by Greg Iles
“Alex?” said a deep voice. “Alex!”
“I’m here!” She shielded her eyes with her left hand and reached out with her right. “Don’t touch it, Uncle Will!”
“I’m not Will,” said the voice, and gradually the blur above her coalesced into the face of John Kaiser. His hazel eyes held a worry as paternal as any that her father or Will Kilmer had ever revealed. “You’re in the emergency room at UMC,” Kaiser said. “You’ve got a pretty serious concussion, but otherwise you seem to be all right.”
“Where’s Will?” she asked, gripping the FBI agent’s hand for support. “Tell me he’s not dead.”
“He’s not. He may have some internal injuries. They stitched up his back and admitted him for twenty-four hours’ observation. They’re going to do the same to you.”
She tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea rolled through her stomach. Kaiser eased her back down onto the examining table.
“How long have I been out?”
“Several hours. It’s night.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you, John. I know you told me not to go there. I know—”
“Stop wasting your energy. I should have known you’d go, no matter what. In your place, I probably would have gone, too.”
“What the hell happened? A bomb?”
“You tell me.”
She shook her head, trying to remember. “All I know is, I was looking inside at dogs, hundreds of them, and they were all asleep. Every last one. And it just seemed wrong, you know? Then I heard an engine, and out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a van racing away. It was just like the van that followed me in Natchez, only it was red. And I just knew, you know?”
Kaiser barely nodded, but his eyes told her he’d experienced such intuitive flashes before.
“I knew that somehow Noel Traver was Eldon Tarver, that Tarver was bugging out, and that he had let me get that close to him for a reason.”
“You saw Tarver at the scene?”
“No. But I felt him. He meant to take me out, along with whatever evidence was inside that building.”
Kaiser seemed discouraged by her answer.
“Did you get the warrant for his house?” Alex asked. “Is the SAC still stonewalling on an all-out investigation?”
Kaiser sighed heavily. “Not completely. We did get the warrant for Tarver’s residence, and there’s a team there now.”
Alex raised her eyebrows.
“So far they’ve found nothing incriminating. Zero.”
“Nothing tying him to Rusk?”
Kaiser shook his head. “But the VCP stuff you uncovered is mind-blowing. In conjunction with the explosion at the breeding facility, that convinced Tyler to ask for the search warrant. We just need to find some evidence that’s fresher than thirty years old.”
“What about Rusk? You should search his residence and his office.”
“Tyler won’t budge on that. He keeps saying there’s no probable cause even to investigate Rusk, much less search his house or office. And technically speaking, he’s right.”
“Come on, John. Tyler’s just—”
“The special agent in charge. Don’t forget that. He has authority over every FBI agent in Mississippi. Don’t worry, Rusk is bottled up in his house right now, and I’ve got six agents covering the place.”
“No idea where Dr. Tarver is?”
“None.”
“Thora Shepard?”
Kaiser looked embarrassed. “She was in Rusk’s office this afternoon, but somehow she slipped out without our guys seeing her.”
“Come on!” cried Alex, coming off the table again.
“A lot of people work in that building, Alex. Four agents just weren’t enough.”
“What about Chris?”
Kaiser pushed her back down. “Dr. Shepard is here in the hospital.”
A stab of fear went through her.
“He’s conscious, and he’s doing a little better. He has a high fever, and he’s seriously dehydrated. He called 911 from the hotel, and when he got here, he asked for an old med-school classmate. Dr. Clarke.”
“My mother’s oncologist?”
“Yes. Between Dr. Clarke and Tom Cage, they managed to check Chris into the oncology unit here. He’s just a few doors down from your mother. Now they’ve got an oncologist from Sloan-Kettering involved.”
Alex could scarcely comprehend it all. She felt as though she had come out of heavy sedation for surgery. “What about Chris’s son? Ben Shepard? He’s only nine, and he’s staying with some older woman in Natchez. Has anyone checked on him?”
“Dr. Shepard was delirious when he arrived, but he kept asking about the boy—and you, by the way. He finally managed to make a call. Ben seems to be fine, and Dr. Cage promised to check on him.”
