True Evil

“So there’s a precedent for women murdering the husbands in this thing.”

Morse took a deep breath, then looked up at him and said, “That’s why I’m here with you, Doctor.”

Chris tried to imagine Thora secretly driving up to Jackson for a clandestine meeting with a divorce lawyer. He simply couldn’t do it. “I buy your logic, okay? But in my case it’s irrelevant, and for lots of reasons. The main one is that if Thora asked me for a divorce, I’d give her one. Simple as that. And I think she knows that.”

Morse shrugged. “I don’t know the lady.”

“You’re right. You don’t.” The concrete rail was not even waist high to Chris. He sometimes urinated off it during his rides. He suppressed the urge to do so now.

“It’s beautiful down there,” Morse said, gazing down the winding course of the creek. “It looks like virgin wilderness.”

“It’s as close as you’ll find. It hasn’t been logged since the 1930s, and it’s federal land. I spent a lot of time walking that creek as a boy. I found dozens of arrowheads and spear points in it. The Natchez Indians hunted along that creek for a thousand years before the French came.”

She smiled. “You’re lucky to have had a childhood like that.”

Chris knew she was right. “We only lived in Natchez for a few years—IP moved my dad around a lot, between mills, you know?—but Dad showed me a lot of things out in these woods. After heavy rains, we’d each take one bank of the creek and work our way along it. After one mudslide, I found three huge bones. They turned out to be from a woolly mammoth. Fifteen thousand years old.”

“Wow. I had no idea that kind of stuff was around here.”

Chris nodded. “We’re walking in footsteps everywhere we go.”

“The footsteps of the dead.”

He looked up at the sound of an approaching engine. It was a park ranger’s cruiser. He lifted his hand, recalling a female ranger who’d patrolled this stretch of the Trace for a couple of years. After she moved on, he’d seen her face on the back of a bestselling mystery novel set on the Trace. The place seemed to touch everyone who spent time here.

“What are you thinking, Doctor?”

He was thinking about Darryl Foster, and what Foster had told him about Alexandra Morse. Chris didn’t want to bluntly challenge her, but he did want to know how honest she was being with him.

“From the moment we met,” he said, looking into her green eyes, “you’ve been digging into my personal life. I want to dig into yours for a minute.”

He could almost see the walls going up. But at length she nodded assent. What choice did she have?

“Your scars,” he said. “I can tell they’re recent. I want to know how you got them.”

She turned away and stared down at the rippling sand beneath the surface of the water. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice that had surrendered something. Gone was the professional authority, yet in its place was a raw sincerity that told him he was hearing something very like the truth.

“There was a man,” she said. “A man I worked with at the Bureau. His name was James Broadbent. People called him Jim, but he preferred James. They often assigned him to protect me at hostage scenes. He … he was in love with me. I really cared for him, too, but he was married. Two kids. We were never intimate, but even if we had been, he would never have left his family. Never. You understand?”

Chris nodded.

She looked back down at the water. “I was a good hostage negotiator, Doctor. Some said the best ever. In five years I never lost a hostage. That’s rare. But last December …” Morse faltered, then found the thread again. “My father was killed trying to stop a robbery. Two months later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Very advanced, and you know what that means.”

“I’m sorry.”

Morse shrugged. “I sort of lost it after that. Only I didn’t know it, see? My dad had raised me to be tough, so that’s what I tried to be. ‘Never quit,’ that’s the Morse motto. From Winston Churchill to my father and right down to me.”

Chris nodded with as much empathy as he could.

“I’m getting to the scars, I promise,” she said. “Nine weeks ago, I was called to a hostage scene at a bank. Not a normal bank. A Federal Reserve bank in D.C. Sixteen hostages inside, most of them employees. A lot of suits at the Bureau had the idea this was a terrorist attack. Others thought it was about money. It could have been both—a sophisticated robbery raising capital for terrorist operations. But my gut told me it was something else. The leader spoke with an Arabic accent, but it didn’t sound real to me. He was angry, maybe schizophrenic. He had a lot of rage toward the government. I could tell he’d experienced loss in the recent past, like a lot of people who try something extreme.” Morse gave Chris a tight smile. “Like me, you’re thinking? Anyway, an associate deputy director named Dodson had overall command, and he didn’t give me enough time to do my job. I had a real chance to talk the leader down without anyone firing a shot. All my experience and instinct told me that. And there were sixteen lives at stake, you know? But there was a lot of pressure from above, this being Washington in its post-9/11 mind-set. So Dodson jerked me out of there and ordered in the HRT.”

