“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—”