True Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know.”

“You have a lot of admissions?”

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

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

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

“Why not ship him up to Jackson?”

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

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

“I don’t know, this time.”

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

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

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

“How does that feel?”

“I almost can’t take it.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“Well …?”

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

“Kiss them,” she whispered.

He did.

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

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

“What?” he cried.

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

“Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed. “I’m fine right here.”

“Good answer.”

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

“Why do you ask?”

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

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

“Is the new house bothering you again?”

“I haven’t even thought about it.”

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

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

“If it’s possible at all.”

“We’ll soon find out.”

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

“What?”

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

“The Alluvian?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

His face flushed. “What?”

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

“Thora … you can’t be serious.”

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded in a daze.

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

“No, thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He closed his eyes and kissed Thora with desperate fervor.

SEVEN

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

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

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

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

Jamie smiled. “I had a baseball game.”

“How did it go?”

“They killed us.”

“I’m sorry. How did you do?”

“I got a double.”

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

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

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

“Twice in one game?”

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

“Who’s Hank Aaron?” Jamie asked.

“He hit more home runs than Babe Ruth.”

“Oh. I thought that was Barry Bonds.”

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

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

“Yes, you do. Come on.”

“I think she’s over here right now.”

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

Jamie nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie looked surprised. “Really?”

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

“Will you stay on while I do it?”

Alex smiled. “You know I will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aunt Alex?”

“Yes?”

“I miss my mom.”

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

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

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