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.

FOUR

Chris Shepard dropped a baseball in midair and swung the bat in a fast arc, smacking a ground ball at his four-foot-tall shortstop. The shortstop scooped up the ball and hummed it to the first baseman, Chris’s adopted son, Ben. The throw went wide, but Ben stretched out and sucked the ball into his glove as though by magic.

“Great catch!” Chris shouted. “Throw at his chest, Mike! He’s wearing a glove, he can catch it.”

The shortstop nodded and crouched for the next ball. Ben’s eyes glowed with pride, but he maintained as stern a countenance as a nine-year-old could muster.

Chris pretended to aim another ball at the shortstop, then popped a fly over Ben to his daydreaming right fielder. The kid woke up just in time to dart out of the ball’s path, but it took him several seconds to start chasing it toward the back of the lot.

Chris glanced covertly to his right as he waited for the throw. Two minutes ago, Thora’s silver Mercedes had pulled onto the grassy bank behind the vacant lot where they practiced. She didn’t get out, but sat watching from behind the smoky windshield. Maybe she’s talking on her cell phone, he thought. It struck him how rarely Thora came to practice anymore. Last year, she had been one of the team’s biggest supporters, always bringing the watercooler or even an ice chest filled with POWERade for every kid. But this year she was the rarest visitor. Curiosity had brought her out today, he knew. Instead of making his evening hospital rounds early, as was his habit during the season, Chris had picked Ben up from home right after his office closed. Thora had been out running, of course, so they’d missed each other. As a result, they hadn’t spoken since his visit from Alex Morse.

Chris waved at the Mercedes, then started working ground balls around the infield. He’d avoided talking to Thora because he needed time to process what Agent Morse had told him, and a busy medical office was no place to reflect on personal problems. Running a baseball practice for nine- and ten-year-olds wasn’t exactly Zen meditation, but he could steal a little time to work through the few factual details Morse had given him during their meeting.

He wished he had asked more questions. About the supposed murders, for example. Had the cause of death been stroke in every case? He doubted that Morse had forensic evidence to back up her extraordinary theory. If she did, she wouldn’t need him to try to set up a trap; she would already have arrested the murderer. And yet … if he was completely honest with himself, he couldn’t deny that in the past few hours he’d been turning over certain realities that had been bothering him on a deep level for some time.

Foremost was the baby issue. During their courtship, he and Thora had agreed that they wanted to start having children of their own as soon as they married. At least one, and maybe two. Chris was thirty-six, Thora thirty. The sooner they started having babies, the healthier those children would be, and the better they would know their adopted brother. But after the wedding, Thora had seemed reluctant to get off the pill. Twice she’d claimed that she’d started taking the next month’s pack by mistake. When he remarked on this rare absentmindedness, she admitted that she’d been wondering whether they should move so quickly. Chris had tried to hide his disappointment, but it obviously showed through, because Thora had stopped taking the pill, and they’d begun waiting the obligatory three months required before conception could safely occur. Their sex remained good, but the frequency dropped precipitously. Thora complained that having to use other forms of birth control was a drag after the convenience of the pill. Before long, Chris felt lucky if they made love once a week. After the three months passed, they had abandoned all forms of birth control, but so far, Thora had not conceived. Not even a missed period. Whenever Chris brought up the subject, she subtly suggested that he should get himself checked out, since Ben’s existence proved that she could bear children. Chris never responded verbally to these hints, but he had gotten himself “checked out,” using his own office’s laboratory-service provider. And the answer was unequivocal: high sperm count, high motility.

He wished Thora would get out of her Mercedes. Several other parents were sitting on blankets or lawn chairs on the hill beside the field; only Thora remained in her vehicle. It was this kind of behavior that earned you the reputation of snob in a small town: uppity doctor’s wife. Last year, Chris couldn’t have imagined Thora remaining aloof like this. She would have visited each parent in turn, all the while shouting encouragement to the boys from the sidelines. But maybe he was making a big deal out of nothing. If she felt like sitting in her car, where was the harm? The sun was burning down with unusual ferocity for May, and she might just be enjoying the air-conditioning. He couldn’t tell whether her engine was running; the rumble of the generator in the batting cage was too loud.

“Alex Morse is nuts,” he muttered, cracking a ball toward third base. His marriage might not be in a perfect state—if any such marriage existed on earth—but the idea that his wife was planning to murder him was so ludicrous that Chris hadn’t even known how to respond. It was almost like someone telling you that your mother was planning to kill you. And yet … it wasn’t, quite. There was no blood tie between husbands and wives—not without biological children. And for some reason, Chris couldn’t get Morse’s deadly earnest eyes out of his mind.

She clearly wasn’t the kind of person who would waste time playing games with people’s lives. The answer had to be something else. Like emotional instability. Maybe Morse believed absolutely in the absurd scenario she had outlined today. Given the recent death of her sister, that wasn’t hard to imagine. Chris had seen many extreme grief reactions during his medical career.

But what should he do about it? Call the FBI field office in Jackson and report Morse’s visit? Call his lawyer? Call FBI headquarters in Washington? Or discreetly try to get more information on his own? His receptionist had finally found a phone number for Darryl Foster, and Chris had tried to call his old fraternity brother, but he’d only reached an answering machine. He’d hoped that Foster—an active FBI field agent—would shed some light on the mysterious Agent Morse before he had to face Thora, but the cell phone in Chris’s pocket had not rung. Until he knew more, he wasn’t going to let Thora know anything was amiss. It wasn’t that he believed anything Morse had told him, but if he related the afternoon’s events to Thora, her first question would be Who did you report her to? And what would he say then? Why hadn’t he reported her?

“You gonna hit the ball or what, Coach?”

Chris blinked himself back to reality. His catcher was staring up at him with confusion. Chris laughed to cover, then hit a high fly ball to center field. As he watched its arc, he caught a movement to his right. Thora was standing in the open door of her Mercedes now, her blond hair flashing in the afternoon sun. She was staring directly at him. Had she noticed his little zone-out at home plate?

She gave him a small wave and smiled beneath her sunglasses, dark avian things that gave her the look of an art deco hawk on the side of a skyscraper. She was wearing running clothes, her lithe, muscular body on display for all. Maybe that’s why she didn’t get out, he thought. But that was wishful thinking. For the past eight months—since running marathons had become fashionable among the young married women of the town—Thora had run between two and ten miles a day. She’d bought $200 shoes, the wrist GPS unit, and all the other gear of the modern distance runner. The thing was, with Thora it wasn’t just for show. She actually had talent. After just three months’ training, she’d started beating the times of women who had been running for two and three years. But Thora’s running garb typified another point of tension between them.

When she was married to Red Simmons, Thora had dressed conservatively. Fashionably, yes, but never pushing the envelope of taste. After a suitable period of mourning, though—about the time she’d started seeing Chris—she had subtly begun changing her style. In the beginning, Chris had approved. The new look revealed more of her beauty and signaled an engagement with life that she’d sorely needed. But lately Thora had begun wearing things he would never have imagined she would buy, much less wear in public: ultrashort shorts; transparent tops meant to be worn with an outer garment, but worn alone; and push-up bras (when she wore bras at all). Chris had kidded her about this, hoping she’d get the hint, but Thora had continued to wear the stuff, so he’d shut up. He didn’t feel he had the right to control the way she dressed. Maybe he was getting old, losing touch with the times. And until today, it hadn’t seemed that big a deal. Nothing had, really. Only the issue of Thora getting pregnant had been disturbing enough to rob him of sleep.

“Coach Grant,” he called to his assistant, another team father. “Let’s run some bases and then call it a day.”

The boys cheered, and their parents started rising from blankets and chairs, packing up ice chests and babies for the trek home. Chris ran the boys for five minutes, then circled them and led them in a team shout that reverberated off a thick stand of oak trees to the west. The boys packed the gear—a team tradition—and then everyone headed for his family car.

Ben walked beside Chris as they tromped toward the Mercedes. Chris tried to blank his mind but couldn’t. Too many things were surfacing after a period of unconscious repression. Like the Mercedes. Last Christmas, Thora had bought herself an SL55 AMG. Hardly anyone in town knew how expensive this car really was. Several local doctors owned Benzes, but most were in the $50,000 to $80,000 range. Thora’s SL had cost $145,000. Chris didn’t begrudge her the car—it was her money, after all—but while she was married to Red Simmons, she had driven a Toyota Avalon: forty grand, fully loaded. She’d also worn a Timex watch. Chris had sometimes joked with her about it while she was on nursing duty. But a month ago, a Patek Philippe had quietly appeared on her wrist. He had no idea how much the watch cost, but the jewels on its bezel told him it was probably something north of $20,000—more than several fathers watching this practice earned in a year.

“Big Ben!” cried Thora, moving out from behind the SL’s door with a grin and bending to hug her sweaty son. “You didn’t miss a catch the whole time I was here!”

Ben shrugged. “I play first base, Mom. You can’t play first if you miss balls.”

Chris wished he could see Thora’s eyes, but the sunglasses hid them completely. She gave Ben a quick squeeze, then straightened and gave Chris her thousand-watt smile. His gaze went to the Patek Philippe. Stop it, he said silently.

“You picked up Ben early today,” she said.

“Yeah. I knew rounds were going to take a while, so I decided to do them after practice.”

She nodded but said nothing.

He wasn’t sure where to go next, but Ben saved him by asking, “Can we go to La Fiesta, Mom?”

Thora glanced at Chris over the tops of her sunglasses, but he couldn’t read her meaning. La Fiesta was a family-oriented Mexican restaurant with low prices and fast service; thus it was always loud and crowded.

“I really need to get to the hospital,” Chris said. “You guys go, though.”

Thora shook her head. “We’ve got plenty of food at home, and it’s a lot healthier than Mexican. I made chicken salad this afternoon.”

Ben rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose.

Chris almost said, I’ll pick up something on the way home, but that would only result in Ben begging for takeout and Thora getting irritated. “Help me load the gear, Son.”

Chris and Ben tossed the two bulging canvas bags into his pickup. Then Chris gave Ben a high five, hugged Thora lightly to his side, and climbed into the truck. “I won’t be too late,” he said through the open window.

As though in answer, Thora took off her sunglasses. Her sea-blue eyes cut right through his feigned nonchalance. Her gaze had always caused a physical reaction in his chest, something between a fluttering and radiant warmth. (It caused a reaction lower down, as well.) Now that gaze held an unspoken question, but he broke eye contact, lifted his hand in a wave, then backed onto the road and drove north toward town.

FIVE

Alex Morse drove her rented Corolla into the parking lot of the Days Inn, pulled up to the door of room 125, and shut off the engine. When she opened the door of her room, her sister’s calico cat mewed and dropped soundlessly from the bathroom counter to the carpet. Alex paid five extra dollars per night so that Meggie could stay in the hotel room. She only had Grace’s cat because Jamie had begged her to take it after the funeral. Jamie loved Meggie, but his father did not, and the boy had been afraid that his dad would take her to the pound as soon as Alex flew back to Charlotte. Since Alex knew that Bill Fennell was quite capable of this small act of brutality, she’d accepted the burden. To her surprise, the bright-eyed calico had helped to ease the loneliness of the past five weeks. Alex took off her shoulder holster, massaged the wet place where it had lain against her ribs, then knelt and rubbed Meggie’s chin with a bent knuckle. When she poured some food into the plastic dish by the bathroom door, the cat began eating voraciously.

Alex had checked into the Days Inn five days ago, and she’d done what she could to make a home of her room. Her notebook computer sat humming on the desk, its screen saver an ever-changing montage of photos shot on the cruise she’d taken with Grace to celebrate Grace’s thirtieth birthday. Beside the computer stood a photo of Jamie wearing his Jackson Academy basketball uniform—a gangly ten-year-old with auburn hair, a freckled, unfinished face, and deep-set eyes that projected heartbreaking uncertainty.

Looking at this picture, she remembered how frantic Jamie had been the morning after his mother died, when Alex told him she had to take him back to his father. Running off with him after Grace’s death had been an act of desperation, and in the eyes of the law, kidnapping. If Alex had kept Jamie, Bill wouldn’t have hesitated to have her arrested, and he would probably have done so the previous night had he been able to locate her. Many times since that day Alex had regretted returning Jamie, but she had enough experience to know that a successful custody kidnapping required careful planning and preparation. In the five weeks since that day, she had actually taken several steps in that direction. And if her efforts to prove Bill’s complicity in Grace’s murder should fail—which without Dr. Shepard’s help was likely—then she would be ready to take drastic action.

On a low dresser beside the motel desk lay several neat stacks of paper, all relating to her mother’s medical care. There were lists of oral medications and chemotherapy drugs; treatment schedules; bills to be paid by the insurance company; bills from private physicians for the fees the insurance company didn’t cover; test results from the University Medical Center and from the lab of the private oncologist; and of course the correspondence between Grace and various cancer specialists around the world. Grace had dealt with their mother’s cancer the way she’d dealt with every other crisis: she’d declared war on it. And she’d carried on that war with the implacable persistence of Sherman burning his way across the South. Woe betide the insurance clerk who made an error on a bill addressed to Margaret Morse; Grace’s retribution was swift and sure. But now the running of that campaign had passed to Alex, and by Grace’s standard she was doing a piss-poor job.

Her cardinal sin? She was not at her mother’s bedside. Instead, she was camped out a hundred miles southeast, in Natchez, Mississippi, while paid nurses—strangers!—tended her mother in Jackson. And what was she doing in Natchez? Only burning through her life savings and risking her career in an almost certainly vain quest to punish her sister’s murderer. Grace would have had plenty to say about that. But on the other hand, it was Grace who had charged Alex with “saving” Jamie from his father. And since Bill Fennell had legal custody of his son, the only way Alex could see to save Jamie was to prove that his father had murdered his mother.

