True Evil

CHAPTER 10

Agent Morse wasn't wearing a biking helmet, but her dark hair was drawn back into a soaking-wet ponytail, making her facial scars all the more prominent. It was the scars that allowed Chris to recognize her. He could hardly believe her presence, and he was about ready to sprint right past her when she crossed the road and hissed to a stop a yard away from him.

"Good morning, Doctor."

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.

"I needed to talk to you. This seemed like a good way to do it."

"How did you know I was here?"

Morse only smiled.

Chris looked her from head to toe, taking in the soaked clothes stuck to her body and her dripping ponytail. She had chill bumps on her arms and legs, and the cotton TULANE LAW shirt she was wearing would take forever to dry, even if the rain stopped.

"And the bike?" he asked. "You a big cyclist?"

"No. I bought it four days ago, when I found out that you were a biker and your wife was a runner."

"You've been following Thora, too?"

Morse's smile faded. "I've shadowed a couple of her runs. She's fast."

"Jesus." Chris shook his head and started to ride away.

"Wait!" Morse cried. "I'm not a threat, Dr. Shepard!"

He stopped and looked back. "I'm not so sure of that."

"Why not?"

He thought of Darryl Foster's words. "Call it instinct."

"You have good instincts about sources of danger?"

"In the past I have."

"Even when those sources are human?"

A red pickup truck whizzed past, its rider staring at them.

"Why don't we keep riding?" Morse suggested. "We'll be less noticeable talking that way."

"I don't intend to continue yesterday's conversation."

She looked incredulous. "Surely you must have some questions for me."

Chris looked off into the trees, then turned and let some of his anger through his eyes. "Yes, I do. My first question is, did you personally see my wife go into this divorce lawyer's office?"

Morse took a small step backward. "Not personally, no, but-"

"Who did?"

"Another agent."

"How did he identify Thora?"

"He followed her down to her car, then took down her license plate."

"Her license plate. No chance of a mistake? No chance he got one number wrong, and it could have been someone else?"

Morse shook her head. "He shot a picture of her."

"Do you have that picture?"

"Not on me. But she was wearing a very distinctive outfit. A black silk dress with a white scarf and an Audrey Hepburn hat. Not many women can pull that kind of thing off anymore."

Chris gritted his teeth. Thora had worn that same outfit to a party only a month ago. "Do you have any recordings of her conversation with the lawyer? Copies of any memos or files? Anything that proves what they talked about?"

Morse reluctantly shook her head.

"So you admit that it's possible that they talked about wills and estates, or investments, or something else legitimate."

Agent Morse looked down at her wet shoes. After a while, she looked back up and said, "It's possible, yes."

"But you don't believe it."

She bit her bottom lip but said nothing.

"Agent Morse, I happen to know from my wife's recent behavior that what you suggested yesterday is impossible."

The FBI agent looked intrigued, but instead of asking what he was talking about, she said, "It's ten miles back to your truck. Why don't we ride back together? I promise not to piss you off, if I can help it."

Chris knew he could leave Morse behind in seconds. But for some reason-maybe just the manners he'd been raised with-he decided not to. He shrugged, climbed into his pedal clips, and started southward at an easy pace. Morse fell in beside him and immediately started talking.

"Have you called anybody about me?"

He decided to leave Darryl Foster out of the conversation. "I figured you'd already know the answer to that. Aren't you tapping my phones?"

She ignored this. "I'm sure you have some questions for me, after all I said yesterday."

Chris shook the rain out of his eyes. "I'll admit I've done some thinking about what you told me, especially about the medical side."

"Good. Go on."

"I want to know more about these unexplained deaths, as you called them."

"What do you want to know?"

"How the people died. Was it a stroke in every case?"

"No. Only my sister's."

"Really. What were the other causes of death?"

"Pulmonary embolism in one. Myocardial infarction in another."

"What else?"

A hundred feet of road passed beneath them before Morse answered. "The rest were cancer."

Chris looked sharply over at her, but Morse kept watching the road. "Cancer?"

She nodded over her handlebars, and water dripped off her nose. "Fatal malignancies."

"You're kidding, right?"

"No."

"You're telling me this cluster of suspicious deaths that has you so worked up involves people who've died of cancer?"

"Yes."

He thought about this for a while. "How many victims were there? Total?"

