True Evil (35 page)

The director sat back in his chair, obviously waiting for an answer. Above his head, the eyes of the president stared down at Alex as though he were waiting, too. Alex studied Moran's shoes as she mulled over the director's words. They were cordovan wing tips, new and shiny, a far cry from the Rockports he used to wear in the field. She could not deny that the offer was remarkably generous. In it, she felt the hands of both Jack Moran and Senator Calvert. She didn't want to disappoint the new director, who was obviously a considerate man. Even less did she want to disappoint Moran, who had done so much for her as a mentor. After a couple of minutes, she looked at the director and spoke in a quiet voice.

"Do you have a sister, sir?"

"Alex," Moran cut in. "Don't make it—"

"It's all right, Jack," said the director.

"I don't mean to be presumptuous, sir. I just want you to understand my position, if you can. You see, as my sister lay on her deathbed, she told me that she'd been murdered by her husband. My sister wasn't the imaginative type, but I was still skeptical. However, in a matter of days I discovered that her husband
did
have a motive to get rid of her—a very attractive female motive. Sir, I promised my sister that I would do everything in my power to save her son from his father. And the only way I can see to do that is to solve her murder. As far as I can tell, nobody else is going to do that." Alex turned up her palms. "So that leaves me here. I promised her, sir. It was her last request. Do you understand?"

The director stared intently at her. "I do have a sister, Agent Morse. And truthfully, I can't answer for what I would do if I were in your shoes." Roberts picked up a paperweight from the desk—a glass cube enclosing a clock—and turned it in his hands. "But this is the FBI, and we can't tolerate the kind of off-the-reservation things you've been doing."

"I understand, sir. I don't want to be off the reservation. I'm no rogue agent. I wish you would throw the weight of the Bureau behind me. I've got good instincts—Jack can attest to that."

Moran nodded with obvious affection.

"I know I'm right about this. The same way I was right about the Federal Reserve bank, which still bothers some people, I'm afraid."

Moran winced at this veiled reference to Dodson.

Alex touched her scarred cheek as she went on. "I paid a heavy price to go with my instincts on that day. A lot heavier price than my face. And whether you help me or not, I'm going to fulfill the promise I made to my sister. No matter what you do to me, I'm going to get to the bottom of her death. I hope that I'm still an FBI agent on that day, but whether I am or not, that day is going to come."

Director Roberts sighed wearily, then looked over at Moran. "I think we're done here, Jack."

Moran got up and escorted Alex into the hall. As soon as the door closed, he put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her tight. She struggled to hold back her tears, but when she felt Jack stroking her hair, a sob broke from her throat.

"What was it?" she asked. "What finally did it?"

"The Charlotte apartment. When you broke that lease, Dodson knew you were never going back. He started asking questions in Charlotte, and that was that."

She nodded into Jack's chest, then leaned back and looked into his eyes. "Do you think I'm crazy?"

"I think you're exhausted. I've been tired that way myself. I had to be hospitalized in Minneapolis once, I was working so hard. By a strange coincidence, that was just after my wife died. You hear what I'm saying? There's a connection between personal loss and…losing your grip on things. You've lost a lot in the past few months, Alex. More than anybody should have to lose."

She nodded in agreement, then tried to wipe away her tears. "I concede all that. But—"

Jack put a finger up to her lips. "Just promise me one thing."

"What?"

"You won't hurt yourself any more than you have to tomorrow morning."

She laughed strangely. "What does it matter now?"

Moran squeezed her upper arm. "You've still got friends in this building. That's all I'm saying. Don't give that prick Dodson the rope to hang you with."

Alex nodded, but her mind was already far away. As she pulled away and walked down the hall alone, she saw an image of Chris Shepard practicing baseball with his adopted son. Superimposed over that picture like a descending shadow was a scene of Thora Shepard copulating with Dr. Shane Lansing. Thora's eyes, blazing with desperate lust, were the brightest things in Alex's head. Standing in the shadows behind Thora was Andrew Rusk, his face a grinning mask of greed, and behind him, almost beyond the realm of sight, hovered an even darker figure—far more threatening yet utterly faceless.

