by Greg Iles
Dr. Tarver had seen only two other humans so far, both runners. Not many people ventured into this corner of the park, where branches hung low to the ground and the path was overgrown in many places. The doctor had startled both runners, partly by his simple presence at this place and time, but also because of his appearance. Eldon Tarver would never be mistaken for a runner.
He was not dressed in shorts or warm-ups, but in cheap slacks and a pullover from the Casual Male Big & Tall shop on County Line Road. Dr. Tarver stood six feet three inches tall, with a barrel chest and ropy arms covered with black hair. He had been bald since the age of forty, but he wore a full gray beard that gave him the look of a Mennonite preacher. He had preacher’s eyes, too—not parson’s eyes, but the burning orbs of a revealed prophet—bright blue irises that shimmered in the center of their dark sockets like coins at the bottom of a well. When he was angry, those eyes could burn like the eyes of a demon, but few people had ever seen this. More often, his eyes radiated a glacial coldness. Some women at the medical center thought him handsome, but others called him downright ugly, this impression being bolstered by what most people thought was a wine-stain birthmark on his left cheek. The disfiguring mark was actually a severe arteriovenous anomaly, a horror that had begun mildly during childhood but which during puberty had flamed to the surface like the sign of a guilty conscience. All these qualities had combined to make even the large male runner jig five steps to the right as he passed, for it took five steps to get clear of the bearded giant ambling along the path with his aluminum stick and duffel bag.
As the first yellow rays of sunlight spilled through the oak limbs to the east, another runner appeared—a girl this time, a vision in tight blue Under Armour with white wires trailing from her golden hair. The wires disappeared into an iPod strapped to her upper arm. Dr. Tarver wanted to watch her approach, but just then he noticed another bird off the path, this one twitching in its death throes. It might have fallen only seconds ago.
The girl’s shoes swished through the dewy grass as she left the asphalt path on the side opposite the doctor. She tried to make it appear as though she’d done this out of courtesy, but she could not deceive him. He divided his attention between the girl and the bird, one filled with life, the other dying fast. She tried not to look at him as she sprinted past, but she couldn’t manage it. Twice her pupils flicked toward him, gauging the distance, making sure he hadn’t moved closer. Threat assessment was such a finely tuned gift, one of the blessings of evolution. He smiled as the girl passed, then turned and regarded her flexing glutes as they receded from view, appreciating their shape with the cool regard of an expert anatomist.
After she’d vanished around a bend, he stood still, breathing the wake of her perfume—an ill-advised accessory for morning jogs if one wanted to avoid unwelcome attention. After the fragrance had dissipated beyond detection, he knelt, donned surgical gloves, and withdrew a scalpel, a syringe, and a culture dish from his pocket. Then he tied on a surgical mask and laid open the sparrow’s breast with a single incision. With a long finger he exposed the bird’s liver. Inserting the tip of the hypodermic into the nearly black organ, he exerted a gentle back-pressure and probed with the needle until he was rewarded with a slow spurt of blood. He needed only a single cc—less, actually—but he took the full amount possible, then snapped the sparrow’s neck with a quick twist and tossed its carcass into the underbrush.
Opening the petri dish, Dr. Tarver squirted some blood onto the layer of minced chick embryo inside and rubbed it around with a sterile swab taken from his pocket. Then he closed the dish and slipped it into the duffel with the Ziploc bags. His gloves came off with a snap—those went into the bag, as well—and then he cleaned his hands with a dab of Purell. A good morning’s work. When he got back to the lab, he’d test the last bird first. He felt confident that it was a carrier.
A slow shiver in the grass where he’d tossed the sparrow raised the hair on his arms. The accompanying sound was faint, but the sounds of childhood never faded. Dr. Tarver set down the Nike bag and walked lightly—very lightly, considering his size—toward the closing groove in the grass. As soon as he saw the rotting log, he knew. He closed his eyes for a moment, stilling himself at the center. Then he reached down with his left hand and lifted the log. What he saw beneath fluttered his heart: no crotalid, but a beautiful coil of red, yellow, and black shimmering in the sun.