"Nine deaths tied to the divorce lawyer I told you about. Six cancers that I've traced so far."

"Same kind of tumor in every person?"

"That depends on how picky you are. They were all blood cancers."

"Call me picky. Blood cancer encompasses a whole constellation of diseases, Agent Morse. There are over thirty different types of non-Hodgkin's lymphomas alone. At least a dozen different leukemias. Were all the deaths from one type of blood cancer, at least?"

"No. Three leukemias, two lymphomas, one multiple myeloma."

Chris shook his head. "You're out of your mind. You really believe someone is murdering people by giving them different kinds of cancer?"

Morse looked over at him, and her eyes were as grim as any he'd ever seen.

"I know it."

"That's impossible."

"Are you so sure? You're not an oncologist."

Chris snorted. "It doesn't take an oncologist to realize that would be a stupid way to murder someone-even if it were possible. Even if you could somehow induce cancer in your victim, it could take years for that person to die, if they died at all. A lot of people survive leukemia now. Lymphomas, too. And people live well over five years with myeloma after bone marrow transplants. Some patients have two transplants and live ten years or more."

"All these patients died in eighteen months or less."

This brought him up short. "Eighteen months from diagnosis to death? All of them?"

"All but one. The myeloma patient lived twenty-three months after an autologous bone marrow transplant."

"Aggressive cancers, then. Very aggressive."

"Obviously."

Morse wanted him to work this out for himself. "These people who died…they were all married to wealthy people?"

"All of them. To very wealthy people."

"And all the surviving spouses were clients of the same divorce lawyer?"

Morse shook her head. "I never said that. I said all the surviving spouses wound up in business with the same divorce lawyer-and only after the deaths of their spouses. Big deals, mostly, one-offs that had nothing to do with the lawyer's area of expertise."

Chris nodded, but his mind was still on Morse's cancer theory. "I don't want to get into a technical argument, but even if all these patients died from leukemias, you're talking about several different disease etiologies. And the actual carcinogenesis isn't understood in a majority of types. Include the lymphomas, and you're dealing with entirely different cell groups-the erythroid and B-cell malignancies-and the causes of those cancers are also unknown. The fact that your 'blood cancers' killed in less than eighteen months is probably their only similarity. In every other way they're probably as different from each other as pancreatic cancer and a sarcoma. And if the best oncologists in the world don't know what causes those cancers, who do you think could intentionally cause them to commit murder?"

"Radiation causes leukemia," Morse said assertively. "You don't have to be a genius to give someone cancer."

She's right, Chris realized. Many initial survivors of Hiroshima died of leukemia in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, as did many "survivors" of the Chernobyl disaster. Marie Curie died of leukemia caused by her radium experiments. You could cause sophisticated genetic damage with a metaphorically blunt instrument. His mind instantly jumped to the issue of access to gamma radiation. You'd have to consider physicians, dentists, veterinarians-hell, even some medical technologists had access to X-ray machines or the radioactive isotopes used for radiotherapy. Agent Morse's theory was based on more than wild speculation. Yet the basic premise still seemed ludicrous to him.

"It's been done before, you know," Morse said.

"What has?"

"During the late 1930s, the Nazis experimented with ways of sterilizing large numbers of Jews without their knowledge. They asked subjects to sit at a desk and fill out some forms that would take about fifteen minutes. During that time, high-energy gamma rays were fired at their genitals from three sides. The experiment worked."

"My God."

"Why couldn't someone do the same thing to an unsuspecting victim in a lawyer's office?" Morse asked. "Or a dentist's office?"

Chris pedaled harder but said nothing.

"You know that researchers purposely cause cancer in lab animals all the time, right?"

"Of course. They do it by injecting carcinogenic chemicals into the animals. And chemicals like that are traceable, Agent Morse. Forensically, I mean."

She gave him a skeptical look. "In an ideal world. But you said yourself, it takes time to die from cancer. After eighteen months, all traces of the offending carcinogen could be gone. Benzene is a good example."

Chris knit his brow in thought. "Benzene causes lung cancer, doesn't it?"

"Also leukemia and multiple myeloma," she informed him. "They proved that by testing factory workers with minor benzene exposure in Ohio and in China."

She's done her homework, he thought. Or someone has. "Have you done extensive toxicological studies in all these deaths?"

"Almost none of them."

This stunned him. "Why not?"

