True Evil

“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.”