Читать книгу True Evil - Greg Iles - Страница 7
TWO
ОглавлениеFive Weeks Later
Dr. Chris Shepard lifted a manila folder from the file caddy on the door of Exam Room 4 and quickly perused it. He didn’t recognize the patient’s name, and that was unusual. Chris had a large practice, but it was a small town, and that was the way he liked it.
This patient’s name was Alexandra Morse, and her file held only a medical history, the long form that all new patients filled out on their first visit. Chris looked down the corridor and saw Holly, his nurse, crossing from her station to the X-ray room. He called out and waved her up the hall. Holly said something through the door to X-ray, then hurried toward him.
“Aren’t you coming in with me?” he asked softly. “It’s a female patient.”
Holly shook her head. “She asked to speak to you alone.”
“New patient?”
“Yes. I meant to say something before now, but we got so busy with Mr. Seward—”
Chris nodded at the door and lowered his voice to a whisper. “What’s her story?”
Holly shrugged. “Beats me. Name’s Alex. Thirty years old and in great shape, except for the scars on her face.”
“Scars?”
“Right side. Cheek, ear, and orbit. Head through a window is my guess.”
“There’s nothing about a car accident in her history.”
“Couple of months ago, by the color of the scars.”
Chris moved away from the door, and Holly followed. “She didn’t give you any complaint?”
The nurse shook her head. “No. And you know I asked.”
“Oh, boy.”
Holly nodded knowingly. A woman coming in alone and refusing to specify her complaint usually meant the problem was sexual—most often fear of a sexually transmitted disease. Natchez, Mississippi, was a small town, and its nurses gossiped as much as its other citizens. Truth be told, Chris thought, most doctors here are worse gossips than their nurses.
“Her chart says Charlotte, North Carolina,” he noted. “Did Ms. Morse tell you what she’s doing in Natchez?”
“She told me exactly nothing,” Holly said with a bit of pique. “Do you want me to shoot that flat-and-erect series on Mr. Seward before he voids on the table?”
“Sorry. Go to it.”
Holly winked and whispered, “Have fun with Ms. Scarface.”
Chris shook his head, then summoned a serious expression and walked into the examining room.
A woman wearing a navy skirt and a cream-colored top stood beside the examining table. Her face almost caused him to stare, but he’d seen a lot of trauma during his medical training. This woman’s scars weren’t actually too bad. It was her youth and attractiveness that made them stand out so vividly. Almost fiercely, Chris thought. You figured a woman who looked and dressed this way would have had plastic surgery to take care of an injury like that. Not that she was a knockout or anything; she wasn’t. It was just—
“Hello, Dr. Shepard,” the woman said in a direct tone.
“Ms. Morse?” he said, remembering that the history said she was single.
She gave him a smile of acknowledgment but said nothing else.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked.
The woman remained silent, but he could feel her eyes probing him as deeply as a verbal question. What’s going on here? Chris wondered. Is it my birthday or something? Did the staff plan some kind of trick? Or does she want drugs? He’d had that happen before: some female patients offered sex for drugs, usually narcotics. Chris studied the woman’s face, trying to divine her real purpose. She had dark hair, green eyes, and an oval face not much different from those of the dozens of women he saw each day. A little better bone structure, maybe, especially the cheekbones. But the real difference was the scars—and a shock of gray hair above them that didn’t look added by a colorist. Except for those things, Alex Morse might be any woman at the local health club. And yet … despite her usualness, if that was a word, there was something about her that Chris couldn’t quite nail down, something that set her apart from other women. Something in the way she stood, maybe.
Laying the chart on the counter behind him, he said, “Maybe you should just tell me what the problem is. I promise, however frightening it might seem now, I’ve seen or heard it many times in this office, and together we can do something about it. People usually feel better once they verbalize these things.”
“You’ve never heard what I’m about to tell you,” Alex Morse said with utter certainty. “I promise you that, Doctor.”
The conviction in her voice unsettled him, but he didn’t have time for games. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Ms. Morse, if I’m going to help you at all, I have to know the nature of your problem.”
“It’s not my problem,” the woman said finally. “It’s yours.”