Alex walked to the oversize card table she’d bought at Wal-Mart to arrange her case materials. This table was the nerve center of her investigation. It was fairly primitive stuff—jotted notes, surveillance records, digital snapshots, minicassettes—but her father had told her countless times that there was no substitute for putting your heels on the pavement or your ass behind the wheel of your car. All the computers in the world couldn’t nail a killer if you never left your office. Alex kept a framed picture of her dad propped on the card table—her patron saint of cold cases. It wasn’t actually a photograph, but a newspaper story that included two snapshots of Jim Morse: one as a fresh-faced patrolman in 1968, the other as a weary but determined-looking homicide detective who’d solved a high-profile race murder in Jackson in 1980.

Her father had gone into police work straight out of the army, returning to Mississippi after two tours in Vietnam. He’d seen action, but he’d never talked about it, and he never had any lasting problems that Alex knew about. But working as an MP in Saigon, Jim Morse had somehow wound up involved in a couple of murder cases. The work had left an impression on him, so when he’d found himself at loose ends on his twenty-first birthday, he’d registered at the police academy in Jackson. He did well as a patrolman, making sergeant before anyone else in his academy class. He passed the detective’s exam when he was twenty-seven and quickly made a name for two things: brilliant detective work; and speaking his mind, no matter whom he happened to be talking to. The first trait would have assured rapid promotion, had he not possessed the second in equal measure. Alex had fought all her life to control the same tendency, and she’d mostly succeeded. But her father had watched men with much less talent and dedication climb past him on the promotional ladder for most of his career.

After retirement, Jim Morse had opened a detective agency with a former partner who’d served as his rabbi early in his career—a wise old redneck named Will Kilmer. The freedom of a private agency had suited both men, and they got all the referral business they could handle. Alex was certain that it was her teenage exposure to their livelier cases that had caused her to spurn all offers after law school and enroll in the FBI academy instead. Her father had applauded her career choice, but her mother … well, Margaret had reacted as she always did when Alex departed from the path of conventional Southern womanhood. Silent reproach.

A stab of guilt hit Alex high in the chest, followed by a wave of grief. To avoid the guilt, she looked down at a jumble of snapshots of Chris and Thora Shepard. In some shots they were together, but in most not. Alex had been following them long enough to form an impression of a classic upper-middle-class couple, harried by the demands of daily life and never quite catching up. Chris spent a remarkable amount of time working, while Thora alternated vigorous exercise with personal pampering. Alex wasn’t yet sure how far that pampering extended, but she had suspicions. She also had some notes and photographs that Dr. Shepard might like to see, once he got over the initial shock of today’s meeting. But not just yet.

Alex felt a vague resentment as she looked down at Thora; the woman looked better after a six-mile run than most women did after two hours of prepping themselves for a party. You had to hate her a little for that. Chris, on the other hand, was much more down-to-earth, a dark-haired Henry Fonda type rather than a pretty boy. A little more muscular than Fonda, maybe, but with that same gravitas. In that way Dr. Shepard reminded her of her father, another quiet man who had lived for his work.

Mixed in with the images of Thora and Chris were a few of Chris and Ben, all shot at the vacant lot where Chris coached Ben’s Little League team. Ben Shepard was only a year younger than Jamie, and his eyes held some of the same tentativeness that Jamie’s did. Maybe it’s just their age, she thought. Or maybe children sense when there’s something wrong at the heart of their families.

Dwelling on Jamie’s plight usually made Alex too upset to function, so she switched on the TV to make the room seem less empty. She turned on the water as hot as she could stand it, then soaked a washcloth, lay on the bed, and began to scrub her face. The heat spread through her scalp and neck, sending blessed relief down the length of her body. As some of the day’s stress faded, her mind returned to Chris Shepard. The meeting had gone a lot better than it might have. Of course, for all she knew, Dr. Shepard had already called the Jackson field office and reported her visit.

How many people could react with equanimity to the kind of accusation she had made today? Reduced to its essentials, her message was I think your wife is planning to kill you. If Shepard had reported her, she would soon be getting a call from Washington. Like any successful field agent, Alex had made enemies as well as friends in the Bureau. But unlike most of those agents, she had both in high places. One of those enemies had almost gotten her fired after James Broadbent’s death, but he’d been forced to settle for her banishment to Charlotte. If he suspected dereliction of duty there, the mildest response she could expect would be immediate recall to headquarters for an “interview” with the Office of Professional Responsibility, the Bureau’s equivalent of Internal Affairs. Even a cursory investigation in Charlotte would prove their case, and then … a squalid end to her once-stellar career.

But Alex had a good feeling about Chris Shepard. He was quick on the uptake, and she liked that. He was a good listener—which was rare in men and seemed even rarer in male physicians, at least in Alex’s experience. Shepard had married a witch—and a blond one at that—but then a lot of decent guys did that. He’d waited until he was thirty-five to get remarried, which made Alex wonder about his first wife. Shepard had married his college sweetheart during his first year of medical school, but two years after graduation—just as he was finishing up a commitment to practice in the dirt-poor Mississippi Delta to pay off his school loans—there had been a quick divorce. No kids, no muss, no fuss: nothing but “irreconcilable differences” in the court records. But there had to be more to it than that. Otherwise, how had a single doctor who wasn’t hard to look at evaded marriage for almost five years after his divorce?

That first wife did a number on him, Alex thought. He was damaged goods for a while. That’s why he went for Thora, the ice queen. There’s a lot of damage in that girl, too, and I don’t think Dr. Chris knows much about it …

Alex reluctantly turned her mind to more mundane matters, like finances. A kindly accountant might tell her that the outlook was discouraging, but her own view was more succinct: she was broke. It cost real money to run a murder investigation, even when you were doing a lot of the legwork yourself. She was paying two private detective agencies regularly, and various others for small contract jobs. Most of the work was being done by her father’s old agency, but even with Will Kilmer giving her all the breaks he could, the fees were eating her alive. Surveillance was the main drain. “Uncle” Will couldn’t send out operatives on goodwill alone. Time spent working Alex’s case was time stolen from others—man-hours piling upon man-hours, each day’s accumulation taking a hefty bite out of her hemorrhaging retirement fund. On top of that, she was paying for gasoline, airfare between Jackson and Charlotte, private nurses for her mother … there was no end to it.

The Charlotte apartment was her most urgent problem. For the last three years, she’d leased a condo in Washington, D.C. If she had bought it instead, she could have sold it tomorrow for double her money. But that was a pipe dream. A prudent agent would have dumped the condo after getting transfer orders, but Alex had kept it, knowing that her superiors would learn that she had and would see this as a tangible symbol of her belief in her eventual redemption. But now on top of the condo she had a six-month lease on a place in Charlotte, an apartment she’d slept in fewer than a dozen nights. She’d paid her second month’s rent to maintain the fiction that she was diligently working at her punishment duty, but she simply couldn’t afford to continue. Yet if she broke the lease, her superiors would eventually find out. She thought of possible explanations, but none that would mollify the Office of Professional Responsibility.

“Shit,” she muttered, tossing the cold washcloth onto the other bed.

Meggie leaped into the air, startled by the wet rag. Alex hadn’t seen her curl up on the bed, and now she had an indignant cat on her hands. “I’d be pissed, too,” she said, getting up and going to her computer.

She logged on to MSN and checked her Contacts list to see whether Jamie was online, but the icon beside his screen name—Ironman QB—was red, not green. This didn’t worry her. Their nightly webcam ritual normally occurred later, after Bill had gone to bed. Though only ten years old, Jamie was quite talented with computers. And since one of the few things Bill was generous with was allowance—guilt money, she knew—Jamie had been able to purchase a webcam that allowed him to open a video link with Alex anytime that both of them were logged on to MSN. Secret communication with a ten-year-old boy might fall on the questionable side of the ethical spectrum, but Alex figured it paled in comparison to premeditated murder. And since Grace had charged her with protecting Jamie, Alex felt justified in maintaining contact any way she could.

Leaving her MSN screen name active, she got up from the desk, took her cell phone from her purse, and dialed her mother’s house. A nurse answered.

“It’s Alex. Is she awake?”

“No, she’s sleeping. She’s on the morphine pump again.”

Oh, God. “How’s she doing apart from the pain?”

“No change, really. Not physically. Emotionally …” The nurse trailed off.

“What is it?”

“She seems down.”

Of course she is. She’s dying. And she’s doing it alone. “Tell her I’ll call back later,” Alex whispered.

“She’s been saying you might be coming back to Mississippi soon.”

I’m already in Mississippi. Alex shut her eyes against the guilt of the necessary lie. “I may be, but I’m stuck in Charlotte for now. Are the doctors checking on her regularly?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please call me if there’s any change.”

“I’ll make sure someone does.”

“Thank you. Good-bye.”

Alex shoved her Glock into her waistband at the small of her back, flipped her shirttail over its butt, then picked up Meggie and walked outside to the parking lot. Room 125 faced the pool, which was empty at this hour. She felt like swimming some laps, but she hadn’t packed a bathing suit, nor had she thought to buy one when she was at Wal-Mart. The lobby building of the Days Inn was styled after an antebellum mansion, in imitation of Natchez’s primary tourist attractions. Beyond the lobby and a one-story line of rooms, an ancient tennis court lay beneath a rectangle of oak trees. Alex scratched Meggie’s ears and walked toward it.

She had planned to register at the Eola Hotel downtown, which she remembered from a childhood visit to Natchez, but she’d found she couldn’t hack the rate. The Days Inn was fifty-nine bucks a night, Meggie’s fee included. Its parking lot led right onto Highway 61. Turn left and you were headed to New Orleans; turn right, Chicago. I’m losing it, Alex thought. Get a grip.

She stepped onto the cracked green surface of the tennis court and sniffed the air. She smelled a heavy potpourri of verdant foliage: forest leaves, kudzu, and pine needles laced with honeysuckle, azalea, and sweet olive. She smelled water, too, real running water, not the sterile pool behind her. Somewhere nearby, a creek was winding its way through the forested city toward the mighty river that rolled only a mile to the west.

Alex had only been to Natchez three times in her life, but she knew one thing: it was different from everywhere else. Most Americans considered Mississippi unique in their experience, but Natchez was unique in Mississippi. An arrogant city, to her way of thinking, though a certain amount of arrogance could be justified, especially about the past. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez had grown fantastically wealthy before the rich Delta upriver had even been cleared. Governed by England, France, and Spain in turn, the city had absorbed the style, manners, and architecture of those European powers and thus quite naturally saw herself as superior to the rest of the state of which she was nominally a part. This won Natchez few supporters outside her borders, but her cotton-rich leaders cared so little that they surrendered the magnificent city without firing a shot. It was for this reason that Alex, growing up in Jackson, had occasionally heard hisses when Natchez was mentioned in conversation. Yet that bloodless surrender had allowed the city to survive the terrible war intact, much like Charleston and Savannah, and Natchez remained a world unto itself, seemingly immune to history, outside of time.

As the fertile soil surrounding Natchez was depleted, the cotton business moved north to the Delta, yet Natchez did not die. Decades later, travelers from around the world began making pilgrimages to the pristine jewel of the Old South, to see decadent opulence preserved as though by divine intervention (though in fact its beauty was maintained by the free labor of countless society ladies). Even the hard-shell Baptists in rural Mississippi had a grudging fascination with the river city whose bars stayed open all night and whose black-owned whorehouse was known by name in Paris. The discovery of oil beneath the old cotton fields resurrected the city’s vital spirit for another forty years, and some of its celebrated wealth returned. As a young girl visiting to take part in the Confederate Pageant, Alex had briefly been sucked into a social tornado that only old blood, new money, and simmering racial tension could generate. But by the time she visited again—during college with a sorority sister—the city had seemed a faded image of itself, everything smaller in scale, less vivid in color.

During the past five days, Alex had read the Natchez Examiner from front to back every morning while following Thora Shepard on her runs. What she saw in those pages was a city still wrestling with the demons of its past. Half-black and half-white, this former capital of the plantation South could not seem to find its place in the modern world. Alex wondered what had brought a man like Chris Shepard back here after a topflight performance in medical school. Maybe the city sang a siren song that only its natives could hear.

She walked back to the pool and set Meggie down at the shallow end. As the cat perched gracefully on the edge and lapped up the placid water, Alex thought of Chris Shepard in his white coat. After five weeks of frenetic investigation, her fate—and Jamie’s—lay in the doctor’s hands. She planned to give Shepard some time to think about today’s meeting, but not too much. During their next visit, she’d feed him more facts—just enough to set the hook. He’d been intrigued by that first nibble, she could tell. Who wouldn’t have been? She’d presented him with a classic murder mystery: Alfred Hitchcock brought to life. The problem was, it was Chris Shepard’s life. And Shepard’s wife. In the end, of course, the doctor’s decision about whether to help her would be based upon factors Alex could never know: the secret realities of his marriage, unfathomable currents of emotion that no investigator could ever plumb. But she was betting that he would help.

She’d been following Thora for five days now, and she was certain that Thora was leading a secret life. On some level, her husband had to know that. But would he consciously acknowledge it? People saw only what they wanted to see, and only when they were ready to see it. Reality might be painfully obvious to others, but in love, everything was veiled. By hope, by fear, and most of all by trust. Alex’s father had struggled to teach her this, but it had taken personal experience to etch the truth into the marrow of her bones.

Trust only your blood.

She picked up Meggie and walked back toward her room. A few miles to the south, Chris Shepard was probably lying wide-awake in bed, wondering if he knew the woman beside him at all. Alex was sorry for pulling his world inside out, but she didn’t regret it. Left to the mercy of his wife, Shepard probably wouldn’t have survived the month. As she reached for the doorknob, she realized that she had made her decision about the Charlotte apartment.

“Sayonara,” she said softly.

She bolted the door behind her and sat down at her computer. Jamie still wasn’t online. Her watch read 11:25 p.m. Alex’s chest and throat began to tighten, as though she were breathing noxious fumes. She badly needed sleep, but she would wait until Jamie’s icon turned green, no matter how long it took. She rubbed her eyes, fished a pink Tab Energy drink from her ice chest, sat back down, and drank half the can in a few seconds. By the time she burped, she could already feel the rush of caffeine absorbed through her tongue.

“Come on, baby,” she murmured. “Come on. Talk to Aunt Alex.”

Jamie’s icon remained red.

