Of course hardly any “blondes” nowadays were true blondes. She had to give Thora that. Few human beings—even those who were blond as children—made it far through adulthood without their hair darkening naturally. But Thora had Danish blood, and her Viking blond hair was almost the same shade of straw as that of her father, who at fifty-eight still had a shockingly full head of hair. For this reason, Thora Shepard—unlike the frosted, streaked, bottled, frizzed, teased, and dark-rooted blondes Alex saw and despised every day—radiated a kind of predatory confidence, an avian watchfulness that signaled you would not get far trying to pull something over on her. It also made men and women turn and stare after her as she walked by them on the street. And finally, it had made a smart and fairly good-looking young doctor named Chris Shepard propose marriage to her—not to mention legally adopt a fatherless baby born nine years before. Not bad for a woman with her past.
Alex hurried across Main Street and began walking behind Thora, who was a block ahead now. She felt a pang of irritation as a young man wearing a business suit turned 180 degrees to watch Thora walk away from him. Then an older man stopped Thora and engaged her in conversation. Thora spoke animatedly, using her hands often to make her point. Alex turned and looked into a shop window.
She had instinctively disliked Thora from the beginning, but she wasn’t sure why. No one could argue that Thora had had an easy childhood. She had begun life with a silver spoon in her mouth, but that spoon had quickly been snatched away. The daughter of a renowned Vanderbilt surgeon, Thora Rayner had spent the first eight years of her life in the elite social world of Nashville, Tennessee. A tony school, the right country club, the riding academy, the works. But when Thora was eight, her mother’s alcoholism had reached a crisis point. After several attempts at drying out, Anna Rayner slipped into an alcoholic daze that showed no sign of abating. With the help of some friends, Lars Rayner committed his wife to a state hospital, then filed divorce papers. Six months later he was free of her, but the price of keeping his fortune had been his daughter. Signing away his rights to Thora had little effect on Dr. Rayner, but this act profoundly altered the little girl’s future.
Thora’s life became an odyssey from one small East Tennessee town to another. She attended public schools, private academies being far out of economic reach, as her court-mandated child-support payments were squandered on alcohol. Her mother’s drinking waxed and waned by no particular rule, but on several occasions Thora had to be taken in by her paternal grandmother. Her high school grades were middling to poor until her junior year, when she apparently decided to show her father what she could do when she put her mind to it. When Thora blew the top out of both the ACT and SAT, Lars Rayner finally took notice. He offered to pull strings to get Thora into Vanderbilt, and also to foot the bills. Thora refused. Instead, she applied on her own and won an academic scholarship to her father’s alma mater.
Sadly, her luck did not last long. Her maternal genes and conditioning were against her. After a perfect first semester, her grades steadily worsened until the second half of her sophomore year, which she did not complete. When she took a job as a waitress in a dive in the Printers Alley district, the reason soon became apparent: Thora was pregnant. The boyfriend vanished, but Thora chose to have the baby in spite of this. With financial and babysitting help from her grandmother, she entered nursing school and after two years graduated with honors. She began work at the VA hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, but quit after only nine months, suddenly and inexplicably relocating to Natchez, Mississippi. Alex suspected that a messy affair lay behind this move, but she had no proof (though she did have a detective working to find it). Thora had been hired by St. Catherine’s Hospital, and it was there that she’d met Red Simmons, the oilman who would become her first husband and soon after make her a widow. A very rich widow.
Alex glanced to her left. Thora spoke for another twenty seconds, then hugged the older man and continued down Main Street. Alex took a small camera from her purse and shot a picture of the man as he passed. He looked sixty, probably too old to be a paramour.
Alex had long prided herself on her physical conditioning, but simply following Thora through her daily routine was exhausting. Up at dawn for a morning run—four miles, minimum, and sometimes ten—then a quick shower at home, followed by a trip to the Shepards’ building site in Avalon. Thora would argue with the contractors for a half hour or so, then drive her Mercedes convertible to the country club for a swim or a couple of sets of tennis (Alex usually watched from the parking lot). Afterward, she alternated touch-ups on her hair and nails with serious weight work at Mainstream Fitness. Another shower, and then lunch with at least one girlfriend. She favored Thai food, from an excellent restaurant not far from Mainstream, and that was probably her present destination. After her meal (very little nourishment, Alex had noted from a nearby table), Thora often made a second trip to the building site.
The only absolutely required stop of her day was St. Stephen’s Prep, to pick up Ben. While most mothers waited in line for up to twenty minutes—in case their children came charging out of school right after the bell—Thora always showed up twenty minutes late. That way she avoided the boring wait and usually found Ben shooting baskets alone on the playground. After taking him home to the maid, she would spend the remainder of the afternoon running errands or shopping, then stop by the Avalon site one final time before going home to the Elgin house.
