Chris’s legs stopped pumping. “Who got killed?” he asked, coasting along the pavement. “A hostage?”
“No. A fellow agent.”
“How did that happen?”
“Word is, it was a super-tense hostage scene, and Morse flipped out. The Hostage Rescue Team—basically our SWAT guys—was given the order to go in, and Morse couldn’t deal with it. She charged back into the scene—apparently to try to keep negotiating—and everybody started shooting. An agent named James Broadbent got his heart blown out by a shotgun. I did know Jim personally. He was your all-American guy with a wife and two kids. There was some talk that he was having an affair with Morse at the time, but you never know what’s true in those situations.”
Chris was trying to absorb this fast enough to ask intelligent questions. “So you don’t know if Morse is legit or not,” he temporized.
“No. You want me to find out?”
“Can you do it without setting off any alarms in Washington?”
“Maybe. But you need to tell me what this is about.”
“Darryl, is there any chance that Morse could be involved in a murder investigation?”
Foster said nothing for a while. “I don’t think so. We don’t handle murder cases, you know? Not unless there are special circumstances. Civil rights murders, stuff like that.”
“On TV it’s always FBI agents chasing the serial killers.”
“That’s Hollywood bullshit. One very small branch of the Bureau advises local and state cops on murder cases—if they request it—but they never make arrests or anything like that.”
Chris couldn’t think of any brilliant questions, and he didn’t want Foster to get aggressive with his own. “I really appreciate you calling back, Darryl. Thank you.”
“You can’t give me any more details than you already have?”
Chris searched his mind for some plausible explanation. “Morse was originally from Mississippi, okay? That’s all I can say right now. If anything strange happens, I’ll call you back.”
“Guess that’ll have to do,” Foster said, sounding far from satisfied. “Hey, how’s that new wife of yours?”
“Fine, she’s good.”
“Sorry I missed the wedding. But Jake Preston told me she’s hot. Like really hot.”
Chris managed a laugh. “She looks good, yeah.”
“Goddamn doctors. They always get the hot ones.”
Chris laughed genuinely this time, hearing some of his old friend’s personality come through. “Thanks again, Darryl. I mean it.”
“I’ll call you back when I get the story on Morse. Could be today. Probably tomorrow, though.”
“Any time is fine. Hey, where are you living now?”
“Still the Windy City. It’s nice this time of year, but I froze my ass off last winter. I’m ready for Miami or L.A.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah. Talk to you soon.”
Chris stuffed his phone back into the seat pouch and dug in hard. There were cars and trucks moving along the Trace now, most carrying workers who lived beyond the borders of the long but narrow strip of federal land. The speed limit on the Trace was fifty—great for bikers if the commuters had observed it, but none did. Checking his watch, he realized that he probably wouldn’t make it home in time to take Ben to school. That would make Thora wonder, but he’d had to do something to dissipate the tension that Morse’s visit had caused.
Now Foster’s call had canceled out any relief he’d felt from the exercise. He had more information now, but no real answers. Alex Morse was a star FBI agent who’d screwed up and gotten someone killed. Fine. She’d admitted the screw-up herself. But what was she now? A field agent working a legitimate case? Or a rogue agent working her sister’s murder without permission? In one respect it didn’t matter, because Chris was convinced that in her views of his situation, she was out of her goddamn mind.
He wrenched his handlebars to the right as a car blasted by from behind, its horn blaring, its tires spraying water. He almost took a spill on the shoulder, then made a last-second recovery and edged back onto the wet pavement. The driver was too far gone to see now, but Chris flipped him off anyway. He wouldn’t normally have done that, but then he wouldn’t normally have allowed a vehicle to catch him unawares on a seldom-traveled road.
As his tires thrummed along the pavement’s edge, he saw another biker in the distance, approaching on the opposite side of the Trace. As the distance closed, Chris saw that the rider was female. He raised his hand in greeting, then hit his brakes.
The rider was Alexandra Morse.
CHAPTER 10
Agent Morse wasn’t wearing a biking helmet, but her dark hair was drawn back into a soaking-wet ponytail, making her facial scars all the more prominent. It was the scars that allowed Chris to recognize her. He could hardly believe her presence, and he was about ready to sprint right past her when she crossed the road and hissed to a stop a yard away from him.
“Good morning, Doctor.”
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“I needed to talk to you. This seemed like a good way to do it.”
“How did you know I was here?”
Morse only smiled.
Chris looked her from head to toe, taking in the soaked clothes stuck to her body and her dripping ponytail. She had chill bumps on her arms and legs, and the cotton TULANE LAW shirt she was wearing would take forever to dry, even if the rain stopped.
“And the bike?” he asked. “You a big cyclist?”
“No. I bought it four days ago, when I found out that you were a biker and your wife was a runner.”
“You’ve been following Thora, too?”
Morse’s smile faded. “I’ve shadowed a couple of her runs. She’s fast.”
“Jesus.” Chris shook his head and started to ride away.
