“I don’t know. But I’d like you to do me one favor, if you would.”
“Sure.”
“Come with me to the Days Inn to get my computer? It’s not far away, and I really need it.”
“What about the guy who attacked you?”
“I don’t think he’ll be there. That’s only instinct, but I have faith in it.”
Chris turned and set his instrument tray in a sink. “If you promise to stay the night at my house, I’ll go with you.”
When she hesitated, he said, “Obviously I’m not talking about anything improper.”
“I know.” She took out her cell phone and dialed Will Kilmer’s cell. He answered after two rings. After she had explained the situation, Will practically ordered her to remain in Natchez. “I’m in the lounge now,” he said wearily. “She’s not even conscious, Alex. There’s no change at all. Hell, Margaret’s just liable to fool the doctors again. She’s a tough old bird, like me.”
Alex hung up and turned to Chris. “Your house it is. Let’s go.”
The Days Inn’s parking lots were silent but well lit. Most of the vehicles parked there were pickup trucks or bigger rigs. Alex parked the Corolla four doors down from her room, then waited for Chris to pull up beside her in his pickup. He climbed out of his truck with his .38 in his hand.
“I really appreciate this,” she whispered.
He laughed softly. “We used to eat Sunday dinner at this hotel sometimes when I was a kid. It used to be called the Belmont.”
“Everything changes, I guess. Even small towns.”
“Yeah, but slower. I like it that way.”
She took out her room key and handed it to him. “The room’s one twenty-five, right down there. I’d like you to unlock the door and turn the handle, but don’t go in. I’ll be right behind you, and I’m going in hard. If anything crazy happens, use your gun to protect yourself, not to help me. Just get away and call the police.”
Chris stared at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”
She gave him a deadly earnest look. “No. No Southern Neanderthal heroics.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
He eased down the side of the building, then inserted the key and turned the handle. When Alex heard the mechanism open, she crashed through the door with her Glock leveled, sweeping it from side to side.
“Clear!” she called, moving toward the bathroom. Halfway there, she stopped cold. Grace’s cat lay stretched on the carpet, its mouth open in a rictus of death. Alex saw no blood, but she knew that Meggie was dead. She started to kneel, but then she heard a sliding sound from behind the bathroom door.
“What the hell?” Chris cried from behind her.
Alex motioned toward the bathroom with her Glock, then waved Chris back. After he’d knelt behind the far bed, she yelled: “FEDERAL AGENT! THROW OUT YOUR WEAPON AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
Nothing happened.
“I’m Special Agent Alex Morse of the FBI! Come out or I’ll shoot!”
After five seconds of crazed silence, she heard the sliding sound again. In her mind she saw a shower curtain sliding along the side of a bathtub.
“Maybe the water’s on,” Chris said.
Alex cursed to herself, then charged forward and kicked open the bathroom door, ready to blast a hole in anybody she found there.
She saw no one.
The sliding sound came again. She looked down, then leaped backward in terror. A brilliantly colored snake was writhing on the floor beneath the commode, its head biting empty air, its body twisting wildly through figure eights and whipping back upon itself as though it had been run over by a car.
“Chris!” she hissed.
He jerked her out of the doorway and thrust himself in front of her.
“What is that?” she asked.
“It’s a goddamn coral snake. The deadliest snake in the U.S.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. See the red bands touching the yellow ones? They teach you a rhyme in the Boy Scouts: ‘Red over yellow, kill a fellow, red over black, venom lack.’”
Alex shuddered. “Is that what killed Meggie?”
“Has to be. The scary thing is, nobody would go to that trouble to kill your cat. That snake was put here for you.”
Even in its current distress, the snake had an almost hypnotic beauty. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I’d say Meggie gave as good as she got. Cats are good snake hunters.”
“But it still killed her?”
“Coral snakes aren’t like rattlers or moccasins. They carry neurotoxic venom, like cobras. They have short fangs, but one good bite to an animal as small as a cat, and it’s lights out.”
