Chris shook his head at Holly's wiseass tone, then walked down the hall to his private office and closed the door.
He had a waiting room filled with patients, but as sick as some of them were, they seemed secondary now.
He shoved aside a stack of charts and looked at Thora's picture on his desk. Thora was the antithesis of Agent Alex Morse. She was blond—naturally blond, unlike 98 percent of the golden- haired women you saw on the street—and of Danish descent, which was unusual in the South. Her eyes were grayish blue—sea blue, if you wanted to get poetic about it, which he had, on occasion. But though she might be mistaken for a Viking princess on the basis of appearance, Thora had no pretensions of superiority.
She had spent four years married to Red Simmons, a down-to-earth country boy who'd made good by trusting his instincts and who'd treated people well after he made his pile.
Chris believed Red's instincts about women were as good as his hunches about oil. Yes, Thora had become rich when Red died, but where was the fault in that? When a rich man died, someone always profited. That was the way of the world. And Red Simmons wasn't the type to demand a prenuptial agreement.
He'd had a loving young wife who'd shared his life for better or worse—with quite a bit of worse in that last year—and she deserved everything he had, come hell or high water. That's the way Red would have put it. And the more Chris reflected on what Agent Morse had said in Exam Room 4, the angrier he got.
He picked up the phone and called his front desk.
"Yes?" drawled Jane Henry, his peppery receptionist. The yes finally terminated after two long syllables —maybe two and a half.
"Jane, I had a fraternity brother in college named Darryl Foster. That's D-A-R-R-Y-L." "Uh-huh. And?"
"I think he's an FBI agent now. I don't know where. He was originally from Memphis, but the last I heard, he was working in the Chicago field office."
"And?"
"I need you to find him for me. His phone number, I mean. My old fraternity is trying to add on to the house up at Ole Miss, and they want to hit up everybody for contributions."
"And just how do you suggest I find this supercop?"
"Get on the Internet, I guess. You spend enough time on there playing poker and shopping eBay. The least you can do is locate one old classmate for me."
Jane harrumphed loudly. "I'll give it a try, I guess."
"Don't strain yourself."
She hung up without a word, but Chris knew she would have the number in less than an hour.
Don't change your routine, Agent Morse had said. Don't do anything that might tip off your killer….
"My killer," Chris said aloud. "This has got to be bullshit."
He picked up his stethoscope and walked to the door, but Jane's buzz brought him back to his desk. He grabbed his phone. "You found Foster already?"
"Not yet. Your wife's on the phone."
Chris felt another wave of numbness. Thora rarely called his office; she knew he was too busy to spend time on the phone. He looked down at her picture, waiting for a spark of instinct about what to do. But what he saw before him wasn't his wife, but Special Agent Alex Morse, regarding him coolly from behind her scars.
Stupid mistakes, Morse had said. Even the best of us make them.
"Tell Thora I'm with a patient, Jane."
"What?" asked the receptionist, clearly surprised.
"I'm way behind already. Just do it. I'll call her back in a little while." "Whatever you say. You sign my checks."
Chris started to hang up, but at the last second he said, "Find Foster's number for me, okay? Stat."
The playfulness went out of Jane's voice; she knew when her boss meant business.
"You got it, Doc."
Andrew Rusk was afraid.
He stood at the window of his law office and gazed out over the jigsaw skyline of Jackson, Mississippi. Not an impressive vista as cityscapes went, but Rusk did have the corner office on the sixteenth floor.
Looking north, he could see all the way to the forested plains where white flight was expanding once- sleepy counties into bustling enclaves for twenty-first-century yuppies. Farther on, the new Nissan plant was bringing relative wealth to the state's struggling blue-collar workers. They commuted up to a hundred miles a day, both ways, from the tiny towns surrounding the state capital.
Behind him—out of sight to the west—lived the uneducated blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables."
The untouchables killed each other at an alarming rate and preyed upon others with enough regularity to breed deep anxiety in the white citizens of Jackson.
But they weren't the source of his fear.
They were invisible from his office, and he worked hard to keep them that way in all areas of his life. To that end, he had built his home in an oak forest north of the city, near Annandale, a golf club that occupied the self-assured niche between the old money of the Jackson Country Club and the young optimists at Reunion.
Every afternoon at four thirty, Rusk took the elevator down to the garage, climbed into his black Porsche Cayenne Turbo, and roared northward to his stone-and-glass sanctuary among the oak and pine trees.
His second wife was invariably lying by their infinity pool when he arrived. Lisa was still young enough for a string bikini, but she rarely wore swimwear in the summer. After a poolside kiss—or more often, lately, a session of listening to her bitch about nothing—he went inside for a stiff drink. His black cook always had supper waiting on the table, and Andrew looked forward to it every day.
But now the taste of fear overrode that of food. Rusk had not felt real fear for twenty-five years, but he'd never forgotten it. Fear tasted like junior high school: like being backed into a corner by a tenth grader who wanted to beat your face into red pulp, your friends watching but too petrified to help, your bladder threatening to send an ocean of piss down your leg.
Rusk lifted a tumbler of bourbon to his lips and took a long pull. Whiskey at work was an indulgence, one he'd allowed himself more and more in the past weeks, a balm against the fear.
He refilled the tumbler with Woodford Reserve, then lifted a five-by-seven photograph from his desktop. The photo showed a dark-haired woman with an angular face and deep-set eyes—the kind of eyes that looked alive even on a piece of paper.
Rusk knew that the woman in that picture would never fall for his sweetest pickup line. Maybe if he'd caught her young—a freshman in college when he was a senior, drunk at a frat party, like that—but even then he doubted it.
This girl had what most women didn't—self-confidence—and she had it in spades. The apple of her daddy's eye, you could tell. That was probably what had led her to the FBI.
"Special Agent Alex," he murmured. "Nosy bitch."
Rusk's phone rang, and his secretary answered it.
They still had secretaries at his little firm—not goddamn personal assistants—and they were old-school girls, all the way.
They gave and received generous perks, and everybody stayed happy.
Rusk had read that there was a rule at the Google headquarters in Mountain View: no worker should ever be more than fifty feet away from food. To that end, snack stations had been set up throughout the Googleplex.
The Rusk rule—established by Andrew's father at his much more venerable firm—predated the Google edict by five decades, and it went thus: no partner should ever be more than fifty feet from a good and willing piece of ass. Andrew junior had imported this tradition into his own firm, with most gratifying results.
He gulped the last slug from the tumbler and walked to his desk, where his flat-panel monitor glowed insistently.
Flickering on the screen was the portal graphic of a Dutch Web site called EX NIHILO—a black hole with a shimmering event horizon. Rusk remembered a little Latin from his days in prep school: ex nihilo meant "out of nothing." For a considerable fee, EX NIHILO provided absolute anonymity in the digital domain.
The company also provided other services requiring discretion, and it was one of those services that Rusk had contracted for today. He suspected that kiddie-porn addicts made up the lion's share of EX NIHILO's clients, but he didn't care. All that mattered was that the company could protect him.
Partners, he thought, recalling his father's cynical voice.
All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it's over. And that's not life—it's living death. Rusk hated most things about his father, but one thing he could not deny: the man had been right about most things in life.
Rusk moved his cursor into a blank box and typed 3.141592653—pi to the ninth decimal place. As a boy, he'd memorized pi to the fortieth decimal place to impress his father. Immediately after his proud dinner recitation, dear old Dad had told him about an Indian boy who'd memorized pi to the six-hundredth place.
Typical paternal response in the Rusk home. Nothing was ever good enough for Andrew Jackson Rusk Sr.