GREG ILES
Blood Memory

Dedication

This novel is dedicated to all those women who realize in the dead of night that something is wrong, and has been for a long time. More than most, they know that Faulkner’s words are true: ‘There is no such thing as was – only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.’ You are not alone.

Memory is the guardian of all things.

—Cicero

Evil being the root of mystery,

pain is the root of knowledge.

—Erasmus

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Books by Greg Iles

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

When does murder begin?

With the pull of a trigger? With the formation of a motive? Or does it begin long before, when a child swallows more pain than love and is forever changed?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Or perhaps it matters more than everything else.

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.

Forward and backward …

So we begin in the middle, with a telephone ringing in a dark bedroom on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, Louisiana. There’s a woman lying on the bed, mouth open in the mindless gape of sleep. She seems not to hear the phone. Then suddenly the harsh ring breaks through, like defibrillator paddles shocking a comatose patient. The woman’s hand shoots from beneath the covers, groping for the phone, not finding it. She gasps and rises onto one elbow. Then she groans and picks up the receiver from the bedside table.

The woman is me.

“Dr. Ferry,” I croak.

“Are you sleeping?” The voice is male, taut with anger.

“No.” My denial is automatic, but my mouth is dry as a cotton ball, and my alarm clock reads 8:20 P.M. I’ve been out for nine hours. The first decent sleep I’ve had in days.

“He hit another one.”

Something sparks in my drowsy brain. “What?”

“This is the fourth time I’ve called in the past half hour, Cat.”

The voice brings up a well of anger, longing, and guilt. It belongs to the detective I’ve been sleeping with for the past eighteen months. Sean Regan. An insightful, fascinating man with a wife and three kids.

“What did you say before?” I ask, ready to bite off Sean’s head if he asks me to meet him somewhere.

“I said, he hit another one.”

I blink and try to orient myself in the darkness. It’s early August, and the purple glow of dusk filters through my curtains. God, my mouth is dry. “Where?”

“The Garden District. Owner of a printing company. Male Caucasian.”

“Bite marks?”

“Worse than the others.”

“How old was he?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Jesus. It is him.” I’m already getting out of bed. “This makes no sense at all.”

“Nope.”

“Sexual predators kill women, Sean. Or children. Not old men.”

“We’ve had this conversation. How fast can you get here? Piazza’s hovering over me, and the chief himself may be coming down for a look.”

I lift yesterday’s jeans off the chair and slip them over my panties. Victoria’s Secret, Sean’s favorite pair, but he won’t be seeing them tonight. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never again. “Any gay angle on this victim? Did he use male prostitutes, anything like that?”

“Not even a tickle,” Sean replies. “Looks as clean as the others.”

“If he’s got a home computer, confiscate it. He might—”

“I know my job, Cat.”

“I know, but—”

“Cat.” The single syllable is a probing finger. “Are you sober?”

A column of heat rises up my spine. I haven’t had a sip of vodka for nearly forty-eight hours, but I’m not going to give Sean the satisfaction of answering his interrogation. “What’s the victim’s name?”

“Arthur LeGendre.” His voice drops. “Are you sober, darlin’?”

The craving is already awake in my blood, like little teeth gnawing at the walls of my veins. I need the anesthetic burn of a shot of Grey Goose. Only I can’t have that anymore. I’ve been using Valium to fight the physical withdrawal symptoms, but nothing can truly replace the alcohol that has kept me together for so long.

I shift the phone from shoulder to shoulder and pull a silk blouse from my closet. “Where are the bite marks?”

“Torso, nipples, face, penis.”

I freeze. “Face? Are they deep?”

“Deep enough for you to take impressions, I think.”

Excitement blunts the edge of my craving. “I’m on my way.”

“Have you taken your meds?”

Sean knows me too well. No one else in New Orleans is even aware that I take anything. Lexapro for depression, Depakote for impulse control. I stopped taking both drugs three days ago, but I don’t want to get into that with Sean.

“Stop worrying about me. Is the FBI there?”

“Half the task force is here, and they want to know what you think about these bite marks. The Bureau guy is photographing them, but you have that ultraviolet rig … and when it comes to teeth, you’re the man.”

Sean’s admiring misstatement of my gender is typical cop talk, and it tells me he’s speaking for the benefit of others. “What’s the address?”

“Twenty-seven twenty-seven Prytania.”

“Sounds like an address with a security system.”

“Switched off.”

“Just like the first one. Moreland.” Our first victim—one month ago—was a retired army colonel, highly decorated in Vietnam.

“Just like that.” Sean’s voice drops to a whisper. “Get your lovely ass down here, okay?”

Today his Irish intimacy makes me want to jab him. “No ‘I love you’?” I ask with feigned sweetness.

His reply is barely audible. “You know I’m surrounded.”

As usual. “Yeah. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

Night falls fast as I drive my Audi from my house on Lake Pontchartrain to the Garden District, the fragrant heart of New Orleans. I spent two minutes in the bathroom trying to make myself presentable, but my face is still swollen from sleep. I need caffeine. In five minutes I’ll be surrounded by cops, FBI agents, forensic techs, the chief of robbery homicide, and possibly the chief of the NOPD. I’m accustomed to that kind of attention, but seven days ago—the last time this predator hit—I had a problem at the crime scene. Nothing too bad. A garden-variety panic attack, according to the EMT who checked me out. But panic attacks don’t exactly inspire confidence in the hard men and women who work serial murder cases. The last thing they want is a consulting expert who can’t hold her mud.

The word got around about my little episode, too. Sean told me that. Nobody could really believe it. Why did the woman that some homicide detectives call “the ice queen” suddenly lose her composure at the scene of a not-very-grisly murder? I’d like to know that myself. I have a theory, but analyzing one’s own mental condition is a notoriously unreliable business. As for the sobriquet, I’m no ice queen, but in the macho world of law enforcement, playing that role is the only thing that keeps me safe—from men and from my own rogue impulses. Of course, Sean gives the lie to that little strategy.