“Micrurus fulvius fulvius,” he whispered.
He had uncovered an eastern coral snake, one of the shiest serpents in America, and undoubtedly the deadliest. With a fluid motion like that of a father stroking his child’s hair, Tarver took hold of the stirring elapid behind its head and lifted it into the air. The brightly banded body coiled around his forearm—a full twenty inches of him—but this was not a strong snake. A cottonmouth or rattler would have struggled, using its strong muscles to try to whip away from him and strike. But the coral snake was no brutish pit viper, injecting prey with crude hemotoxin that caused terrible pain and swelling as it ate away the walls of blood vessels, bringing gangrene and infection to its human victims. No, the coral was a refined killer. Like its relative the cobra, it injected pure neurotoxin, which brought only numbness before shutting down the central nervous system of its prey, quickly bringing on paralysis and death.
Dr. Tarver was a pathologist, not a herpetologist, but he had a long history with snakes. It had begun in childhood, this education, and not by choice. For Dr. Tarver, serpents were inevitably bound up with the idea of God. Not the way his adoptive parents had seen this relationship—because only fools tempted death as a test of faith—but bound up with God nonetheless. As a boy Eldon had watched dozens of frightened rattlesnakes held high by chanting hillbillies who believed that God had anointed them against the lethal compounds in the bulging poison sacs behind the slitted eyes. He knew better. He had seen many of those hillbillies bitten on their hands, arms, necks, and faces, and every blessed one had suffered fleshly torments beyond their imagination. Some had lost digits, others limbs, and two had lost their lives. Eldon knew their fates because he had been one of those hillbillies once, not by choice or even by birth but by the authority of the State of Tennessee. He also knew that the skeptics who accused his adoptive father of keeping the snakes in refrigerators to make them sluggish, or of milking their venom before the services, had no idea whom they were talking about. The faith of those hillbillies was as genuine as the rocks they plowed from the brick-hard earth of the Appalachian foothills every day but Sunday. They wanted death in the church with them when they witnessed to the Lord. Eldon had personally gathered many of the vipers for Sunday and Wednesday services. The church elders had quickly seen that the big, birth-marked boy taken from the Presbyterian Children’s Home in Knoxville had the gift—so much so that his adoptive father had begged him to take up the cloth himself. But that was another story….
Eldon watched the sunlight play upon the coral’s overlapping scales, each scale part of a perfect minuet of indescribable beauty. There had been no corals in Tennessee. You had to go east to North Carolina or south to Mississippi to find them. But during his long walks in the wilderness around Jackson, he had seen three or four in the past few years. It was one of the hidden pleasures of this much-maligned state.
The serpent’s body curled around his arm in a fluid figure eight, a perfect symbol of infinity. His adoptive father’s congregation had believed snakes to be incarnations of Satan, but the twin serpents on the caduceus that Eldon wore on a chain around his neck were far more representative of the reptile’s true nature, at least in the symbolic realm. Serpents symbolized healing because the ancient Greeks had seen their skin-shedding as a process of healing and rebirth. Had the Greeks understood microbiology, they would have observed much deeper links between serpents and the secret machinery of life. But even the ancients had understood that snakes personified the fundamental paradox of all medicinal drugs: in small doses they cured, while in large ones they killed.
He held the coral snake up to his face and laughed richly, then opened the Nike bag, slid the snake inside, and zipped it shut.
Turning toward the distant clearing where he’d parked his car, Dr. Tarver experienced a sense of fulfillment that far exceeded that which he had felt upon finding the dead birds. Indeed, he felt blessed. Americans lived in constant fear, yet they never really knew how close they were to death at all hours of the day and night. If you wanted to find death, you hardly had to go looking for it.
Stay in one place long enough, and it would find you.