It was during these end-of-the-day stops that Dr. Shane Lansing had twice stopped by for an informal visit. Alex had never entered the house while Lansing was inside, but if the surgeon showed up again, she planned to try. After her two meetings with Dr. Shepard (whom she hadn’t expected to be so staunch in defense of his wife’s morals) she regretted not bringing Will Kilmer to Natchez with her. Her father’s old partner routinely worked marital cases, and he owned equipment that could listen in on and decode digital cell calls in real time. But Will was already going beyond the call of duty in his surveillance of Andrew Rusk, and Alex couldn’t afford to pay one of his operatives to come to Natchez. She was working on hacking into Thora’s e-mail account, though. Thora carried a Treo 650 everywhere she went and frequently logged on to the Internet with the device. Alex felt sure that if she could obtain a single e-mail proving that Thora and Lansing were lovers, Dr. Shepard would realize the danger he was in and get on board with her plan.
Thora stopped again, this time to speak to a man about her age. As Alex cautiously moved closer, trying to catch the conversation, her private cell phone rang. When she moved away and answered, she heard the gravelly voice of Will Kilmer.
“Hey, Uncle Will,” she whispered, though the honorific was purely one of affection.
“Got some news for you,” said the old man.
“Good or bad?”
“Bad, in the short run. A little while ago, Andrew Rusk made one of my guys and turned rabbit.”
“Oh, shit. How did he lose one of your guys?”
“Bastard took that four-wheel-drive Porsche down to the Pearl River and drove slap into the mud. My guy was in a Crown Victoria—supercharged, but that don’t do you much good in the mud. And I don’t think Rusk was doing it for fun. I think he was headed somewhere important. Otherwise, why go to the trouble?”
“Damn it.”
“I told you we needed more cars. But you said—”
“I know what I said,” Alex snapped, furious that she lacked the money to pay for the kind of surveillance this case required. Penny-wise, pound-foolish, her father whispered from the grave. Now all the surveillance she’d paid for up to now was wasted. Rusk was gone, and she could do nothing about it until he chose to show up again.
Thirty yards away, Thora Shepard shook hands with the man she was talking to, then crossed Commerce Street and turned right. Alex followed.
“I’m sorry, Will. This is completely my fault. I hamstrung you.”
Labored breathing came down the line. Kilmer was seventy, and he had mor
e than a touch of emphysema. “What you want me to do now, hon?”
“Put someone out at Rusk’s house, if you can. He has to come home eventually, right?”
“Sure. He’ll be home tonight for sure.”
“Unless we really spooked him.”
Will said nothing.
“You think a guy like that would blow town because of this?”
“No, I don’t. Rusk is dug in. He’s got a high-dollar job, a wife, a big house, kids.”
“His kids don’t live with him,” Alex pointed out.
“Take it easy. Rusk is a rich lawyer, not a CIA field agent. He’ll be home.”
She forced herself to calm down. Thora had almost reached the Thai restaurant.
“I’ll send somebody out there,” Will said. “And if I don’t have anybody free, I’ll go myself.”
“You don’t have to do—” Alex froze in midsentence. Thora had stopped dead on the sidewalk to answer a cell call. Now she was backing against the wall of a building with the phone held close to her ear.
“God, I wish you were here,” Alex breathed.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I’ve got to go. Call me.”
As she hit END, Thora leaned out from the wall and looked obliquely through the window of the Thai restaurant. Apparently satisfied, she nodded, then put the phone back into her pocket and reversed direction, moving quickly back toward Main Street.
Straight toward Alex.
Alex darted into the nearest shop, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink place, filled from wall to wall with antique furniture, framed mirrors, prints, woven baskets, and trays of pecan pralines for sale. When Thora passed the shop, her features were set in an expression of severe concentration. Alex counted to fifteen, then walked out of the shop and followed Thora toward her Mercedes.
Something was about to happen.
CHAPTER 14
Andrew Rusk checked the Porsche’s odometer once more, then started searching the trees for the turn. He’d left I-55 forty minutes ago, and after twenty miles he’d turned onto a narrow gravel road. Somewhere along this road was the turn for the Chickamauga Hunting Camp. Rusk had been a member of the elite camp for fifteen years, buying his way in after his father-in-law opted out, and the membership had proved useful in many ways beyond providing recreation in the fall.
Rusk saw the turn at last, marked by a sign over the entrance road. He swung his wheel and stopped before the steel gate blocking his way, then punched a combination into the keypad on the post beside his vehicle. When the gate swung back, he drove slowly through. He still had a half mile of gravel to cover, and he did this slowly. Despite the vast wealth of the club’s members, this road was poorly maintained. He wondered if they left it that way to preserve the illusion of primitive conditions. Because illusion was all it was.
Though the camp buildings appeared to be log cabins, they contained hotel-style rooms with private baths, central air and heat, and satellite TV in the common room. For serious hunters, the expense was justified. There were more whitetail deer per acre in this area than in any other part of the United States. And they were big. The largest trophy buck ever taken had been shot in Mississippi. Whitetail loved the deep underbrush of second-growth woods, and the virgin forests around this part of the state had been logged out almost 200 years ago. This was deer heaven, and hunters from around the country paid premium prices for hunting leases here. The prices were even higher to the southwest, right around Natchez. That was deer heaven.
