True Evil (31 page)

The van's headlights refracted off a thousand leaves as branches stretched, then snapped back into position with a scream along the van's sides. He had always viewed the van as disposable. He had another exactly like it, except for the color, safely garaged at his primate lab in Jackson. Suddenly the twin beams shot out into unobstructed space, a pure blackness that changed to dark blue when he extinguished his lights.

As he stared into the night sky, tiny red lights on the massive towers that held telephone cables suspended across the river announced themselves. Lower down—much lower and to his right, about a mile distant—he saw the lights of a barge churning toward him. If he stayed where he was, it would soon pass him.

He shut off his engine, climbed out of the van, and walked slowly forward, his eyes never leaving the sandy earth beneath his feet. He had a sense that he was above the river, but how far above he could not tell. An armadillo bolted from beneath his feet. He watched the moonlight on its armored back until the creature vanished into waist-high grass. Starting forward again, only ten steps carried him to a cliff.

Twenty feet below swirled the dark waters of the Mississippi River. He pulled off his blood-soaked shirt and tossed it into the current. The woman had stabbed him well and truly in the throat, but with a blunt weapon. Probably a key. Had she used a knife, he would already be dead. As it was, his beard was matted with blood.

He jogged back to the van, opened its rear doors, and mounted the aluminum ramp he used to unload the motorcycle. With all the caution due the darkness, he rolled the Honda to the ground and set its kickstand, then unloaded a small Igloo ice chest and duffel bag from behind the passenger seat. Apart from these three things, the van was empty. He had driven all the way from Jackson with work gloves on his hands, a Ziploc bag over his beard, and a plastic shower cap over his scalp.

He kick-started the Honda to be sure he would not be stranded, then climbed into the van, put it into low gear, and drove slowly toward the cliff's edge. Fifteen feet from the precipice, he leaped from the open door and rolled paratrooper-style on the sandy ground. He heard a splash like a breaching whale crashing into the sea. Running to the cliff's edge, he stared down at the absurd spectacle of a Chevy van floating like a royal barge down the Mississippi River. The van's nose collided with a little spit of land, which started the vehicle spinning in slow circles as it sank, drifting southward toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Had not the circumstances been so dire, Eldon would have laughed. But laughter would have to wait. A thousand troubling thoughts fought for supremacy in his mind. He would allow none free rein until he reached a place of sanctuary. Part of him wanted to remain in Natchez, to finish the work he'd started. But in that matter, time was on his side. He had more important problems to deal with. Andrew Rusk, for example.

Rusk had lied to him. Eldon couldn't be sure about the extent of Rusk's deception, but he was certain of the lie. This angered him more than almost anything Rusk could have done. Eldon shut out the images of revenge welling up inside and focused on survival. He had always known a day like this would come. Now that it had, he was ready. Sanctuary was less than forty miles away. There he could rest, regroup, and plan his response. He strapped the Igloo and the duffel bag to the Honda. All he needed to reach that sanctuary was a cool head and steady nerves. As he climbed onto the bike and kicked it into gear, a rush of confidence flooded through him.

He was already there.

CHAPTER 26

Chris pulled his pickup into the doctor's section of the St. Catherine's Hospital lot and parked. Before going inside, he ran a cable lock through the pitching machine and generator he carried for Ben's baseball practices. There had been a time in Natchez when he would not have had to take such measures, but that time was gone.

He made his rounds as conscientiously as he could, but the events of last night would not leave him. After saying good-bye to his last patient on the medicine floor, he took the stairs down to the first floor, heading for the ICU. There he met Michael Kaufman, Thora's obgyn, coming up. Two days ago, Chris had sent some of Thora's blood to Kaufman for analysis, to check for hormone imbalances that might be affecting her fertility.

"I'm glad I ran into you," Mike said, pausing on the stairs. "I found something strange in Thora's sample."

"Really? What?"

"A high level of progesterone."

"What?"

Kaufman nodded. "She's still trying to get pregnant, right?"

"Of course. What kind of level are we talking about? Contraceptive level?"

"More. Like morning-after pill."

