Читать книгу True Evil - Greg Iles - Страница 11

Chris had never been a good liar. His father hadn’t either. Buddy Shepard never earned much money, but he had earned respect wherever he worked, and he’d passed his integrity on to his son. Integrity wasn’t an easy thing to maintain, Chris had found, in a world that ran according to the laws of human nature.

Walking down the dark path between his house and the remodeled barn behind it, he wasn’t even sure what the right thing was. His tread was heavy, and he took no joy in his surroundings, which had always been a source of pride. After moving to Natchez, he had used a chunk of his savings to buy a large house sited on twenty acres of the former Elgin plantation, an estate south of town that predated the Civil War. Despite its isolation, the house was only five minutes from Ben’s school and less than ten minutes from both Natchez hospitals. Chris couldn’t see how this situation could be improved upon, but Thora had long wanted to move to Avalon, a trendy new subdivision springing up farther south. Red Simmons had always resisted this desire, but after several months of discussion Chris had finally given in, conceding that in the new neighborhood Ben would have more friends living nearby.

Their house in Avalon—he privately called it the McMansion—was three-fifths finished. Thora was personally overseeing construction, but Chris rarely visited the site. He had been raised in a series of rural towns (his father had worked for International Paper, and they were transferred every couple of years), and he believed that growing up in the country had played a large part in forging his self-reliance. He knew that Ben would benefit from a similar environment, and for this reason he had privately decided not to sell this land when they moved to Avalon.

A large building appeared before him in the darkness, but its rustic exterior belied its real purpose. Chris had remodeled this barn himself, converting it into a video production studio to house the technology of his avocation—his “camera hobby” as Thora called it, which bothered him more than he admitted. He unlocked the door and walked into his main production room, a haven of blond maple and glass, spotlessly clean and kept at sixty-five degrees for the health of the cameras, computers, and other equipment. Simply entering this room elevated his mood. Booting up his Apple G5 did even more. In this room he could leave the thousand importunities of daily life behind. Here, he actually had control over what he was doing. And deep down, he felt that he was doing something great.

Chris had gotten into filmmaking during college, where he’d worked on several documentaries, two of which had won national awards. During medical school, he produced a documentary called A Day in the Life of a Resident. Shot with a hidden camera, this digital video had almost ended his medical career before it began. But after a fellow student sent the tape to a national news network, it had ultimately contributed to the limiting of work hours for medical residents. Once Chris began practicing medicine for real, though, he’d found that he had little time for filming anything. Medicine offered many rewards, but spare time wasn’t one of them.

But last year, after associating with Dr. Tom Cage, an old-time general practitioner in Natchez, Chris had discovered a way to combine his vocation with his avocation. After close observation of his new partner, Chris began work on a documentary about the decline of traditional primary-care medicine. And Mississippi, which was ten years behind the rest of the country in most things, was the perfect place to do that.

Tom Cage was one of those doctors who would spend a full hour listening to a patient, if a sympathetic ear was what that patient needed most. Seventy-three years old, Tom suffered from several serious chronic diseases; and as he often admitted, he was sicker than many of his patients. But he still worked eighty-hour weeks, and when he wasn’t working, he was reading journals to stay up on the latest standards of care. Dr. Cage frequently touched patients during his exams, and he paid close attention to what he felt. Most important, he questioned patients deeply about not only their specific symptoms, but also other areas of their lives that might yield clues to their general health. He thought about his fees in terms of trying to save his patients money (and thus he was not rich), and he never thought about the dozens of patients—many of them walk-ins—waiting to see him. Tom Cage stayed at his office until the last patient was seen, and only then did he declare his workday done.

For Chris, who had begun his private-practice career in a group of internists his own age, Dr. Cage’s methods had come as a profound shock. To physicians of Chris’s generation, a good practice meant high pay, short working hours, and an abundance of partners to take call, so that one night a week was the most you had to worry about phone calls from patients. Chris’s former partners practiced defensive medicine, ordering every lab test remotely relevant to every patient’s symptoms, but spending as little time as possible with those patients, all in the hallowed name of gross income. This kind of practice was anathema to Tom Cage. A system geared toward the convenience and gain of the physician was the tail wagging the dog. Dr. Cage saw medicine as a life of service: a noble calling, perhaps, but still a life of service. And that, Chris believed, was worth documenting for posterity.

