by Greg Iles
That’s a fucking relief, I say silently.
Kaiser and Hannah are lost in their own musings, but something won’t let me focus. It’s not grief over Ann. I’m too numb to feel anything about that now. It’s a sense of something missing.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, John.”
He looks up and shakes his head. “Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know. Have you told me everything about Ann’s death? The scene? Did you leave anything out?”
His brows wrinkle. He looks like he’s making an honest effort. “She injected the morphine into veins in both arms. That tell you anything?”
“Only that she was serious. What else? Do you have photos from the scene?”
He nods cautiously. “I had the West Feliciana Parish sheriff’s department e-mail me their crime-scene stuff. That’s how I knew the building had a tin roof. Are you sure you want to see them?”
“Yes.”
He glances at Dr. Goldman again. Hannah studies me for a few moments, then says, “Cat’s already in shock. If it will help solve the murders, I don’t see any point in keeping them from her.”
Kaiser promises to be right back with the photos, then leaves the room.
Hannah looks up at me from the cot where she’s sitting. “I’m worried about your affect, Cat. You do know you’re in shock?”
“I suppose so. I feel numb.”
“And you’re not drinking?”
“Not for days now.”
Her eyes probe me like a metal instrument. “You’re not taking your medication, are you?”
I hate to answer this. “No.”
“How long?”
“I’m not sure. A week, maybe.”
She shakes her head. “I dislike mechanical analogies, but today that’s the only thing I can use. Watching you now is exactly like watching a machine. All the biology is working, but you’re not present. You’ve described yourself as being that way when you have sex.”
“I know, but this isn’t that. I’m like this when I work.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
Hannah looks over at the door, as though she hears Kaiser returning. “I was that way at times during medical school. But something about you seems different. And this isn’t a normal case, no matter what you tell yourself. You can’t pretend you weren’t related to Ann. You were. You are. In the Faulknerian sense of the past never really being past. Faulkner said that if the past were truly past, there would be no grief or sorrow. Ann was your blood relation, Cat, and she took her own life. Something you’ve thought of doing yourself many times.”
“I have to find the truth, Hannah. That’s the only thing that will keep me sane now.”
Her gaze doesn’t waver. “Will it?”
“It’s my only hope.”
The door opens, and Kaiser walks in carrying some eight-by-ten photos. Before second thoughts can stop me, I take them from him and shuffle through the stack as I would photos from any crime scene.
Hannah was right. This is not just another case.
The mere sight of the clinic brings on a wave of nausea. A small, tin-roofed building sitting in a sun-scorched field of weeds. A lone fig tree beside it. I can feel splinters being pulled from my hands, tetanus shots being stuck into my shoulder.
The next photo makes me thankful I haven’t eaten. It’s not gross—no blood and brain matter covering a dinner table, no ejected shell casing lying in the blasted wreck of a human face. It’s just my aunt, my once glamorous aunt lying naked on a bare wooden floor, her breasts and thighs sagging like pools of melted wax. Her mouth yaws open in the gape of sleep, eternal sleep this time, and—
“Cat?” Hannah says softly. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
It’s a downward-angled shot. It shows the legs of the examining table, a pair of brown feet in sandals—probably Louise’s—and the molding at the bottom of a cabinet. Just behind Ann’s head, there’s something rounded and dark, but I can’t make out what it is. I slide the photo over and move it to the bottom of the pile.
And my heart stops.
In the next photo—shot from a different angle—a stuffed animal lies on the floor about three feet behind Ann’s head. It’s not just any animal. It’s a turtle. And his name is Thomas. Thomas the Timid Turtle.
“Thomas,” I breathe.
“What?” says Kaiser.
I point at the turtle.
Kaiser walks up to see. “Is that turtle important?”
“Thomas was Ann’s favorite toy, ever since she was a child.”
“I had no idea. Apparently there were several stuffed animals in the room. We figured they were there to let kids hold while they got injections or something.”
“They were.” Ivy always kept stuffed animals in the clinic. She would hand you one as you came in. But along with the feeling of comfort came a sense of betrayal, because you knew pain was coming soon. Still, you clung to the animal. The pain wasn’t his fault. “Thomas didn’t live at the clinic. Ann brought him there. I’m surprised she wasn’t holding him when she died.”
“She may have tried. There’s some indication that she started out on the examining table, then fell to the floor after losing consciousness.”
I don’t know I’m crying until the tears fall onto the obscene photograph, one of hundreds I’ve studied in the past few years. I never want to see another one again.
“Cat?” says Kaiser.
I shake my head and try to get control, but the tears keep running down my face like they’re never going to stop.
Chapter
46
Hannah gently takes the photographs from my hands and gives them back to Kaiser. “I think that’s enough for now.”
“No,” I say. “We have to keep going.”
“What does the turtle tell you?” asks Kaiser.
I quickly summarize my recurring dream about the pickup truck, the pond, and my father pulling Lena the Leopardess out of his gunshot wound. As I speak, Hannah’s eyes focus on me with absolute concentration.
