“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 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.
CHAPTER 11
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.
CHAPTER 12
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 SIMM 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?”
Morse’s reply was a blunt as a hammer. “No workmen.”
“Neither time?”
“Neither time. I’m sorry, Chris.”
He grimaced. “That could still be innocent contact, you know?”
“Is that how you think of Shane Lansing? A choirboy?”
Chris didn’t think of Lansing in those terms at all.
“No matter who I ask about him,” Morse said, “I hear three things: he’s a gifted surgeon, he’s an arrogant asshole who treats nurses like shit, and he’s a pussy hound.”
Chris flinched.
“I also hear he likes them pretty,” Morse added. “Thora definitely meets that requirement.”
“Is that everything?”
“No. I’ve talked to a few nurses in the last five days.”
“And?”
“They say Thora had an affair with a married doctor when she first got to town. Seven years ago. That was before you knew her, right? The guy was an ER doctor. Did she ever tell you about that?”
“Who was the guy supposed to be?”
“His name was Dennis Stephens.”
A faint memory of a young, bearded face went through Chris’s mind. “Never heard of him.”
“Apparently the affair started getting out of hand, so Stephens took a job in another state.”
“The hospital is always buzzing with gossip like that.”
Morse said nothing.
“Thora would have been single at that time, anyway.”
“There’s also a story about her and an ophthalmic surgeon who was here for a while. This would have been just before she married Red Simmons
.”
“A lot of nurses hate my wife, Agent Morse. They think she’s arrogant.”
“Is she?”
“That’s hard to answer. Thora’s smarter than half the doctors here, in terms of raw intelligence. You can imagine the effect that has on them. Most of them are men.”
“I can relate to that.” The cellular connection crackled with static. “I’m your friend, Chris, even though you don’t know me. Friends tell the truth, even when it’s tough.”
“Are you my friend? Or is it just that you need me?”
“Give me a chance to show you. Then make up your own mind.”
I’ll bet she was a good hostage negotiator, he thought as he hit END. She’s manipulating me already.
CHAPTER 13
Four hours after bicycling the last mile to her car, Alex Morse sat on a bench in the shadow of a Catholic cathedral in downtown Natchez and watched Thora Shepard walk out of the Mainstream Fitness center, her blond hair flying from beneath a blue silk scarf. She turned right and started walking west on Main Street. A quarter mile in this direction would carry her to the two-hundred-foot bluff that overlooked the Mississippi River. Thora often ran along the edge of that bluff, which stretched for miles with only chain-link fencing or a few scrub bushes separating her from eternity. Alex had jogged along behind her once, amazed by the vastness of the Mississippi River. The muddy flood was a full mile across at Natchez, and beyond it the Louisiana Delta stretched flat beyond the limits of human vision.
But Thora would not be jogging today. She was wearing Mosquito sunglasses and a tailored pantsuit that cost more than Alex earned in a month. As Thora strode gracefully down the street, she looked fit for a magazine cover shoot. Alex could see the double-takes as Thora passed people on the sidewalk. The thing was, it wasn’t only men who stared—women stared, too. She was that kind of woman. And maybe that was the root of Alex’s antipathy. Alex had never been able to like blondes. She didn’t want to stereotype anyone, but in the case of blondes, it was hard not to. They had a certain way of walking, of talking, of flipping their goddamn hair, that just plain got to her. That helpless lilt in their voices—the pathetic little-girl sound—even the smallest trace of it made Alex want to hit somebody. And that was leaving out the whole “dumb” issue. She knew that blondes weren’t all dumb by genetic command, but on the other hand, she hadn’t known many—if any—who were rigorously intellectual. And that was the core of her problem with them. Most blondes had simply never had to work hard to get what they wanted in life; therefore, they had developed few skills—beyond flirting and inserting knives between female shoulder blades—that would prove useful in any practical situation.