"A hundred and eleven pounds," he said. "How much did you weigh when we got married?"

Thora shrugged. "I don't remember."

"I do. A hundred and twenty-six."

"I never weighed that in my life."

Chris chuckled. She was definitely lying about that, but there was nothing sinister in it. "You're five feet six, Thora. You don't need to lose fifteen pounds when your starting point is one twenty-six."

She sighed and stepped off the scale.

Chris knew he'd never get her down the hall to the lab, so he sat her down and fastened a blood-pressure cuff around her upper arm. After he'd pumped it up, he dug into Holly's bottom drawer and took out one of the syringes she used for injections.

"Hey!" Thora cried. "What do you think you're doing with that?"

"Just sit back and be calm. I'm very good with a needle."

"He is," said Holly from behind him. "He could find a vein on an overweight elephant."

"I'm not sure that's relevant here," Thora said. "What gauge needle is that?"

"A twenty-one," said Chris.

She grimaced. "Can't I have a twenty-three?"

"Stop being a baby. Most people get twenty-ones, you know."

"I'm not most people." She pulled her arm away at first, but after a few evasions she sat back and let him draw ten ccs of dark venous blood into the barrel of the syringe. If they were in the lab, he would have filled several tubes, but this was better than nothing. "God," Thora said, clenching her inner elbow to facilitate clotting. "I come in for a kiss and I get violated instead. No wonder I don't come here very much."

Chris laughed, but he was thinking that something he'd always suspected about Thora's attitude toward his office was true: it reminded her of her father in some way, and she didn't want to be around it. "I thought you liked me violating you," he said.

"Not today." She got up and walked back toward his office.

When Chris got there, she had put her scarf back on and was slipping her Treo into her purse. "I've got a lot to do to get ready for my trip," she said, coming to the door.

"Will you be home when I pick up Ben?" he asked. "We've got baseball practice today."

"Practice?" Thora's eyes narrowed. "Ben has a game tonight, Chris. You're playing last year's championship team."

"Jesus, you're right."

Thora laughed with real pleasure. "I can't believe you forgot and I remembered. The world must be rotating backwards today."

"After the morning I've had, it wouldn't surprise me. I hope the rest of the day is better."

She shook her head as though puzzled. "It's afternoon already, Chris."

He looked at his watch. She was right. "God. I'll bet the staff is ready to kick my ass."

"Have you eaten anything?"

"Not since this morning."

Thora walked into the corridor and looked back at him. "You need to shut this place down and run over to the hospital cafeteria."

"I think I will. Do you want to come?"

"No, I'm full of sushi."

"Somehow I doubt that. You probably took two or three bites, total."

She pushed him playfully, then called good-bye to Holly, who was down by the door to X-ray. "I'll see you at the house, okay?" Thora leaned close to him. "Maybe after Ben's game we can do a replay of last night."

He was about to answer when he felt her hand close around his testicles. She looked meaningfully at him and squeezed.

"Maybe so," he said, turning red.

Thora laughed softly, then turned and walked toward the private exit, her silk pants swishing gracefully around her ankles. After she'd gone, Chris walked down the hall and handed the full syringe to Holly.

"I want you to inject this into a red-top Vacutainer and spin it down."

"Okay. What tests do you want done?"

"A CBC and a standard Chem-20. But don't throw any serum away. I may do some more tests, depending on what I find."

"Okay." Holly walked quickly toward the lab.

As Chris turned, he saw Jane, his receptionist, leaning through the window that opened onto the hall. "Are you okay, boss?" she asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"You don't seem like yourself today."

"I'm good to go."

Jane snorted. "Then maybe you should. It's time to tie on the feed bag, darlin'."

"Past time," said his lab tech from behind him. "Even Dr. Cage left out of here forty-five minutes ago."

Chris shook his head. If Tom was gone to lunch, he had definitely stayed too late.

"You've still got one patient," Holly reminded him, coming back up the hall. "Room four, Mr. Patel. Sounds like a hot gallbladder."

Chris walked back to his office and closed the door. He needed to examine Patel, but right now he couldn't summon the concentration. He walked around his desk and sat in his chair again. Without quite knowing why, he opened his drawer. As he did, he realized that he was checking to see if Thora had been through his things.

Why should I worry about that? he wondered.

Then he saw the answer. Lying on top of a prescription pad was the silver Motorola clamshell phone that Alex Morse had given him on the Trace that morning. If Thora had opened this drawer, she would have seen it instantly. Maybe she did, he thought. No…if she'd seen a new cell phone, she would have asked me about it.

As Chris turned the Motorola in his hand, he saw that its blue LCD window said 1 MISSED CALL. The phone's ringer was set to SILENT. He flipped open the phone and checked the time of the call. One minute ago. Strangely flustered, he speed-dialed the only number programmed into the memory. After only half a ring, a woman said, "It's Alex. Can you talk?"

"Yes."

"I'm right outside your office. Thora just left."

He felt a wave of disorientation. "Why are you here?"

"I followed your wife here."

"Crap, Alex. What are you doing?"

"Trying to save your life."

"Jesus. I told you-"

"I have something to show you, Chris. Something unequivocal."

Dread settled in his chest. "What is it?"

"I'll tell you when I see you."

"Goddamn it. You said Thora's gone?"

"Yes."

"Just come into my office then."

A hesitation. "That would be a mistake."

"You can use my private entrance."

"No. You come to me."

"I still have patients! I can't leave now. Besides, where would we go?"

"There's some kind of park at the end of this boulevard."

"That's not a park, it's a historical site. The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians."

"Fine, whatever. It's deserted, and it's only a quarter mile away."

"Agent Morse, I-"

"Is Thora leaving town today, Chris?"

"Tomorrow morning."

A quick expulsion of breath. "This won't take ten minutes. You owe it to yourself. To Ben, too."

Irrational anger flooded through him. He considered asking Morse to wait ten minutes and then slip into his office, but sometimes one or two staff members stayed through lunch and ate Lean Cuisines in the lounge. He couldn't be sure that wouldn't happen today. "I'll meet you there in five minutes."

"I'll be waiting on the big hill in the middle," Morse said.

The big hill? "That's a ceremonial mound, not a hill. An Indian mound."

"Great. Please hurry."

Fifteen minutes later, Chris was trotting under a thick stand of oak trees, heading for a vividly lit stretch of grass almost half a mile long. He jogged past a replica of an Indian hut and broke out into the sunlight. In the distance stood two steeply sloped mounds separated by eighty meters. The nearer was a ceremonial mound where the chief of the Natchez, the Great Sun, had once presided over the rituals of this unique tribe. Farther on stood the Temple mound. Both had been built by the sun-worshipping natives that settled this land a thousand years before the white man came. Like many old cities, Natchez had been founded upon murder, in this case the massacre of the Natchez Indians by French troops from New Orleans, in retaliation for a rebellion in the previous year-1729.