“Jesus,” Kaiser says when I finish. “From the point of view of your life, I think that’s probably very important. But it’s hard to see how it impacts this murder case. It sounds to me like your aunt was molested as a child—just as you were—and this stuffed-animal angle is part of all that. The only relevance to our case is that the sexual abuse is probably what brought Ann into contact with Malik.”
I take a step toward Kaiser. “I have to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“I have things I need to do.”
He glances at Hannah. “Such as?”
“I want to see the stuffed animal I buried with my father. It was my grandfather who suggested that I put Lena into his coffin. To keep him from being lonely, he said.”
“You want to exhume your father’s body to see a stuffed animal?”
“Yes. It’s too much coincidence. Ann kills herself with her favorite stuffed animal. And my grandfather—after killing my father because he supposedly abused me—tells me to bury my favorite stuffed animal in the coffin? I want to get Lena and Thomas together and give them every test known to forensic science. And I want a new autopsy done on my father. You told me his original autopsy report was lost, right?”
“Yes,” says Kaiser, watching me as he might a psychotic patient. “But I can’t let you leave here. You know that.”
“Because?”
“Cat, there are only two options for you. Stay here, or let the NOPD arrest you and put you in jail. You could raise bail, I’m sure, but it might be tomorrow before you got free.”
An engine is spinning in my chest, building frantic energy that won’t be discharged until I get out of this building and learn what I have to learn. “Can you order the exhumation of my father’s body for a new autopsy?”
Kaiser glances at Hannah again, then looks pointedly at me. “I’m not sure what the law is in Mississippi.”
<
br /> “Don’t patronize me, John. Is Mississippi law really the point? You’re the FBI.”
“Expediting your aunt’s autopsy is one thing, Cat. She died under suspicious circumstances. She’s a material witness to Malik’s activities at the very least, and at worst an accessory to murder. Your father, on the other hand, was murdered twenty-three years ago. And though his death intrigues me, it has no clear tie to this case. His military record also happens to be sealed for the next fifteen years. If I tell the SAC that my next big idea is exhuming Luke Ferry to look at a stuffed animal, I’m not going to get a lot of traction.”
I look to Hannah for help, but she’s silent.
“If you want to analyze Lena the Leopardess, you’re going to have to find a way to do it on your own. After you get out of here. Okay? The FBI isn’t in the business of psychotherapy.” Kaiser’s tone sounds official, but something in his eyes is speaking to me in a different language.
“Right,” I say. “Okay.”
He moves to the door. “I only mentioned that Mississippi law thing because sometimes it’s not that difficult to get a body exhumed. By the family, I mean.” He opens the door. “I’ve got a lot of balls in the air right now, one of which is keeping you out of jail. If I hear anything I think you need to know, I’ll come tell you. And I’m having some food sent up from the cafeteria. You must be starving.”
I’m not hungry, but I tell him thanks anyway.
And then he’s gone.
Hannah takes my hand and pulls me down beside her on the cot. Then she puts an arm around me and hugs me like the sister I never had. “That was tough,” she says. “You’re a tough cookie.”
“But?” I ask, dreading the inevitable.
“You want the truth?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re very close to cracking.”
I put my elbows on my knees. “It’s the same old dilemma. Fall off the cliff into depression or start flying into mania. And I have no control over which it will be.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Hannah says gravely. “This time, I’m afraid you’ll do neither. This time you could really crack. I’m talking about total psychological collapse. A rubber room, Cat.”
“Why? Why is this so different?”
“Because losing your aunt isn’t merely an echo of losing your father. It’s more like losing yourself. You’ve always been a sort of shadow of your aunt. Her illness was more extreme than yours, but in essence the same.”
Hannah’s right, but what am I supposed to do about it? “I haven’t told you everything.”
Her eyes tell me she knows this already. No patient ever reveals everything.
I recount the dream of seeing my father masturbating in the barn, and the rain hitting the tin roof over my head. She listens impassively until I fall silent.
“Seeing a father masturbating could be traumatic for a little girl,” she says, “but that’s a normal activity. Depending on what he was looking at while he did it, of course.”
“I wonder why I couldn’t see that in my dream?”
She shrugs. “Dreams always bring more questions than answers. So…you still have the same riddle. ‘Who abused me? My father or someone else?’”
“I have to know, Hannah. I have to know whether my father was a hero who died trying to protect me, or a pervert who never really loved me. And the same for my grandfather. On the surface he was the war hero and my father the weirdo, but—”
“It might not be one or the other, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“It might have been both of them, dear.”
A fresh layer of fear settles over the dread at the bottom of my soul. “Why do you say that?”
Hannah suddenly seems unsure whether to go on. “Many abuse survivors have been molested by multiple offenders, Cat. If your mother was abused by her father, she may well have married a sexually abusive man. It happens all the time.”
“I don’t think I could take that.”
Hannah squeezes her arm tight around my shoulders. “I hope that’s not the answer. But if you’re going down this road, you should prepare for the worst.”
