Five Weeks Later
Dr. Chris Shepard lifted a manila folder from the file caddy on the door of Exam Room 4 and quickly perused it.
He didn't recognize the patient's name, and that was unusual. Chris had a large practice, but it was a small town, and that was the way he liked it.
This patient's name was Alexandra Morse, and her file held only a medical history, the long form that all new patients filled out on their first visit.
Chris looked down the corridor and saw Holly, his nurse, crossing from her station to the X-ray room. He called out and waved her up the hall. Holly said something through the door to X-ray, then hurried toward him.
"Aren't you coming in with me?" he asked softly.
"It's a female patient."
Holly shook her head.
"She asked to speak to you alone."
"New patient?"
"Yes. I meant to say something before now, but we got so busy with Mr. Seward—" Chris nodded at the door and lowered his voice to a whisper.
"What's her story?"
Holly shrugged.
"Beats me. Name's Alex. Thirty years old and in great shape, except for the scars on her face."
"Scars?"
"Right side. Cheek, ear, and orbit. Head through a window is my guess."
"There's nothing about a car accident in her history."
"Couple of months ago, by the color of the scars."
Chris moved away from the door, and Holly followed.
"She didn't give you any complaint?"
The nurse shook her head.
"No. And you know I asked."
"Oh, boy."
Holly nodded knowingly.
A woman coming in alone and refusing to specify her complaint usually meant the problem was sexual—most often fear of a sexually transmitted disease. Natchez, Mississippi, was a small town, and its nurses gossiped as much as its other citizens. Truth be told, Chris thought,most doctors here are worse gossips than their nurses.
"Her chart says Charlotte, North Carolina," he noted.
"Did Ms. Morse tell you what she's doing in Natchez?"
"She told me exactly nothing," Holly said with a bit of pique.
"Do you want me to shoot that flat-and-error series on Mr. Seward before he vomits on the table?"
"Sorry. Go to it."
Holly winked and whispered, "Have fun with Ms. Scarface."
Chris shook his head, then summoned a serious expression and walked into the examining room.
A woman wearing a navy skirt and a cream-colored top stood beside the examining table. Her face almost caused him to stare, but he'd seen a lot of trauma during his medical training.
This woman's scars weren't actually too bad. It was her youth and attractiveness that made them stand out so vividly.
Almost fiercely, Chris thought. You figured a woman who looked and dressed this way would have had plastic surgery to take care of an injury like that.
Not that she was a knockout or anything; she wasn't. It was just—
"Hello, Dr. Shepard," the woman said in a direct tone.
"Ms. Morse?" he said, remembering that the history said she was single.
She gave him a smile of acknowledgement but said nothing else.
"What can I do for you today?" he asked.
The woman remained silent, but he could feel her eyes probing him as deeply as a verbal question.
What's going on here? Chris wondered.
Is it my birthday or something?
Did the staff plan some kind of trick?
Or does she want drugs?
He'd had that happen before: some female patients offered sex for drugs, usually narcotics. Chris studied the woman's face, trying to divine her real purpose.
She had dark hair, green eyes, and an oval face not much different from those of the dozens of women he saw each day.
A little better bone structure, maybe, especially the cheekbones.
But the real difference was the scars—and a shock of gray hair above them that didn't look added by a colorist. Except for those things, Alex Morse might be any woman at the local health club. And yet…despite her usualness, if that was a word, there was something about her that Chris couldn't quite nail down, something that set her apart from other women. Something in the way she stood, maybe.
Laying the chart on the counter behind him, he said, "Maybe you should just tell me what the problem is. I promise, however frightening it might seem now, I've seen or heard it many times in this office, and together we can do something about it. People usually feel better once they verbalize these things."
"You've never heard what I'm about to tell you," Alex Morse said with utter certainty. "I promise you that, Doctor."
The conviction in her voice unsettled him, but he didn't have time for games. He looked pointedly at his watch. "Ms. Morse, if I'm going to help you at all, I have to know the nature of your problem."
"It's not my problem," the woman said finally. "It's yours."
As Chris frowned in confusion, the woman reached into a small handbag on the chair behind her and brought out a wallet.
This she flipped open and held up for him to examine.
He saw an ID card of some sort, one with a blue-and-white seal.
He looked closer.
Bold letters on the right side of the card readFBI.
His stomach fluttered. To the left of the big acronym, smaller letters read Special Agent Alexandra Morse. Beside this was a photo of the woman standing before him. Special Agent Morse was smiling in the photo, but she wasn't smiling now.
"I need to tell you some things in confidence," she said.
"It won't take much of your time. I pretended to be a patient because I don't want anyone in your life to know you've spoken to an FBI agent. Before I leave, I need you to write me a prescription for Levaquin and tell your nurse that I had a urinary-tract infection. Tell her that the symptoms were so obvious that you didn't need to do a urinalysis. Will you do that?"
Chris was too surprised to make a conscious decision. "Sure," he said.
"But what's going on?
Are you investigating something?
Are you investigating me?"
"Not you." "Someone I know?"
Agent Morse's eyes didn't waver. "Yes." "Who?"
"I can't tell you that yet. I may tell you at the end of this conversation. Right now I'm going to tell you a story. A quick story. Will you sit down, Doctor?"
Chris sat on the short stool he used in the examining room.
"Are you really from North Carolina? Or is that just a cover?"
"Why do you ask?"
"You talk like a Yankee, but I hear Mississippi underneath."
Agent Morse smiled, or gave him what passed for a smile with her—a slight widening of her taut lips.
"You have good ears. I grew up in Jackson. But I'm based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now."
He was glad to have his intuition confirmed.
"Please go on with your story."
She sat on the chair where her handbag had been, crossed her legs, and regarded him coolly.
"Five weeks ago, my sister died of a brain hemorrhage. This happened at University Hospital in Jackson."
"I'm sorry."
Agent Morse nodded as though she were past it, but Chris saw held-in emotion behind her eyes.
"Her death was sudden and unexpected, but before she died, she told me something that sounded crazy to me."
"What?"
"She told me she'd been murdered."
He wasn't sure he understood.
"You mean she told you someone had murdered her?"
"Exactly. Her husband, to be specific."
Chris thought about this for a while.
"What did the autopsy show?"
"A fatal blood clot on the left side of the brain, near the brain stem."
"Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?"
"No."
"Was your sister taking birth-control pills?"
"Yes."
"That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?"
"No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that."
"Did your sister's husband resist the autopsy?"
Agent Morse actually beamed with approval.
"No. He didn't."
"But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?"
"Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then—"
Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars.
Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass.
But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?
"Agent Morse?" he prompted.