True Evil

CHAPTER 35

Chris and Ben were sitting on the leather couch in Chris's medical office when the cell phone rang. Chris had taken eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and his head was still pounding. Ben's headache was just as bad. Chris was starting to worry about food poisoning, but neither of them had any gastrointestinal symptoms.

"It's that hospital phone," Ben said. "Are you going to answer it?"

Truthfully, Chris didn't feel like it. But since there was no way Alex could have landed in Jackson yet, the call had to be important.

"Dr. Shepard," he answered for Ben's benefit.

"Chris," said Alex, "I need to talk to you. Are you alone?"

"Hang on." He touched Ben on the thigh. "You lie down here. I'm going to turn off the lights and go in my bathroom to take this call. Okay?"

Ben nodded dispiritedly.

Chris switched off the lights and stepped into his private cubicle. "Okay, go ahead."

"Will sent me a digital photograph a few minutes ago. It's a still image captured from a videotape. He's probably e-mailing the video to your address right now. It's not something that you want to see, but you need to see it."

"What is it?" he asked, fear roiling his gut.

"It was shot last night at the Alluvian Hotel."

Chris wanted to curse, but Ben would pick up the fury in his voice, even through the door. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His eyes looked like those of a stranger. "Okay, thanks," he heard himself say. "I'm going to check my e-mail."

"Can you stay on the phone while you do it?"

He rubbed the base of his throbbing skull. "I'd rather not. Is there anything else?"

"Yes. I need you to come to Jackson this afternoon. Tonight at the latest."

"Why?"

"To meet an FBI agent named John Kaiser. He's going to help us."

"Who is he?"

"One of the top agents in the Bureau. Kaiser's a specialist in serial murder."

"Why would he help you? I thought they fired you."

"They're going to. But Kaiser owes me big. Just watch the video, Chris. After you see that, you're going to want to do something. The best thing you can do is come to Jackson. You owe it to yourself, and to Ben."

"I can't go anywhere, even if I wanted to. Ben is sick. I had to pick him up from school."

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's got a headache. A bad one."

There was a pause. "You told me earlier that you had a headache, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Since this morning."

"Huh."

"I need to go, Alex." Chris hung up, pocketed the phone, and left the bathroom.

"Who was that?" asked Ben.

"A doctor in New York that I'm consulting on a case."

"A lady doctor?"

Chris sometimes forgot how acute the senses of children were compared to those of adults. "That's right. How's your head?"

"It still hurts. Where does she want you to go?"

"Jackson. I sent a patient up there."

Ben looked pensive. "Can we go home now?"

"Not yet, buddy." Chris sat beside him and looked at the screen saver on his computer. It showed Ben sliding into home plate during a game last year. The boy had already grown four inches and put on ten pounds. Chris squeezed Ben's arm. "Son, I need to bring a patient in here. Let's take you out to Mrs. Jane's office. You can play games on her insurance computer, okay?"

Ben shrugged apathetically.

Chris led him to the front office, then returned to his own. On the way back, Holly tried to steer him into one of the examining rooms, but he held up his hand to ward her off.

Back at his desk, he typed in his password and opened his e-mail account. The newest message had come from wkilmer@argusoperations.com. He opened the mail, which simply read, I'm sorry, Doctor Shepard. Sincerely, Will Kilmer. At the bottom of the message was an icon indicating that a file was attached. Chris opted to save the file to his hard drive. A little meter popped up on his screen, indicating the pace of the download. His blood pressure mounted in synchrony with the right-moving meter; then the process was complete, and he opened Windows Media Player.

He sat with his forefinger poised over the mouse button, painfully certain that opening this file would change his life forever. He felt like one of the patients who sat anxiously on the sofa across from his desk, afraid to ask for the test results on the sheet of paper in the doctor's hand. But there was no use putting it off, not in either case. There was nothing to be gained, and a hell of a lot to lose.

"Fuck it," he muttered, and opened the file.

