Читать книгу: «True Evil»
GREG ILES
True Evil
Dedication
IN MEMORY
Mike McGraw and Ryan Buttross
True evil has a face you know and a voice you trust.
Anonymous
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Greg Iles
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
Alex Morse charged through the lobby of the new University Medical Center like a doctor to a code call, but she was no doctor. She was a hostage negotiator for the FBI. Twenty minutes earlier, Alex had deplaned from a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jackson, Mississippi, a flight prompted by her older sister’s sudden collapse at a Little League baseball game. This year had been plagued by injury and death, and there was more to come—Alex could feel it.
Sighting the elevators, she checked the overhead display and saw that a car was descending. She hit the call button and started bouncing on her toes. Hospitals she thought bitterly. She’d practically just gotten out of one herself. But the chain of tragedy had started with her father. Five months ago Jim Morse had died in this very hospital, after being shot during a robbery. Two months after that, Alex’s mother had been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She had already outlived her prognosis, but wasn’t expected to survive the week. Then came Alex’s accident. And now Grace—
A bell dinged softly, and the elevator opened.
A young woman wearing a white coat over street clothes leaned against the rear wall in a posture of absolute exhaustion. Intern, Alex guessed. She’d met enough of them during the past month. The woman glanced up as Alex entered the car, then looked down. Then she looked up again. Alex had endured this double take so many times since the shooting that she no longer got angry. Just depressed.
“What floor?” asked the young woman, raising her hand to the panel and trying hard not to stare.
“Neuro ICU,” said Alex, stabbing the 4 with her finger.
“I’m going down to the basement,” said the intern, who looked maybe twenty-six—four years younger than Alex. “But it’ll take you right up after that.”
Alex nodded, then stood erect and watched the glowing numbers change above her head. After her mother’s diagnosis, she’d begun commuting by plane from Washington, D.C.—where she was based then—to Mississippi to relieve Grace, who was struggling to teach full-time and also to care for their mother at night. Unlike J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the modern Bureau tried to be understanding about family problems, but in Alex’s case the deputy director had made his position clear: time off to attend a funeral was one thing, regularly commuting a thousand miles to be present for chemotherapy was another. But Alex had not listened. She’d bucked the system and learned to live without sleep. She told herself she could hack the pressure, and she did—right up until the moment she cracked. The problem was, she hadn’t realized she’d cracked until she caught part of a shotgun blast in her right shoulder and face. Her vest had protected the shoulder, but her face was still an open question.
For a hostage negotiator, Alex had committed the ultimate sin, and she’d come close to paying the ultimate price. Because the shooter had fired through a plate-glass partition, what would have been a miraculous escape (being grazed by a couple of pellets that could have blown her brains out but hadn’t) became a life-altering trauma. A blizzard of glass tore through her cheek, sinuses, and jaw, lacerating her skin and ripping away tissue and bone. The plastic surgeons had promised great things, but so far the results were less than stellar. They’d told her that in time the angry pink worms would whiten (they could do little to repair the “punctate” depressions in her cheek), and that laymen wouldn’t even notice the damage. Alex wasn’t convinced. But in the grand scheme of things, what did vanity matter? Five seconds after she was shot, someone else had paid the ultimate price for her mistake.
During the hellish days that followed the shooting, Grace had flown up to D.C. three times to be with Alex, despite being exhausted from taking care of their mother. Grace was the family martyr, a genuine candidate for sainthood. The irony was staggering: tonight it was Grace lying in an intensive care unit, fighting for her life.
And why? Certainly not karma. She’d been walking up the steps of a stadium to watch her ten-year-old son play baseball when she collapsed. Seconds after she hit the stairs, she voided her bladder and bowels. A CAT scan taken forty minutes later showed a blood clot near Grace’s brain stem, the kind of clot that too often killed people. Alex had been swimming laps in Charlotte when she got word (having been transferred there as punishment duty after the shooting). Her mother was too upset to be coherent on the phone, but she’d communicated enough details to send Alex racing to the airport.
When the first leg of her flight touched down in Atlanta, Alex had used her Treo to call Grace’s husband, whom she’d been unable to reach before boarding the plane. Bill Fennell explained that while the neurological damage had initially not looked too bad—some right-side paralysis, weakness, mild dysphasia—the stroke seemed to be worsening, which the doctors said was not uncommon. A neurologist had put Grace on TPA, a drug that could dissolve clots but also carried serious risks of its own. Bill Fennell was a commanding man, but his voice quavered as he related this, and he begged Alex to hurry.
When her plane landed in Jackson, Alex called Bill again. This time he sobbed as he related the events of the past hour. Though still breathing on her own, Grace had lapsed into a coma and might die before Alex could cover the fifteen miles from the airport. A panic unlike any she had known since childhood filled her chest. Though the plane had only begun its taxi to the terminal, Alex snatched her carry-on from beneath the seat and marched to the front of the 727. When a flight attendant challenged her, she flashed her FBI creds and quietly told the man to get her to the terminal ASAP. When she cleared the gate, she sprinted down the concourse and through baggage claim, then jumped the cab queue, flashed her creds again, and told the driver she’d give him $100 to drive a hundred miles an hour to the University Medical Center.
Now here she was, stepping out of the elevator on the fourth floor, sucking in astringent smells that hurled her four weeks back in time, when hot blood had poured from her face as though from a spigot. At the end of the corridor waited a huge wooden door marked NEUROLOGY ICU. She went through it like a first-time parachutist leaping from a plane, steeling herself for free fall, terrified of the words she was almost certain to hear: I’m sorry, Alex, but you’re too late.
The ICU held a dozen glass-walled cubicles built in a U-shape around the nurses’ station. Several cubicles were curtained off, but through the transparent wall of the fourth from the left, Alex saw Bill Fennell talking to a woman in a white coat. At six feet four, Bill towered over her, but his handsome face was furrowed with anxiety, and the woman seemed to be comforting him. Sensing Alex’s presence, he looked up and froze in midsentence. Alex moved toward the cubicle. Bill rushed to the door and hugged her to his chest. She’d always felt awkward embracing her brother-in-law, but tonight there was no way to avoid it. And no reason, really. Tonight they both needed some kind of contact, an affirmation of family unity.
“You must have taken a helicopter,” he said in his resonant bass voice. “I can’t believe you made it that fast.”
“Is she alive?”
“She’s still with us,” Bill said in a strangely formal tone. “She’s actually regained consciousness a couple of times. She’s been asking for you.”
Alex’s heart lifted, but with hope came fresh tears.
The woman in the white coat walked out of the cubicle. She looked about fifty, and her face was kind but grave.
“This is Grace’s neurologist,” Bill said.
“I’m Meredith Andrews,” said the woman. “Are you the one Grace calls KK?”
Alex couldn’t stop her tears. KK was a nickname derived from her middle name, which was a family appellation: Karoli. “Yes. But please call me Alex. Alex Morse.”
“Special Agent Morse,” Bill said in an absurd interjection.
“Has Grace asked for me?” Alex asked, wiping her cheeks.
“You’re all she can talk about.”
“Is she conscious?”
“Not at this moment. We’re doing everything we can, but you should prepare yourself for”—Dr. Andrews gave Alex a lightning-fast appraisal—“you should prepare for the worst. Grace had a serious thrombosis when she was brought in, but she was breathing on her own, and I was encouraged. But the stroke extended steadily, and I decided to start thrombolytic therapy. To try to dissolve the clot. This can sometimes produce miracles, but it can also cause hemorrhages elsewhere in the brain or body. I have a feeling that may be happening now. I don’t want to risk moving Grace for an MRI. She’s still breathing on her own, and that’s the best hope we have. If she stops breathing, we’re ready to intubate immediately. I probably should have done it already”—Dr. Andrews glanced at Bill—“but I knew she was desperate to talk to you, and once she’s intubated, she won’t be able to communicate with anyone. She’s already lost her ability to write words.”
Alex winced.
“Don’t be shocked if she manages to speak to you. Her speech center has been affected, and she has significant impairment.”
“I understand,” Alex said impatiently. “We had an uncle who had a stroke. Can I just be with her? I don’t care what her condition is. I have to be with her.”
Dr. Andrews smiled and led Alex into the room.
