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 to 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.
Dr. Tarver had seen only two other humans so far, both runners. Not many people ventured into this corner of the park, where branches hung low to the ground and the path was overgrown in many places. The doctor had startled both runners, partly by his simple presence at this place and time, but also because of his appearance. Eldon Tarver would never be mistaken for a runner.
He was not dressed in shorts or warm-ups, but in cheap slacks and a pullover from the Casual Male Big & Tall shop on County Line Road. Dr. Tarver stood six feet three inches tall, with a barrel chest and ropy arms covered with black hair. He had been bald since the age of forty, but he wore a full gray beard that gave him the look of a Mennonite preacher. He had preacher's eyes, too—not
parson's
eyes, but the burning orbs of a revealed prophet—bright blue irises that shimmered in the center of their dark sockets like coins at the bottom of a well. When he was angry, those eyes could burn like the eyes of a demon, but few people had ever seen this. More often, his eyes radiated a glacial coldness. Some women at the medical center thought him handsome, but others called him downright ugly, this impression being bolstered by what most people thought was a wine-stain birthmark on his left cheek. The disfiguring mark was actually a severe arteriovenous anomaly, a horror that had begun mildly during childhood but which during puberty had flamed to the surface like the sign of a guilty conscience. All these qualities had combined to make even the large male runner jig five steps to the right as he passed, for it took five steps to get clear of the bearded giant ambling along the path with his aluminum stick and duffel bag.
As the first yellow rays of sunlight spilled through the oak limbs to the east, another runner appeared—a girl this time, a vision in tight blue Under Armour with white wires trailing from her golden hair. The wires disappeared into an iPod strapped to her upper arm. Dr. Tarver wanted to watch her approach, but just then he noticed another bird off the path, this one twitching in its death throes. It might have fallen only seconds ago.
The girl's shoes swished through the dewy grass as she left the asphalt path on the side opposite the doctor. She tried to make it appear as though she'd done this out of courtesy, but she could not deceive him. He divided his attention between the girl and the bird, one filled with life, the other dying fast. She tried not to look at him as she sprinted past, but she couldn't manage it. Twice her pupils flicked toward him, gauging the distance, making sure he hadn't moved closer. Threat assessment was such a finely tuned gift, one of the blessings of evolution. He smiled as the girl passed, then turned and regarded her flexing glutes as they receded from view, appreciating their shape with the cool regard of an expert anatomist.
After she'd vanished around a bend, he stood still, breathing the wake of her perfume—an ill-advised accessory for morning jogs if one wanted to avoid unwelcome attention. After the fragrance had dissipated beyond detection, he knelt, donned surgical gloves, and withdrew a scalpel, a syringe, and a culture dish from his pocket. Then he tied on a surgical mask and laid open the sparrow's breast with a single incision. With a long finger he exposed the bird's liver. Inserting the tip of the hypodermic into the nearly black organ, he exerted a gentle back-pressure and probed with the needle until he was rewarded with a slow spurt of blood. He needed only a single cc—less, actually—but he took the full amount possible, then snapped the sparrow's neck with a quick twist and tossed its carcass into the underbrush.
Opening the petri dish, Dr. Tarver squirted some blood onto the layer of minced chick embryo inside and rubbed it around with a sterile swab taken from his pocket. Then he closed the dish and slipped it into the duffel with the Ziploc bags. His gloves came off with a snap—those went into the bag, as well—and then he cleaned his hands with a dab of Purell. A good morning's work. When he got back to the lab, he'd test the last bird first. He felt confident that it was a carrier.
A slow shiver in the grass where he'd tossed the sparrow raised the hair on his arms. The accompanying sound was faint, but the sounds of childhood never faded. Dr. Tarver set down the Nike bag and walked lightly—very lightly, considering his size—toward the closing groove in the grass. As soon as he saw the rotting log, he knew. He closed his eyes for a moment, stilling himself at the center. Then he reached down with his left hand and lifted the log. What he saw beneath fluttered his heart: no crotalid, but a beautiful coil of red, yellow, and black shimmering in the sun.
"Micrurus fulvius fulvius,"
he whispered.
He had uncovered an eastern coral snake, one of the shiest serpents in America, and undoubtedly the deadliest. With a fluid motion like that of a father stroking his child's hair, Tarver took hold of the stirring elapid behind its head and lifted it into the air. The brightly banded body coiled around his forearm—a full twenty inches of him—but this was not a strong snake. A cottonmouth or rattler would have struggled, using its strong muscles to try to whip away from him and strike. But the coral snake was no brutish pit viper, injecting prey with crude hemotoxin that caused terrible pain and swelling as it ate away the walls of blood vessels, bringing gangrene and infection to its human victims. No, the coral was a refined killer. Like its relative the cobra, it injected pure neurotoxin, which brought only numbness before shutting down the central nervous system of its prey, quickly bringing on paralysis and death.
Dr. Tarver was a pathologist, not a herpetologist, but he had a long history with snakes. It had begun in childhood, this education, and not by choice. For Dr. Tarver, serpents were inevitably bound up with the idea of God. Not the way his adoptive parents had seen this relationship—because only fools tempted death as a test of faith—but bound up with God nonetheless. As a boy Eldon had watched dozens of frightened rattlesnakes held high by chanting hillbillies who believed that God had anointed them against the lethal compounds in the bulging poison sacs behind the slitted eyes. He knew better. He had seen many of those hillbillies bitten on their hands, arms, necks, and faces, and every blessed one had suffered fleshly torments beyond their imagination. Some had lost digits, others limbs, and two had lost their lives. Eldon knew their fates because he had been one of those hillbillies once, not by choice or even by birth but by the authority of the State of Tennessee. He also knew that the skeptics who accused his adoptive father of keeping the snakes in refrigerators to make them sluggish, or of milking their venom before the services, had no idea whom they were talking about. The faith of those hillbillies was as genuine as the rocks they plowed from the brick-hard earth of the Appalachian foothills every day but Sunday. They
wanted
death in the church with them when they witnessed to the Lord. Eldon had personally gathered many of the vipers for Sunday and Wednesday services. The church elders had quickly seen that the big, birth-marked boy taken from the Presbyterian Children's Home in Knoxville had the gift—so much so that his adoptive father had begged him to take up the cloth himself. But that was another story….