SIX

Chris had never been a good liar. His father hadn’t either. Buddy Shepard never earned much money, but he had earned respect wherever he worked, and he’d passed his integrity on to his son. Integrity wasn’t an easy thing to maintain, Chris had found, in a world that ran according to the laws of human nature.

Walking down the dark path between his house and the remodeled barn behind it, he wasn’t even sure what the right thing was. His tread was heavy, and he took no joy in his surroundings, which had always been a source of pride. After moving to Natchez, he had used a chunk of his savings to buy a large house sited on twenty acres of the former Elgin plantation, an estate south of town that predated the Civil War. Despite its isolation, the house was only five minutes from Ben’s school and less than ten minutes from both Natchez hospitals. Chris couldn’t see how this situation could be improved upon, but Thora had long wanted to move to Avalon, a trendy new subdivision springing up farther south. Red Simmons had always resisted this desire, but after several months of discussion Chris had finally given in, conceding that in the new neighborhood Ben would have more friends living nearby.

Their house in Avalon—he privately called it the McMansion—was three-fifths finished. Thora was personally overseeing construction, but Chris rarely visited the site. He had been raised in a series of rural towns (his father had worked for International Paper, and they were transferred every couple of years), and he believed that growing up in the country had played a large part in forging his self-reliance. He knew that Ben would benefit from a similar environment, and for this reason he had privately decided not to sell this land when they moved to Avalon.

A large building appeared before him in the darkness, but its rustic exterior belied its real purpose. Chris had remodeled this barn himself, converting it into a video production studio to house the technology of his avocation—his “camera hobby” as Thora called it, which bothered him more than he admitted. He unlocked the door and walked into his main production room, a haven of blond maple and glass, spotlessly clean and kept at sixty-five degrees for the health of the cameras, computers, and other equipment. Simply entering this room elevated his mood. Booting up his Apple G5 did even more. In this room he could leave the thousand importunities of daily life behind. Here, he actually had control over what he was doing. And deep down, he felt that he was doing something great.

Chris had gotten into filmmaking during college, where he’d worked on several documentaries, two of which had won national awards. During medical school, he produced a documentary called A Day in the Life of a Resident. Shot with a hidden camera, this digital video had almost ended his medical career before it began. But after a fellow student sent the tape to a national news network, it had ultimately contributed to the limiting of work hours for medical residents. Once Chris began practicing medicine for real, though, he’d found that he had little time for filming anything. Medicine offered many rewards, but spare time wasn’t one of them.

But last year, after associating with Dr. Tom Cage, an old-time general practitioner in Natchez, Chris had discovered a way to combine his vocation with his avocation. After close observation of his new partner, Chris began work on a documentary about the decline of traditional primary-care medicine. And Mississippi, which was ten years behind the rest of the country in most things, was the perfect place to do that.

Tom Cage was one of those doctors who would spend a full hour listening to a patient, if a sympathetic ear was what that patient needed most. Seventy-three years old, Tom suffered from several serious chronic diseases; and as he often admitted, he was sicker than many of his patients. But he still worked eighty-hour weeks, and when he wasn’t working, he was reading journals to stay up on the latest standards of care. Dr. Cage frequently touched patients during his exams, and he paid close attention to what he felt. Most important, he questioned patients deeply about not only their specific symptoms, but also other areas of their lives that might yield clues to their general health. He thought about his fees in terms of trying to save his patients money (and thus he was not rich), and he never thought about the dozens of patients—many of them walk-ins—waiting to see him. Tom Cage stayed at his office until the last patient was seen, and only then did he declare his workday done.

For Chris, who had begun his private-practice career in a group of internists his own age, Dr. Cage’s methods had come as a profound shock. To physicians of Chris’s generation, a good practice meant high pay, short working hours, and an abundance of partners to take call, so that one night a week was the most you had to worry about phone calls from patients. Chris’s former partners practiced defensive medicine, ordering every lab test remotely relevant to every patient’s symptoms, but spending as little time as possible with those patients, all in the hallowed name of gross income. This kind of practice was anathema to Tom Cage. A system geared toward the convenience and gain of the physician was the tail wagging the dog. Dr. Cage saw medicine as a life of service: a noble calling, perhaps, but still a life of service. And that, Chris believed, was worth documenting for posterity.

Deep down, he shared a lot of Tom’s feelings about modern medicine. His own ideas of service had cost him his first wife, and he had been cautious in love after that. Only after Thora Rayner entered his life had Chris felt emboldened to take such a risk again. For this reason, Agent Morse’s visit had disturbed him more than it might have another man. Chris had fundamentally misjudged his first wife, and to admit that he might have done the same thing a second time would be hard. In fact, he reflected, the niggling worries that had surfaced during baseball practice were just that—inconsequential peeves. Every adult went through personality changes, and the first year of a marriage was always a time of adjustment. That Thora had started spending more money than she used to, or wearing tighter clothes, meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chris opened the studio’s refrigerator, poured a nearly freezing shot of Grey Goose, and drank it off. Then he sat down before his G5, opened Final Cut Pro, and began reviewing some scenes he’d filmed last week. Shooting directly to hard drives from his Canon XL2S meant that he wasted no time dumping footage from tape to his computer. Unfolding before him now was an interview with Tom Cage and a black woman who had been his patient since 1963. That woman now had a great-great-granddaughter, and that little girl was playing at her feet. Tom preferred not to treat children anymore, but this woman had refused to take her “grandchild” to any other doctor. Chris had more recent experience with pediatrics than Tom did, and he’d been proud to help in evaluating the child’s high fever (which Tom had feared might be meningitis).

As the old woman spoke about Dr. Cage traveling to her home one night during the blizzard of 1963, Chris felt a strange tide of emotion moving through him. Until this morning, when Agent Morse had subversively entered his life, he’d felt more content than he had since childhood. His father had been a good man, but he’d rarely pondered life’s deeper mysteries. In Tom Cage, Chris had found a mentor with a wealth of knowledge to pass on, but who did so without pretense or didacticism, almost like a Zen master. A trenchant question here, a small gesture while a patient’s attention was elsewhere—in this unassuming way, Tom had been turning Chris into more than a first-class internist: he was turning him into a healer.

But a career isn’t enough to sustain a man, Chris thought, feeling the vodka cross his blood-brain barrier. Not even if it’s a passionate calling. A man needs someone to engage his deepest emotions, to relieve his drives, to soften his obsessions, to accept the gifts he feels compelled to give, and maybe most important, to simply be with him during the thousands of small moments that in aggregate compose a life.

For almost two years, Chris had believed that Thora was that person. Along with Ben, she had closed some magic circle in his life. Before he married Thora, Chris had not understood how acting as a father to Ben would affect him. But in less than a year, with Chris’s patient attention, the boy had blossomed into a young man who amazed his teachers with his attitude and schoolwork. He was no slouch on the athletic field, either. The pride Chris felt in Ben had stunned him, and he’d felt it a solemn duty—even a privilege—to adopt the boy. Given what he felt for Ben, Chris could hardly imagine what having his own biological child might do to him. He almost felt guilty for asking more of life than he already had. Every week he watched men die without the things he now possessed, either because they had never found them or because they had foolishly cast them away. Yet now … everything had changed somehow. Alexandra Morse had released a serpent of doubt into his personal Eden, forcing him to wonder if he truly possessed any of the gifts he had believed to be his.

“Goddamn it,” he murmured. “Goddamn woman.”

“Did I mess something up?” asked a worried voice.

Chris looked over his shoulder and saw Thora standing behind him. She wore a diaphanous blue nightgown and white slippers with wet blades of grass on them. He’d been so absorbed in the footage and his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her enter the studio.

“You were pretty late getting home from the hospital,” she said diffidently.

“I know.”

“You have a lot of admissions?”

“Yeah. Most of them are routine stuff, but there’s one case nobody can figure out. Don Allen consulted Tom about it, and Tom asked for my opinion.”

A look of surprise widened Thora’s eyes. “I can’t believe Don Allen consulted with anybody.”

Chris smiled faintly. “The patient’s family pressured him into it. It killed Don to do it, I could tell. But if somebody doesn’t figure out what this guy has, he could die.”

“Why not ship him up to Jackson?”

“Don already talked to all the specialists at UMC. They’ve seen the test results, and they don’t know what to think either. I think the family figured Tom has seen almost everything in almost fifty years of practicing medicine, so they wanted him consulted. But Tom is stumped, too. For now, anyway.”

“My money’s on you,” Thora said, smiling. “I know you’ll figure it out. You always do.”

“I don’t know, this time.”

Thora moved closer, then leaned down and kissed Chris’s forehead. “Turn back around,” she said softly. “Toward the monitor.”

It seemed an odd request, but after a moment he turned and faced the screen.

Thora began to rub his shoulders. She had surprisingly strong hands for a lithe woman, and the release of tension in his neck was so sudden that he felt a mild nausea.

“How does that feel?”

“I almost can’t take it.”

Her hands worked up the sides of his neck and began to knead the bunched muscles at the base of his skull. Then she slipped her fingertips into his ears and began to massage the shells, working steadily inward with increasing pressure. Before long he felt like sliding out of the chair and onto the floor. One of Thora’s hands vanished, but her other moved down into his polo shirt, the palm circling his pectoral muscles with surprising force.

“You know what I was thinking?” she said.

“What?”

“We haven’t tried to get me pregnant in a while.”

No remark could have surprised him more. “You’re right.”

“Well …?”

She slowly spun his chair until he found himself facing her bare breasts. Normally, they were porcelain pale—her Danish blood—but like her friends, Thora had recently become an addict of the tanning salon, and her skin glowed an uncharacteristic burnished gold, with nary a line in sight.

“Kiss them,” she whispered.

He did.

She a made a purring sound deep in her throat, a nearly feline expression of pleasure, and he felt her shift position. While her fingers played in the hair at the back of his neck, he worked delicately but steadily at her nipples. They were infallible sources of arousal, and soon Thora was breathing in shallow rasps. She bent her knees and reached down to see if he was ready. Finding him hard, she unsnapped his pants, then knelt and tried to pull them down. He raised his hips for her, then sat back down.

Without delay Thora lifted her gown and sat, wrapping her strong legs around his waist and the chair back. Chris groaned, nearly overcome by her urgency, which he had not experienced in some time. But tonight Thora was the woman he had fallen in love with two years ago, and the power of this incarnation pushed him quickly toward climax. She gazed into his eyes as she rode him, silently urging him on, but at the last moment she planted both feet on the floor and thrust herself up and off him.

“What?” he cried.

“That’s not exactly the ideal position for bringing a new generation into the world,” she said, her eyes teasing him with mock reproach.

“Oh.”

Taking hold of his penis, she pulled him over to the leather sofa, then lay down on her back and motioned for him to mount her. After staring at her long enough to engrave the image in his mind, he did. As Thora whispered lewd encouragements in his ear, the interview with Alex Morse rose inexplicably into his mind. Their conversation had a surreal quality now. Could such a thing be possible? Had someone pretending to be a patient actually lied her way into his office and then accused his wife of murder? And before the fact? It was crazy—

“Now,” Thora told him. “Now, now, now …”

Chris thrust deep and held the contact, letting Thora take herself over the threshold. When she cried out, her nails raking his shoulder blades, he let himself go, and a white glare burned away all ambiguity.

As he came slowly back to the present, Thora strained upward to kiss his lips, then fell back, sweating despite the steady flow of air-conditioning. Chris drew out and lay beside her on the cold leather.

“You can get up if you want to,” she said. “I’m going to stay here a few minutes. Let things take their natural course.”

He laughed. “I’m fine right here.”

“Good answer.”

They lay in silence for a while. Then Thora said, “Is everything all right, Chris?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You seemed distant today. Did something happen at work?”

God, did something happen. “Just the usual.”

“Is the new house bothering you again?”

“I haven’t even thought about it.”

She looked disappointed. “I don’t know if that’s good either.”

He forced a smile. “The house is fine. It just takes a while to turn a country boy into a city boy.”

“If it’s possible at all.”

“We’ll soon find out.”

Thora pulled damp hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I forgot. I wanted to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Laura Canning is going up to the Alluvian this week. She asked me to go with her.”

“The Alluvian?”

“You know, that hotel in Greenwood. Up in the Delta. The one the Viking Range people remodeled. It’s supposed to be stunning. You practiced up in the Delta for a while, didn’t you?”

He laughed. “My patient base couldn’t afford that kind of place.”

“They supposedly have a terrific spa up there. People fly down from New York to stay there. Morgan Freeman has that blues club in the Delta, you know, and he’s stayed at the Alluvian.”

Chris nodded. He liked Morgan Freeman’s work, but he wasn’t into picking spas based on where Hollywood actors went. He wasn’t into spas at all, to be honest. He broke all the sweat he needed to while maintaining the twenty acres of land around his house.

“If you don’t want me to go, I won’t,” Thora said, seemingly without rancor. “But this is Ben’s last week of school, and he always asks you for help with his homework anyway. I don’t have the patience.”

Chris couldn’t argue this point. “When are we talking about?”

“A couple of days from now, probably. We’d just be gone three nights. Then right back home. Mud packs and champagne, a little blues music, then home.”

Chris nodded and forced another smile, but this one took more effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Thora to have fun. It was Alex Morse’s voice whispering in his head: Is your wife planning to be out of town anytime soon?

“Chris?” Thora asked. “Tell the truth. Do you want me to stay home?”

He recalled her face as she made love to him, the unalloyed pleasure in her blue-gray eyes. Now she was lying on her back on chilly leather so that his sperm would have the maximum probability of impregnating her. What the hell was he worried about? “I think I’m just worn-out,” he said. “Between work and rounds and working on my project—”

“And baseball practice,” Thora added. “Ninety minutes a day in eighty-five-degree heat with a bunch of wild Indians.”

“You go up to the Delta and chill out,” he said, though he had never associated the words Delta and chill in his mind before. “Ben and I will be fine.”

Thora gave him an elfin smile, then kissed him again. “You stay right here.”

He stared as she jumped up and ran to the studio door, then disappeared through it. She reappeared a moment later, holding both hands behind her back.

“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling strangely anxious.

“I’ve got a surprise for you. Two surprises.”