As she reached the door, Alex turned back to Bill. “Where’s Jamie?”
“With my sister in Ridgeland.”
Ridgeland was a white-flight suburb ten miles away. “Did he see Grace fall?”
Bill shook his head somberly. “No, he was down on the field. He just knows his mother’s sick, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think he should be here?”
Alex had tried to keep all judgment out of her voice, but Bill’s face darkened. He seemed about to snap at her, but then he drew a deep breath and said, “No, I don’t.”
When Alex kept staring at him, he lowered his voice and added, “I don’t want Jamie to watch his mother die.”
“Of course not. But he should have a chance to say good-bye.”
“He’ll get that,” Bill said. “At the funeral.”
Alex closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. “Bill, you can’t—”
“We don’t have time for this.” He nodded into the room where Dr. Andrews stood waiting.
Alex walked slowly to the edge of Grace’s bed. The pale face above the hospital blanket did not look familiar. And yet it did. It looked like her mother’s face. Grace Morse Fennell was thirty-five years old, but tonight she looked seventy. It’s her skin, Alex realized. It’s like wax. Drooping wax. She had the sense that the muscles that controlled her sister’s face had gone slack and would never contract again. Grace’s eyes were closed, and to Alex’s surprise, she felt this was a mercy. It gave her time to adjust to the new reality, however fleeting that reality might be.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Andrews asked from behind her.
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave you with her, then.”
Alex glanced at the bank of CRTs monitoring Grace’s life functions. Heartbeat, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, God knew what else. A single IV line disappeared beneath a bandage on her forearm; Alex’s wrist ached at the sight. She wasn’t sure what to do, and maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe the important thing was just to be here.
“You know what this tragedy has taught me?” asked the familiar bass voice.
Alex jumped but tried to hide her discomfiture. She hadn’t realized Bill was still in the room, and she hated showing any sign of weakness. “What?” she said, though she didn’t really care about the answer.
“Money isn’t really worth anything. All the money in the world won’t make that blood clot go away.”
Alex nodded distantly.
“So, what the hell have I been working for?” Bill asked. “Why haven’t I just kicked back and spent every second I could with Grace?”
Grace probably asked the same question a thousand times, Alex thought. But it was too late for regrets. A lot of people thought Bill was a cold fish. Alex had always thought he tended to be maudlin.
“Could I be alone with her for a while?” Alex asked, not taking her eyes from Grace’s face.
She felt a strong hand close on her shoulder—the wounded shoulder—and then Bill said, “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
After he’d gone, Alex took Grace’s clammy hand in hers and bent to kiss her forehead. She had never seen her sister so helpless. In fact, she had never seen Grace close to helpless. Grace was a dynamo. Crises that brought others’ lives to a standstill hardly caused her to break stride. But this was different. This was the end—Alex could tell. She knew it the way she had known when James Broadbent went down after she was shot. James had watched Alex charge into the bank just seconds ahead of the go-order for the Hostage Rescue Team, and he had gone in right behind her. He saw her take the shotgun blast, but instead of instantly returning fire at the shooter, he’d glanced down to see how badly Alex was hurt. For that concern he’d caught the second blast square in the chest. He wasn’t wearing a vest (he’d taken it off upon learning that the HRT was going in), and the shotgun chopped his heart and lungs into something you saw behind a butcher’s counter. Why did he look down? Alex wondered for the millionth time. Why did he follow me in at all? But she knew the answer. Broadbent had followed her because he loved her—from a distance, true, but the emotion was no less real for that. And that love had killed him. Alex saw tears falling on Grace’s cheeks—her own tears, numberless these past months. She wiped her eyes, then took out her cell phone and called Bill Fennell, who was standing less than thirty feet away.
“What is it?” he asked frantically. “What’s wrong?”
“Jamie should be here.”
“Alex, I told you—”
“You get him, goddamn it. This is his mother lying here.”
There was a long silence. Then Bill said, “I’ll call my sister.”
On impulse, Alex turned and saw him standing near the nurses’ station. He’d been talking to Dr. Andrews. She saw him disengage from the neurologist and lift his cell phone to his cheek. Alex leaned down to Grace’s ear and tried to think of something that would reach the bottom of the dark well where her sister now dwelled.
“Sue-Sue?” she whispered, simultaneously squeezing the cold hand. Sue-Sue was another nickname based on a middle name—a family tradition. “Sue-Sue, it’s KK.”
Grace’s eyes remained shut.
“It’s me, Sue-Sue. It’s KK. I’m back from Sally’s. Wake up, before Mama gets up. I want to go to the carnival.”
Seconds dilated into some unknown measure of time. Memories swirled through Alex’s mind, and her heart began to ache. Grace’s eyes stayed shut.
“Come on, Sue-Sue. I know you’re playing possum. Quit faking.”
Alex felt a twitch in her hand. Adrenaline surged through her, but when she saw the frozen eyelids, she decided that the twitch must have come from her own hand.
“Kuh … kuh,” someone coughed.
Alex turned, thinking it was Bill or Dr. Andrews, but then Grace clenched her hand and let out a sharp cry. When Alex whipped her head around, she saw Grace’s green eyes wide-open. Then Grace blinked. Alex’s heart soared. She leaned down over her sister, because though Grace was only thirty-five, her eyes were almost useless without glasses or contacts.
“KK?” Grace moaned. “Iz zah wu?”
“It’s me, Gracie,” Alex said, rubbing a strand of hair out of her sister’s cloudy eyes.
“Oh, Goth,” Grace said in a guttural voice, and then she began to sob. “Thang Godth.”
Alex had to clench her jaw muscles to keep from sobbing. The right half of Grace’s face was paralyzed, and drool ran down her chin whenever she struggled to speak. She sounded exactly like Uncle T.J., who’d died after a series of strokes left him without a shred of his old identity.
“Wu … wu have tuh thave Jamie,” Grace gargled.
“What? I missed that.”
“Havuh thave Jamie!” Grace repeated, struggling to rise in the bed. She seemed to be trying to look behind Alex.
“Jamie’s fine,” Alex said in a comforting voice. “He’s on his way here.”
Grace shook her head violently. “Wissen! Havuh wissen!”
“I’m listening, Sue-Sue, I promise.”
Grace stared into Alex’s eyes with all the urgency in her soul. “You—have—tuh—thave—Jamie … Gay-Gay. You thuh … onwe … one ooh can.”
“Save Jamie from what?”
“Biw.”
“Bill?” Alex asked, sure she must be wrong in her translation.
With painful effort, Grace nodded.
Alex blinked in astonishment. “What are you talking about? Is Bill hurting Jamie in some way?”
A weak nod. “Ee wiw … thoon ath I’m gone.”
Alex struggled to understand the tortured words. “Hurt Jamie how? Are you talking about some sort of abuse?”
Grace shook her head. “Biw—wiw—kiw—Jamie’s—thole.”
Alex squinted as though trying to decipher some coded text. “Bill … will … kill … Jamie’s … soul?”
Grace’s head sagged in exhaustion.
“Gracie … Bill isn’t my favorite person. You’ve always known that. But he’s been a good father, hasn’t he? He seems like a basically decent man.”
Grace gripped Alex’s hand and shook her head. Then she hissed, “Eeth a monther!”
Alex felt a chill. “He’s a monster? Is that what you said?”
A tear of relief slid down Grace’s paralyzed cheek.
Alex looked at the anguished eyes, then turned and glanced over her shoulder. Bill Fennell was still speaking to Dr. Andrews, but his eyes were on Alex.
“Ith Biw coming?” Grace asked in a terrified voice, trying in vain to twist in the bed.
“No, no. He’s talking to the doctor.”
“Dogtor—duthend—know.”
“Doesn’t know what?”
“Whuh Biw did.”
“What do you mean? What did Bill do?”
Grace suddenly raised her hand and gripped Alex’s blouse, then pulled her head down to her lips. “Ee kiwd me!”
Alex felt as though ice water had been shunted into her veins. She drew back and looked into Grace’s bloodshot eyes. “He killed you? Is that what you said?”
Grace nodded once, her eyes filled with conviction.
“Grace, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
Even with a partially paralyzed face, Grace managed a smile that said, Oh, yes, I do.
“You can’t mean that. Not literally.”