Alex struggled to see all angles of the situation through the fog in her mind. “Thora could be a threat to Ben,” she thought aloud. “She’s got to be out of her mind with fear. She’s also a major threat to Andrew Rusk and his accomplice. What if she never left that building, John? What if she’s hiding up there?”
Kaiser considered this.
Alex grabbed his arm. “What if Rusk killed her up there?”
“Rusk hasn’t killed anyone yet, has he?”
“I have no idea. But Christ, for all we know, Tarver could have been up in Rusk’s office today. You know?”
“I guess it’s possible. Do you think they’d move so quickly against Thora?”
“Two words: William Braid.”
Kaiser grimaced. “Damn it. All right, I’ll get some people to start searching that tower.”
“Officially?”
“No. But if we find a corpse, the case will break wide open. We can haul Rusk in and put his feet to the fire.”
“I hope you find a very scared woman. Will Kilmer overheard Thora screaming at Rusk to cancel the hit on Chris. If she would turn state’s evidence, we’d have Rusk by the balls. And I guarantee Rusk would cut a deal and give us Dr. Tarver.”
“You really believe Thora would talk?”
“You show her the alternative, she’ll crack. She wouldn’t last a day in prison.”
Kaiser squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “I’m going now. It’s time you got some rest.”
Alex snorted in contempt. “You know I can’t sleep with all this going on.”
“Then I’ll have the doctor sedate you.”
“You can’t sedate someone who has a concussion.”
Kaiser shook his head in exasperation, but Alex could tell he was glad to see her healthy enough to argue with him.
“If you’ll get them to discharge me,” she said, “I promise I won’t leave the hospital. I’ll spend the night in my mother’s room. That way, I can keep an eye on both her and Chris.”
Kaiser stared at her for a long time. “Stay here,” he said finally. “Stay right here, as in do not move. I’ll see what I can do.”
CHAPTER 48
Andrew Rusk blinked awake to a hell beyond anything that his subconscious had ever spewed into his nightmares. Dr. Tarver had duct-taped him to the chair behind his desk. His mouth was taped shut. Lisa was sitting opposite him on the leather sofa, her slim wrists and ankles taped together, a silver rectangle of tape sealing her lips. Her eyes looked twice their normal size; more white than color was showing.
Tarver stood between Lisa and the desk, holding both arms high above his head. In his hands, twisting and curling about his muscular forearms, were two thick, black snakes with heads as big as a man’s fist. A maniacal light shone from Tarver’s eyes; some might have called it religious fervor, but Rusk knew better. Eldon Tarver was as far from God as a man could get. The doctor spun almost gracefully around the room, as though hypnotizing the serpents into passivity, yet the flexing tubular bodies never ceased their motion.
The room stank of urine, and Rusk soon saw why: Lisa’s biking shorts were stained from her navel to her knees. Every square inch of his own skin was popping with sweat, but at lea
st he hadn’t pissed himself yet. The throbbing at the base of his skull had all but ceased, or maybe it had been blotted out by the agony radiating from his sternum. A bolt of terror shot through him when he saw the two spots of blood on his shirt, but then he saw a shining tangle of silver wire near Dr. Tarver’s feet. Taser wires. Now he remembered the gun coming up in the hallway…the nearly point-blank shot at his chest. It was a stun gun. That was how Tarver had gotten him into this chair.
The doctor stopped his eerie dance and sat sideways on the desk, facing Rusk. The snake nearest Andrew was thicker than his forearm, with a diamond-shaped head and bulging poison sacs beneath its eyes. Cottonmouth moccasin, he thought. The knowledge made his sphincter clench. Unlike most snakes, cottonmouths would not retreat when humans approached. They were highly territorial and would stand their ground, sometimes attacking and even pursuing an intruder.
“I see you thinking, Andrew,” said Dr. Tarver. “I’m sure by now you’ve worked out exactly why I’m here.”
Rusk shook his head, but he knew all right. Eldon Tarver hadn’t broken through a ring of armed FBI agents to do a fucking snake dance in Rusk’s study. He wanted the diamonds. All of them.
