True Evil

CHAPTER 37

Alex was alone as she rode the elevator to the fifth floor of the University Medical Center, her excitement at the possibility of John Kaiser's help exploded by Chris's news that he'd probably been injected with something during the night. Since Kaiser was still an hour south of Jackson, and since UMC was practically across the street from the Cabot Lodge, she'd decided to visit her mother.

When the elevator doors opened, she walked down to the adult oncology wing: not a place of gladness, despite the efforts of families and nurses to nurture a hopeful atmosphere. Alex was thankful that the pediatric cases had their own hospital; she might not have been able to endure them in her present emotional state.

She found her mother much as she had left her two days ago. Her liver was larger, her skin yellower, her kidneys deader, her belly more bloated. Her ovarian cancer had proved atypical, invading areas and organs usually spared by that disease-yet still she clung to life. To life, but not to consciousness, thank God.

Alex sat beside her, holding the limp and sweaty hand, trying to fight off waves of despair. At times like this, it seemed there was no happiness in the world. If there was, it was unknowing: the happiness of children who had not yet learned what lay behind the masks of the adults they saw each day and night. The people Alex knew seemed bent on destroying whatever happiness they might have found, as though unable to tolerate the hell of living with what they'd once thought they wanted. She wondered if human beings had ever been meant to attain the things they desired. Of course, that question presupposed some divine intent inherent in the world, whereas most of the evidence she had seen contradicted this idea. She hoped that if the day ever came that she found a man who loved her as she dreamed of being loved, she would be content to love him in return. She believed she would, if only because she had lost so much, and so young. Unlike most people she'd encountered, Alex knew in her bones that existence was terribly fragile, a flickering flame that could be extinguished at any moment without cause or justice.

She checked her watch. Chris would arrive soon, and Kaiser not long after. She squeezed her mother's hand, then wrote a brief note for the nurses to read to her later. Dear Mom, I was here. I love you. I hope it doesn't hurt too much. I'm close by, and I'll be back soon. I love you. Alexandra.

"Alexandra," she said, getting up and walking into the hall. Never in her life had she felt like an Alexandra, yet Margaret Morse had spent most of her life trying to force her daughter to become one. Girlie outfits, pink hair ribbons, debutante balls, sorority recommendations…Christ.

Alex stepped aside for a group of white-coated doctors walking together. Most looked five years younger than she was. Interns. A couple of the women were staring at her face. They were curious about the scars, and they were probably wondering how they would deal with something like that. They saw people with infirmities and afflictions every day, but most of that they shut out by force of will, aided by the separation implicit in a wide age difference. But when they saw her, a woman like them-even prettier than they were-disfigured by fate, it scared them.

When Alex reached the elevator, she found a man already waiting in front of it. She stood behind his big white coat, waiting for the car to come. Hospital smells permeated the air: alcohol, harsh disinfectant, God knew what else. There were highly resistant bacteria on every surface in this place, waiting to find some portal into a warm, wet body so that they could multiply into the millions, then billions, until they had wiped out the host that nourished them for their brief stay on earth-

A bell dinged softly.

Alex walked into the elevator behind the white-coated man. Another white coat was waiting inside, both members of the same exclusive club, the world within the world of the hospital, inhuman humans with faces whose smiles never quite reached their eyes, who dealt each day with death and thus denied it with twice the fervor of average citizens. The man already on board the elevator backed away from the larger newcomer and stood in the car's right rear corner. The big man took the left corner. By unwritten law, Alex took one of the remaining corners-right front, near the buttons-and stood facing the door.

The elevator smelled new, and its doors were polished until reflective. In the blurred reflection, Alex saw that the big man had a beard, and also a flaming birthmark above it. It must be bad, she thought, to show even in the dim reflection.

The elevator stopped on the third floor, and the man directly behind her walked out. As the doors closed, Alex backed into the spot that he'd occupied. The man with the birthmark looked over and nodded, but instead of looking away afterward, he continued to study her. This broke one of the unwritten laws, but Alex figured that her scars had drawn his attention-his professional attention.

"Shotgun?" asked the man, touching his own cheek.

She colored deeply. He was the first one to guess right. Some doctors knew that her particular kind of scarring was caused by gunshot, but since so much of the mess had been made by flying glass, most guessed wrong. Maybe he was a trauma surgeon.