He sat up on the couch. “What? I don’t need anything.”

She laughed and moved closer. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She brought her right hand from behind her back. In it was a plate of chocolate chip cookies. His mouth watered at the scent of them—until Alex Morse’s warnings sounded in his head. Before he had to make a choice about eating the cookies, Thora held out a cardboard tube like the ones she used to carry blueprints for the new house. Chris forced a smile, but the prospect of discussing the Avalon house did not please him in the least.

“I see that frown,” Thora said, setting the cookies beside him, then perching her perfect derriere on his knees. “You just wait and see.”

She removed a sheet of paper from the tube, unrolled it, and spread it across her nude thighs. Chris saw what appeared to be plans for a new building behind the seven-thousand-square-foot house that was now nearing completion. A rather large building.

“What’s that?” he asked, groaning internally. “A private gym?”

Thora laughed. “No. That’s your new studio.”

His face flushed. “What?”

She smiled and kissed his cheek. “That’s my housewarming present to you. I had our architect consult with an expert in New York. You’re looking at a state-of-the-art video production studio. All you have to do is select your equipment.”

“Thora … you can’t be serious.”

Her smile broadened. “Oh, I’m serious. They’ve already poured the foundation and run the high-tech cabling. Very expensive.”

This was almost too much to absorb after what Chris had endured today. He wanted to get up and pace the room, but Thora had him pinned to the couch. Suddenly, she tossed the plans and the tube onto the couch and hugged him tight.

“I’m not letting you slip back here every time you want to edit your videos. You’re stuck with me, understand?”

He didn’t. He felt as though he had swallowed some sort of hallucinogen. But then, if Alex Morse had not visited his office this morning, none of this would seem anything but a wonderful surprise.

“I finally surprised you,” Thora said in an awestruck voice. “I did, didn’t I?”

He nodded in a daze.

She took a cookie from the plate and held it to his lips. “Here. You need your strength.”

“No, thanks.”

Her disappointment was plain. “I actually made these from scratch.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really not hungry. I’ll eat some later.”

She shrugged, then popped the cookie into her mouth. “Your loss,” she said, her eyes twinkling as she chewed. “Mmm … almost better than sex.”

Chris smelled the melting chocolate in her mouth, watched her swallow with exaggerated pleasure. Alex Morse is batshit, he told himself.

Thora looked into his eyes, then took his hand and cupped her breast with it. “You up for a second round? We can raise the odds by two hundred million or so.”

He felt like an astronaut cut loose from his spacecraft, drifting steadily away from everything familiar. Who could live like this? he wondered. Second-guessing every move in my own house?

He closed his eyes and kissed Thora with desperate fervor.

SEVEN

Alex’s heart leaped when she saw the little red icon turn green, indicating that Jamie had logged on to MSN. She’d been checking for the past three hours, playing Spider Solitaire and waiting for Jamie’s icon to light up.

A new screen like a small TV appeared within her main screen, but the TV was blank. Then an image of Jamie sitting at his desk in his room at Bill Fennell’s house flashed up. The immediacy of the webcam was overwhelming at first. It truly was like being in the same room with the person you were talking to. You could see every emotion in their eyes, every movement of their face. Tonight Jamie was wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and the yellow baseball cap of his Dixie Youth team. His eyes weren’t looking at her, but at his monitor, so that he could watch her image projected from his screen. She knew that she looked the same to him, since she was staring at his image and not the camera mounted atop her screen.

“Hey, Aunt Alex,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

She smiled genuinely for the first time all day. “It’s okay. You know I’ll be here whenever you log on. What you been doing, bub?”

Jamie smiled. “I had a baseball game.”

“How did it go?”

“They killed us.”

“I’m sorry. How did you do?”

“I got a double.”

Alex yelped and applauded. “That’s great!”

Jamie’s smile vanished. “But I struck out twice.”

“That’s okay. Even the pros strike out.”

“Twice in one game?”

“Sure they do. I once saw Hank Aaron strike out three times in one game.” This was a lie, but a harmless one. Hank Aaron was about the only player whose name she knew, and him only because of her father.

“Who’s Hank Aaron?” Jamie asked.

“He hit more home runs than Babe Ruth.”

“Oh. I thought that was Barry Bonds.”

Alex shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You got a double, that’s what matters. What else has been going on?”

Jamie sighed like a fifty-year-old man. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Come on.”

“I think she’s over here right now.”

“Missy?” Missy Hammond was Bill’s mistress.

Jamie nodded.

Anger flooded through Alex; she tasted copper in her mouth. “Why do you think that? Did you see her?”

“No.” Jamie glanced behind him, at his bedroom door. “Dad thinks I’m asleep now. He came in to check, and I had the lights off. After a few minutes, I heard the back door. I thought he might be leaving, so I sneaked out to the rail. I didn’t see anything, but after a while I heard somebody laughing. It sounded exactly like her.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Jamie. Let’s talk about something else.”

The boy hung his head. “That’s easy for you to say. Why don’t you just come get me? Dad wants to be with her, not me. I’m not sleepy at all.”

“I can’t just come get you. We talked about that. But your father wants you, Jamie.” Alex wasn’t sure whether this was true. “He wants both of you.”

The boy shook his head. “After the game, all Dad talked about was my strikeouts. And what else I did wrong. Nothing about my double.”

Alex put on a smile and nodded as though she understood. “I think a lot of dads are like that. Your granddad did that when I played softball.”

Jamie looked surprised. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. He didn’t hesitate to tell me what I did wrong.”

This wasn’t quite true. Jim Morse could give constructive criticism, but he knew how to do it without making you feel bad. And most of what Alex remembered from being ten years old was unconditional praise.

“Your dad’s just trying to help you improve,” she added.

“I guess. I don’t like it, though.” Jamie reached down, then lifted a heavy book onto his desk. “I was supposed to do my homework earlier, but I didn’t feel like it. Can I do it now?”

“Sure.”

“Will you stay on while I do it?”

Alex smiled. “You know I will.”

Now Jamie was grinning. They had done this many times since Grace’s death. While Jamie read his assignment, Alex sat watching him, her mind roving back through the past. For some reason her father was in her mind tonight. Jim Morse had loved his grandson more than anything else in the world, and that might have included his own daughters. When Grace and Alex were young, Jim had been building a business, and despite putting real effort into being a father, he had seen them mostly in passing. But with Jamie, he’d had endless hours to spend with the boy. Jim had taught him to hunt and fish, to water-ski, to fly kites, and not just to throw a baseball but to pitch one for real. Jamie Fennell could throw a curveball when he was eight years old. Jim had spent all this time with Jamie despite the fact that Jim and Bill Fennell did not get along. In Alex’s eyes, her father had proved his manhood for all time by compromising as much as was required to keep close contact with his grandson.

One thing Alex knew in her bones, though: if her father had been alive to hear Grace’s deathbed accusation of murder, the events of the past weeks would have unfolded differently. That very night, Bill Fennell would have been hauled into an empty room, slammed against a wall, and made to cough up all the sediment at the bottom of his soul. Had that treatment not proved sufficient to dredge up the truth, Bill would have been taken on an involuntary boat ride with Jim Morse, Will Kilmer, and some of the other ex-cops who worked for their detective agency. One way or another, Bill would have spilled all he knew about Grace’s death. And Jamie would not be living in Bill’s ugly mansion on the edge of the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Jackson. If the courts didn’t save Jamie, his grandfather would have taken him somewhere safe to be raised by people who loved him. And Alex would have gone with them. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

None of that had happened, of course. Because like his daughter Grace, Jim Morse was dead. Alex had studied all the eyewitness accounts, but none of them ever dovetailed exactly—unlike the accounts of her own act of lunacy at the bank, when Broadbent was killed. Everybody had seen exactly the same thing on that day. But with her father’s death it was different. At age sixty, Jim had walked into a dry cleaner’s late on a Friday afternoon. He normally used the drive-through window, but that day he chose to go inside. Two female clerks stood behind the counter. A young black man wearing a three-piece suit was waiting in the store, but he was no customer. The real customers were lying flat on their stomachs behind the counter, beside a grocery bag filled with cash from the register.

Jim didn’t know that when he walked in, but Alex figured it had taken him about six seconds to realize something was wrong. No one was going to bluff Jim Morse out of a robbery in progress, no matter how old he was. The girls behind the counter were so scared they could hardly speak when Jim walked up to the counter and started a monologue about the weather: how warm the fall had been, and how it used to snow once or twice a year in Mississippi, but nowadays almost never. One clerk saw Jim glance behind the counter without moving his head, but the other didn’t. What she did see was Jim take his wife’s clothes from the hanging rod and turn to leave the store. As he passed the waiting “customer,” Jim flattened him with a savage blow to the throat. The clerk was shocked that “an old gray-haired dude” had attacked a muscular man in his early twenties. No one who knew Jim Morse was surprised. He’d often carried a gun after retirement, but he hadn’t on that day, not for a short run to the cleaner’s. Jim was digging in the fallen robber’s jacket when the plate-glass window of the store exploded. One clerk screamed, then fell silent as a bullet punctured her left cheek. The other dived behind the counter. After that, few facts were known.

The medical examiner believed that the shot that killed Alex’s father had been fired from behind the counter, not from the getaway car parked out front. Not that it mattered. After a lifetime spent courting danger, Jim Morse had simply run out of luck. And despite relentless efforts by the police department, by his old partner, and even a large reward offered by the Police Benevolent Association, his killers were never caught. Alex knew that her father had not wanted to die that day, but she knew something else, too: he would rather have died like that than the way his wife was dying now—in agony and by inches.

The sound of Jamie closing his book startled her from her reverie.

“I’m done,” he said, his green eyes still on the screen. “It’s way easier when you’re with me.”

“I like being here with you. It helps me work, too.”

Jamie smiled. “You weren’t working. I saw you. You were just sitting there.”

“I was working in my head. A lot of my work is like that.”

Jamie’s smile vanished, and he looked away from the screen.

“Jamie? Are you all right? Look at me, honey. Look into the camera.”

At length, he did, and his sad eyes pierced her to the core.

“Aunt Alex?”

“Yes?”

“I miss my mom.”

Alex forced herself to repress her grief. Tears were pooling in her eyes, but they would not help Jamie. One thing she had learned the hard way: when adults started crying, kids lost all their composure.

“I know you do, baby,” she said softly. “I miss her, too.”

“She used to say what you said. That she was working in her head.”

Alex tilted back her head and wiped her eyes, unable to shut out the memory of the night Grace died, when she’d snatched up Jamie and raced out of the hospital. She hadn’t gone far, just to a nearby Pizza Hut, where she’d broken the news of Grace’s death and comforted Jamie as best she could. Her own father had died only six months before, and his death had hit Jamie as hard as it had her. But Grace’s death was a tragedy of such magnitude that the boy simply could not process it. Alex had buried his head between her breasts, silently praying for the power to revoke death, and hoping that Grace had been out of her mind when she accused her husband of murder.

Alex held an opened hand up to the eye of the camera. “You be strong, little man. You do that for me, okay? Things are going to get better.”

Jamie put up his hand, too. “Are they?”

“You bet. I’m working on it right now.”

“Good.” Jamie looked back at the door. “I guess I better go now.”

Alex blinked back more tears. “Same time tomorrow?”

Jamie smiled faintly. “Same time.”

Then he was gone.

Alex got up from the desk with tears streaming down her cheeks. She spat curses and stomped around the motel room like a confined mental patient, but she knew she hadn’t lost her mind yet. She looked down at the newspaper photo of her father. He would understand why she was living in this claustrophobic motel instead of keeping a deathwatch over her mother’s bed. Right or wrong, Jim would be doing the same thing: trying to save his grandson. And no matter what it took, Alex was going to fulfill her promise to Grace. If the Bureau wanted to fire her for doing the job it should have been doing, then the Bureau could go to hell. There was law, and there was justice. And no Morse she was related to had ever had any trouble recognizing the difference.

Alex stripped off her pants and shirt, walked out to the empty pool, and started swimming laps in her underwear. It was too late for anyone decent to complain, and if a Bill Fennell type wanted to sit on the plastic furniture and ogle her ass while she worked out her frustration, then he was welcome to it. If he was still there when she got out, she’d kick his butt across the parking lot.

EIGHT

Dr. Eldon Tarver walked slowly along the park path, his big head down, his eyes in a practiced state of general focus, searching for feathers in the tall grass. In one hand he carried a Nike duffel bag, in the other an aluminum Reach-Arm device, used by most people for picking up soda cans and litter from the ground. But Dr. Tarver was not like most people. He was using the Reach-Arm to pick up dead birds, which he then sealed inside Ziploc bags and dropped into the Nike duffel. He’d been out since before dawn, and he’d bagged four specimens already, three sparrows and a martin. Two seemed quite fresh, and this boded well for the work he would do later in the morning.

Dr. Tarver had seen only two other humans so far, both runners. Not many people ventured into this corner of the park, where branches hung low to the ground and the path was overgrown in many places. The doctor had startled both runners, partly by his simple presence at this place and time, but also because of his appearance. Eldon Tarver would never be mistaken for a runner.

He was not dressed in shorts or warm-ups, but in cheap slacks and a pullover from the Casual Male Big & Tall shop on County Line Road. Dr. Tarver stood six feet three inches tall, with a barrel chest and ropy arms covered with black hair. He had been bald since the age of forty, but he wore a full gray beard that gave him the look of a Mennonite preacher. He had preacher’s eyes, too—not parson’s eyes, but the burning orbs of a revealed prophet—bright blue irises that shimmered in the center of their dark sockets like coins at the bottom of a well. When he was angry, those eyes could burn like the eyes of a demon, but few people had ever seen this. More often, his eyes radiated a glacial coldness. Some women at the medical center thought him handsome, but others called him downright ugly, this impression being bolstered by what most people thought was a wine-stain birthmark on his left cheek. The disfiguring mark was actually a severe arteriovenous anomaly, a horror that had begun mildly during childhood but which during puberty had flamed to the surface like the sign of a guilty conscience. All these qualities had combined to make even the large male runner jig five steps to the right as he passed, for it took five steps to get clear of the bearded giant ambling along the path with his aluminum stick and duffel bag.

