"Blood Memory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Iles Greg)

Chapter 16

I’m standing with John Kaiser at the bottom of a metal staircase that leads up to Nathan Malik’s office building. The stucco structure has only one floor, but it’s elevated on concrete columns so that patients can park beneath the building.

“Everything okay?” Kaiser asks from behind me. “Transmitter bothering you?”

“I’m good.” An FBI technician taped the transmitter to my inner thigh, beneath my skirt. I almost came casual, but at the last minute I chose a pencil skirt and fitted top. If Malik was attracted to me during medical school, a subtle sensuality might serve me well in my quest for information today.

The transmitter on my thigh is the least of my worries. Two dozen cops are concealed in and around vehicles parked at the buildings adjacent to Malik’s, eight of them members of a special weapons and tactics team. As soon as I’m inside Malik’s office, that team will surreptitiously enter the building and cover me from one room away. Unless Malik plans to simply pull out a gun and shoot me as I enter-knowing that the police are outside-I should be safe. Yet now that I stand on the threshold of the meeting, reality has dampened my earlier excitement. I feel as though I’m about to enter the cage of a tamed tiger. The beast might be conditioned to show docility, but anyone who believes that savagery can be removed from a predator is kidding himself.

“Cat?” Kaiser says anxiously.

In the past half hour, it’s become clear to me that John Kaiser is running the NOMURS task force. It may be a joint law enforcement operation in name, but in the primitive hierarchy that determines the true chain of command, Kaiser is the alpha male. I’ve tried to be very conscious about how I behave toward him in front of Sean. It’s an old problem I have, a compulsion to make the dominant male in any situation want me.

“I’m all right,” I assure Kaiser, silently repeating the safety phrase that he gave me a few minutes ago. Do you follow Saints football? This mundane sentence-in theory, at least-will trigger an explosive entry by the NOPD SWAT team.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Kaiser says. “It’s your show now.”

I climb the steps in a single steady effort, then open the door at the top before second thoughts can stop me. The FBI agent pats me on the back as I go in, and I’m thankful for the touch. It reminds me of my swimming coach wishing me luck before I took my place on the starting block.

Beyond the door is a hallway with doors running down either side. Threadbare green carpet on the floor, brown paneling on the walls. The place smells like a doctor’s office, which surprises me. Most therapists’ offices I’ve been to smelled like houses or apartments.

“Hello?” calls a male voice. “Is that you, Dr. Ferry?”

“Yes,” I answer, embarrassed by the smallness of my voice in the dead air of the corridor.

“In here. End of the hall.”

The door at the end of the hall is partly open. I walk to within two steps of it, then pause and flatten my skirt against my thighs. It crinkled during the drive over.

“Come in,” says the voice. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

Right, I say silently, and walk through the door.

Nathan Malik sits at a large table facing the doorway. Despite the summer heat, he’s wearing black slacks and a black mock turtleneck, probably silk. There isn’t a spare ounce of fat on his muscular frame, and his bald head seems posed upon his body like a carved bust on a shelf. His skin is fair, almost pale, a difficult feat to manage in the New Orleans summer, but the paleness dramatically sets off his eyes, which have irises so brown they look black. His hands are small and appear delicate enough to be a woman’s. I try to imagine those hands firing bullets into the spines of five men in the past month, then finishing them off with a shot to the head.

In a single fluid movement Malik stands and gestures at a sofa opposite his desk. Black leather squares in a tubular chrome frame-a Mies van der Rohe, or maybe a knockoff. As I sit, I glance quickly around the office, but the place is so sparsely decorated that I only register a few details. Soft white walls, teak shelves, a couple of long, vertical paintings that look Chinese. To my left hangs a samurai sword, its truncated blade gleaming with threatening purpose. To my right, on a sideboard, sits a stone Buddha that looks authentic enough to have been stolen from an Asian jungle somewhere.

“Everyone likes the Buddha,” Malik says, taking his seat again.

“Where did you get it? I’ve never seen one like it.”

“I brought it back from Cambodia. It’s five hundred years old.”

“When were you there?”

“Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“As a soldier?”

A thin smile touches Malik’s lips. “An invader. I regret taking it, but I’m glad I have it now.”

Behind the psychiatrist hangs a large painted mandala, a circular geometric design of brilliant colors woven into a mazelike pattern to stimulate contemplation in the viewer. Carl Jung was fascinated with mandalas.