First he saw only a steel balcony rail in what appeared to be an enclosed courtyard, shot from about twenty feet below it. A half-open French door stood behind the rail. The cheep of crickets came from Chris's computer speakers, but there was no other sound. Maybe the hum of an air conditioner. Then a woman's laughter shattered the silence, chilling Chris to the core of his being. Even before he saw her, he knew. A muffled female voice protested something, but not too seriously. Then the door flew inward, and Thora shot from the door to the balcony rail, as though she'd been pushed.

She was stark naked.

Squealing like a sorority girl at a Chippendales show, she tried to run back inside, but a man eclipsed in shadow barred the door. He grabbed her arms and spun her back to the rail. Chris's hands clenched into fists as Shane Lansing stepped onto the balcony, his penis jutting out from his body. Before Thora could turn again, he grabbed her hips and plunged into her from behind. She gasped, squealed once more, then gripped the rail and braced herself against his thrusts. Her muscles stood out in stark relief as she endured what quickly became a brutal onslaught, her mouth hanging open, her eyes almost bulging from her head. Chris had seen her look that way during the final kick of a marathon, when she tested the very limits of her endurance. She began to grunt in time to Lansing's lunging hips, her face more animal than human. When she began to moan, her catlike howls reverberating off the courtyard walls, Chris glanced worriedly at his office door. He reached for the volume knob on his speakers, but before he could turn it, Lansing covered Thora's mouth with his hand, yanked back her head, and began pounding her taut abdomen against the rail. As Chris waited for the inevitable climax, a wave of nausea suddenly overcame the shock that had held him rooted to his chair. He jumped up and ran into his private bathroom, where he dropped to his knees and ejected what remained of his lunch into the toilet.

"Dr. Shepard?" called a female voice. Holly, his nurse.

By the time he got back to his desk, the screen had mercifully gone black. "What is it?" he called, knowing his face was probably red with anger.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, come in."

He got up and stepped back into his bathroom, where he wet a towel and wiped his face. "I'm just feeling a little tired."

"I don't blame you. All that baseball at night. I'm worn slap out myself."

When Chris looked back, Holly was sitting in front of his computer, fanning herself with a magazine. If she clicked his mouse, the balcony video would start to roll. He moved behind her and squeezed her shoulders, which surprised her, but which also got her out of the chair more quickly. His only thought was getting back into that chair to extinguish the possibility of the nightmare being displayed again.

"I've been looking for those results on Mrs. Young," Holly said. "Have you seen them?"

"No."

She studied him without speaking. Then, hesitantly, she said, "Nancy finished with Mr. Martin's X-rays. He's been waiting in room three for a good while."

"I'm coming!" Chris snapped.

Holly's mouth dropped open. She turned and left without a word.

Some morbid part of him wanted to reopen the video file, but he resisted the urge. His mind was filled with images dating to the day he had first noticed Thora Rayner on a ward in St. Catherine's Hospital. The video now residing on his hard drive seemed incomprehensible in light of all they had done since that day. How could the woman who had so devotedly cared for her dying husband so casually betray a man who loved her as Chris did? How could she throw away a father who had bonded so deeply with her son? It was beyond him. The denial that had slowly been crumbling since Alex Morse's arrival finally lay in ruins at his feet. Yet anger had not replaced it. He had moved directly into grief, an unbearably heavy pall that brought with it paralyzing numbness.

His cell phone was ringing again. Alex, of course. He picked up the phone but did not answer, a juvenile response. He couldn't afford paralysis. Any moment now Holly would knock at the door again. Patients waiting. He also had Ben up front, playing computer games but wanting more than anything to go home with his dad. His dad? Chris thought. I'm not his dad. Not really. He's not flesh of my flesh. I've legally adopted him, but what would happen in a divorce? I know what Ben would want, as crazy as that seems. Even Thora has attributed his newfound happiness and improved grades to having me in his life. But what would a judge say?

The cell stopped ringing. As though moving underwater, Chris opened the clamshell phone and pressed the button that would connect him to Alex. She answered on the first ring.

"Are you all right?" she asked. "I know seeing that that was rough."

"Yep."

"I'm so sorry, Chris."

"Are you?"

"Of course. All I care about in this is you and Ben."

