True Evil

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.

Then it hit him: My truck!

He ran out to the garage and held the wand of the Geiger counter over the driver's seat of his pickup. All he heard was a steady hum. He wanted to rip open the seat anyway, but he knew that was pointless. If there was enough radiation to give him cancer in that seat, the Geiger counter would have detected it.

He started to switch off the machine, but an almost paralyzing terror stopped him. Nancy had only shot an X-ray of his trunk. What if the radiation source had been placed elsewhere? Near a marrow reservoir in his femur, say? Or what if it was moving through his body? Standing in his garage, Chris stripped naked, then held the wand at his feet and began moving up along each leg. What would he do if the machine started clicking? Probably cut out the offending pellet with the Buck knife, unless he could somehow muster the patience to drive back to the office and have Tom cut it out using local anesthetic. Despite the normal X-ray, he felt himself tense when he came to his genitals and rectum…. No click.

Almost unwilling to believe the silence, he kept moving north until he reached his scalp. Then he switched off the machine.

He felt like puking. Some childish part of him wanted to believe that it was all bullshit, that Alex Morse was as crazy as a road lizard. But Tom had found something. And Chris had seen Shane Lansing screwing Thora on that balcony. And Lansing was part owner of a radiation oncology center. And then there were the headaches: three out of three people on the same day. That couldn't be coincidence. There was no escaping the truth: Grace Fennell's killer had struck again last night.

His victim was Chris Shepard.

CHAPTER 36

Neville Byrd lay on the bed in his hotel room and stared openmouthed at the screen of his notebook computer. He was masturbating. Thanks to the scope he'd mounted on the Marriott's roof, he could watch Andrew Rusk's secretary lying spread-eagled on Rusk's desk, while the lawyer pounded her for all he was worth. This was light-years better than the pay-per-view porn flickering on his TV screen. This was real. And he was getting it all on videotape. He made a mental note to dub himself a copy for later whack use before he gave the original to Dr. Traver.

The secretary got off the desk, turned her back to Rusk, and leaned over the wood. Rusk took hold of her hips, went into her, and continued his attack. The guy must be angry at her, Neville thought, the way he was hammering her. Relentless, man. Neville had never fucked like that, personally. He wasn't sure he could. Rusk was one of those guys who worked out all the time, went surfing, mountain climbing, the works. Maybe all that shit paid off during sex. Because this was marathon stuff. Forty-five minutes without a break, not even a pause for water.

Then suddenly it was over. Rusk pulled out of her and walked out of the frame, leaving the secretary to mop herself up with Kleenex from the desk. Neville yanked for all he was worth and brought himself to a screaming climax before she could vanish, too.

Sure enough, the secretary soon limped out of the frame. Rusk reappeared, fully dressed again. He sat at his keyboard and checked his watch. Then he lifted his right hand and started working his mouse. A few clicks, and then he typed several strokes on his keyboard.

Neville checked his other computer, the one giving the readout from the laser rig. Then he began to laugh. Rusk had typed in pi to the ninth decimal place, a password Neville could appreciate. He recorded a few more seconds, then rewound the image and zoomed in on Rusk's monitor. He saw what looked like a black hole-or the event horizon surrounding one. Then this image was replaced by the gateway of a Web site he had seen yesterday: EX NIHILO.

'Boo-ya!' Neville shouted. He had pegged EX NIHILO yesterday, but he'd needed another day to confirm his suspicion. Now Andrew Rusk was entering a deeper level of the site, and typing another password to confirm his identity. This was the key to the mechanism that Rusk had created to protect himself. Neville was tempted to log into EX NIHILO himself and do a little scoping, but Traver had told him not to waste a moment. As he dialed the number the vet had given him, he was tempted to press for a higher fee. After all, he was holding the cards now. What did he have to lose? Traver was just a gray-bearded old veterinarian. But then again…he had known about the laser and the scope. Your average puppy doctor didn't know that kind of shit. Such knowledge pointed to something else. Something in the intelligence line, or even the military.

Nah, Neville thought. I'll take my money and boogie. After all, he's already paying double rates.