True Evil

"I can't just come get you. We talked about that. But your father wants you, Jamie." Alex wasn't sure whether this was true. "He wants both of you."

The boy shook his head. "After the game, all Dad talked about was my strikeouts. And what else I did wrong. Nothing about my double."

Alex put on a smile and nodded as though she understood. "I think a lot of dads are like that. Your granddad did that when I played softball."

Jamie looked surprised. "Really?"

"Oh, yeah. He didn't hesitate to tell me what I did wrong."

This wasn't quite true. Jim Morse could give constructive criticism, but he knew how to do it without making you feel bad. And most of what Alex remembered from being ten years old was unconditional praise.

"Your dad's just trying to help you improve," she added.

"I guess. I don't like it, though." Jamie reached down, then lifted a heavy book onto his desk. "I was supposed to do my homework earlier, but I didn't feel like it. Can I do it now?"

"Sure."

"Will you stay on while I do it?"

Alex smiled. "You know I will."

Now Jamie was gri

One thing Alex knew in her bones, though: if her father had been alive to hear Grace's deathbed accusation of murder, the events of the past weeks would have unfolded differently. That very night, Bill Fe

None of that had happened, of course. Because like his daughter Grace, Jim Morse was dead. Alex had studied all the eyewitness accounts, but none of them ever dovetailed exactly-unlike the accounts of her own act of lunacy at the bank, when Broadbent was killed. Everybody had seen exactly the same thing on that day. But with her father's death it was different. At age sixty, Jim had walked into a dry cleaner's late on a Friday afternoon. He normally used the drive-through window, but that day he chose to go inside. Two female clerks stood behind the counter. A young black man wearing a three-piece suit was waiting in the store, but he was no customer. The real customers were lying flat on their stomachs behind the counter, beside a grocery bag filled with cash from the register.

Jim didn't know that when he walked in, but Alex figured it had taken him about six seconds to realize something was wrong. No one was going to bluff Jim Morse out of a robbery in progress, no matter how old he was. The girls behind the counter were so scared they could hardly speak when Jim walked up to the counter and started a monologue about the weather: how warm the fall had been, and how it used to snow once or twice a year in Mississippi, but nowadays almost never. One clerk saw Jim glance behind the counter without moving his head, but the other didn't. What she did see was Jim take his wife's clothes from the hanging rod and turn to leave the store. As he passed the waiting "customer," Jim flattened him with a savage blow to the throat. The clerk was shocked that "an old gray-haired dude" had attacked a muscular man in his early twenties. No one who knew Jim Morse was surprised. He'd often carried a gun after retirement, but he hadn't on that day, not for a short run to the cleaner's. Jim was digging in the fallen robber's jacket when the plate-glass window of the store exploded. One clerk screamed, then fell silent as a bullet punctured her left cheek. The other dived behind the counter. After that, few facts were known.

The medical examiner believed that the shot that killed Alex's father had been fired from behind the counter, not from the getaway car parked out front. Not that it mattered. After a lifetime spent courting danger, Jim Morse had simply run out of luck. And despite relentless efforts by the police department, by his old partner, and even a large reward offered by the Police Benevolent Association, his killers were never caught. Alex knew that her father had not wanted to die that day, but she knew something else, too: he would rather have died like that than the way his wife was dying now-in agony and by inches.

The sound of Jamie closing his book startled her from her reverie.

"I'm done," he said, his green eyes still on the screen. "It's way easier when you're with me."

"I like being here with you. It helps me work, too."

Jamie smiled. "You weren't working. I saw you. You were just sitting there."

"I was working in my head. A lot of my work is like that."

Jamie's smile vanished, and he looked away from the screen.

"Jamie? Are you all right? Look at me, honey. Look into the camera."

At length, he did, and his sad eyes pierced her to the core.

"Aunt Alex?"

"Yes?"

"I miss my mom."

Alex forced herself to repress her grief. Tears were pooling in her eyes, but they would not help Jamie. One thing she had learned the hard way: when adults started crying, kids lost all their composure.

"I know you do, baby," she said softly. "I miss her, too."

"She used to say what you said. That she was working in her head."

Alex tilted back her head and wiped her eyes, unable to shut out the memory of the night Grace died, when she'd snatched up Jamie and raced out of the hospital. She hadn't gone far, just to a nearby Pizza Hut, where she'd broken the news of Grace's death and comforted Jamie as best she could. Her own father had died only six months before, and his death had hit Jamie as hard as it had her. But Grace's death was a tragedy of such magnitude that the boy simply could not process it. Alex had buried his head between her breasts, silently praying for the power to revoke death, and hoping that Grace had been out of her mind when she accused her husband of murder.

Alex held an opened hand up to the eye of the camera. "You be strong, little man. You do that for me, okay? Things are going to get better."

Jamie put up his hand, too. "Are they?"

"You bet. I'm working on it right now."

"Good." Jamie looked back at the door. "I guess I better go now."

Alex blinked back more tears. "Same time tomorrow?"

Jamie smiled faintly. "Same time."

Then he was gone.

Alex got up from the desk with tears streaming down her cheeks. She spat curses and stomped around the motel room like a confined mental patient, but she knew she hadn't lost her mind yet. She looked down at the newspaper photo of her father. He would understand why she was living in this claustrophobic motel instead of keeping a deathwatch over her mother's bed. Right or wrong, Jim would be doing the same thing: trying to save his grandson. And no matter what it took, Alex was going to fulfill her promise to Grace. If the Bureau wanted to fire her for doing the job it should have been doing, then the Bureau could go to hell. There was law, and there was justice. And no Morse she was related to had ever had any trouble recognizing the difference.