Four victims now, I remind myself, focusing on the case. Four men between the ages of forty-two and sixty-nine, all murdered within weeks of each other. In a single thirty-day period, to be exact. The pace of the killings is virtually unprecedented, and if the victims were women, the city would be gripped by terror. But because the victims are middle-aged or older men, a sort of fascinated curiosity has taken hold of New Orleans. Each victim has been shot in or near the spine, mutilated with human bites, then finished off with a coup de grâce shot to the head. The bites have increased in savagery from victim to victim, and they’ve also provided the strongest evidence against any future suspect—mitochondrial DNA from the killer’s saliva.

The bite marks are the reason for my involvement with the case. I’m a forensic odontologist, an expert on human teeth and the damage they can do. I acquired this knowledge in four boring years of dental school and five fascinating years of fieldwork. If people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I’m a dentist, which is true enough and all they need to know. Odontologist doesn’t mean anything to anybody, but in post-CSI America, forensic prompts questions I’d just as soon not answer in a grocery store. So, while most acquaintances know me as a dentist who’s too busy to accept new patients, an assortment of government agencies—including the FBI and the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes—knows me as one of the leading forensic odontologists in the world. Which is nice. I take my identity where I can find it.

The task force wants my expertise on bite marks tonight, but Sean Regan wants more. When he sought my help on a murder case two years ago, he soon learned that I knew about a lot more than teeth. I completed two years of medical school before I withdrew, and that gave me a strong foundation for self-education in forensics. Anatomy, hematology, histology, biochemistry, whatever a case requires. I can glean twice as much information from an autopsy report as any detective, and twice as fast. After Sean and I became closer than the rules allowed, he began using me unofficially to help with difficult cases. And used is the proper word; Sean Regan lives to catch killers, and he’ll exploit anything and anyone to help him do it.

But Sean isn’t simply a user. He’s my comrade-in-arms, my rabbi, and my enabler. He doesn’t judge me. He knows me for what I am, and he gives me what I need. Like Sean, I’m a born hunter. Not of animals. I’ve hunted animals, and I hate it. Animals are innocent; men are not. I am a hunter of men. But unlike Sean, I have no license to do this. Not really. Forensic odontology brings only tangential involvement with murder cases; it’s my involvement with Sean that puts me into the bloody thick of things. By allowing me access—unethical and probably illegal access—to crime scenes, witnesses, and evidence, he has put me in a position to solve four major murder cases, one of them a serial. Sean took the credit every time, of course—plus the attendant promotions—and I let him do it. Why? Maybe because telling the truth would have exposed our love affair, gotten Sean fired, and freed the killers. But the truth is simpler than that. The truth is that I didn’t care about the credit. I’d tasted the pulse-pounding rush of hunting predators, and I was addicted to it as surely as I am to the vodka I need so terribly at this moment.

For this reason, I’ve let our relationship run long past the point where I would usually have sabotaged it. Long enough, in fact, for me to have forgotten one of my hardest-won lessons: the husband doesn’t leave. Not the husbands I pick, anyway. Only this time it’s different. Sean has gone a long way toward convincing me he really means to do it. And I’m very close to believing him. Close enough to find myself hoping desperately for it in the most vulnerable hours of the night. But now … the situation has changed. Fate has taken a hand. And unless Sean really surprises me, our relationship is over.

Without warning, a wave of nausea rolls through my stomach. I try to tell myself it’s alcohol withdrawal, but deep down I know better. It’s panic. Pure terror at the idea of giving up Sean and being alone. Don’t think about it, says a shaky voice inside me. In two minutes you’re onstage. Think about the case …

As I decelerate down the interstate ramp to the surface streets at St. Charles Avenue, my cell phone rings out the opening notes to U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” I know without looking that it’s Sean.

“Where are you?” he asks.

I’m still fifteen blocks from the stately Victorian houses of Prytania Street, but I need to calm Sean down. “A few blocks from the scene.”

“Good. Can you handle your gear okay?”

My dental case weighs thirty-one pounds fully loaded, and tonight I’ll also need my camera case and tripod. Maybe Sean is hinting that I should ask him outside to help me. This would give him an excuse for a private talk before we find ourselves together in front of others. But a private talk is the last thing I want tonight.

“I’ve got it,” I tell him. “You sound strange. What’s going on down there?”

“Everybody’s uptight. You know the history.”

I do. There have been three serial murder cases in the New Orleans–Baton Rouge area in as many years, and serious investigative mistakes were made in all of them.

“We got some Sixth District detectives down here,” Sean goes on, “but the task force has taken over the scene. We’ll be running our investigation out of headquarters, just like the others. Captain Piazza’s already busting my balls.”

Carmen Piazza is a tough, fiftysomething Italian-American woman who came up through the ranks of the detective bureau and is now the Homicide Division commander. If anyone ever fires Sean for his involvement with me, it will be Piazza. She likes Sean’s record of arrests, but she thinks he’s a cowboy. And she’s right. He’s a tough, devilish Irish cowboy. “Does she suspect anything about us?”

“No.”

“No rumors? Nothing?”

“Don’t think so.”

“What about Joey?” I ask, referring to Sean’s partner, Detective Joey Guercio. “Has he blabbed to anybody?”

A millisecond’s hesitation. “No way. Look, just be cool like you always are. Except for last time. You feeling okay about that? Your nerves or whatever?”

I close my eyes. “I was until you asked.”

“Sorry. Just hurry down here. I’m going back in.”

A rush of anxiety blindsides me. “You can’t wait for me?”

“Probably better if I don’t.”

Better for you … “Fine.”

Focus on the case, I tell myself, checking the house numbers on Prytania to be sure where I am. They expect you to know your business.