"That's not true. You want to nail Andrew Rusk."

This gave her pause. "Well, yes, but not out of some cheap sense of vengeance. It's for Grace, and for you, and for all the other people whose lives have been destroyed."

Chris said nothing. He waited for a fresh sales pitch, but none came. Alex waited in silence as well. He was about to speak when she said, "Whatever you do, please don't tell Thora what you know."

"Stop worrying. We already talked about that."

"But it's different now. Isn't it? Listen to me, Chris. I'm assuming you want to be the one Ben lives with when this is all over?"

He remained silent.

"I'm not just an FBI agent, you know. I'm also a lawyer. And the best way to ensure that you get custody of Ben is to make sure Thora is punished for attempted murder."

Anger flooded through him. "I'm supposed to help Ben by putting his mother in jail?"

"In a word? Yes."

"That's great, Alex."

"There's something else. Something that's scaring me."

"What is it?"

"You and Ben both have headaches, right?"

"Yes."

"Uncle Will has one, too. A bad one."

Chris thought about this.

"He's had it since this morning," Alex continued. "He took some aspirin, but it won't go away."

A strange buzzing started in Chris's head.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"What do you think?"

"I don't like it."

"It seemed like too much coincidence to me, too. But I don't see what could have happened. I mean, Will was guarding you all night, right?"

"He was passed out in my easy chair all night."

"What?"

"He drank three beers and went out like a light."

"Shit."

A sudden image of Alex's room at the Days Inn flashed into Chris's mind: the wounded coral snake writhing in the bathroom, the dead cat lying on the floor. "Alex, is there anything I need to know that you haven't told me?"

Another pause.

"Goddamn it, what are you holding back?"

"Nothing. I just-"

"Tell me!"

"I spoke to Will again, right before I called you. His detective found out how Lansing has been getting here and back. There's a small charter service out at the local airport. Crop dusters mostly, but the local farmers use it to fly to Houston and Memphis, stuff like that. Lansing called from Natchez a few days ago and arranged to get round-trip flights from the Natchez airport to Greenwood and back. He flies in there after dark and flies out about dawn. He's been commuting to-"

"Screw Thora's brains out."

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Is her girlfriend even up there? Laura Canning?"

"Yes. She's covering for Thora."

Chris slammed his hand down on his desk. Anger was finally coming to the surface. "Goddamn it!"

"Chris, wait. Hold on a sec."

"What?"

"Will's calling me back. It must be important."

She clicked him into hold mode. The wait seemed to stretch forever. "Chris?" she said, after another click.

"Yeah."

"There's more, and it's bad."

Some deep part of him tensed against the unknown. "Tell me."

"Will has been checking into Shane Lansing's business affairs. You know Lansing has his hand in a lot of stuff, right?"

"Yeah. Truck stops with gambling, restaurants, nursing homes, all kinds of shit."

"Well, it seems he's also part owner of a radiation oncology clinic in Meridian, Mississippi. The Humanity Cancer Care Center."

Chris felt as though his core temperature had dropped ten degrees. "Are you kidding?"

"No. Will just found this out."

"But that means Lansing has access to-"

"I know. Cesium pellets, liquid iodine, radiation-treatment machinery-everything."

"But…you told me these crimes go back like five years. Right?"

"Yes."

"Then how could Lansing be a part of it? I mean, if Thora just went to see Andrew Rusk a couple of weeks ago, how could Rusk possibly have found Lansing and hired him to kill me in that time? The time frame doesn't make sense."

"Thora's an atypical client for Rusk," said Alex. "There've only been two other female clients that I know about-"

"Wait," Chris cut in. "Red Simmons."

"Exactly. Thora may have used Andrew Rusk three years ago, to have Red Simmons killed. If so, she first contacted Rusk at least three years ago, and possibly as long as seven. She could have even met Shane Lansing through Rusk."

"But Red didn't die of cancer."

"Neither did my sister."

Chris's thoughts were tumbling over themselves, but beneath the rational level of his mind something else was happening. Fear and anger were melding into a kind of dark desperation whose only outlet could be action. "What time did you say this friend of yours would be in Jackson?"

