A perfect murder is worth waiting for.”
She has a point, Chris thought. “I can see that. But no matter how you slice it, there’s an element of urgency in a divorce situation. People go crazy. They’ll do anything to get out of their marriage. There’s a frantic desire to move on, to marry their lover, whatever.”
“You’re right, of course,” Morse agreed. “But you’ve already waited years for your freedom. Maybe decades. Any divorce lawyer can tell you that obtaining a divorce—the whole process from beginning to end—can take a very long time. If the divorce is contested, we’re talking nightmare delays. Even filing under irreconcilable differences, spouses often argue back and forth for a year or more. People are hurting, they stonewall, negotiations break down. You can wind up in court even if it’s the last thing you wanted. Years can go by.” Morse was suddenly puffing hard. “If your lawyer told you that in the same amount of time that your divorce would take, he could save you millions of dollars, guarantee you full custody of your children, and prevent them from hating you—you’d have to at least consider what he had to say, wouldn’t you?”
They were crossing the high bridge over Cole’s Creek. Chris braked to a stop, climbed off, and leaned the Trek against the concrete rail.
“You’ve got me,” he said. “If you remove urgency from the equation, then a delayed-action weapon becomes viable. You could use something like cancer as a weapon. If it’s technically possible.”
“Thank you,” Alex said softly. She leaned her bike against the concrete and gazed at the brown water drifting lazily over the sand fifty feet below.
Chris watched a burst of tiny drops pepper the surface of the water, then vanish. The rain was slacking off. “Didn’t you tell me that some of the victims were men?”
“Yes. In two cases, the surviving spouses were female.”
“So there’s a precedent for women murdering the husbands in this thing.”
Morse took a deep breath, then looked up at him and said, “That’s why I’m here with you, Doctor.”
Chris tried to imagine Thora secretly driving up to Jackson for a clandestine meeting with a divorce lawyer. He simply couldn’t do it. “I buy your logic, okay? But in my case it’s irrelevant, and for lots of reasons. The main one is that if Thora asked me for a divorce, I’d give her one. Simple as that. And I think she knows that.”
Morse shrugged. “I don’t know the lady.”
“You’re right. You don’t.” The concrete rail was not even waist high to Chris. He sometimes urinated off it during his rides. He suppressed the urge to do so now.
“It’s beautiful down there,” Morse said, gazing down the winding course of the creek. “It looks like virgin wilderness.”
“It’s as close as you’ll find. It hasn’t been logged since the 1930s, and it’s federal land. I spent a lot of time walking that creek as a boy. I found dozens of arrowheads and spear points in it. The Natchez Indians hunted along that creek for a thousand years before the French came.”
She smiled. “You’re lucky to have had a childhood like that.”
Chris knew she was right. “We only lived in Natchez for a few years—IP moved my dad around a lot, between mills, you know?—but Dad showed me a lot of things out in these woods. After heavy rains, we’d each take one bank of the creek and work our way along it. After one mudslide, I found three huge bones. They turned out to be from a woolly mammoth. Fifteen thousand years old.”
“Wow. I had no idea that kind of stuff was around here.”
Chris nodded. “We’re walking in footsteps everywhere we go.”
“The footsteps of the dead.”
He looked up at the sound of an approaching engine. It was a park ranger’s cruiser. He lifted his hand, recalling a female ranger who’d patrolled this stretch of the Trace for a couple of years. After she moved on, he’d seen her face on the back of a bestselling mystery novel set on the Trace. The place seemed to touch everyone who spent time here.
“What are you thinking, Doctor?”
He was thinking about Darryl Foster, and what Foster had told him about Alexandra Morse. Chris didn’t want to bluntly challenge her, but he did want to know how honest she was being with him.
“From the moment we met,” he said, looking into her green eyes, “you’ve been digging into my personal life. I want to dig into yours for a minute.”
He could almost see the walls going up. But at length she nodded assent. What choice did she have?
“Your scars,” he said. “I can tell they’re recent. I want to know how you got them.”
She turned away and stared down at the rippling sand beneath the surface of the water. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice that had surrendered something. Gone was the professional authority, yet in its place was a raw sincerity that told him he was hearing something very like the truth.
“There was a man,” she said. “A man I worked with at the Bureau. His name was James Broadbent. People called him Jim, but he preferred James. They often assigned him to protect me at hostage scenes. He … he was in love with me. I really cared for him, too, but he was married. Two kids. We were never intimate, but even if we had been, he would never have left his family. Never. You understand?”
Chris nodded.
She looked back down at the water. “I was a good hostage negotiator, Doctor. Some said the best ever. In five years I never lost a hostage. That’s rare. But last December …” Morse faltered, then found the thread again. “My father was killed trying to stop a robbery. Two months later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Very advanced, and you know what that means.”
“I’m sorry.”
Morse shrugged. “I sort of lost it after that. Only I didn’t know it, see? My dad had raised me to be tough, so that’s what I tried to be. ‘Never quit,’ that’s the Morse motto. From Winston Churchill to my father and right down to me.”
Chris nodded with as much empathy as he could.
“I’m getting to the scars, I promise,” she said. “Nine weeks ago, I was called to a hostage scene at a bank. Not a normal bank. A Federal Reserve bank in D.C. Sixteen hostages inside, most of them employees. A lot of suits at the Bureau had the idea this was a terrorist attack. Others thought it was about money. It could have been both—a sophisticated robbery raising capital for terrorist operations. But my gut told me it was something else. The leader spoke with an Arabic accent, but it didn’t sound real to me. He was angry, maybe schizophrenic. He had a lot of rage toward the government. I could tell he’d experienced loss in the recent past, like a lot of people who try something extreme.” Morse gave Chris a tight smile. “Like me, you’re thinking? Anyway, an associate deputy director named Dodson had overall command, and he didn’t give me enough time to do my job. I had a real chance to talk the leader down without anyone firing a shot. All my experience and instinct told me that. And there were sixteen lives at stake, you know? But there was a lot of pressure from above, this being Washington in its post-9/11 mind-set. So Dodson jerked me out of there and ordered in the HRT.”
Chris saw that she was reliving the memory as she recounted the events. She’d probably been over it a million times in the privacy of her head, but how many times had she spoken of it to someone else?
“There was no way to resolve the situation with snipers. It had to be an explosive entry, which meant extreme risk to the hostages. I couldn’t accept that. So I marched right back through the cordon and into the bank. My people were screaming at me, but I barely heard them. Some HRT guys didn’t get the word in time, and they blew the doors and windows just as I reached the lobby. Flash-bang-crash grenades, the works.” Morse touched her scarred cheek as though feeling the injury for the first time. “One of the robbers shot me from