Chris walked back to the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him. Before he finished making the second turkey-and-Swiss, Kilmer had joined him in the kitchen. The detective set a camouflage backpack on the floor and sat on one of the barstools at the counter. Chris slid a plate over, then opened a Corona and passed it to the detective. Kilmer’s eyes lit up when he saw the beer.
“Thanks, Doc. It’s pretty damn hot for May.”
Chris nodded and went back to his own sandwich.
“You’ve got a nice place out here,” Kilmer said. “But I hear you’re moving.”
“My wife’s idea. Keeping up with the Joneses, I guess.”
Kilmer took another swallow of beer, then started on his sandwich.
“So you used to work with Alex’s father?” Chris prompted.
“That’s right. First at the PD, then at our detective agency. Never knew a better man in a tight spot.”
“He was killed recently?”
“Yessir. Trying to help some people in trouble, which is about what I’d of guessed.”
“Crime’s pretty bad in Jackson, I hear.”
“Bad? You take the Jackson I grew up in as a boy and compare it to now, it’s like the end of the world. It started in the eighties with the crack. Now the inmates are running the asylum. Now that Jim’s gone, I doubt I’ll stay at it more than another couple years. Close the agency, retire up to Virginia.”
Chris nodded. “You’ve known Alex her whole life?”
Kilmer’s eyes sparkled. “From the day she was born. Worst tomboy I ever saw in my life. Been handling guns since she was eight. And smart?” Kilmer shook his head. “By the time she was fourteen, she made me feel stupid. Not just me, either.”
Chris laughed. “What about that murder theory of hers?”
Kilmer pressed his lips together and sighed. “I’m not sure what to think. The technical side is over my head. But I’ll tell you this: I worked homicide for more years than anybody ought to, and I think a lot more people have been murdered in divorce situations than anybody knows or even suspects—especially before the forensics were what they are now. I had lots of cases where I just knew the husband had offed his wife and made it look like an accident. Same way I knew it was sex abuse when I’d find a mama and her daughters over a dead husband. But divorce is a lot more common than child abuse.” Kilmer looked suddenly abashed. “Look, just because I think Alex may be onto something don’t mean I think your wife is doing you wrong. I’m just here as a favor to Alex.”
“I understand. I’ve only known Alex a few days, but I can see why you like her so much.” Chris took a swallow of beer. “But I have wondered if she hasn’t gone through so much in the past few months that she’s not quite in control of her faculties.”
Kilmer raised his eyebrows, as though considering this possibility. “She’s been through a lot, all right. And you may not know the worst of it. I believe Alex loved that fella who got killed the day she was shot. But he was married, and she wasn’t the type to break up a family. So that day was pretty rough. She lost half her face and the man she loved in about five seconds. She feels guilty that she loved him, and guilty that she got him killed. A lot of people would crack under strain like that. But excepting her daddy, Alex is the last person out of anybody I ever met who would lose her grip on reality.” Kilmer met Chris’s eyes. “If she believes you’re in danger, watch out. She ain’t down here to waste her time or yours.”
Kilmer’s furrowed face had been hardened by years of smoking cigarettes, and his belly had probably grown during years of eating bad food on stakeouts. How many years had he taken off his life by choosing the life he had? Would Alex look that rough when she was seventy? It seemed unlikely, but her facial wounds had already taken her partway down that road.
“Well,” Chris said, getting up and taking his plate to the sink, “I’m going to hit the rack pretty soon. You’re welcome to sleep in the house tonight. There’s a guest room right off that hall over there.”
“Where’s your boy?” Kilmer asked.
“He fell asleep in the TV room.” Chris pointed. “That glow right down there. I’ll be just past it.”
“If he wakes up and sees me, what should I tell him?”
“He won’t. But if he should, just come get me.”
As Chris reached up to the top of the refrigerator, a sudden thought struck him. He brought down the .38 and said, “Do you have any identification on you, Mr. Kilmer?”
Kilmer stared back for a long moment, then nodded, walked to his backpack, and reached inside. Chris felt himself tense, as though preparing for violence, but Kilmer only brought out a wallet. He showed Chris a Mississippi driver’s license. The good-natured face on it matched the man in front of him.