"As soon as he can get there," said Alex, relief suffusing her voice. "If you leave within the hour, you'll probably get there the same time Kaiser does."

"Good."

"You're coming?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Thank you, Chris."

"Don't thank me. This is survival now."

Alex started to say something, but he hung up and put the phone in his desk drawer. After closing his e-mail account, he walked down to Tom's end of the clinic. Tom's chief nurse, Melba Price, was standing outside the door to Exam Room 7. Melba was quick to read nonverbal clues in patients and colleagues alike. This skill had made her Tom's right hand for more than twenty years.

"I need to see him, Melba," Chris said. "As soon as possible."

"He's just finishing up." She gave Chris a sidelong glance. "I heard about you and Dr. Lansing."

Chris grimaced.

"None of my business," Melba went on, "but a lot of people's been wanting to do what you did for a long time."

Tom Cage's good-humored baritone reverberated through the heavy wooden door. Chris heard the squeak of a chair, a booming farewell, and then Tom stepped into the hall, surprise on his face. "Hey, slugger," he said. "What's up?"

"I need to talk to you."

"Let's go in my office."

Chris shook his head. "Do you have an exam room open?"

Tom looked at Melba.

"Number five," she said.

Chris led the way. After Tom closed the door, he looked at his young partner with paternal concern. "What's going on, Chris? I didn't mean to tease you about Lansing. He's just such an unmitigated prick."

Chris looked back at his mentor, realizing perhaps for the first time how much older Tom Cage really was. Tom had started practicing medicine in 1958. He'd grown up in an era when antibiotics did not exist, yet he'd lived to practice in the era of the PET scan and gene therapy.

"I need you to do me a favor, Tom. No questions asked."

The older man nodded soberly. "Name it."

"I want you to examine me. My whole body."

"What am I looking for? Are you having symptoms?"

Tom was thinking what Chris would be thinking in the same situation. Most doctors at some time in their life suspect that they're dying of a terminal illness. They know too much, see too much, and even the slightest symptom can bring on fears of fatal disease.

"I've got a severe headache," Chris said, "but that's not really the problem. I have reason to suspect…something. I want you to go over every inch of my body with a light. Even a magnifying glass, if you need it."

"What am I looking for?"

"Anything abnormal. A needle mark, a bruise, a lesion, a small incision. I want you to start inside my mouth."

Tom stared at him for a long time. Chris could almost see the questions turning inside his mind. But in the end Tom only said, "You'd better strip and get on the table."

While Chris removed his clothes, Tom donned a leather headpiece with a light mounted on it. Chris climbed onto the examining table and lay on his back.

"My eyes aren't what they used to be," said Tom. "But I found a melanoma yesterday, so tiny you wouldn't believe it. Start in your mouth, you say?"

Chris opened wide.

Tom took a tongue depressor from a jar and used it to expose Chris's gums and mucosa. Then he took a small mirror from a drawer and, cursing quietly, began to check Chris's mouth.

"Goddamn it," Tom muttered. "This is like spelunking."

Chris made a guttural sound of acknowledgment.

"Looks clear to me." Tom withdrew the tongue depressor. "Remember to floss after every meal."

Chris was in no mood for levity, but Tom gave him a wry look anyway.

"Okay, what now?"

"Look under my hair," Chris said, flashing back to Gregory Peck in The Omen.

As Tom carefully worked his way across Chris's scalp, he said, "I don't see anything but incipient male-pattern baldness."

"Good. Now my skin. Every inch of it."

Tom started at Chris's neck and moved down his trunk. "I'm glad you're not a hairy bastard," he said, moving the light across Chris's sternum. "Okay…getting to the family jewels now."

"Every crack and crevice." Chris felt Tom's gloved hands lift his testicles, then check his penis. "The hole, too."

"Jesus."

Tom checked him there, then moved back to his shoulders. He checked both underarms, then the extremities.

"Between my toes, too."

"This reminds me of my internship," Tom said. "I worked several months in the Orleans Parish Prison. The cops used to have me check between suspects' toes for needle marks."

