Blood Memory by Greg Iles Read Free Book Online

blood: My work is never done. Again I see the bite marks on LeGendre’s bloodless flesh, one more set in the endless train of scars and mutilation I’ve witnessed over the past seven years. Is this really my job? How can someone’s life’s work be the analysis of something so brutal, so small, so irritatingly specialized? There has to be more to my choice of career. But what? My father’s mysterious death? Too obvious. “My work is never done,” I murmur, feeling the Valium course through my veins. Earlier today, the sedative I’d swallowed to combat my alcohol withdrawal gave me an unexpected gift: dreamless sleep. I haven’t known such relief for years.
    “Thank you,” I whisper to the drug, as though to the god of sleep. My left hand slides over my hip and comes to rest on my lower tummy. My right hand slips out of the covers, reaching for a hand that isn’t there.
    “Daddy?” I whisper. “Is that you?”
    He doesn’t answer.
    He never does, but tonight the aching loneliness that accompanies thoughts of my father isn’t so severe. Valium pads the edges of the pain, easing my descent into sleep. For years I’ve suffered from nightmares, and lately the alcohol I use to deaden them seems to have made them worse. But the Valium is an unfamiliar drug, as fresh and potent as the first drink I ever swallowed.
    Tonight sleep enfolds me like the ocean depths on a free dive, a bright upper layer that deepens in color and density as I descend, swimming down, down, down, away from the chaos of the surface, into the blue cathedral of the deep. My sanctuary from the world and from myself. No thoughts here beyond the exigencies of survival. Only peace, the bliss of entering a place where but a handful of humans can go without bottled air, where death is a constant companion, where life is sweeter for the awareness of its fragility.
    Here I am weightless.
    Shapeless.
    An astronaut drifting through deep space without a tether, unconcerned that her life support systems have shut down, that her body must sustain itself or die. Anyone with a lick of sense would kick madly for the surface.
    Not me.
    Because here I am free.
    I don’t know how long I float this way, because time means nothing here. What I do know is that I must be sleeping, because on a real free dive, time means everything. Time is the remaining oxygen dissolved in your bloodstream, the only currency that can buy you depth, and depth is the holy grail, the point of the whole mad exercise. Or it’s supposed to be, anyway. That part confuses me, actually. Because you can never reach the bottom. Not in the real ocean. It’s only back on land that you can do that.
    Surfacing now. I know because the sea has slowly stopped trying to drive my wet suit into every opening in my body, and blue-white lightning is flashing above me. A sudden storm? I tense against the inevitable clap of thunder, but it doesn’t come. When the lightning flashes again, a strange sound registers in my mind. Not thunder—not even the lap of waves against the dive boat. It’s the snick of a camera shutter. When I finally break through the surface, I smell acetone, not the ozone that follows a lightning strike. Blinking in confusion, I call out, “Sean? Sean, is that you?”
    A dark brown forehead and saucer eyes rise above the footboard of my bed. A nose and mouth follow, the mouth agape in wonder. I’m looking into the face of a black girl of about eight. She has the frozen look of a child who has entered a familiar yard only to find a strange dog waiting for her.
    “Who are you?” I ask, half wondering if the girl is real.
    “Natriece,” she says, her voice almost defiant. “Natriece Washington.”
    I glance around the room, but all that registers is the sunlight pouring through a crack in some curtains. “What are you doing here?”
    The girl’s eyes are still wide. “I be here with my auntie. I didn’t mean to make no mess.”
    “Your auntie?” The smell of acetone is