"Are you in New Orleans now?"
"Sí."
"Drive up to Jackson, Mississippi. I'm on my way there now, nonstop flight. And, no, the Bureau doesn't know."
"What would we do at this meeting?"
"I want you to meet this doctor. Listen to him, then listen to me. I need your brain, John. Your experience with homicide. It's three hours by car. Please tell me you'll come."
After a long silence, Kaiser said, "Where do you want to meet?"
Alex suggested the Cabot Lodge near the University Medical Center. Kaiser said he could make no promises, but that he would try to be there. Then he hung up.
Energized by the prospect of Kaiser's assistance, she started to dial Chris. Then she remembered the balcony photograph. Chris would demand to see the video as soon as he heard of its existence. What would he do after he saw it? Drive to Shane Lansing's office and beat him senseless? Get drunk and simply shut down from despair? She had seen men react both ways, and there was no way to predict the reaction. Of course, she could "forget" to mention the photo when she asked Chris to meet Kaiser, but she would pay a price for that later. No…she should let Chris deal with the pain now. That way, by the time he got to Jackson, he might be as committed as she to nailing Andrew Rusk and his accomplice. Alex glanced around the cabin again, then speed-dialed Will Kilmer.
CHAPTER 35
Chris and Ben were sitting on the leather couch in Chris's medical office when the cell phone rang. Chris had taken eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and his head was still pounding. Ben's headache was just as bad. Chris was starting to worry about food poisoning, but neither of them had any gastrointestinal symptoms.
"It's that hospital phone," Ben said. "Are you going to answer it?"
Truthfully, Chris didn't feel like it. But since there was no way Alex could have landed in Jackson yet, the call had to be important.
"Dr. Shepard," he answered for Ben's benefit.
"Chris," said Alex, "I need to talk to you. Are you alone?"
"Hang on." He touched Ben on the thigh. "You lie down here. I'm going to turn off the lights and go in my bathroom to take this call. Okay?"
Ben nodded dispiritedly.
Chris switched off the lights and stepped into his private cubicle. "Okay, go ahead."
"Will sent me a digital photograph a few minutes ago. It's a still image captured from a videotape. He's probably e-mailing the video to your address right now. It's not something that you want to see, but you need to see it."
"What is it?" he asked, fear roiling his gut.
"It was shot last night at the Alluvian Hotel."
Chris wanted to curse, but Ben would pick up the fury in his voice, even through the door. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His eyes looked like those of a stranger. "Okay, thanks," he heard himself say. "I'm going to check my e-mail."
"Can you stay on the phone while you do it?"
He rubbed the base of his throbbing skull. "I'd rather not. Is there anything else?"
"Yes. I need you to come to Jackson this afternoon. Tonight at the latest."
"Why?"
"To meet an FBI agent named John Kaiser. He's going to help us."
"Who is he?"
"One of the top agents in the Bureau. Kaiser's a specialist in serial murder."
"Why would he help you? I thought they fired you."
"They're going to. But Kaiser owes me big. Just watch the video, Chris. After you see that, you're going to want to do something. The best thing you can do is come to Jackson. You owe it to yourself, and to Ben."
"I can't go anywhere, even if I wanted to. Ben is sick. I had to pick him up from school."
"What's wrong with him?"
"He's got a headache. A bad one."
There was a pause. "You told me earlier that you had a headache, didn't you?"
"Yeah. Since this morning."
"Huh."
"I need to go, Alex." Chris hung up, pocketed the phone, and left the bathroom.
"Who was that?" asked Ben.
"A doctor in New York that I'm consulting on a case."
"A lady doctor?"
Chris sometimes forgot how acute the senses of children were compared to those of adults. "That's right. How's your head?"
"It still hurts. Where does she want you to go?"
"Jackson. I sent a patient up there."
Ben looked pensive. "Can we go home now?"
"Not yet, buddy." Chris sat beside him and looked at the screen saver on his computer. It showed Ben sliding into home plate during a game last year. The boy had already grown four inches and put on ten pounds. Chris squeezed Ben's arm. "Son, I need to bring a patient in here. Let's take you out to Mrs. Jane's office. You can play games on her insurance computer, okay?"
