Blood Memory by Greg Iles

confessed our secrets, which was painful but the only way to maintain sanity in a relationship conducted in the shadows. There has to be some honesty amid the lies. My fear—when I’m brave enough to face it—is that Sean will think I got pregnant on purpose. That I trapped him. And even if he believes the truth, will he leave his family to be with me? Will he want to father a child with me when he already has three of his own? Sean is obsessed with his work, so much so that it takes time away from his family now. Will the fact that we could work together persuade him that our relationship could succeed if it were out in the open?
    I wonder if part of my zeal for solving Sean’s cases has been an effort to make myself indispensable to him. Pathetic, if true. Yet if it is…this time I’ve failed at even that. With the NOMURS victims connected at last, finding the killer is only a matter of time. If Nathan Malik’s teeth match the bite marks on the victims’ corpses, it’s all over but the lethal injection, ten years down the road….
    The idea of a psychiatrist-murderer intrigues me. There are similar cases in the literature. I wonder if Dr. Malik is aware of that. I’ve had therapists I suspected of deep-rooted weirdness. There was Dr. DeLorme, a soft-spoken psychologist of sixty whose eyes glittered whenever he questioned me about sexual matters. His best efforts went in vain, but I at least found a diversion from my problems during the sessions, by trying to read what went on behind those eyes. What would DeLorme make of my panic attacks at the crime scenes? He’d probably attribute them to my pregnancy. But I experienced the first attack two days before I discovered I was pregnant. Unless slightly elevated hormones can precipitate panic, the cause must lie elsewhere. Alcohol is another possible culprit—too much or too little—but I had the first attack while floating comfortably on Grey Goose and the second while stone sober. I’ve always suffered occasional blackouts from drinking, but never panic attacks. In fact, alcohol gives me a surplus of courage. Dutch courage, they call it in old movies.
    As the level of oxygen in my tissues continues to fall, deeper questions bubble up from my subconscious. What’s the significance of rain on a tin roof? Why am I hearing that? And why at the times that I do? The only tin roof at Malmaison is on the barn my father used for a studio, and my memories of that space are so precious as to be sacred. Nothing about the barn elicits panic. And my nightmares? For years my sleep has been haunted by terrifying scenes of creatures—sometimes human, other times half human, half beast—trying to break into my house and kill me. This scenario comes in a thousand variations, all of them as “real” as my experiences in the waking world. I also have recurring dreams, as though my subconscious is trying to send me a message. Yet neither I nor my therapists have been able to decode the imagery. Two weeks ago, before my first panic attack, I began dreaming of a summer day on DeSalle Island. I’m riding in the old, round-nosed pickup truck that my grandfather used for work on the island. Grandpapa is driving, and I’m just tall enough to see over the dashboard. The truck smells of old motor oil and hand-rolled cigarettes. We’re riding across a pasture, up a gentle hill. On the other side of that hill lies a small pond where the cows drink. Each time the dream recurs, we make it a little farther up the hill. But we never reach the crest.
    The glowing footprint from my bedroom fills my darkening mind. Did my eight-year-old foot leave that track? Who else could have left it? That bedroom was mine alone for sixteen years. The carpet was installed the year I was born, when the whole room was remodeled. No other child lived at Malmaison after me, and as far as I know, no other child has ever stayed in that room. The conclusion seems inescapable. But why am I using logic? The