True Evil

She clearly wasn’t the kind of person who would waste time playing games with people’s lives. The answer had to be something else. Like emotional instability. Maybe Morse believed absolutely in the absurd scenario she had outlined today. Given the recent death of her sister, that wasn’t hard to imagine. Chris had seen many extreme grief reactions during his medical career.

But what should he do about it? Call the FBI field office in Jackson and report Morse’s visit? Call his lawyer? Call FBI headquarters in Washington? Or discreetly try to get more information on his own? His receptionist had finally found a phone number for Darryl Foster, and Chris had tried to call his old fraternity brother, but he’d only reached an answering machine. He’d hoped that Foster—an active FBI field agent—would shed some light on the mysterious Agent Morse before he had to face Thora, but the cell phone in Chris’s pocket had not rung. Until he knew more, he wasn’t going to let Thora know anything was amiss. It wasn’t that he believed anything Morse had told him, but if he related the afternoon’s events to Thora, her first question would be Who did you report her to? And what would he say then? Why hadn’t he reported her?

“You gonna hit the ball or what, Coach?”

Chris blinked himself back to reality. His catcher was staring up at him with confusion. Chris laughed to cover, then hit a high fly ball to center field. As he watched its arc, he caught a movement to his right. Thora was standing in the open door of her Mercedes now, her blond hair flashing in the afternoon sun. She was staring directly at him. Had she noticed his little zone-out at home plate?

She gave him a small wave and smiled beneath her sunglasses, dark avian things that gave her the look of an art deco hawk on the side of a skyscraper. She was wearing running clothes, her lithe, muscular body on display for all. Maybe that’s why she didn’t get out, he thought. But that was wishful thinking. For the past eight months—since running marathons had become fashionable among the young married women of the town—Thora had run between two and ten miles a day. She’d bought $200 shoes, the wrist GPS unit, and all the other gear of the modern distance runner. The thing was, with Thora it wasn’t just for show. She actually had talent. After just three months’ training, she’d started beating the times of women who had been running for two and three years. But Thora’s running garb typified another point of tension between them.

When she was married to Red Simmons, Thora had dressed conservatively. Fashionably, yes, but never pushing the envelope of taste. After a suitable period of mourning, though—about the time she’d started seeing Chris—she had subtly begun changing her style. In the beginning, Chris had approved. The new look revealed more of her beauty and signaled an engagement with life that she’d sorely needed. But lately Thora had begun wearing things he would never have imagined she would buy, much less wear in public: ultrashort shorts; transparent tops meant to be worn with an outer garment, but worn alone; and push-up bras (when she wore bras at all). Chris had kidded her about this, hoping she’d get the hint, but Thora had continued to wear the stuff, so he’d shut up. He didn’t feel he had the right to control the way she dressed. Maybe he was getting old, losing touch with the times. And until today, it hadn’t seemed that big a deal. Nothing had, really. Only the issue of Thora getting pregnant had been disturbing enough to rob him of sleep.

“Coach Grant,” he called to his assistant, another team father. “Let’s run some bases and then call it a day.”

The boys cheered, and their parents started rising from blankets and chairs, packing up ice chests and babies for the trek home. Chris ran the boys for five minutes, then circled them and led them in a team shout that reverberated off a thick stand of oak trees to the west. The boys packed the gear—a team tradition—and then everyone headed for his family car.

Ben walked beside Chris as they tromped toward the Mercedes. Chris tried to blank his mind but couldn’t. Too many things were surfacing after a period of unconscious repression. Like the Mercedes. Last Christmas, Thora had bought herself an SL55 AMG. Hardly anyone in town knew how expensive this car really was. Several local doctors owned Benzes, but most were in the $50,000 to $80,000 range. Thora’s SL had cost $145,000. Chris didn’t begrudge her the car—it was her money, after all—but while she was married to Red Simmons, she had driven a Toyota Avalon: forty grand, fully loaded. She’d also worn a Timex watch. Chris had sometimes joked with her about it while she was on nursing duty. But a month ago, a Patek Philippe had quietly appeared on her wrist. He had no idea how much the watch cost, but the jewels on its bezel told him it was probably something north of $20,000—more than several fathers watching this practice earned in a year.

“Big Ben!” cried Thora, moving out from behind the SL’s door with a grin and bending to hug her sweaty son. “You didn’t miss a catch the whole time I was here!”

Ben shrugged. “I play first base, Mom. You can’t play first if you miss balls.”