Ben shrugged apathetically.
Chris led him to the front office, then returned to his own. On the way back, Holly tried to steer him into one of the examining rooms, but he held up his hand to ward her off.
Back at his desk, he typed in his password and opened his e-mail account. The newest message had come from [email protected]. He opened the mail, which simply read,
I'm sorry, Doctor Shepard. Sincerely, Will Kilmer.
At the bottom of the message was an icon indicating that a file was attached. Chris opted to save the file to his hard drive. A little meter popped up on his screen, indicating the pace of the download. His blood pressure mounted in synchrony with the right-moving meter; then the process was complete, and he opened Windows Media Player.
He sat with his forefinger poised over the mouse button, painfully certain that opening this file would change his life forever. He felt like one of the patients who sat anxiously on the sofa across from his desk, afraid to ask for the test results on the sheet of paper in the doctor's hand. But there was no use putting it off, not in either case. There was nothing to be gained, and a hell of a lot to lose.
"Fuck it," he muttered, and opened the file.
First he saw only a steel balcony rail in what appeared to be an enclosed courtyard, shot from about twenty feet below it. A half-open French door stood behind the rail. The cheep of crickets came from Chris's computer speakers, but there was no other sound. Maybe the hum of an air conditioner. Then a woman's laughter shattered the silence, chilling Chris to the core of his being. Even before he saw her, he knew. A muffled female voice protested something, but not too seriously. Then the door flew inward, and Thora shot from the door to the balcony rail, as though she'd been pushed.
She was stark naked.
Squealing like a sorority girl at a Chippendales show, she tried to run back inside, but a man eclipsed in shadow barred the door. He grabbed her arms and spun her back to the rail. Chris's hands clenched into fists as Shane Lansing stepped onto the balcony, his penis jutting out from his body. Before Thora could turn again, he grabbed her hips and plunged into her from behind. She gasped, squealed once more, then gripped the rail and braced herself against his thrusts. Her muscles stood out in stark relief as she endured what quickly became a brutal onslaught, her mouth hanging open, her eyes almost bulging from her head. Chris had seen her look that way during the final kick of a marathon, when she tested the very limits of her endurance. She began to grunt in time to Lansing's lunging hips, her face more animal than human. When she began to moan, her catlike howls reverberating off the courtyard walls, Chris glanced worriedly at his office door. He reached for the volume knob on his speakers, but before he could turn it, Lansing covered Thora's mouth with his hand, yanked back her head, and began pounding her taut abdomen against the rail. As Chris waited for the inevitable climax, a wave of nausea suddenly overcame the shock that had held him rooted to his chair. He jumped up and ran into his private bathroom, where he dropped to his knees and ejected what remained of his lunch into the toilet.
"Dr. Shepard?" called a female voice. Holly, his nurse.
By the time he got back to his desk, the screen had mercifully gone black. "What is it?" he called, knowing his face was probably red with anger.
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah, come in."
He got up and stepped back into his bathroom, where he wet a towel and wiped his face. "I'm just feeling a little tired."
"I don't blame you. All that baseball at night. I'm worn slap out myself."
When Chris looked back, Holly was sitting in front of his computer, fanning herself with a magazine. If she clicked his mouse, the balcony video would start to roll. He moved behind her and squeezed her shoulders, which surprised her, but which also got her out of the chair more quickly. His only thought was getting back into that chair to extinguish the possibility of the nightmare being displayed again.
"I've been looking for those results on Mrs. Young," Holly said. "Have you seen them?"
"No."
She studied him without speaking. Then, hesitantly, she said, "Nancy finished with Mr. Martin's X-rays. He's been waiting in room three for a good while."
"I'm coming!" Chris snapped.
Holly's mouth dropped open. She turned and left without a word.
