“If it’s possible at all.”
“We’ll soon find out.”
Thora pulled damp hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I forgot. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Laura Canning is going up to the Alluvian this week. She asked me to go with her.”
“The Alluvian?”
“You know, that hotel in Greenwood. Up in the Delta. The one the Viking Range people remodeled. It’s supposed to be stunning. You practiced up in the Delta for a while, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “My patient base couldn’t afford that kind of place.”
“They supposedly have a terrific spa up there. People fly down from New York to stay there. Morgan Freeman has that blues club in the Delta, you know, and he’s stayed at the Alluvian.”
Chris nodded. He liked Morgan Freeman’s work, but he wasn’t into picking spas based on where Hollywood actors went. He wasn’t into spas at all, to be honest. He broke all the sweat he needed to while maintaining the twenty acres of land around his house.
“If you don’t want me to go, I won’t,” Thora said, seemingly without rancor. “But this is Ben’s last week of school, and he always asks you for help with his homework anyway. I don’t have the patience.”
Chris couldn’t argue this point. “When are we talking about?”
“A couple of days from now, probably. We’d just be gone three nights. Then right back home. Mud packs and champagne, a little blues music, then home.”
Chris nodded and forced another smile, but this one took more effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Thora to have fun. It was Alex Morse’s voice whispering in his head: Is your wife planning to be out of town anytime soon?
“Chris?” Thora asked. “Tell the truth. Do you want me to stay home?”
He recalled her face as she made love to him, the unalloyed pleasure in her blue-gray eyes. Now she was lying on her back on chilly leather so that his sperm would have the maximum probability of impregnating her. What the hell was he worried about? “I think I’m just worn-out,” he said. “Between work and rounds and working on my project—”
“And baseball practice,” Thora added. “Ninety minutes a day in eighty-five-degree heat with a bunch of wild Indians.”
“You go up to the Delta and chill out,” he said, though he had never associated the words Delta and chill in his mind before. “Ben and I will be fine.”
Thora gave him an elfin smile, then kissed him again. “You stay right here.”
He stared as she jumped up and ran to the studio door, then disappeared through it. She reappeared a moment later, holding both hands behind her back.
“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling strangely anxious.
“I’ve got a surprise for you. Two surprises.”
He sat up on the couch. “What? I don’t need anything.”
She laughed and moved closer. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She brought her right hand from behind her back. In it was a plate of chocolate chip cookies. His mouth watered at the scent of them—until Alex Morse’s warnings sounded in his head. Before he had to make a choice about eating the cookies, Thora held out a cardboard tube like the ones she used to carry blueprints for the new house. Chris forced a smile, but the prospect of discussing the Avalon house did not please him in the least.
“I see that frown,” Thora said, setting the cookies beside him, then perching her perfect derriere on his knees. “You just wait and see.”
She removed a sheet of paper from the tube, unrolled it, and spread it across her nude thighs. Chris saw what appeared to be plans for a new building behind the seven-thousand-square-foot house that was now nearing completion. A rather large building.
“What’s that?” he asked, groaning internally. “A private gym?”
Thora laughed. “No. That’s your new studio.”
His face flushed. “What?”
She smiled and kissed his cheek. “That’s my housewarming present to you. I had our architect consult with an expert in New York. You’re looking at a state-of-the-art video production studio. All you have to do is select your equipment.”
“Thora…you can’t be serious.”
Her smile broadened. “Oh, I’m serious. They’ve already poured the foundation and run the high-tech cabling. Very expensive.”
This was almost too much to absorb after what Chris had endured today. He wanted to get up and pace the room, but Thora had him pinned to the couch. Suddenly, she tossed the plans and the tube onto the couch and hugged him tight.
“I’m not letting you slip back here every time you want to edit your videos. You’re stuck with me, understand?”
He didn’t. He felt as though he had swallowed some sort of hallucinogen. But then, if Alex Morse had not visited his office this morning, none of this would seem anything but a wonderful surprise.
“I finally surprised you,” Thora said in an awestruck voice. “I did, didn’t I?”
He nodded in a daze.
She took a cookie from the plate and held it to his lips. “Here. You need your strength.”
“No, thanks.”
Her disappointment was plain. “I actually made these from scratch.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really not hungry. I’ll eat some later.”
She shrugged, then popped the cookie into her mouth. “Your loss,” she said, her eyes twinkling as she chewed. “Mmm…almost better than sex.”
Chris smelled the melting chocolate in her mouth, watched her swallow with exaggerated pleasure. Alex Morse is batshit, he told himself.
Thora looked into his eyes, then took his hand and cupped her breast with it. “You up for a second round? We can raise the odds by two hundred million or so.”
He felt like an astronaut cut loose from his spacecraft, drifting steadily away from everything familiar. Who could live like this? he wondered. Second-guessing every move in my own house?
He closed his eyes and kissed Thora with desperate fervor.
CHAPTER 7
Alex’s heart leaped when she saw the little red icon turn green, indicating that Jamie had logged on to MSN. She’d been checking for the past three hours, playing Spider Solitaire and waiting for Jamie’s icon to light up.