Grace closed her eyes as though gathering herself for one last effort. “You … onwe one … ooh can thop im. Too … wate … fuh me. I urd … dogtuh … out thide. Thave Jamie for me … Gay-Gay. Pleath.”
Alex looked back through the glass wall. Bill was still watching her, and his conversation looked as if it was winding down. Alex had always known Grace’s marriage wasn’t perfect, but what marriage was? Not that Alex was any authority. She had somehow reached the age of thirty without tying the knot. After years of badge groupies and badge bolters, she’d finally accepted a proposal, then terminated the engagement three months later, after discovering that her fiancé was cheating with her best friend. In matters amorous, she was a ridiculous cliché.
“Sue-Sue,” she whispered, “why would Bill want to hurt you?”
“Thum-one else,” Grace said. “Wuh-man.”
“Another woman? Do you know that for a fact?”
Another half-paralyzed smile. “Uh—wife—knowth.”
Alex believed her. During her engagement to Peter Hodges, a feeling very like a sixth sense had told her something was amiss in their relationship. Long before there was any tangible clue, she’d simply known there was betrayal. If she had possessed the same instinct about conventional crimes, she’d already be an SAC instead of a hostage negotiator. Correction, she thought, I’m a common field agent now.
“If Bill wants to be with another woman,” she said, “why doesn’t he just divorce you?”
“Muhn-ey … dum-me. Would coth Biw miw-yens … tuh do that. Five—miwyen … may-be.”
Alex drew back in disbelief. She’d known that Bill had been doing well for some years now, but she’d had no idea he was that wealthy. Why in God’s name was Grace still teaching elementary school? Because she loves it, she answered herself. Because she can’t not work.
Grace had closed her eyes, seemingly drained by her efforts. “Tew … Mom … I tho-we,” she said. “Tew huh … I be waiting fuh hurh … in heaven.” The smile animated the living half of her face again. “If—I—make it.”
“You made it, honey,” Alex said, balling her free hand into a fist and holding it against her mouth.
“Well, look at this, Dr. Andrews!” boomed Bill Fennell. “She looks like she’s ready to get up and out of that bed.”
Grace’s eyes snapped open, and she shrank away from her husband, obviously trying to use Alex as a shield. The terror in her eyes hurt Alex’s heart, and it also thrust her into full-defense mode. She stood up and blocked Bill from coming to the bedside.
“I think it’s better if you don’t come in,” she said, looking hard into her brother-in-law’s eyes.
Bill’s mouth dropped open. He looked past her to Grace, who was literally cowering in the bed. “What are you talking about?” he asked angrily. “What the hell’s going on here? Have you said something about me to Grace?”
Alex glanced at Dr. Andrews, who looked confused. “No. Quite the reverse, I’m afraid.”
Bill shook his head in apparent puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”
Alex probed his brown eyes, searching for some sign of guilt. Grace’s fears and accusations were probably the product of a dying woman’s hallucinations, but there was no doubt about the reality of her terror. “You’re upsetting her, Bill. You can see that. You should go downstairs and wait for Jamie.”
“There’s no way I’m going to leave my wife’s bedside. Not when she might—”
“What?” Alex asked, a note of challenge in her voice.
Bill lowered his voice. “When she might …”
Alex looked at Dr. Andrews.
The neurologist stepped toward Bill and said, “Perhaps we should give Grace and her sister some more time alone.”
“Don’t try to massage me like that,” Bill said irritably. “I’m Grace’s husband. I’m her husband, and I’ll decide who—”
“She’s my blood,” Alex said with bone-deep conviction. “Your presence here is upsetting Grace, and that’s all that matters. We need to keep her as calm as possible. Isn’t that right, Dr. Andrews?”
“Absolutely.” Meredith Andrews walked around Alex and looked down at her patient. “Grace, do you understand me?”
“Yeth.”
“Do you want your husband in this room?”
Grace slowly shook her head. “I wan … my bay … be. Wan Jamie.”
Dr. Andrews looked up at Bill Fennell, who towered over her. “That’s good enough for me. I want you to leave the unit, Mr. Fennell.”
Bill stepped close to the neurologist, his eyes sheened with anger. “I don’t know who you think you are, or who you think you’re talking to, but I give a lot of money to this university. A lot of money. And I—”
“Don’t make me call security,” Dr. Andrews said quietly, lifting the phone beside Grace’s bed.
Bill’s face went white. Alex almost felt sorry for him. The power had clearly passed to Dr. Andrews, but Bill seemed unable to make the decision to leave. He looked, Alex thought, like an actor on a DVD movie after you hit pause. Or that’s what she was thinking when the alarm began to sing.
“She’s coding!” Dr. Andrews shouted through the door, but the shout was unnecessary. Nurses were already running from the station to the cubicle. Alex jumped out of their way, and an instant later Bill did the same.
“Cardiac arrest,” Dr. Andrews said, yanking open a drawer.
Because this was an ICU, there was no crash cart; everything was already here. The quiet cubicle suddenly became a whirlwind of motion, all directed toward a single purpose—to sustain the life fast ebbing from the body on the bed.
“You need to leave,” said a tall male nurse standing behind Dr. Andrews. “Both of you.”
Dr. Andrews glanced up long enough to give Alex a moment of eye contact, then returned to work. Alex backed slowly out of the ICU, watching the final act of her sister’s life unfold without any hope of playing a part herself. Ridiculous regrets about choosing law school over medical school pierced her heart. But what if she had become a doctor? She would be practicing two thousand miles away from Mississippi, and the result would be the same. Grace’s fate was in God’s hands now, and Alex knew how indifferent those hands could be.
She turned away from the cubicle—away from Bill Fennell—and looked at the nurses’ station, where banks of monitors chirped and blinked ceaselessly. How can they focus on all those screens at once? she wondered, recalling how difficult it was to watch multiple surveillance feeds when the Bureau had a TV rig set up on a static post. As she thought about that, she heard Dr. Andrews say, “I’m calling it, guys. Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m.”
Shock is a funny thing, Alex thought. Like the day she was shot. Two searing chunks of buckshot and a half pound of glass had blasted through the right side of her face, yet she’d felt nothing—just a wave of heat, as if someone had opened an oven beside her.
Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m. …
Something started to let go in Alex’s chest, but before the release, she heard a little boy say, “Hey! Is my mom in here?”
She turned toward the big wooden door that had brought her to this particular chamber of hell and saw before it a boy about four and a half feet tall. His face was red, as though he had run all the way from wherever he’d started. He was trying to look brave, but Alex saw fear in his wide green eyes.
“Aunt Alex?” said Jamie, finally picking her out of the uniformed crowd.
Bill’s big voice sounded from behind Alex. “Hello, Son. Where’s Aunt Jean?”
“She’s too slow,” Jamie said angrily.
“Come over here, boy.”
Alex looked back at her brother-in-law’s stern face, and the thing that had started to let go inside her suddenly ratcheted tight. Without thought she ran to Jamie, swept him into her arms and then out the door, away from this heartrending nightmare. Away from his dying mother.
Away from Bill Fennell.
Away …
TWO
Five Weeks Later
Dr. Chris Shepard lifted a manila folder from the file caddy on the door of Exam Room 4 and quickly perused it. He didn’t recognize the patient’s name, and that was unusual. Chris had a large practice, but it was a small town, and that was the way he liked it.
This patient’s name was Alexandra Morse, and her file held only a medical history, the long form that all new patients filled out on their first visit. Chris looked down the corridor and saw Holly, his nurse, crossing from her station to the X-ray room. He called out and waved her up the hall. Holly said something through the door to X-ray, then hurried toward him.
“Aren’t you coming in with me?” he asked softly. “It’s a female patient.”
Holly shook her head. “She asked to speak to you alone.”
“New patient?”
“Yes. I meant to say something before now, but we got so busy with Mr. Seward—”
Chris nodded at the door and lowered his voice to a whisper. “What’s her story?”
Holly shrugged. “Beats me. Name’s Alex. Thirty years old and in great shape, except for the scars on her face.”
“Scars?”
“Right side. Cheek, ear, and orbit. Head through a window is my guess.”
“There’s nothing about a car accident in her history.”
“Couple of months ago, by the color of the scars.”
