True Evil

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.