Chris saw that she was reliving the memory as she recounted the events. She’d probably been over it a million times in the privacy of her head, but how many times had she spoken of it to someone else?

“There was no way to resolve the situation with snipers. It had to be an explosive entry, which meant extreme risk to the hostages. I couldn’t accept that. So I marched right back through the cordon and into the bank. My people were screaming at me, but I barely heard them. Some HRT guys didn’t get the word in time, and they blew the doors and windows just as I reached the lobby. Flash-bang-crash grenades, the works.” Morse touched her scarred cheek as though feeling the injury for the first time. “One of the robbers shot me from behind a plate-glass partition. I caught shards mostly, but what I didn’t know was that James had followed me into the bank. When I was hit, he looked down at me instead of up for the shooter, which was what he should have done. His feelings for me were stronger than his training. And they train us hard, you know?” Morse wiped her face as though to brush away cobwebs, but Chris saw the glint of tears.

“Hey,” he said, reaching out and squeezing her arm. “It’s okay.”

She shook her head with surprising violence. “No, it’s not. Maybe someday it will be, but right now it’s not.”

“I know one thing,” Chris said. “In the shape you’re in, you don’t need to be working a murder case. You need a medical leave.”

Morse laughed strangely. “I’m on medical leave now.”

As he looked down at her, everything suddenly came clear. Her deep fatigue, her obsessiveness, the thousand-yard stare of a shell-shocked soldier … “You’re on your own, aren’t you?”

She shook her head again, but her chin was quivering.

“You say I a lot more than you say we.”

Morse bit her bottom lip, then squinted as though against bright sunlight.

“Is that how it is?” he asked gently. “Are you alone?”

When she looked up at him, her eyes were wet with more than rain. “Pretty much. The truth is, almost everything I’ve done beginning five weeks ago was unauthorized. They’d fire me if they knew.”

Chris whistled long and low. “Jesus Christ.”

She took him by the wrists and spoke with fierce conviction. “You’re my last shot, Dr. Shepard. My no-shit last shot.”

“Last shot at what?”

“Stopping these people. Proving what they’ve done.”

“Look,” he said awkwardly, “if everything you’ve told me is true, why isn’t the FBI involved?”

Frustration hardened her face. “A dozen reasons, none of them good. Murder’s a state crime, not a federal one, unless it’s a RICO case. A lot of what I have is inference and supposition, not objective evidence. But how the hell am I supposed to get evidence without any resources? The FBI is the most hidebound bureaucracy you can imagine. Everything is done by the book—unless it involves counterterrorism, of course, in which case they throw the book right out the window. But nobody’s going to nail the guys I’m after by using the Marquess of Queensberry rules.”

Chris didn’t know what to say. Yesterday morning his life had been ticking along as usual; now he was standing on a bridge in the rain, watching a woman he barely knew fall apart.

“If you’re acting alone, who saw Thora go into the lawyer’s office?”

“A private detective. He used to work for my father.”

“Jesus. What does the FBI think you’re doing right now?”

“They think I’m in Charlotte, working a prostitution case involving illegal aliens. When they transferred me there after I was shot, I got lucky. I found an old classmate from the Academy there. He’s done a lot to cover for me. But it can’t go on much longer.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know I’m not making perfect sense about everything. I haven’t slept more than three hours a night in five weeks. It took me two weeks just to find the connection between my brother-in-law and the divorce lawyer. Then another week to come up with the names of all his business partners. I only came up with my list of victims a week ago. There could be a dozen more, for all I know. But then your wife walked into Rusk’s office, and that brought me to Natchez. I’ve been splitting my time between here and Jackson, where my mother is dying, and—”

“Who’s Rusk?” Chris cut in. “The divorce lawyer?”