“Look here,” Kilmer said, flipping open a plastic picture holder. “This is Alex in her younger days, with me and Jim.”
Chris looked down at three figures huddled in what appeared to be a duck blind in the dead of winter. Sandwiched between two handsome men in their primes was a girl whose arms were wrapped around the neck of a black Labrador retriever. Her grin revealed two missing teeth, and her eyes shone as though they couldn’t possibly hold more happiness than they did in that moment. Despite her youth, Chris could see hints of the woman that Alex would become in the future.
Kilmer flipped up the picture, revealing a snapshot of Alex at what looked like her high school graduation. She was pressed between the same two men, older now and this time wearing dark suits. There were two women in the picture also, classic Mississippi wives with too much makeup and wide, genuine smiles.
“Ain’t she something?” Kilmer said.
“Do you have kids, Will?”
The older man swallowed. “We had a girl, a year behind Alex in school. We lost her on homecoming night the year Alex graduated. Drunk driver. After that…I guess Alex kind of took her place in my heart.” Kilmer closed the wallet, went back to the counter, and drank off the rest of his beer.
“I’m sorry,” Chris said.
“Part of life,” Kilmer said stoically. “You take the good with the bad. Go on to bed, Doc. And don’t worry about nothing. I got you covered.”
Chris shook the detective’s hand, then walked down the hall toward his bedroom.
“Appreciate the sandwich,” Kilmer called.
Chris waved, then backed up and stepped into the home theater room. Ben’s breathing hadn’t changed, but he had managed to tie the bedclothes into a knot around him. Chris tried to imagine getting a call like the one Will Kilmer must have gotten on that long-ago homecoming night, but he couldn’t do it. As he stared down at Ben’s gentle face, he thought of the trauma the boy would suffer if it turned out that his mother was not the woman that either of them believed her to be. Praying for a miracle he no longer believed in, Chris quietly shut the door and walked down to his own bedroom.
CHAPTER 31
Eldon Tarver stood in the deep moon shadow beneath the low-hanging limbs of a water oak and watched the lights go out in the house on the hill. His motorcycle lay in the underbrush back near the highway. A backpack lay on the ground at his feet. He had spent the day at the Chickamauga Hunting Camp in Jefferson County waiting for night to fall. He had done many things during the day, but one he had not done was answer the calls of Andrew Rusk.
When he arrived last night and found a woman here, his first thought was that he had made a mistake about the house. The wife was supposed to be out of town. But when he checked the coordinates on his pocket GPS unit, they had matched his notes exactly. He had moved closer, close enough to see the woman clearly and compare her to the photos in his backpack. She did not match. However, she did match an image deep in Eldon’s mind—one he had seen only briefly in the Fennell file supplied by Rusk. The woman in the house was Special Agent Alexandra Morse, the sister of Grace Fennell. Her presence there—talking to his next target—had such profound implications that he had almost panicked. But life had taught him to expect the unexp
ected.
He’d thought Morse would be easy prey, despite whatever training the Bureau might have given her. She was a hostage negotiator, after all, not a tactical specialist. But she had fought like a demon when he moved in for the kill. He hadn’t been sure he meant to kill her until he was less than ten feet away. Killing an FBI agent was a serious matter. Institutional memory was long, and the Bureau did not forget such crimes. But the way she had played it—slipping into the driveway in an amateurish attempt to trick him—told Eldon one thing: Morse was alone. She had no backup. There or anywhere else. Yet she had taught him a painful lesson and almost exposed him.
Tonight, it seemed better that she had survived. Had Alex Morse died in that carport, a hundred FBI agents would have descended on this little corner of Mississippi. Now he had time to do what was necessary for a clean escape.