Chris moved away from the door, and Holly followed. “She didn’t give you any complaint?”
The nurse shook her head. “No. And you know I asked.”
“Oh, boy.”
Holly nodded knowingly. A woman coming in alone and refusing to specify her complaint usually meant the problem was sexual—most often fear of a sexually transmitted disease. Natchez, Mississippi, was a small town, and its nurses gossiped as much as its other citizens. Truth be told, Chris thought, most doctors here are worse gossips than their nurses.
“Her chart says Charlotte, North Carolina,” he noted. “Did Ms. Morse tell you what she’s doing in Natchez?”
“She told me exactly nothing,” Holly said with a bit of pique. “Do you want me to shoot that flat-and-erect series on Mr. Seward before he voids on the table?”
“Sorry. Go to it.”
Holly winked and whispered, “Have fun with Ms. Scarface.”
Chris shook his head, then summoned a serious expression and walked into the examining room.
A woman wearing a navy skirt and a cream-colored top stood beside the examining table. Her face almost caused him to stare, but he’d seen a lot of trauma during his medical training. This woman’s scars weren’t actually too bad. It was her youth and attractiveness that made them stand out so vividly. Almost fiercely, Chris thought. You figured a woman who looked and dressed this way would have had plastic surgery to take care of an injury like that. Not that she was a knockout or anything; she wasn’t. It was just—
“Hello, Dr. Shepard,” the woman said in a direct tone.
“Ms. Morse?” he said, remembering that the history said she was single.
She gave him a smile of acknowledgment but said nothing else.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked.
The woman remained silent, but he could feel her eyes probing him as deeply as a verbal question. What’s going on here? Chris wondered. Is it my birthday or something? Did the staff plan some kind of trick? Or does she want drugs? He’d had that happen before: some female patients offered sex for drugs, usually narcotics. Chris studied the woman’s face, trying to divine her real purpose. She had dark hair, green eyes, and an oval face not much different from those of the dozens of women he saw each day. A little better bone structure, maybe, especially the cheekbones. But the real difference was the scars—and a shock of gray hair above them that didn’t look added by a colorist. Except for those things, Alex Morse might be any woman at the local health club. And yet … despite her usualness, if that was a word, there was something about her that Chris couldn’t quite nail down, something that set her apart from other women. Something in the way she stood, maybe.
Laying the chart on the counter behind him, he said, “Maybe you should just tell me what the problem is. I promise, however frightening it might seem now, I’ve seen or heard it many times in this office, and together we can do something about it. People usually feel better once they verbalize these things.”
“You’ve never heard what I’m about to tell you,” Alex Morse said with utter certainty. “I promise you that, Doctor.”
The conviction in her voice unsettled him, but he didn’t have time for games. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Ms. Morse, if I’m going to help you at all, I have to know the nature of your problem.”
“It’s not my problem,” the woman said finally. “It’s yours.”
As Chris frowned in confusion, the woman reached into a small handbag on the chair behind her and brought out a wallet. This she flipped open and held up for him to examine. He saw an ID card of some sort, one with a blue-and-white seal. He looked closer. Bold letters on the right side of the card read FBI. His stomach fluttered. To the left of the big acronym, smaller letters read Special Agent Alexandra Morse. Beside this was a photo of the woman standing before him. Special Agent Morse was smiling in the photo, but she wasn’t smiling now.
“I need to tell you some things in confidence,” she said. “It won’t take much of your time. I pretended to be a patient because I don’t want anyone in your life to know you’ve spoken to an FBI agent. Before I leave, I need you to write me a prescription for Levaquin and tell your nurse that I had a urinary-tract infection. Tell her that the symptoms were so obvious that you didn’t need to do a urinalysis. Will you do that?”
Chris was too surprised to make a conscious decision. “Sure,” he said. “But what’s going on? Are you investigating something? Are you investigating me?”
“Not you.”
“Someone I know?”
Agent Morse’s eyes didn’t waver. “Yes.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that yet. I may tell you at the end of this conversation. Right now I’m going to tell you a story. A quick story. Will you sit down, Doctor?”
Chris sat on the short stool he used in the examining room. “Are you really from North Carolina? Or is that just a cover?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You talk like a Yankee, but I hear Mississippi underneath.”
Agent Morse smiled, or gave him what passed for a smile with her—a slight widening of her taut lips. “You have good ears. I grew up in Jackson. But I’m based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now.”
He was glad to have his intuition confirmed. “Please go on with your story.”
She sat on the chair where her handbag had been, crossed her legs, and regarded him coolly. “Five weeks ago, my sister died of a brain hemorrhage. This happened at University Hospital in Jackson.”
“I’m sorry.”
Agent Morse nodded as though she were past it, but Chris saw held-in emotion behind her eyes. “Her death was sudden and unexpected, but before she died, she told me something that sounded crazy to me.”
“What?”
“She told me she’d been murdered.”
He wasn’t sure he understood. “You mean she told you someone had murdered her?”
“Exactly. Her husband, to be specific.”
Chris thought about this for a while. “What did the autopsy show?”
“A fatal blood clot on the left side of the brain, near the brain stem.”
“Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?”
“No.”
“Was your sister taking birth-control pills?”
“Yes.”
“That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?”
“No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that.”
“Did your sister’s husband resist the autopsy?”
Agent Morse actually beamed with approval. “No. He didn’t.”
“But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?”
“Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then—” Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars. Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass. But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?
“Agent Morse?” he prompted.
“I didn’t leave town right away,” she said, focusing on him again. “I stayed for the funeral. And over the course of those three days, I thought a lot about what Grace had told me. That’s my sister’s name, Grace. She told me she thought her husband was having an affair. He’s a wealthy man—far wealthier than I realized—and Grace believed he was involved with another woman. She believed he’d murdered her rather than pay what it would have cost him to divorce her. And to get custody of their son, of course.”
Chris considered this. “I’m sure women have been killed for that reason before. Men, too, I imagine.”
“Absolutely. Even completely normal people admit to having homicidal impulses when going through a divorce. Anyway … after Grace’s funeral, I told her husband I was going back to Charlotte.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Was he having an affair?”
“He was. And Grace’s death didn’t slow him down in the least. Quite the reverse, in fact.”
“Go on.”
“Let’s call Grace’s husband Bill. After I discovered the affair, I didn’t confront Bill. I engaged the resources of the Bureau to investigate him. His personal life, his business, everything. I now know almost everything there is to know about Bill—everything but the one thing I need to prove. I know far more than my sister knew, and I know a lot more than his mistress knows now. For example, when I was going through Bill’s business records, I found that he had some rather complex connections to a local lawyer.”
“A Natchez lawyer?” Chris asked, trying to anticipate the connection to himself. Unlike most local physicians, he had several friends in Natchez who were attorneys.
“No, this lawyer practices in Jackson.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Bill is a real estate developer. He’s building the new ice hockey stadium up there. Naturally, most of the lawyers he deals with specialize in real estate transactions. But this lawyer was different.”
“How?”
“Family law is his specialty.”
“Divorce?” said Chris.
“Exactly. Though he also does some estate planning. Trusts, wills, et cetera.”
“Had ‘Bill’ consulted this lawyer about divorcing your sister?”
Agent Morse shifted on her chair. Chris had the impression that she wanted to stand and pace, but there wasn’t enough room here to pace—he knew from experience. He also sensed that she was trying to conceal nervousness.
“I can’t prove that,” she said. “Not yet. But I’m positive that he did. Still, there’s no evidence of any relationship whatever between Bill and this divorce attorney prior to one week after my sister’s death. That’s when they went into business together.”
Chris wanted to ask several questions, but he suddenly remembered that he had patients waiting. “This story is very intriguing, Agent Morse, but I can’t see how it has anything to do with me.”
“You will.”
“You’d better make it fast, or we’ll have to postpone this. I have patients waiting.”
She gave him a look that seemed to say, Don’t assume you’re in control here. “After I found the connection between Bill and this divorce lawyer,” she continued, “I broadened the investigation. What I found was a web of business relationships that boggled my mind. I know something about dummy corporations, Dr. Shepard. I started my FBI career in South Florida, and I worked a lot of money-laundering cases there.”