As the first yellow rays of sunlight spilled through the oak limbs to the east, another runner appeared—a girl this time, a vision in tight blue Under Armour with white wires trailing from her golden hair. The wires disappeared into an iPod strapped to her upper arm. Dr. Tarver wanted to watch her approach, but just then he noticed another bird off the path, this one twitching in its death throes. It might have fallen only seconds ago.

The girl’s shoes swished through the dewy grass as she left the asphalt path on the side opposite the doctor. She tried to make it appear as though she’d done this out of courtesy, but she could not deceive him. He divided his attention between the girl and the bird, one filled with life, the other dying fast. She tried not to look at him as she sprinted past, but she couldn’t manage it. Twice her pupils flicked toward him, gauging the distance, making sure he hadn’t moved closer. Threat assessment was such a finely tuned gift, one of the blessings of evolution. He smiled as the girl passed, then turned and regarded her flexing glutes as they receded from view, appreciating their shape with the cool regard of an expert anatomist.

After she’d vanished around a bend, he stood still, breathing the wake of her perfume—an ill-advised accessory for morning jogs if one wanted to avoid unwelcome attention. After the fragrance had dissipated beyond detection, he knelt, donned surgical gloves, and withdrew a scalpel, a syringe, and a culture dish from his pocket. Then he tied on a surgical mask and laid open the sparrow’s breast with a single incision. With a long finger he exposed the bird’s liver. Inserting the tip of the hypodermic into the nearly black organ, he exerted a gentle back-pressure and probed with the needle until he was rewarded with a slow spurt of blood. He needed only a single cc—less, actually—but he took the full amount possible, then snapped the sparrow’s neck with a quick twist and tossed its carcass into the underbrush.

Opening the petri dish, Dr. Tarver squirted some blood onto the layer of minced chick embryo inside and rubbed it around with a sterile swab taken from his pocket. Then he closed the dish and slipped it into the duffel with the Ziploc bags. His gloves came off with a snap—those went into the bag, as well—and then he cleaned his hands with a dab of Purell. A good morning’s work. When he got back to the lab, he’d test the last bird first. He felt confident that it was a carrier.

A slow shiver in the grass where he’d tossed the sparrow raised the hair on his arms. The accompanying sound was faint, but the sounds of childhood never faded. Dr. Tarver set down the Nike bag and walked lightly—very lightly, considering his size—toward the closing groove in the grass. As soon as he saw the rotting log, he knew. He closed his eyes for a moment, stilling himself at the center. Then he reached down with his left hand and lifted the log. What he saw beneath fluttered his heart: no crotalid, but a beautiful coil of red, yellow, and black shimmering in the sun.

“Micrurus fulvius fulvius,” he whispered.

He had uncovered an eastern coral snake, one of the shiest serpents in America, and undoubtedly the deadliest. With a fluid motion like that of a father stroking his child’s hair, Tarver took hold of the stirring elapid behind its head and lifted it into the air. The brightly banded body coiled around his forearm—a full twenty inches of him—but this was not a strong snake. A cottonmouth or rattler would have struggled, using its strong muscles to try to whip away from him and strike. But the coral snake was no brutish pit viper, injecting prey with crude hemotoxin that caused terrible pain and swelling as it ate away the walls of blood vessels, bringing gangrene and infection to its human victims. No, the coral was a refined killer. Like its relative the cobra, it injected pure neurotoxin, which brought only numbness before shutting down the central nervous system of its prey, quickly bringing on paralysis and death.

Dr. Tarver was a pathologist, not a herpetologist, but he had a long history with snakes. It had begun in childhood, this education, and not by choice. For Dr. Tarver, serpents were inevitably bound up with the idea of God. Not the way his adoptive parents had seen this relationship—because only fools tempted death as a test of faith—but bound up with God nonetheless. As a boy Eldon had watched dozens of frightened rattlesnakes held high by chanting hillbillies who believed that God had anointed them against the lethal compounds in the bulging poison sacs behind the slitted eyes. He knew better. He had seen many of those hillbillies bitten on their hands, arms, necks, and faces, and every blessed one had suffered fleshly torments beyond their imagination. Some had lost digits, others limbs, and two had lost their lives. Eldon knew their fates because he had been one of those hillbillies once, not by choice or even by birth but by the authority of the State of Tennessee. He also knew that the skeptics who accused his adoptive father of keeping the snakes in refrigerators to make them sluggish, or of milking their venom before the services, had no idea whom they were talking about. The faith of those hillbillies was as genuine as the rocks they plowed from the brick-hard earth of the Appalachian foothills every day but Sunday. They wanted death in the church with them when they witnessed to the Lord. Eldon had personally gathered many of the vipers for Sunday and Wednesday services. The church elders had quickly seen that the big, birthmarked boy taken from the Presbyterian Children’s Home in Knoxville had the gift—so much so that his adoptive father had begged him to take up the cloth himself. But that was another story …

Eldon watched the sunlight play upon the coral’s overlapping scales, each scale part of a perfect minuet of indescribable beauty. There had been no corals in Tennessee. You had to go east to North Carolina or south to Mississippi to find them. But during his long walks in the wilderness around Jackson, he had seen three or four in the past few years. It was one of the hidden pleasures of this much-maligned state.

The serpent’s body curled around his arm in a fluid figure eight, a perfect symbol of infinity. His adoptive father’s congregation had believed snakes to be incarnations of Satan, but the twin serpents on the caduceus that Eldon wore on a chain around his neck were far more representative of the reptile’s true nature, at least in the symbolic realm. Serpents symbolized healing because the ancient Greeks had seen their skin-shedding as a process of healing and rebirth. Had the Greeks understood microbiology, they would have observed much deeper links between serpents and the secret machinery of life. But even the ancients had understood that snakes personified the fundamental paradox of all medicinal drugs: in small doses they cured, while in large ones they killed. He held the coral snake up to his face and laughed richly, then opened the Nike bag, slid the snake inside, and zipped it shut.

Turning toward the distant clearing where he’d parked his car, Dr. Tarver experienced a sense of fulfillment that far exceeded that which he had felt upon finding the dead birds. Indeed, he felt blessed. Americans lived in constant fear, yet they never really knew how close they were to death at all hours of the day and night. If you wanted to find death, you hardly had to go looking for it.

Stay in one place long enough, and it would find you.

Dr. Tarver’s journey to his laboratory took him north along Interstate 55, east of the main cluster of office buildings that surrounded Jackson’s great capitol dome. To his left, the AmSouth tower jutted up from the low skyline of the capital city. His gaze moved along the sixteenth floor, to the blue-black windows of the corner office. Eldon had driven along this interstate and checked those windows almost every day for the past five years. But today was the first time that sunlight had ever flashed back from the office like a silver beacon, reflecting off the aluminum foil that he had named as an emergency signal all those years ago.

The muscles of his big chest tightened, and his breathing shallowed. There had been bumps in the road before—small matters of planning, or miscommunication. But never had anything justified the use of this signal. The foil meant real trouble. Eldon had chosen this primitive method for precisely the same reason that intelligence agencies did. If you were truly in danger, possibly even blown, the worst thing you could do was contact your associates by any traceable method. Unlike a telephone or a computer or a pager, the foil was nonspecific. No one could ever prove it was a signal. Not even the NSA could train cameras on every square inch of land from which that square of foil could be seen. No, the foil had been a good idea. So had the prearranged meeting. Andrew Rusk knew where to go; the question was, could he get there without being followed?

What could the emergency signal imply other than unwanted interest on the part of someone? But who? The police? The FBI? At the most fundamental level, it didn’t matter. Dr. Tarver’s first instinct was to eliminate the source of the danger. Only Andrew Rusk knew his identity, or anything about his recent activities. And Rusk could not be trusted to keep silent under pressure.

The lawyer thought he was strong, and by the standards of the early-twenty-first-century yuppie he might be. But that particular subspecies of Homo sapiens had no clue to the true nature of strength or hardship. No idea of self-reliance. Seconds after seeing the aluminum foil, Eldon was thinking of finding a comfortable perch overlooking one of the streets Rusk drove every day and putting a large-caliber bullet through the lawyer’s cerebral cortex. Only by doing this could he insure his own safety. Of course, if he killed Rusk, he would never know the nature of the threat. Killing Rusk would also mean activating his escape plan, and Dr. Tarver wasn’t ready to leave the country yet. He still had important work to do.

He glanced down at the Nike bag on the front seat beside him. The prearranged meeting place was thirty miles away. Did he have time to run the birds out to his lab? Should he risk meeting Rusk at all? Yes, answered his instinct. Not one death has yet been called murder by the police. Not publicly anyway. Even logic dictated that he should risk the meeting. No one could trap him in the place he had designated.

A new possibility arced through Eldon’s mind. What if Rusk had put up the aluminum foil as bait? What if he’d somehow been caught and, in exchange for leniency, was offering up his accomplice on a platter? There might be cops waiting at the lab right now. Eldon could afford to lose the birds. West Nile was an unpredictable virus, highly variable in patient populations, depending on preexisting immunities, cross-immunities, other factors. The possibility of capture outweighed any possible gain in research. Dr. Tarver gripped the wheel tighter, exited I-55 at Northside Drive, then got back onto the elevated freeway, heading south.

What about the coral snake, though? He hated the idea of ditching it with the birds. Perhaps it should attend the emergency meeting. Or should he do as he’d once done after his briefcase was stolen from his car at the mall? Park his unlocked car in a remote section of the lot with an expensive bag on the seat. In the chaotic free-for-all of crime that was Jackson, a thief had stolen the bag in less than thirty minutes. Dr. Tarver had always imagined the look on the felon’s face when he expectantly opened the bag and found not plunder but a coiled whip of muscle and deadly fangs. Instant karma, shitbird …

A wicked smile glittered in his beard. It was funny how seemingly unrelated events revealed hidden significance as time passed. The foil on the building and the coral snake might well be connected in some Jungian web of synchronicity. Maybe the snake was somehow the resolution of the problem signaled by the foil.

He unzipped the bag and waited for the yellow-banded head to emerge. Ten miles melted beneath his tires before it did. When the first red band slid out of the bag, Dr. Tarver took the coral’s head between his thumb and forefinger and drew its body out of the bag. Children were sometimes bitten by corals because the snakes were so beautiful that kids couldn’t resist picking them up. Were corals not naturally so secretive, there would be a lot more dead children in the American South.

The serpent hung suspended for a moment, then coiled itself around the doctor’s big forearm for the second time. A euphoric rush dilated his blood vessels. Unlike chemically induced highs, the reaction caused by the sliding of scales against his bare skin never lost its potency. He felt the thrill of a young boy holding a gun for the first time: the intoxicating power of holding death in your hand. The death of others, the ability to bring about your own …

As he drove southward, Dr. Tarver reveled in the proximity of eternity.

NINE

Even after three shots of vodka, Chris found himself unable to sleep. At 5 a.m. he finally gave up. He slid silently out of bed and dressed in the closet, then walked out to the garage, loaded his bike onto the rack on his pickup, and drove twenty minutes to the north side of town. There, under a violet sky, he topped off his high-pressure tires, mounted his carbon fiber Trek, and started pedaling north on the lonely gray stripe of the Natchez Trace.

The windless air had felt warm and close while he was filling his tires, but now his forward motion cooled him to the point of a chill. This far south, most of the two-lane Trace was a tunnel created by the high, arching branches of the red oaks that lined the parkway. The effect was that of a natural cathedral that extended for miles. Through the few breaks in the canopy Chris saw a yellow half-moon, still high despite the slowly rising sun. He pumped his legs with a metronomic rhythm, breathing with almost musical regularity. Small animals skittered away as he passed, and every half mile or so, groups of startled deer leapt into the shelter of the trees.

A warm, steady rain began to fall. Landmarks rolled by like a film without a sound track: Loess Bluff, with its steadily eroding face of rare soil; the split-rail fence that marked the ranger station at Mount Locust; the high bridge over Cole’s Creek, from which you could see Low Water Bridge, the site of some of Chris’s happiest childhood memories. After he crossed the high bridge he got serious, pumping his thighs like a Tour de France rider, trying to work out the accumulated anxiety of the past eighteen hours. The thing was, you couldn’t work out anxiety arising from circumstances that remained outside your control, and Special Agent Alex Morse was definitely not under his control. He jammed it all the way to the end of this stretch of the Trace, then made a 180-degree turn and headed back southwest.

Out of the whisper of tires on wet pavement came a faint chirping. It took him fifty feet to recognize the sound of his cell phone. Half the time he had no reception out here; that was one reason he chose the Trace to ride. Reaching carefully backward, he dug his cell phone from the Gore-Tex pouch hanging beneath his seat. The LCD said unknown caller. Chris started to ignore the call, but the early hour made him wonder if one of his hospital patients was in trouble. It might even be Tom Cage, calling about the mystery case on 4-North.

“Dr. Shepard,” he said in his professional voice.

“Hello, Doctor,” said a strangely familiar voice.

“Darryl?” he asked, almost sure that he recognized his old fraternity brother’s voice. “Foster?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“You finally got my message, huh?”

“Just now. I know it’s early, but I figured you hadn’t changed much since college. Always the first one awake, even with a hangover.”

“I appreciate you calling, man.”

“Well, that name you mentioned really woke me up. Why in the world are you asking me about Alex Morse? Did you meet her or something?”

Chris debated about how much to reveal. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say yet.”

“Woo-woo-woo,” Foster said mockingly. “So what do you want to know about her?”

“Anything you can tell me. Is she really an FBI agent?”

“Sure. Or she used to be, anyway. The truth is, I’m not sure about her official status now.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know the lady, Chris, so take all this with a grain of salt. But Alex Morse was a bona fide star in the Bureau. She started out as what we call a blue flamer. Kind of like you in college—A’s on everything, always doing more than you had to. She made quite a name for herself as a hostage negotiator. Word was, she was the best. Anything high-profile or hush-hush, the director flew her in to handle it.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense.”

“Absolutely. I don’t know the whole scoop, but a couple of months ago, Morse lost her shit and got somebody killed.”