Dr. Tarver’s journey to his laboratory took him north along Interstate 55, east of the main cluster of office buildings that surrounded Jackson’s great capitol dome. To his left, the AmSouth tower jutted up from the low skyline of the capital city. His gaze moved along the sixteenth floor, to the blue-black windows of the corner office. Eldon had driven along this interstate and checked those windows almost every day for the past five years. But today was the first time that sunlight had ever flashed back from the office like a silver beacon, reflecting off the aluminum foil that he had named as an emergency signal all those years ago.
The muscles of his big chest tightened, and his breathing shallowed. There had been bumps in the road before—small matters of planning, or miscommunication. But never had anything justified the use of this signal. The foil meant real trouble. Eldon had chosen this primitive method for precisely the same reason that intelligence agencies did. If you were truly in danger, possibly even blown, the worst thing you could do was contact your associates by any traceable method. Unlike a telephone or a computer or a pager, the foil was nonspecific. No one could ever prove it was a signal. Not even the NSA could train cameras on every square inch of land from which that square of foil could be seen. No, the foil had been a good idea. So had the prearranged meeting. Andrew Rusk knew where to go; the question was, could he get there without being followed?
What could the emergency signal imply other than unwanted interest on the part of someone? But who? The police? The FBI? At the most fundamental level, it didn’t matter. Dr. Tarver’s first instinct was to eliminate the source of the danger. Only Andrew Rusk knew his identity, or anything about his recent activities. And Rusk could not be trusted to keep silent under pressure.
The lawyer thought he was strong, and by the standards of the early-twenty-first-century yuppie he might be. But that particular subspecies of Homo sapiens had no clue to the true nature of strength or hardship. No idea of self-reliance. Seconds after seeing the aluminum foil, Eldon was thinking of finding a comfortable perch overlooking one of the streets Rusk drove every day and putting a large-caliber bullet through the lawyer’s cerebral cortex. Only by doing this could he insure his own safety. Of course, if he killed Rusk, he would never know the nature of the threat. Killing Rusk would also mean activating his escape plan, and Dr. Tarver wasn’t ready to leave the country yet. He still had important work to do.
He glanced down at the Nike bag on the front seat beside him. The prearranged meeting place was thirty miles away. Did he have time to run the birds out to his lab? Should he risk meeting Rusk at all? Yes, answered his instinct. Not one death has yet been called murder by the police. Not publicly anyway. Even logic dictated that he should risk the meeting. No one could trap him in the place he had designated.
A new possibility arced through Eldon’s mind. What if Rusk had put up the aluminum foil as bait? What if he’d somehow been caught and, in exchange for leniency, was offering up his accomplice on a platter? There might be cops waiting at the lab right now. Eldon could afford to lose the birds. West Nile was an unpredictable virus, highly variable in patient populations, depending on preexisting immunities, cross-immunities, other factors. The possibility of capture outweighed any possible gain in research. Dr. Tarver gripped the wheel tighter, exited I-55 at Northside Drive, then got back onto the elevated freeway, heading south.
What about the coral snake, though? He hated the idea of ditching it with the birds. Perhaps it should attend the emergency meeting. Or should he do as he’d once done after his briefcase was stolen from his car at the mall? Park his unlocked car in a remote section of the lot with an expensive bag on the seat. In the chaotic free-for-all of crime that was Jackson, a thief had stolen the bag in less than thirty minutes. Dr. Tarver had always imagined the look on the felon’s face when he expectantly opened the bag and found not plunder but a coiled whip of muscle and deadly fangs. Instant karma, shitbird…
A wicked smile glittered in his beard. It was funny how seemingly unrelated events revealed hidden significance as time passed. The foil on the building and the coral snake might well be connected in some Jungian web of synchronicity. Maybe the snake was somehow the resolution of the problem signaled by the foil.
He unzipped the bag and waited for the yellow-banded head to emerge. Ten miles melted beneath his tires before it did. When the first red band slid out of the bag, Dr. Tarver took the coral’s head between his thumb and forefinger and drew its body out of the bag. Children were sometimes bitten by corals because the snakes were so beautiful that kids couldn’t resist picking them up. Were corals not naturally so secretive, there would be a lot more dead children in the American South.