Chris silently thanked his stars for being too afraid to say yes to the various friends who had offered to “put him into some investments” in the Cayman Islands.
“This divorce attorney has interests in just about every business you can think of,” Morse went on. “Mostly partnerships with various wealthy individuals in Mississippi.”
This didn’t surprise Chris. “Is it strange that a rich lawyer—I’m assuming he’s rich—would be into a lot of different businesses?”
“Not in and of itself. But all this activity started about five years ago. And after looking closely at these deals, I couldn’t see any reason that the lawyer was put into them. They’re brother-in-law deals, you might say. Only the lawyer isn’t related to the parties in question. Not by blood or marriage. In some cases he acted as counsel, but in most, not.”
Chris nodded and stole another glance at his watch. “I’m following you. But what does all this add up to?”
Agent Morse looked intently at him, so intently that her gaze made him uncomfortable. “Nine of the individuals that this divorce lawyer is in business with share a common characteristic.”
“What? Are they all patients of mine?”
Morse shook her head. “Each of them had a spouse who died unexpectedly in the past five years. In several cases, a relatively young spouse.”
As Chris digested this, he felt a strange thrill, an alloy of excitement and dread. He said nothing though, but rather tried to get his mind fully around what she was saying.
“Also,” Agent Morse added, “they actually all died within two and a half years of each other.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Let me finish. All these spouses were white, previously healthy, and all were married to wealthy people. I can show you actuarial tables, if you like. It’s way off the charts.”
Chris was intrigued by Morse’s single-minded intensity. “So, what you’re saying … you think this divorce lawyer is helping potential clients to murder their spouses rather than pay them a financial settlement?”
The FBI agent brought her hands together and nodded. “Or to gain sole custody of their children. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Okay. But why are you saying it to me?”
For the first time, Agent Morse looked uncomfortable. “Because,” she said deliberately, “one week ago, your wife drove to Jackson and spent two hours inside that lawyer’s office.”
Chris’s mouth fell open. A wave of numbness moved slowly through his body, as though he’d been shot with a massive dose of lidocaine.
Agent Morse’s eyes had become slits. “You had no idea, did you?”
He was too stunned to respond.
“Have you been having problems in your marriage, Doctor?”
“No,” he said finally, grateful to be certain of something at last. “Not that it’s any of your business. But look … if my wife went to see this lawyer, she must have had some reason other than divorce. We’re not having any kind of marital trouble.”
Morse leaned back in her chair. “You don’t think Thora could be having an affair?”
His face went red at the use of his wife’s first name. “Are you about to tell me that she is?”
“What if I did?”
Chris stood suddenly and flexed his shoulders. “I’d say you’re crazy. Nuts. And I’d throw you out of here. In fact, I want to know where you get off coming in here like this and saying these things.”
“Calm down, Dr. Shepard. You may not believe it at this moment, but I’m here to help you. I realize we’re talking about personal matters. Intimate matters, even. But you’re forced to do the same thing in your job, aren’t you? When human life is at stake, privacy goes by the board.”
She was right, of course. Many of the questions on his medical-history form were intrusive. How many sexual partners have you had in the last five years? Are you satisfied with your sexual life? Chris looked away from her and tried to pace the room, a circuit of exactly two and a half steps. “What are you telling me, Agent Morse? No more games. Spell it out.”
“Your life may be in danger.”
Chris stopped. “From my wife? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Jesus Christ! You’re out of your mind. I’m going to call Thora right now and get to the bottom of this.” He reached for the phone on the wall.
Agent Morse got to her feet. “Please don’t do that, Dr. Shepard.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you may be the only person in a position to stop whoever is behind these murders.”
Chris let his hand fall. “How’s that?”
She took a deep breath, then spoke in a voice of eminent reasonableness. “If you are a target—that is, if you’ve become one in the last week—your wife and this attorney have no idea that you’re aware of their activities.”
“So?”
“That puts you in a unique position to help us trap them.”
Awareness dawned quickly. “You want me to try to trap my wife? To get her jailed for attempted murder?”
Morse turned up her palms. “Would you rather pretend none of this happened and die at thirty-six?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to restrain his temper. “You’re missing the forest for the trees here. Your whole thesis is illogical.”
“Why?”
“Those men you think murdered their wives … they did it to keep from splitting their assets and paying out a ton of alimony, right?”
“In most cases, yes. But not all the victims were women.”
Chris momentarily lost his train of thought.
“In at least one case,” said Morse, “and probably two, the murder was about custody of the children, not money.”
“Again, you’re miles off base. Thora and I have no children.”
“Your wife has a child. A nine-year-old son.”
He smiled. “Sure, but she had Ben even before she married Red Simmons. Thora would automatically get custody.”
“You’ve legally adopted Ben. But that brings up another important point, Dr. Shepard.”
“What?”
“How your wife got her money.”
Chris sat back down and looked at Agent Morse. How much did she know about his wife? Did she know that Thora was the daughter of a renowned Vanderbilt surgeon who’d left his family when his daughter was eight years old? Did she know that Thora’s mother was an alcoholic? That Thora had fought like a wildcat just to get through adolescence, and that making it through nursing school was a pretty amazing achievement given her background?
Probably not.
Morse probably knew only the local legend: how Thora Rayner had been working in St. Catherine’s Hospital when Red Simmons, a local oilman nineteen years her senior, had been carried into the ER with a myocardial infarction; how she’d become close to Red during his hospital stay, then married him six months later. Chris knew this story well because he’d treated Red Simmons during the last three years of his life. Chris had known Thora as a nurse, of course, but he came to know her much better during Red’s years in heart failure. And what he learned was that Red truly loved “his little Viking”—a reference to Thora’s Danish ancestry—and that Thora had been a brave and loyal wife, a woman worthy of deep respect. When Red died two and a half years ago, he left Thora an estate valued at $6.5 million. That was big money in Natchez, but it meant little to Chris. He had some money of his own, and he was young enough to earn plenty more.
“Agent Morse,” he said in a neutral tone, “I’m not going to discuss my wife with you. But I will tell you this. Thora doesn’t stand to gain or lose anything if we get divorced.”
“Why not? She’s very wealthy.”
“She has money, yes. But so do I. I started saving the day I began moonlighting in emergency rooms, and I’ve made some lucky investments. But the real issue here is legal. We both signed a prenuptial agreement before we married. If we were to get divorced, each person would leave the marriage with exactly what he or she brought into it.”
Agent Morse studied Chris in silence. “I didn’t know that.”
He smiled. “Sorry to punch a hole in your theory.”
Morse seemed suddenly lost in thought, and Chris sensed that for her, in that moment, he was not even there. Her face was more angular than he’d thought at first; it had its own odd shadows.
“Tell me this,” she said suddenly. “What happens if either of you dies?”
As Chris thought about this, he felt a hollowness high in his stomach. “Well … I believe our wills kick in at that point. And those override the prenup. At least I think they do.”
“What does your will say? Who gets those lucky investments you made?”
Chris looked at the floor, his face growing hot. “My parents get a nice chunk.”
“That’s good. And the rest?”
He looked up at her. “Thora gets it all.”
Morse’s eyes flashed with triumph.
“But …,” Chris protested.
“I’m listening.”
“Thora is worth millions of dollars. What would be the point? Kill me to get an extra two million?”
Morse rubbed her chin for a few moments, then looked up at the narrow window set in the top of the wall. “People have been killed for less, Dr. Shepard. A lot less.”
“By millionaires?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. And people are murdered every day for reasons other than money. How well do you know your wife? Psychologically, I mean?”
“Pretty damn well.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Chris was starting to dislike Agent Morse intensely. “You think my wife murdered her first husband, don’t you?”
Morse shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have. But Red Simmons had a long history of heart disease.”
“Yes, he did.”
Morse’s inside knowledge of events was pissing him off.
“But no autopsy was done,” she pointed out.
“I’m aware of that. You’re not suggesting that one should be done now, are you?”
Agent Morse dismissed this idea with a flick of her hand. “We wouldn’t find anything. Whoever’s behind these murders is too good for that.”
Chris snorted. “Who’s that good, Agent Morse? A professional assassin? A forensic pathologist?”