The facts are simple enough. In the past thirty days, three men have been shot by the same gun, bitten by the same set of teeth, and—in two cases—marked by the saliva of a man whose DNA shows him 87 percent likely to be a Caucasian male. The NOPD crime lab did the ballistics that matched the bullets. The state police crime lab did the mitochondrial DNA match. And I matched the bite marks.

This is much more difficult than it appears to be on television. To explain my job to homicide detectives, I often tell them about the forensic researcher who used an articulated set of teeth to try to create perfectly matched bite marks on a corpse. He couldn’t do it. The lesson is clear, even to street cops. If matching two bite marks known to have come from the same set of teeth can be difficult, then matching marks that might have been made by any teeth among millions is next to impossible. Even comparing bite marks on a corpse with the teeth of a small group of suspects is more problematic than many odontologists pretend.

Saliva left in a bite mark by a killer can simplify things enormously, by providing DNA to compare against that of suspects. But four weeks ago, when the first victim was discovered, I recovered no saliva from the two bite marks on the body. I figured the killer for an organized offender who washed the saliva out of his bites to prevent recovery of DNA evidence. But a week later, when the second victim was found, my theory was blown out of the water. I recovered saliva from two of four bite marks left on the corpse. This raised the possibility of a different—and disorganized—killer. But by using reflective ultraviolet photography and scanning electron microscopy on the bite marks, I concluded that the same killer had indeed murdered both victims. Ballistic analysis of the recovered bullets supported my conclusion, and six days later, when the third victim was murdered, my opinion was confirmed beyond doubt by DNA recovered from the bite marks left on that body. The same killer had murdered all three men.

The importance of this cannot be overestimated. The baseline criteria for classifying a serial murderer are three victims killed by one person, each victim killed in a different location, and a cooling-off period between the crimes. I had helped prove what I’d known from the moment I saw the first victim. New Orleans had another predator on the hunt.

My official responsibility ended with matching the bite marks, but I wasn’t about to stop there. As the New Orleans Police Department joined the FBI in the uneasy marriage of a task force, I began to analyze other aspects of the case. In sexual homicide, the murderer’s selection criteria for his victims hold the key to every case. And like all serial murders, the NOMURS killings—so dubbed by the FBI for “New Orleans murders”—are at root sexual homicides. Something always links the victims in these cases, even if it’s nothing more individual than geographic location, and that link draws the predator. But the NOMURS victims have ranged widely in age, physical type, occupation, social status, and place of residence. The only similarities are that they’re white, male, over forty, and have families. These four facts combined exclude them from the known target profiles for serial killers. Moreover, none of the victims is known to have had habits that might draw a predator to an atypical target. No victim was gay or had a known sexual paraphilia. None was ever arrested for a sexual crime, reported for child abuse, or known to frequent strip clubs or other sleazy establishments. For this reason the NOMURS task force has made no progress at all in finding a suspect.

As I slow the Audi to read a house number, my skin itches with fear and anticipation. The killer was on this street only hours ago. He may be here now, watching the progress of the investigation, as serial murderers often do. Watching me. And herein lies the thrill. A predator is not prey. When you hunt a predator, you place yourself in a position to be hunted yourself. There’s no other way. If you follow a lion into a thicket, you step within reach of his claws. And my adversary is no lion. He’s the deadliest creature in the world: a human male driven by anger and lust, yet governed—at least temporarily—by logic. He stalks these streets with impunity, confident in his prowess, meticulous in his planning, arrogant in his execution. The only thing I know about him is this: like all his brothers before him, he will kill again, and again, until someone unravels the riddle of his psyche or he self-destructs from the intensity of conflict in his own mind. A lot of people don’t care which way it ends, so long as it ends soon.

I do.

Sean is standing on the sidewalk, waiting. He’s walked a block up from the victim’s house to meet me. He always did have guts. But does he have enough to face our present situation?

I park behind a Toyota Land Cruiser, get out, and start to unload my cases. Sean gives me a quick hug, then unloads the cases himself. He’s forty-six years old but looks forty, with the easy, confident grace of a natural athlete. His hair is mostly black, his eyes green with a bit of a twinkle. Even after being his lover for eighteen months, I half expect a lilting Irish brogue to emerge when Sean opens his mouth. But it’s the familiar New Orleans accent instead, the Brooklynesque drawl with a hint of crawfish.

“You doin’ okay?” he asks.

“Changed your mind?”

He shrugs. “I felt bad.”

“Bullshit. You wanted to see for yourself if I was sober.”

I see the truth of it in his face. He gives me a penetrating survey with his eyes and makes no apology for it.

“Go on,” I tell him.

“What?”

“You were about to say something. Go ahead.”

He sighs. “You look rough, Cat.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Sorry. Are you drunk?”

Anger tightens my jaw muscles. “I’m stone sober for the first time in more years than I can count.”

I see skepticism in his face. Then, as he studies me, belief comes into his eyes. “Jesus. Maybe a drink is what you need.”

“Worse than you know. But I’m not going to.”

“Why not?”

“Come on. Let’s do this.”

“I still need to go in ahead of you.” He looks embarrassed.

Exasperation makes me look away. “How long? Five minutes?”

“Not that long.”

I wave him off and get back into my car. He steps toward my door, then changes his mind and walks down the block.

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

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?

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.

FIVE

In a vast clearing ahead, moonlight washes over a sight that takes most people’s breath away. A French palace rises like a specter out of the mist, its limestone walls as pale as skin, its windows like dark eyes glassy from fatigue or drink. The scale of the place is heroic, projecting an impression of limitless wealth and power. Viewed through the prism of a modern eye, the mansion has a certain absurdity. A French Empire palace nestled in a Mississippi town of twenty thousand souls? Yet Natchez contains more than eighty antebellum homes, many of them mansions, and the provenance of this one perfectly suits the town, a living anachronism of grand excess, much of it built by the hands of slaves.

