True Evil (41 page)

"Will has been checking into Shane Lansing's business affairs. You know Lansing has his hand in a lot of stuff, right?"

"Yeah. Truck stops with gambling, restaurants, nursing homes, all kinds of shit."

"Well, it seems he's also part owner of a radiation oncology clinic in Meridian, Mississippi. The Humanity Cancer Care Center."

Chris felt as though his core temperature had dropped ten degrees. "Are you kidding?"

"No. Will just found this out."

"But that means Lansing has access to—"

"I know. Cesium pellets, liquid iodine, radiation-treatment machinery—everything."

"But…you told me these crimes go back like five years. Right?"

"Yes."

"Then how could Lansing be a part of it? I mean, if Thora just went to see Andrew Rusk a couple of weeks ago, how could Rusk possibly have found Lansing and hired him to kill me in that time? The time frame doesn't make sense."

"Thora's an atypical client for Rusk," said Alex. "There've only been two other female clients that I know about—"

"Wait," Chris cut in.
"Red Simmons."

"Exactly. Thora may have used Andrew Rusk three years ago, to have Red Simmons killed. If so, she first contacted Rusk at
least
three years ago, and possibly as long as seven. She could have even met Shane Lansing through Rusk."

"But Red didn't die of cancer."

"Neither did my sister."

Chris's thoughts were tumbling over themselves, but beneath the rational level of his mind something else was happening. Fear and anger were melding into a kind of dark desperation whose only outlet could be action. "What time did you say this friend of yours would be in Jackson?"

"As soon as he can get there," said Alex, relief suffusing her voice. "If you leave within the hour, you'll probably get there the same time Kaiser does."

"Good."

"You're coming?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Thank you, Chris."

"Don't thank me. This is survival now."

Alex started to say something, but he hung up and put the phone in his desk drawer. After closing his e-mail account, he walked down to Tom's end of the clinic. Tom's chief nurse, Melba Price, was standing outside the door to Exam Room 7. Melba was quick to read nonverbal clues in patients and colleagues alike. This skill had made her Tom's right hand for more than twenty years.

"I need to see him, Melba," Chris said. "As soon as possible."

"He's just finishing up." She gave Chris a sidelong glance. "I heard about you and Dr. Lansing."

Chris grimaced.

"None of my business," Melba went on, "but a lot of people's been wanting to do what you did for a long time."

Tom Cage's good-humored baritone reverberated through the heavy wooden door. Chris heard the squeak of a chair, a booming farewell, and then Tom stepped into the hall, surprise on his face. "Hey, slugger," he said. "What's up?"

"I need to talk to you."

"Let's go in my office."

Chris shook his head. "Do you have an exam room open?"

Tom looked at Melba.

"Number five," she said.

Chris led the way. After Tom closed the door, he looked at his young partner with paternal concern. "What's going on, Chris? I didn't mean to tease you about Lansing. He's just such an unmitigated prick."

Chris looked back at his mentor, realizing perhaps for the first time how much older Tom Cage really was. Tom had started practicing medicine in 1958. He'd grown up in an era when antibiotics did not exist, yet he'd lived to practice in the era of the PET scan and gene therapy.

"I need you to do me a favor, Tom. No questions asked."

The older man nodded soberly. "Name it."

"I want you to examine me. My whole body."

"What am I looking for? Are you having symptoms?"

Tom was thinking what Chris would be thinking in the same situation. Most doctors at some time in their life suspect that they're dying of a terminal illness. They know too much, see too much, and even the slightest symptom can bring on fears of fatal disease.

"I've got a severe headache," Chris said, "but that's not really the problem. I have reason to suspect…something. I want you to go over every inch of my body with a light. Even a magnifying glass, if you need it."

"What am I looking for?"

"Anything abnormal. A needle mark, a bruise, a lesion, a small incision. I want you to start inside my mouth."

Tom stared at him for a long time. Chris could almost see the questions turning inside his mind. But in the end Tom only said, "You'd better strip and get on the table."

While Chris removed his clothes, Tom donned a leather headpiece with a light mounted on it. Chris climbed onto the examining table and lay on his back.

