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.
“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.”
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,