My family arrived in America in 1820, in the person of a Paris financier’s youngest son, sent to the wilds of Louisiana to make his fortune. Cursed with a cruel father, Henri Leclerc DeSalle worked like a slave himself until he surpassed all paternal expectations. By 1840, he owned cotton fields stretching for ten miles along the Mississippi River. And in that year, like most of the cotton barons of the time, he began building a regal mansion on the high bluff across the river, in the sparkling city called Natchez.

Most cotton planters built boxy Greek Revival mansions, but Henri, fiercely proud of his heritage, broke tradition and constructed a perfect copy of Malmaison, the summer palace of Napoléon and Josephine. Designed to humble DeSalle’s father when he visited America, Malmaison and its attendant buildings became the center of a cotton empire that—thanks to my family’s Yankee sympathies—survived both the Civil War and Reconstruction without mortal damage. It endured until 1927, when the Mississippi overran its banks in a flood of biblical proportions. The following year came crop fires, and in 1929 the stock market crash completed the proverbial “three bad years” that even wealthy farming families dreaded.

The DeSalles lost everything.

The patriarch of that era shot himself through the heart, leaving his descendants to scrape out a meager existence alongside the blacks and poor whites they had so recently exploited. But in 1938, fortune reversed herself again.

A young geologist with Texas backers leased a huge tract of former DeSalle land. Through a quirk in Louisiana law, landowners retained the mineral rights to their property for ten years after it was forfeited. My great-grandfather was ecstatic just to get the lease money. But nineteen days before his mineral rights expired, the young geologist struck one of the largest oil fields in Louisiana. Christened the DeSalle field, it produced over 10 million barrels of crude oil. My great-grandfather eventually bought back every acre of DeSalle land, including the island. He also bought back Malmaison and restored the house to its pre–Civil War splendor. Its present owner, my maternal grandfather, keeps Malmaison in pristine condition, worthy of the Architectural Digest cover it graced ten years ago. But the city that surrounds the mansion, though as well preserved as Charleston or Savannah, seems as doomed to slow decay as any other Southern town bypassed by the interstate and abandoned by industry.

I pull around the “big house” and park beside one of the two brick dependencies behind it. The eastern slave quarters—a two-story edifice larger than some suburban houses—was my home during most of my childhood. Our family’s maid, Pearlie, lives in the western quarters, thirty yards across the rose garden. She helped rear my mother and aunt from infancy, then did the same with me. Well over seventy now, Pearlie drives a baby blue Cadillac, the pride of her life. It sits gleaming in the darkness behind her house, its chrome polished more regularly than that on the cars of any white matron in the city. Pearlie often stays up late watching television, but it’s past midnight now, and her windows are dark.

My mother’s car is nowhere in sight. She’s probably in Biloxi, visiting her elder sister, who’s embroiled in a bitter divorce. My grandfather’s Lincoln is gone, too. At seventy-seven, Grandpapa Kirkland still possesses remarkable vitality, but a stroke a year ago ended his driving days. Undeterred, he hired a driver and resumed the pace he’d always kept up, which would exhaust a man of fifty. Grandpapa could be anywhere tonight, but my guess is that he’s on the island. He’s an avid hunter, and DeSalle Island—which teems with deer, wild hogs, and even bear—has been a second home to him since he married into the family a half century ago.

When I get out of the Audi, the summer heat wraps around me like a thick jacket. The whine of crickets and the bellow of frogs from the nearby bayou fills the night, but this soundtrack from my childhood brings mixed feelings. As I glance toward the rear of Malmaison proper, my eyes lock onto a gnarled dogwood tree at the edge of the rose garden that separates our house from Pearlie’s, and my throat seals shut. My father perished under that tree, shot dead by an intruder he confronted there twenty-three years ago. I can’t look at the dogwood without remembering that night. Blue police lights flashing through rain. Wet, gray flesh. Glassy eyes open to the sky. I’ve asked Grandpapa many times to cut down that tree, but he’s always refused, claiming it would be foolish to mar the beauty of our famed rose garden out of sentimentality.

Sentimentality.

I stopped speaking after my father was murdered. Literally. I didn’t utter a word for over a year. But in my eight-year-old brain, I ceaselessly pondered what the intruder had come looking for that was worth my father’s life. Cash? The family silver? Grandpapa’s art or gun collections? All were possible targets, but no money or property was ever discovered missing. As I grew older, I wondered if it could have been my mother that drew the prowler. She was scarcely thirty then and could easily have caught the attention of a rapist. But since the intruder was never caught, this theory couldn’t be tested.

After my first depressive episode—I was fifteen—a new fear crept into my mind: that there had been no intruder at all. My father was shot with his own rifle, and the only fingerprints found on it belonged to family members. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my daddy—scarred within and without by a war he’d wanted no part of—had chosen to end his own life. Whether, even with a wife and daughter who loved him, he’d felt he had no choice but to stop his pain with a bullet. I’d been close to that point myself by then, so I knew it was possible. I’ve reached that point again in the years since, and more than once. Yet something has always kept me from accepting suicide as my father’s fate. Perhaps it’s my belief that the strength that kept me alive during those terrible nights was a gift from him to me, the only legacy he left behind.

I hate the fucking rose garden. Patterned on the Malmaison gardens tended by Josephine herself, where every variety of rose in the world was represented, it fills the air of Malmaison with scents that make tourists gasp with pleasure. But for me the smell of roses will always be part of the stench of death.

I turn away from the garden and, with paranoia born from years of urban living, unload my dental cases from the backseat. Only when I’m halfway to the door of our slave quarters do I remember that in Natchez I could leave my cases in the unlocked car for a month and find them just as I’d left them when I returned.

The front door is locked. I have no key. Trudging around to the window of my old bedroom, I set down my cases and slide up the pane. The closed-in smell that wafts through the curtains hurls me fifteen years back in time. I lift the cases over the sill, set them inside, then climb through and make my way through the dark to the light switch on the wall. It’s an easy journey, because my bedroom looks exactly as it did in May of 1989, when I graduated high school.