Chris felt blood rising into his cheeks. Mike Kaufman had probably just committed an ethical breach, and he seemed to be realizing it himself. More than this, they had both become aware that Chris's wife was not being honest with him about a very important matter. Kaufman gave him an embarrassed nod, then continued up the stairs.

Chris walked slowly down toward the intensive care unit, hardly aware of his surroundings. The implications of Kaufman's revelation did not bear thinking about. Was it possible that Thora's whole seduction of him in the studio—her talk about trying to get pregnant—had been a charade? A cold-blooded act designed to cover up an affair, and God knew what else? When Chris saw the big doors of the ICU before him, they seemed to offer escape from the burgeoning hell in his mind.

The cooler air, the hum and beeping of machinery, and the soft voices of nurses gave him a momentary respite from himself. Here he had no choice but to concentrate on work. He had a resistant bilateral pneumonia in the unit that had failed to respond to two powerful antibiotics: a teenager from St. Stephen's. Last night, during evening rounds, Chris had ordered a vancomycin drip. If the boy's condition had not improved, he intended to punt the case up to Jackson, to an infectious-disease specialist he knew at UMC. When he looked toward the glass-walled cubicles, the first thing he saw was Tom Cage coming out of one of the rooms.

"Tom! I didn't know you had anybody in the unit."

"I don't," Dr. Cage replied, writing on a chart. "I was seeing the patient Don Allen consulted me about. I wanted to take a more detailed history than the one I found in his record."

"You learn anything interesting?"

"I'm not sure. Something is telling me that this guy might have generalized scleroderma, even though the lab tests don't show it. You often see almost no external signs in men, and this guy's blood pressure is truly malignant. Nothing will hold it in check."

"If it is internal scleroderma, what can you do about the hypertension?"

When the white-haired physician's eyes rose from the chart, Chris saw a look that Dr. Cage would never show a patient: helplessness mingled with frustration, rage, and resignation. Chris nodded sadly.

"Oh, I looked in on your pneumonia," Tom said. "His white count dropped significantly during the night."

"I'll be damned!" Chris said excitedly. "I was really starting to worry. The kid's only seventeen."

Tom sighed in commiseration. "I'm seeing more and more of these atypical pneumonias, particularly in young adults."

"Are you done with your rounds?"

"Yeah, I'm headed over to the clinic."

"I'm right behind you."

Chris walked into his patient's cubicle, but he didn't need to see the chart to notice the change. There was a brightness in the boy's eyes that had not been there for at least a week, and his flesh had already lost its deathlike pallor. When Chris listened to his chest with a stethoscope, he heard marked improvement, especially in the left lung. Chris was laughing at a joke the boy had made about nurses and bedpans when he caught sight of Shane Lansing writing in a chart at the nurses' counter outside. Lansing was looking at the chart as he wrote, but Chris had a strong feeling that the surgeon had been staring at him until the instant he looked up.

Mike Kaufman's words replayed in his mind:
More…like morning-after pill.

Was Lansing thinking about a patient? Or was he thinking about Thora? Chris felt some relief at finding the surgeon in Natchez this early in the morning. Greenwood was over four hours away, and it was damned unlikely that Lansing would commute eight hours every day to screw Thora at the Alluvian Hotel. He would have to have left her at 4 a.m. to be here now. Still, Chris felt an irrational urge to walk out to the nurses' station and punch the surgeon's lights out. He told his patient he'd be back to check his progress after lunch, then updated the chart and walked out to the counter.

"Morning, Chris," said Lansing. "You think any more about that golf game?"

"I can't do it this afternoon." Chris searched Lansing's eyes for signs of fatigue. "But maybe I can get away tomorrow."

"Just give me a call. Or leave a message with my service."

"You can get away in the afternoons?"

"Yeah, it's my mornings that suck."

"That's why you make the big bucks."

Lansing didn't reply.

Chris watched the handsome surgeon scan another chart, then turned on his heel and walked out of the ICU.