Deep down, he shared a lot of Tom’s feelings about modern medicine. His own ideas of service had cost him his first wife, and he had been cautious in love after that. Only after Thora Rayner entered his life had Chris felt emboldened to take such a risk again. For this reason, Agent Morse’s visit had disturbed him more than it might have another man. Chris had fundamentally misjudged his first wife, and to admit that he might have done the same thing a second time would be hard. In fact, he reflected, the niggling worries that had surfaced during baseball practice were just that—inconsequential peeves. Every adult went through personality changes, and the first year of a marriage was always a time of adjustment. That Thora had started spending more money than she used to, or wearing tighter clothes, meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chris opened the studio’s refrigerator, poured a nearly freezing shot of Grey Goose, and drank it off. Then he sat down before his G5, opened Final Cut Pro, and began reviewing some scenes he’d filmed last week. Shooting directly to hard drives from his Canon XL2S meant that he wasted no time dumping footage from tape to his computer. Unfolding before him now was an interview with Tom Cage and a black woman who had been his patient since 1963. That woman now had a great-great-granddaughter, and that little girl was playing at her feet. Tom preferred not to treat children anymore, but this woman had refused to take her “grandchild” to any other doctor. Chris had more recent experience with pediatrics than Tom did, and he’d been proud to help in evaluating the child’s high fever (which Tom had feared might be meningitis).

As the old woman spoke about Dr. Cage traveling to her home one night during the blizzard of 1963, Chris felt a strange tide of emotion moving through him. Until this morning, when Agent Morse had subversively entered his life, he’d felt more content than he had since childhood. His father had been a good man, but he’d rarely pondered life’s deeper mysteries. In Tom Cage, Chris had found a mentor with a wealth of knowledge to pass on, but who did so without pretense or didacticism, almost like a Zen master. A trenchant question here, a small gesture while a patient’s attention was elsewhere—in this unassuming way, Tom had been turning Chris into more than a first-class internist: he was turning him into a healer.

But a career isn’t enough to sustain a man, Chris thought, feeling the vodka cross his blood-brain barrier. Not even if it’s a passionate calling. A man needs someone to engage his deepest emotions, to relieve his drives, to soften his obsessions, to accept the gifts he feels compelled to give, and maybe most important, to simply be with him during the thousands of small moments that in aggregate compose a life.

For almost two years, Chris had believed that Thora was that person. Along with Ben, she had closed some magic circle in his life. Before he married Thora, Chris had not understood how acting as a father to Ben would affect him. But in less than a year, with Chris’s patient attention, the boy had blossomed into a young man who amazed his teachers with his attitude and schoolwork. He was no slouch on the athletic field, either. The pride Chris felt in Ben had stunned him, and he’d felt it a solemn duty—even a privilege—to adopt the boy. Given what he felt for Ben, Chris could hardly imagine what having his own biological child might do to him. He almost felt guilty for asking more of life than he already had. Every week he watched men die without the things he now possessed, either because they had never found them or because they had foolishly cast them away. Yet now … everything had changed somehow. Alexandra Morse had released a serpent of doubt into his personal Eden, forcing him to wonder if he truly possessed any of the gifts he had believed to be his.

“Goddamn it,” he murmured. “Goddamn woman.”

“Did I mess something up?” asked a worried voice.

Chris looked over his shoulder and saw Thora standing behind him. She wore a diaphanous blue nightgown and white slippers with wet blades of grass on them. He’d been so absorbed in the footage and his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her enter the studio.

“You were pretty late getting home from the hospital,” she said diffidently.

“I know.”

“You have a lot of admissions?”

“Yeah. Most of them are routine stuff, but there’s one case nobody can figure out. Don Allen consulted Tom about it, and Tom asked for my opinion.”

A look of surprise widened Thora’s eyes. “I can’t believe Don Allen consulted with anybody.”