The walls are brown 1970s paneling, the carpet the same navy blue installed the year I was born. Silk dragonflies of myriad colors hang from filaments tacked to the ceiling, and posters of rock stars adorn the walls: U2, Sinead O’Connor, R.E.M., Sting. Shelves of photographs and swimming trophies line the wall opposite my closet, chronicling a competitive career that began at five and ended at sixteen. The older photographs show my father—a dark, handsome man of medium height—standing next to a gangly little girl with long bones but no apparent muscle. As the girl’s body begins to fill in, my father vanishes from the photos and an older man with silver hair, chiseled features, and piercing eyes takes his place. My grandfather, Dr. William Kirkland. Studying the photos now, it seems odd that my mother is in so few of them. But Mom never took much of an interest in my swimming, an “unsocial” activity that consumed vast amounts of time that could otherwise have been spent in more “appropriate” pursuits.

Glancing into the closet, I see clothes I wore in high school hanging there. Beneath the clothes, a wicker laundry basket filled with Louisiana Rice Creatures. The sight of the clothes doesn’t affect me, but the colorful stuffed animals bring a lump to my throat. Originally stuffed with dried rice, Rice Creatures were local precursors of the Beanie Babies that later became a national craze. There must be thirty of them in the basket, but the only one that really matters to me is missing. Lena the Leopardess. Lena was my favorite, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because she was a cat, like me. I loved Lena’s spots, I loved her whiskers, I loved how she felt pressed against my cheek while I fell asleep. I carried her everywhere I went, including my father’s funeral. It was there, surrounded by adults in the visiting room prior to the service, that I saw my father lying in his coffin.

He didn’t look like my father anymore. He looked older, and he looked very alone. When I pointed this out, my grandfather suggested that Daddy might not feel so lonely if he had Lena for company while he slept. The idea of losing Lena and my father on the same day frightened me, but Grandpapa was right. Lena made me less lonely every night, and I was sure she could do the same for Daddy. After asking Mom if it was okay, I reached over the high side of the coffin and nestled Lena between my father’s cheek and shoulder, just as I did with her every night. I missed her badly after that, but I comforted myself with the thought that Daddy had a little piece of my heart to keep him company.

Standing in this bedroom is creeping me out, as it has on each of the occasions when I’ve returned home. Why does my mother preserve it this way? She’s an interior designer, for God’s sake. Practically manic in her desire to transform every space over which she’s given dominion. Is it an homage to my childhood? To a simpler past? Or is it an open invitation to me to come back and start over at a point before I “veered off track”? Just when that was—my personal failure as a “DeSalle woman”—is a point of contention within my family. In my grandfather’s eyes, I didn’t screw up until I was asked to leave medical school, which precluded my following in his footsteps as a surgeon. But in my mother’s eyes, my failure began long before, at some indeterminate point during adolescence. Though I’m not a DeSalle by name—my father was a Ferry—I am very much considered a DeSalle woman, which carries with it a legion of traditions and expectations. But a thousand small choices have taken me ever further from this predestined road, onto one that hasn’t led me within a stone’s throw of a husband, a fact my mother never lets me forget. I’m actually thankful I arrived tonight to find her gone.

As I stare at a photograph of my father holding my hand high in triumph, the Valium enters my bloodstream, and a blessed calm comes over me. Because my father died when I was eight, it was he alone that I never disappointed. I like to think that, had he lived, he would be proud of what I’ve accomplished. As for my problems … well, Luke Ferry had problems of his own.

I pull back the spread on my permanently made bed and take my cell phone from my pocket. A pang of guilt hits me when I see thirteen missed calls. Punching 1 to check my voice mail, I listen to the first message. Sean called me even before he left Arthur LeGendre’s house. In a reassuring voice he tells me to stay calm, that Piazza is his problem not mine, and then he begs me to keep myself together until he gets there. “There” being my house on the lake. I skip ahead several messages. The change in Sean’s voice is astonishing.

“It’s me again,” he says angrily. “I’m still at your house, and I have no fucking idea where you are. Please call me back, even if you don’t want to see me. I don’t know if you’re drunk in some dive in the Quarter or lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Have you stopped taking your meds? Something’s wrong, Cat, I know it, and I don’t mean the murders. Look … you have to trust me, and you know you can.” There’s a crackling pause. “Damn it, I love you, and this is bullshit. This is why we’re not together already. I’m sitting in this empty house and—” There’s a click, then nothing. This message exhausted the phone’s available memory.

I slip off my pants and draw the bedcovers up to my chest. I want to call Sean and tell him I’m all right, but the truth is, I’m not. In fact, I might be losing my mind. But there’s nothing he can do about that.

As the cell phone drops from my hand, I see an image of Arthur LeGendre lying dead in his gleaming kitchen, black socks pulled up on his white, sticklike legs. Above his corpse floats the killer’s message, painted in blood: My work is never done. Again I see the bite marks on LeGendre’s bloodless flesh, one more set in the endless train of scars and mutilation I’ve witnessed over the past seven years. Is this really my job? How can someone’s life’s work be the analysis of something so brutal, so small, so irritatingly specialized? There has to be more to my choice of career. But what? My father’s mysterious death? Too obvious. “My work is never done,” I murmur, feeling the Valium course through my veins. Earlier today, the sedative I’d swallowed to combat my alcohol withdrawal gave me an unexpected gift: dreamless sleep. I haven’t known such relief for years.

“Thank you,” I whisper to the drug, as though to the god of sleep. My left hand slides over my hip and comes to rest on my lower tummy. My right hand slips out of the covers, reaching for a hand that isn’t there.

“Daddy?” I whisper. “Is that you?”

He doesn’t answer.

He never does, but tonight the aching loneliness that accompanies thoughts of my father isn’t so severe. Valium pads the edges of the pain, easing my descent into sleep. For years I’ve suffered from nightmares, and lately the alcohol I use to deaden them seems to have made them worse. But the Valium is an unfamiliar drug, as fresh and potent as the first drink I ever swallowed.