"Same deal," Chris said, turning onto his stomach.

"Let's get the worst over first," Tom said, and Chris felt cold hands pulling his cheeks apart. He expected Tom to release them immediately, but he didn't.

"What do you see?"

"I'm not sure," Tom murmured. "Looks like maybe an injection site."

Chris's breath died in his throat. "Are you serious?"

"Afraid so. Looks like somebody stuck in a needle and you tried to jerk away. Like a scared toddler, you know? There's definite bruising."

"Outside the anus or in?"

"Right at the opening. This is weird, Chris. Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

Chris got off the table and pulled on his pants. "We need to check Ben, too."

Tom's eyes went wide. "What?"

"I'm dead serious. He's in the front office now. Ben has the same headache I do. I'll tell him we're checking for pinworms."

Tom stared at Chris as though worried he might be drunk.

"I'm not crazy, Tom. I wish I was. Will you stay in here with me while I check Ben?"

I'm sure as hell not leaving you alone with him, said Tom's eyes.

Chris skidded into the driveway at the Elgin house, his heart pounding with anger and fear. On the passenger seat beside him was a wooden case he'd borrowed from the radiologist at St. Catherine's Hospital. The image of Ben lying on his back on the exam table haunted him even more than the video of Thora on the hotel balcony. What are you looking for? Ben had asked. Chris had lied, and Tom had lied to cover for him. But there was no banishing the look of disapproval on the older physician's face. Tom Cage suspected something seriously irregular, and in the same situation Chris probably would have, too. He would have to rely on the goodwill he had built up over nine months of practicing with Tom to carry the day.

After checking Ben for marks and not finding them, Chris had put the boy back in his receptionist's care and shut himself in his office. He had no idea what might have been injected into him, but the thing that kept coming back to him was Alex's revelation that Shane Lansing had access to radioactive materials. Added to this was Pete Connolly's assertion that radiation would be the easiest method of intentionally causing cancer in a human being. Given those two facts, what did the needle mark near his rectum mean? Had a radioactive liquid been injected into him? Or could pellets small enough to pass through a needle have been shot into his bloodstream? He tried to recall what Connolly had said about irradiated thallium being used to assassinate someone, but it was difficult to concentrate with fear ballooning in his chest.

Forcing himself under control, Chris walked down the hall to the X-ray room and asked Nancy Somers, their tech, to shoot an X-ray of his midsection. Nancy looked nonplussed by this request, but she wasn't about to refuse her employer. Chris grabbed a paper gown, stripped beside the big machine, then donned the oversize napkin and climbed onto the cold table. Nancy adjusted the voltage, then shot the picture. Two minutes later, Chris was jamming the X-ray into the clip of the light-box in the viewing room.

"What are you looking for?" Tom asked from behind him.

"Overexposure."

Chris could hardly speak as he scanned the X-ray. He was terrified of seeing black spots caused by radioactive emissions overexposing the film. Yet though he squinted at every inch of the film, he saw nothing abnormal.

"Looks fine to me," Tom said. "Does this have to do with the needle mark?"

Chris nodded. Then he felt Tom's hand on his shoulder.

"What's going on, son? Talk to me."

There was no hiding it anymore. Chris turned to his partner and said, "Somebody's trying to kill me, Tom."

After a shocked silence, Tom said, "Who?"

"Thora."

The older man's eyes narrowed. "Can you substantiate that?"

"No. But I'm working with an FBI agent to prove it."

Tom nodded slowly. "Is Shane Lansing tied up in this somehow?"

"I believe so. Did you know that he owns part of a radiation oncology center in Meridian?"

As Tom shook his head, Chris saw the old doc's mind working quickly behind his wise eyes. It wouldn't take him long to connect the dots.

"Sounds to me like you need some time off," Tom said.

Chris gratefully shook Tom's hand, then collected Ben and a few other things and left the office. His headache was still going strong, but Ben's had started to subside. The boy wanted to stay with his dad, of course, but Chris insisted on dropping him at Mrs. Johnson's house. The widow had cared for Ben since before Thora married Chris, and she loved him like her own. She promised to keep Ben overnight if necessary; all Chris had to do was call. He left a bottle of Advil and a stronger analgesic with her just in case Ben's headache returned.