Chris wished he could see Thora’s eyes, but the sunglasses hid them completely. She gave Ben a quick squeeze, then straightened and gave Chris her thousand-watt smile. His gaze went to the Patek Philippe. Stop it, he said silently.

“You picked up Ben early today,” she said.

“Yeah. I knew rounds were going to take a while, so I decided to do them after practice.”

She nodded but said nothing.

He wasn’t sure where to go next, but Ben saved him by asking, “Can we go to La Fiesta, Mom?”

Thora glanced at Chris over the tops of her sunglasses, but he couldn’t read her meaning. La Fiesta was a family-oriented Mexican restaurant with low prices and fast service; thus it was always loud and crowded.

“I really need to get to the hospital,” Chris said. “You guys go, though.”

Thora shook her head. “We’ve got plenty of food at home, and it’s a lot healthier than Mexican. I made chicken salad this afternoon.”

Ben rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose.

Chris almost said, I’ll pick up something on the way home, but that would only result in Ben begging for takeout and Thora getting irritated. “Help me load the gear, Son.”

Chris and Ben tossed the two bulging canvas bags into his pickup. Then Chris gave Ben a high five, hugged Thora lightly to his side, and climbed into the truck. “I won’t be too late,” he said through the open window.

As though in answer, Thora took off her sunglasses. Her sea-blue eyes cut right through his feigned nonchalance. Her gaze had always caused a physical reaction in his chest, something between a fluttering and radiant warmth. (It caused a reaction lower down, as well.) Now that gaze held an unspoken question, but he broke eye contact, lifted his hand in a wave, then backed onto the road and drove north toward town.

FIVE (#ulink_5dae3dc6-096b-5f04-be17-9b2bbe4389c9)

Alex Morse drove her rented Corolla into the parking lot of the Days Inn, pulled up to the door of room 125, and shut off the engine. When she opened the door of her room, her sister’s calico cat mewed and dropped soundlessly from the bathroom counter to the carpet. Alex paid five extra dollars per night so that Meggie could stay in the hotel room. She only had Grace’s cat because Jamie had begged her to take it after the funeral. Jamie loved Meggie, but his father did not, and the boy had been afraid that his dad would take her to the pound as soon as Alex flew back to Charlotte. Since Alex knew that Bill Fennell was quite capable of this small act of brutality, she’d accepted the burden. To her surprise, the bright-eyed calico had helped to ease the loneliness of the past five weeks. Alex took off her shoulder holster, massaged the wet place where it had lain against her ribs, then knelt and rubbed Meggie’s chin with a bent knuckle. When she poured some food into the plastic dish by the bathroom door, the cat began eating voraciously.

Alex had checked into the Days Inn five days ago, and she’d done what she could to make a home of her room. Her notebook computer sat humming on the desk, its screen saver an ever-changing montage of photos shot on the cruise she’d taken with Grace to celebrate Grace’s thirtieth birthday. Beside the computer stood a photo of Jamie wearing his Jackson Academy basketball uniform—a gangly ten-year-old with auburn hair, a freckled, unfinished face, and deep-set eyes that projected heartbreaking uncertainty.

Looking at this picture, she remembered how frantic Jamie had been the morning after his mother died, when Alex told him she had to take him back to his father. Running off with him after Grace’s death had been an act of desperation, and in the eyes of the law, kidnapping. If Alex had kept Jamie, Bill wouldn’t have hesitated to have her arrested, and he would probably have done so the previous night had he been able to locate her. Many times since that day Alex had regretted returning Jamie, but she had enough experience to know that a successful custody kidnapping required careful planning and preparation. In the five weeks since that day, she had actually taken several steps in that direction. And if her efforts to prove Bill’s complicity in Grace’s murder should fail—which without Dr. Shepard’s help was likely—then she would be ready to take drastic action.

On a low dresser beside the motel desk lay several neat stacks of paper, all relating to her mother’s medical care. There were lists of oral medications and chemotherapy drugs; treatment schedules; bills to be paid by the insurance company; bills from private physicians for the fees the insurance company didn’t cover; test results from the University Medical Center and from the lab of the private oncologist; and of course the correspondence between Grace and various cancer specialists around the world. Grace had dealt with their mother’s cancer the way she’d dealt with every other crisis: she’d declared war on it. And she’d carried on that war with the implacable persistence of Sherman burning his way across the South. Woe betide the insurance clerk who made an error on a bill addressed to Margaret Morse; Grace’s retribution was swift and sure. But now the running of that campaign had passed to Alex, and by Grace’s standard she was doing a piss-poor job.

