True Evil. Greg Iles

Alex said with bone-deep conviction. “Your presence here is upsetting Grace, and that’s all that matters. We need to keep her as calm as possible. Isn’t that right, Dr. Andrews?”

      “Absolutely.” Meredith Andrews walked around Alex and looked down at her patient. “Grace, do you understand me?”

       “Yeth.”

      “Do you want your husband in this room?”

      Grace slowly shook her head. “I wan … my bay … be. Wan Jamie.”

      Dr. Andrews looked up at Bill Fennell, who towered over her. “That’s good enough for me. I want you to leave the unit, Mr. Fennell.”

      Bill stepped close to the neurologist, his eyes sheened with anger. “I don’t know who you think you are, or who you think you’re talking to, but I give a lot of money to this university. A lot of money. And I—”

      “Don’t make me call security,” Dr. Andrews said quietly, lifting the phone beside Grace’s bed.

      Bill’s face went white. Alex almost felt sorry for him. The power had clearly passed to Dr. Andrews, but Bill seemed unable to make the decision to leave. He looked, Alex thought, like an actor on a DVD movie after you hit pause. Or that’s what she was thinking when the alarm began to sing.

      “She’s coding!” Dr. Andrews shouted through the door, but the shout was unnecessary. Nurses were already running from the station to the cubicle. Alex jumped out of their way, and an instant later Bill did the same.

      “Cardiac arrest,” Dr. Andrews said, yanking open a drawer.

      Because this was an ICU, there was no crash cart; everything was already here. The quiet cubicle suddenly became a whirlwind of motion, all directed toward a single purpose—to sustain the life fast ebbing from the body on the bed.

      “You need to leave,” said a tall male nurse standing behind Dr. Andrews. “Both of you.”

      Dr. Andrews glanced up long enough to give Alex a moment of eye contact, then returned to work. Alex backed slowly out of the ICU, watching the final act of her sister’s life unfold without any hope of playing a part herself. Ridiculous regrets about choosing law school over medical school pierced her heart. But what if she had become a doctor? She would be practicing two thousand miles away from Mississippi, and the result would be the same. Grace’s fate was in God’s hands now, and Alex knew how indifferent those hands could be.

      She turned away from the cubicle—away from Bill Fennell—and looked at the nurses’ station, where banks of monitors chirped and blinked ceaselessly. How can they focus on all those screens at once? she wondered, recalling how difficult it was to watch multiple surveillance feeds when the Bureau had a TV rig set up on a static post. As she thought about that, she heard Dr. Andrews say, “I’m calling it, guys. Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m.”

      Shock is a funny thing, Alex thought. Like the day she was shot. Two searing chunks of buckshot and a half pound of glass had blasted through the right side of her face, yet she’d felt nothing—just a wave of heat, as if someone had opened an oven beside her.

       Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m. …

      Something started to let go in Alex’s chest, but before the release, she heard a little boy say, “Hey! Is my mom in here?”

      She turned toward the big wooden door that had brought her to this particular chamber of hell and saw before it a boy about four and a half feet tall. His face was red, as though he had run all the way from wherever he’d started. He was trying to look brave, but Alex saw fear in his wide green eyes.

      “Aunt Alex?” said Jamie, finally picking her out of the uniformed crowd.

      Bill’s big voice sounded from behind Alex. “Hello, Son. Where’s Aunt Jean?”

      “She’s too slow,” Jamie said angrily.

      “Come over here, boy.”

      Alex looked back at her brother-in-law’s stern face, and the thing that had started to let go inside her suddenly ratcheted tight. Without thought she ran to Jamie, swept him into her arms and then out the door, away from this heartrending nightmare. Away from his dying mother.

      Away from Bill Fennell.

       Away …

       TWO

       Five Weeks Later

      Dr. Chris Shepard lifted a manila folder from the file caddy on the door of Exam Room 4 and quickly perused it. He didn’t recognize the patient’s name, and that was unusual. Chris had a large practice, but it was a small town, and that was the way he liked it.

      This patient’s name was Alexandra Morse, and her file held only a medical history, the long form that all new patients filled out on their first visit. Chris looked down the corridor and saw Holly, his nurse, crossing from her station to the X-ray room. He called out and waved her up the hall. Holly said something through the door to X-ray, then hurried toward him.

      “Aren’t you coming in with me?” he asked softly. “It’s a female patient.”

      Holly shook her head. “She asked to speak to you alone.”

      “New patient?”

      “Yes. I meant to say something before now, but we got so busy with Mr. Seward—”

      Chris nodded at the door and lowered his voice to a whisper. “What’s her story?”

      Holly shrugged. “Beats me. Name’s Alex. Thirty years old and in great shape, except for the scars on her face.”

      “Scars?”

      “Right side. Cheek, ear, and orbit. Head through a window is my guess.”

      “There’s nothing about a car accident in her history.”

      “Couple of months ago, by the color of the scars.”

      Chris moved away from the door, and Holly followed. “She didn’t give you any complaint?”

      The nurse shook her head. “No. And you know I asked.”

      “Oh, boy.”

      Holly nodded knowingly. A woman coming in alone and refusing to specify her complaint usually meant the problem was sexual—most often fear of a sexually transmitted disease. Natchez, Mississippi, was a small town, and its nurses gossiped as much as its other citizens. Truth be told, Chris thought, most doctors here are worse gossips than their nurses.

      “Her chart says Charlotte, North Carolina,” he noted. “Did Ms. Morse tell you what she’s doing in Natchez?”

      “She told me exactly nothing,” Holly said with a bit of pique. “Do you want me to shoot that flat-and-erect series on Mr. Seward before he voids on the table?”

      “Sorry. Go to it.”

      Holly winked and whispered, “Have fun with Ms. Scarface.”

      Chris shook his head, then summoned a serious expression and walked into the examining room.

      A woman wearing a navy skirt and a cream-colored top stood beside the examining table. Her face almost caused him to stare, but he’d seen a lot of trauma during his medical training. This woman’s scars weren’t actually too bad. It was her youth and attractiveness that made them stand out so vividly. Almost fiercely, Chris thought. You figured a woman who looked and dressed this way would have had plastic surgery to take care of an injury like that. Not that she was a knockout or anything; she wasn’t. It was just—

      “Hello, Dr. Shepard,” the woman said in a direct tone.

      “Ms.