True Evil

CHAPTER 21

Chris pedaled past the Little Theater, then turned his Trek onto Maple Street and pumped hard up the long slope toward the Natchez Cemetery. Soon he would break out onto the bluff, with miles of open space to his left and the pristine cemetery on his right.

Chris had prescribed a lot of antidepressants in his career, but he had never experienced depression. He'd read deeply on the subject and asked the most penetrating questions he could to patients, but until today he'd had no true inkling of the condition those patients had described to him. Plath's metaphor of a bell jar seemed strikingly apt: he felt as though all the air had been sucked out of his life, that he was moving in a vacuum, and that his actions, whatever he might choose to do, would have no meaning or positive consequence in the world.

Tom Cage, as perceptive as ever, had noticed Chris's dazed mental state and told him to take the afternoon off. Since Thora had left for the Delta before daybreak (despite having promised to take Ben to school), his only remaining obligation-barring evening rounds-was to deliver Ben to the birthday party at the bowling alley at 4 p.m. And even that could be handled by Mrs. Johnson with a single phone call.

After leaving the office, Chris had driven home, suited up, and without really intending it had begun a ride from Elgin to the Mississippi River. He'd covered fifteen miles in thirty-six minutes-a record time for him-yet he felt neither tired nor elated. He felt like a machine endowed with the capacity for thought. Yet he did not want to think. With a rogue wind blowing out of the west, he wanted only to crest the hill and hit the breeze shooting up the face of the two-hundred-foot bluff that lined the Mississippi River.

Ten seconds after he hit Cemetery Road, the vast river valley opened up on his left. He knew then that he would not sidetrack and ride the cemetery, as was his habit, but rather continue past the shotgun shacks that lined the road beyond the cemetery and ride on to the Devil's Punchbowl, the deep defile where notorious outlaws had dumped the bodies of their victims in past centuries. He was staring so intently over the endless miles of Louisiana cotton fields on his left that he almost slammed into a car that had turned broadside across the road.

Chris braked so hard that he nearly went over the handlebars. He was about to start screaming at the driver when she jumped out and started screaming at him. He stood with his mouth hanging open.

The driver was Alex Morse.

She looked as though she hadn't slept for days. Her voice was shockingly hoarse, her eyes ringed with black, and for the first time since he'd met her, she appeared to be out of control.

"Why haven't you been answering my calls?" she shouted.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Because I already know what you're going to say."

"You don't know what I'm going to say, goddamn it! Something terrible has happened! Something I couldn't have predicted in a million years."

Chris pedaled up to her open door. "What?"

"One of the husbands that murdered his wife tried to commit suicide last night."

This took Chris aback. "Tried how?"

"Insulin overdose."

"He's still alive?"

Morse nodded.

"In a coma, right?"

"How did you know?"

"I saw that a lot during my residency. People try insulin because it offers hope of a painless death. More times than not they wind up in a permanent vegetative state. Was he diabetic?"

"Yes. Two injections per day."

Chris looked toward the river. "Could have been an accidental overdose."

"I don't think so. But then I don't think it was suicide either."

He said nothing.

Morse took a couple of steps toward him, her eyes boring into his. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Chris replied.

"Why aren't you at work?"

"Didn't feel like working. Why don't you think it was suicide?"

She studied him as though unsure whether to drop the issue of his mental state. "The guy's name is William Braid. He's from Vicksburg. His wife suffered terribly before she died. If I'm right, and Braid paid for her murder, then we have two possibilities. One, Braid was so consumed by guilt that he couldn't stand to live with himself one more day. Some local gossip supports that scenario. But a couple of his close friends say Braid's ego was so big that he could never kill himself."

"Go on."

"It could also be that whoever Braid hired to murder his wife-Andrew Rusk, for example-decided that an unstable, guilt-ridden client was an intolerable liability. Especially now, with me poking around." Morse looked up and down Cemetery Road. "How hard would it be to put Braid into a permanent insulin coma?"