To keep me from dwelling on this possibility, she changes the subject. “Do you think the green bag from your dream could still be hidden under the barn floor?”
“I don’t see why not. I never saw it anywhere but in that dream. And the barn has apparently been locked up tight for some time.”
“Why didn’t you tell Kaiser about that dream?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I want to see what’s in that bag before he does.” I take Hannah’s hand and squeeze it. “Will you help me get out of here?”
She smiles. “You don’t need my help. You’re not under arrest. Even the FBI can’t detain you without arresting you, unless it’s on some trumped-up terrorism charge. Your problem is the NOPD.”
“They’re not a problem if they can’t find me.”
Hannah’s smile vanishes. “You really want to go back to Mississippi?”
“I have to. And I got the feeling Kaiser wants me to exhume my father’s body on my own. Did you sense that?”
“Actually, I did. He’s very good at nonverbal communication.”
“Yeah.”
Hannah looks at me seriously for a moment, then giggles like a schoolgirl. “I’ll bet he’s good in bed.”
“I knew you were thinking that.”
“No, you didn’t. But I think if you managed to slip out of here, Kaiser wouldn’t look too hard for you.”
“But I can’t just walk out with you. There are cameras all over the place, especially around the entrance. You’ll have to help me.”
“How?”
“I need to use your cell phone.”
She takes a silver Motorola from her pocket and hands it to me. Before she can change her mind, I dial Michael Wells’s cell phone. For a few moments I think he’s not going to answer, but then he does.
“It’s Cat.”
“Christ, it’s about time. Are you all right?”
“Yes and no. My aunt is dead, and things are very crazy right now. I’m in New Orleans, and I need to get back to Natchez. The police aren’t looking for me now, but they will be soon. Would it be completely shameless of me to ask you for help again?”
Michael takes a moment to process all this. “Where in New Orleans are you?”
“FBI headquarters.”
“Where’s that?”
“By the University of New Orleans.”
“UNO is by Lakefront Airport.”
“Yes. You can see the airport from the windows here.” Not from the office I’m in, of course, but from the fourth floor.
“If you can get to Lakefront Airport, I can fly down and get you.”
My pulse rate kicks up. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. I’ve flown in there a dozen times. Last time I watched the Dave Matthews Band at UNO.”
“Michael…are you sure you can get away?”
“What will the police do if they find you?”
“Put me in jail.”
“On what charge?”
“Murder.”
“Did you kill anybody?”
“No.”
“Then I can get away. I’ll have to arrange for coverage, though. Call my cell phone in an hour. I should be airborne and on the way by then. We’ll take it from there. If there’s any problem with the phones, just get your ass to Lakefront and start watching the planes come in. I’ll be in a blue and white Cessna 210. Registry number N324MD.”
By the time I walk into the fourth-floor hallway, Hannah Goldman has been gone for ten minutes. She was to say her good-byes to Kaiser, then slowly make her way down to her car in the parking lot.
My job is to get to the FBI’s motor pool without being seen by anyone who knows who I am. Occupying a large part of the building’s basement level, the motor pool has huge garage doors that open into the parking lot. I’ve been down there a couple of times befor
e, when I rolled out with the FBI forensic team on the serial case where I first met Sean.
The elevator is only thirty feet down the hall, and I’m nearly to it when I hear John Kaiser’s voice.
“Cat? Where are you going?”
I turn and give him a little wave. He’s standing by the office I just left, a tall figure who looks more than anything like a concerned father.
“I feel sick. I need to get to the bathroom.”
“Down past the elevator, on the right.” He starts walking toward me. “Did the food come? Did that make you sick?”
Someone did bring up a tray of sandwiches after Hannah left, but I didn’t touch it. “No, I was about to eat it when I got a wave of nausea.”
“That may be from the blow to your head. I was coming to show you this.” Kaiser has almost reached me. He’s holding something in his hand.
“What is it?”
“Early results on those cultures you asked for. The saliva from the bite marks on Quentin Baptiste.”
The dead homicide detective…victim number six. “Oh, right. What does it show?”
He hands me the lab report. “You tell me.”
I glance over the letters and numbers, trying to pretend that my nerves aren’t shot and that my mind is on the piece of paper in my hand rather than on escaping this building. What I see is a microbiological snapshot of an average human mouth. Except for one thing.
“That’s weird.”
“What?” asks Kaiser.
“Maybe it’s a mistake.”
“What?”
Well, twelve hours is early, but we ought to at least see some Streptococcus mutans growing. You have that particular strep in abundance in any mouth with teeth in it. S. mutans thrives on hard surfaces. It produces the acid that causes cavities.”
“And you don’t have it there?”
“No.”
“Well, if it’s not a mistake, what would that mean?”
“It could mean a couple of things. The saliva may have come from someone taking a course of antibiotics. That would disturb the normal flora of the mouth. I’d look for penicillin, or even more likely, penicillin with gentamicin.” I try to concentrate on the lab report, but all I can keep in my mind is Hannah Goldman waiting for me downstairs.