True Evil

“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.