A new screen like a small TV appeared within her main screen, but the TV was blank. Then an image of Jamie sitting at his desk in his room at Bill Fennell’s house flashed up. The immediacy of the webcam was overwhelming at first. It truly was like being in the same room with the person you were talking to. You could see every emotion in their eyes, every movement of their face. Tonight Jamie was wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and the yellow baseball cap of his Dixie Youth team. His eyes weren’t looking at her, but at his monitor, so that he could watch her image projected from his screen. She knew that she looked the same to him, since she was staring at his image and not the camera mounted atop her screen.
“Hey, Aunt Alex,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
She smiled genuinely for the first time all day. “It’s okay. You know I’ll be here whenever you log on. What you been doing, bub?”
Jamie smiled. “I had a baseball game.”
“How did it go?”
“They killed us.”
“I’m sorry. How did you do?”
“I got a double.”
Alex yelped and applauded. “That’s great!”
Jamie’s smile vanished. “But I struck out twice.”
“That’s okay. Even the pros strike out.”
“Twice in one game?”
“Sure they do. I once saw Hank Aaron strike out three times in one game.” This was a lie, but a harmless one. Hank Aaron was about the only player whose name she knew, and him only because of her father.
“Who’s Hank Aaron?” Jamie asked.
“He hit more home runs than Babe Ruth.”
“Oh. I thought that was Barry Bonds.”
Alex shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You got a double
, that’s what matters. What else has been going on?”
Jamie sighed like a fifty-year-old man. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Come on.”
“I think she’s over here right now.”
“Missy?” Missy Hammond was Bill’s mistress.
Jamie nodded.
Anger flooded through Alex; she tasted copper in her mouth. “Why do you think that? Did you see her?”
“No.” Jamie glanced behind him, at his bedroom door. “Dad thinks I’m asleep now. He came in to check, and I had the lights off. After a few minutes, I heard the back door. I thought he might be leaving, so I sneaked out to the rail. I didn’t see anything, but after a while I heard somebody laughing. It sounded exactly like her.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Jamie. Let’s talk about something else.”
The boy hung his head. “That’s easy for you to say. Why don’t you just come get me? Dad wants to be with her, not me. I’m not sleepy at all.”
“I can’t just come get you. We talked about that. But your father wants you, Jamie.” Alex wasn’t sure whether this was true. “He wants both of you.”
The boy shook his head. “After the game, all Dad talked about was my strikeouts. And what else I did wrong. Nothing about my double.”
Alex put on a smile and nodded as though she understood. “I think a lot of dads are like that. Your granddad did that when I played softball.”
Jamie looked surprised. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. He didn’t hesitate to tell me what I did wrong.”
This wasn’t quite true. Jim Morse could give constructive criticism, but he knew how to do it without making you feel bad. And most of what Alex remembered from being ten years old was unconditional praise.
“Your dad’s just trying to help you improve,” she added.
“I guess. I don’t like it, though.” Jamie reached down, then lifted a heavy book onto his desk. “I was supposed to do my homework earlier, but I didn’t feel like it. Can I do it now?”
“Sure.”
“Will you stay on while I do it?”
Alex smiled. “You know I will.”
Now Jamie was grinning. They had done this many times since Grace’s death. While Jamie read his assignment, Alex sat watching him, her mind roving back through the past. For some reason her father was in her mind tonight. Jim Morse had loved his grandson more than anything else in the world, and that might have included his own daughters. When Grace and Alex were young, Jim had been building a business, and despite putting real effort into being a father, he had seen them mostly in passing. But with Jamie, he’d had endless hours to spend with the boy. Jim had taught him to hunt and fish, to water-ski, to fly kites, and not just to throw a baseball but to pitch one for real. Jamie Fennell could throw a curveball when he was eight years old. Jim had spent all this time with Jamie despite the fact that Jim and Bill Fennell did not get along. In Alex’s eyes, her father had proved his manhood for all time by compromising as much as was required to keep close contact with his grandson.
One thing Alex knew in her bones, though: if her father had been alive to hear Grace’s deathbed accusation of murder, the events of the past weeks would have unfolded differently. That very night, Bill Fennell would have been hauled into an empty room, slammed against a wall, and made to cough up all the sediment at the bottom of his soul. Had that treatment not proved sufficient to dredge up the truth, Bill would have been taken on an involuntary boat ride with Jim Morse, Will Kilmer, and some of the other ex-cops who worked for their detective agency. One way or another, Bill would have spilled all he knew about Grace’s death. And Jamie would not be living in Bill’s ugly mansion on the edge of the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Jackson. If the courts didn’t save Jamie, his grandfather would have taken him somewhere safe to be raised by people who loved him. And Alex would have gone with them. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
None of that had happened, of course. Because like his daughter Grace, Jim Morse was dead. Alex had studied all the eyewitness accounts, but none of them ever dovetailed exactly—unlike the accounts of her own act of lunacy at the bank, when Broadbent was killed. Everybody had seen exactly the same thing on that day. But with her father’s death it was different. At age sixty, Jim had walked into a dry cleaner’s late on a Friday afternoon. He normally used the drive-through window, but that day he chose to go inside. Two female clerks stood behind the counter. A young black man wearing a three-piece suit was waiting in the store, but he was no customer. The real customers were lying flat on their stomachs behind the counter, beside a grocery bag filled with cash from the register.
