black Labrador retriever. Her grin revealed two missing teeth, and her eyes shone as though they couldn't possibly hold more happiness than they did in that moment. Despite her youth, Chris could see hints of the woman that Alex would become in the future.
Kilmer flipped up the picture, revealing a snapshot of Alex at what looked like her high school graduation. She was pressed between the same two men, older now and this time wearing dark suits. There were two women in the picture also, classic Mississippi wives with too much makeup and wide, genuine smiles.
'Ain't she something?' Kilmer said.
'Do you have kids, Will?'
The older man swallowed. 'We had a girl, a year behind Alex in school. We lost her on homecoming night the year Alex graduated. Drunk driver. After that…I guess Alex kind of took her place in my heart.' Kilmer closed the wallet, went back to the counter, and drank off the rest of his beer.
'I'm sorry,' Chris said.
'Part of life,' Kilmer said stoically. 'You take the good with the bad. Go on to bed, Doc. And don't worry about nothing. I got you covered.'
Chris shook the detective's hand, then walked down the hall toward his bedroom.
'Appreciate the sandwich,' Kilmer called.
Chris waved, then backed up and stepped into the home theater room. Ben's breathing hadn't changed, but he had managed to tie the bedclothes into a knot around him. Chris tried to imagine getting a call like the one Will Kilmer must have gotten on that long-ago homecoming night, but he couldn't do it. As he stared down at Ben's gentle face, he thought of the trauma the boy would suffer if it turned out that his mother was not the woman that either of them believed her to be. Praying for a miracle he no longer believed in, Chris quietly shut the door and walked down to his own bedroom.
CHAPTER 31
Eldon Tarver stood in the deep moon shadow beneath the low-hanging limbs of a water oak and watched the lights go out in the house on the hill. His motorcycle lay in the underbrush back near the highway. A backpack lay on the ground at his feet. He had spent the day at the Chickamauga Hunting Camp in Jefferson County waiting for night to fall. He had done many things during the day, but one he had not done was answer the calls of Andrew Rusk.
When he arrived last night and found a woman here, his first thought was that he had made a mistake about the house. The wife was supposed to be out of town. But when he checked the coordinates on his pocket GPS unit, they had matched his notes exactly. He had moved closer, close enough to see the woman clearly and compare her to the photos in his backpack. She did not match. However, she did match an image deep in Eldon's mind-one he had seen only briefly in the Fennell file supplied by Rusk. The woman in the house was Special Agent Alexandra Morse, the sister of Grace Fennell. Her presence there-talking to his next target-had such profound implications that he had almost panicked. But life had taught him to expect the unexpected.
He'd thought Morse would be easy prey, despite whatever training the Bureau might have given her. She was a hostage negotiator, after all, not a tactical specialist. But she had fought like a demon when he moved in for the kill. He hadn't been sure he meant to kill her until he was less than ten feet away. Killing an FBI agent was a serious matter. Institutional memory was long, and the Bureau did not forget such crimes. But the way she had played it-slipping into the driveway in an amateurish attempt to trick him-told Eldon one thing: Morse was alone. She had no backup. There or anywhere else. Yet she had taught him a painful lesson and almost exposed him.
Tonight, it seemed better that she had survived. Had Alex Morse died in that carport, a hundred FBI agents would have descended on this little corner of Mississippi. Now he had time to do what was necessary for a clean escape.
Eldon shouldered his backpack and walked slowly up the hill. As he neared the house, he veered right and moved around dense azaleas to the cluster of air conditioners that served the house. He had studied the blueprints provided by Rusk until he knew this house inside and out. He knew which air-conditioning units cooled which zones, for example, and he would soon make use of that knowledge. He continued circling the house, moving past an outdoor hot tub, then the swimming pool, then into the breezeway that led to the storeroom. There was some risk that he could be seen from the darkened windows inside, but instinct told him he was all right. Moving quickly into the storeroom, he pulled down a collapsible stairway and climbed into the attic. From here, he could reach the attic of the main house.