"Child's play compared to giving someone cancer. Think of the Klaus von Bülow case. Same thing."

Morse's eyes flashed. "You're right. Only in this case, there's no family to get pissed off. So by putting Braid into a coma rather than killing him, the attacker greatly reduced the amount of police scrutiny on the case."

An ancient pickup rumbled by, spewing blue-black exhaust from its tailpipe.

"You look terrible," Chris said. "Why haven't you slept?"

"I drove to Jackson last night. To see my mother. They had to put her into UMC again last night. Her liver's going. Kidneys, too."

"I'm sorry."

"She's close to the end this time. Tons of edema…she's heavily sedated now."

Chris nodded. He'd seen it many times.

"It's weird," Morse said. "Put me on a plane, and I can sleep from wheels-up to the arrival gate. But hospitals…I can't do it."

She seem to expect him to make conversation, but Chris didn't know what to say.

"I did sleep in my car for a couple of hours," she added.

"Sounds risky."

"Not really. I was in the parking lot of your office. I was still asleep when you left."

He felt a prick of guilt.

"I figured you might come out here," she went on. "I've followed Thora when she ran out here."

"Look, Agent Morse-"

"Would you call me Alex, for God's sake?" Exasperation colored her face, darkening the scars around her right eye.

"Okay. Alex. I've heard everything you've told me, okay? I've seen what you've shown me. I know what you want me to do. I've even thought a bit about the feasibility of inducing cancer in human beings. But I didn't feel like listening to any more about it today. That's why I didn't answer your calls."

Her expression had changed from exasperation to something like empathy. "What do you feel like doing?"

"Riding."

She turned up her palms. "Fine. Why not?" She nodded at an approaching car. "But we should get off this road. Where were you going from here?"

He didn't want to mention the Devil's Punchbowl. "I was going to do some sprints in the cemetery, then sit on Jewish Hill for a while."

"What's Jewish Hill?"

Chris pointed to a thirty-foot hill topped with marble monuments and a tall flagpole. The American flag was shamefully weathered, even tattered at the ends of the stripes. "Best place to watch the river go by."

"I can't ride with you today," Alex said, nodding at the empty bike rack attached to her rear bumper. "Could we just take a walk in there? I won't even talk if you don't want me to."

Chris looked away. Could she walk beside him without bringing up her obsession? He doubted it. And talking to Alex Morse would certainly drive him deeper into depression. Yet, oddly enough, she was the only person who might remotely understand what was eating at him. "We're liable to run into people who know me in there, believe it or not. A lot of people run in this cemetery."

Alex shrugged. "If we do, tell them I'm a doctor from out of town. You and Tom Cage are thinking of bringing in a new associate."

Chris smiled for the first time in many hours, maybe days. Then he mounted his bike and pedaled slowly toward the nearest cemetery gate, a wrought-iron monster attached to heavy brick pillars. The whole cemetery was filled with beautiful ironwork from another age. Alex drove through the open gate and parked her Corolla on the grass. Chris chained his bike to her rack, then led her down one of the narrow lanes that divided the tall and silent stones.

They walked some distance without speaking, penetrating ever deeper into the cemetery's interior. Like much of old Natchez, the cemetery had a classical Greek feel to it, thanks largely to the Greek Revival architecture favored by Anglophile cotton planters before the Civil War. Confederate dead were buried here, and also many Americans of national reputation, but the graves of the common people had always interested Chris most.

"Look," he said, pointing toward a dark stone covered with moss.

"Who's buried there?"

"A little girl who was afraid of the dark. She was so afraid that death would be dark that her mother buried her with a glass lid on her coffin. Little steps lead down to the tomb. The mother would go down there every day and read to the dead child from her favorite book."

"My God. When was this?"

"About a century ago."

"Can I see her?"

"Not anymore. They finally had to block it up, because of vandals. Assholes come out here all the time and destroy things. I wish I had the time to sit out here for a few nights in a row. I'd kick the shit out of anybody who tried to desecrate this place."

Alex smiled. "I believe you."