As Rusk drove up to the main cabin and parked, he scanned the clearing for Eldon Tarver. He saw no one. Climbing out of the Cayenne, he checked the main cabin’s door but found it locked. That made sense, because Eldon Tarver was not a member of the club and thus had no key. But Tarver did have the combination to the front gate, courtesy of Andrew Rusk. That was the arrangement they had made long ago, in case of emergency. They chose Chickamauga because they had planned their first joint venture here. Their acquaintance predated that meeting by two years, but there had been almost no physical contact in the interim. Any further meetings had been kept to less than two minutes, and at a place so public that no one would even call their contact a meeting.
Despite the emptiness of the clearing, Rusk was certain that Dr. Tarver was already here. He would have hidden his vehicle, in case any other members happened to be here—an unlikely event out of season, but you never knew. The question was, where would Tarver wait for him?
Rusk closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the forest. He heard the wind first, the rustling dance of a billion spring leaves. Then the birds: sparrows, jays, martins. A lone bobwhite. The erratic pop-pop-pop of a woodpecker. Beneath all this, the low hum of distant trucks on Highway 28. But nothing in the varied symphony gave him a clue to the presence of another human.
Then he smelled fire.
Somewhere out to his left, wood was burning. He set off in that direction, moving with long, sure-footed strides through the trees. The farther he walked upwind, the more intense grew the smell of smoke. And meat. Someone was cooking out here! That made him doubt it was Tarver, but he had to make sure.
A moment later he found himself in a small clearing, at the center of which sat Eldon Tarver. The big pathologist was tending a cast-iron skillet over a small fire, and the sound of sizzling meat filled the clearing. Hanging on a wire beside Dr. Tarver was a dead fawn, freshly skinned but only partly butchered.
“Take a seat,” Tarver said in his deep baritone. “I’m cooking the tenderloin. It’s sinfully good, Andrew.”
By killing the fawn, the pathologist had broken a sacred rule of the camp. By killing it out of season, he had broken several state and federal laws. But Rusk wasn’t going to say anything about that. He had bigger problems to deal with, and whatever rules and laws Dr. Tarver had broken, he had done so with full knowledge and intent. Tarver speared a shaving of tenderloin with a pocketknife and held it out in the air. Rusk took the knife and ate the meat as a sign of their bond.
“It’s good,” he said. “Damn good.”
“As fresh as it comes, this side of raw.”
“Have you ever eaten it raw?”
A bemused look crossed the pathologist’s face. “Oh my, yes. When I was a boy…but that’s another story.”
I’d like to hear that story sometime, Rusk thought. When I have more time. I’d like to know what could turn a boy into a character like this. He knew a little of Dr. Tarver’s history, but not enough to explain the man’s odd behavior and interests. But today was not the day to tease out that kind of thing.
“We have a problem,” Rusk said bluntly.
“I’m here, am I not?”
“Two problems, really.”
“Don’t rush things,” Tarver said. “Sit down. Have some more venison.”
Rusk pretended to look down at the fire. He saw no rifle near Dr. Tarver, not even a handgun. There was a Nike duffel bag near his feet, which might contain a pistol, or even a submachine gun. He’d have to keep an eye on that. “I’m not really hungry,” he said.
“You’d prefer to move straight to business?”
Rusk nodded.
“Then we should get the formalities out of the way first.”
“Formalities?”
“Take off your clothes, Andrew.”
Adrenaline blasted through Rusk’s vascular system. Would he tell me to strip if he wanted to kill me? To save himself the trouble of stripping my corpse? No. What would be the point out here? “Do you think I’m wearing a wire, Doctor?”
Tarver smiled disarmingly. “You said we have an emergency. Stress makes people do things they might not ordinarily do.”
“Are you going to strip?”
“I don’t have to. You called this meeting.”
That made sense. And if Rusk knew Tarver, nothing substantive was going to be said unless he complied with the doctor’s order. Thanking God he had left his own pistol in the Porsche, he bent and untied his Cole Haans
, then unsnapped his pants and stepped out of them. Next he removed his Ralph Lauren button-down, which left only his shorts and socks. Tarver seemed to be watching the campfire, not him.
“Is this far enough?” Rusk asked.
“Everything, please,” Tarver said in a disinterested voice.
Rusk swallowed a curse and pulled off his shorts. He felt an odd and surprising shyness at this point, and it disturbed him. He had stripped in front of men hundreds of times at the health club, and he’d spent his whole youth doing the same in locker rooms around the state. He certainly had nothing to be ashamed of, not by the standard measure, and several women had commented that he was well-hung. But this was different. This was stripping naked in front of a guy with God only knew what sexual perversions, and a pathologist to boot—a man who had coldly stared at a thousand corpses, sizing up every anatomical flaw. It was creepy. And Dr. Tarver wasn’t making it any easier. He was now staring at Rusk’s body like an entomologist studying an insect mating.
“You’ve been working on those latissimi dorsi,” Tarver observed.
It was true. Lisa had commented that age was taking a toll on his back, so Rusk had been putting in extra time on the Nautilus at the club to remedy the alleged deficiency. But how the hell Tarver knew that from a single glance—