“Yes. Andrew Rusk Jr. His father’s a big plaintiff’s attorney in Jackson.” More tears joined the raindrops on her cheeks. “Fuck, it’s a mess! I need your help, Doctor. I need your medical knowledge, but most of all I need you, because you’re the next victim.” Morse’s eyes locked onto his with eerie intensity. “Do you get that?”

Chris closed his eyes. “Nothing you’ve said today even remotely proves that.”

Her frustration finally boiled over. “Listen to me! I know you don’t like hearing it, but your wife drove two hours to Jackson to meet with Andrew Rusk, and she lied to you by not telling you about it. What do you think that adds up to?”

“Not murder,” Chris said stubbornly. “I don’t believe that. I can’t.”

Morse touched his arm. “That’s because you’re a doctor, not a lawyer. Every district attorney in this country has a list of people who come in on a weekly basis to plead with them to open a murder case on their loved one. The deaths are recorded as accidents, suicides, fires, a hundred things. But the parents or the children or the wives of the victims … they know the truth. It was murder. So they work their way through the system, begging for someone to take notice, to at least classify what happened as a crime. They hire detectives and spend their life savings trying to find the truth, to find justice. But they almost never do. Eventually they turn into something like ghosts. Some of them stay ghosts for the rest of their lives.” Morse looked at Chris with the furious eyes of a hardened combat soldier. “I’m no ghost, Doctor. I will not stand by and let my sister be erased for someone’s convenience—for his profit.” Her voice took on a dangerous edge. “As God is my witness, I will not do that.”

Out of respect, Chris waited a few moments to respond. “I support what you’re doing, okay? I even admire you for it. But the difference is, you have a personal stake in this. I don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, you do. You just haven’t accepted it yet.”

“Please don’t start again.”

“Doctor, I would do anything to get you to help me. Do you understand? I’d go over there in the bushes and pull my shorts down for you, if that’s what it would take.” Her eyes gleamed with cold fire. “But I don’t have to do that.”

Chris didn’t like the look that had come into her face. “Why not?”

“Because your wife is cheating on you.”

He tried to keep the shock out of his face, but nothing could slow his pounding heart.

“Thora’s screwing a surgeon right here in town,” Morse went on. “His name is Shane Lansing.”

“Bullshit,” Chris said in a hoarse whisper.

Morse’s eyes didn’t waver.

“Do you have proof?”

“Circumstantial evidence.”

“Circumstantial …? I don’t want to hear it.”

“Denial is always the first response.”

“Shut up, goddamn it!”

Morse’s face softened. “I know how it hurts, okay? I was engaged once, until I found out my fiancé was doing my best friend. But pride is your enemy now, Chris. You have to see things straight.”

“I should see things straight? You’re the one spinning out Byzantine theories of mass murder. Cancer as a weapon, a newlywed planning to murder her husband … no wonder you’re out on your own!”

Morse’s level gaze was unrelenting. “If I’m crazy, then tell me one thing. Why didn’t you call the FBI to report me yesterday?”

He stared down at the concrete rail.

“Why, Chris?”

He felt the words come to him as if of their own accord. “Thora’s leaving town this week. She told me last night.”

Morse’s mouth dropped open. “Where’s she going?”

“Up to the Delta. A spa up in Greenwood. A famous hotel.”

“The Alluvian?”

He nodded.

“I know it. When’s she leaving?”

“Maybe tomorrow. This week, for sure.”

“Returning when?”

“Three nights, then home.”

Morse made a fist and brought it to her mouth. “This is it, Chris. My God … they’re moving fast. You have to deal with this now. You’re in extreme danger. Right now.”

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you hear yourself? Everything you told me is circumstantial. There wasn’t one fact in the whole goddamn pile!”

“I know it seems that way. I know you don’t want to believe any of it. But … look, do you want to know everything I know?”

He stared at her for a long time. “I don’t think so.” He looked at his watch. “I’m really late. I need to get back to my truck. I can’t wait for you now.”

He climbed onto his bike and started to leave, but Morse grabbed his elbow with surprising strength. With her other hand she removed something from her shorts. A cell phone.

“Take this,” she said. “My cell number is programmed into it. You can speak frankly on it. It’s the only safe link we’ll have.”

