True Evil

does to a guy like me.'

'I ain't as young as I used to be,' Barnett said softly.

'That's true.' Rusk smiled. 'Time works on us all.' He rolled his chair back behind his desk.

Barnett was watching him like a man who had thought he was sharing space with a dog, then discovered that his roommate was a wolf.

'You take it easy now,' Rusk said. 'Don't let her get you down.'

'The Jackson Racquet Club?' Barnett murmured.

'What's that?' Rusk said. 'I didn't hear you.'

Barnett's eyes flickered with comprehension. 'Nothing. I was just mumbling.'

'That's what I thought.'

The oilman looked at Rusk a moment longer, then turned to go. When he reached the door, Rusk called after him, 'Carson?'

When Barnett turned back, he looked exhausted.

'I don't think you ought to share this with your future bride.' And then, in the truest moment of their meeting, Rusk added, 'You never know how things will go down the road.'

Barnett's eyes widened, then he hurried out of the office.

CHAPTER 21

Chris pedaled past the Little Theater, then turned his Trek onto Maple Street and pumped hard up the long slope toward the Natchez Cemetery. Soon he would break out onto the bluff, with miles of open space to his left and the pristine cemetery on his right.

Chris had prescribed a lot of antidepressants in his career, but he had never experienced depression. He'd read deeply on the subject and asked the most penetrating questions he could to patients, but until today he'd had no true inkling of the condition those patients had described to him. Plath's metaphor of a bell jar seemed strikingly apt: he felt as though all the air had been sucked out of his life, that he was moving in a vacuum, and that his actions, whatever he might choose to do, would have no meaning or positive consequence in the world.

Tom Cage, as perceptive as ever, had noticed Chris's dazed mental state and told him to take the afternoon off. Since Thora had left for the Delta before daybreak (despite having promised to take Ben to school), his only remaining obligation-barring evening rounds-was to deliver Ben to the birthday party at the bowling alley at 4 p.m. And even that could be handled by Mrs. Johnson with a single phone call.

After leaving the office, Chris had driven home, suited up, and without really intending it had begun a ride from Elgin to the Mississippi River. He'd covered fifteen miles in thirty-six minutes-a record time for him-yet he felt neither tired nor elated. He felt like a machine endowed with the capacity for thought. Yet he did not want to think. With a rogue wind blowing out of the west, he wanted only to crest the hill and hit the breeze shooting up the face of the two-hundred-foot bluff that lined the Mississippi River.

Ten seconds after he hit Cemetery Road, the vast river valley opened up on his left. He knew then that he would not sidetrack and ride the cemetery, as was his habit, but rather continue past the shotgun shacks that lined the road beyond the cemetery and ride on to the Devil's Punchbowl, the deep defile where notorious outlaws had dumped the bodies of their victims in past centuries. He was staring so intently over the endless miles of Louisiana cotton fields on his left that he almost slammed into a car that had turned broadside across the road.

Chris braked so hard that he nearly went over the handlebars. He was about to start screaming at the driver when she jumped out and started screaming at him. He stood with his mouth hanging open.

The driver was Alex Morse.

She looked as though she hadn't slept for days. Her voice was shockingly hoarse, her eyes ringed with black, and for the first time since he'd met her, she appeared to be out of control.

'Why haven't you been answering my calls?' she shouted.

'I don't know.'

'You don't know?'

'Because I already know what you're going to say.'

'You don't know what I'm going to say, goddamn it! Something terrible has happened! Something I couldn't have predicted in a million years.'

Chris pedaled up to her open door. 'What?'

'One of the husbands that murdered his wife tried to commit suicide last night.'

This took Chris aback. 'Tried how?'

'Insulin overdose.'

'He's still alive?'

Morse nodded.

'In a coma, right?'

'How did you know?'

'I saw that a lot during my residency. People try insulin because it offers hope of a painless death. More times than not they wind up in a permanent vegetative state. Was he diabetic?'

'Yes. Two injections per day.'

Chris looked toward the river. 'Could have been an accidental overdose.'

'I don't think so. But then I don't think it was suicide either.'

He said nothing.

Morse took a couple of steps toward him, her eyes boring into his. 'What's wrong with you?'

'Nothing,' Chris replied.

'Why aren't you at work?'

'Didn't feel like working. Why don't you think it was suicide?'

She studied him as though unsure whether to drop the issue of his mental state. 'The guy's name is William Braid. He's from Vicksburg. His wife suffered terribly before she died. If I'm right, and Braid paid for her murder, then we have two possibilities. One, Braid was so consumed by guilt that he couldn't stand to live with himself one more day. Some local gossip supports that scenario. But a couple of his close friends say Braid's ego was so big that he could never kill himself.'

'Go on.'

'It could also be that whoever Braid hired to murder his wife-Andrew Rusk, for example-decided that an unstable, guilt-ridden client was an intolerable liability. Especially now, with me poking around.' Morse looked up and down Cemetery Road. 'How hard would it be to put Braid into a permanent insulin coma?'

'Child's play compared to giving someone cancer. Think of the Klaus von Bulow case. Same thing.'

Morse's eyes flashed. 'You're right. Only in this case, there's no family to get pissed off. So by putting Braid into a coma rather than killing him, the attacker greatly reduced the amount of police scrutiny on the case.'

An ancient pickup rumbled by, spewing blue-black exhaust from its tailpipe.

'You look terrible,' Chris said. 'Why haven't you slept?'

'I drove to Jackson last night. To see my mother. They had to put her into UMC again last night. Her liver's going. Kidneys, too.'

'I'm sorry.'

'She's close to the end this time. Tons of edema…she's heavily sedated now.'

Chris nodded. He'd seen it many times.

'It's weird,' Morse said. 'Put me on a plane, and I can sleep from wheels-up to the arrival gate. But hospitals…I can't do it.'

She seem to expect him to make conversation, but Chris didn't know what to say.

'I did sleep in my car for a couple of hours,' she added.

'Sounds risky.'

'Not really. I was in the parking lot of your office. I was still asleep when you left.'