"Several of the bodies were cremated before we became suspicious."

"That's convenient."

"And in the other cases, we couldn't get permission to exhume the bodies."

"Again, why not?"

"It's complicated."

Chris sensed that he was being played. "I don't buy that, Agent Morse. If the FBI wanted forensic studies, they'd get them. What about the families of these alleged victims? Did they suspect foul play? Is that how you got into this case? Or was it your sister's accusation that started it all?"

Two big touring motorcycles swept around a long curve ahead, their lights illuminating the rain.

"The families of several victims suspected foul play from the beginning."

"Even though their relatives died of cancer?"

"Yes. Most of the husbands we're talking about are real bastards."

Big surprise. "Had all of these alleged victims filed for divorce?"

"None had."

"None? Did the husbands file, then?"

Morse looked over at him again. "Nobody filed."

"Then what the hell happened? People consulted this lawyer but didn't file?"

"Exactly. We think there's probably a single consultation-maybe two visits, at most. The lawyer waits for a really wealthy client who stands to lose an enormous amount of money in his divorce. Or maybe the client stands to lose custody of his kids. But when the lawyer senses that he has a truly desperate client-a client with intense hatred for his spouse-he makes his pitch."

"That's an interesting scenario. Can you prove any of it?"

"Not yet. This lawyer is very savvy. Paranoid, in fact."

Chris gazed at her in disbelief. "You can't even prove that any murders have occurred, much less that anyone specific is involved. You've got nothing but speculation."

"I have my sister's word, Doctor."

"Spoken on her deathbed, after a severe stroke."

Morse's face became a mask of defiant determination.

"I'm not trying to upset you," Chris said. "I'm very sorry for your loss. I see that kind of tragedy week in and week out, and I know what it does to families."

She said nothing.

"But you have to admit, it's a pretty elaborate theory you've developed. It's Hollywood stuff, in fact," he said, recalling Foster's words. "Not real life."

Morse did not look angry; in fact, she looked mildly amused. "Dr. Shepard, in 1995, a forty-four-year-old neurologist was arrested at the Vanderbilt Medical Center with a six-inch syringe and a four-inch needle in his pocket. The syringe was filled with boric acid and salt water. I'm sure you know that solution would have been lethal if injected into a human heart."

"That's about the only thing a four-inch needle's good for," Chris thought aloud.

"The neurologist was planning to murder a physician who'd been his supervisor when he was a resident there. When police searched a storage unit he owned, they found books on assassination and the production of toxic biological agents. They also found a jar containing ricin, one of the deadliest poisons in the world. The neurologist had planned to soak the pages of a book with a solvent mixture that would promote the absorption of ricin through the skin." Morse looked over at Chris with a raised eyebrow. "Is that elaborate enough for you?"

Chris shifted down two gears and pedaled ahead.

Morse quickly rode alongside him again. "In 1999, a woman in San Jose, California, was admitted to the hospital with nausea and blinding headaches. They gave her a CAT scan and found nothing. But a technician had laid the woman's earrings down next to a stack of unexposed X-ray film. When they were developed, the tech saw an apparent defect on each of the films. It was very distinctive. He finally figured out that one of the woman's earrings had exposed the films."

"The earrings were radioactive?"

"One of them was. The woman's husband was a radiation oncologist. The police called in the Bureau, and we discovered that her cell phone was as hot as a piece of debris from Chernobyl. Turned out her husband had hidden a small pellet of cesium inside the phone. Of course, by that time he'd put the pellet back into its lead-lined case at his office. But the traces were still there."

"Did she develop cancer?"

"She hasn't yet, but she may. She absorbed hundreds of times the permissible exposure."

"What happened to the radiation oncologist?"

"He's in San Quentin now. My point is, doctors aren't immune to homicidal impulses. And they're capable of very elaborate plans to carry them out. I could cite dozens of similar cases for you."

Chris waved his right hand. "Save your breath. I know some stone-crazy doctors myself." Despite his casual retort, he was sobered by Morse's revelations.

"There are four and a half thousand doctors in Mississippi," she said. "Add to that about five thousand dentists. Then you have veterinarians, med techs, university researchers, nurses-a massive suspect pool, even if you assume the killer is from Mississippi. And I've only been onto this theory for seven days."