“I’m curiously happy that you’ve come,” Malik says.

“Are you?”

“Yes. I thought it would be you who showed up to take impressions of my teeth. I got a rather ugly little FBI dentist instead.”

I’m confused. “Did he take impressions of your teeth?”

“No, oddly enough. I assume that’s because my X-rays were sufficient to rule me out as a suspect. He did swab my mouth for DNA.”

I’m sitting the way Lauren Bacall sits in old movies, knees together but showing beneath the hem of my skirt, sandaled feet tucked a little behind me. As Malik’s eyes linger on my knees, it strikes me that I’m here to reverse the usual dynamic of the psychiatrist’s office-to extract information from the doctor rather than the other way around. Since Malik is probably an expert at verbal games, I decide to be direct.

“How did you know I was involved with this case, Doctor?”

He waves a hand as if dismissing a triviality. “The FBI wanted a few strands of my hair as well, but alas” He gestures at his bald pate and laughs.

Malik is testing me. “If the FBI came for hairs, they got them. One way or the other. Unless you’re bald down low as well, which I haven’t run across yet.”

“My, my. You don’t shy away from the earthy realities, do you?”

“Did you expect me to?”

He shrugs with obvious amusement. “I didn’t know. I was curious to see how you turned out. I mean, I’ve followed you in the newspapers, but stories like that never offer any meaningful detail.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“You’re still quite striking. Beyond that, I don’t yet know anything I didn’t know before.”

“Is that really why I’m here? You wanted to see how I turned out?”

“No. You’re here because none of this is accidental.”

“What?”

“Our juxtaposition in space and time. We knew each other years ago, seemingly in passing, and now we’re brought together again. Synchronicity, Jung called it. A seemingly acausal linkage of events which have great meaning or effects in human terms.”

“I call those coincidences. We didn’t actually come together until you asked for this meeting.”

“It would have happened sooner or later.”

I have a sudden urge to ask Malik if he knew my father, but instinct takes me in another direction. “Do you have a thing for me, Dr. Malik?”

“A thing?” Feigned ignorance doesn’t suit the psychiatrist well.

“Come on. An interest. A crush. A jones. ”

“Do many men react that way to you?”

“Enough.”

He nods slightly. “I’ll bet they do. You had them eating out of your hand at UMC. All those doctors in their forties salivating over you like a bitch in heat.”

Malik uses the word bitch like a man who breeds dogs, as though referring to a species far down the evolutionary scale. “You were one of them, as I recall.”

“I noticed you. I’ll admit that.”

“Why did you notice me?”

“You were out of the ordinary. Beautiful, highly sexual, you drank like a fish, and you could hold your own in conversation with people twenty years your senior. I was also bored.”

“Are you bored now?”

A thin smile. “No. It’s not often that I speak to someone with a live audience.”

I slide up my skirt and part my knees enough for Malik to see the transmitter pack taped to my inner thigh.

“Hello, everyone,” he says. “Voyeurs one and all.”

“If we’re done strolling down memory lane, I have some questions for you.”

“Fire away. Only I hope they’re your questions. I’d hate to think you volunteered to act as a mouthpiece for the FBI. That would be beneath you.”

“The questions are mine.”

“At your service, then.”

“Do you treat only patients who have repressed memories?”

Malik seems to be debating whether to answer this question. “No,” he says finally. “I specialize in the recovery of lost memories, but I also treat patients for bipolar disorder and for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“PTSD solely as it relates to sexual abuse?”

Another hesitation. “I also treat some combat veterans.”

“ Vietnam veterans?”

“I’d rather not get into specifics about patients.”

I want to ask him about his service in Vietnam, but the time doesn’t yet seem right. “I’m going to ask you this straight out. Why won’t you reveal the names of your patients to the police?”

Whatever good humor was in the psychiatrist’s face vanishes. “Because I owe them my loyalty and my protection. I would never betray my patients in that way.”

“Would merely revealing their names constitute a betrayal?”

“Of course. Their lives would instantly be turned inside out by the police. Many of these patients are very fragile. They live in difficult family situations. For some, violence is a daily reality. For others, an ever-present possibility. I have no intention of putting them at risk to satisfy the whims of the state.”

“The ‘whims of the state’? The police are trying to stop a serial murderer who’s probably choosing his victims from among your patients.”

