True Evil

"Big Ben!" cried Thora, moving out from behind the SL's door with a grin and bending to hug her sweaty son. "You didn't miss a catch the whole time I was here!"

Ben shrugged. "I play first base, Mom. You can't play first if you miss balls."

Chris wished he could see Thora's eyes, but the sunglasses hid them completely. She gave Ben a quick squeeze, then straightened and gave Chris her thousand-watt smile. His gaze went to the Patek Philippe. Stop it, he said silently.

"You picked up Ben early today," she said.

"Yeah. I knew rounds were going to take a while, so I decided to do them after practice."

She nodded but said nothing.

He wasn't sure where to go next, but Ben saved him by asking, "Can we go to La Fiesta, Mom?"

Thora glanced at Chris over the tops of her sunglasses, but he couldn't read her meaning. La Fiesta was a family-oriented Mexican restaurant with low prices and fast service; thus it was always loud and crowded.

"I really need to get to the hospital," Chris said. "You guys go, though."

Thora shook her head. "We've got plenty of food at home, and it's a lot healthier than Mexican. I made chicken salad this afternoon."

Ben rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose.

Chris almost said, I'll pick up something on the way home, but that would only result in Ben begging for takeout and Thora getting irritated. "Help me load the gear, Son."

Chris and Ben tossed the two bulging canvas bags into his pickup. Then Chris gave Ben a high five, hugged Thora lightly to his side, and climbed into the truck. "I won't be too late," he said through the open window.

As though in answer, Thora took off her sunglasses. Her sea-blue eyes cut right through his feigned nonchalance. Her gaze had always caused a physical reaction in his chest, something between a fluttering and radiant warmth. (It caused a reaction lower down, as well.) Now that gaze held an unspoken question, but he broke eye contact, lifted his hand in a wave, then backed onto the road and drove north toward town.

CHAPTER 5

Alex Morse drove her rented Corolla into the parking lot of the Days I

Alex had checked into the Days I

Looking at this picture, she remembered how frantic Jamie had been the morning after his mother died, when Alex told him she had to take him back to his father. Ru

On a low dresser beside the motel desk lay several neat stacks of paper, all relating to her mother's medical care. There were lists of oral medications and chemotherapy drugs; treatment schedules; bills to be paid by the insurance company; bills from private physicians for the fees the insurance company didn't cover; test results from the University Medical Center and from the lab of the private oncologist; and of course the correspondence between Grace and various cancer specialists around the world. Grace had dealt with their mother's cancer the way she'd dealt with every other crisis: she'd declared war on it. And she'd carried on that war with the implacable persistence of Sherman burning his way across the South. Woe betide the insurance clerk who made an error on a bill addressed to Margaret Morse; Grace's retribution was swift and sure. But now the ru

Her cardinal sin? She was not at her mother's bedside. Instead, she was camped out a hundred miles southeast, in Natchez, Mississippi, while paid nurses-strangers!-tended her mother in Jackson. And what was she doing in Natchez? Only burning through her life savings and risking her career in an almost certainly vain quest to punish her sister's murderer. Grace would have had plenty to say about that. But on the other hand, it was Grace who had charged Alex with "saving" Jamie from his father. And since Bill Fe

Alex walked to the oversize card table she'd bought at Wal-Mart to arrange her case materials. This table was the nerve center of her investigation. It was fairly primitive stuff-jotted notes, surveillance records, digital snapshots, minicassettes-but her father had told her countless times that there was no substitute for putting your heels on the pavement or your ass behind the wheel of your car. All the computers in the world couldn't nail a killer if you never left your office. Alex kept a framed picture of her dad propped on the card table-her patron saint of cold cases. It wasn't actually a photograph, but a newspaper story that included two snapshots of Jim Morse: one as a fresh-faced patrolman in 1968, the other as a weary but determined-looking homicide detective who'd solved a high-profile race murder in Jackson in 1980.

Her father had gone into police work straight out of the army, returning to Mississippi after two tours in Vietnam. He'd seen action, but he'd never talked about it, and he never had any lasting problems that Alex knew about. But working as an MP in Saigon, Jim Morse had somehow wound up involved in a couple of murder cases. The work had left an impression on him, so when he'd found himself at loose ends on his twenty-first birthday, he'd registered at the police academy in Jackson. He did well as a patrolman, making sergeant before anyone else in his academy class. He passed the detective's exam when he was twenty-seven and quickly made a name for two things: brilliant detective work; and speaking his mind, no matter whom he happened to be talking to. The first trait would have assured rapid promotion, had he not possessed the second in equal measure. Alex had fought all her life to control the same tendency, and she'd mostly succeeded. But her father had watched men with much less talent and dedication climb past him on the promotional ladder for most of his career.