He pushed the phone away. “I don’t want it.”

“Don’t be a sap, Chris. Please.”

He looked at the phone like a tribesman suspicious of some miraculous technology. “How would I explain it to Thora?”

“Thora’s leaving town. You can hide it for a day or two, can’t you?”

He angrily expelled air from his cheeks, but he took the phone.

Morse’s eyes fairly shone with urgency. “You have to drop the nice-guy routine, Chris. You’re in mortal fucking peril.”

A strange laugh escaped his mouth. “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that.”

“Time will take care of that. One way or another.”

He wanted to race away, but again his Southern upbringing stopped him. “Will you be okay out here?”

Morse turned and lifted the tail of her shirt, revealing the molded butt of a semiautomatic pistol. It looked huge against her tiny waist. As he stared, she climbed onto her bike and gripped her handlebars. “Call me soon. We don’t have much time to prepare.”

“What if I call the FBI instead?”

She shrugged as though genuinely unconcerned. “Then my career is over. But I won’t stop. And I’ll still try to save you.”

Chris slipped his feet into his pedal clips and rode quickly away.

ELEVEN

Andrew Rusk gunned his Porsche Cayenne, shot across two lanes of traffic, then checked his rearview mirror. For the past week, he’d had the feeling that someone was following him. Not only on the road, either. He usually ate lunch in the finer local restaurants, and on more than one occasion he’d had the sense that someone was watching him, turning away just before he looked around to catch them. But he felt it most on the highway. Yet if someone was tailing him, they were good. Probably using multiple vehicles—which was a bad sign. Multiple vehicles meant official interest, and he didn’t want to have to say anything to Glykon about official interest. And he hadn’t had to, so long as he remained unsure.

Today was different. Today a dark blue Crown Victoria had been pacing him ever since he climbed onto I-55. He had made several extreme changes in speed, and the Crown Vic had stayed with him. When Rusk pretended to exit the freeway, then shot back onto the interstate at the last second, his pursuer had finally betrayed himself. The good news was that a law enforcement entity using multiple vehicles would be extremely unlikely to make a bush-league mistake like that. The bad news was that Rusk had a meeting to make, and no time to waste losing a tail.

As he drove southward, a possible solution came to him. Exiting onto Meadowbrook Drive, he drove under the interstate and headed east. The Crown Vic stayed ten car lengths behind. Soon he was rolling through Old Eastover, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the capital city. Rusk wondered if the Ford might be a government car. The FBI sometimes used Crown Vics. Underpowered American crap …

He kept to the main street, which was slowly but steadily dropping in elevation. He wondered whether his tail knew that this gradual drop was caused by their increasing proximity to the Pearl River. A few years ago, the area ahead of them had been a flood plain, unsuitable for building. It was still a flood plain, but in the interim money had spoken, and now the low-lying land was a spanking new housing development.

A few years back, Rusk had done some kayaking on the Pearl with a friend who was getting in shape for a float trip in Canada. At that time, the woods near the edge of the river had been honeycombed with dirt roads, most of them kept open by crazy kids on four-wheelers. If Rusk was right, some of those rutted roads would still be there, in spite of the new houses …

He turned right and parked the Cayenne in front of a large ranch house. Would the Crown Vic pull up behind him? Or would it try to preserve some illusion of unconcern? He watched the dark blue silhouette slow as it passed the opening to the street, then drive on. Rusk shot forward, following the residential street through its long U-shape and back to the main road of the subdivision. When he emerged, the road in front of him was empty.

He checked his rearview mirror: the Crown Vic was idling about a hundred yards behind him. Rusk floored the accelerator, and the Turbo roared, pressing him into the seat like an astronaut in the boost phase of a launch. In seconds he was hurtling toward a wall of trees and chest-high weeds.

As the dead-end barrier expanded to nightmare proportions, Rusk spied a dirt road to the left of it. The opening was scarcely wide enough to accommodate the Porsche, but he didn’t hesitate. With a rush of adrenaline, he wrenched his wheel left, gunned the Turbo, and blew right through the opening in the trees, praying that he wouldn’t meet some kid on a four-wheeler and crush him like a bug on his grille.