“None of my patients has died.”

“Their relatives have. Two that we know about, and maybe more.”

Malik looks at the ceiling in a way that’s almost a roll of his eyes. “Perhaps.”

Anger surges within me at his apparent smugness. “It’s not perhaps for you, is it? You know who else is at risk, yet you refuse to tell the police.”

Malik simply stares at me, his dark eyes flat and steady.

“How many of the murder victims were related to people you treat, Doctor?”

“Do you honestly think I’m going to answer that, Catherine?”

“Please call me Dr. Ferry.”

A gleam of bemusement. “Ahh. Are you in fact a doctor?”

“Yes. I’m a forensic odontologist.”

“To clarify-a dentist.” Malik’s eyes have taken on a sheen.

“With highly specialized expertise.”

“Stillthat’s not quite a doctor, is it? Have you ever delivered a baby? Shoved your hand into the chest cavity of a gunshot victim to keep his heart in one piece?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Oh, that’s right. You left medical school in the second year. Before the clinical work really got started.”

Malik is clearly enjoying himself. “Did you bring me here to insult me, Doctor?”

“No. I merely want us to be clear about who we are. I’d like you to call me Nathan, and I’d prefer to call you Catherine.”

“How about I call you Jonathan? That’s what you called yourself when I met you. Jonathan Gentry.”

The psychiatrist’s eyes go flat again. “That is no longer my name.”

“It’s the one you were born with, though, right?”

Malik makes a very European gesture of the head, the sophisticated version of a teenager’s “whatever.” “Call me what you like, Catherine. But before we go on, let’s dispose of this issue of patient confidentiality. I tell you now, I’m quite prepared to spend a year in jail rather than betray my patients’ privacy.”

He sounds sincere, but I don’t believe this refined professional man is willing to do actual jail time for a principle. “You’re prepared to spend a year in the Orleans Parish Prison?”

“I realize that may be difficult for you to understand.”

“Have you ever seen the parish prison?”

Malik turns up his palms on the desk, as though preparing to explain a complex concept to a child. “I spent six weeks as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. A year in an American jail can only be a vacation.”

Some of my confidence evaporates. There’s more to Nathan Malik than I’ve been led to believe. As I try to decide how to proceed, the psychiatrist puts his elbows on his desk, folds his hands together, and speaks in a voice that carries years of hard-won wisdom.

“Listen to me, Catherine. You walked in here from the world of light. The world of malls and restaurants and Fourth of July fireworks. You see shadows at the edges of all that. You know bad things happen, that evil exists. You’ve worked a few murder cases. But mostly it’s abstract. The policemen to whom you lend your skills see more of the reality, but cops work very hard at denial. The ones who don’t eat their service weapons, anyway.”

Malik’s pale cheeks color with passion. “But here there is no denial. In this office, I shut out nothing. Here the shadows come out and play. These walls have heard the most depraved acts of humanity recounted in all their sickening detail.” He sits back in his chair and speaks quietly. “Here, Catherine, I deal with the worst thing in the world.”

I fold my hands over my knees. “Don’t you think you might be overdramatizing a bit?”

“You think so?” A humorless chuckle escapes Malik’s lips. “What’s the worst scourge of mankind? War?”

“I suppose so. War and the things that go with it.”

“I’ve seen war.” He gestures at the stone Buddha staring placidly from the sideboard. “Hand-to-hand savagery and anonymous slaughter. I’ve been shot. I’ve killed human beings. But what I’ve seen and heard inside this drab little office building is worse. Far worse.”

The psychiatrist speaks with such conviction that I’m not sure what to say. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“To answer your question.”

“Which question?”

“The same one all your friends are asking out there in the world. ‘Why won’t he give us the names of his patients? What’s the big deal?’”

I let the silence stretch out, hoping to dissipate some of Malik’s intensity. “I still think that the imminent danger to innocent people outweighs your patients’ right to privacy.”

“It’s so easy to say that, Catherine. What if I told you that the majority of my patients are Holocaust survivors? Survivors of concentration camps that were never liberated, and that some of them still live with their Nazi guards?”

“That’s not a fair analogy. It’s not true.”