“There was a mob enforcer some years ago who prided himself on this kind of work. He was a very reserved man with a massive ego. He had no formal medical training, but he was an enthusiastic amateur. He’s nominally retired now. We’ve had some people following him, just to make sure.”
Chris couldn’t sit any longer. He rose and said, “This is nuts. I mean, what the hell do you expect me to do now?”
“Help us.”
“Us? That’s only about the third time you’ve said us in this whole conversation.”
Agent Morse smiled more fully this time. “I’m the lead agent. We’re spread pretty thin on these kinds of cases since 9/11. Everybody’s working counterterrorism.”
Chris looked deep into her eyes. There was sincerity there, and passion. But he saw something else, too—something not so different from what he read in the eyes of those patients who tried to con him out of drugs every week.
“Murder’s a state crime, isn’t it?” he said slowly. “Not a federal one.”
“Yes. But when you kill someone, you also deprive him of his civil rights.”
Chris knew this was true. Several decades-old race murders in Mississippi had been dragged back into the courtroom by trying previously acquitted Ku Klux Klan killers for violating their victims’ civil rights. But still … something seemed wrong about Alexandra Morse’s story.
“The first victim you told me about—if these are murder victims—was your sister, right? Doesn’t that create some sort of conflict? I’m not supposed to treat family members for anything serious. Should you be investigating your own sister’s death?”
“To be perfectly frank, no. But there’s no one else I trust to do it right.” Agent Morse looked at her watch for the first time. “We don’t have time to get deep into this, Dr. Shepard. I’ll speak to you again soon, but I don’t want you to deviate from your normal routine. Not in any way that your wife or anyone else would notice.”
“Who else would notice?”
“The person planning to kill you.”
Chris went still. “Are you saying someone might be following me?”
“Yes. You and I cannot be seen together in public.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t tell me something like this and just walk out of here. Are you giving me protection? Are there going to be FBI agents covering me when I walk out?”
“It’s not like that. Nobody’s trying to assassinate you with a rifle. If the past is any guide—and it almost always is, since criminals tend to stick to patterns that have been successful in the past—then your death will have to look natural. You should be careful in traffic, and you shouldn’t walk or jog or bicycle anywhere that there’s traffic. No one can protect you from that kind of hit. But most important is the question of food and drink. You shouldn’t eat or drink at home for a while. Not even bottled water. Nothing bought or prepared by your wife.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I realize that might be difficult, but we’ll work it out. To tell you the truth, I think we have some working room, as far as time is concerned. Your wife just consulted this lawyer, and this kind of murder takes meticulous planning.”
Chris heard a note of hysteria in his laughter. “That’s a huge comfort, Agent Morse. Seriously. I feel so much better now.”
“Does your wife have plans to be out of town anytime soon?”
He shook his head.
“Good. That’s a good sign.” Morse picked up her handbag. “You’d better write me that prescription now.”
“What?”
“The Levaquin.”
“Oh, right.” He took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription for a dozen antibiotic pills. “You think of everything, don’t you?”
“No one thinks of everything. And be glad for it. That’s the way we catch most criminals. Stupid mistakes. Even the best of us make them.”
“You haven’t given me a card or anything,” Chris said. “No references I can check. All you did was show me an ID that I wouldn’t know was fake or not. I want a phone number. Something.”
Agent Morse shook her head. “You can’t call anyone at the Bureau, Doctor. You can’t do anything that could possibly tip off your killer. Your phones may be tapped, and that includes your cell phone. That’s the easiest one to monitor.”
Chris stared at her for a long time. He wanted to ask about the scars. “You said everybody makes mistakes, Agent Morse. What’s the worst you ever made?”
The woman’s hand rose slowly to her right cheek, as though of its own volition. “I didn’t look before I leaped,” she said softly. “And somebody died because of it.”
“I’m sorry. Who was it?”
She hitched her handbag over her shoulder. “Not your problem, Doctor. But you do have a problem. I’m sorry to be the one to turn your life upside down. I really am. But if I hadn’t, you might have gone to sleep one night thinking you were happy and never woken up.”
Morse took the prescription from Chris’s hand, then gave him her taut smile. “I’ll contact you again soon. Try not to freak out. And whatever you do, don’t ask your wife if she’s trying to kill you.”
Chris gaped after Morse as she walked down the corridor toward the waiting-room door. Her stride was measured and assured, the walk of an athlete.
“So?” Holly said from behind him, startling him. “What’s her story?”
“Cystitis,” he mumbled. “Honeymoon syndrome.”
“Too much bumping monkey, huh? I didn’t see no wedding ring on her finger.”
Chris shook his head at Holly’s wiseass tone, then walked down the hall to his private office and closed the door.
He had a waiting room filled with patients, but as sick as some of them were, they seemed secondary now. He shoved aside a stack of charts and looked at Thora’s picture on his desk. Thora was the antithesis of Agent Alex Morse. She was blond—naturally blond, unlike 98 percent of the golden-haired women you saw on the street—and of Danish descent, which was unusual in the South. Her eyes were grayish blue—sea blue, if you wanted to get poetic about it, which he had, on occasion. But though she might be mistaken for a Viking princess on the basis of appearance, Thora had no pretensions of superiority. She had spent four years married to Red Simmons, a down-to-earth country boy who’d made good by trusting his instincts and who’d treated people well after he made his pile. Chris believed Red’s instincts about women were as good as his hunches about oil. Yes, Thora had become rich when Red died, but where was the fault in that? When a rich man died, someone always profited. That was the way of the world. And Red Simmons wasn’t the type to demand a prenuptial agreement. He’d had a loving young wife who’d shared his life for better or worse—with quite a bit of worse in that last year—and she deserved everything he had, come hell or high water. That’s the way Red would have put it. And the more Chris reflected on what Agent Morse had said in Exam Room 4, the angrier he got.
He picked up the phone and called his front desk.
“Yes?” drawled Jane Henry, his peppery receptionist. The yes finally terminated after two long syllables—maybe two and a half.
“Jane, I had a fraternity brother in college named Darryl Foster. That’s D-A-R-R-Y-L.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“I think he’s an FBI agent now. I don’t know where. He was originally from Memphis, but the last I heard, he was working in the Chicago field office.”
“And?”
“I need you to find him for me. His phone number, I mean. My old fraternity is trying to add on to the house up at Ole Miss, and they want to hit up everybody for contributions.”
“And just how do you suggest I find this supercop?”
“Get on the Internet, I guess. You spend enough time on there playing poker and shopping eBay. The least you can do is locate one old classmate for me.”
Jane harrumphed loudly. “I’ll give it a try, I guess.”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
She hung up without a word, but Chris knew she would have the number in less than an hour.
Don’t change your routine, Agent Morse had said. Don’t do anything that might tip off your killer …
“My killer,” Chris said aloud. “This has got to be bullshit.”
He picked up his stethoscope and walked to the door, but Jane’s buzz brought him back to his desk. He grabbed his phone. “You found Foster already?”
“Not yet. Your wife’s on the phone.”
Chris felt another wave of numbness. Thora rarely called his office; she knew he was too busy to spend time on the phone. He looked down at her picture, waiting for a spark of instinct about what to do. But what he saw before him wasn’t his wife, but Special Agent Alex Morse, regarding him coolly from behind her scars.
Stupid mistakes, Morse had said. Even the best of us make them.
“Tell Thora I’m with a patient, Jane.”
“What?” asked the receptionist, clearly surprised.
“I’m way behind already. Just do it. I’ll call her back in a little while.”
“Whatever you say. You sign my checks.”
Chris started to hang up, but at the last second he said, “Find Foster’s number for me, okay? Stat.”
The playfulness went out of Jane’s voice; she knew when her boss meant business.
“You got it, Doc.”
THREE
Andrew Rusk was afraid.
He stood at the window of his law office and gazed out over the jigsaw skyline of Jackson, Mississippi. Not an impressive vista as cityscapes went, but Rusk did have the corner office on the sixteenth floor. Looking north, he could see all the way to the forested plains where white flight was expanding once-sleepy counties into bustling enclaves for twenty-first-century yuppies. Farther on, the new Nissan plant was bringing relative wealth to the state’s struggling blue-collar workers. They commuted up to a hundred miles a day, both ways, from the tiny towns surrounding the state capital.