The serpent hung suspended for a moment, then coiled itself around the doctor’s big forearm for the second time. A euphoric rush dilated his blood vessels. Unlike chemically induced highs, the reaction caused by the sliding of scales against his bare skin never lost its potency. He felt the thrill of a young boy holding a gun for the first time: the intoxicating power of holding death in your hand. The death of others, the ability to bring about your own…
As he drove southward, Dr. Tarver reveled in the proximity of eternity.
CHAPTER 9
Even after three shots of vodka, Chris found himself unable to sleep. At 5 a.m. he finally gave up. He slid silently out of bed and dressed in the closet, then walked out to the garage, loaded his bike onto the rack on his pickup, and drove twenty minutes to the north side of town. There, under a violet sky, he topped off his high-pressure tires, mounted his carbon fiber Trek, and started pedaling north on the lonely gray stripe of the Natchez Trace.
The windless air had felt warm and close while he was filling his tires, but now his forward motion cooled him to the point of a chill. This far south, most of the two-lane Trace was a tunnel created by the high, arching branches of the red oaks that lined the parkway. The effect was that of a natural cathedral that extended for miles. Through the few breaks in the canopy Chris saw a yellow half-moon, still high despite the slowly rising sun. He pumped his legs with a metronomic rhythm, breathing with almost musical regularity. Small animals skittered away as he passed, and every half mile or so, groups of startled deer leapt into the shelter of the trees.
A warm, steady rain began to fall. Landmarks rolled by like a film without a sound track: Loess Bluff, with its steadily eroding face of rare soil; the split-rail fence that marked the ranger station at Mount Locust; the high bridge over Cole’s Creek, from which you could see Low Water Bridge, the site of some of Chris’s happiest childhood memories. After he crossed the high bridge he got serious, pumping his thighs like a Tour de France rider, trying to work out the accumulated anxiety of the past eighteen hours. The thing was, you couldn’t work out anxiety arising from circumstances that remained outside your control, and Special Agent Alex Morse was definitely not under his control. He jammed it all the way to the end of this stretch of the Trace, then made a 180-degree turn and headed back southwest.
Out of the whisper of tires on wet pavement came a faint chirping. It took him fifty feet to recognize the sound of his cell phone. Half the time he had no reception out here; that was one reason he chose the Trace to ride. Reaching carefully backward, he dug his cell phone from the Gore-Tex pouch hanging beneath his seat. The LCD said UNKNOWN CALLER. Chris started to ignore the call, but the early hour made him wonder if one of his hospital patients was in trouble. It might even be Tom
Cage, calling about the mystery case on 4-North.
“Dr. Shepard,” he said in his professional voice.
“Hello, Doctor,” said a strangely familiar voice.
“Darryl?” he asked, almost sure that he recognized his old fraternity brother’s voice. “Foster?”
“Hell, yeah!”
“You finally got my message, huh?”
“Just now. I know it’s early, but I figured you hadn’t changed much since college. Always the first one awake, even with a hangover.”
“I appreciate you calling, man.”
“Well, that name you mentioned really woke me up. Why in the world are you asking me about Alex Morse? Did you meet her or something?”
Chris debated about how much to reveal. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say yet.”
“Woo-woo-woo,” Foster said mockingly. “So what do you want to know about her?”
“Anything you can tell me. Is she really an FBI agent?”
“Sure. Or she used to be, anyway. The truth is, I’m not sure about her official status now.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know the lady, Chris, so take all this with a grain of salt. But Alex Morse was a bona fide star in the Bureau. She started out as what we call a blue flamer. Kind of like you in college—A’s on everything, always doing more than you had to. She made quite a name for herself as a hostage negotiator. Word was, she was the best. Anything high-profile or hush-hush, the director flew her in to handle it.”
“You’re speaking in the past tense.”
“Absolutely. I don’t know the whole scoop, but a couple of months ago, Morse lost her shit and got somebody killed.”