“No?” said Tarver. “Perhaps you’re a little distracted by my friends.”
He stretched out his right arm until the nearer snake’s head was within striking distance of Rusk’s face. Rusk’s throat sealed shut, locking his breath in his chest. The pupils of the moccasin’s eyes were vertical ellipses, like cats’ eyes. Rusk saw the heat-sensing pits that his scoutmaster had taught him to look for a quarter century ago. As though sensing his fear, the cottonmouth opened its huge mouth to reveal a puffy white oval topped with lethal two-inch fangs. The stench from its mouth was sickening—dead fish and other nameless creatures—but Rusk had passed beyond thought. When the doctor moved the snake closer, the ocean of piss Rusk had successfully withheld in junior high school flooded his khakis.
“The diamonds, Andrew,” Dr. Tarver said in a voice of eminent reasonableness. “Where are they?”
Lisa was whimpering steadily on the sofa, but Rusk forced himself not to look. His inability to help her might unman him at the moment when he most needed his full faculties. He wished to God Tarver hadn’t taped his mouth shut. He felt powerless without his voice. He was a lawyer, after all, a wizard in the art of persuasion—or so a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger had once written about him. Maybe that was why Tarver had taped his mouth.
Bullshit, said his father’s voice. He taped your mouth so you can’t scream and alert the FBI agents outside. Rusk hated that voice, but he knew he had to heed it. There was no room for illusion now. Dr. Tarver was back on his feet, spinning slowly, constantly changing the elevation of his arms as he did. Motion must have something to do with keeping the snakes from biting him. Or maybe it’s just professional courtesy—one cold-blooded killer to another—
“Where are they, Andrew?” Dr. Tarver asked in a singsong voice. “Do you want an up-close-and-personal experience with these creatures of God? Perhaps your lovely bride likes serpents better than you do.”
Tarver danced over toward Lisa. She huddled on the sofa in a fetal position, alternately shutting her eyes and opening them wide, unable to endure the horror but too afraid she would be bitten while her eyes were closed.
“These are sacred creatures, Lisa,” Tarver murmured. “They represent both life and death. Death and rebirth. I’m sure through your provincial eyes, you see the serpent of the Christian garden, who so easily corrupted Eve”—he bent and caressed Lisa’s thighs with a scaly tail—“but that’s such a limited view.”
The scream that burst from Lisa’s diaphragm ballooned her taped-shut lips and trumpeted from her nostrils. A few more screams like that, Rusk thought, and she’ll be bleeding from her nose. She’ll drown in her own blood.
Laughing quietly, Dr. Tarver took two steps back and opened the mouth of a white croker sack with his foot, then dipped and thrust one of the moccasins into the bag. Stepping on the mouth of the moving sack, he pulled it tight with a drawstring. Then, caressing the head of the remaining snake, he came around the desk and addressed Rusk again.
“I’m going to partly remove the tape from your lips, Andrew. You will not scream. You will not beg. You will not plead for your life or hers. I know the stones are here. I know your escape plan, remember? I set it up. But it’s time to let go of your banana-republic dream and save yourself, like the smart man you’ve always thought you were.”
He reached out and pulled an inch of tape from the corner of Rusk’s mouth. Rusk remembered his instructions, but he could not obey them. In a parched croak, he said, “You’re going to kill me no matter what I do.”
Dr. Tarver shook his head with an expression of regret, then walked to the corner and picked up a putter that Rusk kept there to practice his short game. Gripping the head of the golf club, Tarver began to tease the moccasin with its padded handle. He jabbed its snout again and again, causing the snake to bare its fangs and strike at the club.
A sharp odor of musk filled the room, utterly alien and yet, after Rusk had inhaled it two or three times, eerily familiar. Some primitive part of his brain had recognized the odor of a reptile under stress, and the swampy scent sucked fear from his glands in a way he had never known before.