As Morse spoke, Chris realized that the apparent enormity of the task was illusory; it only existed because of a lack of baseline information. "You've got to find the cause of death in these people-or rather the cause of the cause, the etiology of these blood cancers. If it is radiation, you could start narrowing your suspect pool pretty quickly."

Her voice took on an excited edge. "An expert I talked to says radiation is the surest and simplest method."

"But you don't have forensic evidence? No radiation burns, or strange symptoms noted long before the cancer was diagnosed?"

"No. Again, because local law enforcement authorities don't believe these deaths were murder, there's a problem of access to the bodies."

"What about the medical records of the alleged victims?"

"I managed to get the records of two victims from angry family members. But experts have been over both of them in microscopic detail, and they haven't turned up anything suspicious."

Chris blinked against stinging sweat that the rain had washed into his eyes.

"But I'm told that radiation could explain the variation in the cancers," Morse went on. "You expose somebody to radiation, there's no way to predict how their cells will react."

Chris nodded, but something about this idea bothered him. "Your expert is right. But then, why are blood cancers the only result? Why no solid tumors? Why no melanomas? And why only superaggressive blood cancers? You couldn't predict something like that with radiation."

"Maybe you could," Morse suggested. "If you were a radiation oncologist."

"Maybe," Chris conceded. "If you managed to expose the bone marrow primarily, you might get more blood cancers than other types. But if that's true, you just shrank your suspect pool by about ten thousand people."

Morse smiled. "Believe me, every radiation oncologist in Mississippi is under investigation at this moment."

"How many are there?"

"Nineteen. But it's not a simple matter of alibis. I can't ask some doctor where he was on a given day at a given time, because we have no way to know when the victims were dosed. You see?"

"Yeah. Dragnet methods are out the window. But it's not just a doctor you're looking for, right? It's the lawyer, too. If you're right, he functions almost like the killer's agent."

"Exactly. Only he handles an assassin instead of a quarterback or a singer."

Chris laughed softly. "How would a relationship like that get started? You can't go scouting for promising young assassins. There's no national draft. Does your greedy lawyer put an ad on the Internet to recruit someone who can kill people without a trace? Does he hire a medical headhunter?"

"I know it sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, but we're talking about a lot of money here."

"How much?"

"Millions in every case. So the lawyer has a pretty big carrot to hold out in front of someone who probably makes a hundred grand or less at his legitimate job."

To break the monotony of the ride, Chris gently steered left and right. Morse gave him room to ride his serpentine course.

"Lawyers get to know a lot of professional criminals in the course of their work," she pointed out. "And necessity is the mother of invention, right? I think this guy simply saw a demand for a service and then found a way to provide it."

Chris pedaled out in front of her so that a large truck could pass. Illegally, since big trucks weren't allowed on the Trace. "A lot of what you say makes sense," he called over the sound of the receding truck, "but I still say your theory doesn't add up."

"Why not?" Morse asked, pulling alongside again.

"The time factor. If I want to kill someone, it's because I really hate them, or because I stand to gain a hell of a lot if they die. Or maybe I stand to lose millions of dollars if my wife goes on living, like you said yesterday. What if she wants to take my children away forever? I'm not going to wait months or years for her to croak. I want immediate action."

"Even if that's the case," said Morse, "the most likely result of any conventional murder-especially in a divorce situation-is the killer going to jail. And if you're not going to try the murder yourself, who do you hire? You're a multimillionaire. You don't have a gangsta posse to turn to. Imagine how someone that desperate might react to a slick lawyer offering him a risk-free road out of his problems. A perfect murder is worth waiting for."

She has a point, Chris thought. "I can see that. But no matter how you slice it, there's an element of urgency in a divorce situation. People go crazy. They'll do anything to get out of their marriage. There's a frantic desire to move on, to marry their lover, whatever."

"You're right, of course," Morse agreed. "But you've already waited years for your freedom. Maybe decades. Any divorce lawyer can tell you that obtaining a divorce-the whole process from beginning to end-can take a very long time. If the divorce is contested, we're talking nightmare delays. Even filing under irreconcilable differences, spouses often argue back and forth for a year or more. People are hurting, they stonewall, negotiations break down. You can wind up in court even if it's the last thing you wanted. Years can go by." Morse was suddenly puffing hard. "If your lawyer told you that in the same amount of time that your divorce would take, he could save you millions of dollars, guarantee you full custody of your children, and prevent them from hating you-you'd have to at least consider what he had to say, wouldn't you?"