“Wait!” Morse cried. “I’m not a threat, Dr. Shepard!”
He stopped and looked back. “I’m not so sure of that.”
“Why not?”
He thought of Darryl Foster’s words. “Call it instinct.”
“You have good instincts about sources of danger?”
“In the past I have.”
“Even when those sources are human?”
A red pickup truck whizzed past, its rider staring at them.
“Why don’t we keep riding?” Morse suggested. “We’ll be less noticeable talking that way.”
“I don’t intend to continue yesterday’s conversation.”
She looked incredulous. “Surely you must have some questions for me.”
Chris looked off into the trees, then turned and let some of his anger through his eyes. “Yes, I do. My first question is, did you personally see my wife go into this divorce lawyer’s office?”
Morse took a small step backward. “Not personally, no, but—”
“Who did?”
“Another agent.”
“How did he identify Thora?”
“He followed her down to her car, then took down her license plate.”
“Her license plate. No chance of a mistake? No chance he got one number wrong, and it could have been someone else?”
Morse shook her head. “He shot a picture of her.”
“Do you have that picture?”
“Not on me. But she was wearing a very distinctive outfit. A black silk dress with a white scarf and an Audrey Hepburn hat. Not many women can pull that kind of thing off anymore.”
Chris gritted his teeth. Thora had worn that same outfit to a party only a month ago. “Do you have any recordings of her conversation with the lawyer? Copies of any memos or files? Anything that proves what they talked about?”
Morse reluctantly shook her head.
“So you admit that it’s possible that they talked about wills and estates, or investments, or something else legitimate.”
Agent Morse looked down at her wet shoes. After a while, she looked back up and said, “It’s possible, yes.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
She bit her bottom lip but said nothing.
“Agent Morse, I happen to know from my wife’s recent behavior that what you suggested yesterday is impossible.”
The FBI agent looked intrigued, but instead of asking what he was talking about, she said, “It’s ten miles back to your truck. Why don’t we ride back together? I promise not to piss you off, if I can help it.”
Chris knew he could leave Morse behind in seconds. But for some reason—maybe just the manners he’d been raised with—he decided not to. He shrugged, climbed into his pedal clips, and started southward at an easy pace. Morse fell in beside him and immediately started talking.
“Have you called anybody about me?”
He decided to leave Darryl Foster out of the conversation. “I figured you’d already know the answer to that. Aren’t you tapping my phones?”
She ignored this. “I’m sure you have some questions for me, after all I said yesterday.”
Chris shook the rain out of his eyes. “I’ll admit I’ve done some thinking about what you told me, especially about the medical side.”
“Good. Go on.”
“I want to know more about these unexplained deaths, as you called them.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How the people died. Was it a stroke in every case?”
“No. Only my sister’s.”
“Really. What were the other causes of death?”
“Pulmonary embolism in one. Myocardial infarction in another.”
“What else?”
A hundred feet of road passed beneath them before Morse answered. “The rest were cancer.”
Chris looked sharply over at her, but Morse kept watching the road. “Cancer?”
She nodded over her handlebars, and water dripped off her nose. “Fatal malignancies.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me this cluster of suspicious deaths that has you so worked up involves people who’ve died of cancer?”
“Yes.”
He thought about this for a while. “How many victims were there? Total?”
“Nine deaths tied to the divorce lawyer I told you about. Six cancers that I’ve traced so far.”
“Same kind of tumor in every person?”
“That depends on how picky you are. They were all blood cancers.”
“Call me picky. Blood cancer encompasses a whole constellation of diseases, Agent Morse. There are over thirty different types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas alone. At least a dozen different leukemias. Were all the deaths from one type of blood cancer, at least?”
“No. Three leukemias, two lymphomas, one multiple myeloma.”
Chris shook his head. “You’re out of your mind. You really believe someone is murdering people by giving them different kinds of cancer?”
Morse looked over at him, and her eyes were as grim as any he’d ever seen.
“I know it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Are you so sure? You’re not an oncologist.”
Chris snorted. “It doesn’t take an oncologist to realize that would be a stupid way to murder someone—even if it were possible. Even if you could somehow induce cancer in your victim, it could take years for that person to die, if they died at all. A lot of people survive leukemia now. Lymphomas, too. And people live well over five years with myeloma after bone marrow transplants. Some patients have two transplants and live ten years or more.”
“All these patients died in eighteen months or less.”
This brought him up short. “Eighteen months from diagnosis to death? All of them?”
“All but one. The myeloma patient lived twenty-three months after an autologous bone marrow transplant.”
“Aggressive cancers, then. Very aggressive.”
“Obviously.”
Morse wanted him to work this out for himself. “These people who died…they were all married to wealthy people?”
“All of them. To very wealthy people.”
“And all the surviving spouses were clients of the same divorce lawyer?”
Morse shook her head. “I never said that. I said all the surviving spouses wound up in business with the same divorce lawyer—and only after the deaths of their spouses. Big deals, mostly, one-offs that had nothing to do with the lawyer’s area of expertise.”