As Chris frowned in confusion, the woman reached into a small handbag on the chair behind her and brought out a wallet. This she flipped open and held up for him to examine. He saw an ID card of some sort, one with a blue-and-white seal. He looked closer. Bold letters on the right side of the card read FBI. His stomach fluttered. To the left of the big acronym, smaller letters read Special Agent Alexandra Morse. Beside this was a photo of the woman standing before him. Special Agent Morse was smiling in the photo, but she wasn’t smiling now.
“I need to tell you some things in confidence,” she said. “It won’t take much of your time. I pretended to be a patient because I don’t want anyone in your life to know you’ve spoken to an FBI agent. Before I leave, I need you to write me a prescription for Levaquin and tell your nurse that I had a urinary-tract infection. Tell her that the symptoms were so obvious that you didn’t need to do a urinalysis. Will you do that?”
Chris was too surprised to make a conscious decision. “Sure,” he said. “But what’s going on? Are you investigating something? Are you investigating me?”
“Not you.”
“Someone I know?”
Agent Morse’s eyes didn’t waver. “Yes.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that yet. I may tell you at the end of this conversation. Right now I’m going to tell you a story. A quick story. Will you sit down, Doctor?”
Chris sat on the short stool he used in the examining room. “Are you really from North Carolina? Or is that just a cover?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You talk like a Yankee, but I hear Mississippi underneath.”
Agent Morse smiled, or gave him what passed for a smile with her—a slight widening of her taut lips. “You have good ears. I grew up in Jackson. But I’m based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now.”
He was glad to have his intuition confirmed. “Please go on with your story.”
She sat on the chair where her handbag had been, crossed her legs, and regarded him coolly. “Five weeks ago, my sister died of a brain hemorrhage. This happened at University Hospital in Jackson.”
“I’m sorry.”
Agent Morse nodded as though she were past it, but Chris saw held-in emotion behind her eyes. “Her death was sudden and unexpected, but before she died, she told me something that sounded crazy to me.”
“What?”
“She told me she’d been murdered.”
He wasn’t sure he understood. “You mean she told you someone had murdered her?”
“Exactly. Her husband, to be specific.”
Chris thought about this for a while. “What did the autopsy show?”
“A fatal blood clot on the left side of the brain, near the brain stem.”
“Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?”
“No.”
“Was your sister taking birth-control pills?”
“Yes.”
“That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?”
“No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that.”
“Did your sister’s husband resist the autopsy?”
Agent Morse actually beamed with approval. “No. He didn’t.”
“But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?”
“Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then—” Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars. Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass. But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?
“Agent Morse?” he prompted.
“I didn’t leave town right away,” she said, focusing on him again. “I stayed for the funeral. And over the course of those three days, I thought a lot about what Grace had told me. That’s my sister’s name, Grace. She told me she thought her husband was having an affair. He’s a wealthy man—far wealthier than I realized—and Grace believed he was involved with another woman. She believed he’d murdered her rather than pay what it would have cost him to divorce her. And to get custody of their son, of course.”
Chris considered this. “I’m sure women have been killed for that reason before. Men, too, I imagine.”
“Absolutely. Even completely normal people admit to having homicidal impulses when going through a divorce. Anyway … after Grace’s funeral, I told her husband I was going back to Charlotte.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Was he having an affair?”
“He was. And Grace’s death didn’t slow him down in the least. Quite the reverse, in fact.”
“Go on.”
“Let’s call Grace’s husband Bill. After I discovered the affair, I didn’t confront Bill. I engaged the resources of the Bureau to investigate him. His personal life, his business, everything. I now know almost everything there is to know about Bill—everything but the one thing I need to prove. I know far more than my sister knew, and I know a lot more than his mistress knows now. For example, when I was going through Bill’s business records, I found that he had some rather complex connections to a local lawyer.”
“A Natchez lawyer?” Chris asked, trying to anticipate the connection to himself. Unlike most local physicians, he had several friends in Natchez who were attorneys.
“No, this lawyer practices in Jackson.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Bill is a real estate developer. He’s building the new ice hockey stadium up there. Naturally, most of the lawyers he deals with specialize in real estate transactions. But this lawyer was different.”
“How?”
“Family law is his specialty.”
“Divorce?” said Chris.
“Exactly. Though he also does some estate planning. Trusts, wills, et cetera.”
“Had ‘Bill’ consulted this lawyer about divorcing your sister?”