She took the lead and started up a lane that sloped toward the high ground over the river. "You said you've given some thought to my cancer theory."

"I thought you weren't going to talk about that."

"You opened the conversation."

Chris heard himself chuckle. "I guess I did." He walked on for several yards, then said, "I've been doing a little reading in my oncology texts between patients."

"What have you learned?"

"I was right about the complexity of the blood cancers. We don't know what causes ninety percent of them. We do know that most of them have different causes. They can tell that from the changes in various blood cells, and by other factors like tumor-suppressor genes, cellular growth factors, et cetera. This is bleeding-edge medicine we're talking about."

"Was I right about radiation?"

"As far as you went, yes. You could definitely cause a whole spectrum of cancers with radiation. But"-Chris held up a forefinger-"not undetectably. You fire gamma rays into somebody without a qualified radiation oncologist directing the beam, you're going to have severe burns, skin rotting off, vomiting around the clock. Even with qualified personnel, you get serious side effects from radiation therapy. And I'm talking about minimum doses given to cure people."

"But it's possible with enough expertise," Alex insisted. "Did you come up with any other options?"

"Chemicals," said Chris, making steadily for Jewish Hill. "As I suspected, the toxins known to cause cancer are some of the most persistent on the planet. You put one nanogram of dioxin into somebody, it'll be there on the day they die. Detailed toxicology studies on autopsy would turn up things like that very quickly. As for volatile compounds like benzene, which you mentioned the second time we met, you'd have the same problem you have with radiation. Using enough to reliably kill people would almost certainly cause acute illness. So basically, as a class, chemicals are a less reliable oncogenic murder weapon than radiation, but more likely to get you caught. I suppose-"

"I'm sorry. Oncogenic?"

"Cancer-causing," Chris clarified.

"Sorry. Go on."

"I suppose someone could come up with an untraceable oncogenic poison-the CIA or the army, I mean-but in that case you'd have almost no practical hope of discovering it."

Alex looked thoughtful. "But it's something to consider. I haven't been profiling intel or military officers as suspects, but maybe that's a realistic option."

"Not around here. Fort Detrick, Maryland, is where they keep the germs and toxins. You really need to talk to an expert, Alex. And I don't mean a garden-variety hematologist. You need somebody from NIH or Sloan-Kettering or Dana-Farber." Chris stopped and watched a half dozen butterflies flitting around a bush bursting with purple flowers. One had marks on its wings that looked almost psychedelic, rounded spheres of electric blue. "M. D. Anderson is probably the closest place."

"That's Houston?"

"Right. Seven hours by car."

Alex held out her hand, and one butterfly danced around her extended finger. "And what do I ask these experts? What would you ask them?"

Chris started walking again. "If we dispense with radiation and chemicals in our little hypothetical, that leaves only one possibility I know of. And it's a biggie."

"What is it?"

"Oncogenic viruses."

She turned toward him. "A professor I spoke to last week mentioned viruses, but a lot of what he said was over my head."

"Do you know anything about retroviruses?"

"Only that AIDS is caused by one."

"Reverse transcriptase?"

Alex looked embarrassed.

"Okay. Some viruses in the herpes family are known to cause cancer. And there's at least one retrovirus that's known to be oncogenic. If there's one, there are probably more. There are theoretical models about this stuff, but it's not my area. I was thinking of calling my old hematology professor from medical school. Peter Connolly. He's up at Sloan-Kettering now. He's done groundbreaking work on gene therapy, which actually uses viruses to carry magic bullets to tumor sites. It's one of the newest forms of cancer therapy."

"From Jackson, Mississippi, to New York?"

Chris laughed again. "It happens. Didn't you know that the first heart transplant in the world was done in Jackson?"

"I thought that was in Houston, too."

"The Jackson transplant was done on a monkey. But the technology was the same. The difficulty was the same. Kind of like the first space shot. Michael DeBakey and Alan Shepard-monkeys helped blaze the trail for both of them."