Some morbid part of him wanted to reopen the video file, but he resisted the urge. His mind was filled with images dating to the day he had first noticed Thora Rayner on a ward in St. Catherine's Hospital. The video now residing on his hard drive seemed incomprehensible in light of all they had done since that day. How could the woman who had so devotedly cared for her dying husband so casually betray a man who loved her as Chris did? How could she throw away a father who had bonded so deeply with her son? It was beyond him. The denial that had slowly been crumbling since Alex Morse's arrival finally lay in ruins at his feet. Yet anger had not replaced it. He had moved directly into grief, an unbearably heavy pall that brought with it paralyzing numbness.
His cell phone was ringing again. Alex, of course. He picked up the phone but did not answer, a juvenile response. He couldn't afford paralysis. Any moment now Holly would knock at the door again.
Patients waiting.
He also had Ben up front, playing computer games but wanting more than anything to go home with his dad.
His dad?
Chris thought.
I'm not his dad. Not really. He's not flesh of my flesh. I've legally adopted him, but what would happen in a divorce? I know what Ben would want, as crazy as that seems. Even Thora has attributed his newfound happiness and improved grades to having me in his life. But what would a judge say?
The cell stopped ringing. As though moving underwater, Chris opened the clamshell phone and pressed the button that would connect him to Alex. She answered on the first ring.
"Are you all right?" she asked. "I know seeing that that was rough."
"Yep."
"I'm so sorry, Chris."
"Are you?"
"Of course. All I care about in this is you and Ben."
"That's not true. You want to nail Andrew Rusk."
This gave her pause. "Well, yes, but not out of some cheap sense of vengeance. It's for Grace, and for you, and for all the other people whose lives have been destroyed."
Chris said nothing. He waited for a fresh sales pitch, but none came. Alex waited in silence as well. He was about to speak when she said, "Whatever you do, please don't tell Thora what you know."
"Stop worrying. We already talked about that."
"But it's different now. Isn't it? Listen to me, Chris. I'm assuming you want to be the one Ben lives with when this is all over?"
He remained silent.
"I'm not just an FBI agent, you know. I'm also a lawyer. And the best way to ensure that you get custody of Ben is to make sure Thora is punished for attempted murder."
Anger flooded through him. "I'm supposed to help Ben by putting his mother in jail?"
"In a word? Yes."
"That's great, Alex."
"There's something else. Something that's scaring me."
"What is it?"
"You and Ben both have headaches, right?"
"Yes."
"Uncle Will has one, too. A bad one."
Chris thought about this.
"He's had it since this morning," Alex continued. "He took some aspirin, but it won't go away."
A strange buzzing started in Chris's head.
"Did you hear me?"
"I heard you."
"What do you think?"
"I don't like it."
"It seemed like too much coincidence to me, too. But I don't see what could have happened. I mean, Will was guarding you all night, right?"
"He was passed out in my easy chair all night."
"What?"
"He drank three beers and went out like a light."
"Shit."
A sudden image of Alex's room at the Days Inn flashed into Chris's mind: the wounded coral snake writhing in the bathroom, the dead cat lying on the floor. "Alex, is there anything I need to know that you haven't told me?"
Another pause.
"Goddamn it, what are you holding back?"
"Nothing. I just—"
"Tell me!"
"I spoke to Will again, right before I called you. His detective found out how Lansing has been getting here and back. There's a small charter service out at the local airport. Crop dusters mostly, but the local farmers use it to fly to Houston and Memphis, stuff like that. Lansing called from Natchez a few days ago and arranged to get round-trip flights from the Natchez airport to Greenwood and back. He flies in there after dark and flies out about dawn. He's been commuting to—"
"Screw Thora's brains out."
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Is her girlfriend even up there? Laura Canning?"
"Yes. She's covering for Thora."
Chris slammed his hand down on his desk. Anger was finally coming to the surface. "God
damn
it!"
"Chris, wait. Hold on a sec."
"What?"
"Will's calling me back. It must be important."
She clicked him into hold mode. The wait seemed to stretch forever. "Chris?" she said, after another click.
"Yeah."
"There's more, and it's bad."
Some deep part of him tensed against the unknown. "Tell me."