Behind him—out of sight to the west—lived the uneducated blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as “untouchables.” The untouchables killed each other at an alarming rate and preyed upon others with enough regularity to breed deep anxiety in the white citizens of Jackson. But they weren’t the source of his fear. They were invisible from his office, and he worked hard to keep them that way in all areas of his life. To that end, he had built his home in an oak forest north of the city, near Annandale, a golf club that occupied the self-assured niche between the old money of the Jackson Country Club and the young optimists at Reunion.
Every afternoon at four thirty, Rusk took the elevator down to the garage, climbed into his black Porsche Cayenne Turbo, and roared northward to his stone-and-glass sanctuary among the oak and pine trees. His second wife was invariably lying by their infinity pool when he arrived. Lisa was still young enough for a string bikini, but she rarely wore swimwear in the summer. After a poolside kiss—or more often, lately, a session of listening to her bitch about nothing—he went inside for a stiff drink. His black cook always had supper waiting on the table, and Andrew looked forward to it every day.
But now the taste of fear overrode that of food. Rusk had not felt real fear for twenty-five years, but he’d never forgotten it. Fear tasted like junior high school: like being backed into a corner by a tenth grader who wanted to beat your face into red pulp, your friends watching but too petrified to help, your bladder threatening to send an ocean of piss down your leg. Rusk lifted a tumbler of bourbon to his lips and took a long pull. Whiskey at work was an indulgence, one he’d allowed himself more and more in the past weeks, a balm against the fear.
He refilled the tumbler with Woodford Reserve, then lifted a five-by-seven photograph from his desktop. The photo showed a dark-haired woman with an angular face and deep-set eyes—the kind of eyes that looked alive even on a piece of paper. Rusk knew that the woman in that picture would never fall for his sweetest pickup line. Maybe if he’d caught her young—a freshman in college when he was a senior, drunk at a frat party, like that—but even then he doubted it. This girl had what most women didn’t—self-confidence—and she had it in spades. The apple of her daddy’s eye, you could tell. That was probably what had led her to the FBI.
“Special Agent Alex,” he murmured. “Nosy bitch.”
Rusk’s phone rang, and his secretary answered it. They still had secretaries at his little firm—not goddamn personal assistants—and they were old-school girls, all the way. They gave and received generous perks, and everybody stayed happy. Rusk had read that there was a rule at the Google headquarters in Mountain View: no worker should ever be more than fifty feet away from food. To that end, snack stations had been set up throughout the Googleplex. The Rusk rule—established by Andrew’s father at his much more venerable firm—predated the Google edict by five decades, and it went thus: no partner should ever be more than fifty feet from a good and willing piece of ass. Andrew junior had imported this tradition into his own firm, with most gratifying results.
He gulped the last slug from the tumbler and walked to his desk, where his flat-panel monitor glowed insistently. Flickering on the screen was the portal graphic of a Dutch Web site called EX NIHILO—a black hole with a shimmering event horizon. Rusk remembered a little Latin from his days in prep school: ex nihilo meant “out of nothing.” For a considerable fee, EX NIHILO provided absolute anonymity in the digital domain. The company also provided other services requiring discretion, and it was one of those services that Rusk had contracted for today. He suspected that kiddie-porn addicts made up the lion’s share of EX NIHILO’s clients, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was that the company could protect him.
Partners, he thought, recalling his father’s cynical voice. All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it’s over. And that’s not life—it’s living death. Rusk hated most things about his father, but one thing he could not deny: the man had been right about most things in life. Rusk moved his cursor into a blank box and typed 3.141592653—pi to the ninth decimal place. As a boy, he’d memorized pi to the fortieth decimal place to impress his father. Immediately after his proud dinner recitation, dear old Dad had told him about an Indian boy who’d memorized pi to the six-hundredth place. Typical paternal response in the Rusk home. Nothing was ever good enough for Andrew Jackson Rusk Sr.
Rusk retyped his password, then clicked CONFIRM. With this act, he armed a digital mechanism that might well become his sole means of survival during the next few weeks. He had no illusions about that. His partner would tolerate zero risk; he had made that clear at the outset. In fact, the man was so obsessive about security that he had not only created a code name—Glykon—for Andrew to use in their conversations, which were few (Rusk had googled Glykon, but all he’d discovered was a Greek snake god that had protected his believers in AD 160 by dispelling a plague cloud with a magical spell), Rusk’s Glykon had rather absurdly insisted that Andrew think of him by the code name on any occasion where thought about their business was required. “Security is based on rigorous habits,” Glykon insisted, and the funny thing was, he’d turned out to be right. They’d experienced five years of steady and staggering profits, without a hitch. But if Glykon perceived risk, Rusk knew, he would instantly move to eliminate it. And that meant only one thing: death.
The glue that had held their partnership together thus far was a Cold War strategy called MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. Only when each party knew that his partner held the key to his destruction could trust be guaranteed. (Rusk had once observed an analogy to adulterers who were both married.) But now the situation had changed, and Rusk no longer felt safe. For the first time in their association, true danger had reared its head. There were two threats, and they had arisen almost simultaneously. One was internal, the other external. In the shadow of these threats, Rusk had come to the conclusion that for MAD to act as a true deterrent, each party had to know that a sword of Damocles hung above his head. Tacit understanding was no longer sufficient. EX NIHILO would provide that sword.
If Rusk did not log in to the Dutch Web site every day and authenticate his identity, then EX NIHILO would forward the contents of a large digital file to the FBI and the Mississippi State Police. That file contained a detailed record of the partnership’s activities for the past five years, with accompanying photos and business records—enough legal dynamite to blast both men into Parchman Farm for life, where the worst of the untouchables lived out their miserable and violent days. There was a built-in grace period, of course. Without one, a random car accident causing a weeklong coma might result in Andrew awakening miraculously only to be arrested for murder. But the delay wasn’t much longer than a week. Ten days, in fact. After that, Glykon would be arrested, jailed, and sentenced to death.
The prospect of relating this information to Glykon was what had Rusk’s sphincter quivering. The moment that he unsheathed this “sword,” the ground would shift beneath his feet. He and Glykon would become adversaries, even if they continued working together, which was by no means certain. Intellectual genius and ruthless efficiency had made Glykon the perfect collaborator, but those same qualities would also make him the most formidable adversary imaginable.
Rusk’s fear disgusted him. The walls of his office were lined with photographs that testified to his virility: brilliant snapshots of a blond ex–fraternity president wearing every type of survival suit known to man. Rusk owned all the best toys, and he’d honed the skills to use them. Extreme skiing. Monster-wave surfing in Hawaii. He had a stunt plane that he flew like a barnstormer. He’d even climbed Everest last year, and during one hell of a storm (albeit with oxygen). All this he’d done before the age of forty, yet he still felt like a boy in the presence of Glykon. It wasn’t just the age difference, because Rusk felt superior to most sixty-year-old men he met. It was something else. A set of factors, probably, damn few of which he could put a name to, but that was the state of things.
Rusk knew he’d made a mistake taking the Fennell case. The target’s sister was an FBI agent, and her father had been a homicide cop. Rusk had planned to refuse the job, but he’d mentioned it to Glykon anyway, assuming that his paranoid partner would reject it out of hand. To his surprise, Glykon had taken the FBI connection as a challenge. By then Bill Fennell had offered a 50 percent bonus—50 percent—so Rusk caved. What else was he going to do? As Oscar Wilde once said, the only sure way to get rid of a temptation was to yield to it. But now Rusk had Special Agent Alex Morse crawling all over his life. Somehow she had latched onto him, like a fucking remora to a shark. He’d expected her to give up after a while, but she hadn’t. She was tenacious. And that kind of tenacity only led one place.
Rusk was sure that Morse had broken into his office. He hadn’t reported this, of course, not to the police and certainly not to Glykon. He’d merely made sure that she would never get in again. But that was closing the proverbial barn door after the horse had bolted. What had Morse discovered while she was here? There was no obvious evidence to find. The case-related data on Rusk’s hard drives was encrypted (even encrypted, it was a violation of Glykon’s rules), but Rusk had a feeling that Morse knew her way around computers. Probably around business records, too. His discreet inquiries into her CV had revealed a law degree from Tulane and a year working in South Florida with an FBI/DEA task force. Perfect preparation for unraveling one side of his operation. Morse had also spent five years as an FBI hostage negotiator. This had surprised him, until his source explained that there were more female hostage negotiators in the Bureau than males. It seemed that women were better at peaceful resolution of conflict than men. That was a surprise. An experienced divorce attorney, Rusk had met women with the predatory instincts of velociraptors—females malicious and manipulative enough to give Machiavelli remedial classes in the provocation of wars.