"I know you're there," Alex murmured. "And I'm going to find you, motherfucker."

CHAPTER 29

While Alex was walking out of the Hoover Building, Eldon Tarver was squatting beside a sandy stream, waiting for his bowels to move. He had spent the last eighteen hours in the woods of Chickamauga, while forty miles away the Natchez police, the Adams County Sheriff's Department, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol combed the area for a white van that was tumbling along the bottom of the Mississippi River toward Baton Rouge.

The doctor's motorcycle was parked beneath a sycamore forty feet away, and his duffel bag lay beside it. Eldon had come down to the stream to escape the sun, and to do his business in peace. As he rocked and strained on his haunches, he kept his eyes peeled for movement near the stream. Snakes liked this kind of ground, down in the cool hollows near water. They needed to drink just as people did. That was one of the secrets of handling them: knowing that they weren't so different from people. Cold-blooded, yes, but Eldon had learned young that many humans shared this trait. Snakes lived to eat, sleep, and mate, just as humans did. To eat, they had to kill. And to kill, they had to hunt.

Most humans hunted, too, those who weren't so alienated from their natures that they retained nothing of their ancient selves. People hunted in different ways and places now: in offices, financial markets, laboratories, and dark city streets. A few still carried the spirit of the true hunter within their breasts. Alex Morse was one of these, and that only made sense. She had been born from a hunter's loins, and she was simply fulfilling her destiny, as her genes bade her to do.

Right now she was hunting
him.

Morse had a tough job ahead. Eldon knew ways of hiding that even animals did not. There had been times, he believed, when he had made himself literally invisible to people passing within a foot of him. Today was a good example. He wasn't tearing across the country in a panic, as so many people who had killed would now be doing. He was living quietly, close to the earth, and still near the sites of his attacks.

He often felt a deep lethargy after a kill, the way snakes did after devouring large prey. It took time to digest the big things. Later, of course, he would begin to stir, to focus on research again. But now he felt a deep slowness in his veins, a reluctance to engage with life that almost frightened him. The feeling wasn't new. Sometimes he felt like a retrovirus himself, neither alive nor dead, but rather half a helix—half a chain—eternally searching for a tie that would bind. He suspected that most human beings were like that: dormant, drifting, like living corpses until they infiltrated the barriers of another person. By insinuating themselves into that other life, they began to function, to act, to feel, and ultimately to reproduce. But after a time (varying in every case, but always inevitable) they began to kill the host body. Look at the desperate men and women who went to Andrew Rusk for help. Most had already attached themselves to a new host and were now consumed by a frantic impulse to flee the dying husk of the old one, the husk that they themselves had sucked dry. And they would not scruple to kill if necessary.

Eldon listened to the whisper of the creek and let his mind drift downstream. Sometimes he had trouble evacuating his bowels. Before his adoptive father came to believe that Eldon had been ordained by God to handle serpents, he had flown into rages and beaten the boy without mercy. All the anger that would have crashed onto the thick heads of his biological children was diverted onto Eldon by his wife, a living monument to passive aggression. But Eldon had understood none of that then; he understood only pain. Even now, he had more than a dozen burn scars on his body, souvenirs of his father's Kafkaesque efforts to "prove" that he was not one of the elect, that he had been touched by the Evil One. (Being burned by the flame constituted damning proof of sin.) The red-hot iron had scourged Eldon in places he had not touched himself back then—the very iron they used in church to fulfill Luke 10:19:
Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
And for the skeptical, there was Mark 16:18, which Eldon had heard repeated ten thousand times before he was fifteen:
They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover
—

The sound of a cell phone was alien in these woods, and many creatures stopped to listen. Eldon let it ring three more times before he answered.

"Yes?"

"Dr. Traver?"

Eldon blinked three times, slowly. "Yes."

"It's Neville Byrd."

"Yes?"

