Blood Memory (3 page)

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.

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?

My hands are shaking on the wheel. I need another Valium, but I don’t want to risk falling asleep on the interstate.
Suck it up,
I tell myself, the mantra of my youth and the unwritten motto of my family. After all, it’s not as if my present dilemma is new. I never got pregnant before, but pregnancy is merely a new wrinkle in an old habit. I’ve always chosen unattainable men. In some ways, my whole life has been a series of inexplicable decisions and unresolved paradoxes. Two therapists have thrown up their hands in despair over my ability to function at my present level despite self-destructive behavior that keeps me dancing on the edge of disaster. My relationship with my present therapist, Dr. Hannah Goldman, has survived only because she allows me to skip my scheduled appointments and call her whenever I feel I need her. I don’t require face time. Just an understanding voice.

Actually, it’s about time I gave Hannah a call. She doesn’t know about my pregnancy. She doesn’t know about my panic attacks, either. After four years with her, I still find it difficult to ask for help. I come from a family that believes depression is a weakness, not an illness. I didn’t see a therapist as a child, when one might have done me some real good. My grandfather, a surgeon, believes psychiatrists are sicker than their patients. My father, a Vietnam vet, saw several VA therapists before he died, but none was able to alleviate the symptoms of his post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother also discouraged therapy, saying shrinks had never done her older sister any good, and that one had even seduced her. When suicidal impulses finally convinced me to seek treatment—at the age of twenty-four—neither the MDs nor the psychologists were able to control my mood swings, ease my nightmares, or slow my drinking and occasional reckless sexual behavior. For me—until Hannah Goldman and her laissez-faire style—therapy was pretty much a washout. And yet…though my present situation would qualify as a crisis in Hannah’s book, I can’t quite bring myself to call her.

As the night landscape changes from wet bottomland to hilly forests of oak and pine, I sense the great river out to my left, rolling southward as it has for millennia, oblivious to human travail. The Mississippi River links the town of my birth to the city of my adulthood, a great winding artery connecting the two spiritual poles of my existence, infancy and independence. Yet how independent am I? Natchez, the upstream city—older than New Orleans by two years, 1716 versus 1718—is the source of all that I am, whether I like it or not. And tonight, the prodigal daughter is returning home at eighty-five miles an hour.

Forward and backward
…

Hurtling around curves in the dark forest, I feel a sort of emotional gravity sucking at my bones. But until the sign that reads
ANGOLA PENITENTIARY
flashes out of the night, I’m not sure why. Then I know. Just south of the razor-wire-enclosed fields known as Angola Farm, a great island rises out of the river. Owned by my family since before the Civil War, this atavistic world hovers like a dark mirage between the genteel cities of New Orleans and Natchez. I haven’t set foot on DeSalle Island in more than ten years, but I sense it now the way you sense a dangerous animal stirring from sleep. Only a dozen miles to my left, it sniffs for my scent in the humid darkness.

I step on the gas and put the place behind me, slipping into a driving trance that carries me the remainder of my journey. I slip out of it not on the outskirts of Natchez, but on the high-banked, curving drive that leads through the woods to my childhood home. Once surrounded by two hundred acres of virgin forest, the antebellum estate where I grew up now occupies only twenty landscaped acres hedged around by St. Catherine’s Hospital, a residential subdivision, and a stately old plantation called Elms Court. Nevertheless, the tunnel of oaks that arches over the drive still gives tourists the sense of approaching a cloistered European manor.

A high wrought-iron gate blocks the last fifty yards of the driveway, but it’s been unlocked for as long as I can remember. I stop and press a button on the gatepost. The iron bars retract as though pulled by unseen hands. As though the gods themselves have opened my way home.

Why am I here?
I ask myself.

You know why,
replies a chiding voice.
You have nowhere else to go.

After dry-swallowing a Valium, I drive slowly through the gate.

The bars close behind me with a clang.