After squeezing his bulky shoulders through one crawl space, he entered a forest of rafters and ceiling joists. By walking carefully on the joists, he traversed the forty feet that took him to the duct he needed. Digging into the backpack, he removed a respirator gas mask and fitted it closely over his nose and mouth. Then he fitted a pair of foam-lined goggles over his eyes. After donning a pair of surgical gloves, Eldon reached into his pack and removed a heavy, oblong canister. It looked like the CO2 cylinders that kids used to charge paintball guns. He laid a heavy rubber mat over the duct to dampen vibration. Then, with a small, battery-powered hand drill, he bored a hole in the duct. After laying a thin piece of rubber over the hole, he lifted the cylinder and punched its sharp nozzle through both rubber and hole, creating a seal. Once he was certain of his setup, he drew a deep breath, then opened the valve on the cylinder.
The soft hissing that followed gave him intense satisfaction. Within two minutes, both men and the boy below would be unconscious. They would remain that way until morning, long after Eldon had left the house. The gas in the cylinder could not be purchased anywhere in the United States unless the buyer was the U.S. government. It had been provided to Dr. Tarver by Edward Biddle, an acquaintance from many years ago. Biddle had once been an army officer associated with a project Dr. Tarver had worked on. Now Biddle was an officer of a large corporation that handled critical defense contracts for the United States. The gas was an agent similar to that the Russians had used in their attempt to free the seven hundred hostages trapped by terrorists in a Moscow theater. Quite a few people had died from the gas in that instance, but most were elderly, and the dosage had not been precisely calculated. Unlike the Russians, Dr. Tarver knew exactly what he was doing.
He sat absolutely still for two minutes, then moved deeper into the attic to the folding-ladder steps over the closet of the master bedroom. So confident was he of the gas that he had not brought a firearm tonight. An unregistered weapon was the quickest path to arrest during a random traffic stop. Bracing both hands on a ceiling joist, he pushed down the spring-mounted steps with his legs. After unfolding the ladder, he carried his backpack into the closet and unpacked an aluminum thermos. Inside the thermos were two pre-loaded syringes. One contained a mixture of corticosteroids to suppress the human immune system. The other contained a solution that had taken Dr. Tarver over a year to develop. Twenty years, really, if you counted the research that had gone into it. But this specific solution had been a year in the making. It was different from those used on the other targets. And for that reason, Eldon was excited. He felt a hyperalertness that even the knowledge that this would be his last operation could not diminish. For there could be no doubt of that. Either Rusk had been lying to him, or Rusk was a fool. Either way, the connection had to be severed. But there were things Eldon had to do first. Some would be unpleasant, but not this. This was something he had waited for, for a very long time.
He walked into the master bedroom without even trying to be quiet. Dr. Shepard lay on his side in the bed, his mouth open wider than appeared normal, but this was common after the gas. Dr. Tarver took a mental snapshot of the bed to make sure he would leave everything exactly as he found it. Then he set the syringes on a dresser, pulled the covers off Shepard, and rolled the internist onto his stomach.
Dr. Tarver took a small LED flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, then got the steroid injection from the dresser. Kneeling between Shepard's thighs, he pulled down his boxer shorts and pushed one cheek aside, exposing the anus. Holding the light between his teeth, he opened the doctor's anus enough to insert the needle, then injected the steroids an inch inside the rectum. Dr. Shepard hardly stirred. Eldon repeated the procedure with the other solution, but at the last instant Shepard's lower body flinched in an involuntary muscle spasm. Eldon found his needle embedded at the entrance to the rectum. A bad mistake, but now that the hole had been made, there wasn't much point in removing it to find a site deeper in.
He hesitated before depressing the plunger. Several times today he'd thought of extending his experiment. He'd known the boy would be in the house, and since his research was likely to be cut short, the boy offered a
