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 grce 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, fifty something
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.
Continues…
Excerpted from Blood Memory
by Greg Iles
Copyright 2005 by Greg Iles.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright 2005
Greg Iles
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-3470-7