Tonight sleep enfolds me like the ocean depths on a free dive, a bright upper layer that deepens in color and density as I descend, swimming down, down, down, away from the chaos of the surface, into the blue cathedral of the deep. My sanctuary from the world and from myself. No thoughts here beyond the exigencies of survival. Only peace, the bliss of entering a place where but a handful of humans can go without bottled air, where death is a constant companion, where life is sweeter for the awareness of its fragility.

Here I am weightless.

Shapeless.

An astronaut drifting through deep space without a tether, unconcerned that her life support systems have shut down, that her body must sustain itself or die. Anyone with a lick of sense would kick madly for the surface.

Not me.

Because here I am free.

I don’t know how long I float this way, because time means nothing here. What I do know is that I must be sleeping, because on a real free dive, time means everything. Time is the remaining oxygen dissolved in your bloodstream, the only currency that can buy you depth, and depth is the holy grail, the point of the whole mad exercise. Or it’s supposed to be, anyway. That part confuses me, actually. Because you can never reach the bottom. Not in the real ocean. It’s only back on land that you can do that.

Surfacing now. I know because the sea has slowly stopped trying to drive my wet suit into every opening in my body, and blue-white lightning is flashing above me. A sudden storm? I tense against the inevitable clap of thunder, but it doesn’t come. When the lightning flashes again, a strange sound registers in my mind. Not thunder—not even the lap of waves against the dive boat. It’s the snick of a camera shutter. When I finally break through the surface, I smell acetone, not the ozone that follows a lightning strike. Blinking in confusion, I call out, “Sean? Sean, is that you?”

A dark brown forehead and saucer eyes rise above the footboard of my bed. A nose and mouth follow, the mouth agape in wonder. I’m looking into the face of a black girl of about eight. She has the frozen look of a child who has entered a familiar yard only to find a strange dog waiting for her.

“Who are you?” I ask, half wondering if the girl is real.

“Natriece,” she says, her voice almost defiant. “Natriece Washington.”

I glance around the room, but all that registers is the sunlight pouring through a crack in some curtains. “What are you doing here?”

The girl’s eyes are still wide. “I be here with my auntie. I didn’t mean to make no mess.”

“Your auntie?” The smell of acetone is stronger now.

“Miss Pearlie.”

Suddenly it all comes rushing back. The phone call from Sean. The corpse in the house on Prytania Street. The zoned-out night drive to Natchez. What an irony to find that you do crazier things sober than you ever did drunk.

“What time is it?”

The child gives an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Morning time.”

Pushing down the covers, I crawl to the foot of the bed. The contents of my forensic dental case are spread across the floor in disarray. Natriece is holding my camera; its flash must have caused the “lightning” that awakened me. Among the instruments and chemicals on the floor lies a spray bottle of luminol, a toxic chemical used to detect latent bloodstains.

“Did you spray any of that, Natriece?”

She solemnly shakes her head.

I gently take the camera from her grasp. “It’s all right if you did. I just need to know.”

“I might’ve sprayed a little bit.”

I get out of bed and pull on my pants. “It’s okay, but you need to leave the room while I clean it up. That’s a dangerous chemical in that bottle.”

“I’ll help you clean up. I knows how to clean.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go visit your auntie, and then I’ll come back and deal with this. I haven’t seen Pearlie in a long time.”

Natriece nods. “She told me nobody was out here. She just unlocked the door to get Mrs. Ferry’s wash.”

I take the little girl’s hand and lead her to the door, then flip off the light and walk into the hall. Natriece lingers behind, standing with her back to me, looking into the dark room. “Did you leave something?” I ask.

“No, ma’am. I just looking at that.”

“What?”

“That there. Did I do that?”

I look over the girl’s head. On the floor near the foot of my bed, a greenish blue glow hovers in the darkness. The luminol has reacted with something on the carpet. The chemical registers false positives with several compounds, one of them household bleach.

“It’s all right,” I tell her, dreading my mother’s reaction to the mess Natriece has made.

“Freaky,” she says. “That looks like Ghostbusters or something.”

Stepping around Natriece, I look down at the luminescence on the floor. It’s not diffuse, as I had thought, but well defined. Suddenly, an eerie numbness spreads through my body.

I’m looking at a footprint.

I felt the same numbness twenty-three years ago, when my grandfather turned away from the first corpse I ever saw, knelt before me, and said, “Baby, your daddy’s dead.”

“Natriece, stay back.”

“Yessum.”

Actually, it isn’t a footprint at all, but a boot print. I only register this fact because now another ghostlike image has taken shape beside it. The image of a bare foot, much smaller than the boot.

A child’s foot.

With slow insistence, a percussive hiss intrudes into my concentration. Subtly at first, but growing steadily to a soft roar. It’s the sound of rain drumming on a tin roof. Which makes no sense, because the slave quarters has a shingle roof—not tin—and I’m standing on the first of two floors. But I’ve heard this sound before, and I know it for what it is. An auditory hallucination. I heard the same metallic patter a week ago, at the Nolan murder scene. Just before my panic attack. I was staring down at the retired CPA’s naked corpse and—

A rapid beat of footsteps startles me from my reverie. Natriece has bolted down the hall. A scream cuts the air in the bedroom.

“Nanna! Nanna! Nanna!”

Checking my watch, I wait for the glowing footprints to fade. False positives generally fade quickly, while the luminescence caused by the hemoglobin in blood lingers like an accusation.

Thirty seconds pass. I look around the bedroom, this strange shrine to my childhood. Then I look back at the floor. A minute now, and the glow shows no sign of diminishing.

“Come on,” I whisper. “Fade.”

My hands are trembling. I want to run for Pearlie, too, but I’m no longer a child. My eyes blur from the strain of focusing so hard. Could that be the imprint of my own foot? Bloodstains can endure for decades on some surfaces.