"My eyes aren't what they used to be," said Tom. "But I found a melanoma yesterday, so tiny you wouldn't believe it. Start in your mouth, you say?"

Chris opened wide.

Tom took a tongue depressor from a jar and used it to expose Chris's gums and mucosa. Then he took a small mirror from a drawer and, cursing quietly, began to check Chris's mouth.

"Goddamn it," Tom muttered. "This is like spelunking."

Chris made a guttural sound of acknowledgment.

"Looks clear to me." Tom withdrew the tongue depressor. "Remember to floss after every meal."

Chris was in no mood for levity, but Tom gave him a wry look anyway.

"Okay, what now?"

"Look under my hair," Chris said, flashing back to Gregory Peck in
The Omen.

As Tom carefully worked his way across Chris's scalp, he said, "I don't see anything but incipient male-pattern baldness."

"Good. Now my skin. Every inch of it."

Tom started at Chris's neck and moved down his trunk. "I'm glad you're not a hairy bastard," he said, moving the light across Chris's sternum. "Okay…getting to the family jewels now."

"Every crack and crevice." Chris felt Tom's gloved hands lift his testicles, then check his penis. "The hole, too."

"Jesus."

Tom checked him there, then moved back to his shoulders. He checked both underarms, then the extremities.

"Between my toes, too."

"This reminds me of my internship," Tom said. "I worked several months in the Orleans Parish Prison. The cops used to have me check between suspects' toes for needle marks."

"Same deal," Chris said, turning onto his stomach.

"Let's get the worst over first," Tom said, and Chris felt cold hands pulling his cheeks apart. He expected Tom to release them immediately, but he didn't.

"What do you see?"

"I'm not sure," Tom murmured. "Looks like maybe an injection site."

Chris's breath died in his throat. "Are you serious?"

"Afraid so. Looks like somebody stuck in a needle and you tried to jerk away. Like a scared toddler, you know? There's definite bruising."

"Outside the anus or in?"

"Right at the opening. This is weird, Chris. Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

Chris got off the table and pulled on his pants. "We need to check Ben, too."

Tom's eyes went wide.
"What?"

"I'm dead serious. He's in the front office now. Ben has the same headache I do. I'll tell him we're checking for pinworms."

Tom stared at Chris as though worried he might be drunk.

"I'm not crazy, Tom. I wish I was. Will you stay in here with me while I check Ben?"

I'm sure as hell not leaving you alone with him,
said Tom's eyes.

Chris skidded into the driveway at the Elgin house, his heart pounding with anger and fear. On the passenger seat beside him was a wooden case he'd borrowed from the radiologist at St. Catherine's Hospital. The image of Ben lying on his back on the exam table haunted him even more than the video of Thora on the hotel balcony.
What are you looking for?
Ben had asked. Chris had lied, and Tom had lied to cover for him. But there was no banishing the look of disapproval on the older physician's face. Tom Cage suspected something seriously irregular, and in the same situation Chris probably would have, too. He would have to rely on the goodwill he had built up over nine months of practicing with Tom to carry the day.

After checking Ben for marks and not finding them, Chris had put the boy back in his receptionist's care and shut himself in his office. He had no idea what might have been injected into him, but the thing that kept coming back to him was Alex's revelation that Shane Lansing had access to radioactive materials. Added to this was Pete Connolly's assertion that radiation would be the easiest method of intentionally causing cancer in a human being. Given those two facts, what did the needle mark near his rectum mean? Had a radioactive liquid been injected into him? Or could pellets small enough to pass through a needle have been shot into his bloodstream? He tried to recall what Connolly had said about irradiated thallium being used to assassinate someone, but it was difficult to concentrate with fear ballooning in his chest.

Forcing himself under control, Chris walked down the hall to the X-ray room and asked Nancy Somers, their tech, to shoot an X-ray of his midsection. Nancy looked nonplussed by this request, but she wasn't about to refuse her employer. Chris grabbed a paper gown, stripped beside the big machine, then donned the oversize napkin and climbed onto the cold table. Nancy adjusted the voltage, then shot the picture. Two minutes later, Chris was jamming the X-ray into the clip of the light-box in the viewing room.