Agent Morse shifted on her chair. Chris had the impression that she wanted to stand and pace, but there wasn’t enough room here to pace—he knew from experience. He also sensed that she was trying to conceal nervousness.
“I can’t prove that,” she said. “Not yet. But I’m positive that he did. Still, there’s no evidence of any relationship whatever between Bill and this divorce attorney prior to one week after my sister’s death. That’s when they went into business together.”
Chris wanted to ask several questions, but he suddenly remembered that he had patients waiting. “This story is very intriguing, Agent Morse, but I can’t see how it has anything to do with me.”
“You will.”
“You’d better make it fast, or we’ll have to postpone this. I have patients waiting.”
She gave him a look that seemed to say, Don’t assume you’re in control here. “After I found the connection between Bill and this divorce lawyer,” she continued, “I broadened the investigation. What I found was a web of business relationships that boggled my mind. I know something about dummy corporations, Dr. Shepard. I started my FBI career in South Florida, and I worked a lot of money-laundering cases there.”
Chris silently thanked his stars for being too afraid to say yes to the various friends who had offered to “put him into some investments” in the Cayman Islands.
“This divorce attorney has interests in just about every business you can think of,” Morse went on. “Mostly partnerships with various wealthy individuals in Mississippi.”
This didn’t surprise Chris. “Is it strange that a rich lawyer—I’m assuming he’s rich—would be into a lot of different businesses?”
“Not in and of itself. But all this activity started about five years ago. And after looking closely at these deals, I couldn’t see any reason that the lawyer was put into them. They’re brother-in-law deals, you might say. Only the lawyer isn’t related to the parties in question. Not by blood or marriage. In some cases he acted as counsel, but in most, not.”
Chris nodded and stole another glance at his watch. “I’m following you. But what does all this add up to?”
Agent Morse looked intently at him, so intently that her gaze made him uncomfortable. “Nine of the individuals that this divorce lawyer is in business with share a common characteristic.”
“What? Are they all patients of mine?”
Morse shook her head. “Each of them had a spouse who died unexpectedly in the past five years. In several cases, a relatively young spouse.”
As Chris digested this, he felt a strange thrill, an alloy of excitement and dread. He said nothing though, but rather tried to get his mind fully around what she was saying.
“Also,” Agent Morse added, “they actually all died within two and a half years of each other.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Let me finish. All these spouses were white, previously healthy, and all were married to wealthy people. I can show you actuarial tables, if you like. It’s way off the charts.”
Chris was intrigued by Morse’s single-minded intensity. “So, what you’re saying … you think this divorce lawyer is helping potential clients to murder their spouses rather than pay them a financial settlement?”
The FBI agent brought her hands together and nodded. “Or to gain sole custody of their children. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Okay. But why are you saying it to me?”
For the first time, Agent Morse looked uncomfortable. “Because,” she said deliberately, “one week ago, your wife drove to Jackson and spent two hours inside that lawyer’s office.”
Chris’s mouth fell open. A wave of numbness moved slowly through his body, as though he’d been shot with a massive dose of lidocaine.
Agent Morse’s eyes had become slits. “You had no idea, did you?”
He was too stunned to respond.
“Have you been having problems in your marriage, Doctor?”
“No,” he said finally, grateful to be certain of something at last. “Not that it’s any of your business. But look … if my wife went to see this lawyer, she must have had some reason other than divorce. We’re not having any kind of marital trouble.”
Morse leaned back in her chair. “You don’t think Thora could be having an affair?”
His face went red at the use of his wife’s first name. “Are you about to tell me that she is?”
“What if I did?”
Chris stood suddenly and flexed his shoulders. “I’d say you’re crazy. Nuts. And I’d throw you out of here. In fact, I want to know where you get off coming in here like this and saying these things.”
“Calm down, Dr. Shepard. You may not believe it at this moment, but I’m here to help you. I realize we’re talking about personal matters. Intimate matters, even. But you’re forced to do the same thing in your job, aren’t you? When human life is at stake, privacy goes by the board.”
She was right, of course. Many of the questions on his medical-history form were intrusive. How many sexual partners have you had in the last five years? Are you satisfied with your sexual life? Chris looked away from her and tried to pace the room, a circuit of exactly two and a half steps. “What are you telling me, Agent Morse? No more games. Spell it out.”