Chris’s legs stopped pumping. “Who got killed?” he asked, coasting along the pavement. “A hostage?”

“No. A fellow agent.”

“How did that happen?”

“Word is, it was a super-tense hostage scene, and Morse flipped out. The Hostage Rescue Team—basically our SWAT guys—was given the order to go in, and Morse couldn’t deal with it. She charged back into the scene—apparently to try to keep negotiating—and everybody started shooting. An agent named James Broadbent got his heart blown out by a shotgun. I did know Jim personally. He was your all-American guy with a wife and two kids. There was some talk that he was having an affair with Morse at the time, but you never know what’s true in those situations.”

Chris was trying to absorb this fast enough to ask intelligent questions. “So you don’t know if Morse is legit or not,” he temporized.

“No. You want me to find out?”

“Can you do it without setting off any alarms in Washington?”

“Maybe. But you need to tell me what this is about.”

“Darryl, is there any chance that Morse could be involved in a murder investigation?”

Foster said nothing for a while. “I don’t think so. We don’t handle murder cases, you know? Not unless there are special circumstances. Civil rights murders, stuff like that.”

“On TV it’s always FBI agents chasing the serial killers.”

“That’s Hollywood bullshit. One very small branch of the Bureau advises local and state cops on murder cases—if they request it—but they never make arrests or anything like that.”

Chris couldn’t think of any brilliant questions, and he didn’t want Foster to get aggressive with his own. “I really appreciate you calling back, Darryl. Thank you.”

“You can’t give me any more details than you already have?”

Chris searched his mind for some plausible explanation. “Morse was originally from Mississippi, okay? That’s all I can say right now. If anything strange happens, I’ll call you back.”

“Guess that’ll have to do,” Foster said, sounding far from satisfied. “Hey, how’s that new wife of yours?”

“Fine, she’s good.”

“Sorry I missed the wedding. But Jake Preston told me she’s hot. Like really hot.”

Chris managed a laugh. “She looks good, yeah.”

“Goddamn doctors. They always get the hot ones.”

Chris laughed genuinely this time, hearing some of his old friend’s personality come through. “Thanks again, Darryl. I mean it.”

“I’ll call you back when I get the story on Morse. Could be today. Probably tomorrow, though.”

“Any time is fine. Hey, where are you living now?”

“Still the Windy City. It’s nice this time of year, but I froze my ass off last winter. I’m ready for Miami or L.A.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah. Talk to you soon.”

Chris stuffed his phone back into the seat pouch and dug in hard. There were cars and trucks moving along the Trace now, most carrying workers who lived beyond the borders of the long but narrow strip of federal land. The speed limit on the Trace was fifty—great for bikers if the commuters had observed it, but none did. Checking his watch, he realized that he probably wouldn’t make it home in time to take Ben to school. That would make Thora wonder, but he’d had to do something to dissipate the tension that Morse’s visit had caused.

Now Foster’s call had canceled out any relief he’d felt from the exercise. He had more information now, but no real answers. Alex Morse was a star FBI agent who’d screwed up and gotten someone killed. Fine. She’d admitted the screw-up herself. But what was she now? A field agent working a legitimate case? Or a rogue agent working her sister’s murder without permission? In one respect it didn’t matter, because Chris was convinced that in her views of his situation, she was out of her goddamn mind.

He wrenched his handlebars to the right as a car blasted by from behind, its horn blaring, its tires spraying water. He almost took a spill on the shoulder, then made a last-second recovery and edged back onto the wet pavement. The driver was too far gone to see now, but Chris flipped him off anyway. He wouldn’t normally have done that, but then he wouldn’t normally have allowed a vehicle to catch him unawares on a seldom-traveled road.

As his tires thrummed along the pavement’s edge, he saw another biker in the distance, approaching on the opposite side of the Trace. As the distance closed, Chris saw that the rider was female. He raised his hand in greeting, then hit his brakes.

The rider was Alexandra Morse.

TEN

Agent Morse wasn’t wearing a biking helmet, but her dark hair was drawn back into a soaking-wet ponytail, making her facial scars all the more prominent. It was the scars that allowed Chris to recognize her. He could hardly believe her presence, and he was about ready to sprint right past her when she crossed the road and hissed to a stop a yard away from him.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“I needed to talk to you. This seemed like a good way to do it.”

“How did you know I was here?”

Morse only smiled.

Chris looked her from head to toe, taking in the soaked clothes stuck to her body and her dripping ponytail. She had chill bumps on her arms and legs, and the cotton tulane law shirt she was wearing would take forever to dry, even if the rain stopped.

“And the bike?” he asked. “You a big cyclist?”

“No. I bought it four days ago, when I found out that you were a biker and your wife was a runner.”

“You’ve been following Thora, too?”

Morse’s smile faded. “I’ve shadowed a couple of her runs. She’s fast.”

“Jesus.” Chris shook his head and started to ride away.

“Wait!” Morse cried. “I’m not a threat, Dr. Shepard!”

He stopped and looked back. “I’m not so sure of that.”

“Why not?”

He thought of Darryl Foster’s words. “Call it instinct.”

“You have good instincts about sources of danger?”

“In the past I have.”

“Even when those sources are human?”

A red pickup truck whizzed past, its rider staring at them.

“Why don’t we keep riding?” Morse suggested. “We’ll be less noticeable talking that way.”

“I don’t intend to continue yesterday’s conversation.”

She looked incredulous. “Surely you must have some questions for me.”

Chris looked off into the trees, then turned and let some of his anger through his eyes. “Yes, I do. My first question is, did you personally see my wife go into this divorce lawyer’s office?”

Morse took a small step backward. “Not personally, no, but—”

“Who did?”

“Another agent.”

“How did he identify Thora?”

“He followed her down to her car, then took down her license plate.”

“Her license plate. No chance of a mistake? No chance he got one number wrong, and it could have been someone else?”

Morse shook her head. “He shot a picture of her.”

“Do you have that picture?”

“Not on me. But she was wearing a very distinctive outfit. A black silk dress with a white scarf and an Audrey Hepburn hat. Not many women can pull that kind of thing off anymore.”

Chris gritted his teeth. Thora had worn that same outfit to a party only a month ago. “Do you have any recordings of her conversation with the lawyer? Copies of any memos or files? Anything that proves what they talked about?”

Morse reluctantly shook her head.

“So you admit that it’s possible that they talked about wills and estates, or investments, or something else legitimate.”

Agent Morse looked down at her wet shoes. After a while, she looked back up and said, “It’s possible, yes.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

She bit her bottom lip but said nothing.

“Agent Morse, I happen to know from my wife’s recent behavior that what you suggested yesterday is impossible.”

The FBI agent looked intrigued, but instead of asking what he was talking about, she said, “It’s ten miles back to your truck. Why don’t we ride back together? I promise not to piss you off, if I can help it.”

Chris knew he could leave Morse behind in seconds. But for some reason—maybe just the manners he’d been raised with—he decided not to. He shrugged, climbed into his pedal clips, and started southward at an easy pace. Morse fell in beside him and immediately started talking.

“Have you called anybody about me?”

He decided to leave Darryl Foster out of the conversation. “I figured you’d already know the answer to that. Aren’t you tapping my phones?”

She ignored this. “I’m sure you have some questions for me, after all I said yesterday.”

Chris shook the rain out of his eyes. “I’ll admit I’ve done some thinking about what you told me, especially about the medical side.”

“Good. Go on.”

“I want to know more about these unexplained deaths, as you called them.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How the people died. Was it a stroke in every case?”

“No. Only my sister’s.”

“Really. What were the other causes of death?”

“Pulmonary embolism in one. Myocardial infarction in another.”

“What else?”

A hundred feet of road passed beneath them before Morse answered. “The rest were cancer.”

Chris looked sharply over at her, but Morse kept watching the road. “Cancer?”

She nodded over her handlebars, and water dripped off her nose. “Fatal malignancies.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“You’re telling me this cluster of suspicious deaths that has you so worked up involves people who’ve died of cancer?”

“Yes.”

He thought about this for a while. “How many victims were there? Total?”

“Nine deaths tied to the divorce lawyer I told you about. Six cancers that I’ve traced so far.”

“Same kind of tumor in every person?”

“That depends on how picky you are. They were all blood cancers.”

“Call me picky. Blood cancer encompasses a whole constellation of diseases, Agent Morse. There are over thirty different types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas alone. At least a dozen different leukemias. Were all the deaths from one type of blood cancer, at least?”

“No. Three leukemias, two lymphomas, one multiple myeloma.”

Chris shook his head. “You’re out of your mind. You really believe someone is murdering people by giving them different kinds of cancer?”

Morse looked over at him, and her eyes were as grim as any he’d ever seen.

“I know it.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Are you so sure? You’re not an oncologist.”

Chris snorted. “It doesn’t take an oncologist to realize that would be a stupid way to murder someone—even if it were possible. Even if you could somehow induce cancer in your victim, it could take years for that person to die, if they died at all. A lot of people survive leukemia now. Lymphomas, too. And people live well over five years with myeloma after bone marrow transplants. Some patients have two transplants and live ten years or more.”

“All these patients died in eighteen months or less.”

This brought him up short. “Eighteen months from diagnosis to death? All of them?”

“All but one. The myeloma patient lived twenty-three months after an autologous bone marrow transplant.”

“Aggressive cancers, then. Very aggressive.”

“Obviously.”

Morse wanted him to work this out for himself. “These people who died … they were all married to wealthy people?”

“All of them. To very wealthy people.”

“And all the surviving spouses were clients of the same divorce lawyer?”

Morse shook her head. “I never said that. I said all the surviving spouses wound up in business with the same divorce lawyer—and only after the deaths of their spouses. Big deals, mostly, one-offs that had nothing to do with the lawyer’s area of expertise.”

Chris nodded, but his mind was still on Morse’s cancer theory. “I don’t want to get into a technical argument, but even if all these patients died from leukemias, you’re talking about several different disease etiologies. And the actual carcinogenesis isn’t understood in a majority of types. Include the lymphomas, and you’re dealing with entirely different cell groups—the erythroid and B-cell malignancies—and the causes of those cancers are also unknown. The fact that your ‘blood cancers’ killed in less than eighteen months is probably their only similarity. In every other way they’re probably as different from each other as pancreatic cancer and a sarcoma. And if the best oncologists in the world don’t know what causes those cancers, who do you think could intentionally cause them to commit murder?”

“Radiation causes leukemia,” Morse said assertively. “You don’t have to be a genius to give someone cancer.”

She’s right, Chris realized. Many initial survivors of Hiroshima died of leukemia in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, as did many “survivors” of the Chernobyl disaster. Marie Curie died of leukemia caused by her radium experiments. You could cause sophisticated genetic damage with a metaphorically blunt instrument. His mind instantly jumped to the issue of access to gamma radiation. You’d have to consider physicians, dentists, veterinarians—hell, even some medical technologists had access to X-ray machines or the radioactive isotopes used for radiotherapy. Agent Morse’s theory was based on more than wild speculation. Yet the basic premise still seemed ludicrous to him.

“It’s been done before, you know,” Morse said.

“What has?”

“During the late 1930s, the Nazis experimented with ways of sterilizing large numbers of Jews without their knowledge. They asked subjects to sit at a desk and fill out some forms that would take about fifteen minutes. During that time, high-energy gamma rays were fired at their genitals from three sides. The experiment worked.”

“My God.”

“Why couldn’t someone do the same thing to an unsuspecting victim in a lawyer’s office?” Morse asked. “Or a dentist’s office?”

Chris pedaled harder but said nothing.

“You know that researchers purposely cause cancer in lab animals all the time, right?”

“Of course. They do it by injecting carcinogenic chemicals into the animals. And chemicals like that are traceable, Agent Morse. Forensically, I mean.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “In an ideal world. But you said yourself, it takes time to die from cancer. After eighteen months, all traces of the offending carcinogen could be gone. Benzene is a good example.”

Chris knit his brow in thought. “Benzene causes lung cancer, doesn’t it?”

“Also leukemia and multiple myeloma,” she informed him. “They proved that by testing factory workers with minor benzene exposure in Ohio and in China.”

She’s done her homework, he thought. Or someone has. “Have you done extensive toxicological studies in all these deaths?”

“Almost none of them.”

This stunned him. “Why not?”

“Several of the bodies were cremated before we became suspicious.”

“That’s convenient.”

“And in the other cases, we couldn’t get permission to exhume the bodies.”

“Again, why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

Chris sensed that he was being played. “I don’t buy that, Agent Morse. If the FBI wanted forensic studies, they’d get them. What about the families of these alleged victims? Did they suspect foul play? Is that how you got into this case? Or was it your sister’s accusation that started it all?”

Two big touring motorcycles swept around a long curve ahead, their lights illuminating the rain.

“The families of several victims suspected foul play from the beginning.”

“Even though their relatives died of cancer?”

“Yes. Most of the husbands we’re talking about are real bastards.”

Big surprise. “Had all of these alleged victims filed for divorce?”

“None had.”

“None? Did the husbands file, then?”

Morse looked over at him again. “Nobody filed.”

“Then what the hell happened? People consulted this lawyer but didn’t file?”

“Exactly. We think there’s probably a single consultation—maybe two visits, at most. The lawyer waits for a really wealthy client who stands to lose an enormous amount of money in his divorce. Or maybe the client stands to lose custody of his kids. But when the lawyer senses that he has a truly desperate client—a client with intense hatred for his spouse—he makes his pitch.”

“That’s an interesting scenario. Can you prove any of it?”

“Not yet. This lawyer is very savvy. Paranoid, in fact.”

Chris gazed at her in disbelief. “You can’t even prove that any murders have occurred, much less that anyone specific is involved. You’ve got nothing but speculation.”

“I have my sister’s word, Doctor.”

“Spoken on her deathbed, after a severe stroke.”

Morse’s face became a mask of defiant determination.

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Chris said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I see that kind of tragedy week in and week out, and I know what it does to families.”

She said nothing.

“But you have to admit, it’s a pretty elaborate theory you’ve developed. It’s Hollywood stuff, in fact,” he said, recalling Foster’s words. “Not real life.”