Chris smiled faintly. “The patient’s family pressured him into it. It killed Don to do it, I could tell. But if somebody doesn’t figure out what this guy has, he could die.”

“Why not ship him up to Jackson?”

“Don already talked to all the specialists at UMC. They’ve seen the test results, and they don’t know what to think either. I think the family figured Tom has seen almost everything in almost fifty years of practicing medicine, so they wanted him consulted. But Tom is stumped, too. For now, anyway.”

“My money’s on you,” Thora said, smiling. “I know you’ll figure it out. You always do.”

“I don’t know, this time.”

Thora moved closer, then leaned down and kissed Chris’s forehead. “Turn back around,” she said softly. “Toward the monitor.”

It seemed an odd request, but after a moment he turned and faced the screen.

Thora began to rub his shoulders. She had surprisingly strong hands for a lithe woman, and the release of tension in his neck was so sudden that he felt a mild nausea.

“How does that feel?”

“I almost can’t take it.”

Her hands worked up the sides of his neck and began to knead the bunched muscles at the base of his skull. Then she slipped her fingertips into his ears and began to massage the shells, working steadily inward with increasing pressure. Before long he felt like sliding out of the chair and onto the floor. One of Thora’s hands vanished, but her other moved down into his polo shirt, the palm circling his pectoral muscles with surprising force.

“You know what I was thinking?” she said.

“What?”

“We haven’t tried to get me pregnant in a while.”

No remark could have surprised him more. “You’re right.”

“Well …?”

She slowly spun his chair until he found himself facing her bare breasts. Normally, they were porcelain pale—her Danish blood—but like her friends, Thora had recently become an addict of the tanning salon, and her skin glowed an uncharacteristic burnished gold, with nary a line in sight.

“Kiss them,” she whispered.

He did.

She a made a purring sound deep in her throat, a nearly feline expression of pleasure, and he felt her shift position. While her fingers played in the hair at the back of his neck, he worked delicately but steadily at her nipples. They were infallible sources of arousal, and soon Thora was breathing in shallow rasps. She bent her knees and reached down to see if he was ready. Finding him hard, she unsnapped his pants, then knelt and tried to pull them down. He raised his hips for her, then sat back down.

Without delay Thora lifted her gown and sat, wrapping her strong legs around his waist and the chair back. Chris groaned, nearly overcome by her urgency, which he had not experienced in some time. But tonight Thora was the woman he had fallen in love with two years ago, and the power of this incarnation pushed him quickly toward climax. She gazed into his eyes as she rode him, silently urging him on, but at the last moment she planted both feet on the floor and thrust herself up and off him.

“What?” he cried.

“That’s not exactly the ideal position for bringing a new generation into the world,” she said, her eyes teasing him with mock reproach.

“Oh.”

Taking hold of his penis, she pulled him over to the leather sofa, then lay down on her back and motioned for him to mount her. After staring at her long enough to engrave the image in his mind, he did. As Thora whispered lewd encouragements in his ear, the interview with Alex Morse rose inexplicably into his mind. Their conversation had a surreal quality now. Could such a thing be possible? Had someone pretending to be a patient actually lied her way into his office and then accused his wife of murder? And before the fact? It was crazy—

“Now,” Thora told him. “Now, now, now …”

Chris thrust deep and held the contact, letting Thora take herself over the threshold. When she cried out, her nails raking his shoulder blades, he let himself go, and a white glare burned away all ambiguity.

As he came slowly back to the present, Thora strained upward to kiss his lips, then fell back, sweating despite the steady flow of air-conditioning. Chris drew out and lay beside her on the cold leather.

“You can get up if you want to,” she said. “I’m going to stay here a few minutes. Let things take their natural course.”

He laughed. “I’m fine right here.”

“Good answer.”

They lay in silence for a while. Then Thora said, “Is everything all right, Chris?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You seemed distant today. Did something happen at work?”

God, did something happen. “Just the usual.”

“Is the new house bothering you again?”

“I haven’t even thought about it.”

She looked disappointed. “I don’t know if that’s good either.”

He forced a smile. “The house is fine. It just takes a while to turn a country boy into a city boy.”

“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.