As he trudged aimlessly down the hall, he almost walked into Jay Mercier, Natchez's sole hematologist. Like the other small-town specialists who found themselves treating everything from poison ivy to gout, Mercier served as a general-purpose oncologist, diagnosing almost every neoplasm in the county, then either treating them himself or acting as the contact person for specialized care in large metropolitan centers. He was one of the busiest doctors in town, yet Chris had always found him generous with his time, especially with consultations. Chris thought of pulling him aside and asking about the possibility of intentionally inducing cancer in human beings, but if he did, Mercier was certain to pepper him with questions about such an off-the-wall scenario.

"Morning, Chris," Mercier said with a smile. "How's that resistant pneumonia coming?"

"I think the vancomycin's going to do the trick."

"Good. That kid was looking shaky."

They had slowed enough to stop for a fuller conversation, but Chris forced himself to continue down the corridor. Once he rounded the corner, the exit was only a short walk away, but without quite knowing why, he stopped and leaned against the wall like a man taking a smoke break. Less than a minute later, he had his answer. When Shane Lansing rounded the corner, Chris stepped directly in front of him, blocking his path.

The surgeon looked surprised, but not afraid. "You reconsider that golf game?"

Chris looked hard into Lansing's eyes. "Are you fucking my wife, Shane?"

Lansing blinked, but he betrayed no deep emotion. "Hell, no. What are you talking about?"

Chris stared without speaking for a few moments. "I think you're lying."

Lansing's eyes narrowed. He started to speak, then he closed his mouth and tried to sidestep Chris.

Chris caught him by the arm and slammed him against the wall. "Don't walk away from me, you son of a bitch."

Lansing looked stunned, probably more by the directness of the confrontation than the physical attack. "You've lost your fucking mind, Shepard!"

"I'll bet you've been through a lot of these scenes, haven't you? A ladies' man like you? Well, guess what? This time you're not going to skate. If this were junior high school, I'd just whip your ass and let it go. But there's a kid at stake in this. And I know enough about you to know you don't really give a shit about Thora. Oh, you like fucking her, I'm sure. You like knowing she wants you. But the whole package doesn't interest you, does it?"

Lansing's eyes continued to betray nothing. But then, in the crackling silence, Chris saw a chink in his armor. It was smugness. Lansing could not conceal the superiority he felt—a secret superiority undoubtedly based on his intimate knowledge of Chris's wife—her body, her emotions, her intentions. And then a far more frightening scenario entered Chris's mind.

"Or
does
it?" he said. "It's the
money.
You always did love money. And Thora's got enough to make your mouth water, doesn't she?"

Lansing had abandoned all pretense at innocence—or so it seemed to Chris. He was saying something, but Chris didn't hear. His reptilian brain was reacting to the fist he felt rising from the surgeon's waist. Chris was no boxer, but he had wrestled for three years during high school. He threw himself backward with the momentum of Lansing's punch, then grabbed the extended wrist and hurled the surgeon bodily over him, smacking him to the floor.

Lansing's breath exploded from his lungs. Chris flipped him onto his stomach, shoved a knee into his back, and wrenched one arm behind his back. As Lansing yelped in pain, two nurses rounded the corner and stopped, gaping.

"Move on!" Chris shouted. "Leave!"

They scurried down the hall, but never took their eyes off the scene.

Chris put his mouth against Lansing's ear. "A friend of mine almost got killed last night. You may know that, or you may not. But remember this: you're not the only one involved here. There's Ben, your kids, your wife, Thora, and there's me. Most of those people can't defend themselves. But
I can.
" He twisted Lansing's right arm until the surgeon screamed. "You do something to hurt Ben, and it'll be a year before you operate on anybody again. Do you hear me, Shane?"

Lansing grunted.

"I thought so. Now, if you're innocent, you just call the police and press charges against me. I'll be waiting at my office."

Chris heard a buzz of voices approaching from around the corner. He got to his feet and walked through the glass exit doors, then trotted to his pickup. As he drove out of the parking lot, he saw the hospital administrator standing outside the door, staring after him.

When Chris reached the clinic, he told Holly not to disturb him, then walked into his private office, buzzed the front desk, and asked Jane to get Dr. Peter Connolly of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on the telephone.