Greg Iles - True Evil

"Thanks," Alex said, gratified to have someone pushing in the same direction at last. "Anything new on the background checks?"

"Lansing looks clean to me. Typical surgeon. Son of a lawyer, big ladies' man. He's moved around a lot, which is sometimes a flag with doctors, but he's only thirty-six, so maybe he's just the restless type. Like Rusk, he's invested in a lot of different ventures, most medical but some not. The radiology clinic in Meridian is a legitimate concern, and Lansing seems to be a passive partner. I suppose he could get access to radioactive material if he really wanted to, but right now he seems like the least likely killer of the bunch."

"And the others?"

"You know Rusk. He's rich, well connected, and on his second wife. Lives like an international playboy when he's not working. The only grounds for suspicion are those business connections you turned up, but all of those are aboveboard. Not even the IRS has a gripe with Rusk."

"And Tarver?"

"Tarver's is a little different. He was born in 1946, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the illegitimate son of an army officer. He was dumped at the Lutheran Children's Home in Greenwood, Tennessee, from which he was adopted at age seven. The adoptive family was from Sevierville, Tennessee. I worked a serial murder case around there twelve years ago. That's the Smoky Mountains. It's commercialized now, but in the 1950s it was rural, with primitive fundamentalist religion. Some of the snake churches were based there."

"Snake churches?" echoed Alex, and Will cut his eyes at her.

"Congregations that use poisonous snakes in their worship services. Drink strychnine, that kind of crap. I don't know if Tarver saw any of that, but his foster father was a pig farmer and lay preacher. Eldon went to the University of Tennessee on full academic scholarship. That got him out of Vietnam. While I was running through rice paddies, Tarver was doing high-level graduate research in microbiology at UT. Data's pretty scarce for that part of his life, but in 1974, he went to work for a major pharmaceutical company. They fired him less than a year later on sexual harassment grounds. It must have been something pretty bad to be fired for that in 1975. He didn't actually go to medical school until 1976, but he definitely found his calling there. He's board-certified in multiple specialties, including pathology and hematology. He took the job at UMC in 1985, and he married a biochemistry professor there two years later. She died in 1998, of cervical cancer. You know the rest. He opened a free clinic with the money he inherited from his wife. He's had the pathology lab for over fifteen years. So far, no information about girlfriends or live-in lovers. The sexual harassment thing gives me a little pause-"

"And the birthmark," Alex cut in.

"Yeah," said Kaiser. "It looks pretty severe in photos. I wonder why he hasn't had a buddy take it off for him."

"I don't think he can. He told me it's some sort of vascular anomaly. It's dangerous to mess with."

"I think we've got a weird one, all right," Kaiser said thoughtfully. "My antennae are quivering. We may find some kinky stuff in Tarver's house, if we ever get inside it. Webb Tyler's starting to piss me off. He's a bureaucrat to the marrow of his bones. If he has any bones."

"He sure doesn't have a backbone," Alex grumbled.

Will grabbed her knee and pointed through the windshield. Sixty yards away, a red van was pulling through the gate of the parking lot. The gate must have been unlocked, because the driver simply nosed through it without getting out and drove slowly toward the side of the building.

"Chris needs me," Alex said, trying to make out the license plate of the van. It was too far away and the angle was bad.

"One more thing," said Kaiser. "Noel Traver is a real mystery man. On paper, he didn't even exist prior to ten years ago, as far as I can tell. He's got a driver's license but no car, and his residence appears to be the same address as that dog-breeding facility."

"I really need to run, John. Anything else?"

Kaiser laughed. "Yeah, one thing. I've really been calling to make sure you don't do something stupid, like break into Tarver's house or that breeding facility."

Alex laughed, hoping it didn't ring hollow. "I wish," she said. "Keep pushing for that search warrant." She hung up before he could reply.

"Did you hear that?" asked Will. "The driver just honked his horn."

The red van had pulled up to a large aluminum door set in the side wall of the old bakery. As Alex stared, the door rose until it was high enough for the van to pull inside the building.

"Son of a bitch," said Will. "I think somebody's been in there all along."

"He may be using a remote. Did you get a look at the driver?"

"No, the damn windows are tinted."

The overhead door stayed up, but the van did not pull inside.

"What should we do?" Alex asked.

Will stuck out his lower lip. "You're the boss."

"I want to know who's in that van."

Will laughed softly. "I do, too. And we can find out. But it sure won't be legal."

"I don't give a shit." Alex reached for her door handle.

Will caught hold of her wrist. "Hold on, now. Let's don't get you in worse trouble than you're already in."

She pulled her arm free. "The bastards have already fired me. What else can they do?"

Will lowered his head and looked at her with seven decades of accumulated wisdom. "Well, honey, there's fired, and then there's fired fired. You just got off the phone with a special agent of the FBI. If you were fired fired, he wouldn't be talking to you at all."

Alex forced herself to sit back in the Explorer, anger boiling in her gut. Immediately after Grace's death, she had felt she was at a great disadvantage in her quest, but not powerless. She may have acted irresponsibly, but at least she'd been doing something. Now she was being restrained by the possibility that the agency that should have been investigating all along might finally get off its ass and do something.

She grabbed her computer from the floor and took it out of hibernation yet again. This time her toolbar showed a three-bar data connection. She'd already searched the names Eldon Tarver and Noel D. Traver so many times in the past few hours that her eyes blurred when she looked at the Google search page.

"I'm missing something," she said.

Will grunted.

She checked MSN Messenger, but Jamie wasn't logged on.

"What did Kaiser tell you?" Will asked.

"Not much." She thought back to Kaiser's brief biography of Eldon Tarver. "He said there was a gap in the years when Tarver was in college or grad school. During Vietnam, I guess. When did the Vietnam War end?"

"They scraped the last chopper off the roof of the embassy in '75, but for all practical purposes, the big show was over by '73."

Vietnam…

"Late Vietnam," Alex murmured.

"What?"

"Something Dr. Tarver said to me in his office. It was about a research project he worked on…something about combat veterans and cancer." She closed her eyes and saw the photograph on Tarver's office wall again, the black-and-white snapshot of the blonde bookended by Tarver and the military officer. "VCP," she said, scrunching her eyelids tight. "Those letters were embroidered on Tarver's lab coat. Also painted on the building behind him."

"What are you talking about?" asked Will.

"An acronym," she said, suddenly recalling Tarver's explanation. "The Veterans' Cancer Project."

Alex typed "Veterans' Cancer Project" into the Google search field. Google returned over 8 million links, but not one in the first fifty referred to a formally named Veterans' Cancer Project. Most of the links led to sites dealing with various types of cancer in Gulf War or Vietnam veterans. But the Vietnam links dealt almost exclusively with Agent Orange, which Tarver had said his group had not looked into.