They had reached Jewish Hill at last, but as they started toward its forward precipice, and the immense vista it offered, Chris glanced at his watch.

"Alex, I hate to say this, but I've got to run. Ben's at a birthday party, and with Thora gone, I've got to pick him up."

She smiled. "It's okay. We can jog back to the car."

They started trotting downhill, but Alex clearly didn't intend to squander her remaining time with him. "I've wondered about someone simply injecting tumor cells from a sick person into a healthy one. I saw that done with mice on the Discovery Channel."

A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, Chris reflected. "They can do that because the mice used for cancer research are either nude mice, which means they have no immune systems, or because they're genetic copies of each other. Clones, basically. That's like injecting cells from a tumor in my body into my identical twin. Sure, those cells would grow, or they'd have a chance to, anyway. But if I injected cells from my tumor into you, your immune system would quickly wipe them out. Very violently, too, on the cellular level."

"Are you positive? Even with really aggressive tumors?"

"I'm pretty certain. Even with what we call undifferentiated tumors, those cancer cells began as part of a specific person, from their unique DNA. Any other person's immune system is going to recognize that foreign tissue as an alien invader."

"What if you somehow beat down your victim's immune system beforehand?"

"You mean like with cyclosporine? Anti-organ-rejection drugs?"

"Or corticosteroids," Alex suggested.

She had been doing her homework. "If you compromised someone's immune system sufficiently to accept cancer cells from another person, they'd be vulnerable to all sorts of opportunistic infections. They'd be noticeably sick. Very ill. Do the medical records of your victims show strange illnesses before their cancer diagnosis?"

"I only have access to the records of two victims. But, no, those records don't show anything like that."

The Corolla was forty yards away. Chris cut across the grass, picking his way between the tombstones. "If you had the records of every victim, you might be able to learn a lot. You could really move this thing forward."

Alex stopped beside a black granite stone and looked at him with complete candor. "I feel so inadequate in this investigation. I mean, my genetics stops at the high school level. Mendel and his peas. But you speak the language, you know the experts we need to talk to-"

"Alex-"

"If I can get hold of the other records, will you consider helping me analyze them?"

"Alex, listen to me."

"Please, Chris. Do you really think you're going to be able to avoid thinking about all this?"

He grabbed her hands and squeezed hard. "Listen to me!"

She nodded almost violently, as though aware she had crossed some line.

"I'm not sure what to do yet," he said. "Everything that's happened is swirling around inside me, and I'm trying to come to terms with it. I'm working on it, okay? In my own way. I am going to call my friend at Sloan-Kettering tomorrow."

Alex closed her eyes and exhaled with relief. "Thank you."

"But right now I need to pick up Ben, and I don't want to be late."

"Let me give you a ride to your truck. Where is it?"

He dropped her hands. "At home."

"Home! It'll take you an hour just to get there."

"A half hour."

"You have to let me take you."

He walked the rest of the way to the car, and she followed. "I need to be alone, Alex. I've had all I can take for now." He unlocked his bike and took it off her rack. "I'm going to call in a prescription for you, to help you sleep."

"Those things don't work for me. Not even Ambien."

"I'm going to give you Ativan. It can't not work, unless you're already addicted to it. If you don't sleep, you'll still relax. Is Walgreens pharmacy okay? That's near your motel."

"Sure."

He climbed onto the Trek and held out his hand. When Alex took it between both of hers, he felt her hands shivering.

"Promise me you'll be careful," she implored. "Stay away from the traffic."

"I'll be fine. I do this all the time. Now, let me go. We'll talk later."

"Tonight?"

"Maybe. By tomorrow for sure."

"Promise?"

"Jesus."

Alex bit her bottom lip and looked at the ground. When she raised her head, the sclera of her eyes were shot with blood. "I'm out on the edge here, Chris. You are, too. Only you don't know it."

He looked back long enough for her to see that he meant what he was going to say. "I do know."

She obviously wanted to say more, but before she could, he kicked his right foot forward and sprinted for the cemetery gate.