Greg Iles - True Evil

"Thanks, Doc. It's pretty damn hot for May."

Chris nodded and went back to his own sandwich.

"You've got a nice place out here," Kilmer said. "But I hear you're moving."

"My wife's idea. Keeping up with the Joneses, I guess."

Kilmer took another swallow of beer, then started on his sandwich.

"So you used to work with Alex's father?" Chris prompted.

"That's right. First at the PD, then at our detective agency. Never knew a better man in a tight spot."

"He was killed recently?"

"Yessir. Trying to help some people in trouble, which is about what I'd of guessed."

"Crime's pretty bad in Jackson, I hear."

"Bad? You take the Jackson I grew up in as a boy and compare it to now, it's like the end of the world. It started in the eighties with the crack. Now the inmates are running the asylum. Now that Jim's gone, I doubt I'll stay at it more than another couple years. Close the agency, retire up to Virginia."

Chris nodded. "You've known Alex her whole life?"

Kilmer's eyes sparkled. "From the day she was born. Worst tomboy I ever saw in my life. Been handling guns since she was eight. And smart?" Kilmer shook his head. "By the time she was fourteen, she made me feel stupid. Not just me, either."

Chris laughed. "What about that murder theory of hers?"

Kilmer pressed his lips together and sighed. "I'm not sure what to think. The technical side is over my head. But I'll tell you this: I worked homicide for more years than anybody ought to, and I think a lot more people have been murdered in divorce situations than anybody knows or even suspects-especially before the forensics were what they are now. I had lots of cases where I just knew the husband had offed his wife and made it look like an accident. Same way I knew it was sex abuse when I'd find a mama and her daughters over a dead husband. But divorce is a lot more common than child abuse." Kilmer looked suddenly abashed. "Look, just because I think Alex may be onto something don't mean I think your wife is doing you wrong. I'm just here as a favor to Alex."

"I understand. I've only known Alex a few days, but I can see why you like her so much." Chris took a swallow of beer. "But I have wondered if she hasn't gone through so much in the past few months that she's not quite in control of her faculties."

Kilmer raised his eyebrows, as though considering this possibility. "She's been through a lot, all right. And you may not know the worst of it. I believe Alex loved that fella who got killed the day she was shot. But he was married, and she wasn't the type to break up a family. So that day was pretty rough. She lost half her face and the man she loved in about five seconds. She feels guilty that she loved him, and guilty that she got him killed. A lot of people would crack under strain like that. But excepting her daddy, Alex is the last person out of anybody I ever met who would lose her grip on reality." Kilmer met Chris's eyes. "If she believes you're in danger, watch out. She ain't down here to waste her time or yours."

Kilmer's furrowed face had been hardened by years of smoking cigarettes, and his belly had probably grown during years of eating bad food on stakeouts. How many years had he taken off his life by choosing the life he had? Would Alex look that rough when she was seventy? It seemed unlikely, but her facial wounds had already taken her partway down that road.

"Well," Chris said, getting up and taking his plate to the sink, "I'm going to hit the rack pretty soon. You're welcome to sleep in the house tonight. There's a guest room right off that hall over there."

"Where's your boy?" Kilmer asked.

"He fell asleep in the TV room." Chris pointed. "That glow right down there. I'll be just past it."

"If he wakes up and sees me, what should I tell him?"

"He won't. But if he should, just come get me."

As Chris reached up to the top of the refrigerator, a sudden thought struck him. He brought down the.38 and said, "Do you have any identification on you, Mr. Kilmer?"

Kilmer stared back for a long moment, then nodded, walked to his backpack, and reached inside. Chris felt himself tense, as though preparing for violence, but Kilmer only brought out a wallet. He showed Chris a Mississippi driver's license. The good-natured face on it matched the man in front of him.

"Look here," Kilmer said, flipping open a plastic picture holder. "This is Alex in her younger days, with me and Jim."

Chris looked down at three figures huddled in what appeared to be a duck blind in the dead of winter. Sandwiched between two handsome men in their primes was a girl whose arms were wrapped around the neck of a 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.

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.