They were crossing the high bridge over Cole's Creek. Chris braked to a stop, climbed off, and leaned the Trek against the concrete rail.

"You've got me," he said. "If you remove urgency from the equation, then a delayed-action weapon becomes viable. You could use something like cancer as a weapon. If it's technically possible."

"Thank you," Alex said softly. She leaned her bike against the concrete and gazed at the brown water drifting lazily over the sand fifty feet below.

Chris watched a burst of tiny drops pepper the surface of the water, then vanish. The rain was slacking off. "Didn't you tell me that some of the victims were men?"

"Yes. In two cases, the surviving spouses were female."

"So there's a precedent for women murdering the husbands in this thing."

Morse took a deep breath, then looked up at him and said, "That's why I'm here with you, Doctor."

Chris tried to imagine Thora secretly driving up to Jackson for a clandestine meeting with a divorce lawyer. He simply couldn't do it. "I buy your logic, okay? But in my case it's irrelevant, and for lots of reasons. The main one is that if Thora asked me for a divorce, I'd give her one. Simple as that. And I think she knows that."

Morse shrugged. "I don't know the lady."

"You're right. You don't." The concrete rail was not even waist high to Chris. He sometimes urinated off it during his rides. He suppressed the urge to do so now.

"It's beautiful down there," Morse said, gazing down the winding course of the creek. "It's looks like virgin wilderness."

"It's as close as you'll find. It hasn't been logged since the 1930s, and it's federal land. I spent a lot of time walking that creek as a boy. I found dozens of arrowheads and spear points in it. The Natchez Indians hunted along that creek for a thousand years before the French came."

She smiled. "You're lucky to have had a childhood like that."

Chris knew she was right. "We only lived in Natchez for a few years-IP moved my dad around a lot, between mills, you know?-but Dad showed me a lot of things out in these woods. After heavy rains, we'd each take one bank of the creek and work our way along it. After one mudslide, I found three huge bones. They turned out to be from a woolly mammoth. Fifteen thousand years old."

"Wow. I had no idea that kind of stuff was around here."

Chris nodded. "We're walking in footsteps everywhere we go."

"The footsteps of the dead."

He looked up at the sound of an approaching engine. It was a park ranger's cruiser. He lifted his hand, recalling a female ranger who'd patrolled this stretch of the Trace for a couple of years. After she moved on, he'd seen her face on the back of a bestselling mystery novel set on the Trace. The place seemed to touch everyone who spent time here.

"What are you thinking, Doctor?"

He was thinking about Darryl Foster, and what Foster had told him about Alexandra Morse. Chris didn't want to bluntly challenge her, but he did want to know how honest she was being with him.

"From the moment we met," he said, looking into her green eyes, "you've been digging into my personal life. I want to dig into yours for a minute."

He could almost see the walls going up. But at length she nodded assent. What choice did she have?

"Your scars," he said. "I can tell they're recent. I want to know how you got them."

She turned away and stared down at the rippling sand beneath the surface of the water. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice that had surrendered something. Gone was the professional authority, yet in its place was a raw sincerity that told him he was hearing something very like the truth.

"There was a man," she said. "A man I worked with at the Bureau. His name was James Broadbent. People called him Jim, but he preferred James. They often assigned him to protect me at hostage scenes. He…he was in love with me. I really cared for him, too, but he was married. Two kids. We were never intimate, but even if we had been, he would never have left his family. Never. You understand?"

Chris nodded.

She looked back down at the water. "I was a good hostage negotiator, Doctor. Some said the best ever. In five years I never lost a hostage. That's rare. But last December…" Morse faltered, then found the thread again. "My father was killed trying to stop a robbery. Two months later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Very advanced, and you know what that means."

"I'm sorry."

Morse shrugged. "I sort of lost it after that. Only I didn't know it, see? My dad had raised me to be tough, so that's what I tried to be. 'Never quit,' that's the Morse motto. From Winston Churchill to my father and right down to me."

Chris nodded with as much empathy as he could.

