True Evil

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.