"What are you looking for?" Tom asked from behind him.

"Overexposure."

Chris could hardly speak as he scanned the X-ray. He was terrified of seeing black spots caused by radioactive emissions overexposing the film. Yet though he squinted at every inch of the film, he saw nothing abnormal.

"Looks fine to me," Tom said. "Does this have to do with the needle mark?"

Chris nodded. Then he felt Tom's hand on his shoulder.

"What's going on, son? Talk to me."

There was no hiding it anymore. Chris turned to his partner and said, "Somebody's trying to kill me, Tom."

After a shocked silence, Tom said, "Who?"

"Thora."

The older man's eyes narrowed. "Can you substantiate that?"

"No. But I'm working with an FBI agent to prove it."

Tom nodded slowly. "Is Shane Lansing tied up in this somehow?"

"I believe so. Did you know that he owns part of a radiation oncology center in Meridian?"

As Tom shook his head, Chris saw the old doc's mind working quickly behind his wise eyes. It wouldn't take him long to connect the dots.

"Sounds to me like you need some time off," Tom said.

Chris gratefully shook Tom's hand, then collected Ben and a few other things and left the office. His headache was still going strong, but Ben's had started to subside. The boy wanted to stay with his dad, of course, but Chris insisted on dropping him at Mrs. Johnson's house. The widow had cared for Ben since before Thora married Chris, and she loved him like her own. She promised to keep Ben overnight if necessary; all Chris had to do was call. He left a bottle of Advil and a stronger analgesic with her just in case Ben's headache returned.

Now that he'd arrived at the Elgin house, he charged inside with the wooden case he'd borrowed from the hospital. Cutting into the laundry room, he opened his toolbox and took out a razor-sharp Buck knife. With the knife and a pair of pliers in one hand, and the case in the other, he ran back to the master bedroom.

First he tore the bedclothes off the king-size bed, exposing the pillow-top mattress beneath. With his eyes only six inches from the cover, he examined the entire surface of the mattress, focusing on his side of the bed. He saw no sign of tampering, but that meant nothing. Kneeling beside the bed, he opened the wooden case he'd brought from St. Catherine's. Inside was a Geiger counter borrowed from the radiology department at the hospital. The radiologist had told him that, aside from checking for "spills" after certain procedures, the counter was supposed to double for civil defense use after a nuclear attack.

Chris switched on the counter, dreading the click-click-click that would herald the presence of radioactivity, but the machine only emitted a faint hum. The Geiger counter had a carrying handle and a wand attached to it by a flexible cable. Chris moved the wand over the entire surface of the bed, but he heard no clicks.

Setting the counter aside, he stabbed the Buck knife into the mattress at the spot where his head would normally lie and ripped it open from head to foot. Using the teeth of the pliers, he tore through dense foam padding, throwing chunks of it around the bedroom, but again he found nothing.

Sweating and exasperated, he stared around the room.
Where would they put it?
he wondered.
Where would I get sufficient exposure?
He picked up the Geiger counter and ran down the hall to the den, to the easy chair where Will Kilmer had spent the night in beer-induced slumber. The Buck knife made short work of the chair seat, but when Chris passed the wand over the wreckage that remained, he heard nothing. He realized then that he had almost been hoping for the telltale click.

Why?
he asked himself.
Because nothing is worse than not knowing.

That was his problem. He had no idea what the needle mark meant. Had someone injected something merely to sedate him while they violated him in some other way? That might be the answer, given that Ben and Kilmer both had headaches, too. Yet Chris had found no needle mark on Ben. Had Ben's injection site simply been more successfully concealed? Or had they all been sedated in some other way, while only Chris was attacked through hypodermic injection? He had no way to know. Not without sophisticated medical testing.

The only poison he was likely to discover on his own was radiation. And Lansing's tie to the radiation clinic in Meridian increased the odds that radiation was the method of attack. Chris stared around the kitchen, his mind spinning.
Could it be in the shower?
Sometimes he sat for half an hour on the shower seat, relaxing under a near-scalding stream of water, but…No, they would have had to dig out a tile to plant a pellet there.