happened to me. Tried to, anyway. I was very drunk. She didn’t believe me.”
“Why not?”
“Sarah was married by then. She’d married at seventeen. To get out of the house, of course, the fastest way she could. I asked if our father had done anything like that to her. She was flabbergasted. Didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Maybe she was just pretending she didn’t.”
“No. Her eyes were blank as a doll’s. Two years later, I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. I did well there. I had a lot of rage inside, but also a desire to help people. A quite common paradox among abuse victims. They made me a medical corpsman, but I still managed to kill some Vietnamese.”
“Vietcong?”
Malik raises one eyebrow. “Dead Vietnamese were by definition Vietcong. Surely you know that.”
“Why would I know that?”
Another cryptic smile.
My sense of emotional nakedness has returned. “Look, if you have something to say about my father, why don’t you get it out? You knew him, didn’t you?”
“I know every man who served in Vietnam, more or less. We’re brothers under the skin.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Malik sighs. “I never knew your father.”
“Are you speaking literally or figuratively?”
“Does it matter?”
“Jesus. You were the same age, from the same state, and you both went to Vietnam-”
“How much do you remember about the night your father died, Catherine?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’d like to make it my business. I think I could help you with it. If you would trust me-”
“I’m not here for therapy, Doctor.”
“Are you sure? You look like you could use a drink. I have some Isojiman sake here. No vodka, I’m afraid.”
“Did I not?”
“Your sister had been abused, too, right? But she blocked out the memory?”
Malik studies me for perhaps half a minute. Then he begins speaking softly. “During my tour in-country, I got a letter from Sarah. She’d been having nightmares for some time. But now she was having what she thought were hallucinations. While she was awake. Images of our father removing her clothes, touching her. Those were flashbacks, of course, not hallucinations. At the end of her letter, she told me she’d been thinking of harming herself. Of ending her life.”
“What triggered all that? Your talking to her?”
“No. She had a daughter by then, and the daughter had just turned three-probably the age at which my father began abusing Sarah. That’s a very common trigger for delayed memory recall in young adult women.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to get compassionate leave to go back to the States. The army wasn’t having any. I wrote her letters every day, trying to keep up her spirits, pointing out all she had to live for. Some of it must have rung hollow, because I had my suicidal moments, too. I’d run to wounded men in the middle of firefights, when I was almost certain to catch a bullet. I ran through mortar fire, machine-gun fire, everything. They gave me a medal for my death wish. A Bronze Star. Anyway…my letters weren’t enough. The flashbacks got worse, and Sarah came to realize that she was seeing something that had really happened to her. She couldn’t bear that. She hanged herself while her husband and daughter were at the zoo.”
Malik is no longer looking at me. His eyes have focused somewhere in the middle distance, and the glaze over them tells me his mind is far away. I don’t even presume to express my sympathy.
“I want to know what I’m doing here,” I say quietly.
The thinnest of smiles touches his lips, and then his eyes focus on mine at last. “So do I, Catherine.”
It’s time to end any semblance of a charade. “I’m here because I think you killed those five men.”
Malik’s eyes flicker above the smile. “Do you really?”
“If you didn’t kill them, you know who did. And you’re protecting them.”
“Them?”
“Him, whatever. You get my point.”
“Oh, Catherine. I expected so much more from you.”
His condescension is finally too much for me to bear. “I think our murder victims are male relatives of your patients-sexual abusers-and that by killing them you see yourself as some kind of crusader against an evil you know only too well.”
The psychiatrist watches me in silence. “What would you think of me if that were true? Pedophilia has the highest rate of recidivism of any crime. Abusers never stop, Catherine. They just move on to new victims. They cannot be rehabilitated.”
“Are you saying that murdering them is justified?”
“I’m saying that death or infirmity are the only things that will stop them.”
I pray that the transmitter is relaying all this to Kaiser and the others.
“Are you an expert shot, Doctor?”
“I can hit what I aim at.”
“Do you practice martial arts?”
He glances at the samurai sword on the wall. “I could decapitate you with that before the SWAT team outside could get in here, if that’s what you mean.”
A shudder goes through me. I glance at the closed door behind me, praying there’s a SWAT officer on the other side of it. I’ve forgotten the safety phrase. Something about football-
I almost jump out of my chair when Malik stands, but he only folds his arms across his chest and looks at me with something like pity. “When you leave, remember that we’ve barely scratched the surface of this subject. We haven’t even discussed the guilty ones.”
“The guilty ones?”
He nods. “How can a holocaust happen in our midst without the community rising up to stop it?”
“Well…”
“Think about that, Catherine. I have things to do now. You can tell me your thoughts at our next meeting.”
“There won’t be another meeting.”
Malik smiles. “Of course there will. Much is going to come to you over the next few days. That’s the way it works.” He reaches back and takes something off a low table. Then he leans across the table that serves as his desk and holds it out.
It’s a business card.
Out of curiosity, I stand and take it. On it is printed Malik’s name, and beneath that two phone numbers.
“Call me,” he says. “If they decide to jail me, don’t worry. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”
The meeting is over. I walk to the door, then turn back one last time. Malik looks odd standing there, clad in black from head to toe, so still that he could be carved in stone. I’m not sure he blinked once during the entire interview.
“Don’t blame yourself,” he says.
Chapter 18
I’m sitting in the backseat of an FBI Crown Victoria, leaning against Sean as the car roars down West Esplanade, skirting Lake Pontchartrain on its way to the FBI field office. John Kaiser sits up front with a Bureau
