True Evil

"And just how do you suggest I find this supercop?"

"Get on the Internet, I guess. You spend enough time on there playing poker and shopping eBay. The least you can do is locate one old classmate for me."

Jane harrumphed loudly. "I'll give it a try, I guess."

"Don't strain yourself."

She hung up without a word, but Chris knew she would have the number in less than an hour.

Don't change your routine, Agent Morse had said. Don't do anything that might tip off your killer…

"My killer," Chris said aloud. "This has got to be bullshit."

He picked up his stethoscope and walked to the door, but Jane's buzz brought him back to his desk. He grabbed his phone. "You found Foster already?"

"Not yet. Your wife's on the phone."

Chris felt another wave of numbness. Thora rarely called his office; she knew he was too busy to spend time on the phone. He looked down at her picture, waiting for a spark of instinct about what to do. But what he saw before him wasn't his wife, but Special Agent Alex Morse, regarding him coolly from behind her scars.

Stupid mistakes, Morse had said. Even the best of us make them.

"Tell Thora I'm with a patient, Jane."

"What?" asked the receptionist, clearly surprised.

"I'm way behind already. Just do it. I'll call her back in a little while."

"Whatever you say. You sign my checks."

Chris started to hang up, but at the last second he said, "Find Foster's number for me, okay? Stat."

The playfulness went out of Jane's voice; she knew when her boss meant business.

"You got it, Doc."

CHAPTER 3

Andrew Rusk was afraid.

He stood at the window of his law office and gazed out over the jigsaw skyline of Jackson, Mississippi. Not an impressive vista as cityscapes went, but Rusk did have the corner office on the sixteenth floor. Looking north, he could see all the way to the forested plains where white flight was expanding once-sleepy counties into bustling enclaves for twenty-first-century yuppies. Farther on, the new Nissan plant was bringing relative wealth to the state's struggling blue-collar workers. They commuted up to a hundred miles a day, both ways, from the tiny towns surrounding the state capital.

Behind him-out of sight to the west-lived the uneducated blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables." The untouchables killed each other at an alarming rate and preyed upon others with enough regularity to breed deep anxiety in the white citizens of Jackson. But they weren't the source of his fear. They were invisible from his office, and he worked hard to keep them that way in all areas of his life. To that end, he had built his home in an oak forest north of the city, near A

Every afternoon at four thirty, Rusk took the elevator down to the garage, climbed into his black Porsche Caye

But now the taste of fear overrode that of food. Rusk had not felt real fear for twenty-five years, but he'd never forgotten it. Fear tasted like junior high school: like being backed into a corner by a tenth grader who wanted to beat your face into red pulp, your friends watching but too petrified to help, your bladder threatening to send an ocean of piss down your leg. Rusk lifted a tumbler of bourbon to his lips and took a long pull. Whiskey at work was an indulgence, one he'd allowed himself more and more in the past weeks, a balm against the fear.

He refilled the tumbler with Woodford Reserve, then lifted a five-by-seven photograph from his desktop. The photo showed a dark-haired woman with an angular face and deep-set eyes-the kind of eyes that looked alive even on a piece of paper. Rusk knew that the woman in that picture would never fall for his sweetest pickup line. Maybe if he'd caught her young-a freshman in college when he was a senior, drunk at a frat party, like that-but even then he doubted it. This girl had what most women didn't-self-confidence-and she had it in spades. The apple of her daddy's eye, you could tell. That was probably what had led her to the FBI.

"Special Agent Alex," he murmured. "Nosy bitch."

Rusk's phone rang, and his secretary answered it. They still had secretaries at his little firm-not goddamn personal assistants-and they were old-school girls, all the way. They gave and received generous perks, and everybody stayed happy. Rusk had read that there was a rule at the Google headquarters in Mountain View: no worker should ever be more than fifty feet away from food. To that end, snack stations had been set up throughout the Googleplex. The Rusk rule-established by Andrew's father at his much more venerable firm-predated the Google edict by five decades, and it went thus: no partner should ever be more than fifty feet from a good and willing piece of ass. Andrew junior had imported this tradition into his own firm, with most gratifying results.

He gulped the last slug from the tumbler and walked to his desk, where his flat-panel monitor glowed insistently. Flickering on the screen was the portal graphic of a Dutch Web site called EX NIHILO-a black hole with a shimmering event horizon. Rusk remembered a little Latin from his days in prep school: ex nihilo meant "out of nothing." For a considerable fee, EX NIHILO provided absolute anonymity in the digital domain. The company also provided other services requiring discretion, and it was one of those services that Rusk had contracted for today. He suspected that kiddie-porn addicts made up the lion's share of EX NIHILO's clients, but he didn't care. All that mattered was that the company could protect him.

Partners, he thought, recalling his father's cynical voice. All partnerships fail in the end, just like marriages. The only life after death any human being will ever know is staying in a marriage or a partnership after it's over. And that's not life-it's living death. Rusk hated most things about his father, but one thing he could not deny: the man had been right about most things in life. Rusk moved his cursor into a blank box and typed 3.141592653-pi to the ninth decimal place. As a boy, he'd memorized pi to the fortieth decimal place to impress his father. Immediately after his proud di

Rusk retyped his password, then clicked CONFIRM. With this act, he armed a digital mechanism that might well become his sole means of survival during the next few weeks. He had no illusions about that. His partner would tolerate zero risk; he had made that clear at the outset. In fact, the man was so obsessive about security that he had not only created a code name-Glykon-for Andrew to use in their conversations, which were few (Rusk had googled Glykon, but all he'd discovered was a Greek snake god that had protected his believers in AD 160 by dispelling a plague cloud with a magical spell), Rusk's Glykon had rather absurdly insisted that Andrew think of him by the code name on any occasion where thought about their business was required. "Security is based on rigorous habits," Glykon insisted, and the fu