Jim didn’t know that when he walked in, but Alex figured it had taken him about six seconds to realize something was wrong. No one was going to bluff Jim Morse out of a robbery in progress, no matter how old he was. The girls behind the counter were so scared they could hardly speak when Jim walked up to the counter and started a monologue about the weather: how warm the fall had been, and how it used to snow once or twice a year in Mississippi, but nowadays almost never. One clerk saw Jim glance behind the counter without moving his head, but the other didn’t. What she did see was Jim take his wife’s clothes from the hanging rod and turn to leave the store. As he passed the waiting “customer,” Jim flattened him with a savage blow to the throat. The clerk was shocked that “an old gray-haired dude” had attacked a muscular man in his early twenties. No one who knew Jim Morse was surprised. He’d often carried a gun after retirement, but he hadn’t on that day, not for a short run to the cleaner’s. Jim was digging in the fallen robber’s jacket when the plate-glass window of the store exploded. One clerk screamed, then fell silent as a bullet punctured her left cheek. The other dived behind the counter. After that, few facts were known.
The medical examiner believed that the shot that killed Alex’s father had been fired from behind the counter, not from the getaway car parked out front. Not that it mattered. After a lifetime spent courting danger, Jim Morse had simply run out of luck. And despite relentless efforts by the police department, by his old partner, and even a large reward offered by the Police Benevolent Association, his killers were never caught. Alex knew that her father had not wanted to die that day, but she knew something else, too: he would rather have died like that than the way his wife was dying now—in agony and by inches.
The sound of Jamie closing his book startled her from her reverie.
“I’m done,” he said, his green eyes still on the screen. “It’s way easier when you’re with me.”
“I like being here with you. It helps me work, too.”
Jamie smiled. “You weren’t working. I saw you. You were just sitting there.”
“I was working in my head. A lot of my work is like that.”
Jamie’s smile vanished, and he looked away from the screen.
“Jamie? Are you all right? Look at me, honey. Look into the camera.”
At length, he did, and his sad eyes pierced her to the core.
“Aunt Alex?”
“Yes?”
“I miss my mom.”
Alex forced herself to repress her grief. Tears were pooling in her eyes, but they would not help Jamie. One thing she had learned the hard way: when adults started crying, kids lost all their composure.
“I know you do, baby,” she said softly. “I miss her, too.”
“She used to say what you said. That she was working in her head.”
Alex tilted back her head and wiped her eyes, unable to shut out the memory of the night Grace died, when she’d snatched up Jamie and raced out of the hospital. She hadn’t gone far, just to a nearby Pizza Hut, where she’d broken the news of Grace’s death and comforted Jamie as best she could. Her own father had died only six months before, and his death had hit Jamie as hard as it had her. But Grace’s death was a tragedy of such magnitude that the boy simply could not process it. Alex had buried his head between her breasts, silently praying for the power t
o revoke death, and hoping that Grace had been out of her mind when she accused her husband of murder.
Alex held an opened hand up to the eye of the camera. “You be strong, little man. You do that for me, okay? Things are going to get better.”
Jamie put up his hand, too. “Are they?”
“You bet. I’m working on it right now.”
“Good.” Jamie looked back at the door. “I guess I better go now.”
Alex blinked back more tears. “Same time tomorrow?”
Jamie smiled faintly. “Same time.”
Then he was gone.
Alex got up from the desk with tears streaming down her cheeks. She spat curses and stomped around the motel room like a confined mental patient, but she knew she hadn’t lost her mind yet. She looked down at the newspaper photo of her father. He would understand why she was living in this claustrophobic motel instead of keeping a deathwatch over her mother’s bed. Right or wrong, Jim would be doing the same thing: trying to save his grandson. And no matter what it took, Alex was going to fulfill her promise to Grace. If the Bureau wanted to fire her for doing the job it should have been doing, then the Bureau could go to hell. There was law, and there was justice. And no Morse she was related to had ever had any trouble recognizing the difference.
Alex stripped off her pants and shirt, walked out to the empty pool, and started swimming laps in her underwear. It was too late for anyone decent to complain, and if a Bill Fennell type wanted to sit on the plastic furniture and ogle her ass while she worked out her frustration, then he was welcome to it. If he was still there when she got out, she’d kick his butt across the parking lot.
CHAPTER 8
Dr. Eldon Tarver walked slowly along the park path, his big head down, his eyes in a practiced state of general focus, searching for feathers in the tall grass. In one hand he carried a Nike duffel bag, in the other an aluminum Reach-Arm device, used by most people for picking up soda cans and litter from the ground. But Dr. Tarver was not like most people. He was using the Reach-Arm to pick up dead birds, which he then sealed inside Ziploc bags and dropped into the Nike duffel. He’d been out since before dawn, and he’d bagged four specimens already, three sparrows and a martin. Two seemed quite fresh, and this boded well for the work he would do later in the morning.