True Evil
An electrifying serial killer thriller from the New York Times No.1 bestseller. True evil has a face you know and a voice you trust…True evil has a face you know and a voice you trust…Dr Chris Shepard has been happily married for just one year. Then FBI agent Alex Morse brings him the news no newly-wed should hear.His beautiful wife recently visited a local divorce attorney.And the attorney has a cluster of clients whose spouses have all conveniently died, apparently of natural causes…Morse has just one question for Dr Shepard: will he act as bait to catch the killer?
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GREG ILES
True Evil
True evil has a face you know and a voice you trust.
Anonymous
Table of Contents
Alex Morse charged through the lobby of the new University Medical Center like a doctor to a code call, but she was no doctor. She was a hostage negotiator for the FBI. Twenty minutes earlier, Alex had deplaned from a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jackson, Mississippi, a flight prompted by her older sister’s sudden collapse at a Little League baseball game. This year had been plagued by injury and death, and there was more to come—Alex could feel it.
Sighting the elevators, she checked the overhead display and saw that a car was descending. She hit the call button and started bouncing on her toes. Hospitals she thought bitterly. She’d practically just gotten out of one herself. But the chain of tragedy had started with her father. Five months ago Jim Morse had died in this very hospital, after being shot during a robbery. Two months after that, Alex’s mother had been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She had already outlived her prognosis, but wasn’t expected to survive the week. Then came Alex’s accident. And now Grace—
A bell dinged softly, and the elevator opened.
A young woman wearing a white coat over street clothes leaned against the rear wall in a posture of absolute exhaustion. Intern, Alex guessed. She’d met enough of them during the past month. The woman glanced up as Alex entered the car, then looked down. Then she looked up again. Alex had endured this double take so many times since the shooting that she no longer got angry. Just depressed.
“What floor?” asked the young woman, raising her hand to the panel and trying hard not to stare.
“Neuro ICU,” said Alex, stabbing the 4 with her finger.
“I’m going down to the basement,” said the intern, who looked maybe twenty-six—four years younger than Alex. “But it’ll take you right up after that.”
Alex nodded, then stood erect and watched the glowing numbers change above her head. After her mother’s diagnosis, she’d begun commuting by plane from Washington, D.C.—where she was based then—to Mississippi to relieve Grace, who was struggling to teach full-time and also to care for their mother at night. Unlike J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the modern Bureau tried to be understanding about family problems, but in Alex’s case the deputy director had made his position clear: time off to attend a funeral was one thing, regularly commuting a thousand miles to be present for chemotherapy was another. But Alex had not listened. She’d bucked the system and learned to live without sleep. She told herself she could hack the pressure, and she did—right up until the moment she cracked. The problem was, she hadn’t realized she’d cracked until she caught part of a shotgun blast in her right shoulder and face. Her vest had protected the shoulder, but her face was still an open question.
For a hostage negotiator, Alex had committed the ultimate sin, and she’d come close to paying the ultimate price. Because the shooter had fired through a plate-glass partition, what would have been a miraculous escape (being grazed by a couple of pellets that could have blown her brains out but hadn’t) became a life-altering trauma. A blizzard of glass tore through her cheek, sinuses, and jaw, lacerating her skin and ripping away tissue and bone. The plastic surgeons had promised great things, but so far the results were less than stellar. They’d told her that in time the angry pink worms would whiten (they could do little to repair the “punctate” depressions in her cheek), and that laymen wouldn’t even notice the damage. Alex wasn’t convinced. But in the grand scheme of things, what did vanity matter? Five seconds after she was shot, someone else had paid the ultimate price for her mistake.
During the hellish days that followed the shooting, Grace had flown up to D.C. three times to be with Alex, despite being exhausted from taking care of their mother. Grace was the family martyr, a genuine candidate for sainthood. The irony was staggering: tonight it was Grace lying in an intensive care unit, fighting for her life.