Chris grabbed a pillow off the near bed and blocked the open door with it. Then he went out to his truck and came back carrying a tall, white bucket filled with baseballs.
“What are you going to do with those?” Alex asked. “Stone it to death?”
He held up the bucket with both hands, then leaned over the pillow and smashed the bucket’s bottom down onto the snake with all his strength. He ground the wounded reptile against the tile floor, then lifted the bucket and slammed it down again. The next time he lifted it, the snake came up with it, stuck to its bottom like a bug on a windshield.
“Is it dead?” Alex asked.
“Dead is a subjective state with a snake. Their nervous systems continue to function after death. People have died after being bitten by a dead rattlesnake.”
“What about this one?”
Chris examined the half-exploded serpent on the bottom of the bucket. “Dead as a hammer.”
He carried the bucket outside and tossed it into his truck bed. Alex heard baseballs roll everywhere. While she gathered up her computer and her case materials, Chris loaded Meggie’s remains into a trash bag. “I’ll take a look at her when we get back,” he said, “see if I can find any bite marks.”
“You’re sure I won’t cause a problem with Ben?”
“He’s at Mrs. Johnson’s house. Let’s get out of here.”
Alex started to get into her car, then paused. “Is the coral snake native to Mississippi? I mean, I grew up here, but I don’t remember any.”
“They’re native to Mississippi, all right. But not this part of Mississippi. You’d have to drive two hours to reach coral snake territory, and you could still search for a week and never find one. They’re very shy.”
“So there’s no way it could have simply wandered—”
“No way in hell. Somebody put that snake in your room. And that answers your question once and for all.”
“What question?”
“The guy who attacked you in that carport came here for you, not me.”
CHAPTER 25
Eldon Tarver nosed his white van through a thicket of bushes blocking the rutted track. This was the fourth route he had tried, and this time he felt lucky. Reaching the river wasn’t difficult. Every fifty yards or so, dirt tracks led from the gravel road to the broad sandbar bordering the Mississippi south of Natchez. The problem was that at the end of those tracks, the sand was soft and the river shallow. Dr. Tarver needed a shoulder of land that would bear the van’s weight right up to the river’s edge, then a good ten feet of water in which to sink it. The river’s powerful current would do the rest, rolling the van downstream with a force guaranteed to make it disappear by morning. But if he stuck it in the sand, it would still be standing there in the morning for any redneck or jig with a johnboat to see as they sped past in search of catfish and gar.
Dr. Tarver had known better than to run for Jackson. Agent Morse could easily have ordered roadblocks on the main routes leading out of town. For this reason, he’d driven back roads all the way from the subdivision where he’d fought her to the asphalt road that ran past the colossal husk of the old International Paper mill. A vast soybean field marked the place where pavement turned to gravel. The gravel paralleled the river; it it led to
a string of oil wells and a federal game reserve south of town. Eldon had learned all this from studying topographical maps—one small part of the intensive preparation he put into every operation. Experience had taught him that preparedness was the key to survival, and he never let himself down in that regard.
In the back of the van was a tangible symbol of the doctor’s readiness for every eventuality: a Honda motorcycle designed for both street and off-road riding. Eldon had carried the Honda with him on every operation he’d undertaken for the past five years, and tonight every drop of sweat he had ever put into loading and unloading that bike would prove worth it.
The van’s headlights refracted off a thousand leaves as branches stretched, then snapped back into position with a scream along the van’s sides. He had always viewed the van as disposable. He had another exactly like it, except for the color, safely garaged at his primate lab in Jackson. Suddenly the twin beams shot out into unobstructed space, a pure blackness that changed to dark blue when he extinguished his lights.
As he stared into the night sky, tiny red lights on the massive towers that held telephone cables suspended across the river announced themselves. Lower down—much lower and to his right, about a mile distant—he saw the lights of a barge churning toward him. If he stayed where he was, it would soon pass him.