Chris nodded, but his mind was still on Morse’s cancer theory. “I don’t want to get into a technical argument, but even if all these patients died from leukemias, you’re talking about several different disease etiologies. And the actual carcinogenesis isn’t understood in a majority of types. Include the lymphomas, and you’re dealing with entirely different cell groups—the erythroid and B-cell malignancies—and the causes of those cancers are also unknown. The fact that your ‘blood cancers’ killed in less than eighteen months is probably their only similarity. In every other way they’re probably as different from each other as pancreatic cancer and a sarcoma. And if the best oncologists in the world don’t know what causes those cancers, who do you think could intentionally cause them to commit murder?”
“Radiation causes leukemia,” Morse said assertively. “You don’t have to be a genius to give someone cancer.”
She’s right, Chris realized. Many initial survivors of Hiroshima died of leukemia in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, as did many “survivors” of the Chernobyl disaster. Marie Curie died of leukemia caused by her radium experiments. You could cause sophisticated genetic damage with a metaphorically blunt instrument. His mind instantly jumped to the issue of access to gamma radiation. You’d have to consider physicians, dentists, veterinarians—hell, even some medical technologists had access to X-ray machines or the radioactive isotopes used for radiotherapy. Agent Morse’s theory was based on more than wild speculation. Yet the basic premise still seemed ludicrous to him.
“It’s been done before, you know,” Morse said.
“What has?”
“During the late 1930s, the Nazis experimented with ways of sterilizing large numbers of Jews without their knowledge. They asked subjects to sit at a desk and fill out some forms that would take about fifteen minutes. During that time, high-energy gamma rays were fired at their genitals from three sides. The experiment worked.”
“My God.”
“Why couldn’t someone do the same thing to an unsuspecting victim in a lawyer’s office?” Morse asked. “Or a dentist’s office?”
Chris pedaled harder but said nothing.
“You know that researchers purposely cause cancer in lab animals all the time, right?”
“Of course. They do it by injecting carcinogenic chemicals into the animals. And chemicals like that are traceable, Agent Morse. Forensically, I mean.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “In an ideal world. But you said yourself, it takes time to die from cancer. After eighteen months, all traces of the offending carcinogen could be gone. Benzene is a good example.”
Chris knit his brow in thought. “Benzene causes lung cancer, doesn’t it?”
“Also leukemia and multiple myeloma,” she informed him. “They proved that by testing factory workers with minor benzene exposure in Ohio and in China.”
She’s done her homework, he thought. Or someone has. “Have you done extensive toxicological studies in all these deaths?”
“Almost none of them.”
This stunned him. “Why not?”
“Several of the bodies were cremated before we became suspicious.”
“That’s convenient.”
“And in the other cases, we couldn’t get permission to exhume the bodies.”
“Again, why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
Chris sensed that he was being played. “I don’t buy that, Agent Morse. If the FBI wanted forensic studies, they’d get them. What about the families of these alleged victims? Did they suspect foul play? Is that
how you got into this case? Or was it your sister’s accusation that started it all?”
Two big touring motorcycles swept around a long curve ahead, their lights illuminating the rain.
“The families of several victims suspected foul play from the beginning.”
“Even though their relatives died of cancer?”
“Yes. Most of the husbands we’re talking about are real bastards.”
Big surprise. “Had all of these alleged victims filed for divorce?”
“None had.”
“None? Did the husbands file, then?”
Morse looked over at him again. “Nobody filed.”
“Then what the hell happened? People consulted this lawyer but didn’t file?”
“Exactly. We think there’s probably a single consultation—maybe two visits, at most. The lawyer waits for a really wealthy client who stands to lose an enormous amount of money in his divorce. Or maybe the client stands to lose custody of his kids. But when the lawyer senses that he has a truly desperate client—a client with intense hatred for his spouse—he makes his pitch.”
“That’s an interesting scenario. Can you prove any of it?”
“Not yet. This lawyer is very savvy. Paranoid, in fact.”
Chris gazed at her in disbelief. “You can’t even prove that any murders have occurred, much less that anyone specific is involved. You’ve got nothing but speculation.”
“I have my sister’s word, Doctor.”
“Spoken on her deathbed, after a severe stroke.”
Morse’s face became a mask of defiant determination.
“I’m not trying to upset you,” Chris said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I see that kind of tragedy week in and week out, and I know what it does to families.”
She said nothing.
“But you have to admit, it’s a pretty elaborate theory you’ve developed. It’s Hollywood stuff, in fact,” he said, recalling Foster’s words. “Not real life.”
Morse did not look angry; in fact, she looked mildly amused. “Dr. Shepard, in 1995, a forty-four-year-old neurologist was arrested at the Vanderbilt Medical Center with a six-inch syringe and a four-inch needle in his pocket. The syringe was filled with boric acid and salt water. I’m sure you know that solution would have been lethal if injected into a human heart.”