“Your life may be in danger.”
Chris stopped. “From my wife? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Jesus Christ! You’re out of your mind. I’m going to call Thora right now and get to the bottom of this.” He reached for the phone on the wall.
Agent Morse got to her feet. “Please don’t do that, Dr. Shepard.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you may be the only person in a position to stop whoever is behind these murders.”
Chris let his hand fall. “How’s that?”
She took a deep breath, then spoke in a voice of eminent reasonableness. “If you are a target—that is, if you’ve become one in the last week—your wife and this attorney have no idea that you’re aware of their activities.”
“So?”
“That puts you in a unique position to help us trap them.”
Awareness dawned quickly. “You want me to try to trap my wife? To get her jailed for attempted murder?”
Morse turned up her palms. “Would you rather pretend none of this happened and die at thirty-six?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to restrain his temper. “You’re missing the forest for the trees here. Your whole thesis is illogical.”
“Why?”
“Those men you think murdered their wives … they did it to keep from splitting their assets and paying out a ton of alimony, right?”
“In most cases, yes. But not all the victims were women.”
Chris momentarily lost his train of thought.
“In at least one case,” said Morse, “and probably two, the murder was about custody of the children, not money.”
“Again, you’re miles off base. Thora and I have no children.”
“Your wife has a child. A nine-year-old son.”
He smiled. “Sure, but she had Ben even before she married Red Simmons. Thora would automatically get custody.”
“You’ve legally adopted Ben. But that brings up another important point, Dr. Shepard.”
“What?”
“How your wife got her money.”
Chris sat back down and looked at Agent Morse. How much did she know about his wife? Did she know that Thora was the daughter of a renowned Vanderbilt surgeon who’d left his family when his daughter was eight years old? Did she know that Thora’s mother was an alcoholic? That Thora had fought like a wildcat just to get through adolescence, and that making it through nursing school was a pretty amazing achievement given her background?
Probably not.
Morse probably knew only the local legend: how Thora Rayner had been working in St. Catherine’s Hospital when Red Simmons, a local oilman nineteen years her senior, had been carried into the ER with a myocardial infarction; how she’d become close to Red during his hospital stay, then married him six months later. Chris knew this story well because he’d treated Red Simmons during the last three years of his life. Chris had known Thora as a nurse, of course, but he came to know her much better during Red’s years in heart failure. And what he learned was that Red truly loved “his little Viking”—a reference to Thora’s Danish ancestry—and that Thora had been a brave and loyal wife, a woman worthy of deep respect. When Red died two and a half years ago, he left Thora an estate valued at $6.5 million. That was big money in Natchez, but it meant little to Chris. He had some money of his own, and he was young enough to earn plenty more.
“Agent Morse,” he said in a neutral tone, “I’m not going to discuss my wife with you. But I will tell you this. Thora doesn’t stand to gain or lose anything if we get divorced.”
“Why not? She’s very wealthy.”
“She has money, yes. But so do I. I started saving the day I began moonlighting in emergency rooms, and I’ve made some lucky investments. But the real issue here is legal. We both signed a prenuptial agreement before we married. If we were to get divorced, each person would leave the marriage with exactly what he or she brought into it.”
Agent Morse studied Chris in silence. “I didn’t know that.”
He smiled. “Sorry to punch a hole in your theory.”
Morse seemed suddenly lost in thought, and Chris sensed that for her, in that moment, he was not even there. Her face was more angular than he’d thought at first; it had its own odd shadows.
“Tell me this,” she said suddenly. “What happens if either of you dies?”
As Chris thought about this, he felt a hollowness high in his stomach. “Well … I believe our wills kick in at that point. And those override the prenup. At least I think they do.”
“What does your will say? Who gets those lucky investments you made?”
Chris looked at the floor, his face growing hot. “My parents get a nice chunk.”
“That’s good. And the rest?”
He looked up at her. “Thora gets it all.”
Morse’s eyes flashed with triumph.
“But …,” Chris protested.
“I’m listening.”
“Thora is worth millions of dollars. What would be the point? Kill me to get an extra two million?”
Morse rubbed her chin for a few moments, then looked up at the narrow window set in the top of the wall. “People have been killed for less, Dr. Shepard. A lot less.”