Despite a promising start, Alex Morse had proved unequal to the job of hostage negotiator. Her father’s death and her mother’s cancer had evidently pushed her into a zone where her judgment abandoned her, and she’d gotten somebody killed. She’d almost died herself, Rusk thought wistfully, and her butchered face bore the evidence of her brush with death. But the bottom line was, her emotions had short-circuited her professional restraint. She’d acted wholly on instinct, without regard for the consequences, and this disturbing precedent could not be ignored.
Glykon had to know about Alex Morse.
And Morse wasn’t their only problem. Internal threats were always more dangerous than those from without, and right now a nuclear bomb was ticking beneath their partnership. “A client,” Rusk muttered in disbelief, swigging from his tumbler. “A goddamn rogue client.”
He started at the sound of his door, which had opened just enough for his secretary to lean inside. It was only mid-May, but Janice was already deeply tanned, making her look closer to thirty than thirty-five, her true age. She met Rusk’s eyes with utter openness, the look of an intimate confidante.
“Almost everybody’s gone,” she said. “You want to do it before I go home?”
Rusk weighed her offer. Janice was older than his wife, and while not as beautiful as Lisa, she was much more accomplished and enthusiastic in bed. It was a perfect arrangement. Janice’s husband was a cost accountant who bored her silly but was a good father, and Janice did not aspire to higher social station. Moreover, Rusk paid her almost three times what other secretaries earned in the capital city.
“Are you all right?” Janice asked, stepping fully into the office. She was wearing a khaki skirt and white linen top that her bra showed through. Her calves and forearms rippled with muscle acquired from tournament tennis and obsessive workouts at the gym.
Rusk nodded, but he knew she could read him in all weathers.
“Is it your father?” she asked tentatively, knowing this was a chronic sore spot.
“No. There’s just a lot going on right now.”
Her gaze remained on him, but she didn’t push. “Do you want me to just use my mouth?”
Rusk studied her eyes, which held only concern, and estimated the chances that his wife would want sex tonight. What the hell? he thought. I could die in a car crash on the way home. He summoned a smile for Janice.
She walked over, knelt before his chair, and unzipped his trousers. She could usually bring him off quickly when she wanted to, but today he sensed that it might take a while. He looked down at the photo of Alex Morse and let his mind wander. It was the timing that he couldn’t believe. He was forty years old, and if business continued at its present pace, he would surpass his father’s net worth within the year. Andrew Jackson Rusk Sr.—known as A.J. to his friends (among these, a list of governors stretching back fifty years)—was seventy-five years old and still practicing as a plaintiff’s attorney. A.J. had earned millions in three recent cases that had garnered national media attention—two of them in Jefferson County, where the all-black juries handed out fortunes like party favors. It was tough to keep up with that kind of racket when you handled divorce cases—even the big ones—but Andrew had managed it. Which was good, because his father never let him forget that they were competing.
“Careful with your teeth,” he said.
Janice mumbled something and kept working at him.
A.J. senior had labored to grind every trace of softness, idealism, and compassion out of his son, and for the most part he’d succeeded. When Andrew junior saw the father-son basketball game in The Great Santini for the first time—Robert Duvall bouncing the ball off his son’s head—he’d found himself unable to breathe. And because his own personal Bull Meechum had not died in a fiery plane crash, the competition had not ended when Andrew reached adulthood. It intensified. Instead of joining his father’s law firm, Andrew had joined that of his first wife’s father—a mistake it had taken him several years to acknowledge to himself. His divorce from the senior partner’s daughter had ended his tenure with that firm, but A.J. had not offered him a job after he was cut loose. Rather than join a lesser firm, Andrew had formed his own, taking every potential money case that walked in the door. Most of those had turned out to be divorces. And in that milieu he had discovered his gift. In subsequent years, he had often faced lawyers from his father’s firm in court, and he’d triumphed in every battle. Those victories had been sweet, but it wasn’t quite the same as licking his old man. But this year, he’d been telling himself, this year he was finally going to cut Big A.J. down to size.
“Will you rub my nipples?” Janice asked.
Rusk looked down. Her free hand had disappeared beneath her skirt. He reached down and absently pinched her. She moaned, then gripped him with her hand and went at him with renewed fervor. He looked at the top of her head, where the dark roots showed beneath the blond color job. Every solitary gray hair frizzed out in a direction of its own—
“Stop,” he said.
“Wha …?” she gurgled.
“I can’t do it.”
Her head came up, and she smiled with almost maternal encouragement. “Yes, you can. You need it. Just relax.” She lowered her head again.
“I said stop.”
He shoved her shoulders back hard enough to disengage from her mouth, but Janice would not be put off so easily—not when she was aroused. She stood and stepped quickly out of some blue panties, then hiked up her skirt and sat down on him. He didn’t help her, but neither did he push her off, despite a rush of nausea. He let her do what she needed to do, focusing on her muscular thighs as she worked up and down. Janice’s grunts grew steadily louder, but it didn’t matter. He’d had the walls professionally soundproofed. He took his eyes off the wet tangle where he disappeared into her and focused on Alexandra Morse’s picture. He imagined the FBI agent sweating over him like this. Then he inverted the image in his mind: now he was doing Special Agent Alex in a very painful way—making her pay dearly for all the inconvenience she had caused—
“Oh,” Janice groaned. “Now it’s hard.”
An image of Glykon suddenly filled his mind.
“Come on,” urged Janice, a hint of panic in her voice. “Keep it up, baby. Think about whatever you have to.”
He focused on Morse’s eyes and gripped the breasts in front of him. They were good-sized but flabby; Janice’s two kids had taken their toll, and surgery never quite brought boobs back to their prematernal state, no matter what the surgeons promised. Alex Morse had no children. Her tits would be firm and high, like Lisa’s. And her IQ would be 50 percent higher, at least. Rusk closed his hands with savage force. Janice screamed in pain, but the scream drew out to a long moan as she broke through and peaked, gritting her teeth against his neck to keep from biting him, which she always wanted to do. Rusk was amazed to find himself climaxing after all; he shut his eyes and forced the leering visage of Glykon from his mind.
“I told you,” Janice said. She stood up and looked down at him, still panting from her exertions. She obviously considered his climax a small victory in their ongoing sex play. “I told you you could do it.”
Rusk gave her a perfunctory nod, thinking he might need to take half a Viagra on the way home, in case Lisa wanted servicing.
“Who’s that?” asked Janice, pointing at Alex Morse.
“Nobody.”
Janice fished her panties off the floor and worked them back up her legs. “She’s obviously somebody.”
He glanced at Morse again, then shook his head.
“Do you think she’s hot?” Janice asked in a girlish voice.
“No,” he said, meaning it.
“You’re lying. You thought about her while you were inside me, didn’t you?”
“I did. You know me, Janice.”
She gave him a pouting glance.
“You don’t have to be jealous of her,” Rusk said.
“Why not?”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh.” Janice smiled with satisfaction.
After Janice flattened her skirt and carried her shoes back to her desk, Rusk walked over to a credenza and removed a box of Reynolds Wrap from a drawer. It had lain there for five years, but he’d never had to use it. Opening the long box, he tore off two squares of aluminum foil, then laid them on a table by the northeast window of his office. There was packaging tape in the bottom drawer of his desk. He cut off several short lengths and stuck a line of dangling pieces to the edge of the credenza. With these he taped the foil to the eastward-facing window, shiny side out. In sunlight, the squares would be visible from Interstate 55, which was elevated for most of its length where it passed through the city.
The aluminum foil was another of Glykon’s ideas. Those two goddamn squares of Reynolds Wrap would bring about a meeting that Rusk dreaded like no other in his life, one that would require all his powers of persuasion to survive. His hand shook as he drained another tumbler of bourbon.
He felt as though he had carried out a ritual to summon the devil.
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