“Fade,” I plead. But my plea does no good.

I’ve been drinking for over fifteen years. I’ve been sober now for forty-eight hours. I’ve never needed a drink so badly in my life.

SIX

Inside my mind, instinct is at war with itself. As I stare down at the two glowing footprints, half of me wants to run, the other half to lock the door. I want photographs of the prints, but to get them I’ll have to act quickly. Once the chemical reaction that causes the blood hidden in the carpet to luminesce is complete, it can’t be repeated.

The front door of the house bangs shut. Pearlie. I cross the bedroom and lock the door. Then I open my camera case, bring out my SLR, and fit a standard 35mm lens and cable release to it. Damn. I forgot to unload my tripod from the trunk of my car.

Someone raps sharply on my bedroom door. A rush of déjà vu tells me that rhythm belongs to Pearlie.

“Catherine Ferry?” calls a throaty voice as familiar to me as my mother’s. “You in there, girl?”

“I’m here, Pearlie.”

“What you doing home? Last time you came back was … I don’t know when. Why you didn’t call ahead?”

I can’t waste time trying to explain the situation. “I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”

Grabbing my car keys, I slide up the window, climb out, and run to my car. Tripod in hand, I climb back into the bedroom, close the curtains, and set up the tripod almost directly above the footprints. Pearlie is still knocking on the door. After mounting the camera and aiming it downward, I switch on the lights and shoot a reference photo of the floor. Then I close down the lens aperture by two f-stops, take a ruler from my dental case, and switch off the overhead light. The ruler has copper wire wrapped around the inch markings. The copper will fluoresce when sprayed with luminol. Laying the ruler alongside the glowing footprint, I spray both ruler and bloodstain with more of the chemical and wait.

“What you doing in there?” Pearlie demands. “Did Natriece mess up something?”

“I’m all right!” I snap. “Just give me a minute.”

I hear the muted chatter of Pearlie interrogating the little girl.

As the greenish-white glow begins to increase in intensity, I open the camera shutter with the cable release and look at my dive watch. To capture the faint glow of luminol in the dark, I need a sixty-second exposure. My hands are shaking badly, but the cable release will keep the camera from vibrating. This time the tremor isn’t from medication or alcohol withdrawal. It’s fear. The same sickening panic I felt at the LeGendre crime scene, and at the Nolan scene before that. If it weren’t for the child’s footprint, I’d assume the boot print was made with deer blood. Whitetail often wander onto the grounds of Malmaison, and my grandfather has been known to shoot a buck now and again, sometimes from the window of his study. But the child’s footprint is there …

When my watch hits the sixty-second mark, I close the shutter. Then, to be sure I capture the prints, I open the lens aperture by one f-stop and repeat the procedure. By then Pearlie is squawking through the door.

“Catherine DeSalle Ferry! You open this door!”

The familiar ritual of crime scene photography is calming my nerves. Habits have great comforting power—even bad habits, as I discovered long ago.

“Answer me, girl! I can’t read your mind like I used to. You’ve grown up too much and been gone too long.”

I smile in spite of my fear. The year after my father died—the year I stopped speaking—only Pearlie was able to communicate with me. The stoic maid could read my emotions in a glance, from the curl of a lip to the angle of my downcast eyes.

“I’m coming!” I call, going to the door.

As soon as I turn the knob, Pearlie pushes open the door and stands with her hands on her hips. Over seventy years old, she is tall, thin, and tough as gristle, with chocolate brown skin and clear traces of Caucasian ancestry in her facial features. Her eyes still flash with intelligence and wit, and her bark—though intimidating to strangers—is considerably worse than her bite. Around my grandfather and my mother, Pearlie displays the quiet dignity of a nineteenth-century servant. She can vanish as silently as a ghost when certain whites enter a room, but around me she is much more animated, treating me as she might a daughter. She still wears a starched white uniform, which you don’t see much anymore, and a shiny, reddish brown wig to cover her grizzled white hair.

I’ve missed her more than I realized. For her part, I see a mixture of pique and excitement in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know whether to hug me or spank me. Were it not for Natriece’s fear and the odd scene in the bedroom, Pearlie would undoubtedly crush me to her chest.

“Answer me this minute!” she demands. “You ain’t been home since your grandmother’s funeral, and that’s been a year now.”

“Fifteen months,” I correct, fighting a new wave of emotion that I can’t afford to face right now. Last June, my grandmother drowned on DeSalle Island. Part of the sandbar she was standing on simply slid into the Mississippi River. There was no warning. Four people saw it happen, yet no one could save her. No one even saw her surface after the bar collapsed. Catherine Poitiers Kirkland was an excellent swimmer in her youth—she taught me to swim—but at seventy-five, she’d been no match for the mighty current of the Mississippi.

“Lord, Lord.” Pearlie sighs. “Well … why didn’t you call to say you was coming? I would have cooked for you.”

“It was an impulse.”

“Ain’t it always with you?” She gives me a knowing look, then pushes past me into the bedroom. “What’s going on in here? Natriece told me they’s a ghost in here.”

I see the little girl standing just outside the door. “There is, in a way. Go look at the carpet by the foot of the bed.”

Pearlie walks over to the tripod, bends at the waist, and examines the floor with the eagle eye of a woman who has spent decades eradicating the slightest specks of dirt from “her” house.

“What’s making that rug look like that?”

“Blood. Old bloodstains hidden in the carpet fibers. It’s reacting with a chemical that Natriece sprayed on it by accident.”

“Blood?” Pearlie says skeptically. “I don’t see no blood. That looks like them Halloween teeth you used to wear when you was a child. Vampire teeth, like Count Dracula.”

“It’s the same principle. But there’s blood there, you can count on that.”

“Blood the only thing make that stuff glow?”

“No,” I concede. “Some metals will do it. Household bleach can do it. Have you spilled Clorox in here? Or in the laundry room and then tracked it in here?”