Now that he'd arrived at the Elgin house, he charged inside with the wooden case he'd borrowed from the hospital. Cutting into the laundry room, he opened his toolbox and took out a razor-sharp Buck knife. With the knife and a pair of pliers in one hand, and the case in the other, he ran back to the master bedroom.

First he tore the bedclothes off the king-size bed, exposing the pillow-top mattress beneath. With his eyes only six inches from the cover, he examined the entire surface of the mattress, focusing on his side of the bed. He saw no sign of tampering, but that meant nothing. Kneeling beside the bed, he opened the wooden case he'd brought from St. Catherine's. Inside was a Geiger counter borrowed from the radiology department at the hospital. The radiologist had told him that, aside from checking for "spills" after certain procedures, the counter was supposed to double for civil defense use after a nuclear attack.

Chris switched on the counter, dreading the click-click-click that would herald the presence of radioactivity, but the machine only emitted a faint hum. The Geiger counter had a carrying handle and a wand attached to it by a flexible cable. Chris moved the wand over the entire surface of the bed, but he heard no clicks.

Setting the counter aside, he stabbed the Buck knife into the mattress at the spot where his head would normally lie and ripped it open from head to foot. Using the teeth of the pliers, he tore through dense foam padding, throwing chunks of it around the bedroom, but again he found nothing.

Sweating and exasperated, he stared around the room. Where would they put it? he wondered. Where would I get sufficient exposure? He picked up the Geiger counter and ran down the hall to the den, to the easy chair where Will Kilmer had spent the night in beer-induced slumber. The Buck knife made short work of the chair seat, but when Chris passed the wand over the wreckage that remained, he heard nothing. He realized then that he had almost been hoping for the telltale click.

Why? he asked himself. Because nothing is worse than not knowing.

That was his problem. He had no idea what the needle mark meant. Had someone injected something merely to sedate him while they violated him in some other way? That might be the answer, given that Ben and Kilmer both had headaches, too. Yet Chris had found no needle mark on Ben. Had Ben's injection site simply been more successfully concealed? Or had they all been sedated in some other way, while only Chris was attacked through hypodermic injection? He had no way to know. Not without sophisticated medical testing.

The only poison he was likely to discover on his own was radiation. And Lansing's tie to the radiation clinic in Meridian increased the odds that radiation was the method of attack. Chris stared around the kitchen, his mind spinning. Could it be in the shower? Sometimes he sat for half an hour on the shower seat, relaxing under a near-scalding stream of water, but…No, they would have had to dig out a tile to plant a pellet there.

Then it hit him: My truck!

He ran out to the garage and held the wand of the Geiger counter over the driver's seat of his pickup. All he heard was a steady hum. He wanted to rip open the seat anyway, but he knew that was pointless. If there was enough radiation to give him cancer in that seat, the Geiger counter would have detected it.

He started to switch off the machine, but an almost paralyzing terror stopped him. Nancy had only shot an X-ray of his trunk. What if the radiation source had been placed elsewhere? Near a marrow reservoir in his femur, say? Or what if it was moving through his body? Standing in his garage, Chris stripped naked, then held the wand at his feet and began moving up along each leg. What would he do if the machine started clicking? Probably cut out the offending pellet with the Buck knife, unless he could somehow muster the patience to drive back to the office and have Tom cut it out using local anesthetic. Despite the normal X-ray, he felt himself tense when he came to his genitals and rectum… No click.

Almost unwilling to believe the silence, he kept moving north until he reached his scalp. Then he switched off the machine.

He felt like puking. Some childish part of him wanted to believe that it was all bullshit, that Alex Morse was as crazy as a road lizard. But Tom had found something. And Chris had seen Shane Lansing screwing Thora on that balcony. And Lansing was part owner of a radiation oncology center. And then there were the headaches: three out of three people on the same day. That couldn't be coincidence. There was no escaping the truth: Grace Fennell's killer had struck again last night.

His victim was Chris Shepard.