As I climb through the heavy draperies, I smell the scent of mothballs. Most of the furniture in this wing is covered with white slip-covers. I feel as though I’m walking through a deserted museum. In the hallway, I smell bacon frying. I move quickly to my grandfather’s study, the room patterned after Napoléon’s library. The door is standing open, and the desk lamp is on, but the room is empty.
The gun safe is quite large, big enough to hold the architectural model he showed me the other day, plus his collection of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The combination lock is easy to open—it’s my birthday. Four clicks left, eight clicks right, seventy-three left, then turn the handle. I freeze once as I turn the dial, sure that I heard footsteps in the hall, but no one appears.
When I turn the handle, the heavy steel door opens.
The casino model is gone, but the guns are there. Five rifles, three shotguns, and several handguns lying in holsters on the floor of the safe. The scent of gun oil is strong, but there’s something else, too.
Burnt gunpowder.
One by one, I pull the rifles from their slots and sniff the barrels. The first two gleam in the light, their barrels clean. But the third has recently been fired. Holding the weapon in my hands, I turn it in the light. It’s a bolt-action Remington 700, scarred from use but well maintained. As I stare, my pulse begins to race. I killed a deer with this rifle when I was a girl. But that’s not why my heart is pounding.
I’m holding the rifle that killed my father.
As a child, I asked my grandfather several times to get rid of this gun, but he never did. He saw no reason to get rid of a “good gun” for “sentimental reasons.” Knowing what I know now about what he did with this rifle—or at least the story he told me—it surprises me that he would keep it. Was it a trophy, like the Weatherby he used to bring down his bull elk in Alaska? But more important, who fired it in the last couple of days?
I don’t have time to speculate.
Replacing the rifle, I grab an automatic pistol from the bottom of the safe. Nothing big or fancy, just a Walther PPK we used for target practice on the island. The black handgun looks wet and dangerous under the light. Ejecting the clip, I see that it’s fully loaded. I’d like some extra ammunition, but I don’t see any, and I don’t have time to look. Besides, if six rounds isn’t enough to get me out of whatever scrape I get into with Malik, another six probably wouldn’t save me either.
Closing the door to the safe, it strikes me as odd that a man would leave so many guns accessible to a teenage girl who he knew suffered from depression. Grandpapa even used my birthday for the combination, for God’s sake. What was he thinking? But then…Grandpapa never saw depression as an illness, only a weakness. Maybe he figured that if I wasn’t strong enough to resist the temptation to kill myself, I didn’t deserve to live.
Back in the hall, something stops me. Faint voices floating on the air. Grandpapa first. Then Pearlie. Maybe Billy Neal, though I’m not sure. Then a richer, warmer voice chimes in. It has a submissive tone, like the voice of a laborer in his employer’s house. The warm voice belongs to Henry, the black man who drove me across the bridge to the island yesterday. He’s talking about finding my Audi this morning, and how it threw him into a panic. He’s worried that I fell into the river and drowned like my grandmother. Grandpapa says I might die a lot of ways, but drowning won’t be one of them. Then he thanks Henry for bringing back the car and bids him good-bye. Heavy footsteps sound on the hardwood.
A screen door slams.
Someone speaks, and I recognize the careless voice of Billy Neal for sure. “Maybe she hitched a ride with somebody,” he says.
“Why the hell would she do that?” Grandpapa snaps. “Her goddamn car was sitting right there with a spare set of keys in a magnetic case under the bumper. Who do you think put those keys there?”
“The Audi dealer, maybe?”
“Boy, have you got an ounce of brains in your head? Catherine put those keys there. That’s the kind of girl she is.”
“Maybe the car wouldn’t start.”
“It started right up for Henry this morning.”
“Maybe she’s still on the island, then. Maybe the bridge got covered over before she left.”
“Get the hell out of here!” bellows my grandfather. “Don’t come back till you start making some sense. That girl knows how to take care of herself. I want to know what happened down there. I’ve got enough to worry about with the casino project. Government questioning every goddamn thing on the applications, DNA tests on three-hundred-year-old teeth. Jesus. Get out of here!”
More footsteps, and the door sl
ams again.
“What do you think, Pearlie?” asks Grandpapa.
I move closer to the door, close enough to hear Pearlie sigh.
“Am I paid to think?” she asks.
“I asked your opinion. Where is she? Where’s my grandbaby?”
“I’m afraid somebody done hurt that girl, Dr. Kirkland. Like you said, she knows how to take care of herself. And she wouldn’t leave that car behind without a good reason.”
“She might if she went into one of her manic states. What you call her spells.”
“Last time I saw her,” says Pearlie, “she looked more down than up to me. No, if Louise put her on a bicycle, then somebody followed her. She never made it to that bridge.”
“Who would do that?” asks Grandpapa.
“I’d ask that trash you got working for you where he was yesterday evening.”
The silence stretches for some time. “You think Billy followed her down there?”
“Do you know where he was yesterday?”
“Doing some business for me in Baton Rouge. Picking up some things for me.”
“Way I remember it, that island ain’t far off the highway to Baton Rouge.”
More silence. “What would Billy want with Catherine?”
“You’d know more about that than I would.” Pearlie’s voice carries a sharp rebuke. “What does any man want with any woman?”
Grandpapa makes a rumbling noise. “I’ll talk to him.”
The screen door bangs again.
I step into the kitchen.
Pearlie is standing at the sink, her back to me. She lifts an iron skillet and turns on the tap, then freezes. Slowly she turns, and her eyes go wide.
“Don’t say anything,” I whisper. “Not a word.”
She nods silently.
“I’m leaving town, Pearlie. Are my extra keys in here?”
She glances at the counter. The spring-loaded Audi key is lying on top of some mail. I grab it and return to the doorway.
“Where you going, girl?” Pearlie asks.
“I have to meet someone. I want you to tell me something first, though.”
“What?”
“Somebody did some bad things to me when I was a little girl. A man. It was either Daddy or Grandpapa. And I don’t see how you could have taken care of me for so long—you did my mother’s job, really—without knowing about that. I just don’t.”