Eldon shouldered his backpack and walked slowly up the hill. As he neared the house, he veered right and moved around dense azaleas to the cluster of air conditioners that served the house. He had studied the blueprints provided by Rusk until he knew this house inside and out. He knew which air-conditioning units cooled which zones, for example, and he would soon make use of that knowledge. He continued circling the house, moving past an outdoor hot tub, then the swimming pool, then into the breezeway that led to the storeroom. There was some risk that he could be seen from the darkened windows inside, but instinct told him he was all right. Moving quickly into the storeroom, he pulled down a collapsible stairway and climbed into the attic. From here, he could reach the attic of the main house.
After squeezing his bulky shoulders through one crawl space, he entered a forest of rafters and ceiling joists. By walking carefully on the joists, he traversed the forty feet that took him to the duct he needed. Digging into the backpack, he removed a respirator gas mask and fitted it closely over his nose and mouth. Then he fitted a pair of foam-lined goggles over his eyes. After donning a pair of surgical gloves, Eldon reached into his pack and removed a heavy, oblong canister. It looked like the CO2 cylinders that kids used to charge paintball guns. He laid a heavy rubber mat over the duct to dampen vibration. Then, with a small, battery-powered hand drill, he bored a hole in the duct. After laying a thin piece of rubber over the hole, he lifted the cylinder and punched its sharp nozzle through both rubber and hole, creating a seal. Once he was certain of his setup, he drew a deep breath, then opened the valve on the cylinder.
The soft hissing that followed gave him intense satisfaction. Within two minutes, both men and the boy below would be unconscious. They would remain that way until morning, long after Eldon had left the house. The gas in the cylinder could not be purchased anywhere in the United States unless the buyer was the U.S. government. It had been provided to Dr. Tarver by Edward Biddle, an acquaintance from many years ago. Biddle had once been an army officer associated with a project Dr. Tarver had worked on. Now Biddle was an officer of a large corporation that handled critical defense contracts for the United States. The gas was an agent similar to that the Russians had used in their attempt to free the seven hundred hostages trapped by terrorists in a Moscow theater. Quite a few people had died from the gas in that instance, but most were elderly, and the dosage had not been precisely calculated. Unlike the Russians, Dr. Tarver knew exactly what he was doing.
He sat absolutely still for two minutes, then moved deeper into the attic to the folding-ladder steps over the closet of the master bedroom. So confident was he of the gas that he had not brought a firearm tonight. An unregistered weapon was the quickest path to arrest during a random traffic stop. Bracing both hands on a ceiling joist, he pushed down the spring-mounted steps with his legs. After unfolding the ladder, he carried his backpack into the closet and unpacked an aluminum thermos. Inside the thermos were two pre-loaded syringes. One contained a mixture of corticosteroids to suppress the human immune system. The other contained a solution that had taken Dr. Tarver over a year to develop. Twenty years, really, if you counted the research that had gone into it. But this specific solution had been a year in the making. It was different from those used on the other targets. And for that reason, Eldon was excited. He felt a hyperalertness that even the knowledge that this would be his last operation could not diminish. For there could be no doubt of that. Either Rusk had been lying to him, or Rusk was a fool. Either way, the connection had to be severed. But there were things Eldon had to do first. Some would be unpleasant, but not this. This was something he had waited for, for a very long time.
He walked into the master bedroom without even trying to be quiet. Dr. Shepard lay on his side in the bed, his mouth open wider than appeared normal, but this was common after the gas. Dr. Tarver took a mental snapshot of the bed to make sure he would leave everything exactly as he found it. Then he set the syringes on a dresser, pulled the covers off Shepard, and rolled the internist onto his stomach.
Dr. Tarver took a small LED flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, then got the steroid injection from the dresser. Kneeling between Shepard’s thighs, he pulled down his boxer shorts and pushed one cheek aside, exposing the anus. Holding the light between his teeth, he opened the doctor’s anus enough to insert the needle, then injected the steroids an inch inside the rectum. Dr. Shepard hardly stirred. Eldon repeated the procedure with the other solution, but at the last instant Shepard’s lower body flinched in an involuntary muscle spasm. Eldon found his needle embedded at the entrance to the rectum. A bad mistake, but now that the hole had been made, there wasn’t much point in removing it to find a site deeper in.
