Greg Iles - True Evil

Like running away.

A half hour ago, she had broken down and called the landline at Bill Fennell's house. She had a right to talk to her nephew (and she'd meant to tell Bill so, in no uncertain terms), but she never got the chance. All she got was an answering machine.

She looked over at the hotel bed and considered climbing into it. She had an early interview tomorrow with the OPR people, and she needed to look her best. Solid. Reliable. Deserving of institutional trust. Ha! She wasn't going to take a chance on missing Jamie.

No way, nohow.

"Have you got enough silk?" asked the nurse.

"I think so," said Chris, tying off the last of twenty-three stitches.

The lacerated arm under his light belonged to a fifty-year-old handyman named Curtis Johnese, a huge man in stained overalls, with a pumpkin-shaped head and a dip of Skoal tucked behind his lip. An hour ago, Mr. Johnese had contrived to open an eight-inch gash on his forearm using a table saw. In the custom from time immemorial, he had come to Tom Cage's office to be sewn up rather than visit the emergency room, which would have cost four times as much and taken four times as long. Johnese would have preferred Dr. Cage, but Tom had stepped into Chris's office and asked if he would suture the wound. Among Tom's many chronic illnesses was psoriatic arthritis, and with a recent bout with cataracts under his belt, he didn't feel he was ready for detailed work.

Chris set down his forceps, lifted the paper drape, and examined his work. As he stared, a sharp throbbing stabbed the base of his skull. He'd felt this intermittently since waking this morning, and it was strong enough that he'd taken three Advil. Surprisingly, the pain had grown worse, not better. At first he'd thought it was a tension headache-Thora was set to return tomorrow, and there was bound to be trouble when he confronted her-but this pain had a relentless quality to it, as though it signaled the onset of a fever.

"Looks great, Mr. Johnese," he said, rubbing his neck. "Just let Holly give you a tetanus booster, and you can be on your way. Come back in a week, and I'll take them out for you."

Johnese smiled and said, "I shore appreciate it, Doc. Dr. Cage is all right, ain't he?"

"He's fine. We're just backed up this morning."

The handyman looked down at his tanned forearm as Holly applied a bandage. "That's pretty good work for a young fella. You keep at it and listen to Dr. Cage, and you can't go far wrong."

"I'm with you there," Chris said, patting him on the back.

Chris left the surgery, walked into his office, and shut the door behind him. Sitting in his chair, he massaged his temples with his thumbs, then tried to work the muscles at the base of his neck. This brought no relief. He reached into his desk and popped another Advil, upping the dose to eight hundred milligrams.

"That ought to do it," he muttered.

He'd intended to call the University Medical Center to try to speak to a couple of the doctors Pete Connolly had mentioned, but he was in no mood to do that now. He leaned back in his chair, recalling Ben's fright this morning when he'd discovered Will Kilmer sound asleep in the easy chair in the den. Ben had raced back to Chris's bedroom and shaken him awake. But once Chris had explained that Kilmer was a distant cousin who was passing through town on his way to Florida (and once Ben saw that his dad wasn't worried), the boy put it out of his mind and started getting ready for school. Kilmer had apologized profusely and quickly left the house.

On the way to school, Ben told Chris he'd seen three empty beer bottles beside "Cousin Will's" chair. Chris hadn't seen the bottles, but he figured that was why Kilmer had fallen asleep before reaching the guest room. Not much of a watchdog, he thought wryly. The only question remaining was what he'd say to Thora if Ben mentioned their visitor.

"Dr. Shepard?" Holly's voice intruded into his reverie like a shout.

As he jumped in his chair, Chris wondered if he might be getting a migraine. He'd never had one before, but the hypersensitivity to sound and light seemed to signal the onset of something in that line. "What is it, Holly?"

"You've got patients waiting in all four rooms."

Chris rubbed his eyes and sighed heavily. "I'm on my way."

"Are you okay?" she asked, breaking through the professional barrier, which she didn't observe much anyway.

"Yeah. I've just got a headache."

The nurse nodded. "I'll try to pace things a little better today."

Chris heaved himself out of his chair, put on his stethoscope, and walked into the hall. Between his door and that of Exam Room 1, he felt a surge of sympathy for Alex Morse. Right about now, she was probably watching her career get flushed down the toilet. He wished there were something he could do to help her. If only she could be patient, there might be. But Alex had been under so much strain for so long that patience seemed not to be an option for her.

Just as he'd done on the day he met Alex, Chris lifted a chart from the file caddy on the door and walked into the examining room. What awaited him was not a mystery woman with a scarred face but a 280-pound man with a pilonidal abscess. Chris forced a smile, steeled himself against the coming stink, and went to work.

Alex sat in a straight-backed wooden chair before a stone-faced tribunal of OPR officials. There were two men and a woman, the men bookending the woman behind a long table. They had introduced themselves at the opening of the proceedings, but Alex had paid no attention to their names. Nothing she said today would change the outcome of this hearing, and taking part in their little charade would only demean her further.

Almost no FBI agent got through his or her career without a few OPR reviews. Usually they resulted from minor infractions of the rules, and sometimes from tattletale gossip anonymously provided to the OPR by jealous fellow agents (common enough behavior to have a slang term describing it: jamming ). But today's hearing was different. One of the worst offenses in the eyes of the OPR was "lack of candor," which meant deception of any kind and degree by an agent, including trivial lies of omission. Judged by this standard, Alex's offenses were grave. She had not yet been ordered to take a polygraph, but she had been placed under oath.

One of the male officials had recounted all the charges that Associate Deputy Director Dodson had leveled against her, then added a few technicalities for good measure. It was all the equivalent of an auditory blur until the woman held up a copy of the threatening text message Alex had sent to Andrew Rusk yesterday during her initial fury at being called to Washington. She had no idea how Mark Dodson could have come into possession of that message, but she was an old enough hand not to ask. The bureaucrats behind the table would tell her nothing. But now they were coming to a part of the proceeding that she could not ignore.

"Special Agent Morse," said the woman, "do you have anything to say on your behalf before we close this hearing?"

"No, ma'am."

The woman frowned like a reproachful church matron, then conferred quietly with her colleagues. A stenographer sat patiently at a desk to Alex's right. Alex filled the time by studying the stenographer's shoes. They were low heels from Nine West, or maybe Kenneth Coles, if she'd saved her money-still a far cry from the Manolo Blahniks covering the feet of the OPR bitch behind the table. It took Italian leather to shoe ambition like that in the Washington OPR.

"Special Agent Morse," said the woman, "as a result of this preliminary hearing, we are suspending you from all further duties until final and formal disposition of your case. You will turn in your credentials and your weapon, and all further contact with the Bureau should be handled through your attorney."