Morse did not look angry; in fact, she looked mildly amused. “Dr. Shepard, in 1995, a forty-four-year-old neurologist was arrested at the Vanderbilt Medical Center with a six-inch syringe and a four-inch needle in his pocket. The syringe was filled with boric acid and salt water. I’m sure you know that solution would have been lethal if injected into a human heart.”

“That’s about the only thing a four-inch needle’s good for,” Chris thought aloud.

“The neurologist was planning to murder a physician who’d been his supervisor when he was a resident there. When police searched a storage unit he owned, they found books on assassination and the production of toxic biological agents. They also found a jar containing ricin, one of the deadliest poisons in the world. The neurologist had planned to soak the pages of a book with a solvent mixture that would promote the absorption of ricin through the skin.” Morse looked over at Chris with a raised eyebrow. “Is that elaborate enough for you?”

Chris shifted down two gears and pedaled ahead.

Morse quickly rode alongside him again. “In 1999, a woman in San Jose, California, was admitted to the hospital with nausea and blinding headaches. They gave her a CAT scan and found nothing. But a technician had laid the woman’s earrings down next to a stack of unexposed X-ray film. When they were developed, the tech saw an apparent defect on each of the films. It was very distinctive. He finally figured out that one of the woman’s earrings had exposed the films.”

“The earrings were radioactive?”

“One of them was. The woman’s husband was a radiation oncologist. The police called in the Bureau, and we discovered that her cell phone was as hot as a piece of debris from Chernobyl. Turned out her husband had hidden a small pellet of cesium inside the phone. Of course, by that time he’d put the pellet back into its lead-lined case at his office. But the traces were still there.”

“Did she develop cancer?”

“She hasn’t yet, but she may. She absorbed hundreds of times the permissible exposure.”

“What happened to the radiation oncologist?”

“He’s in San Quentin now. My point is, doctors aren’t immune to homicidal impulses. And they’re capable of very elaborate plans to carry them out. I could cite dozens of similar cases for you.”

Chris waved his right hand. “Save your breath. I know some stone-crazy doctors myself.” Despite his casual retort, he was sobered by Morse’s revelations.

“There are four and a half thousand doctors in Mississippi,” she said. “Add to that about five thousand dentists. Then you have veterinarians, med techs, university researchers, nurses—a massive suspect pool, even if you assume the killer is from Mississippi. And I’ve only been onto this theory for seven days.”

As Morse spoke, Chris realized that the apparent enormity of the task was illusory; it only existed because of a lack of baseline information. “You’ve got to find the cause of death in these people—or rather the cause of the cause, the etiology of these blood cancers. If it is radiation, you could start narrowing your suspect pool pretty quickly.”

Her voice took on an excited edge. “An expert I talked to says radiation is the surest and simplest method.”

“But you don’t have forensic evidence? No radiation burns, or strange symptoms noted long before the cancer was diagnosed?”

“No. Again, because local law enforcement authorities don’t believe these deaths were murder, there’s a problem of access to the bodies.”

“What about the medical records of the alleged victims?”

“I managed to get the records of two victims from angry family members. But experts have been over both of them in microscopic detail, and they haven’t turned up anything suspicious.”

Chris blinked against stinging sweat that the rain had washed into his eyes.

“But I’m told that radiation could explain the variation in the cancers,” Morse went on. “You expose somebody to radiation, there’s no way to predict how their cells will react.”

Chris nodded, but something about this idea bothered him. “Your expert is right. But then, why are blood cancers the only result? Why no solid tumors? Why no melanomas? And why only superaggressive blood cancers? You couldn’t predict something like that with radiation.”

“Maybe you could,” Morse suggested. “If you were a radiation oncologist.”

“Maybe,” Chris conceded. “If you managed to expose the bone marrow primarily, you might get more blood cancers than other types. But if that’s true, you just shrank your suspect pool by about ten thousand people.”

Morse smiled. “Believe me, every radiation oncologist in Mississippi is under investigation at this moment.”

“How many are there?”

“Nineteen. But it’s not a simple matter of alibis. I can’t ask some doctor where he was on a given day at a given time, because we have no way to know when the victims were dosed. You see?”

“Yeah. Dragnet methods are out the window. But it’s not just a doctor you’re looking for, right? It’s the lawyer, too. If you’re right, he functions almost like the killer’s agent.”

“Exactly. Only he handles an assassin instead of a quarterback or a singer.”

Chris laughed softly. “How would a relationship like that get started? You can’t go scouting for promising young assassins. There’s no national draft. Does your greedy lawyer put an ad on the Internet to recruit someone who can kill people without a trace? Does he hire a medical headhunter?”

“I know it sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, but we’re talking about a lot of money here.”

“How much?”

“Millions in every case. So the lawyer has a pretty big carrot to hold out in front of someone who probably makes a hundred grand or less at his legitimate job.”

To break the monotony of the ride, Chris gently steered left and right. Morse gave him room to ride his serpentine course.

“Lawyers get to know a lot of professional criminals in the course of their work,” she pointed out. “And necessity is the mother of invention, right? I think this guy simply saw a demand for a service and then found a way to provide it.”

Chris pedaled out in front of her so that a large truck could pass. Illegally, since big trucks weren’t allowed on the Trace. “A lot of what you say makes sense,” he called over the sound of the receding truck, “but I still say your theory doesn’t add up.”

“Why not?” Morse asked, pulling alongside again.

“The time factor. If I want to kill someone, it’s because I really hate them, or because I stand to gain a hell of a lot if they die. Or maybe I stand to lose millions of dollars if my wife goes on living, like you said yesterday. What if she wants to take my children away forever? I’m not going to wait months or years for her to croak. I want immediate action.”

“Even if that’s the case,” said Morse, “the most likely result of any conventional murder—especially in a divorce situation—is the killer going to jail. And if you’re not going to try the murder yourself, who do you hire? You’re a multimillionaire. You don’t have a gangsta posse to turn to. Imagine how someone that desperate might react to a slick lawyer offering him a risk-free road out of his problems. A perfect murder is worth waiting for.”

She has a point, Chris thought. “I can see that. But no matter how you slice it, there’s an element of urgency in a divorce situation. People go crazy. They’ll do anything to get out of their marriage. There’s a frantic desire to move on, to marry their lover, whatever.”

“You’re right, of course,” Morse agreed. “But you’ve already waited years for your freedom. Maybe decades. Any divorce lawyer can tell you that obtaining a divorce—the whole process from beginning to end—can take a very long time. If the divorce is contested, we’re talking nightmare delays. Even filing under irreconcilable differences, spouses often argue back and forth for a year or more. People are hurting, they stonewall, negotiations break down. You can wind up in court even if it’s the last thing you wanted. Years can go by.” Morse was suddenly puffing hard. “If your lawyer told you that in the same amount of time that your divorce would take, he could save you millions of dollars, guarantee you full custody of your children, and prevent them from hating you—you’d have to at least consider what he had to say, wouldn’t you?”

They were crossing the high bridge over Cole’s Creek. Chris braked to a stop, climbed off, and leaned the Trek against the concrete rail.

“You’ve got me,” he said. “If you remove urgency from the equation, then a delayed-action weapon becomes viable. You could use something like cancer as a weapon. If it’s technically possible.”

“Thank you,” Alex said softly. She leaned her bike against the concrete and gazed at the brown water drifting lazily over the sand fifty feet below.

Chris watched a burst of tiny drops pepper the surface of the water, then vanish. The rain was slacking off. “Didn’t you tell me that some of the victims were men?”

“Yes. In two cases, the surviving spouses were female.”

“So there’s a precedent for women murdering the husbands in this thing.”

Morse took a deep breath, then looked up at him and said, “That’s why I’m here with you, Doctor.”

Chris tried to imagine Thora secretly driving up to Jackson for a clandestine meeting with a divorce lawyer. He simply couldn’t do it. “I buy your logic, okay? But in my case it’s irrelevant, and for lots of reasons. The main one is that if Thora asked me for a divorce, I’d give her one. Simple as that. And I think she knows that.”

Morse shrugged. “I don’t know the lady.”

“You’re right. You don’t.” The concrete rail was not even waist high to Chris. He sometimes urinated off it during his rides. He suppressed the urge to do so now.

“It’s beautiful down there,” Morse said, gazing down the winding course of the creek. “It looks like virgin wilderness.”

“It’s as close as you’ll find. It hasn’t been logged since the 1930s, and it’s federal land. I spent a lot of time walking that creek as a boy. I found dozens of arrowheads and spear points in it. The Natchez Indians hunted along that creek for a thousand years before the French came.”

She smiled. “You’re lucky to have had a childhood like that.”

Chris knew she was right. “We only lived in Natchez for a few years—IP moved my dad around a lot, between mills, you know?—but Dad showed me a lot of things out in these woods. After heavy rains, we’d each take one bank of the creek and work our way along it. After one mudslide, I found three huge bones. They turned out to be from a woolly mammoth. Fifteen thousand years old.”

“Wow. I had no idea that kind of stuff was around here.”

Chris nodded. “We’re walking in footsteps everywhere we go.”

“The footsteps of the dead.”

He looked up at the sound of an approaching engine. It was a park ranger’s cruiser. He lifted his hand, recalling a female ranger who’d patrolled this stretch of the Trace for a couple of years. After she moved on, he’d seen her face on the back of a bestselling mystery novel set on the Trace. The place seemed to touch everyone who spent time here.

“What are you thinking, Doctor?”

He was thinking about Darryl Foster, and what Foster had told him about Alexandra Morse. Chris didn’t want to bluntly challenge her, but he did want to know how honest she was being with him.

“From the moment we met,” he said, looking into her green eyes, “you’ve been digging into my personal life. I want to dig into yours for a minute.”

He could almost see the walls going up. But at length she nodded assent. What choice did she have?

“Your scars,” he said. “I can tell they’re recent. I want to know how you got them.”

She turned away and stared down at the rippling sand beneath the surface of the water. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice that had surrendered something. Gone was the professional authority, yet in its place was a raw sincerity that told him he was hearing something very like the truth.

“There was a man,” she said. “A man I worked with at the Bureau. His name was James Broadbent. People called him Jim, but he preferred James. They often assigned him to protect me at hostage scenes. He … he was in love with me. I really cared for him, too, but he was married. Two kids. We were never intimate, but even if we had been, he would never have left his family. Never. You understand?”

Chris nodded.

She looked back down at the water. “I was a good hostage negotiator, Doctor. Some said the best ever. In five years I never lost a hostage. That’s rare. But last December …” Morse faltered, then found the thread again. “My father was killed trying to stop a robbery. Two months later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Very advanced, and you know what that means.”

“I’m sorry.”

Morse shrugged. “I sort of lost it after that. Only I didn’t know it, see? My dad had raised me to be tough, so that’s what I tried to be. ‘Never quit,’ that’s the Morse motto. From Winston Churchill to my father and right down to me.”

Chris nodded with as much empathy as he could.

“I’m getting to the scars, I promise,” she said. “Nine weeks ago, I was called to a hostage scene at a bank. Not a normal bank. A Federal Reserve bank in D.C. Sixteen hostages inside, most of them employees. A lot of suits at the Bureau had the idea this was a terrorist attack. Others thought it was about money. It could have been both—a sophisticated robbery raising capital for terrorist operations. But my gut told me it was something else. The leader spoke with an Arabic accent, but it didn’t sound real to me. He was angry, maybe schizophrenic. He had a lot of rage toward the government. I could tell he’d experienced loss in the recent past, like a lot of people who try something extreme.” Morse gave Chris a tight smile. “Like me, you’re thinking? Anyway, an associate deputy director named Dodson had overall command, and he didn’t give me enough time to do my job. I had a real chance to talk the leader down without anyone firing a shot. All my experience and instinct told me that. And there were sixteen lives at stake, you know? But there was a lot of pressure from above, this being Washington in its post-9/11 mind-set. So Dodson jerked me out of there and ordered in the HRT.”

Chris saw that she was reliving the memory as she recounted the events. She’d probably been over it a million times in the privacy of her head, but how many times had she spoken of it to someone else?

“There was no way to resolve the situation with snipers. It had to be an explosive entry, which meant extreme risk to the hostages. I couldn’t accept that. So I marched right back through the cordon and into the bank. My people were screaming at me, but I barely heard them. Some HRT guys didn’t get the word in time, and they blew the doors and windows just as I reached the lobby. Flash-bang-crash grenades, the works.” Morse touched her scarred cheek as though feeling the injury for the first time. “One of the robbers shot me from behind a plate-glass partition. I caught shards mostly, but what I didn’t know was that James had followed me into the bank. When I was hit, he looked down at me instead of up for the shooter, which was what he should have done. His feelings for me were stronger than his training. And they train us hard, you know?” Morse wiped her face as though to brush away cobwebs, but Chris saw the glint of tears.

“Hey,” he said, reaching out and squeezing her arm. “It’s okay.”

She shook her head with surprising violence. “No, it’s not. Maybe someday it will be, but right now it’s not.”

“I know one thing,” Chris said. “In the shape you’re in, you don’t need to be working a murder case. You need a medical leave.”

Morse laughed strangely. “I’m on medical leave now.”

As he looked down at her, everything suddenly came clear. Her deep fatigue, her obsessiveness, the thousand-yard stare of a shell-shocked soldier … “You’re on your own, aren’t you?”

She shook her head again, but her chin was quivering.

“You say I a lot more than you say we.”

Morse bit her bottom lip, then squinted as though against bright sunlight.

“Is that how it is?” he asked gently. “Are you alone?”

When she looked up at him, her eyes were wet with more than rain. “Pretty much. The truth is, almost everything I’ve done beginning five weeks ago was unauthorized. They’d fire me if they knew.”

Chris whistled long and low. “Jesus Christ.”

She took him by the wrists and spoke with fierce conviction. “You’re my last shot, Dr. Shepard. My no-shit last shot.”

“Last shot at what?”

“Stopping these people. Proving what they’ve done.”

“Look,” he said awkwardly, “if everything you’ve told me is true, why isn’t the FBI involved?”