“He’s a fearsome killer, Agkistrodon piscivorus,” said the doctor. “Nothing like the coral snake. The elapids are deadlier per milliliter of venom, but the results of envenomation are quite different. With the coral snake, you get numbness, sweating, shortness of breath, paralysis, and death. But with these babies, you get a much nastier spectrum of consequences. The venom is a hemotoxin, a complex mix of proteins that starts destroying blood cells and dissolving vascular walls the instant it enters your flesh. It even dissolves muscle tissue. The pain, I’m told, is really beyond description, and the swelling, my God, I’ve seen it split the skin. Within hours gangrene sets in, and the skin turns black as roadkill on an August day. A life-altering experience altogether, Andrew, if you survive it. Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind?”
Rusk stared back at Tarver with utter resignation. No matter what the doctor promised, he meant to kill them tonight. To Rusk’s surprise, this knowledge freed him from much of his fear. He had tempted death often in the past, but he’d always done it by choice, usually with other thrill-seeking yuppies who knew that if the shit hit the fan, paid experts would pull their asses out of the fire or off the mountain, whatever the situation required.
This was different.
This was a battle to the death, and there were no paid allies on his side. What he knew was this: he was willing to die in agony, but he wasn’t willing to let Eldon Tarver steal the fruits of five years’ labor. Rusk also knew that his newfound courage was not based on a rush of endorphins that would dissipate in a few minutes. Somewhere deep within him, a remnant of the Boy Scout still survived. And that scout knew that the bites of cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, while every bit as painful as Tarver had described, were rarely fatal. If the cottonmouth coiling around Tarver’s arm bit Rusk on an extremity, he might well lose an arm—or even a leg—in the morning. But he wouldn’t die. And therein lay his secret advantage. He was willing to trade an arm for $20 million. Because by morning, the FBI agents outside would start to wonder why he hadn’t left for work. And if Alex Morse was pushing as hard as she usually did, they might crash in here even sooner. Rusk looked steadily at Tarver and said, “The diamonds aren’t here.”
What happened next blasted all his logic to hell. Tarver leaned over Lisa, rapped the snake twice on the snout with the golf club, then let it go. The moccasin struck in a blur, hitting Lisa in the upper chest. When the blur stopped, the snake’s head was clenched tight around Lisa’s forearm. She leaped up from the sofa and flung her bound arms around like a woman possessed by demons. Finally, the snake let go, and its heavy body thudded against a row of books.
Dr. Tarver was on the snake in a moment
. He distracted it with the flashing head of the putter, then grabbed it behind the head and held it high.
Lisa had collapsed onto the sofa and was now staring at two puncture wounds in her forearm. Her breathing grew more and more frantic until foam emerged from her nostrils. When she started jerking like an epileptic, Rusk feared she might have a heart attack.
Dr. Tarver walked back to the desk, his eyes devoid of emotion. “You see the consequences of noncooperation. I’m going to give you one more chance, Andrew. Before I do, I’m going to explain something. I have no intention of killing you. If I kill you here, that creates a host of problems for me. Your EX NIHILO mechanism, for example. Not to mention a murder investigation. But if I leave you alive, there’ll be no murder investigation, and you’ll take care of the EX NIHILO business for me. You can’t release that confession, because your hands are tied by your own guilt. The way it’s always been. You see? You can survive this night. Your diamonds are the price of life. I know you’ve had your heart set on spending that money, but what’s money weighed against thirty or forty more years of life? You have plenty of time to earn more. But I don’t. I must take what life offers.”
Tarver came around the desk and sat only inches away from him. The moccasin was struggling to escape. “Put your trust in logic, Andrew. I’m much safer with you alive than with you dead.”
Rusk looked across the room. Lisa lay shivering on the sofa, still staring at the holes in her arm. Two tracks of blood and yellow fluid had dribbled down to her hand, and there was already pronounced swelling at the site of the bite. As Rusk stared, her facial expression changed from the stunned shock of an accident victim to fearful curiosity. She lifted her taped hands and pulled down the front of her tank top, exposing her left breast. Where the inner curve of the breast met her sternum were two more puncture marks, an inch apart and joined by a dark purple swelling. Lisa’s eyes bulged like those of a woman suffering hyperthyroidism. She tried to get to her feet again, but this time she tumbled onto the floor.