"Yes," she said.

"I don't mean to make you uncomfortable. I can relate to having people stare at your face."

Alex stared back. The big, bearded man was about sixty, with a deep voice that had probably reassured ten thousand patients over the years. "Is that a birthmark?"

He smiled. "Not technically. It's an arteriovenous anomaly. It's not bad when you're born, but when you hit puberty, it suddenly explodes into this."

Alex started to ask a question, but as though reading her mind, the stranger said, "Surgery often makes it worse. I don't want to risk that."

She nodded. He wasn't handsome, but he would certainly have been decent-looking without that awful web of indigo and scarlet on his left cheek.

The bell dinged again.

"Good afternoon," said the man, then he walked out.

Alex stood there in a trance, thinking of the day at the bank, of the flying glass she had seen only as flashes of light, and of James Broadbent lying on the floor with his chest smashed into something his wife would weep to see-

"Miss?"

The man with the birthmark was back; he was holding the door open with his elbow. "This is the lobby."

"Oh! I'm sorry. Thank you."

He nodded and waited until she had cleared the doors to let them go. "Tough night?"

"My mother is dying."

Genuine sympathy furrowed his brow. "You got on at Oncology. Is it cancer?"

Alex nodded. "Ovarian."

The man shook his head like a consoling priest. "A terrible disease. I hope she doesn't suffer too much."

"I think she already has."

He sighed heavily. "I'm sorry. Will you be all right?"

"Yes. I'm right over at the Cabot Lodge."

He smiled. "Good. They know how to take care of people over there."

"Yes. Thank you, again."

"Anytime."

The man gave her a small wave, then walked down a hall that led deep into the bowels of the hospital. The floor had colored lines painted on it. Red lines and green lines and yellow lines and even black ones. Alex wondered whether, if you knew all the color codes, you might guess your prognosis by where you were sent. Probably not. The yellow line might take you to McDonald's, for all she knew. There was a McDonald's in the hospital somewhere.

As she hitched her purse over her shoulder and walked out into the dusk, her cell phone chirped. It was a text message from John Kaiser: I'm at Gallman, MS. 25 mins away. See u soon. She needed to hurry. Will Kilmer was supposed to meet her in the lobby of the Cabot Lodge with an unregistered gun. She wanted to hide it upstairs before Kaiser arrived. He wouldn't like the idea of her carrying while suspended. Even if he understood, it would make his position more difficult. Alex caught sight of her car across the huge parking lot and started running.

Eldon Tarver stood at the window of the second-floor doctors' lounge and watched Special Agent Morse jog across the parking lot. She ran with purpose, her head well forward like a sprinter's, not like the hobbyists he saw jogging all the time. As he stared, he felt a near-euphoric sense of triumph flowing through him.

"She doesn't know me," he said softly. "She was three feet away…she looked right into my face, she heard my voice…and she didn't recognize me." The fact that his beard hid the wound she'd given him undoubtedly helped.

"Are you talking to me?" asked a female resident sitting on the couch behind him.

"No."

He heard the girl shift on the couch. She was probably pissed off that he was here. The slut had probably told some attending to meet her for a quick fuck, and now he'd screwed up their plans. Eldon felt so invulnerable in this moment that he considered locking the door and bending her over the counter of the little kitchenette, showing her what penetration really was-

Take it easy, said his inner censor. Everything is falling your way.

And it was. First Neville Byrd had discovered the EX NIHILO site, and now Alex Morse had walked right into his hands. She'd even given him the name of her hotel! Eldon didn't believe in fate, but it was hard not to see Jungian patterns in all this.

Of course, it was also possible that Morse was deeper than he'd been led to believe. Rusk's judgment could not be trusted, and Morse had risen to stardom in the FBI. That she'd disobeyed orders was more a recommendation than a black mark to Dr. Tarver, especially in a rulebound bureaucracy like the FBI.

Yes, he decided, their whole conversation could have been a performance. And even if it wasn't-even if Morse really had no idea who he was-could he take the chance that he was wrong? His policy had always been zero risk, and that policy had served him well. He had been committing felonies almost daily for five years, some of them capital crimes, yet he was not in jail.

It was time to call Biddle back.