Frustration hardened her face. “A dozen reasons, none of them good. Murder’s a state crime, not a federal one, unless it’s a RICO case. A lot of what I have is inference and supposition, not objective evidence. But how the hell am I supposed to get evidence without any resources? The FBI is the most hidebound bureaucracy you can imagine. Everything is done by the book—unless it involves counterterrorism, of course, in which case they throw the book right out the window. But nobody’s going to nail the guys I’m after by using the Marquess of Queensberry rules.”

Chris didn’t know what to say. Yesterday morning his life had been ticking along as usual; now he was standing on a bridge in the rain, watching a woman he barely knew fall apart.

“If you’re acting alone, who saw Thora go into the lawyer’s office?”

“A private detective. He used to work for my father.”

“Jesus. What does the FBI think you’re doing right now?”

“They think I’m in Charlotte, working a prostitution case involving illegal aliens. When they transferred me there after I was shot, I got lucky. I found an old classmate from the Academy there. He’s done a lot to cover for me. But it can’t go on much longer.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know I’m not making perfect sense about everything. I haven’t slept more than three hours a night in five weeks. It took me two weeks just to find the connection between my brother-in-law and the divorce lawyer. Then another week to come up with the names of all his business partners. I only came up with my list of victims a week ago. There could be a dozen more, for all I know. But then your wife walked into Rusk’s office, and that brought me to Natchez. I’ve been splitting my time between here and Jackson, where my mother is dying, and—”

“Who’s Rusk?” Chris cut in. “The divorce lawyer?”

“Yes. Andrew Rusk Jr. His father’s a big plaintiff’s attorney in Jackson.” More tears joined the raindrops on her cheeks. “Fuck, it’s a mess! I need your help, Doctor. I need your medical knowledge, but most of all I need you, because you’re the next victim.” Morse’s eyes locked onto his with eerie intensity. “Do you get that?”

Chris closed his eyes. “Nothing you’ve said today even remotely proves that.”

Her frustration finally boiled over. “Listen to me! I know you don’t like hearing it, but your wife drove two hours to Jackson to meet with Andrew Rusk, and she lied to you by not telling you about it. What do you think that adds up to?”

“Not murder,” Chris said stubbornly. “I don’t believe that. I can’t.”

Morse touched his arm. “That’s because you’re a doctor, not a lawyer. Every district attorney in this country has a list of people who come in on a weekly basis to plead with them to open a murder case on their loved one. The deaths are recorded as accidents, suicides, fires, a hundred things. But the parents or the children or the wives of the victims … they know the truth. It was murder. So they work their way through the system, begging for someone to take notice, to at least classify what happened as a crime. They hire detectives and spend their life savings trying to find the truth, to find justice. But they almost never do. Eventually they turn into something like ghosts. Some of them stay ghosts for the rest of their lives.” Morse looked at Chris with the furious eyes of a hardened combat soldier. “I’m no ghost, Doctor. I will not stand by and let my sister be erased for someone’s convenience—for his profit.” Her voice took on a dangerous edge. “As God is my witness, I will not do that.”

Out of respect, Chris waited a few moments to respond. “I support what you’re doing, okay? I even admire you for it. But the difference is, you have a personal stake in this. I don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, you do. You just haven’t accepted it yet.”

“Please don’t start again.”

“Doctor, I would do anything to get you to help me. Do you understand? I’d go over there in the bushes and pull my shorts down for you, if that’s what it would take.” Her eyes gleamed with cold fire. “But I don’t have to do that.”

Chris didn’t like the look that had come into her face. “Why not?”

“Because your wife is cheating on you.”

He tried to keep the shock out of his face, but nothing could slow his pounding heart.

“Thora’s screwing a surgeon right here in town,” Morse went on. “His name is Shane Lansing.”

“Bullshit,” Chris said in a hoarse whisper.

Morse’s eyes didn’t waver.

“Do you have proof?”

“Circumstantial evidence.”

“Circumstantial …? I don’t want to hear it.”

“Denial is always the first response.”

“Shut up, goddamn it!”

Morse’s face softened. “I know how it hurts, okay? I was engaged once, until I found out my fiancé was doing my best friend. But pride is your enemy now, Chris. You have to see things straight.”

“I should see things straight? You’re the one spinning out Byzantine theories of mass murder. Cancer as a weapon, a newlywed planning to murder her husband … no wonder you’re out on your own!”

Morse’s level gaze was unrelenting. “If I’m crazy, then tell me one thing. Why didn’t you call the FBI to report me yesterday?”

He stared down at the concrete rail.

“Why, Chris?”

He felt the words come to him as if of their own accord. “Thora’s leaving town this week. She told me last night.”

Morse’s mouth dropped open. “Where’s she going?”

“Up to the Delta. A spa up in Greenwood. A famous hotel.”

“The Alluvian?”

He nodded.

“I know it. When’s she leaving?”

“Maybe tomorrow. This week, for sure.”

“Returning when?”

“Three nights, then home.”

Morse made a fist and brought it to her mouth. “This is it, Chris. My God … they’re moving fast. You have to deal with this now. You’re in extreme danger. Right now.”

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you hear yourself? Everything you told me is circumstantial. There wasn’t one fact in the whole goddamn pile!”

“I know it seems that way. I know you don’t want to believe any of it. But … look, do you want to know everything I know?”

He stared at her for a long time. “I don’t think so.” He looked at his watch. “I’m really late. I need to get back to my truck. I can’t wait for you now.”

He climbed onto his bike and started to leave, but Morse grabbed his elbow with surprising strength. With her other hand she removed something from her shorts. A cell phone.

“Take this,” she said. “My cell number is programmed into it. You can speak frankly on it. It’s the only safe link we’ll have.”

He pushed the phone away. “I don’t want it.”

“Don’t be a sap, Chris. Please.”

He looked at the phone like a tribesman suspicious of some miraculous technology. “How would I explain it to Thora?”

“Thora’s leaving town. You can hide it for a day or two, can’t you?”

He angrily expelled air from his cheeks, but he took the phone.

Morse’s eyes fairly shone with urgency. “You have to drop the nice-guy routine, Chris. You’re in mortal fucking peril.”

A strange laugh escaped his mouth. “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that.”

“Time will take care of that. One way or another.”

He wanted to race away, but again his Southern upbringing stopped him. “Will you be okay out here?”

Morse turned and lifted the tail of her shirt, revealing the molded butt of a semiautomatic pistol. It looked huge against her tiny waist. As he stared, she climbed onto her bike and gripped her handlebars. “Call me soon. We don’t have much time to prepare.”

“What if I call the FBI instead?”

She shrugged as though genuinely unconcerned. “Then my career is over. But I won’t stop. And I’ll still try to save you.”

Chris slipped his feet into his pedal clips and rode quickly away.

ELEVEN

Andrew Rusk gunned his Porsche Cayenne, shot across two lanes of traffic, then checked his rearview mirror. For the past week, he’d had the feeling that someone was following him. Not only on the road, either. He usually ate lunch in the finer local restaurants, and on more than one occasion he’d had the sense that someone was watching him, turning away just before he looked around to catch them. But he felt it most on the highway. Yet if someone was tailing him, they were good. Probably using multiple vehicles—which was a bad sign. Multiple vehicles meant official interest, and he didn’t want to have to say anything to Glykon about official interest. And he hadn’t had to, so long as he remained unsure.

Today was different. Today a dark blue Crown Victoria had been pacing him ever since he climbed onto I-55. He had made several extreme changes in speed, and the Crown Vic had stayed with him. When Rusk pretended to exit the freeway, then shot back onto the interstate at the last second, his pursuer had finally betrayed himself. The good news was that a law enforcement entity using multiple vehicles would be extremely unlikely to make a bush-league mistake like that. The bad news was that Rusk had a meeting to make, and no time to waste losing a tail.

As he drove southward, a possible solution came to him. Exiting onto Meadowbrook Drive, he drove under the interstate and headed east. The Crown Vic stayed ten car lengths behind. Soon he was rolling through Old Eastover, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the capital city. Rusk wondered if the Ford might be a government car. The FBI sometimes used Crown Vics. Underpowered American crap …

He kept to the main street, which was slowly but steadily dropping in elevation. He wondered whether his tail knew that this gradual drop was caused by their increasing proximity to the Pearl River. A few years ago, the area ahead of them had been a flood plain, unsuitable for building. It was still a flood plain, but in the interim money had spoken, and now the low-lying land was a spanking new housing development.

A few years back, Rusk had done some kayaking on the Pearl with a friend who was getting in shape for a float trip in Canada. At that time, the woods near the edge of the river had been honeycombed with dirt roads, most of them kept open by crazy kids on four-wheelers. If Rusk was right, some of those rutted roads would still be there, in spite of the new houses …

He turned right and parked the Cayenne in front of a large ranch house. Would the Crown Vic pull up behind him? Or would it try to preserve some illusion of unconcern? He watched the dark blue silhouette slow as it passed the opening to the street, then drive on. Rusk shot forward, following the residential street through its long U-shape and back to the main road of the subdivision. When he emerged, the road in front of him was empty.

He checked his rearview mirror: the Crown Vic was idling about a hundred yards behind him. Rusk floored the accelerator, and the Turbo roared, pressing him into the seat like an astronaut in the boost phase of a launch. In seconds he was hurtling toward a wall of trees and chest-high weeds.

As the dead-end barrier expanded to nightmare proportions, Rusk spied a dirt road to the left of it. The opening was scarcely wide enough to accommodate the Porsche, but he didn’t hesitate. With a rush of adrenaline, he wrenched his wheel left, gunned the Turbo, and blew right through the opening in the trees, praying that he wouldn’t meet some kid on a four-wheeler and crush him like a bug on his grille.

The Cayenne jounced up and down like a dune buggy in Baja, but Rusk kept his foot jammed nearly to the floor. The ass of the Cayenne flew into the air, and its nose slammed down into a deep hole, spraying water in all directions. Before all momentum died, Rusk jiggered the steering wheel and applied power, letting the four-wheel drive do its work. After a few tense moments, the rear tires found traction and he scrambled up out of the hole, his front wheels spinning with a high whine. Rusk howled with delight when his front wheels grabbed the sandy ground and hurled him down the rutted track, his engine growling like an angry grizzly bear.

No cheap-ass Crown Victoria could follow him through that hole. The only remaining trick was to find his way back to a paved road before his pursuer figured out where he might emerge. He kept bearing toward the river—or where he thought the river was—keeping his eyes open for a wider track. His instinct didn’t fail him. In less than a minute, he saw the broad brown stream of the Pearl cutting through a wide ravine thirty yards below. He whipped the wheel to the right and started following the river’s course.

Where was the Crown Vic? Was its driver a Jackson native? Would he guess that Rusk was trying to work his way south and back onto paved roads? The mystery man in the Crown Vic could easily call for backup: another car, or maybe even a chopper. A chopper would be tough to evade, unless Rusk abandoned the Cayenne and went to ground in the woods. But what would that accomplish? They already knew who he was. He’d long had an escape plan in place—one that would put him out of reach of all American authorities—but it would be tough to implement if they were already sending choppers after him.

They’re not, he told himself. It’s not even a they, as far as I know. It’s one guy.

“Yeah, but who?” he said aloud.

That fucking girl.

Rusk gritted his teeth against the juddering of the Porsche. All he could do was play the hand he was dealt.

A beautiful wooden canoe rounded the river bend ahead of him, piloted by two college-age girls with bright red backpacks stowed between them. Rusk wondered if they’d started out on the Strong River, then entered the Pearl not far away. He’d floated that trip back in high school, with some fellow Boy Scouts. As Rusk watched the girls, that memory brought strange baggage with it. He was a long way from the Boy Scouts now—good old Pack 8. And their motto … holy Christ. There was a reason people called babes in the woods Boy Scouts—

Rusk mashed his brake pedal. Just beyond a cluster of thick bamboo stalks on his right, a dark tunnel opened in the trees. Deep wheel ruts led into it, and at the opening lay a pile of half-burned logs and about a hundred empty beer cans. Rusk nodded with satisfaction. That road led back to civilization. He gave the Porsche some gas, ramped over a sand berm, and raced toward the tunnel. Ten seconds later the shadows swallowed him. He was still laughing when he bounced onto clean asphalt and drove unmolested toward the I-55 overpass towering in the distance.

TWELVE

The sun was fully up now, and Chris was pushing his pickup well over the speed limit. The rain had finally petered out, but his left front wheel threw up a wall of glistening spray as he swung onto the bypass that would take him to Highway 61 South.

Alex Morse’s final revelation had left him hollow inside. He couldn’t really think about it yet. But at least he’d solved the mystery that Darryl Foster had been unable to explain. Special Agent Morse was a rogue agent conducting a murder investigation that the FBI knew nothing about. And not just an investigation, but a quest, a single-minded mission to punish those she believed had murdered her sister. She had been on that mission for five weeks, yet all she had produced were some fascinating theories and circumstantial evidence. And yet, he thought with something like shame, when she finally offered to reveal real evidence, I cut her off. As he passed the Super Wal-Mart, he picked up the cell phone Morse had given him and dialed the only number in the SIM memory.

“It’s Alex,” Morse answered. “Are you okay? I know I hit you pretty hard back there about Thora.”

“What evidence do you have tying my wife to Shane Lansing?”

Morse took an audible breath. “Twice this week, Dr. Lansing has stopped at your new house while Thora was there.”

Chris felt a wave of relief. “So what? Shane lives in that neighborhood.”

“The first time he stayed inside for twenty-eight minutes.”

“And the second?”

“Fifty-two minutes.”

Fifty-two minutes. Long enough to— “Thora was probably showing off the place to him. She designed the house herself. And there were workmen there, right?”

Morse’s reply was a blunt as a hammer. “No workmen.”

“Neither time?”

“Neither time. I’m sorry, Chris.”

He grimaced. “That could still be innocent contact, you know?”

“Is that how you think of Shane Lansing? A choirboy?”

Chris didn’t think of Lansing in those terms at all.

“No matter who I ask about him,” Morse said, “I hear three things: he’s a gifted surgeon, he’s an arrogant asshole who treats nurses like shit, and he’s a pussy hound.”

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