Her cardinal sin? She was not at her mother’s bedside. Instead, she was camped out a hundred miles southeast, in Natchez, Mississippi, while paid nurses—strangers!—tended her mother in Jackson. And what was she doing in Natchez? Only burning through her life savings and risking her career in an almost certainly vain quest to punish her sister’s murderer. Grace would have had plenty to say about that. But on the other hand, it was Grace who had charged Alex with “saving” Jamie from his father. And since Bill Fennell had legal custody of his son, the only way Alex could see to save Jamie was to prove that his father had murdered his mother.

Alex walked to the oversize card table she’d bought at Wal-Mart to arrange her case materials. This table was the nerve center of her investigation. It was fairly primitive stuff—jotted notes, surveillance records, digital snapshots, minicassettes—but her father had told her countless times that there was no substitute for putting your heels on the pavement or your ass behind the wheel of your car. All the computers in the world couldn’t nail a killer if you never left your office. Alex kept a framed picture of her dad propped on the card table—her patron saint of cold cases. It wasn’t actually a photograph, but a newspaper story that included two snapshots of Jim Morse: one as a fresh-faced patrolman in 1968, the other as a weary but determined-looking homicide detective who’d solved a high-profile race murder in Jackson in 1980.

Her father had gone into police work straight out of the army, returning to Mississippi after two tours in Vietnam. He’d seen action, but he’d never talked about it, and he never had any lasting problems that Alex knew about. But working as an MP in Saigon, Jim Morse had somehow wound up involved in a couple of murder cases. The work had left an impression on him, so when he’d found himself at loose ends on his twenty-first birthday, he’d registered at the police academy in Jackson. He did well as a patrolman, making sergeant before anyone else in his academy class. He passed the detective’s exam when he was twenty-seven and quickly made a name for two things: brilliant detective work; and speaking his mind, no matter whom he happened to be talking to. The first trait would have assured rapid promotion, had he not possessed the second in equal measure. Alex had fought all her life to control the same tendency, and she’d mostly succeeded. But her father had watched men with much less talent and dedication climb past him on the promotional ladder for most of his career.

After retirement, Jim Morse had opened a detective agency with a former partner who’d served as his rabbi early in his career—a wise old redneck named Will Kilmer. The freedom of a private agency had suited both men, and they got all the referral business they could handle. Alex was certain that it was her teenage exposure to their livelier cases that had caused her to spurn all offers after law school and enroll in the FBI academy instead. Her father had applauded her career choice, but her mother … well, Margaret had reacted as she always did when Alex departed from the path of conventional Southern womanhood. Silent reproach.

A stab of guilt hit Alex high in the chest, followed by a wave of grief. To avoid the guilt, she looked down at a jumble of snapshots of Chris and Thora Shepard. In some shots they were together, but in most not. Alex had been following them long enough to form an impression of a classic upper-middle-class couple, harried by the demands of daily life and never quite catching up. Chris spent a remarkable amount of time working, while Thora alternated vigorous exercise with personal pampering. Alex wasn’t yet sure how far that pampering extended, but she had suspicions. She also had some notes and photographs that Dr. Shepard might like to see, once he got over the initial shock of today’s meeting. But not just yet.

Alex felt a vague resentment as she looked down at Thora; the woman looked better after a six-mile run than most women did after two hours of prepping themselves for a party. You had to hate her a little for that. Chris, on the other hand, was much more down-to-earth, a dark-haired Henry Fonda type rather than a pretty boy. A little more muscular than Fonda, maybe, but with that same gravitas. In that way Dr. Shepard reminded her of her father, another quiet man who had lived for his work.

Mixed in with the images of Thora and Chris were a few of Chris and Ben, all shot at the vacant lot where Chris coached Ben’s Little League team. Ben Shepard was only a year younger than Jamie, and his eyes held some of the same tentativeness that Jamie’s did. Maybe it’s just their age, she thought. Or maybe children sense when there’s something wrong at the heart of their families.

Dwelling on Jamie’s plight usually made Alex too upset to function, so she switched on the TV to make the room seem less empty. She turned on the water as hot as she could stand it, then soaked a washcloth, lay on the bed, and began to scrub her face. The heat spread through her scalp and neck, sending blessed relief down the length of her body. As some of the day’s stress faded, her mind returned to Chris Shepard. The meeting had gone a lot better than it might have. Of course, for all she knew, Dr. Shepard had already called the Jackson field office and reported her visit.