“You’re wrong.” Malik’s eyes flash. “Children suffering prolonged and repeated sexual abuse are living in concentration camps. They’re under the power of despots on whom they depend for their very survival. They suffer terror and torture on a daily basis. Their own siblings, and often their mothers, betray them in the struggle for survival. Any identity these children have is systematically destroyed, and hope isn’t even a memory. Make no mistake, Doctor, there’s a holocaust going on all around us. Only most of us prefer not to see it.”

Nathan Malik’s preternatural calm has given way to a deep and abiding anger. He is nothing like the psychiatrists I’ve seen as a patient. At some level, I always craved this kind of passion in my therapists. But in truth, it’s not their proper role. This kind of passion in a therapist is dangerous.

In a neutral voice, I say, “My memory from med school is that therapists should maintain objectivity at all costs. You sound more like a patient advocate than a dispassionate clinician.”

“Should one be objective in the face of a holocaust? Just because one happens to be a physician? Do you know how many American women are believed to have suffered sexual abuse as children? One in three. One in three. That’s tens of millions of women. That’s women in your family, Catherine. For men, it’s between one in four and one in seven.”

I force myself to maintain my neutral tone. “Believed by whom?”

“That’s hard data, not propaganda from some victims’ group. The average duration of incestuous abuse is four years. Half of abused children are assaulted by multiple perpetrators. You want to know more, Doctor?”

“I’m a little confused,” I say softly. “Are you treating children or adults?”

With an explosive movement Malik stands, as though the chair can no longer contain him. He’s only about five-nine, but he radiates a power that seems to have its origin in his unearthly stillness. He projects a centeredness I’ve only seen in devotees of the martial arts.

“You’re speaking in a chronological sense,” he says, his voice almost too quiet for me to hear. “I can’t afford to make such distinctions. A child’s emotional development is typically frozen in whatever stage he or she was in at the time the abuse occurred. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m dealing with an adult or a child until the patient opens her mouth.”

“Sowhat you’re talking about now is repressed memories. Right?”

Malik hasn’t moved toward me, but he suddenly seems much closer than he did before. And the SWAT team seems a lot farther away than it did a minute ago. My eyes go to the samurai sword on the wall to my left. Its placement opposite the Buddha on the right wall creates a disturbing impression of extremes: peace and war, serenity and violence.

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Malik says. “Doctor.”

For the first time since entering the office, I am afraid. My scalp is tingling, and my palms are wet. The man before me isn’t the man I knew in medical school. Physically, he is. But emotionally he has evolved into something else. The psychiatrist I knew was an observer, essentially impotent. This man is as far from impotent as I can imagine, and his agenda remains a mystery to me.

“I need to pee,” I say lamely.

“Down the hall,” Malik replies, his expression unchanging. “Last door on the right.”

As I walk to the door, I feel as though his words emerged from the simplest cells in his brain, while the higher functions remained totally focused on his internal landscape-of which I am clearly a part.

Alone in the corridor, I exhale as though I’ve been holding in a single breath for fifteen minutes. I don’t need to pee, but I walk down the hall anyway, certain that Malik would notice a lack of footsteps. As I pass an open door on my left, I see a man covered in black body armor kneeling in the doorway with a stubby submachine gun. His eyes track me as I pass, but he doesn’t move.

When I pull open the bathroom door, I find John Kaiser standing inside. He quickly motions for me to enter the tiny cubicle.

“Do you really have to pee?” he asks.

“No. I just had to get out of there. He jumped up from his desk, and it scared me.”

The FBI agent squeezes my upper arm, his hazel eyes reassuring. “Do you feel you’re in danger?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t really threaten me. It just felt scary.”

“You’re doing great, Cat. Can you handle going back in?”

I turn the taps on the little sink and splash cold water on my neck. “Is it really doing any good?”

“Are you kidding? This conversation is the only window we have into this guy’s head.”

I lean back against the wall and dry my neck with a paper towel. “Okay.”

“Do you feel confident enough to try to provoke him a little?”

“Jesus. How do you suggest I do that?”

Kaiser gives me a smile that tells me he knows me better than I thought. “I don’t think you need any suggestions in that area. Do you?”

“I guess not.”

“If you feel threatened, don’t hesitate to pull the plug. We’ll have him facedown on the floor in five seconds.”

“Alive or dead?”

“That’s his choice.” Kaiser’s eyes almost glitter in their hardness.

“Is it?”

The FBI agent reaches behind him and flushes the toilet. “You’re right where you like to be, Cat. On the edge. Go nail this guy.”