LITMIR.BIZ

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woman remained silent, but he could feel her eyes probing him as deeply as a verbal question. What’s going on here? Chris wondered. Is it my birthday or something? Did the staff plan some kind of trick? Or does she want drugs? He’d had that happen before: some female patients offered sex for drugs, usually narcotics. Chris studied the woman’s face, trying to divine her real purpose. She had dark hair, green eyes, and an oval face not much different from those of the dozens of women he saw each day. A little better bone structure, maybe, especially the cheekbones. But the real difference was the scars—and a shock of gray hair above them that didn’t look added by a colorist. Except for those things, Alex Morse might be any woman at the local health club. And yet … despite her usualness, if that was a word, there was something about her that Chris couldn’t quite nail down, something that set her apart from other women. Something in the way she stood, maybe.

      Laying the chart on the counter behind him, he said, “Maybe you should just tell me what the problem is. I promise, however frightening it might seem now, I’ve seen or heard it many times in this office, and together we can do something about it. People usually feel better once they verbalize these things.”

      “You’ve never heard what I’m about to tell you,” Alex Morse said with utter certainty. “I promise you that, Doctor.”

      The conviction in her voice unsettled him, but he didn’t have time for games. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Ms. Morse, if I’m going to help you at all, I have to know the nature of your problem.”

      “It’s not my problem,” the woman said finally. “It’s yours.”

      As Chris frowned in confusion, the woman reached into a small handbag on the chair behind her and brought out a wallet. This she flipped open and held up for him to examine. He saw an ID card of some sort, one with a blue-and-white seal. He looked closer. Bold letters on the right side of the card read FBI. His stomach fluttered. To the left of the big acronym, smaller letters read Special Agent Alexandra Morse. Beside this was a photo of the woman standing before him. Special Agent Morse was smiling in the photo, but she wasn’t smiling now.

      “I need to tell you some things in confidence,” she said. “It won’t take much of your time. I pretended to be a patient because I don’t want anyone in your life to know you’ve spoken to an FBI agent. Before I leave, I need you to write me a prescription for Levaquin and tell your nurse that I had a urinary-tract infection. Tell her that the symptoms were so obvious that you didn’t need to do a urinalysis. Will you do that?”

      Chris was too surprised to make a conscious decision. “Sure,” he said. “But what’s going on? Are you investigating something? Are you investigating me?”

      “Not you.”

      “Someone I know?”

      Agent Morse’s eyes didn’t waver. “Yes.”

      “Who?”

      “I can’t tell you that yet. I may tell you at the end of this conversation. Right now I’m going to tell you a story. A quick story. Will you sit down, Doctor?”

      Chris sat on the short stool he used in the examining room. “Are you really from North Carolina? Or is that just a cover?”

      “Why do you ask?”

      “You talk like a Yankee, but I hear Mississippi underneath.”

      Agent Morse smiled, or gave him what passed for a smile with her—a slight widening of her taut lips. “You have good ears. I grew up in Jackson. But I’m based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now.”

      He was glad to have his intuition confirmed. “Please go on with your story.”

      She sat on the chair where her handbag had been, crossed her legs, and regarded him coolly. “Five weeks ago, my sister died of a brain hemorrhage. This happened at University Hospital in Jackson.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      Agent Morse nodded as though she were past it, but Chris saw held-in emotion behind her eyes. “Her death was sudden and unexpected, but before she died, she told me something that sounded crazy to me.”

      “What?”

      “She told me she’d been murdered.”

      He wasn’t sure he understood. “You mean she told you someone had murdered her?”

      “Exactly. Her husband, to be specific.”

      Chris thought about this for a while. “What did the autopsy show?”

      “A fatal blood clot on the left side of the brain, near the brain stem.”

      “Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?”

      “No.”

      “Was your sister taking birth-control pills?”

      “Yes.”

      “That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?”

      “No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that.”

      “Did your sister’s husband resist the autopsy?”

      Agent Morse actually beamed with approval. “No. He didn’t.”

      “But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?”

      “Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then—” Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars. Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass. But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?

      “Agent Morse?” he prompted.

      “I didn’t leave town right away,” she said, focusing on him again. “I stayed for the funeral. And over the course of those three days, I thought a lot about what Grace had told me. That’s my sister’s name, Grace. She told me she thought her husband was having an affair. He’s a wealthy man—far wealthier than I realized—and Grace believed he was involved with another woman. She believed he’d murdered her rather than pay what it would have cost him to divorce her. And to get custody of their son, of course.”

      Chris considered this. “I’m sure women have been killed for that reason before. Men, too, I imagine.”

      “Absolutely. Even completely normal people admit to having homicidal impulses when going through a divorce. Anyway … after Grace’s funeral, I told her husband I was going back to Charlotte.”

      “But you didn’t.”

      “No.”

      “Was he having an affair?”

      “He was. And Grace’s death didn’t slow him down in the least. Quite the reverse, in fact.”

      “Go on.”

      “Let’s call Grace’s husband Bill. After I discovered the affair, I didn’t confront Bill. I engaged the resources of the Bureau to investigate him. His personal life, his business, everything. I now know almost everything there is to know about Bill—everything but the one thing I need to prove. I know far more than my sister knew, and I know a lot more than his mistress knows now. For example, when I was going through Bill’s business records, I found that he had some rather complex connections to a local lawyer.”

      “A Natchez lawyer?” Chris asked, trying to anticipate the connection to himself. Unlike most local physicians, he had several friends in Natchez who were attorneys.

      “No, this lawyer practices in Jackson.”

      “I see. Go on.”

      “Bill is a real estate developer. He’s building the new ice hockey stadium up there. Naturally, most of the lawyers he deals with specialize in real estate transactions. But this lawyer was different.”

      “How?”

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