How many people could react with equanimity to the kind of accusation she had made today? Reduced to its essentials, her message was I think your wife is planning to kill you. If Shepard had reported her, she would soon be getting a call from Washington. Like any successful field agent, Alex had made enemies as well as friends in the Bureau. But unlike most of those agents, she had both in high places. One of those enemies had almost gotten her fired after James Broadbent’s death, but he’d been forced to settle for her banishment to Charlotte. If he suspected dereliction of duty there, the mildest response she could expect would be immediate recall to headquarters for an “interview” with the Office of Professional Responsibility, the Bureau’s equivalent of Internal Affairs. Even a cursory investigation in Charlotte would prove their case, and then … a squalid end to her once-stellar career.

But Alex had a good feeling about Chris Shepard. He was quick on the uptake, and she liked that. He was a good listener—which was rare in men and seemed even rarer in male physicians, at least in Alex’s experience. Shepard had married a witch—and a blond one at that—but then a lot of decent guys did that. He’d waited until he was thirty-five to get remarried, which made Alex wonder about his first wife. Shepard had married his college sweetheart during his first year of medical school, but two years after graduation—just as he was finishing up a commitment to practice in the dirt-poor Mississippi Delta to pay off his school loans—there had been a quick divorce. No kids, no muss, no fuss: nothing but “irreconcilable differences” in the court records. But there had to be more to it than that. Otherwise, how had a single doctor who wasn’t hard to look at evaded marriage for almost five years after his divorce?

That first wife did a number on him, Alex thought. He was damaged goods for a while. That’s why he went for Thora, the ice queen. There’s a lot of damage in that girl, too, and I don’t think Dr. Chris knows much about it …

Alex reluctantly turned her mind to more mundane matters, like finances. A kindly accountant might tell her that the outlook was discouraging, but her own view was more succinct: she was broke. It cost real money to run a murder investigation, even when you were doing a lot of the legwork yourself. She was paying two private detective agencies regularly, and various others for small contract jobs. Most of the work was being done by her father’s old agency, but even with Will Kilmer giving her all the breaks he could, the fees were eating her alive. Surveillance was the main drain. “Uncle” Will couldn’t send out operatives on goodwill alone. Time spent working Alex’s case was time stolen from others—man-hours piling upon man-hours, each day’s accumulation taking a hefty bite out of her hemorrhaging retirement fund. On top of that, she was paying for gasoline, airfare between Jackson and Charlotte, private nurses for her mother … there was no end to it.

The Charlotte apartment was her most urgent problem. For the last three years, she’d leased a condo in Washington, D.C. If she had bought it instead, she could have sold it tomorrow for double her money. But that was a pipe dream. A prudent agent would have dumped the condo after getting transfer orders, but Alex had kept it, knowing that her superiors would learn that she had and would see this as a tangible symbol of her belief in her eventual redemption. But now on top of the condo she had a six-month lease on a place in Charlotte, an apartment she’d slept in fewer than a dozen nights. She’d paid her second month’s rent to maintain the fiction that she was diligently working at her punishment duty, but she simply couldn’t afford to continue. Yet if she broke the lease, her superiors would eventually find out. She thought of possible explanations, but none that would mollify the Office of Professional Responsibility.

“Shit,” she muttered, tossing the cold washcloth onto the other bed.

Meggie leaped into the air, startled by the wet rag. Alex hadn’t seen her curl up on the bed, and now she had an indignant cat on her hands. “I’d be pissed, too,” she said, getting up and going to her computer.

She logged on to MSN and checked her Contacts list to see whether Jamie was online, but the icon beside his screen name—Ironman QB—was red, not green. This didn’t worry her. Their nightly webcam ritual normally occurred later, after Bill had gone to bed. Though only ten years old, Jamie was quite talented with computers. And since one of the few things Bill was generous with was allowance—guilt money, she knew—Jamie had been able to purchase a webcam that allowed him to open a video link with Alex anytime that both of them were logged on to MSN. Secret communication with a ten-year-old boy might fall on the questionable side of the ethical spectrum, but Alex figured it paled in comparison to premeditated murder. And since Grace had charged her with protecting Jamie, Alex felt justified in maintaining contact any way she could.

Leaving her MSN screen name active, she got up from the desk, took her cell phone from her purse, and dialed her mother’s house. A nurse answered.

“It’s Alex. Is she awake?”

“No, she’s sleeping. She’s on the morphine pump again.”

Oh, God. “How’s she doing apart from the pain?”

“No change, really. Not physically. Emotionally …” The nurse trailed off.

“What is it?”