"I think I may have him, sir. Or it, rather."

"Go on."

"The thing you were waiting for, you know? The
mechanism.
"

"Go on."

"Andy Rusk just logged on to this Dutch Web site. It seems to me he's going through an authentication protocol of some kind. You know, verifying his identity."

"And?"

"Well…I mean, if he does that tomorrow, I'd say we've found the trigger, you know? Like, if he didn't log in the next day, all hell would break loose. Or whatever it is you're expecting."

Eldon found it hard to adjust to the sudden intrusion of modernity. "Very good. Call me when…you're certain."

Neville Byrd sat breathing into the phone—he was almost panting, really, and obviously puzzled by his employer's apparent detachment. "I'll do that, Doctor. Is there anything else?"

"No."

"Okay, then."

The connection went dead.

Eldon hit END, then wiped himself with some broad leaves and walked slowly back to his motorcycle. He saw a shiver in the pine straw as he walked, a shiver that filled him with anticipation. Instead of halting, as most people would have, he threw out his right foot.

A thick black snake reared up before him, exposing the milky lining of its mouth and two long fangs. A cottonmouth moccasin. The tip of its tail vibrated like a rattlesnake's, but there was no sound. This viper had no rattle like its cousin. Still, it stood its ground more fiercely than a rattler would have done.

"Agkistrodon piscivorus,"
Eldon murmured. "Are you a sign, my friend?"

The cottonmouth seemed perplexed by his lack of fear. As Dr. Tarver moved forward, he opened his mouth and flicked his tongue in and out, an old habit from his snake-hunting days. The cottonmouth was not brilliantly hued like the coral, but corals were rare, and the one he'd found in the park was probably dead by now. Agent Morse would almost certainly survive, even if she'd been bitten. But she would never be the same. She would have tasted the enmity that God had promised in Genesis, and she would know that her present hunt was like no other.

The cottonmouth advanced in a quick rush, showing that he meant business. Eldon laughed and sidestepped the snake, whose body was nearly as thick as his forearm. Its diamond-shaped head was big as an average man's fist. A snake like that could generate a lot of fear. In some contexts, it could be a very persuasive tool.

"I believe you are," he said. "A sign of rebirth."

As he shouldered his duffel bag and climbed aboard the Honda, his laughter echoed strangely through the trees.

CHAPTER 30

Chris was sitting at his kitchen table dictating charts when the cell phone Alex had given him began to ring. Ben was in the den playing
Madden NFL
on his Xbox, but they could see each other through the open door. Ben had already asked about the unfamiliar cell phone, and Chris had played it off as something the hospital had lent him. He debated not answering, then calling Alex back after Ben went to sleep, but that might be some time. He glanced at Ben, then got up and reached to the top of the refrigerator, where he'd stashed his .38. Slipping it into his pocket, he picked up the cell phone and a flashlight, then walked to the front door, calling, "I'm going outside for better reception, okay?"

Ben didn't even look in his direction.

"Alex?" he said, walking across the driveway. "How's it going up there?"

"Not so good."

"You sound shaky."

"Not my best day."

"I'm sorry. Take another Ativan."

"I'd like to, but they're giving me a drug test in the morning. And it's not voluntary."

"Ativan's no big deal. You've got a prescription."

"Not in writing."

"I'll fax one up there tomorrow."

"That won't help. They don't want me talking to you, Chris. They don't want me talking to anybody associated with any of the cases. Actually, ‘noncases' would be more accurate."

"They still don't believe you?"

"For a second, I thought I saw something in an old friend's eye, but I was wrong."

Chris switched on the flashlight and scanned his front yard. Two pairs of yellow-green eyes glowed to life on a hilltop sixty meters away. The deer reassured him, for the skittish animals would instantly vanish if someone were prowling the area. "Well, your big worry was that they would fire you. Have they done that?"

"Not yet. They offered me a deal."

"What deal?"

"If I give up everything, stop trying to find out what happened to Grace, they probably won't fire me."