“By millionaires?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. And people are murdered every day for reasons other than money. How well do you know your wife? Psychologically, I mean?”
“Pretty damn well.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Chris was starting to dislike Agent Morse intensely. “You think my wife murdered her first husband, don’t you?”
Morse shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have. But Red Simmons had a long history of heart disease.”
“Yes, he did.”
Morse’s inside knowledge of events was pissing him off.
“But no autopsy was done,” she pointed out.
“I’m aware of that. You’re not suggesting that one should be done now, are you?”
Agent Morse dismissed this idea with a flick of her hand. “We wouldn’t find anything. Whoever’s behind these murders is too good for that.”
Chris snorted. “Who’s that good, Agent Morse? A professional assassin? A forensic pathologist?”
“There was a mob enforcer some years ago who prided himself on this kind of work. He was a very reserved man with a massive ego. He had no formal medical training, but he was an enthusiastic amateur. He’s nominally retired now. We’ve had some people following him, just to make sure.”
Chris couldn’t sit any longer. He rose and said, “This is nuts. I mean, what the hell do you expect me to do now?”
“Help us.”
“Us? That’s only about the third time you’ve said us in this whole conversation.”
Agent Morse smiled more fully this time. “I’m the lead agent. We’re spread pretty thin on these kinds of cases since 9/11. Everybody’s working counterterrorism.”
Chris looked deep into her eyes. There was sincerity there, and passion. But he saw something else, too—something not so different from what he read in the eyes of those patients who tried to con him out of drugs every week.
“Murder’s a state crime, isn’t it?” he said slowly. “Not a federal one.”
“Yes. But when you kill someone, you also deprive him of his civil rights.”
Chris knew this was true. Several decades-old race murders in Mississippi had been dragged back into the courtroom by trying previously acquitted Ku Klux Klan killers for violating their victims’ civil rights. But still … something seemed wrong about Alexandra Morse’s story.
“The first victim you told me about—if these are murder victims—was your sister, right? Doesn’t that create some sort of conflict? I’m not supposed to treat family members for anything serious. Should you be investigating your own sister’s death?”
“To be perfectly frank, no. But there’s no one else I trust to do it right.” Agent Morse looked at her watch for the first time. “We don’t have time to get deep into this, Dr. Shepard. I’ll speak to you again soon, but I don’t want you to deviate from your normal routine. Not in any way that your wife or anyone else would notice.”
“Who else would notice?”
“The person planning to kill you.”
Chris went still. “Are you saying someone might be following me?”
“Yes. You and I cannot be seen together in public.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t tell me something like this and just walk out of here. Are you giving me protection? Are there going to be FBI agents covering me when I walk out?”
“It’s not like that. Nobody’s trying to assassinate you with a rifle. If the past is any guide—and it almost always is, since criminals tend to stick to patterns that have been successful in the past—then your death will have to look natural. You should be careful in traffic, and you shouldn’t walk or jog or bicycle anywhere that there’s traffic. No one can protect you from that kind of hit. But most important is the question of food and drink. You shouldn’t eat or drink at home for a while. Not even bottled water. Nothing bought or prepared by your wife.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I realize that might be difficult, but we’ll work it out. To tell you the truth, I think we have some working room, as far as time is concerned. Your wife just consulted this lawyer, and this kind of murder takes meticulous planning.”
Chris heard a note of hysteria in his laughter. “That’s a huge comfort, Agent Morse. Seriously. I feel so much better now.”
“Does your wife have plans to be out of town anytime soon?”
He shook his head.
“Good. That’s a good sign.” Morse picked up her handbag. “You’d better write me that prescription now.”
“What?”
“The Levaquin.”
“Oh, right.” He took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription for a dozen antibiotic pills. “You think of everything, don’t you?”
“No one thinks of everything. And be glad for it. That’s the way we catch most criminals. Stupid mistakes. Even the best of us make them.”
“You haven’t given me a card or anything,” Chris said. “No references I can check. All you did was show me an ID that I wouldn’t know was fake or not. I want a phone number. Something.”
Agent Morse shook her head. “You can’t call anyone at the Bureau, Doctor. You can’t do anything that could possibly tip off your killer. Your phones may be tapped, and that includes your cell phone. That’s the easiest one to monitor.”
