Kaiser looks as if he’d prefer not to venture down the path he’s about to take. “After you and I spoke yesterday, I called Dr. Christopher Omartian. To find out what he remembered about Malik.”
I close my eyes and steel myself. Chris Omartian tried to kill himself because of me. He probably had plenty to say, none of it good.
“Dr. Omartian said some unkind things about you,” Kaiser confirms. “I sensed that he has some issues of his own, particularly as related to you. But I need to ask some questions based on what he said.”
“Go ahead.”
“He suggested that you might be manic-depressive.”
“I’m not. But I have been diagnosed as cyclothymic.”
Kaiser gives me a questioning look. “Cyclo-what?”
“Cyclothymia is a mild form of bipolar disorder. I have symptoms of mania that fall below the cutoff for true mania. They call it hypo-mania. The diagnosis depends on the frequency and severity of your manic episodes.”
The FBI man clearly wants more specific information.
“Look, I suffer from depression. I also have occasional episodes of manic behavior. The periods alternate with varying frequency. Sean has suffered through these swings for almost two years. I can be suicidally depressed, then a week later, flying. I think I’m invulnerable, I take crazy risks. I do not-very-nice things sometimes. And sometimes—not very often—I don’t remember those things.”
Kaiser glances at Sean, who surprises me by saying, “It’s not as bad as she makes out. She’s been doing really well.”
“Dr. Ferry,” Kaiser says carefully, “is there any possibility that you’ve ever seen Dr. Malik as a patient?”
“What?”
“I have to ask you that.”
“Why? Do you think I have multiple personalties or something?”
“I’m just trying to put together a picture.”
“Nathan Malik and I don’t fit into the same picture! I don’t know the guy.”
“All right.” Kaiser steeples his fingers, his eyes uncertain. “Do you feel that you’re stable enough to handle a meeting like this?”
I start to answer, but he holds up a hand. “I’m thinking of your panic attacks at the murder scenes. There’s no telling what kind of head games Malik might try to run on you.”
“Where would this meeting happen?”
“Malik suggested his office. It’s not far from here, actually. On Ridgelake. Just off Veterans’ Boulevard. He wants to talk to you face-to-face and alone.”
“You’re kidding, right?” says Sean.
Kaiser shakes his head, but his eyes remain on me. “You’d be wearing a wire, of course. SWAT would be right outside, and you could trigger a rescue with a prearranged phrase if you became concerned for your safety.”
“No way,” snaps Sean. “Malik could shoot her before your guys even made the door. I’ve seen it happen, John. So have you.”
Kaiser gives Sean a dark look. “Dr. Malik said Dr. Ferry could come to the interview armed if she wants to. He also told us we’re welcome to tape the conversation.” The FBI agent shifts his gaze back to me. “I think you know why I’m inclined to allow this meeting to happen at Malik’s office.”
“It’s his territory. The more comfortable he feels, the more likely he is to say something that might be useful to you.”
Kaiser smiles. “It’s nice not to have to spoon-feed someone for a change.” He gestures at the bloody crime-scene photos on the table. “Five murders in the past month, two in the last three days. I’d say our killer is decompensating rapidly. Anything we can do to stop him, I’m game for trying.”
“This is bullshit,” says Sean. “Pick a neutral location. A place you can control.”
I lay a hand on his arm. “Let it go, Sean. When are we talking about doing this?”
Kaiser stands and looks down at me. “Malik’s at his office now. I’ve got a wire team in the van outside. How soon can you get dressed?”
A thrill of anticipation shoots through me. For the first time in three days, my craving for alcohol has receded to the level of background noise. Five men have been murdered. Hundreds of law enforcement agents are working around the clock to find the killer, yet no one has come close. Now I’m going to walk into a room with the man most likely to have committed the crimes. A normal person ought to feel some fear. At least some anxiety. But I feel only exhilaration, the pure and distilled essence of being alive. The only feeling that comes close is the almost sexual rush of hyperawareness that signals the onset of a manic episode. And no normal person ever experiences that.
Kaiser and Sean are watching me with the wariness of doctors in a psych ward. I strangle the impulse to laugh.
“Give me ten minutes.”
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 sum
mer 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.”
“Still…that’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.”