Black Cross

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Greg Iles

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE (#u9202e47e-8c10-57b0-9178-03a7dc256446)

It’s odd how death often marks a beginning rather than an end. We know someone for ten years, twenty years, longer. We see them in the course of daily life. We speak, laugh, exchange harsh words; we think we have some notion of who they are.

And then they die.

In death, the fluid impressions formed over a lifetime begin to assume definite shape. The picture comes into focus. New facts emerge. Safes are opened, wills read. With finality, and with distance, we often discover that the people we thought we knew were actually quite different than we imagined. And the closer we were to them, the more shocking this surprise is.

So it was with my grandfather. He died violently, and quite publicly, in circumstances so extraordinary that they got thirty seconds of airtime on the national evening news. It happened last Tuesday, in a MedStar helicopter ambulance en route from Fairplay, Georgia—the small town in which I was born and raised—to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where I work as an emergency physician. While making his rounds at Fairplay’s local hospital, my grandfather collapsed at a nurses’ station. Fighting to ignore the terrible pain in his lower back, he had a nurse take his blood pressure. When he heard the figures, he correctly diagnosed a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm and realized that without immediate surgery he would die.

With two nurses supporting him, he spoke on a telephone just long enough to summon the MedStar from Atlanta, forty miles away. My grandmother insisted on remaining by his side in the chopper, and the pilot reluctantly agreed. They don’t usually allow that, but damn near everybody in the Georgia medical community knew or knew of my grandfather—a quiet but eminently respected lung specialist. Besides, my grandmother wasn’t the kind of woman that men talked back to. Ever.

The MedStar crashed twenty minutes later on a quiet street in the suburbs of Atlanta. That was four days ago, and as yet no one has determined the cause of the crash. Just one of those freak things, I guess. Pilot error, they like to call it. I don’t really care whose fault it was. I’m not looking to sue. We’re not—or weren’t—that kind of family.

My grandparents’ deaths hit me especially hard, because they raised me from the age of ten. My parents died in a car crash in 1970. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy, I suppose. I still do. It sweeps through my emergency room every day and night, trailing blood and cocaine and whiskey-breath and burnt skin and dead kids. Such is life. The reason I’m writing this down is because of what happened at the burial—or rather, who I met at the burial. Because it was there, in a place of death, that my grandfather’s secret life revealed itself at last.

The cemetery crowd—a large one for our town, and predominantly Protestant—had already drifted back toward the long line of sedate Lincolns and brighter Japanese imports. I was standing at the green edge of the graves, two side-by-side holes smelling of freshly turned earth. A pair of gravediggers waited to cover the gleaming silver caskets. They seemed in no particular hurry; both had been patients of my grandfather at one time or another. One—a wiry fellow named Crenshaw—had even been brought into the world by him, or so he said.

“They don’t make docs like your grandpa anymore, Mark,” he declared. “Or Doctor, I should say,” he added, smiling. “I can’t quite get used to that title. No offense, but I still remember catching you out here at midnight with that Clark girl.”

I smiled back. That was a good memory. I can’t quite get used to the title either, as a matter of fact. Doctor McConnell. I know I am a doctor—a damn good one—but when I stand, or stood, beside my grandfather, I always felt more like an apprentice, a bright but inexperienced student in the shadow of a master. That was what I was thinking when someone tugged at my jacket sleeve from behind.

“Afternoon, Rabbi,” said the gravedigger, nodding past me.

“Shalom, Mr. Crenshaw,” said a deep, much-traveled voice.

I turned. Behind me stooped an avuncular old man with snow-white hair and a yarmulke. His twinkling eyes settled on me and gave me a thorough going-over. “The spitting image,” he said quietly. “Though you’re a little heavier-boned than Mac was.”

“My grandmother’s genes,” I said, a little embarrassed to be at a disadvantage.

“Quite right,” said the old man. “Quite right. And a beautiful woman she was, too.”

Suddenly I placed him. “Rabbi Leibovitz, isn’t it?”

The old man smiled. “You have a good memory, Doctor. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen me up close.”

The old man’s voice had a low, musical quality to it, as if all its edges had been worn away by years of soothing, reasonable speech. I nodded again. The gravediggers shuffled their feet.

“Well,” I said, “I guess it’s about time—”

“I’ll take that shovel,” Rabbi Leibovitz told Crenshaw.

“But Rabbi, you shouldn’t be doing heavy work.”

The rabbi took the shovel from the amazed gravedigger and spaded it into the soft pile of dirt. “This is work for a man’s friends and family,” he said. “Doctor?” He looked up at me.

I took the other shovel from the second man and followed his example.

“Afternoon, Mark,” muttered Crenshaw, a little put out. He and his partner shambled off toward a battered pickup that waited at a discreet distance.