Chris stared at her for a long time. He wanted to ask about the scars. “You said everybody makes mistakes, Agent Morse. What’s the worst you ever made?”
The woman’s hand rose slowly to her right cheek, as though of its own volition. “I didn’t look before I leaped,” she said softly. “And somebody died because of it.”
“I’m sorry. Who was it?”
She hitched her handbag over her shoulder. “Not your problem, Doctor. But you do have a problem. I’m sorry to be the one to turn your life upside down. I really am. But if I hadn’t, you might have gone to sleep one night thinking you were happy and never woken up.”
Morse took the prescription from Chris’s hand, then gave him her taut smile. “I’ll contact you again soon. Try not to freak out. And whatever you do, don’t ask your wife if she’s trying to kill you.”
Chris gaped after Morse as she walked down the corridor toward the waiting-room door. Her stride was measured and assured, the walk of an athlete.
“So?” Holly said from behind him, startling him. “What’s her story?”
“Cystitis,” he mumbled. “Honeymoon syndrome.”
“Too much bumping monkey, huh? I didn’t see no wedding ring on her finger.”
Chris shook his head at Holly’s wiseass tone, then walked down the hall to his private office and closed the door.
He had a waiting room filled with patients, but as sick as some of them were, they seemed secondary now. He shoved aside a stack of charts and looked at Thora’s picture on his desk. Thora was the antithesis of Agent Alex Morse. She was blond—naturally blond, unlike 98 percent of the golden-haired women you saw on the street—and of Danish descent, which was unusual in the South. Her eyes were grayish blue—sea blue, if you wanted to get poetic about it, which he had, on occasion. But though she might be mistaken for a Viking princess on the basis of appearance, Thora had no pretensions of superiority. She had spent four years married to Red Simmons, a down-to-earth country boy who’d made good by trusting his instincts and who’d treated people well after he made his pile. Chris believed Red’s instincts about women were as good as his hunches about oil. Yes, Thora had become rich when Red died, but where was the fault in that? When a rich man died, someone always profited. That was the way of the world. And Red Simmons wasn’t the type to demand a prenuptial agreement. He’d had a loving young wife who’d shared his life for better or worse—with quite a bit of worse in that last year—and she deserved everything he had, come hell or high water. That’s the way Red would have put it. And the more Chris reflected on what Agent Morse had said in Exam Room 4, the angrier he got.
He picked up the phone and called his front desk.
“Yes?” drawled Jane Henry, his peppery receptionist. The yes finally terminated after two long syllables—maybe two and a half.
“Jane, I had a fraternity brother in college named Darryl Foster. That’s D-A-R-R-Y-L.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“I think he’s an FBI agent now. I don’t know where. He was originally from Memphis, but the last I heard, he was working in the Chicago field office.”
“And?”
“I need you to find him for me. His phone number, I mean. My old fraternity is trying to add on to the house up at Ole Miss, and they want to hit up everybody for contributions.”
“And just how do you suggest I find this supercop?”
“Get on the Internet, I guess. You spend enough time on there playing poker and shopping eBay. The least you can do is locate one old classmate for me.”
Jane harrumphed loudly. “I’ll give it a try, I guess.”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
She hung up without a word, but Chris knew she would have the number in less than an hour.
Don’t change your routine, Agent Morse had said. Don’t do anything that might tip off your killer …
“My killer,” Chris said aloud. “This has got to be bullshit.”
He picked up his stethoscope and walked to the door, but Jane’s buzz brought him back to his desk. He grabbed his phone. “You found Foster already?”
“Not yet. Your wife’s on the phone.”
Chris felt another wave of numbness. Thora rarely called his office; she knew he was too busy to spend time on the phone. He looked down at her picture, waiting for a spark of instinct about what to do. But what he saw before him wasn’t his wife, but Special Agent Alex Morse, regarding him coolly from behind her scars.
Stupid mistakes, Morse had said. Even the best of us make them.
“Tell Thora I’m with a patient, Jane.”
“What?” asked the receptionist, clearly surprised.
“I’m way behind already. Just do it. I’ll call her back in a little while.”
“Whatever you say. You sign my checks.”
Chris started to hang up, but at the last second he said, “Find Foster’s number for me, okay? Stat.”
The playfulness went out of Jane’s voice; she knew when her boss meant business.
“You got it, Doc.”