"I'm getting to the scars, I promise," she said. "Nine weeks ago, I was called to a hostage scene at a bank. Not a normal bank. A Federal Reserve bank in D.C. Sixteen hostages inside, most of them employees. A lot of suits at the Bureau had the idea this was a terrorist attack. Others thought it was about money. It could have been both-a sophisticated robbery raising capital for terrorist operations. But my gut told me it was something else. The leader spoke with an Arabic accent, but it didn't sound real to me. He was angry, maybe schizophrenic. He had a lot of rage toward the government. I could tell he'd experienced loss in the recent past, like a lot of people who try something extreme." Morse gave Chris a tight smile. "Like me, you're thinking? Anyway, an associate deputy director named Dodson had overall command, and he didn't give me enough time to do my job. I had a real chance to talk the leader down without anyone firing a shot. All my experience and instinct told me that. And there were sixteen lives at stake, you know? But there was a lot of pressure from above, this being Washington in its post-9/11 mind-set. So Dodson jerked me out of there and ordered in the HRT."

Chris saw that she was reliving the memory as she recounted the events. She'd probably been over it a million times in the privacy of her head, but how many times had she spoken of it to someone else?

"There was no way to resolve the situation with snipers. It had to be an explosive entry, which meant extreme risk to the hostages. I couldn't accept that. So I marched right back through the cordon and into the bank. My people were screaming at me, but I barely heard them. Some HRT guys didn't get the word in time, and they blew the doors and windows just as I reached the lobby. Flash-bang-crash grenades, the works." Morse touched her scarred cheek as though feeling the injury for the first time. "One of the robbers shot me from behind a plate-glass partition. I caught shards mostly, but what I didn't know was that James had followed me into the bank. When I was hit, he looked down at me instead of up for the shooter, which was what he should have done. His feelings for me were stronger than his training. And they train us hard, you know?" Morse wiped her face as though to brush away cobwebs, but Chris saw the glint of tears.

"Hey," he said, reaching out and squeezing her arm. "It's okay."

She shook her head with surprising violence. "No, it's not. Maybe someday it will be, but right now it's not."

"I know one thing," Chris said. "In the shape you're in, you don't need to be working a murder case. You need a medical leave."

Morse laughed strangely. "I'm on medical leave now."

As he looked down at her, everything suddenly came clear. Her deep fatigue, her obsessiveness, the thousand-yard stare of a shell-shocked soldier…"You're on your own, aren't you?"

She shook her head again, but her chin was quivering.

"You say I a lot more than you say we."

Morse bit her bottom lip, then squinted as though against bright sunlight.

"Is that how it is?" he asked gently. "Are you alone?"

When she looked up at him, her eyes were wet with more than rain. "Pretty much. The truth is, almost everything I've done beginning five weeks ago was unauthorized. They'd fire me if they knew."

Chris whistled long and low. "Jesus Christ."

She took him by the wrists and spoke with fierce conviction. "You're my last shot, Dr. Shepard. My no-shit last shot."

"Last shot at what?"

"Stopping these people. Proving what they've done."

"Look," he said awkwardly, "if everything you've told me is true, why isn't the FBI involved?"

Frustration hardened her face. "A dozen reasons, none of them good. Murder's a state crime, not a federal one, unless it's a RICO case. A lot of what I have is inference and supposition, not objective evidence. But how the hell am I supposed to get evidence without any resources? The FBI is the most hidebound bureaucracy you can imagine. Everything is done by the book-unless it involves counterterrorism, of course, in which case they throw the book right out the window. But nobody's going to nail the guys I'm after by using the Marquess of Queensberry rules."

Chris didn't know what to say. Yesterday morning his life had been ticking along as usual; now he was standing on a bridge in the rain, watching a woman he barely knew fall apart.

"If you're acting alone, who saw Thora go into the lawyer's office?"

"A private detective. He used to work for my father."

"Jesus. What does the FBI think you're doing right now?"

"They think I'm in Charlotte, working a prostitution case involving illegal aliens. When they transferred me there after I was shot, I got lucky. I found an old classmate from the Academy there. He's done a lot to cover for me. But it can't go on much longer."

"Holy shit."

"I know I'm not making perfect sense about everything. I haven't slept more than three hours a night in five weeks. It took me two weeks just to find the connection between my brother-in-law and the divorce lawyer. Then another week to come up with the names of all his business partners. I only came up with my list of victims a week ago. There could be a dozen more, for all I know. But then your wife walked into Rusk's office, and that brought me to Natchez. I've been splitting my time between here and Jackson, where my mother is dying, and-"

"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.