He hesitated before depressing the plunger. Several times today he’d thought of extending his experiment. He’d known the boy would be in the house, and since his research was likely to be cut short, the boy offered a unique opportunity. Eldon had not prepared enough solution to inject both Shepard and his son with the precalculated dose, but instinct told him there was probably enough. On the other hand, a juvenile immune system might be resilient enough to overcome the virus. Given the unknowns, Eldon depressed the plunger to the bottom of the syringe’s barrel and gave Shepard the full dose.
The boy would live.
Eldon turned Shepard back on his side, pulled the covers over him, then loaded everything back into the pack and walked quickly down the hall. He found the boy on a sofa bed in the home theater. To his surprise, he discovered an older man sleeping in an easy chair in the den, three empty beer bottles beside him. Eldon did not know the man. He took a cell phone from his pack, aimed its tiny lens at the stranger’s face, and shot a picture of him. Then he forced his hand into the stranger’s back pocket and took out his wallet.
Eldon looked around the room. Leaning against the sofa by William Kilmer’s feet was a camouflage backpack. When he opened the backpack, a strange numbness began spreading outward from his heart. Inside was a handgun, a starlight scope, a canister of pepper spray, a camera, and a pair of handcuffs. It took several moments for Eldon to gather himself, but he put everything back exactly as it had been before he arrived.
He left the house by the ladder in the closet, retracing his steps back to the duct, where he sealed his tiny hole with duct tape. Ten minutes after he injected Shepard, he was walking swiftly through the trees toward the highway. The sense of exhilaration he’d felt inside had vanished, now replaced by anxiety, anger, even fear.
Tonight, everything had changed.
Alex sat with her elbows propped on the desk of her hotel room in Washington, drunk on Ativan and room service wine. She’d been staring at her computer for hours, afraid that the announcement bell wouldn’t ding when Jamie logged on to MSN. The bell had not dinged yet, but not because of a malfunction. For whatever reason, Jamie simply had not logged on. The reason might be as simple as a power outage in Jackson, but Alex couldn’t make herself believe it. Given what Jamie had told her during their last video chat, she feared that he might have tried something desperate….
Like running away.
A half hour ago, she had bro
ken down and called the landline at Bill Fennell’s house. She had a right to talk to her nephew (and she’d meant to tell Bill so, in no uncertain terms), but she never got the chance. All she got was an answering machine.
She looked over at the hotel bed and considered climbing into it. She had an early interview tomorrow with the OPR people, and she needed to look her best. Solid. Reliable. Deserving of institutional trust. Ha! She wasn’t going to take a chance on missing Jamie.
No way, nohow.
CHAPTER 32
“Have you got enough silk?” asked the nurse.
“I think so,” said Chris, tying off the last of twenty-three stitches.
The lacerated arm under his light belonged to a fifty-year-old handyman named Curtis Johnese, a huge man in stained overalls, with a pumpkin-shaped head and a dip of Skoal tucked behind his lip. An hour ago, Mr. Johnese had contrived to open an eight-inch gash on his forearm using a table saw. In the custom from time immemorial, he had come to Tom Cage’s office to be sewn up rather than visit the emergency room, which would have cost four times as much and taken four times as long. Johnese would have preferred Dr. Cage, but Tom had stepped into Chris’s office and asked if he would suture the wound. Among Tom’s many chronic illnesses was psoriatic arthritis, and with a recent bout with cataracts under his belt, he didn’t feel he was ready for detailed work.
Chris set down his forceps, lifted the paper drape, and examined his work. As he stared, a sharp throbbing stabbed the base of his skull. He’d felt this intermittently since waking this morning, and it was strong enough that he’d taken three Advil. Surprisingly, the pain had grown worse, not better. At first he’d thought it was a tension headache—Thora was set to return tomorrow, and there was bound to be trouble when he confronted her—but this pain had a relentless quality to it, as though it signaled the onset of a fever.
“Looks great, Mr. Johnese,” he said, rubbing his neck. “Just let Holly give you a tetanus booster, and you can be on your way. Come back in a week, and I’ll take them out for you.”