He shut off his engine, climbed out of the van, and walked slowly forward, his eyes never leaving the sandy earth beneath his feet. He had a sense that he was above the river, but how far above he could not tell. An armadillo bolted from beneath his feet. He watched the moonlight on its armored back until the creature vanished into waist-high grass. Starting forward again, only ten steps carried him to a cliff.
Twenty feet below swirled the dark waters of the Mississippi River. He pulled off his blood-soaked shirt and tossed it into the current. The woman had stabbed him well and truly in the throat, but with a blunt weapon. Probably a key. Had she used a knife, he would already be dead. As it was, his beard was matted with blood.
He jogged back to the van, opened its rear doors, and mounted the aluminum ramp he used to unload the motorcycle. With all the caution due the darkness, he rolled the Honda to the ground and set its kickstand, then unloaded a small Igloo ice chest and duffel bag from behind the passenger seat. Apart from these three things, the van was empty. He had driven all the way from Jackson with work gloves on his hands, a Ziploc bag over his beard, and a plastic shower cap over his scalp.
He kick-started the Honda to be sure he would not be stranded, then climbed into the van, put it into low gear, and drove slowly toward the cliff’s edge. Fifteen feet from the precipice, he leaped from the open door and rolled paratrooper-style on the sandy ground. He heard a splash like a breaching whale crashing into the sea. Running to the cliff’s edge, he stared down at the absurd spectacle of a Chevy van floating like a royal barge down the Mississippi River. The van’s nose collided with a little spit of land, which started the vehicle spinning in slow circles as it sank, drifting southward toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Had not the circumstances been so dire, Eldon would have laughed. But laughter would have to wait. A thousand troubling thoughts fought for supremacy in his mind. He would allow none free rein until he reached a place of sanctuary. Part of him wanted to remain in Natchez, to finish the work he’d started. But in that matter, time was on his side. He had more important problems to deal with. Andrew Rusk, for example.
Rusk had lied to him. Eldon couldn’t be sure about the extent of Rusk’s deception, but he was certain of the lie. This angered him more than almost anything Rusk could have done. Eldon shut out the images of revenge welling up inside and focused on survival. He had always known a day like this would come. Now that it had, he was ready. Sanctuary was less than forty miles away. There he could rest, regroup, and plan his response. He strapped the Igloo and the duffel bag to the Honda. All he needed to reach that sanctuary was a cool head and steady nerves. As he climbed onto the bike and kicked it into gear, a rush of confidence flooded through him.
He was already there.
CHAPTER 26
Chris pulled his pickup into the doctor’s section of the St. Catherine’s Hospital lot and parked. Before going inside, he ran a cable lock through the pitching machine and generator he carried for Ben’s baseball practices. There had been a time in Natchez when he would not have had to take such measures, but that time was gone.
He made his rounds as conscientiously as he could, but the events of last night would not leave him. After saying good-bye to his last patient on the medicine floor, he took the stairs down to the first floor, heading for the ICU. There he met Michael Kaufman, Thora’s obgyn, coming up. Two days ago, Chris had sent some of Thora’s blood to Kaufman for analysis, to check for hormone imbalances that might be affecting her fertility.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” Mike said, pausing on the stairs. “I found something strange in Thora’s sample.”
“Really? What?”
“A high level of progesterone.”
“What?”
Kaufman nodded. “She’s still trying to get pregnant, right?”
“Of course. What kind of level are we talking about? Contraceptive level?”
“More. Like morning-after pill.”
Chris felt blood rising into his cheeks. Mike Kaufman had probably just committed an ethical breach, and he seemed to be realizing it himself. More than this, they had both become aware that Chris’s wife was not being honest with him about a very important matter. Kaufman gave him an embarrassed nod, then continued up the stairs.
Chris walked slowly down toward the intensive care unit, hardly aware of his surroundings. The implications of Kaufman’s revelation did not bear thinking about. Was it possible that Thora’s whole seduction of him in the studio—her talk about trying to get pregnant—had been a charade? A cold-blooded act designed to cover up an affair, and God knew what else? When Chris saw the big doors of the ICU before him, they seemed to offer escape from the burgeoning hell in his mind.