Pearlie purses her lips. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I ain’t either. Could have done, I guess.”

“I’ve seen lots of stains like this. Blood has a particular kind of glow with luminol. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I’m looking at blood.”

“Well, I don’t hardly see nothing now.”

“It fades pretty quickly. That’s why I took pictures of it.”

Pearlie always minimized the negative aspects of any situation. Part of what she was paid for, I suppose. I even used to hear her sing an old Johnny Mercer song to that effect while she worked: “You got to ac-cent-uate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the negative …”

“Could be deer blood,” Pearlie suggests. “Or armadillo maybe. Dr. Kirkland shoots armadillos round here all the time. They always digging up the yard, nasty things.”

“There are tests that will tell me whether the blood’s human. You know, it would take a lot of blood to make prints this well defined. There’s a boot print, and also the print of a child’s bare foot.”

Pearlie stares down with mute skepticism.

“Have there been any children around here since I left?” I’m an only child, and my aunt Ann, despite three marriages, has no children. “Has Natriece been around here much?”

Pearlie shakes her head. “My kids live in Chicago and Los Angeles, you know that. And Natriece only been to this house two times before this. She never been out here that I know about.” She turns and glares at Natriece. “You ever been in this room before, child?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Answer me straight, now! I ain’t one of them soft teachers you got at school.”

“I’m telling you true!”

As Natriece pooches out her lower lip, I kneel and study the fading image of the bare foot. Pearlie’s right; it’s nearly vanished. “Natriece, will you take off your flip-flop and put your foot over here?”

“In blood?”

“Not in it. Just hold your foot above the rug.”

The little girl slips off her yellow flip-flop and places a callused foot in my waiting hands. I hold it just above the dying glow of the footprint. It’s almost a perfect match.

“How old are you, Natriece?”

“Six. But I be big for my age.”

“I think you’re right.” I had guessed her age as eight, so her foot is probably about the size of a normal eight-year-old’s.

Pearlie is watching me with a worried look.

“Where’s Mom, Pearlie?”

“Where you think? Gone to Biloxi again.”

“To see Aunt Ann?”

“What else? That Ann draws trouble like my Sheba draws tomcats.”

“What about Grandpapa?”

“Dr. Kirkland gone off on another trip. He supposed to get back later today, though.”

“Where has he been? The island?”

“Lord, no. He ain’t been down there in a good while.”

“Where, then?”

Pearlie’s face closes. “I ain’t supposed to say.”

“Not even to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pearlie …”

The maid sighs and cocks her head at me. She and I have kept each other’s secrets for years. Pearlie kept quiet about my sneaking in and out of the house as a teenager, which she usually witnessed while smoking on her porch in the wee hours. I kept quiet about occasional male guests staying over at Pearlie’s house. Pearlie was never officially divorced, but she’s been alone since she was thirty, and as she often said, she might be old, but she wasn’t dead.

“You won’t say I told?” she asks.

“You know I won’t.”

“Dr. Kirkland gone to Washington.”

“Washington, Mississippi?” Washington is a small town about five miles east of Natchez, and at one time the territorial capital of Mississippi.

Pearlie snorts. “Dr. Kirkland wouldn’t waste five minutes out there, unless there was timber to buy out that way.”

“Then where?”

“Washington, D.C., girl. He go up there all the time now. I think he must know the president or something.”

“He does know the president. But that can’t be who he’s seeing. Who is it?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

“Not Mom?”

“She act like she don’t. You know your grandfather.”

I want to ask more questions, but Natriece doesn’t need to hear them. I cut my eyes toward the child, who is trying to reach one of the silk dragonflies hanging in the corner of the room. Pearlie gets the message.

“Run outside and play for a few minutes, Treecy.”

Natriece pooches out her lip again. “You told me I could have a sno-cone if I was good.”

I laugh despite my sense of urgency. “She promised me the same thing lots of times.”

“Did you get it?” Natriece asks with severity.

“If I was good, I did.”

“Which wasn’t too often,” Pearlie snaps, taking a step toward Natriece. “If you don’t go play right this minute, you ain’t getting no kind of cone. You’ll be eating brussels sprouts for supper.”

Natriece makes a face, then darts past Pearlie, just out of reach of the old woman’s spanking hand. I close the door. Pearlie is again studying the carpet where the bloodstains are hidden.

“How is Natriece related to you? Granddaughter?”

Pearlie laughs, a deep, rattling sound. “Great-granddaughter.”

I should have guessed.

“That’s what’s wrong with black peoples round here nowadays,” she says. “These little girls getting theirselves pregnant at twelve years old.”

I can’t believe my ears. “They don’t do that alone, do they? What about the men who get them pregnant?”

She waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, mens gonna be mens no matter how many shows Oprah runs about child mamas. It’s up to us old ones to teach these girls how to act. But they all too far from the church now, these young people. Mm-mm.”

The last two syllables carry such finality that I know it’s fruitless to argue. “Pearlie, I want to talk to you about the night Daddy died.”

She doesn’t turn away, but neither does she say anything. She doesn’t respond in any overt way, though I detect a deepening in her dark eyes. There are different levels of awareness in Pearlie’s eyes, the way there are in the eyes of most black people of her generation. In Natchez prior to 1965, a black person could witness a fatal shooting between two white people and see nothing at all. Such an event was “white folks’ business,” and that was that. I hate to think what sins lie concealed beneath that outdated rubric. Instead of prodding her further, I wait in silence.

“You done asked me about that a thousand times, baby,” she says, closing her eyes against my scrutiny.

“And you’ve put me off a thousand times.”

“I told you what I saw that night.”

“When I was a child. But I’m asking you again. I’m thirty-one years old, for God’s sake. Tell me about that night, Pearlie. Tell me everything you saw.”

At last the eyelids open, revealing dark brown irises that have probably seen more of life than I ever will. “All right,” she says wearily. “Maybe it’ll finally settle you down.”

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