Lewis Perdue - Perfect killer

In the far corner of the EZ-Sleep Suites' parking lot, hidden among the cable vans, Jael St. Clair sat behind the wheel of her white rented SUV, took a deep hit off a fresh cigarette, and watched the door to Brad Stone's room open. He walked out, emptyhanded, closed the door, then headed toward the stairs.

St. Clair smiled as Stone turned back to check the door, then got into his truck and drove away.

"Surprise, asshole," she said quietly, thinking about how nice it would be to watch the reception she had arranged for him and his black beauty. But there was work to be done. St. Clair opened her door, stood up, and took another drag on the cigarette. Then she ground it out on the pavement with her shoe and made her way to Stone's room, pulling on a pair of latex gloves as she walked. At his door, she wiggled a plastic shim in the lock; the door opened in the blink of an eye. Jael closed the door behind her and turned on the lights. The multiple flashing lights on Stone's laptop drew her attention.

Her anger rose as she examined the cables and alarms. She'd need cutters and a way to muffle the alarms. The heavy, braided steel cable meant a bolt cutter wouldn't work. She'd need a Dremel with an abrasive cutoff disk.

And fast-setting acoustic foam for the alarms. What a mess.

"You pig-fucking shit-bird."

She walked to the bathroom, where her frown softened as her eyes fell on the short, graying-brown hairs gathered at the drain. St. Clair gathered the strands and put them in one of the Ziploc snack bags she had brought just for this. Running her hand across the cigarette-scarred fake-marble counter, she found another half dozen hairs.

Then she left.

About a mile northwest of my hotel, Highway 82 crossed a wide stretch of railroad tracks. Moments later, I turned right on Strong Avenue and caught sight of the hospital in which I had been born. According to Mama, lightning from a passing thunderstorm had hit the building pretty near to the time I had been born.

The hospital was a pale yellow brick affair towering over the street and the green, green levee that ran behind it along the Yazoo River. Suddenly, I looked through a sevenyear-old's eyes at my grandmother, Mamie, the Judge's wife, lying in one of the hospital's darkened rooms under a plastic oxygen tent that looked pieced together from dry-cleaner suit bags. A cerebral hemorrhage had nailed her like a stroke of lightning and sent her there to drift out of our lives for a terminal day or so. Mamie slept so peacefully to my young eyes.

This vision washed over me like muddy floodwaters from a breached levee. Something like this happened every time I visited Mississippi, home no matter how long I lived elsewhere. I shook my head and tried to focus on my mission. I decided to start with the emergency room, which always had sharp people able to deal with the unexpected- such as some California doctor coming and asking to use their computer system. I put the truck in gear and pulled into sparse eastbound traffic.

As I neared the emergency room entrance, I spotted a prominent sign at the road's edge for Giles Claiborne, M.D., and the past lurched in front of me again. Claiborne had to be as old as the hills because he had been my family physician in Itta Bena not long after Uncle Doc had died. Uncle Doc was the husband of Mamie's sister and took care of everyone regardless of color or their ability to pay. I remembered shots, stitches, and the back entrance that led to a separate waiting room for Negroes Only. I do remember getting entirely unsatisfactory answers about this from Al Thompson and Mama.

As I parked next to Claiborne's office, my cell phone rang.

"Where you at, boy?" I recognized Rex's voice.

"Greenwood. Camilla's in a really bad way. I'm at the hospital seeing if there's a way to have them pull up her scans"

"Y'mama said a prayer for her every damned day. I'da said some myself, but God'n me, we don't get along."

I wanted to laugh, but Camilla's shadow chilled my heart.

"Okay, look. I've been doing some checking," Rex said. "Nothing for sure. I just wanted to say you better watch your back. I-"

My phone beeped a "no service" tone. I tried to call Rex back, but got nothing. "Nuts." I got out and made my way into the clinic. A young woman with intensely dark skin in a white uniform sat behind the receptionist's desk and gave me a smile filled with brilliant, even teeth set in gums the color of blueberries. I introduced myself and asked for Dr. Claiborne.

"Across the street in the little broom closet he calls an office," she said. "I'll call him"

As soon as she finished punching in the numbers, she looked up at me. "You one of his old patients?"

"I think maybe his father's." I smiled. "A long time ago!"

She gave me a warm laugh and shook her head. "Dr. Claiborne has three daughters, no sons."

The surprise played across my face.

"He retired once, back when my mother worked for him. It didn't take so-" She stopped to leave a voice mail to tell Dr. Claiborne about me, then she drew me a map to his office.

I thanked her took the map, and hurried across the street, where a uniformed security officer directed me straight on back. I passed through a set of double doors guarded by another security officer and followed the hand-drawn map's zigzag along the fluorescent-lighted, tiled corridor to the first landmark, a lighted sign for radiology. Across the hall sat an unmarked wooden door with louvered vents in the lower panel. I stopped by the door and raised my hand to knock when it opened, leaving me to stare straight into the timeworn face of Dr. Giles Claiborne.

The wrinkled familiarity of the past froze me for another instant. I figured he must be at least eighty-five, but his cool, glacial blue eyes lit up his face and made him appear decades younger. Claiborne stood imperially straight and unbent by time and crowned with a full shock of white hair.

He wore a cotton broadcloth shirt with a weave as fine as silk and a three-letter script monogram instead of a pocket. A gold collar bar made sure the knot in his silk, regimental stripe tie remained perfect. His khakis had knife creases, where mine resembled tired aluminum foil someone had tried to press into respectability. His knife creases broke perfectly above stylishly comfortable and obviously expensive burnished leather loafers.

My old feelings of social insecurity rebounded with a vengeance. Even though I had been wellborn into a family with a distinguished Mississippi heritage, I had come along at a time when the family fortunes had slipped away in a latter-day Faulknerian crisis that had left too many of my relatives clinging to nothing more substantial than ancestral bloodlines. As a result, I had grown up uneasily among the privileged classes from the planter culture of the Delta and, later, the moneyed movers of Jackson. I had always felt from those classes but never of them. I tried to belong to those classes as a child, but never found a comfort level with their patrician attitudes and their casual, nonreflective acceptance of superior entitlement granted by the natural order of things. I'm sure that played no small role in my ultimate rebellion and rejection of my heritage.

Despite my professional and financial achievements, I had never completely exorcised my desire to be accepted by them. I didn't understand that flaw, but it played a major role in my avoidance of my home state and most of those with whom I had grown up. Clearly, I had rejected this culture but had not escaped it.

"Bradford! What an unanticipated pleasure!" Giles Claiborne extended his hand. I took his powerful, warm grip. It subtracted yet more years from my perception of him and made me feel almost like his child patient again.