The cooler air, the hum and beeping of machinery, and the soft voices of nurses gave him a momentary respite from himself. Here he had no choice but to concentrate on work. He had a resistant bilateral pneumonia in the unit that had failed to respond to two powerful antibiotics: a teenager from St. Stephen’s. Last night, during evening rounds, Chris had ordered a vancomycin drip. If the boy’s condition had not improved, he intended to punt the case up to Jackson, to an infectious-disease specialist he knew at UMC. When he looked toward the glass-walled cubicles, the first thing he saw was Tom Cage coming out of one of the rooms.
“Tom! I didn’t know you had anybody in the unit.”
“I don’t,” Dr. Cage replied, writing on a chart. “I was seeing the patient Don Allen consulted me about. I wanted to take a more detailed history than the one I found in his record.”
“You learn anything interesting?”
“I’m not sure. Something is telling me that this guy might have generalized scleroderma, even though the lab tests don’t show it. You often see almost no external signs in men, and this guy’s blood pressure is truly malignant. Nothing will hold it in check.”
“If it is internal scleroderma, what can you do about the hypertension?”
When the white-haired physician’s eyes rose from the chart, Chris saw a look that Dr. Cage would never show a patient: helplessness mingled with frustration, rage, and resignation. Chris nodded sadly.
“Oh, I looked in on your pneumonia,” Tom said. “His white count dropped significantly during the night.”
“I’ll be damned!” Chris said excitedly. “I was really starting to worry. The kid’s only seventeen.”
Tom sighed in commiseration. “I’m seeing more and more of these atypical pneumonias, particularly in young adults.”
“Are you done with your rounds?”
“Yeah, I’m headed over to the clinic.”
“I’m right behind you.”
Chris wa
lked into his patient’s cubicle, but he didn’t need to see the chart to notice the change. There was a brightness in the boy’s eyes that had not been there for at least a week, and his flesh had already lost its deathlike pallor. When Chris listened to his chest with a stethoscope, he heard marked improvement, especially in the left lung. Chris was laughing at a joke the boy had made about nurses and bedpans when he caught sight of Shane Lansing writing in a chart at the nurses’ counter outside. Lansing was looking at the chart as he wrote, but Chris had a strong feeling that the surgeon had been staring at him until the instant he looked up.
Mike Kaufman’s words replayed in his mind: More…like morning-after pill.
Was Lansing thinking about a patient? Or was he thinking about Thora? Chris felt some relief at finding the surgeon in Natchez this early in the morning. Greenwood was over four hours away, and it was damned unlikely that Lansing would commute eight hours every day to screw Thora at the Alluvian Hotel. He would have to have left her at 4 a.m. to be here now. Still, Chris felt an irrational urge to walk out to the nurses’ station and punch the surgeon’s lights out. He told his patient he’d be back to check his progress after lunch, then updated the chart and walked out to the counter.
“Morning, Chris,” said Lansing. “You think any more about that golf game?”
“I can’t do it this afternoon.” Chris searched Lansing’s eyes for signs of fatigue. “But maybe I can get away tomorrow.”
“Just give me a call. Or leave a message with my service.”
“You can get away in the afternoons?”
“Yeah, it’s my mornings that suck.”
“That’s why you make the big bucks.”
Lansing didn’t reply.
Chris watched the handsome surgeon scan another chart, then turned on his heel and walked out of the ICU.
As he trudged aimlessly down the hall, he almost walked into Jay Mercier, Natchez’s sole hematologist. Like the other small-town specialists who found themselves treating everything from poison ivy to gout, Mercier served as a general-purpose oncologist, diagnosing almost every neoplasm in the county, then either treating them himself or acting as the contact person for specialized care in large metropolitan centers. He was one of the busiest doctors in town, yet Chris had always found him generous with his time, especially with consultations. Chris thought of pulling him aside and asking about the possibility of intentionally inducing cancer in human beings, but if he did, Mercier was certain to pepper him with questions about such an off-the-wall scenario.