Blood Memory

help her.

“But for me to help you, you’re going to have to tell me the truth.”

“What about?”

“How it started. I know those six men were punished for what they did. But I need to know how it started.”

Angie’s face is as blank as the head of a mannequin.

“Did you ever meet a woman named Ann Hilgard?”

For the first time, I see fear in her eyes. Why should the mention of my aunt’s name generate fear in this girl?

“Angie, if you don’t talk to me tonight, Sean is going to have to tell the task force what I figured out about these murders. About how you’re involved. And I won’t be able to help you after that.”

The fear ratchets up a notch. “What are you talking about? What did you figure out?”

Here goes…“I know you’re taking saliva from a baby at the day-care center where you work and putting it into the bite marks on the dead men.”

Pitre’s eyes widen, and her bottom lip quivers like a five-year-old’s.

“What I need to know is, have you done all this on your own, or is somebody helping you? Was Dr. Malik helping you? I know he knew about the killings. He told me that. He was going to talk about them in the movie, wasn’t he?”

Angie’s hands are shaking now, and her left leg is bouncing up and down. She’s like a machine that has run reliably for twenty-two years, but is now about to vibrate to pieces. Sean was right: Angie Pitre couldn’t have committed the murders alone.

“Did you videotape the killings for Dr. Malik, Angie?”

She stands so suddenly that I jerk back in my chair.

“This isn’t right!” she cries, jabbing her sinewy arm at me. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like this! You don’t have proof of nothing!”

Sean races back into the den, gun in hand. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” I motion for him to put the gun away.

He doesn’t. “Bathtub’s full of hot water,” he says to Angie. “Why?”

“I was about to take a bath.”

He points at the cigarette burning in the ashtray by the recliner. “Looks like you were watching TV to me.”

“I was waiting to buy some earrings.”

He studies her for a few moments, then holsters his gun and takes his seat in the La-Z-Boy. “What did I miss?” he asks, glancing at the hall.

“Angie was about to tell me who’s helping her punish those men.”

“What will happen to me if I talk to you?” she asks Sean.

He gives me a pointed look that I have no trouble reading: It’s time to Mirandize this girl and put her in front of a video camera. “That depends on what you tell us,” he says.

“Angie,” I say softly, “I know it’s hard for you to trust people. It’s hard for me, too. That’s one of the problems women like us have. But you need to listen to me now. Because I don’t want to put you in jail. Okay? I am the best friend you’re ever going to have.”

The guarded look doesn’t lessen in vigilance, but there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s wavering.

“Take a deep breath, Angie. Take a deep breath and get it off your chest.”

Slowly, Angie Pitre sits back down on the sofa.

“Whose idea was it?” I ask. “Who first said, ‘We can’t just sit around and bitch about this. We have to do something’?”

Her eyes flick back and forth like those of a crack addict. Then she says, “That’s hard to say, you know? It wasn’t really like that.”

My heart thuds in my chest. I force myself not to look at Sean. “Was it Dr. Malik?”

She draws up her shoulders and hugs herself like a sullen child. “Sort of. I mean, he was always talking about how the men who do it never stop. You know? How none of the treatments work, except maybe castration. He said only death or prison ever really stop them from doing it.”

“By ‘it,’ you mean sexually abusing children?”

“Yeah. Dr. Malik didn’t think any of the old ways worked for victims either. They didn’t make you well. It was all a lot of feel-good talk, he said. When you got back out in the world, it couldn’t stop you from doing the bad things caused by what happened when you were a kid. You know? Sleeping around, or dope, or cutting yourself…whatever. Numbing behavior, he called it.”

I nod understanding. “I’ve been an alcoholic since I was a teenager.”

“There you go. So, that’s why Dr. Malik started Group X. To try something new. It was like exploring a new world, he said. The dark world inside our heads.”

“How many women were in the group?”

She shakes her head, the survivor’s eyes glinting again.

“But all the members of Group X were repressed-memory cases.”

“Yeah. Our lives were all fucked-up, and we didn’t know why. I only got in because I was seeing this lady down at the mental health center, and she referred me. I don’t have no money or nothing.”

“I understand. So…Group X?”

“Yeah. What was different was that Dr. Malik did the delayed-memory work right there with all of us in the same room. And it was intense, man. If we weren’t reliving what had happened to us, we were hearing somebody else relive what happened to them. And the way Dr. Malik did it, you couldn’t hardly stand to hear it. When you’re the patient, he makes you, like, become the kid you were when it happened to you. You talk in a little girl’s voice and everything. It’s scary to hear. I mean, some of the stuff I heard was really sick. Some people couldn’t take it. Two or three times, people peed in their chairs. Seriously, man. And I think what happened came out of that.”

“The decision to kill an abuser?”

She nods with sudden solemnity. “See, even though the bad stuff had happened to most of us years ago, in Group X it was like it was happening right then. All the terror and rage you couldn’t express back then comes blasting out of you like an explosion or something. And it makes you mad. All of us felt that way. Even Dr. Malik. You could see it in his face. He wanted to hurt those men the way they’d hurt us.”

“Did he suggest that you do that?”

Angie shakes her head. “No. See, as intense as all that was, it wasn’t what started the…you know. It was that we got to talking afterward. We got to be friends, see? All of us. We weren’t supposed to, but we started meeting outside Dr. Malik’s office after group on Wednesdays. We’d go to somebody’s apartment or whatever and drink Cokes and stuff. And talk. And it was there that we figured out the really scary thing.”

I glance at Sean. He’s hypnotized by Pitre’s story. “What was that, Angie? What was the really scary thing?”

“That the guys who had done this to us were probably still doing it.” She bites her bottom lip and nods as though talking silently to herself. “Not to us, but to other kids. You know? So we started watching them, trying to figure out what to do. But it’s hard to tell, right? Unless you live in the house with them…and most of us had jobs or whatever.”

“Of course.”

“But I knew, okay? There’s this kid on my dad’s block, he’s home alone all day-” Angie shakes her head with sudden violence. “Anyway, that’s what it came out of. It wasn’t just to punish them. I mean, that was part of it-to make them admit what they did. Because none of them will, you know? You get up your nerve for this big blowout, and then they just deny it. All of it. Dr. Malik had seen it a million times. They look at you like you’re the crazy one, and then they tell you how much they love you and shit. It’s sick. It makes you think maybe you are crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Angie. I know that.”