The Cayenne jounced up and down like a dune buggy in Baja, but Rusk kept his foot jammed nearly to the floor. The ass of the Cayenne flew into the air, and its nose slammed down into a deep hole, spraying water in all directions. Before all momentum died, Rusk jiggered the steering wheel and applied power, letting the four-wheel drive do its work. After a few tense moments, the rear tires found traction and he scrambled up out of the hole, his front wheels spinning with a high whine. Rusk howled with delight when his front wheels grabbed the sandy ground and hurled him down the rutted track, his engine growling like an angry grizzly bear.

No cheap-ass Crown Victoria could follow him through that hole. The only remaining trick was to find his way back to a paved road before his pursuer figured out where he might emerge. He kept bearing toward the river—or where he thought the river was—keeping his eyes open for a wider track. His instinct didn’t fail him. In less than a minute, he saw the broad brown stream of the Pearl cutting through a wide ravine thirty yards below. He whipped the wheel to the right and started following the river’s course.

Where was the Crown Vic? Was its driver a Jackson native? Would he guess that Rusk was trying to work his way south and back onto paved roads? The mystery man in the Crown Vic could easily call for backup: another car, or maybe even a chopper. A chopper would be tough to evade, unless Rusk abandoned the Cayenne and went to ground in the woods. But what would that accomplish? They already knew who he was. He’d long had an escape plan in place—one that would put him out of reach of all American authorities—but it would be tough to implement if they were already sending choppers after him.

They’re not, he told himself. It’s not even a they, as far as I know. It’s one guy.

“Yeah, but who?” he said aloud.

That fucking girl.

Rusk gritted his teeth against the juddering of the Porsche. All he could do was play the hand he was dealt.

A beautiful wooden canoe rounded the river bend ahead of him, piloted by two college-age girls with bright red backpacks stowed between them. Rusk wondered if they’d started out on the Strong River, then entered the Pearl not far away. He’d floated that trip back in high school, with some fellow Boy Scouts. As Rusk watched the girls, that memory brought strange baggage with it. He was a long way from the Boy Scouts now—good old Pack 8. And their motto … holy Christ. There was a reason people called babes in the woods Boy Scouts—

Rusk mashed his brake pedal. Just beyond a cluster of thick bamboo stalks on his right, a dark tunnel opened in the trees. Deep wheel ruts led into it, and at the opening lay a pile of half-burned logs and about a hundred empty beer cans. Rusk nodded with satisfaction. That road led back to civilization. He gave the Porsche some gas, ramped over a sand berm, and raced toward the tunnel. Ten seconds later the shadows swallowed him. He was still laughing when he bounced onto clean asphalt and drove unmolested toward the I-55 overpass towering in the distance.

TWELVE

The sun was fully up now, and Chris was pushing his pickup well over the speed limit. The rain had finally petered out, but his left front wheel threw up a wall of glistening spray as he swung onto the bypass that would take him to Highway 61 South.

Alex Morse’s final revelation had left him hollow inside. He couldn’t really think about it yet. But at least he’d solved the mystery that Darryl Foster had been unable to explain. Special Agent Morse was a rogue agent conducting a murder investigation that the FBI knew nothing about. And not just an investigation, but a quest, a single-minded mission to punish those she believed had murdered her sister. She had been on that mission for five weeks, yet all she had produced were some fascinating theories and circumstantial evidence. And yet, he thought with something like shame, when she finally offered to reveal real evidence, I cut her off. As he passed the Super Wal-Mart, he picked up the cell phone Morse had given him and dialed the only number in the SIM memory.

“It’s Alex,” Morse answered. “Are you okay? I know I hit you pretty hard back there about Thora.”

“What evidence do you have tying my wife to Shane Lansing?”

Morse took an audible breath. “Twice this week, Dr. Lansing has stopped at your new house while Thora was there.”

Chris felt a wave of relief. “So what? Shane lives in that neighborhood.”

“The first time he stayed inside for twenty-eight minutes.”

“And the second?”

“Fifty-two minutes.”

Fifty-two minutes. Long enough to— “Thora was probably showing off the place to him. She designed the house herself. And there were workmen there, right?”